Chapter 6
“Okay,” I said to Chunk. “How about this? A hang glider. It's quiet, and it can travel a long distance. You could get over the wall and well beyond it without drawing any attention from the ground troops.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But you'd still have to deal with the helicopters. They've got heat sensing equipment on those things. They'd pick you off in the air before you ever got anywhere near the wall.”
I thought about that for a second. I imagined getting shot out of the sky by a U.S. Army attack helicopter.
“Yeah, I guess you're right.”
“Besides, where are you gonna find a hang glider?”
“True,” I said. “Okay, how about this? We dig a tunnel under the wall…”
Lieutenant Tom Treanor had short blond hair that was going gray at the temples, but he still looked young for a lieutenant. He was 36, and at 5 ft 8 in was not a tall man, but he was built solidly. There was a picture on the wall behind his desk of him as a younger man, wearing a Marine officer's uniform, and I got the feeling not much had changed since those days. Not much except the uniform. He still had the same hard look in his eyes.
And he didn't waste time on small talk, either. He hadn't even finished shaking our hands before he started firing off questions. We filled him in on where we were at, the dead girl, the doctors on the WHO staff, the fight in the doctor's lounge.
“And you're buying that shit?” Treanor said. “You really think Ken Wade has gone off and done something as stupid as kill the person he was assigned to protect?”
Chunk handled it with Treanor. “We're following down the leads as we get them, Lieutenant. We're not saying nothing against Wade. All we want to do is talk to him about it.”
“Yeah, well, he hasn't come back yet.”
“Don't you think that's a pretty good indicator something's wrong?” I said. “We already know Dr. Bradley's dead. If Wade didn't kill her, then it's probably pretty likely that something's happened to him too. Wouldn't you agree with that?”
He just stared at me. Even before H2N2 started dropping people like flies, the Department was small enough you got to know just about everybody after being on the job a few years. I first met Treanor back when he was a junior Homicide detective. I'd gotten a call for a man barricaded in his room with his father's vintage World War I rifle. When I got there, the front door was open and the father was crying against his son's locked door, slapping it over and over again with the flat of his palm, begging his boy to open it.
“I heard a shot,” the man said to me, his cheeks shining with tears.
“Stand back,” I said, and hit the door with my shoulder. When it didn't give I hit it again, and that time it flew open.
There, sitting on the floor, his back against the side of the bed, the antique rifle across his thighs, was the man's twenty-two year old son, his lifelong battle with psychosis and suicidal tendencies ending in defeat.
The father wasn't all that sane himself, and he flew into a screaming, hair-pulling fit that rattled me badly enough that all my training went right out the window. Rather than pull the man out of the room and secure the scene, like I should have done, I reached down, took the rifle from under the dead man's hand, and walked out to the front porch with it, where I proceeded to work the action back and forth until I'd jacked all the rounds out of the magazine and spread them all over the chinaberry shrubs growing along the front of the house.
When Treanor got there and saw what I had done to his crime scene, he went into a rage that rattled me worse than the father's had. He grabbed me by the shoulder and pushed me out the front door and down into the front yard. Neighbors had come down to the street to see what all the police cars were there for, and they all watched in slack-jawed disbelief as Treanor screamed at me, telling me what a fucking idiot I was.
I was mortified, but we both formed opinions of each other that day that stuck with us over the years.
Chunk asked, “Is it normal for the guys not to check in after their shift?”
Treanor gave Chunk a patronizing stare. “It's the way things are done around here,” he said. “These research teams start out early in the day and come back at unpredictable hours. My guys are with them the whole time. Sometimes they're back early. Sometimes late. When they come in late, they don't check in. I trust them.”
“You said you couldn't raise him on the radio?”
“That's right.”
“And that didn't raise any red flags with you?” Chunk asked.
“It's the way things are. These radios they give us aren't worth shit. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. And we don't have any spare batteries, either. The chargers in our cars are all busted, too. About the only place my guys can charge them up is in the office, and so, when their radios run out juice, well, you know.”
“Yes sir,” Chunk said. “I know.” We had the same problem in Homicide. Everybody had the same problem.
Treanor rocked back in his chair and regarded the two of us like we were amateurs. “Look,” he said, “I got to tell you. You guys are barking up the wrong tree here. Ken Wade didn't kill that girl.”
“You're probably right, sir,” Chunk said. “All we want to do is talk with him.”
“I'd tell you where to find him if I knew where he was,” Treanor said.
“I know that, sir,” Chunk said. “But I think it's pretty obvious we've got something to worry about here. You don't have any idea where he and Dr. Bradley were doing their research?”
Treanor shrugged. “Somewhere in the GZ, last I heard.”
“Do you think any of the other guys would know?”
“I doubt it. We cover all the research teams in the city, and Wade was the only one working out at Arsenal.”
“He didn't mention anything over the past week or so?”
“Have you been listening to me, Reggie?”
“Yes sir,” Chunk said.
“Why don't you go ask those people over in the WHO? They should know where she was working.”
“We did, sir.”
“And they said they didn't know?”
“They said in the GZ, but they didn't know where exactly.”
He swiveled in his chair a little and looked out the window of his second story office. From his desk, he had a view of the front of the Bandera Food Distribution Center, where long lines of ragged looking people had already started to gather for the next morning's delivery. It was a pathetic sight, but Treanor's face remained as impassive as a Latin American dictator's.
Chunk said, “Thank you for your time, sir.”
Treanor regarded us icily. “There's one more thing. About that fight. I'm pretty sure you're not getting the full story.”
Chunk and I waited for more.
“That girl. Dr. Bradley? She's the one who called here this morning, wanting to get Ken Wade for her escort.”
“She did?” Chunk said, and he looked at me. “We didn't know that.”
“Yeah. If you ask me, I think that Dr. Bradley saw the kind of man she likes in Ken Wade. Probably tired of hanging around with that Brit faggot. What's his name, Myers? I bet she wanted a man she could really wrap her legs around, if you know what I mean.”
He gave me a quick glance. “No offense, Lily.”
I smiled. You bastard. “None taken,” I said.
“You think there was really something going on between them?” Chunk said.
“I'd bet two week's pay on it,” Treanor said.
Chunk adjusted himself in his seat, like he had hemorrhoids or something. Treanor had that kind of effect on people. “Well, you know sir, if there was something going on between them, that's not gonna look real good.”
I couldn't see the part of Treanor's face that was covered by his surgical mask, but I could tell the smile had
