The Right Jack

She turned and saw Alan Knight loping across the traffic lanes to join her. His driver, the same bewildered yeoman, pulled gratefully alongside the empty curb and cut the engine.

'I've been all the way down to Battery Park looking for you,' Knight called as he neared her. 'Your friend said you were walking along the water but he didn't know what direction.'.

'Up,' Sigrid gestured.

'Down's right nice, too,' he drawled, matching her long strides. 'They've got a real pretty park there.'

Sigrid observed the crisp crease in the trouser legs of his dark blue uniform. 'Are you on duty today or has something come up?'

'Both. I had a report waiting on my desk first thing this morning.' There was an embarrassed look on his face.

'And?'

'You know those pictures Vassily Ivanovich showed us of his sons yesterday? Remember that nice boy who pulled a few strings so his sweet old papa could enjoy a vacation in America?'

Sigrid nodded.

'KGB,' Knight said bitterly.

'Well, he did tell us his son was something in the Party,' Sigrid recalled.

'Go on and say it.'

'Say what?'

'I told you so.'

'I never said Ivanovich was connected with the KGB.'

'No, but you said he might not be asi nnocuous as he looks.'

'Yes,' Sigrid admitted.

'You were right. We've just learned that Ivanovich was the Russian equivalent of an EOD during the war.'

'What's that?'

'Explosive Ordnance Demolition.'

'Someone who dismantles bombs?' Lieutenant Knight nodded. 'Among other things.'

'Then he'd know how to put one together.'

'I don't see how we missed it. Or how Commander Dixon ever got a security clearance with what amounts to a Russian godfather in her background.'

'Maybe she didn't know,' Sigrid suggested reasonably as she paused to let three joggers pass. 'Her father died over twenty-five years ago and if the two men hadn't corresponded since forty-eight or forty-nine-well, she was just a child then. She didn't try to keep him secret when he contacted her last spring, did she?'

'No.' Lieutenant Knight glanced at her with disappointment. 'I thought you'd be excited to hear that Vassilym ight be our bomber.'

'I'm interested,' Sigrid agreed, resuming her pace, 'but it may not pertain. John Sutton seems the more logical target to me.'

'The professor? Why?'

'It's beginning to look as if he recognized a Red Snow survivor.'

'A who?'

Belatedly Sigrid recalled that Knight had not joined them at headquarters yesterday until after the discussion about the radical group that blew themselves up in the summer of 1970, so she summarized for him the facts and speculations they had about Fred Hamilton and Red Snow and how John Sutton had been so deeply involved in the war protest movement out at McClellan State that he could probably have recognized anyone from those days.

'Like Ted Flythe?' Knight suggested shrewdly.

'Mrs. Sutton didn't think so when I raised the possibility last night.'

'How's she handling it?' Alan Knight's handsome face was immediately sympathetic.

'She's handling it,' Sigrid said bluntly. Her voice remained cool and matter-of-fact, betraying no hint of how grief-wrenched she'd felt watching Val Sutton and her small son last night. She carefully confined her narrative to the pertinent facts. 'And even though she doesn't think he's Hamilton, we'll get his fingerprints from FBI files and compare them with Flythe's.'

A pair of sailboats slipped by them, headed downriver. Their pristine white sails ballooned in the steady breeze. A clatter of rotors passed overhead, and Knight shaded his eyes to follow the helicopter's flight until it dropped down out of sight at the heliport many blocks north.

'In a way, I hope you're wrong,' he said, tugging at the brim of his hat. 'I hope it turns out to be Ivanovich.'

'For Commander Dixon's sake?' asked Sigrid, recalling how determined Val Sutton had been that her husband be the intended victim.

'Yeah,' He walked along beside her in silence, then stopped to face her, his chiseled features bleak. 'They hadt o take her arm off.'

'When?'

'Last night. They tried to graft in new blood veins, but it didn't work.'

Sigrid listened mutely, then strode on without comment. She had not met Commander T. J. Dixon, had not even seen a photograph, unless one counted the snapshot Vassily Ivanovich carried of her as a baby. Yet everyone commented on her prettiness; a feminine woman who enjoyed her beauty and used it to keep at least four men interested. How could she adapt to such a monstrous loss? Would she accept it philosophically, or would she withdraw into isolation, feeling mutilated and hideously disfigured?

Lieutenant Knight trailed along beside her and her silence began to fuel his youthful indignation. The naval officer possessed the Southern charm that remains a birthright of all young adults-male and female-reared by mothers to whom manners are almost more important than morals and who install both in their children with equal vigor. He was by nature friendly and easygoing and willing to meet anyonem ore than halfway, but he couldn't see that Lieutenant Harald had budged an inch beyond the first five minutes of their introduction yesterday.

If anything, she was becoming steadily more distant.

He remembered his young yeoman clerk this morning. Her tender blue eyes had pooled with tears when she relayed the hospital report, repeating how dreadful it was and how sorry she felt for Commander Dixon until he'd finally seized on the information about Ivanovich to clear out of the office for a few hours.

So it certainly wasn't that he wanted Lieutenant Harald to burst into tears, he told himself. But not to say a word? To keep walking like T. J. Dixon's arm was nothing more than a piece of meat to be thrown in the river?

He'd worked with some hard-nosed senior women officers in his five years with the Navy, but he'd found that if he was friendly and properly respectful of their rank, they soon climbed down and opened up, while this one-

Oblivious to his growing resentment.

Sigrid moved through the sunlit morning almost blindly as she thought how devastated the commander would be when she recovered enough to realize that she'd lost her arm by a fluke, a bad coincidence of time and place. She thought of how bothersome her own arm was, yet it was only wounded and would soon heal.

She turned to Lieutenant'tKnight abruptly. 'How much of her arm did they amputate?'

'How much does it take, Lieutenant?'

His hostility took her by surprise.

'I guess police officers get like doctors after a while,' he said.

'What-?'

'Cold. Detached. Objective' His soft Southern drawl heaped scorn on the words. 'Doctors can tell you about watching a baby die like I'd tell you about the Mets losing to St. Louis. They say it's 'cause they can't let themselves feel; that they'd burn out if they grieved over every patient. After a while, they don't have to worry. They've got no feelings left.' His bitterness was scalding. 'Is that what happened to you,

Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the new York Police Department?'

'I don't know what you're talking about,' she said icily, without stopping.

'Is that how you quit being a woman with a woman's softness and a woman's tender heart?'

Goaded now, Sigrid turned on him, her gray eyes blazing. 'I'm a professional investigator, Lieutenant. It's my job to stay detached and objective. Will grieving replace Dixon 's arm or bring Val Sutton's husband back to life? Will crying keep whoever did this obscene thing from doing it again? I don't think so, Lieutenant. And what's more if I had a sick child, I'd rather have a doctor cold enough to keep fighting against death than one too choked up to