by Thomas Perry
She was surprised to see Padgett at his desk behind the glass, frowning over a report. She rapped on the glass and he got up to open the door for her without putting down the papers he was reading.
“I thought you would be on your break, Roger,” she said.
“Not today,” said Padgett. “Must have been a big weekend. Four of our friends bought airline tickets in the last three days.” He always called them “our friends,” as though the years of scanning lists for familiar names had prompted a kind of affection.
“All to the same place?”
“No,” he said. “Two to Las Vegas, one to Phoenix, and one to Los Angeles.”
“It’s probably the weather,” said Elizabeth. “They don’t like it any more than we do. You still have to scrape the snow off your car if it’s a Rolls Royce.”
He looked impatient. “Okay, love. What did you find?”
“Eight possibles. The numbers are marked. The rest are the usual weekend stuff—rapes, muggings, and arguments that went a little too far.”
“I’ll have Mary get the details to you as soon as they’re printed out. Give her fifteen minutes. Take a break or something.”
“Okay,” she said, and walked out again into the large outer office. She saw that Brayer, her section head, was just putting a few papers into a file, then throwing on his sport coat.
“On a break, Elizabeth?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Can’t do anything until the computer spits out the day’s possibles.”
“Come on,” said Brayer. “I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. I’m waiting on something myself.” They walked down the hall and into the employees’ lounge. Brayer poured two cups of coffee while Elizabeth staked her claim on a table in the far corner of the room.
Brayer sat down, sighing. “I sometimes get tired of this job. You never seem to get anything worthwhile, and you spend an awful lot of time analyzing data that doesn’t form a pattern and wouldn’t prove anything if it did. This morning I’ve been going over the field reports of last week’s possibles. Nothing.”
Elizabeth said, “Just what I needed—to hear my section chief talking like that on a Monday morning.”
“I guess it’s the logical flaw that bothers me,” said Brayer. “You and I are looking for a pattern that will lead us to a professional killer, a hit man. So we pick out everything that doesn’t seem routine and normal. The point about professional killers is that they don’t do things to draw attention to themselves. What did you get this morning, for instance?”
“A shotgun suicide. One where they tortured a man and then cut his throat. One where a man was poisoned in a hotel dining room, one where the brakes failed on a new car. And a dynamite murder, and—”
“There!” said Brayer. “That’s just what I was talking about. A dynamite murder. That’s no hit man. It’s a mental defective who saw a hit man do that on television. What we ought to be looking at is the ones that don’t look unusual. The ones where the coroner says it was a natural death.”
“You know why we don’t,” said Elizabeth.
“Sure. Too many of them. Thousands every day. But that’s where our man will be. And you wouldn’t be able to tell whether it was a hit man or pneumonia. Dynamite, shotguns, knives, hell. You don’t have to hire a professional for that. You can find some junkie in half an hour who could do that for a couple of hundred.”
“We help catch one now and then, you have to remember that.”
“Yes, we do. You’re right. We’re not just wasting time. But there has to be a better way to do it. As it is, we find what we find, not what we’re looking for. We catch lunatics, axe murderers, people like that. Once every few years an old Mafia soldier who wants to come in from the cold and can tell us who did what to whom in 1953. It’s okay, but it’s not what we’re after.”
“John, how many actual hit men do you suppose there are operating right now? The professionals we look for?”
“Oh, a hundred. Maybe two hundred if you count the semiretired and the novices who have the knack. That’s in the world. Not too many, is it?”
“No, not many when you’re trying to find them by analyzing statistics. From another point of view it’s plenty. I’d better go call my bank while I’ve got a minute. They bounced my check unjustly.”
Brayer laughed. “Typical woman,” he said. “Mathematical genius who can’t add up her checkbook.”
Elizabeth smiled her sweetest smile at him, the one that didn’t show that her teeth were clenched. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll have the activity report in an hour or two.” She got up and disappeared out the door of the lounge.
Brayer sat there alone, sipping the last half of his cup of coffee and feeling vaguely bereft. He liked to sit at a table with a pretty woman. That was about as far as he allowed it to go these days, he thought. It made him feel young.
“May I join you, or am I too ugly?” came a voice. Brayer looked up and saw Connors, the Organized Crime Division head, standing above him.
“You’re perfect, Martin,” said Brayer. “You being the boss, this being Monday, and you being ugly enough to fit right in. It’s a pattern.”
“Thanks,” Connors said. “How are things going?”
“Rotten, I’m afraid. Elizabeth went back to pick out the second-stage possibles, of which there are several. None very promising, but they all take time. The field reports from last week are all blanks except the one from Tulsa, which is three days late and is probably just as blank.”
“I almost hope so this morning,” said Connors. “We’ve got just about every investigator in the field, and Padgett’s airline reports say at least four of the people we keep an eye on bought tickets west this weekend.”
“Anything in it?”
“Probably the usual. Old men like warm weather. At least I do. And Roncone and Neroni have investments out there. Legitimate businesses, or at least they would be if those two weren’t in on them. But there’s always a chance of a meeting.”
“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” said Brayer without enthusiasm. “Well, I think I’ll go see if Tulsa phoned in. I’d like to close the books on last week before Elizabeth comes up with today’s massacres.”
“How’s she working out, anyway? It’s been over a year.”
Brayer sat back down and spoke in a low voice. “To tell you the truth, Martin, she’s a real surprise. I think if I had to retire tomorrow, she’d be the one I’d pick to replace me.”
“Come on, John,” said Connors. “She can’t possibly know enough yet. There’s a difference between being clever and pretty and running an analysis section. She hasn’t even been in any field investigation yet.”
“But I think she’s got the touch,” said Brayer. “She’s the only one in my section that’s smarter than I am.”
3Two this week, he thought. Too many. After the next one, a vacation. At least a month. The old lady in front of him stepped aside to count her change, so he moved forward. “One way to Los Angeles, the three o’clock.”
“Five fifty,” said the weary ticket agent, running his hand over the bald spot on his head as though checking to be sure nothing had grown in there while he wasn’t paying attention.
He paid the money and waited while the man filled in the ticket. It would be no problem. After something like Friday, a man buying a ticket on Saturday morning for someplace far away might have stuck. A man buying a ticket for Los Angeles on Monday afternoon was nothing. He wasn’t leaving the vicinity of a crime. He was just leaving. This man behind the counter wouldn’t remember him. Too many people in line buying the same ticket, as fast as he could write. Not even time to look at them all. Not the men, anyway.
He stepped aside and pocketed his ticket. The clock on the wall said 2:45. Almost time to board. Not much time to hang around the bus station and get stared at. No reason for anybody to remember having seen him, because they hadn’t seen anybody in the first place. No chance they’d check on the motel either. He’d registered Friday afte
rnoon three hours before the truck blew up, and the truck had been thirty miles away in Ventura. Another county. All clean and simple. From Los Angeles, you could take any kind of transport to anywhere. You practically had to set yourself on fire to attract a second glance in L. A.
On Monday, February twelfth, at 2:43 P.M., a man not fat, not thin, not young, not old, not tall, not short, not dark, not light, bought a bus ticket for Los Angeles at the Santa Barbara bus station. He was one of twenty or thirty that afternoon that you couldn’t have told from one another, but that didn’t matter because nobody looked at any of them. If the police were looking for someone in the area, it wasn’t on a bus coming toward Ventura on its way to Los Angeles.
ELIZABETH STUDIED THE SECOND SET of printouts on the day’s possibles. The man who had been killed by the shotgun had left a note that satisfied his family and the coroner. The death by torture was linked to a religious cult that had been under investigation for a year and a half. The brake failure was officially attributed to incorrect assembly at the factory in Japan. That left the man poisoned in the hotel dining room and the victim of the dynamite murder.
The autopsy report on the unlucky diner convinced Elizabeth that there wasn’t much point in following up with an investigation. Chances were that he hadn’t even ingested the poison on the premises. It was a combination of drugs, all used for treatment of hypertension, and taken this time with a large amount of alcohol. Elizabeth moved on to the last one.
Veasy, Albert Edward. Machinist for a small company in Ventura, California, called Precision Tooling. Not very promising, really. Professional killers were an expensive service, and that meant powerful enemies. Machinists in Ventura didn’t usually have that kind of enemy. Sexual jealousy? That might introduce him to somebody he wouldn’t otherwise meet—somebody whose name turned up on Activity Reports now and then. Thirty-five years old, married for ten years, three kids. Still possible. Have to check his social habits, if it came to that.
Elizabeth scanned the narrative for the disqualifier, the one element that would make it clear that this one too was normal, just another instance of someone being murdered by someone who had a reason to do it, someone who at least knew him.
She noticed the location of the crime. Outside the headquarters of the Brotherhood of Machinists, Local 602, where he had been for a meeting. Her breath caught—a union meeting. Maybe a particularly nasty strike, or the first sign that one of the West Coast families was moving in on the union. She made a note to check it, and also the ownership of Precision Tooling. Maybe that was dirty money. Well what the hell, she thought. Might as well get all of it. Find out what they made, whom they sold it to, and tax summaries. She’d been expecting a busy day anyway, and the other possibles had already dissolved.
She moved down to the summary of the lab report. Explosives detonated by the ignition of the car. She made a note to ask for a list of the dynamite thefts during the last few months in California. She read further. “Explosive not dynamite, as earlier reported. Explosive 200 pounds of fertilizer carried in the bed of the victim’s pickup truck.” Elizabeth laughed involuntarily. Then she threw her pencil down, leaned back in her chair, and tore up her notes.
“What’s up, Elizabeth?” asked Richardson, the analyst at the next desk. “You find a funny murder?”
Elizabeth said, “I can’t help it. I think we’ve established today’s pattern. My one possible blew himself up with a load of fertilizer. You should appreciate that. You’re a connoisseur.”
Richardson chuckled. “Let me see.” He came up and looked over her shoulder at the printout. “Well, I guess it hit the fan this weekend,” he said. “But that’s a new one on me.”
“Me too,” said Elizabeth.
“How do you suppose it happened?”
“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve heard of sewers and septic tanks blowing up. I guess there’s a lot of methane gas in animal waste.”
“Oh yeah,” said Richardson, suddenly pensive. “I remember reading about some guy who was going to parlay his chicken ranch into an energy empire. But you know what this means, don’t you?”
“No.”
“Brayer’s a walking bomb. His pep talks at staff meetings could kill us.”
Elizabeth giggled. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you about this. I suppose I’ll have to listen to a lot of infantile jokes now.”
“No, I think I got them all out of my system for the present,” said Richardson.
Elizabeth groaned. “Go back to your desk, you creep.”
Richardson said, “I’m going. But you know what?”
“What?”
“I’d have this one checked out.” Elizabeth made a face, but he held up his hand in the gesture he used to signal the return of the businesslike Richardson. “Seriously,” he said.
“Checked out with whom?” asked Elizabeth, moving warily toward whatever absurdity he was anxious for her to elicit from him. “And why?”
“I’m not sure who. I guess the bomb squad. Maybe even somebody over in the Agriculture Department. Maybe this sort of thing happens all the time. Who knows? I’m a city boy myself. But if it does we ought to know about it. We might be sending agents out into the field once a week to find out some farmer blew himself up with his manure spreader.”
Elizabeth studied his face, but he seemed serious. “I don’t know if you’re joking or not, but what you’re saying makes sense. It’ll take a few minutes to clear this up, and I’ve got some time on my hands this afternoon.”
“Then do it,” he said. “If only to cater to my curiosity.”
IN THE LOS ANGELES AIRPORT there are some people who stand on the moving walkway, letting the long belt carry them to the end of the corridor. Others walk forward on it, combining muscle and machinery into something over a dead run; and others, probably the biggest group, don’t use the machinery at all. This group consists of people who have spent too much time sitting down and know they’ll soon be sitting again for a few hours, or people who arrived at the airport an hour earlier than they needed to. Among them was a man not tall or short, not young or old, not light or dark, with a oneway ticket to Denver in his breast pocket. When the stewardess checks his boarding pass for the seat number a few minutes from now, she won’t be able to decide whether he is on his way to one of the military bases in that area, or one of the ski resorts. And she certainly won’t ask. After that she won’t have time to notice. As soon as the lights go on she will be too busy to study faces. Once they are strapped in she will look mostly at their laps, where the trays and the drinks and the magazines will be.
THE MAN AT Treasury said, “That one’s not in our bailiwick, I’m afraid. Have you tried the FBI?”
“Not yet,” said Elizabeth. “I’d hoped to get something on it today.”
The man chuckled. “Oh, you’ve noticed. But I’ll tell you what you can do. There’s a guy over there who knows just about everything about explosives. Name’s Hart. Agent Robert E. Hart. If you call him direct you’ll avoid all the referral forms and runarounds. He’s the one you’d get to in the end anyway. He’s at extension 3023. Write down that name and number, because it’ll come in handy every now and then. Agent Hart.”
“Thanks,” said Elizabeth. “That’ll save me a lot of time.”
Elizabeth dialed the FBI number and waited. The female voice on the other end seemed to come from the soul of a melting candy bar: “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Elizabeth retaliated, making her voice go soft and whispery. “Extension 3023 please, dear.”
“That’ll hold her,” thought Elizabeth.
“Whom would you like to speak with, ma’am?” said the voice, now suddenly businesslike and mechanical.
“Agent Hart,” said Elizabeth.
“I’ll ring his office,” said the voice.
The line clicked and there was that sound that seemed as though a door had opened on a physically larger space. “Hart,” said a man’s voice.
Elizabeth wondered
if she had missed the ring. “This is Elizabeth Waring at Justice, Agent Hart. We have an explosives case and we need some information.”
“Who told you to call me?”
“Treasury.”
“Figures,” he said, without emotion. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything you can tell me about fertilizer blowing up.”
“About what?”
“Fertilizer. Er … manure. You know, fertilizer.”
“Oh.” There was silence on Hart’s end.
Elizabeth waited. Then she said, “I assure you, Agent Hart, this isn’t a—”
“I know,” he said. “I was just thinking. What’s the LEAA computer code designation?”
“Seven nine dash eight four seven seven.”
“I’ll take a look at it and call you back. What’s your extension?”
“Two one two one. But does that happen? Have you heard of it before?”
“I’m not sure what we’re talking about yet,” said Hart. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.” He hung up and Elizabeth said “Good-bye” into a dead phone.
She looked up and saw Padgett dash by with a cup of coffee in one hand and an open file in the other. Just then a loose sheet in the file peeled itself off in the breeze and wafted to the floor. He stopped and looked back at it in remorse.
“Got it,” said Elizabeth, and sprang up to retrieve it for him.
“Thanks,” said Padgett. “Too many things at once.”
“Are your friends having a nice time out west?”
“Much better than I am,” he said. “We’ve got to get a few investigators out there today before anything has a chance to happen, and I don’t know where we’re going to get them.”
“You mean it might be something?”
“Probably not,” he said, “but you never know. You can’t take a chance of missing another Apalachin just because somebody’s got the damned flu and somebody else is at an airport that’s fogged in.”
