cheekbone was probably the result of another blow from those Wellingtons. Boyd checked the man’s wallet: Rudi Zahn was the name on his driver’s license, and his address was in Beverly Hills, California.
Luther Boyd had spent his adult life in practicing and teaching martial arts and as a military historian had professionally examined terrain long after the cannon had faded into the silence of history.
And now he stared about this open stretch of moonlit ground and studied it as he would a battlefield.
Kate had screamed; no cawing bird or rustling tree, but his daughter, Kate, screaming. This man, Rudi Zahn, had heard her, had gone to her aid and had taken a brutal battering from the man who wore the Wellingtons. The question he couldn’t answer was this: Why hadn’t Kate made a run for it? Maybe she believed she had no chance of getting away. But possibly, and this gave him a certain hope, she had been shrewd enough to do something so unpredictable that it might jar a psycho off balance.
It was then, with his exceptional peripheral vision, that Boyd noted a movement among the trees, and when Patrolman Prima came running into the glade, the Browning in Boyd’s hand was pointed squarely at Prima’s head. Prima’s own police special was in his hand, but it was pointed fifteen degrees off target from Boyd, and instinct told Prima with chilling force that he couldn’t move it fast enough to turn the situation at least into a stalemate. Something in the way that big, rangy man held the gun warned Prima that he knew how to use it.
“Holster your weapon, son,” Boyd said quietly, and turned back to look for signs of consciousness in Rudi Zahn.
“On your feet,” Prima said, swinging his gun around on the man crouched in the middle of the clearing.
“I told you, put that gun away,” Boyd said without looking at Prima.
“I’m Colonel Boyd.”
“And I’m telling you-” Prima stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, swallowing with difficulty, reacting then to Boyd’s name. “Jesus Christ,” he said softly. “You’re the kid’s father.”
Boyd looked at him intently. “How would you know that?”
“Well, your wife called it in.”
“Goddamn her,” Boyd said bitterly. And now, he thought, the park would be crawling with cops, rookies like this one blundering through the woods with drawn guns, and he had to stay here until he asked Rudi Zahn one vital question. No, he thought, and checked his wristwatch. I’ll waste just thirty more seconds.
“Sir, she did the right thing,” “Prima said. “Lieutenant Tonnelli’s already got the park sealed off with squads.”
Still eyeing his watch, Boyd said. “Then tell your lieutenant to set up an east-west skirmish line between Sixty-ninth and Seventieth Streets, from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West. Some psycho-and my daughter-are traveling north and they’ve crossed Seventieth.”
Rudi Zahn moaned and opened his eyes.
“Ilana,” he said. “He took Ilana.”
The man was in shock, Boyd knew. Maybe he’d wasted a precious moment after all.
“Why didn’t my daughter try to run?” he asked Zahn, his voice low and intense.
“I couldn’t help her,” Zahn said. “He was too big, too crazy. He took her away.”
Patrolman Prima removed the police artist’s sketch of the Juggler from his tunic, quickly opened it, and held it in front of Zahn.
“This the guy grabbed the kid?”
Zahn’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded.
“Brown sweater, maniac.”
“Was my daughter tied up?” Boyd asked him sharply.
Zahn shook his head wearily. “I told her to run. I shouted at her to run. But she didn’t.”
“Get a medic for him,” Boyd said to Prima, and while Prima was debating with himself just how many orders he should take from this civilian, Boyd leaped to his feet and within seconds was lost among the dark trees, running north after the imprints of the big Wellingtons.
Patrolman Prima snapped a switch on his two-way radio and spoke into it.
“This is Patrolman Prima. About twenty yards east of the Mall, between Sixty-ninth and Seventieth. We got action here. Lieutenant Tonnelli? Lieutenant Tonnelli?”
“Give me what you got,” Rusty Boyle answered him. “He’s on wheels. I’ll patch it to him through Central. . ”
Within minutes after receiving a positive make on the Juggler and the confirmation that he had crossed Seventieth Street and was traveling north, Lieutenant Gypsy Tonnelli’s unmarked car turned off the Mall and drove at speed through a formal stand of red maples toward the glade where Prima was administering rudimentary first aid to Rudi Zahn.
More equipment had already been dispatched to the scene: light trucks, an ambulance with police medics, communications units and emergency service vans equipped with shotguns and snipers’ rifles, and two teams of expert marksmen. The caliber of the ammo used in the sniper’s rifle was incredibly low, almost a third less than a.22, but with a muzzle velocity so fast that its striking power was such that a human target would go down no matter where the bullet struck it. The scopes on the rifles were powerful enough to bring targets to the cross hairs that would be invisible to the naked eye.
And from the first radio broadcast ordered by Lieutenant Tonnelli, the print and electronic media had been gathering pools of photographers, reporters, TV and radio staffs to monitor the remote-control units already on their way to cover still another of the Juggler’s grisly escapades.
While from opposite ends of the borough, Commanders Slocum and Larkin, in their limousines with sirens wailing, were on their way to give the public what it seemed to want and need: the drama of the human chase, the exhilaration of a televised scrutiny of the police running a monster to ground under the direction and scenario of borough commanders in uniform, twin silver stars gleaming on their shoulders.
Chapter 15
Luther Boyd followed the track of the Wellingtons and his daughter’s boots through stands of cut-leaf beech trees which made his task laborious and difficult because a luxuriance of foliage fell to the ground from masses of horizontal branches, and Boyd had to sweep them aside like coarse curtains to find the sign he was searching for. But when he reached the band shell, an open-air theater at the head of the Mall-he was north of Seventieth Street now-he came on a narrow, spongy strip of ground which circled the theater, and it was here, traveling east, that he again found sign of the Wellingtons and Kate’s small boots. Following their trail, he turned north at the eastern end of the theater and made his way past the Mall and band shell through heavy stands of giant sycamores, with mottled gray-white trunks, and huge exposed roots. There were heaps of fallen branches and scattered stacks of underbrush left by the park’s cleanup crews.
He ran a zigzag course, steadily extending its perimeters, but the exposed roots and heaps of windfall timber made an impossible tracking surface; the wood, hard as iron, would require an ax to so much as dent it. And here Boyd lost the Wellingtons.
Instinct told Boyd his quarry hadn’t doubled back on him, so he continued on a northern line until he came to the barrier of Seventy-second Street, brilliant and noisy with traffic. He looked toward Fifth Avenue and saw that the light had turned red against the east-west flow of cars. In seconds, he could cross this conduit and try to pick up the Wellingtons on the turf he could see on the opposite side of the street.
But while he was waiting, his muscles tensed and ready to run, a black sedan pulled up and parked directly in front of him, and from the front passenger seat a man with a huge chest and vivid scar along his cheek stepped out and said, “I’m Lieutenant Tonnelli, Colonel Boyd.”
At the wheel of the car was the young patrolman, Max Prima, whom Boyd had encountered only minutes before in the park. In the rear of the car was Boyd’s wife, Barbara, and he could see the tears in her eyes and the ravaged lines of fear in her face.
“I did what I thought best, Luther,” she said. “You must believe that.”
Recriminations were irrelevant now. She had cast the die, and he would not have to live with it. Whether Kate would or not was another matter. She had added chaos to his simple strategy, and that might destroy their
