‘Sunny’s Surplus just took delivery of a thousand of the goddamn things a month ago. The Marines must have enough and so now the Boy Scouts can buy them for four ninety-five. Other places, too. I didn’t know how many of the things were out there.’
‘Me, neither,’ Ryan admitted. The Ka-Bar was a very large and bulky weapon. Hoods carried smaller knives, especially switchblades, though guns were becoming increasingly common on the streets.
What neither man wanted to admit openly was that they were stymied again, despite what had appeared to be a wealth of physical evidence in the brownstone. Ryan looked down at the open file and about twenty forensic photographs. There had almost certainly been a woman there. The murder victim – probably a hood himself, but still officially a victim – had been identified immediately from the cards in his wallet, but the address on his driver’s license had turned out to be a vacant building. His collection of traffic violations had been paid on time, with cash. Richard Farmer had brushed with the police, but nothing serious enough to have merited a detailed inquiry. Tracking his family down had turned up precisely nothing. His mother – the father was long dead – had thought him a salesman of some sort. But somebody had nearly carved his heart out with a fighting knife, so quickly and decisively that the gun on the body hadn’t been touched. A full set of fingerprints from Farmer merely generated a new card. The central FBI register did not have a match. Neither did the local police, and though Farmer’s prints would be compared with a wide selection of unknowns, Ryan and Douglas didn’t expect much. The bedroom had provided three complete sets of Farmer’s, all on window glass, and semen stains had matched his blood type – O. Another set of stains had been typed as AB, which could mean the killer or the supposed (not quite certain) missing owner of the Road-runner. For all they knew the killer might have taken the time to have a quickie with the suspected female – unless homosexuality was involved, in which case the suspected female might not exist at all.
There were also a selection of partial prints, one of a girl (supposition, from their size), and one of a man (also supposition), but they were so partial that he didn’t expect much in the way of results. Worst of all, by the time the latent-prints team had gotten to check out the car parked outside, the blazing August sun had heated the car up so much that what might have been something to match prints with the registered owner of the car, one William Peter Grayson, had merely been a collection of heat-distorted blobs. It wasn’t widely appreciated that matching partial prints with less than ten points of identification was difficult at best.
A check of the FBI’s new National Crime Information Computer had turned up nothing on Grayson or Farmer. Finally, Mark Charon’s narcotics team had nothing on the names Farmer or Grayson. It wasn’t so much a matter of being back to square one. It was just that square seventeen didn’t lead them anywhere. But that was often the way of things in homicide investigation. Detective work was a combination of the ordinary and the remarkable, but more of the former than the latter. Forensic sciences could tell you much. They did have the imprint of common-brand sneaker from tracks in the brownstone – brand new, a help. They did know the approximate stride of the killer, from which they had generated a height range of from five-ten to six-three, which, unfortunately, was taller than Virginia Charles had estimated – something they, however, discounted. They knew he was Caucasian. They knew he had to be strong. They knew that he was either very, very lucky or highly skilled with all manner of weapons. They knew that he probably had at least rudimentary skills in hand-to-hand combat – or, Ryan sighed to himself, had been lucky; after all, there had been only one such encounter, and that with an addict with heroin in his bloodstream. They knew he was disguising himself as a bum.
All of which amounted to not very much. More than half of male humanity fell into the estimated height range. Considerably more than half of the men in the Baltimore metropolitan area were white. There were millions of combat veterans in America, many from elite military units – and the fact of the matter was that infantry skills were infantry skills, and you didn’t have to be a combat vet to know them, and his country had had a draft for over thirty years, Ryan told himself. There were perhaps as many as thirty thousand men within a twenty-mile radius who fit the description and skill-inventory of his unknown suspect. Was he in the drug business himself? Was he a robber? Was he, as Farber had suggested, a man on some sort of mission? Ryan leaned heavily to the latter model, but he could not afford to discount the other two. Psychiatrists, and detectives, had been wrong before. The most elegant theories could be shattered by a single inconvenient fact. Damn. No, he told himself, this one was exactly what Farber said he was. This wasn’t a criminal. This was a killer, something else entirely.
‘We just need the one thing,’ Douglas said quietly, knowing the look on his lieutenant’s face.
‘The one thing,’ Ryan repeated. It was a private bit of shorthand. The one thing to break a case could be a name, an address, the description or tag number of a car, a person who knew something. Always the same, though frequently different, it was for the detective the crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle that made the picture clear, and for the suspect the brick which, taken from the wall, caused everything to fall apart. And it was out there. Ryan was sure of it. It had to be there, because this killer was a clever one, much too clever for his own good. A suspect like this who eliminated a single target could well go forever undetected, but this one was not satisfied with killing one person, was he? Motivated neither by passion nor by financial gain, he was committed to a process, every step of which involved complex dangers. That was what would do him in. The detective was sure of it. Clever as he was, those complexities would continue to mount one upon the other until something important fell loose from the pile. It might even have happened already, Ryan thought, correctly.
* * *
‘Two weeks,’ Maxwell said.
‘That fast?’ James Greer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘Dutch, that’s really fast.’
‘You think we should fiddle around?’ Podulski asked.
‘Damn it, Cas, I said it was fast. I didn’t say it was wrong. Two weeks’ more training, one week of travel and setup?’ Greer asked, getting a nod. ‘What about weather?’
‘The one thing we can’t control,’ Maxwell admitted. ‘But weather works both ways. It makes flying difficult. It also messes up radar and gunnery.’
‘How in hell did you get all the pieces moving this early?’ Greer asked with a mixture of disbelief and admiration.
‘There are ways, James. Hell, we’re admirals, aren’t we? We give orders, and guess what? Ships actually move.’
‘So the window opens in twenty-one days?’
‘Correct. Cas flies out tomorrow to Constellation. We start briefing the air-support guys. Newport News is already clued in -well, partway. They think they’re going to sweep the coast for triple-A batteries. Our command ship is plodding across the big pond right now. They don’t know anything either except to rendezvous with TF-77.’
‘I have a lot of briefing to do,’ Cas confirmed with a grin.
‘Helicopter crews?’
‘They’ve been training at Coronado. They come into Quantico tonight. Pretty standard stuff, really. The tactics are straightforward. What does your man “Clark” say?’
‘He’s my man now?’ Greer asked. ‘He tells me he’s comfortable with how things are going. Did you enjoy being killed?’
‘He told you?’ Maxwell chuckled. ‘James, I knew the boy was good from what he did with Sonny, but it’s different when you’re there to see it – hell, to not see or hear it. He shut Marty Young up, and that’s no small feat. Embarrassed a lot of Marines, too.’
‘Give me a timeline on getting mission approval,’ Greer said. It was serious now. He’d always thought the operation had merit, and watching it develop had been a lesson in many things that he’d need to know at CIA. Now he believed it possible. BOXWOOD GREEN might well succeed if allowed to go.
‘You’re sure Mr Ritter won’t waffle on us?’
‘I don’t think he will. He’s one of us, really.’
‘Not until all the pieces are in place,’ Podulski said.
‘He’ll want to see a rehearsal,’ Greer warned. ‘Before you ask a guy to stick it on the line, he has to have confidence in the job.’