10
FIVE-THIRTY TUESDAY MORNING FBI Special Agent
Brogan was alone in the third-floor meeting room, using one of the
newly installed phone lines for an early call to his girlfriend.
Five-thirty in the morning is not the best time to deliver an
apology for a broken date from the night before, but Brogan had
been very busy, and he anticipated being busier still. So he made
the call. He woke her and told her he had been tied up, and
probably would be for the rest of the week. She was sleepy and
annoyed, and made him repeat it all twice. Then she chose to
interpret the message as a cowardly prelude to some kind of a
brush-off. Brogan got annoyed in turn. He told her the Bureau had
to come first. Surely she understood that? It was not the best
point to be making to a sleepy annoyed woman at five-thirty in the
morning. They had a short row and Brogan hung up, depressed.
His partner Milosevic was alone in his own office
cubicle. Slumped in his chair, also depressed. His problem was a
lack of imagination. It was his biggest weakness. McGrath had told
him to trace Holly Johnson’s every move from noon yesterday. But he
hadn’t come up with anything. He had seen her leaving the FBI
building. Stepping out of the door, onto the street, forearm jammed
into the curved metal clip of her hospital cane. He had seen her
getting that far. But then the picture just went blank. He’d
thought hard all night, and told McGrath nothing.
Five-forty, he went to the bathroom and got more
coffee. Still miserable. He walked back to his desk. Sat down, lost
in thought for a long time. Then he glanced at the heavy gold watch
on his wrist. Checked the time. Smiled. Felt better. Thought some
more. Checked his watch again. He nodded to himself. Now he could
tell McGrath where Holly Johnson had gone at twelve o’clock
yesterday.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND two miles away, panic had
set in. Numb shock had carried the carpenter through the first
hours. It had made him weak and acquiescent. He had let the
employer hustle him up the stairs and into the room. Then numb
shock had made him waste his first hours, just sitting and staring.
Then he had started up with a crazy optimism that this whole thing
was some kind of bad Halloween joke. That made him waste his next
hours convinced nothing was going to happen. But then, like
prisoners everywhere locked up alone in the cold small hours of the
night, all his defenses had stripped away and left him shaking and
desperate with panic.
With half his time gone, he burst into frantic
action. But he knew it was hopeless. The irony was crushing him.
They had worked hard on this room. They had built it right. Dollar
signs had danced in front of their eyes. They had cut no corners.
They had left out all their usual shoddy carpenter’s tricks. Every
single board was straight and tight. Every single nail was punched
way down below the grain. There were no windows. The door was
solid. It was hopeless. He spent an hour running around the room
like a madman. He ran his rough palms over every square inch of
every surface. Floor, ceiling, walls. It was the best job they had
ever done. He ended up crouched in a corner, staring at his hands,
crying.
“THE DRY CLEANER’S,” McGrath said. “That’s where
she went.”
He was in the third-floor conference room. Head of
the table, seven o’clock, Tuesday morning. Opening a fresh pack of
cigarettes.
“She did?” Brogan said. “The dry cleaner’s?”
McGrath nodded.
“Tell him, Milo,” he said.
Milosevic smiled.
“I just remembered,” he said. “I’ve worked with her
five weeks, right? Since she busted up her knee? Every Monday
lunchtime, she takes in her cleaning. Picks up last week’s stuff.
No reason for it to be any different yesterday.”
“OK,” Brogan said. “Which cleaner’s?”
Milosevic shook his head.
“Don’t know,” he said. “She always went on her own.
I always offered to do it for her, but she said no, every time,
five straight Mondays. OK if I helped her out on Bureau business,
but she wasn’t about to have me running around after her cleaning.
She’s a very independent type of a woman.”
“But she walked there, right?” McGrath said.
“Right,” Milosevic said. “She always walked. With
maybe eight or nine things on hangers. So we’re safe to conclude
the place she used is fairly near here.”
Brogan nodded. Smiled. They had some kind of a
lead. He pulled the Yellow Pages over and opened it up to D.
“What sort of a radius are we giving it?” he
said.
McGrath shrugged.
“Twenty minutes there, twenty minutes back,” he
said. “That would be about the max, right? With that crutch, I
can’t see her doing more than a quarter-mile in twenty-minutes.
Limping like that? Call it a square, a half-mile on a side, this
building in the center. What does that give us?”
Brogan used the AAA street map. He made a crude
compass with his thumb and forefinger. Adjusted it to a half-mile
according to the scale in the margin. Drew a square across the
thicket of streets. Then he flipped back and forth between the map
and the Yellow Pages. Ticked off names with his pencil. Counted
them up.
“Twenty-one establishments,” he said.
McGrath stared at him.
“Twenty-one?” he said. “Are you sure?”
Brogan nodded. Slid the phone book across the shiny
hardwood.
“Twenty-one,” he said. “Obviously people in this
town like to keep their clothes real clean.”
“OK,” McGrath said. “Twenty-one places. Hit the
road, guys.”
Brogan took ten addresses and Milosevic took
eleven. McGrath issued them both with large color blowups of Holly
Johnson’s file photograph. Then he nodded them out and waited in
his chair at the head of the conference room table, next to the
telephones, slumped, staring into space, smoking, drumming a
worried little rhythm with the blunt end of his pencil.
HE HEARD FAINT sounds much earlier than he
thought he should. He had no watch and no windows, but he was
certain it was not yet morning. He was certain he had another hour.
Maybe two. But he could hear noise. People moving in the street
outside. He held his breath and listened. Maybe three or four
people. He quartered the room again. Frozen with indecision. He
should be pounding and kicking at the new pine boards. He knew
that. But he wasn’t. Because he knew it was hopeless, and because
he felt in his gut he must be silent. He had become sure of that.
Convinced. If he was silent, they might leave him alone. They might
forget he was in there.
MILOSEVIC FOUND THE right place, the seventh of
the eleven establishments on his list. It was just opening up for
business, seven-forty in the morning. Just a store-front place, but
elegant, not really aimed at the typical commuter’s cheap worsteds.
It advertised all kinds of specialized processes and custom
treatments. There was a Korean woman in charge of the store.
Milosevic showed her his FBI shield and placed Holly’s file picture
flat on the counter in front of her.
“You ever see this person?” he asked her.
The Korean woman looked at the picture, politely,
with concentration, her hands clasped together behind her
back.
“Sure,” she said. “That’s Miss Johnson, comes in
every Monday.”
Milosevic stepped closer to the counter. He leaned
up close to the woman.
“She come in yesterday?” Milosevic asked her.
The woman thought about it and nodded.
“Sure,” she said. “Like I told you, she comes in
every Monday.”
“What kind of time?” he asked.
“Lunch hour,” the woman said. “Always lunch
hour.”
“About twelve?” he said. “Twelve-thirty, something
like that?”
“Sure,” the woman said. “Always lunch hour on a
Monday.”
“OK, yesterday,” Milosevic said. “What
happened?”
The woman shrugged.
“Nothing happened,” she said. “She came in, she
took her garments, she paid, she left some garments to be
cleaned.”
“Anybody with her?” he asked.
“Nobody with her,” the woman said. “Nobody ever
with her.”
“Which direction was she headed?” Milosevic
asked.
The woman pointed back toward the Federal
Building.
“She came from that direction,” she said.
“I didn’t ask you where she came from,” Milosevic
said. “Where did she head when she left?”
The woman paused.
“I didn’t see,” she said. “I took her garments
through to the back. I heard the door open, but I couldn’t see
where she went. I was in back.”
“You just grabbed her stuff?” Milosevic said.
“Rushed through to the back before she was out of here?”
The woman faltered, like she was being accused of
an impoliteness.
“Not rushed,” she said. “Miss Johnson was walking
slow. Bad leg, right? I felt I shouldn’t stare at her. I felt she
was embarrassed. I walked her clothes through to the back so she
wouldn’t feel I was watching her.”
Milosevic nodded and tilted his head back and
sighed up at the ceiling. Saw a video camera mounted high above the
counter.
“What’s that?” he said.
The Korean woman twisted and followed his
gaze.
“Security,” she said. “Insurance company says we
got to have it.”
“Does it work?” he asked.
“Sure it works,” the woman said. “Insurance company
says it’s got to.”
“Does it run all the time?” Milosevic asked.
The woman nodded and giggled.
“Sure it does,” she said. “It’s running right now.
You’ll be on the tape.”
Milosevic checked his watch.
“I need yesterday’s tape,” he said.
“Immediately.”
The woman faltered again. Milosevic pulled his
shield for the second time.
“This is an FBI investigation,” he said. “Official
federal business. I need that tape, right now, OK?”
The woman nodded and held up her hand to make him
wait. Stepped through a door to the rear of the establishment. Came
back out after a long moment with a blast of chemical smell and a
videocassette in her hand.
“You let me have it back, OK?” she said. “Insurance
company says we got to keep them for a month.”
MILOSEVIC TOOK IT straight in, and by
eight-thirty the Bureau technicians were swarming all over the
third-floor conference room again, hooking up a standard VHS player
to the bank of monitors piled down the middle of the long table.
There was a problem with a fuse, and then the right wire proved too
short, so a computer had to be moved to allow the video player to
get nearer to the center of the table. Then the head tech handed
McGrath the remote and nodded.
“All yours, chief,” he said.
McGrath sent him out of the room and the three
agents crowded around the screens, waiting for the picture to roll.
The screens faced the wall of windows, so they all three had their
backs to the glass. But at that time of day, there was no danger of
anybody getting uncomfortable, because right then the bright
morning sun was blasting the other side of the building.
THAT SAME SUN rolled on seventeen hundred and two
miles from Chicago and made it bright morning outside the white
building. He knew it had come. He could hear the quiet ticking as
the old wood frame warmed through. He could hear muffled voices
outside, below him, down at street level. The sound of people
starting a new day.
His fingernails were gone. He had found a gap where
two boards were not hard together. He had forced his fingertips
down and levered with all his strength. His nails had torn off, one
after the other. The board had not moved. He had scuttled backward
into a corner and curled up on the floor. He had sucked his
bloodied fingers and now his mouth was smeared all around with
blood, like a child’s with cake.
He heard footsteps on the staircase. A big man,
moving lightly. The sound halted outside the door. The lock clicked
back. The door opened. The employer looked in at him. Bloated face,
two nickel-sized red spots burning high on his cheeks.
“You’re still here,” he said.
The carpenter was paralyzed. Couldn’t move,
couldn’t speak.
“You failed,” the employer said.
There was silence in the room. The only sound was
the slow ticking of the wood frame as the morning sun slid over the
roof.
“So what shall we do now?” the employer
asked.
The carpenter just stared blankly at him. Didn’t
move. Then the employer smiled a relaxed, friendly smile. Like he
was suddenly surprised about something.
“You think I meant it?” he said, gently.
The carpenter blinked. Shook his head, slightly,
hopefully.
“You hear anything?” the employer asked him.
The carpenter listened hard. He could hear the
quiet ticking of the wood, the song of the forest birds, the silent
sound of sunny morning air.
“You were just kidding around?” he asked.
His voice was a dry croak. Relief and hope and
dread were jamming his tongue into the roof of his mouth.
“Listen,” the employer said.
The carpenter listened. The frame ticked, the birds
sang, the warm air sighed. He heard nothing else. Silence. Then he
heard a click. Then he heard a whine. It started slow and quiet and
stabilized up at a familiar loud pitch. It was a sound he knew. It
was the sound of a big power saw being run up to speed.
“Now do you think I meant it?” the employer
screamed.