'Sergeant Douglas?'
'He's in court today.'
'Okay, I'll call back.' Oreza hung up. He looked at the clock. Pushing four in the afternoon - he'd been at the station since midnight. He pulled open a drawer and started filling out the forms accounting for the fuel he'd burned up today, making the Chesapeake Bay safe for drunks who owned boats. Then he planned to get home, get dinner, and get some sleep.
The problem was making sense out of what she said. A physician was called in from his office across the street, and diagnosed her problem as barbiturate intoxication, which wasn't exactly news, and then went on to say that they'd just have to wait for the stuff to work its way out of her system, for which two opinions he'd charged the county twenty dollars. Talking to her for several hours had only made her at turns amused and annoyed, but her story hadn't changed, either. Three people dead, bang bang bang. It was less funny to her now. She'd started remembering what Burt was like, and that talk was quite foul.
'If this girl was any higher she'd be up on the moon with the astronauts,' the Captain thought.
'Three dead people on a boat somewhere,' Trooper Freeland repeated. 'Names and everything.'
'You believe it?'
'Story stays the same, doesn't it?'
'Yeah.' The Captain looked up. 'You like to fish out there. What's it sound like to you, Ben?'
'Like around Bloodsworth Island.'
'We'll hold her overnight on public drunkenness... we have her dead-bang on possession, right?'
'Cap'n, all I had to do was ask. She handed the stuff to me.'
'Okay, process her all the way through.'
'And then, sir?'
'Like helicopter rides?'
He picked a different marina this time. It turned out to be pretty easy, with so many boats always out fishing or partying, and this one had plenty of guest slips for transient boats which in the summer season plied up and down the coast, stopping off on the way for food and fuel and rest much as motorists did. The dockmaster watched him move in expertly to his third-largest guest slip, which didn't always happen with the owners of the larger cruisers. He was more surprised to see the youth of the owner.
'How long you plan to be here?' the man asked, helping with the lines.
'Couple of days. Is that okay?'
'Sure.'
'Mind if I pay cash?'
'We honor cash,' the dockmaster assured him.
Kelly peeled off the bills and announced that he'd be sleeping aboard this night. He didn't say what would be happening the next day.
CHAPTER 34
Stalking
'We missed something, Em,' Douglas announced at eight-ten in the morning.
'What was it this time?' Ryan asked. Missing something wasn't exactly a new happening in their business.
'How they knew she was in Pittsburgh. I called that Sergeant Meyer, had 'em check the long-distance charges on the house phone. None, not a single outgoing call for the last month.'
The detective lieutenant stubbed out his cigarette. 'You have to assume that our friend Henry knew where she was from. He had two girls get loose from him, he probably took the time to ask where they were from. You're right,' Ryan said after a second's thought. 'He probably assumed she was dead.'
'Who knew she was there?'
'The people who took her there. They sure as hell didn't tell anyone.'
'Kelly?'
'Found out yesterday over at Hopkins, he was out of the country.'
'Oh, really? Where?'
'The nurse, O'Toole, she says she knows but she isn't allowed to say, whatever the hell that means.' He paused. 'Back to Pittsburgh.'
'The story is, Sergeant Meyer's dad is a preacher. He was counseling the girl and told his son a little of what he knew. Okay. The sergeant goes up the chain to his captain. The Captain knows Frank Allen, and the sarge calls him for advice on who's running the case. Frank refers him to us. Meyer didn't talk to anybody else.' Douglas lit up one of his own. 'So how did the info get to our friends?'
This was entirely normal, but not particularly comfortable. Now both men thought that they had a breaking case. This was happening, it was breaking open. Not unusually, things were now happening too fast for the analytical process that was necessary to make sense of it all.
'As we've thought all along, they have somebody inside.'
'Frank?' Douglas asked. 'He's never been connected with any of the cases. He doesn't even have access to the information that our friends would need.' Which was true. The Helen Waters case had started in the Western District with one of Allen's junior detectives, but the Chief had turned it over to Ryan and Douglas almost immediately because of the degree of violence involved. 'I suppose you could call this progress, Em. Now we're sure. There has to be a leak inside the Department.'
'What other good news do we have?'
The State Police only had three helicopters, all Bell Jet Rangers, and were still learning how to make use of them. Getting one was not the most trivial of exercises, but the Captain running Barracks 'V' was a senior man who ran a quiet county - this was less a matter of his competence than of the nature of his area, but police hierarchies tend to place stock in results, however obtained. The helicopter arrived on the barracks helicopter pad at a quarter to nine. Captain Ernest Joy and Trooper 1/c Freeland were waiting. Neither had taken a helicopter ride before, and both were a little nervous when they saw how small the aircraft was. They always look smaller close up, and smaller still on the inside. Mainly used for Medevac missions, the aircraft had a pilot and a paramedic, both of whom were gun-toting State Police officers in sporty flight suits that went well, they thought, with their shoulder holsters and aviator shades. The standard safety lecture took a total of ninety seconds, delivered so quickly as to be incomprehensible. The ground-pounders strapped in, and the helicopter spooled up. The pilot decided against jazzing up the ride. The senior man was a captain, after all, and cleaning vomit out of the back was a drag.
'Where to?' he asked over the intercom.
'Bloodsworth Island,' Captain Joy told him.
'Roger that,' the pilot replied as he thought an aviator ought, turning southeast and lowering the nose. It didn't take long.
The world looks different from above, and the first time people go up in helicopters the reaction is always the same. The takeoff, rather like jerking aloft in an amusement-park cable-car ride, is initially startling, but then the fascination begins. The world transformed itself before the eyes of both officers, and it was as though it all suddenly made sense. They could see the roads and the forms all laid out like a map. Freeland grasped it first. Knowing his territory as he did, he instantly saw that his mental picture of it was flawed; his idea of how things really were was not quite right. He was only a thousand feet above it, a linear distance his car traversed in seconds, but this perspective was new, and he immediately started learning from it.
'That's where I found her,' he told the Captain over the intercom.
'Long way from where we're going. Yoa think she walked that far?'
'No, sir.' But it wasn't that far from the water, was it? Perhaps two miles away, they saw the old dock of a farm up for sale, and that was less than five miles from where they were heading, scarcely two minutes' flying time. The Chesapeake Bay was a wide blue band now, under the morning haze. To the northwest was the large expanse of Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center, and they could both see aircraft flying there - a matter of concern to the pilot, who kept a wary eye out for low-flying aircraft. The Navy jocks liked to smoke in low.
'Straight ahead,' he said. The paramedic pointed so that the passengers would know where straight-ahead
