He looked at the lighted doorway of the union hall, where he could see the men filing out past the bulky shape of O’Connell, who was smiling and slapping somebody on the back. He would be saying something about how we don’t know yet and that it’s too early to panic. “That’s right, you big dumb bastard,” thought Veasy. “Keep calm, and you’ll never know what hit you.”
Veasy turned the key in the ignition and the whole world turned to fire and noise. The concussion threw O’Connell back against the clapboards of the union hall and disintegrated the front window. Then the parking lot was bathed in light as the billowing ball of flame tore up into the sky. Afterward a machinist named Lynley said pieces of the pickup truck went with it, but O’Connell said there wasn’t anything to that. People always said things like that, especially when somebody actually got killed. Sure was a shame, though, and it was bad enough without making things up.
“Here’s the daily gloom,” said Padgett, tossing the sheaf of computer printouts on Elizabeth’s desk. “Early today, and you’re welcome to it.”
“Thanks,” said Elizabeth, not looking up from her calculations. She was still trying to figure out how that check had bounced. Even if the store had tried to cash it the next morning, the deposit should have been there at least twelve hours before. Eight fifteen, and the bank would open at nine thirty. She made a note to call. It was probably the post office, as usual. Anybody who couldn’t deliver a piece of mail across town in two days ought to get into another business. They had sure delivered the notice of insufficient funds fast enough. One day.
Elizabeth put the checkbook and notice back in her purse and picked up the printout. “All those years of school for this,” she thought. “Reading computerized obituaries for the Department of Justice for a living, and lucky to get it.”
She started at the first sheet, going through the items one by one. “De Vitto, L. G. Male. Caucasian. 46. Apparent suicide. Shotgun, 12 gauge. Toledo, Ohio. Code number 79-8475.” She marked the entry in pencil, maybe just because of the name that could mean Mafia, and maybe just because it was the first one, and the other prospects might be even less likely.
“Gale, D. R. Female. Caucasian. 34. Apparent murder. Revolver, .38. Suspects: Gale, P. G., 36; no prior arrests. Wichita, Kansas, code number 79-8476.” No, just the usual thing, thought Elizabeth. Family argument and one of them picks up a gun. She went on down the list, searching for the unusual, the one that might not be one of the same old things.
“Veasy, A. E. Male. Caucasian. 35. Apparent murder. Dynamite. Ventura, California. Code number 79-8477.” Dynamite? Murder by dynamite? Elizabeth marked this one. Maybe it wasn’t anything for the Activity Report, but at least it wasn’t the predictable, normal Friday night’s random violence.
“Satterfield, R. J. Male. Afro-American. 26. Apparent murder/robbery. Revolver, .32. Washington, D.C. Code number 79-8478.” No.
“Davidson, B. L. Female. Caucasian. 23. Apparent murder/rape. Knife. Carmel, California. Code number 79- 8479.” No again.
Down the printout she went, letting the sheets fall in front of her desk to re-form themselves into an accordion shape on the floor. Now and then she would make a check mark with her pencil beside an entry that didn’t fall into the ten or twelve most common murder patterns. It was Monday, so she had to work fast to catch up. One thing Elizabeth had learned on this job was that a lot of people killed each other on weekends.
It was just after ten when she reached the final entry. “Stapleton, R. D. Male. Caucasian. 41. Apparent murder. Revolver, .45. Suspects: Stapleton, A. E., 38; no prior arrests. Buffalo, New York. Code number 79-102033.” Padgett, the senior analyst in charge of analyzing reports, would be on his morning break, she thought. The timing was always wrong, somehow. Whenever you got to the stage where you needed somebody it was either lunchtime or a break. She picked up the printout and carried it across the office to the glass-walled room where the computer operators worked.
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.
