at Officer O'Mara's bidding, followed Supervisory Special Agent Larkin into Inspector Wohl's office.
'Well, Peter,' Larkin asked as they shook hands, 'how did the promotion ceremony go?'
Does everybody in Philadelphia know I've been promoted? And what the hell is Matt doing in here?
'I did all right until the Commissioner kissed me.'
He stopped.
I'll show Payne the photograph and then throw him out.
'Yes, sir?'
'Excuse me, Charley. This won't take a minute,' Wohl said, and handed Matt the photograph. 'You ever see this woman before?'
Matt looked at it.
'That's the girl Lanza had in the Poconos.'
'Okay. Call Captain Olsen in Internal Affairs and tell him that,' Wohl ordered.
'Right now?'
'Right now,' Wohl said sharply.
'Peter,' Larkin said. 'Excuse me, but is that as important as our lunatic?'
No, of course it isn't. I am just having one of my goddamned bad days. What the hell is the matter with me?
'No, of course not,' Wohl said. 'Sorry. Payne, that will wait.'
'Yes, sir.'
'I'm reasonably sure, Peter, that we know where our man has been,' Larkin said. 'But we don't have an idea who he is, or where.'
'What happened in New Jersey?'
'A deputy sheriff came across a piece of steel that showed evidence of having been involved in a high- explosive detonation,' Larkin said. 'Actually, he ran over it. Anyway, an ATF guy out of Atlantic City ran it down, and they called us. What we found, in a garbage dump in the middle of the Pine Barrens, were half a dozen railroad station, airline terminal, bus station rental lockers that had been, recently, blown up. The ATF expert said he was almost sure it was Composition C-4, and that it was set up with GI detonators. This guy knows his way around explosives.'
'That's not good news, is it?'
'It may not be all bad. It may give us a line on him. We're already back-checking with the military. And if he knows what he's doing, that would lessen the chance of his explosives going off accidentally.'
'But you don't know who he is?'
'That's the bad news. Where we stand is that the FBI is searching records in the county courthouse over there to find out who owns the property. There's a house, more of a cabin, on the property. Someone has been there in the past week or ten days, which coincides with when the ATF explosives guy says the explosions took place. And, for a cabin, the place was out-of-the-ordinary neat and clean. Which ties in with the psychological profile. Both of them. Ours and Dr. Payne's. I have a gut feeling he could be our guy.'
'But no name?'
'Not yet. And I could be wrong. Maybe the people who own the property have nothing to do with what happened there. But that's all we have to go on, unless we get a name from the Defense Department, some explosives guy with mental problems.'
'How can we help?' Wohl asked.
'If wecome up with a name, we're going to have to move fast. It would help if we had a search warrant that had the important parts left blank.'
'Denny Coughlin,' Wohl said. 'I'll call him. He's good at that. He knows every judge in the city.'
'You're not?'
'There's a Superior Court judge named Findermann in the slam,' Wohl said. 'Since I put him there, I have not been too popular with the bench.'
'The only people worse than doctors and Congressmen when it comes to protecting their own are judges,' Larkin said, and then went on: ' If we get a name and an address,and a search warrant, we'll need some explosives people, maybe even a booby-trap expert.'
'I thought of that,' Wohl said. 'We call it 'Ordnance Disposal.' It's in the Special Patrol Bureau. When I called over there, they told me, 'You tell us where, and we'll be there in ten minutes.''
'Good. I appreciate your cooperation, Peter.'
'You keep saying that.'
'I keep saying it because I mean it. We couldn't handle this by ourselves.'
'I have the simple solution to this problem,' Wohl said. 'Tell the Vice President to stay the hell home.'
'No way,' Larkin chuckled. 'What I think I should do now is go back to the office and see if I can lean on the Defense Department to come up with some names. Can Matt take me?'
'Sure. On your way back, go see Hay-zus Martinez. Tell him…' He stopped, and then went on. 'Hell, when all else fails, tell the truth. Tell Hay-zus that other people are watching Lanza. If he goes back to work, he is to stay away from Lanza. If he sees him doing something, he is to telephone either Captain Olsen or me. He's not to do anything about it.'
'If he goes back to work?' Matt asked.
'His mother said he has the flu. Make sure he understands the message, Matt.'
'Yes, sir.'
'If he goes off half-cocked, he's liable to blow the whole thing,' Wohl went on.
'I'll tell him, sir.'
'And then come back here, of course, so Captain Sabara can have his car back.'
'Yes, sir.'
The red light was blinking on the answering machine when Matt came into his apartment at twenty minutes after five.
I don't want to listen to any goddamned messages. I'm just going to have to bite the goddamned bullet.
He reached down and pushed the ERASE button before he could change his mind. Nothing happened.
You have to play the goddamned messages before you can erase them! Damn!
He pushed the PLAY button and walked into the kitchen and took a beer from the refrigerator. He could hear that there had again been a number of callers who had elected not to leave their names.
Nature called, and he went to the bathroom off his bedroom. He had just begun to void his bladder when there was a familiar voice, somewhat metallically distorted.
Penny! Jesus, I can't understand a word she's saying! I wonder what the hell she wanted?
By the time he had zipped up his fly and returned to the answering machine, all the recorded messages, including the hang-ups, had played.
Do I want to push rewind so that I can hear what Precious Penny wants? No, I do not want to hear what Precious Penny wants.
He pushed the ERASE button, and this time it worked.
Banishing forever into the infinite mystery of rearranged microscopic metallic particles whatever Penny wanted to tell me. Why did I do that?
He went into the kitchen, picked up the beer bottle, returned to the telephone, and dialed Evelyn's number.
It was a brief, but enormously painful conversation, punctuated by long, painful silences.
He told Evelyn the truth. He could not see her tonight because he was on orders to keep himself available. That was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Peter Wohl had even told him to take an unmarked car home with him in case he would need a car with radios and a siren.
Evelyn, her voice made it quite plain, did not believe a word he was saying. Nor did Evelyn believe him when he said he really didn't know about tomorrow, but that he thought the same thing would be true then. That was also the unvarnished truth. Until they found the lunatic who wanted to disintegrate the Vice President, everyone
