“Right.”
“Then call the supervisor at Forest Hills and tell him to let me know stat if any doctors or ambulance attendants or nurses —
The young man peeled off into his office to do what Silverman had ordered and the senior detective returned to his own desk. He called a counterpart at the county sheriff’s office in Hamilton and told him what he suspected and added that they had to be on the lookout for any medical people who were close to Pease.
The detective then sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes and massaging his neck. He was more and more convinced he was right, that the secret message left by the dying informant was pointing toward a killer masquerading as a health care worker. He picked up the phone again. For several hours, he nagged hospitals and ambulance services around the county to find out if all of their people and vehicles were accounted for.
As the hour neared lunchtime, his phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Silverman.” The captain’s abrupt voice instantly killed the detective’s sleep-deprivation haze; he was instantly alert. “We just had an attempt on Pease.”
Silverman’s heart thudded. He sat forward. “He okay?”
“Yeah. Somebody in an SUV fired thirty, forty shots through the front windows of the safe house. Steel- jacketed rounds, so they got through the armored glass. Pease and his guard got hit with some splinters, but nothing serious. Normally we’d send ’em to the hospital but I was thinking about what you said, about the killer pretending to be a tech or doctor, so I thought it was better to bring Pease straight here, to Detention. I’ll have our sawbones look ’em both over.”
“Good.”
“We’ll keep him here for a day or two and then send him up to the federal WP facility in Ronanka Falls.”
“And have somebody head over to the Forest Hills emergency room and check out the doctors. Doyle’s hired gun might be thinking we’d send him there and be waiting.”
“Already ordered,” the captain said.
“When’ll Pease get here?”
“Anytime now.”
“I’ll have the lockup cleared.” He hung up, rubbed his eyes again. How the hell had Doyle found out the location of the safe house? It was the best-kept secret in the department. Still, since no one had been seriously injured in the attack, he allowed himself another figurative pat of self-congratulations. His theory was being borne out. The shooter hadn’t tried to kill Pease at all, just shake him up and cause enough carnage to have him dive to the floor and scrape an elbow or get cut by flying glass. Then off to the ER — and straight into the arms of Doyle’s hit man.
He called the Detention supervisor at the jail and arranged to have the existing prisoners in the holding cell moved temporarily to the town police station, then told the man to brief the guards and warn them to make absolutely certain they recognized the doctor who was going to look over Pease and his bodyguard.
“I already did. ’Causa what the captain said, you know.”
Silverman was about to hang up when he glanced at the clock. It was noon, the start of second guard shift. “Did you tell the afternoon-shift personnel about the situation?”
“Oh. Forgot. I’ll do it now.”
Silverman hung up angrily. Did he have to think of everything himself?
He was walking to his door, headed for the Detention Center intake area to meet Pease and his guard, when his phone buzzed. The desk sergeant told him he had a visitor. “It’s a Reverend Lansing. He said it’s urgent that he sees you. He said to tell you that he’s figured out the message. You’d know what he means.”
“I’ll be right there.”
Silverman grimaced. As soon as he’d figured out what the passage meant that morning the detective had planned to call the minister and tell him they didn’t need his help any longer. But he’d forgotten all about it. Shit…. Well, he’d do something nice for the guy — maybe donate some money to the church or take the reverend out to lunch to thank him. Yeah, lunch would be good. They could talk about TV cop shows.
The detective met Reverend Lansing at the front desk. Silverman greeted him with a wince, noticing how exhausted he looked. “You get any sleep last night?”
The minister laughed. “Nope. Just like you, looks like.”
“Come on with me, Reverend. Tell me what you came up with.” He led the man down the corridor toward intake. He decided he’d hear what the man had to say. Couldn’t hurt.
“I think I’ve got the answer to the message.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I was thinking that we shouldn’t limit ourselves just to the verse fifteen itself. That one’s just a sort of introduction to the parable that follows. I think that’s the answer.”
Silverman nodded, recalling what he’d read in Noveski’s Bible. “The parable about the farmer?”
“Exactly. Jesus tells about a rich farmer who has a good harvest. He doesn’t know what to do with the excess grain. He thinks he’ll build bigger barns and figures he’ll spend the rest of his life enjoying what he’s done. But what happens is that God strikes him down because he’s greedy. He’s materially rich but spiritually impoverished.”
“Okay,” Silverman said. He didn’t see any obvious message yet.
The reverend sensed the cop’s confusion. “The point of the passage is greed. And I think that might be the key to what that poor man was trying to tell you.”
They got to the intake dock and joined an armed guard who was awaiting the arrival of the armored van carrying Pease. The existing prisoners in the lockup, Silverman learned, weren’t all in the transport bus yet for the transfer to the city jail.
“Tell ’em to step on it,” Silverman ordered and turned back to the minister, who continued his explanation.
“So I asked myself, what’s greed nowadays? And I figured it was Enron, Tyco, CEOs, internet moguls…. And Cahill Industries.”
Silverman nodded slowly. Robert Cahill was the former head of a huge agri-business complex. After selling that company he’d turned to real estate and had put up dozens of buildings in the county. The man had just been indicted for tax evasion and insider trading.
“Successful farmer,” Silverman mused. “Has a big windfall and gets in trouble. Sure. Just like the parable.”
“It gets better,” the minister said excitedly. “There was an editorial in the paper a few weeks ago — I tried to find it but couldn’t — about Cahill. I think the editor cited a couple of Bible passages about greed. I can’t remember which but I’ll bet one of them was Luke twelve, fifteen.”
Standing on the intake loading dock, Silverman watched the van carrying Randy Pease arrive. The detective and the guard looked around them carefully for any signs of threats as the armored vehicle backed in. Everything seemed clear. The detective knocked on the back door, and the witness and his bodyguard hurried out onto the intake loading dock. The van pulled away.
Pease started complaining immediately. He had a small cut on his forehead and a bruise on his cheek from the attack at the safe house but he moaned as if he’d fallen down a two-story flight of stairs. “I want a doctor. Look at this cut. It’s already infected, I can tell. And my shoulder is killing me. What’s a man gotta do to get treated right around here?”
Cops grow very talented at ignoring difficult suspects and witnesses, and Silverman hardly heard a word of the man’s whiny voice.
“Cahill,” Silverman said, turning back to the minister. “And what do you think that means for us?”
“Cahill owns high-rises all over town. I was wondering if the way you’re going to drive your witness to the courthouse would go past any of them.”
“Could be.”
“So a sniper could be on top of one of them.” The reverend smiled. “I didn’t actually think that up on my own. I saw it in a TV show once.”
A chill went through Silverman’s spine.
