Bank. 'Accessible by car,' he said to himself. Then he walked back to where Billy Pritchard's remains were now in a yellow canvas body bag on a stretcher.
Chief Kugler, looking more and more shaken, glanced up to Cochrane. 'Don't get much of this around here,' said the police chief. 'This is a family region. Worst thing that'll normally happen is a man will take a deer out of season.'
'This incident didn't happen, Chief,' Cochrane said. 'The boys who made this discovery actually found a wino sleeping in the woods. That's all.'
Several heads turned.
'Oh, well, that's just dandy,' Chief Kugler snapped. 'As soon as the county medical examiner gets the body-'
Cochrane interrupted. 'The corpse is going to Newark for a postmortem. F.B.I. forensics lab,' he said. Cochrane nodded to Cianfrani and Hearn. 'Twelve hours should be sufficient for a thorough autopsy. If there are any doubts or delays, this is upon the authority of J. Edgar Hoover's office. Any questions?'
There weren't.
Two state troopers accompanied the Newark agents down the hill with the yellow canvas bag. Cochrane turned back to Kugler.
'Did this Pritchard boy have friends?' Cochrane asked.
'A boatload. Down at the yard.' Kugler paused. 'Parents, too.'
'I'll start with the friends,' Cochrane answered.
*
What emerged that afternoon was a portrait of a homesick, clean-cut, dutiful young naval officer, half-man and half-boy, and totally naive to the malevolence of the world beyond Kansas.
'Is he dead?' asked one shipmate.
Cochrane wasn’t happy with a lie, but he was stuck with it. 'This is a standard investigation. Ensign Pritchard is AWOL from a sensitive installation. Now, perhaps,'
Cochrane nudged firmly, 'you could recall your friend's daily routine?'
At Reilly's, Pritchard's friend recalled, the young man liked to hobnob with the local females, and even shoot a round of darts with some of the English sailors, to whom he always lost.
'A terrible dart player!' another of Pritchard's friends remarked. 'The worst in the house.'
'Second worst,' Buck Reilly, the bartender and owner, recalled that evening as he removed the padlock from his front doors and opened for business. 'The worst was Pritchard's pal. The old man.'
'What old man?' Cochrane asked.
'Elmer,' said Buck Reilly, his ham-hock arms swinging at his sides as Cochrane followed. 'And come to think of it, he's disappeared, too.'
Cochrane took up a place at the end of the bar. 'Elmer who?' he asked.
'I don't know Elmer who,' said Reilly. 'I don't learn last names unless a customer is behind on his tab. Elmer used to hang around here at nights.'
'Continue,' Cochrane asked.
Reilly blew his breath into a glass and polished the glass with his apron. 'Well, he was an old guy. I don't know how old, but he said he fought in the last war. Tall, but up a bit. Sallow complexion. Gray hair. Looked like a thousand other old men.'
'Nothing strange about him?'
'Not that I recall.'
'How did he get here?'
'What? To the bar?'
'Yes. Walk? Car? With friends?”
'Darned if I know.'
'You never saw a car? Or a bicycle?'
'No, but I wouldn't have. Hey, I'm busy serving when this place is open. Stay around. You'll see.'
'If he didn't live around here, he couldn't have walked,' Cochrane said. 'Particularly if he was old.'
Reilly shrugged. 'Now you tell me something,' he said.
'If I can.'
'Is Rosenfeld going to get us into the war? He is, isn't he? Franklin D. Rosenfeld?'
'I only work for the F.B.I.,' Cochrane answered, a sudden fatigue overtaking him. 'I've never been to the White House.'
'Seems to me there's still eleven thousand Americans buried in France from the last war,' Reilly said. 'And for what? Know what I think? I think Mussolini is just what the dagos deserve. I can't buy a drop of liquor in New Jersey without paying the Don Macaronis. I hear Mussolini put them all out of business in Italy. That's why they all come here. And as for Hitler… as for Hitler,' he repeated for emphasis, 'well if there's anything worse than the Jews it's those filthy English. So I say, let Adolf eat them both alive.'
Cochrane felt anger swelling inside him and did not understand how he suppressed it. Maybe it was professionalism, because his overwhelming instinct was to knock the flintyeyed Reilly squarely in the jaw.
Instead, he flipped shut the palm-sized notebook in which he had been writing and recognized that it was time to leave. To his abiding shame, he answered Reilly. 'Who knows, Buck? Maybe you're right.'
“Of course I am,” Reilly muttered. “Ask anyone around here. They’ll tell you the same thing.”
A pair of brutal thunderclaps toward five in the afternoon shook the very foundations of everything that was standing. There followed a few heartbeats later a deluge and all Cochrane could think about was, there goes any clue that we missed in the woods this morning. Cochrane had taken refuge in a Red Bank guest house.
He sighed and a depression was upon him. Billy Pritchard was dead as were scores of other people. Cochrane bought an afternoon Newark Star, and lost himself in the sports.
Not surprisingly, the Washington Senators baseball team had been thrashed a second day in a row by the formidable Yankees: home runs by Joe DiMaggio, Charley Keller, and the newcomer Tommy Henrich. Then he found himself laughing out loud.
DiMaggio, Keller, and Henrich. Wait till he told Hoover, he fantasized. An Axis connection on the New York Yankees!
The rain continued. Mike Cianfrani telephoned from Newark in the evening.
'The killer used a hard, flexible tool. There were scars on the neck,' said Cianfrani. 'Strangled the Pritchard kid.'
Cochrane lay restlessly in bed much of the night. A sense of Siegfried was beginning to emerge:
A six-foot German. Young. Strong. A talent with disguises, explosives, and probably dialects, too. The man had a car. He could work ably with a wireless and was privy to a complex code. Cochrane was certain that young Pritchard had been lured from Reilly's, murdered, conveyed to the parking lot, and dumped in the woods.
On his way back to Washington, a vision of Bobby Charles Martin, the cartographer, was before Cochrane. He thought back to the circles Martin had drawn on the maps of New Jersey, courtesy of the Bluebirds' triangulation.
Red Bank was within the circle. The saboteur had spied on the United States Navy by day and transmitted to Germany at night.
Cozy, Cochrane concluded. FDR would be apoplectic.
Cochrane returned to his office and telephoned Newark again, ordering reports of the Pritchard slaying to be sent to all town police chiefs in northern New Jersey, as well as the chief homicide investigators of all principal cities between Washington and Boston. Somewhere, Cochrane prayed, the Pritchard killing might strike a parallel with something else. Moments later, Dick Wheeler lumbered into Cochrane's office.
'Hoover's called a meeting for Monday morning,' Wheeler said. 'The Chief wants all the Indians present. All three of us tribe members. You, me, Lerrick.'
Wheeler curled an upper lip. So did Cochrane.
'Now, more bad news,' Wheeler added. 'For you, that is.'
'Let's have it.'
'The LKW you requested. Last Known Whereabouts of one Otto Mauer.'
'Yes?'
