"My God that's awful, Doc. That's an awful thing. Please don't any of you touch anything for a while. Mary, it might be a good idea for you to get out of this house temporarily while my men work. Doc, we never found the body. They came in through the window. Jimmied it up clean as a whistle. They bypassed the alarm too. They're pros, Doc. They knew exactly what they were doing."
"And the noise I heard coming in the front was them leaving by the window. They saw my headlights and hurried out."
"Doc, I think their message is pretty clear."
I nodded.
"What they're saying is lay off or you'll be next."
"The dogs were all outside last night. They were together, but neither Danny nor Flack barked. How did they get to Angel without the other two knowing? And how did they catch and kill her silently? And why did they bring her inside?"
"They did it all for the message. They've showed they're silent. So quiet that dogs don't wake up when they're near. They're quick. So quick they can snatch a dog in her sleep and destroy her without a peep. And finally, you can't keep them out. They can get to you whenever they want."
I let out a long sigh as I heard Mary trundling up the stairs.
"That's not encouraging."
"No. I'd be extremely wary if I were you, Doc. Whatever it is you've been poking around in, forget it. You and Joe have discovered a body up in Gloucester. Now you stay out of it. Let the Commonwealth handle it. I guarantee your house will be guarded twenty-four hours a day."
"And what will you be doing?"
"I am gonna stay with you. I'm gonna be harder to shake than athlete's foot. Count on it."
He spun around and went to his men. I went to a pay phone and called the boys and told them to leave their present dwellings at once; and go to earth elsewhere.
"Call Chief Hannon in two days and let him know your whereabouts. That's an order."
I saw Joe pull into the drive: I was never so glad to see him. The rest of the day was taken up with estate and local police, the dismantling and hauling away of the stove at Mary's irrational insistence, (although I admitted to myself that I never wanted to set teeth around anything cooked in that oven again as long as I, too, lived), and the tramping around through our domicile by state and local lab teams, who admitted to a person (two of them were women) that the breakers-enterers-murderers were very clean. No stray prints were found. The burglar alarm system had been circumvented with surgical precision. I cornered Joe and Brian on the porch.
"Has either of you any comments about the mode of entry? Does it not strike you as interesting that this group appears to be adept at circumventing burglar alarms?"
They nodded at each other without hesitating.
"Well?"
"Well what? It's always interesting that the M.O. has a definite pattern. We're up against pros here, that's certain."
"Yes," I answered, "and pros good enough to crack an armory maybe?"
"Oh I've thought of that," said Brian.
"Of course. I thought of it right away," added Joe.
"Oh you did? But then neither of you apparently thought that the Rose could be running something out of the country-namely guns. Instead you thought I was off my nut. Since then we've uncovered a body, some tangible evidence of gun-running, and a direct threat to Yours Truly. The question is, how seriously are you guys taking this?"
"Very," they answered in unison. I was somewhat heartened, but not very. To me they still seemed a bit like Tweedledum and his big fat brother, dee.
"Before he left Joe hugged Mary on the couch and comforted her.
"I want you at ten-ten Comm. Ave. Tomorrow at ten," he said as he left.
On Commonwealth Avenue, right at the Boston/Brookline line, is a large store called Eastern Mountain Sports, abbreviated EMS. It sells down parkas, snowshoes, camping gear, and mountain climbing apparatus. The shelves are lined with pitons, nylon lifelines, ice axes, and small hammers to drive the pitons and steel rings into cliff faces. All this so people can scale sheer cliffsides and dangle about underneath ledges and outcroppings like spiders.
The people who die doing this stuff deserve it. It is nature's way of weeding out the insane.
Hordes of people flock to this emporium. Most don't pay any attention to the big dun-colored building across the street. It's blocky and ugly, and is conspicuous in having a splendid array of aerials and antennae on its rooftops. This is the headquarters building of the Department of Public Safety for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. One of the biggest divisions in the department is the State Police. Joe has an office in this big building. The day after we found Angel's severed head in the oven, I found myself on the third floor of this building seated at a table. Joe sat across from me. Next to me sat Sergeant Kevin O'Hearn. We were flipping through a big book filled with black and white photographs.
They were mugshots, but not of people. They were pictures of weapons: military small arms. I identified one picture and rapped at it with my fingernail.
"You sure?"
"Yep. Positive. I knew it looked familiar. It's the M-60."
"Now look in this section."
Kevin O'Hearn flipped through the pages. These were smaller automatic weapons, assault rifles and submachine guns. I stopped briefly at one called the Skorpion, a Czech machine pistol, then went on. It glanced for a few seconds at the Uzi, the fine Israeli machine pistol made under license in Holland. It is (so O'Hearn told me) the most widely used submachine gun today. The White House Guards tote them. Not it; the Uzi was too rounded. The gun I wanted looked as angular as a hunk of two-by-four. Then I saw it, complete with the big tubes.
"Here.'This one."
"Sure?"
"As sure as I'm sitting here."
O'Hearn gave a low whistle at Joe, than excused himself, saying he had to make a phone call.
I remember now I read where these are made: Powder Springs, Georgia. I could've saved you some time.?
"We wanted a positive visual identification. Kevin thought it might be the Ingram as soon as I told him about your escapade out west. The government's been looking for these things for two months now. You've made quite a discovery."
"They're hot I assume?"
"You could fry eggs on 'em."
"Can I go now? Mary and I are looking at dogs today."
The first rule when you lose a dog, either to old age, accident, or murder, is to get another one quick. We had an appointment to look at the new German sporting breed, the drahthar, after lunch.
"In a little bit. Major Downey would like to interview you first. He's on his way now."
"Does he work here or out in Amherst?"
"He's stationed at Fort Ord, California. He's a major in the United States Army, Ordnance."
"0h."
The phone on Joe's desk rang. He grunted into it and hung up.
"Major Downey and O'Hearn are down in the range. Come on down with me and you can see for yourself what man hath wrought."
"What do you mean?"
"Downey has a real live Ingram with him. You can see what one of the things'll do."
The range was located in a subbasement, presumably to deaden the noise of target practice. I heard the hum of ventilating fans and could smell the bitter odor of cordite. As a sometime hunter I liked the smell, though I could see why Vietnam veterans would hate it. Another smell I like is the aroma of Hoppe's powder solvent, used for cleaning shotguns. We approached a door and I could hear the solid blam of firearms. The sound was two-in-one because the shot was followed a millisecond later by the impact sound of the slug thumping against the inclined steel wall of the range eighty feet away. Joe opened the door and went in.
There were eight stalls to the range. Troopers and plainclothesmen occupied about half of them. They wore ear protectors as they fired their sidearms at the big suspended paper targets at the far end of the range. The targets were life-sized silhouettes of the human being. Parts of the body were outlined in white lines, with various scores. I noticed you got a lot of points for the head and chest, a bit fewer for the stomach and abdomen, and hardly any for legs, knees, and such. It was a rather ominous spectacle for the uninitiated. Most of the men were standing, but sometimes they dropped to a crouch and fired their weapons held in both hands. When they did this they emptied the cylinder, pumping off six shots very quickly. One pistol sounded particularly loud, and I remarked on it.