"Hence the panic," Lanier said, "which Frank would so like to avoid. Anyway, I thought I'd let Darrel and Debra get you up to speed and you can decide where we are exactly and how we handle things if it gets hot." He nodded at his female inspector, whose pretty face she tried to make invisible, with limited success, by wearing a tough expression most of the time. "Debra, you want to start?"
"Sure." Bent over slightly in her chair, she had her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped in front of her. Raising her chin, she shifted a little to face Glitsky. "It's not much of a story by itself, but last Wednesday, I got a late call down in the Mish, early a.m. There's a body in an alley down there around the corner from the Makeout Room. White male, decently dressed, his wallet's still in his back pocket. Turns out he's a thirty-six-year-old ex-Navy SEAL named Arnold Zwick. No criminal record, unmarried and unconnected, currently unemployed. But he'd evidently come back from Iraq recently where he'd done some work for Allstrong Security, which is based here in town."
"What kind of work?" Glitsky asked.
"Whatever they do over there with former military guys. I went back to Allstrong and they told me that their main contract right now is protecting Baghdad Airport. But they didn't know where Zwick had gone to. The manager of the office told me they thought that he might have been killed over there. One day he just disappeared. Except that we now know he came back here. And some witnesses I talked to-neighbors he'd made friends with-seemed to have had the impression that he had a lot of money. But it's not in a bank account that I've been able to find, and there wasn't any cash in his apartment, so robbery might still be a motive, either that or he had the stuff hidden pretty well."
Glitsky asked, "Do you think it's possible he stole money from Allstrong over there?"
Debra nodded, apparently pleased at the question. "That was my assumption, too, sir. Especially given the way he died."
"And how was that?"
"Somebody snapped his neck."
"Close work," Glitsky said. "Not that easy."
"It's even harder when you factor in Zwick's training and that there was no sign of struggle or a weapon from his attacker. And Zwick was heavily armed. He had a knife in a sheath on his leg and a forty-five carried loose in his coat pocket. Both still on him when I got to him."
"So his killer," Glitsky said, "was another commando. You were thinking probably with Allstrong, somehow, getting back their money."
Debra nodded. "That is kind of where I was going until Marcel called me yesterday and told me about Darrel's latest."
Glitsky shifted his interest over to Bracco. "Talk to me," he said.
" Three street thugs, all with sheets. All of 'em young, strong, and armed, out for a good time on Saturday night in the Tenderloin. All of 'em killed by hand. Maybe they just decided to mug the wrong guy, the same guy who killed Zwick, but that's a stretch, don't you think?"
"The stretch is why he would have stayed around," Glitsky said, "if he's one of the Allstrong people."
"There aren't any Allstrong people, though," Debra said. "The whole staff is over in Iraq. They've got a woman manager over here in a tiny office by Candlestick and a couple of clerks. None of 'em had ever met Zwick personally. And I believe them."
"On the other hand," Lanier interjected, "maybe we got a bona fide wacko who's getting off on killing people with his hands. These Tenderloin meatballs, we got two broken necks and a septum jabbed up into the brain. But there's no connection we can come up with between Zwick and these dirtbags. None of the victims had anything stolen off them."
Glitsky scratched at his cheek. "How many broken-neck murders have you seen in the past twenty years, Marcel?"
The lieutenant nodded. "I know what you're saying, Abe. And every one of the very few was in the course of some kind of a fight. These guys, there was hardly a sign of a struggle. The problem is that we got reporters already onto the story-I got a call at home this morning, and so did Frank-and they're salivating over this serial killer possibility."
Glitsky chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute. "And Allstrong hires Navy SEALs and guys like that for their security work over in Iraq?"
"That's what I gather," Debra said. "They've got nice brochures, but really, as I said, no people."
"But let's not lose sight of the main question," Lanier said. "We don't want to spin this toward a serial killer loose in the city. Frank would have my balls. Excuse me, Debra."
But Glitsky was standing up. "I'm doing my very favorite Monday-morning press briefing in fifteen, Marcel. I'll put that fire out at least until we get another broken neck."
"What are you going to tell 'em?" Lanier asked.
"I'll say I can't comment on ongoing investigations, except to say that it would be irresponsible to print or run rumors of a serial killer when there is no evidence to support it. And none of these victims are high profile. We got three dead brothers in the hood and one dead unemployed white guy in the Mish. This stuff is unfortunate but it happens. And the story goes away."
"Even if this guy's the same guy," Bracco said, "who did all of them?"
"If it was," Glitsky said, "I've got to believe he's long gone by now and never coming back."
7
Major Charles Tucker, the Senior Auditor for Aviation Issues, didn't like to leave the Green Zone any more than anyone else did. But in the past ten days, since Ron Nolan had shown up downstairs at the Republican Palace with his $2 million requisition, he had signed off on another $3.3 million in cash to Allstrong Security-all of it approved by Airbase Security Services Coordinator Colonel Kevin Ramsdale.
Jack Allstrong himself had shown up at his desk four times, patiently explaining to Tucker that obviously, if he continued to question the need for money, he was unaware of the sheer vastness of the task that Allstrong Security had contracted to undertake. The airport itself, BIAP, was enormous-thirty-two thousand acres. Securing even half of all that land alone in a hostile country was a monumental job. Besides that, Allstrong needed immediate money to buy the cars and trucks that would deliver the new dinar cash all over the country on his latest contract. He also needed more money for the bomb-sniffing dogs, for his enormous payroll, for food for his constantly growing influx of employees.
In spite of the danger inherent in every trip outside of the Green Zone, Tucker decided he had to see for himself what was going on out at BIAP. Leaving the Republican Palace in the early afternoon, and in uniform, he was chaffeured through the city and out to the airport by a three-Mercedes convoy of KBR security people who carried only sidearms-the irony wasn't lost on him. Nevertheless, by the time they arrived at the first airport checkpoint, it was nearly four o'clock in the afternoon.
There was, as always, a long line of cars ahead of his convoy, all of them waiting to be searched and to have their papers inspected. At this rate, Tucker's convoy wasn't going to get inside for at least another hour. So to save himself the time, he decided to get out of his vehicle and enter the compound on foot. With any luck, he could complete his informal inspection and start back to Baghdad before his convoy even made it as far as the gate anyway. They could U-turn away and be gone with that much less of a hassle.
But no sooner had he gotten out of his car than he became aware of the sound of gunfire. Not distant gunfire, which was so common in Baghdad and often relatively harmless, but nearby gunfire that seemed to be coming from the neighborhood just to his left, adjacent to the eastern border of BIAP. In contrast to the airport's western edge, which bordered the Euphrates River and opened into a plain of flat and formless ditch-crossed farmland that gradually degraded into desert, this eastern no-man's-land was a densely populated area of the ubiquitous low-lying, dung-brown structures that seemed to make up so many of Baghdad's suburbs, and that Tucker knew to be home to hundreds of Saddam Hussein's former officers. Gunfire in this area wouldn't be good news. But still, if it was confined to the neighborhood, he knew that it needn't necessarily concern him here.