seducing a virgin, but much sadder. This man would never see his home again. The Vietnamese had every intention of lulling these men when their utility ended. It was such a colossal waste of talent, and his antipathy to his supposed allies was every bit as real as he feigned it to be - it was no longer pretense. From the first moment he'd arrived in Hanoi, seeing first-hand their arrogant superiority, and their incredible cruelty - and their stupidity. He had just achieved more with kind words and not even a liter of vodka than what they and their torturers had failed to do with years of mindless venom. Instead of inflicting pain, he had shared it. Instead of abusing the man beside him, he had given kindness, respecting his virtues, assuaging his injuries as best he could, protecting him from more, and utterly regretting that he'd necessarily been the agent of the most recent of them.
There was a downside, however. To achieve this breakthrough, he'd opened his soul, told true stories, dredged up his own childhood nightmares, reexamined his true reason for coining the profession he loved. Only possible, only thinkable, because he'd known that the man sitting next to him was doomed to a lonely, unknown death - already dead to his family and his country - and an unattended grave. This man was no fascist Hitlerite. He was an enemy, but a straightforward one who had probably done his utmost to spare harm to noncombatants because he, too, had a family. There was in him no illusion of racial superiority - not even hatred for the North Vietnamese, and that was the most remarkable thing of all, for he, Grishanov, was learning to hate them. Zacharias didn't deserve to die, Grishanov told himself, recognizing the greatest irony of all.
Kolya Grishanov and Robin Zacharias were now friends.
'How does this grab you?' Douglas asked, setting it on Ryan's desk. The wine bottle was in a clear plastic bag, and the smooth, clear surface was uniformly coated with a fine yellow dust.
'No prints?' Emmet looked it over in considerable surprise.
'Net even a smudge, Em. Zilch.' The knife came down next. It was a simple switchblade, also dusted and bagged.
'Smudges here.'
'One partial thumbprint, matched with the victim. Nothing else we can use, but smudges, uniform smudges, the prints department says. Either he stabbed himself in the back of the neck or our suspect was wearing gloves.'
It was awfully warm this time of the year to wear gloves. Emmet Ryan leaned back, staring at the evidence items on his desk, then at Tom Douglas, sitting beside them. 'Okay, Tom, go on.'
'We've had four murder scenes, a total of six victims. No evidence left behind. Five of the victims - three incidents - are pushers, two different MOs. But in every case, no witnesses, roughly the same time of day, all within a five-block radius.'
'Craftsmanship.' Lieutenant Ryan nodded. He closed his eyes, first mentally viewing the different crime scenes, then correlating the data. Rob, not rob, change??. But the last one did have a witness. Go home, ma'am. Why was he polite? Ryan shook his head. 'Real life isn't Agatha Christie, Tom.'
'Our young lad, today, Em. Tell me about the method our friend used to dispatch him.'
'Knife there... I haven't seen anything like that in a long time. Strong son of a bitch. I did see one... back in '58 or '59.' Ryan paused, collecting his thoughts. 'A plumber, I think, big, tough guy, found his wife in bed with somebody. He let the man leave, then he took a chisel, held her head up -'
'You have to be really pissed off to do it the hard way. Anger, right? Why do it that way?' Douglas asked. 'You can cut a throat a lot easier, and the victim is just as dead.'
'A lot messier, too. Noisy...' Ryan's voice trailed off as he thought it through. It was not appreciated that people with their throats cut made a great deal of noise. If you opened the windpipe there could be the most awful gurgling sound, and if not, people screamed their way to death. Then there was the blood, so much of it, flying like water from a cut hose, getting on your hands and clothes.
On the other hand, if you wanted to kill someone in a hurry, like turning off a light switch, and if you were strong and had him crippled already, the base of the skull, where the spinal cord joined the brain, was just the perfect spot: quick, quiet, and relatively clean.
'The two pushers were a couple blocks away, time of death almost identical. Our friend does them, walks over this way, turns a corner, and sees Mrs Charles being hassled.'
Lieutenant Ryan shook his head. 'Why not just keep going? Cross the street, that's the smart move. Why get involved? A killer with morals?' Ryan asked. That was where the theory broke down. 'And if the same guy is wasting pushers, what's the motive? Except for the two last night, it looks like robbery. Maybe with those two something spooked him off before he could collect the money and the drugs. A car going down the street, some noise? If we're dealing with a robber, then it doesn't connect with Mrs Charles and her friend. Tom, it's just speculation.'
'Four separate incidents, no physical evidence, a guy wearing gloves - a street wino wearing gloves!'
'Not enough, Tom.'
'I'm going to have Western District start shaking them down anyway.'
Ryan nodded. That was fair enough.
It was midnight when he left his apartment. The area was so agreeably quiet on a weekday night. The old apartment complex was peopled with residents who minded their own business. Kelly had not so much as shaken a hand since the manager's. A few friendly nods, that was all. There were no children in the complex, just middle- aged people, almost all married couples sprinkled with a few widowed singles. Mainly white-collar workers, a surprising number of whom rode the bus to work downtown, watched TV at night, heading to bed around ten or eleven. Kelly moved out quietly, driving the VW down Loch Raven Boulevard, past churches and other apartment complexes, past the city's sports stadium as the neighborhoods evolved downward from middle- to working-class, and from working-class to subsistence, passing darkened office buildings downtown in his continuing routine. But tonight there was a difference.
Tonight would be his first major payoff. That meant risk, but it always did, Kelly told himself, flexing his hands on the plastic steering wheel. He didn't like the surgical gloves. The rubber held heat in, and though the sweat didn't affect his grip, the discomfort was annoying. The alternative was not acceptable, however, and he remembered not liking a lot of the things he'd done in Vietnam, like the leeches, a thought that generated a few chills. They were even worse than rats. At least rats didn't suck your blood.
Kelly took his time, driving around his objective almost randomly while he sized things up. It paid off. He saw a pair of police officers talking to a street bum, one of them close, the other two steps back, seemingly casual, but the distance between the two cops told him what he needed to know. One was covering the other. They saw the wino as someone potentially threatening.
Looking for you, Johnnie-boy, he told himself, turning the wheel and changing streets.
But the cops wouldn't change their whole operating routine, would they? Looking at and talking to winos would be an additional duty for the next few nights. There were other things that had higher priority: answering calls for holdup alarms in liquor stores, responding to family disputes, even traffic violations. No, hassling drunks would just be one more burden on men already overworked. It would be something with which to spice up their normal patrol patterns, and Kelly had troubled himself to learn what those patterns were. The additional danger was therefore somewhat predictable, and Kelly reasoned that he'd had his supply of bad luck for this mission. Just one more time and he'd switch patterns. To what he didn't know, but if things went right, what he should soon learn would provide the necessary information.
Thank you, he said to destiny, a block away from the corner brownstone. The Roadrunner was right there, and it was early still, a collection night; the girl wouldn't be there. He drove past it, continuing up the next block before turning right, then another block, and right again. He saw a police cruiser and checked the clock on the car. It was within five minutes of its normal schedule, and this one was a solo car. There wouldn't be another pass for about two hours, Kelly told himself, making a final right turn and heading towards the brownstone. He parked as close to it as he dared, then got out and walked away from the target house, heading back to the next block before dropping into his disguise.
There were two pushers on this block, both lone operators. They looked a little tense. Perhaps the word was getting out, Kelly thought with a suppressed smile. Some of their brethren were disappearing, and that had to be cause for concern. He kept well clear of both as he covered the block, inwardly amused that neither knew how close Death had passed them. How tenuous their lives were, and yet they didn't know. But that was a distraction, he told himself, turning yet again and heading to the objective. He paused at the corner, looking around. It was after one in the morning now, and things were settling down into the accustomed boredom that comes at the end of any working day, even the illegal kind. Activity on the street was diminishing, just as expected from all the reconnaissance he had done. There was nothing untoward on this street, and Kelly headed south past the rows of
