Well, you know it now, jackass, Hogan thought.
“Yeah,” he said, “he does. So we’re thinking there might be some connection. Can you tell me a little more about the missing woman? I had the daughter in here a while ago, but she was a bit distraught, if you know what I mean, and I didn’t want to ask her too many questions about her mother. I think somebody’s been batting her around a little, she was wearing a shiner the size of Staten Island.”
“Didn’t have one when I saw her,” Gregors said, sounding surprised.
“Well, she’s got one now. Anyway, can you fill me in a little on the missing woman?”
“I’ll fax you what the daughter gave us, if you want,” Gregors said.
“Well, just give it to me on the phone, if that’s okay,” Hogan said.
“Sure. Just thought I’d save time. Let me get it for you.”
He was away from the phone for about three minutes, coming back with what Hogan guessed was a complaint form, and began to read from it like a kid reciting in class.
“White female,” he said, “thirty-nine years old, five feet seven inches tall, a hundred twenty-five pounds. Blond hair, blue eyes, no identifying scars, marks or...”
“Blond, did you say?”
“Blond,” Gregors said.
Hogan had suddenly remembered yesterday’s call from Homicide South.
He hoped to God he was wrong.
The two plainclothes cops standing on the Battery Park dock were from the First Detective Squad, here to check the identification of anyone going out to Liberty Island on the special ferry. This was now ten in the morning, a glorious day, and the cops were grateful for a cushy assignment like this one, which certainly beat looking down into the face of a stiff on a city pavement.
An earlier ferry had carried to the island forty-two Marine Corps Band musicians in their dress blues, three members of the President’s advance team, and four Secret Service men from the New York field office. Most of the people boarding the ferry now were from the three television networks and CNN, all of them wearing lucite-encased press cards, the rainbow peacock on the NBC tag, the black-and-white CBS eye on the Channel 2 tag, the big 7 on the ABC tag. Some of them were carrying cameras, others were carrying sound equipment, others seemed to be carrying only clipboards. All of them seemed happy to be outdoors on a nice day like today. Chatting amiably among themselves, here on a cooperative assignment where there was no sense of rivalry, the men and women boarded the ferry together with nine men wearing dark blue suits, white shirts, and muted ties.
The television people were savvy enough to know that these nine guys weren’t a baseball team. Whispers ran around that this was Secret Service, but the surmise was only two-thirds correct. Six of the nine were, in fact, Secret Service: Dobbs and the men he’d brought with him from Washington, D.C. The other three were CIA: Alex Nichols, Moss Peggot, and Conrad Templeton.
None of them knew that Sonny Hemkar was already on the island.
Hogan hated this part of police work more than anything in the world.
They stood together in the stainless steel silence of the morgue. There were stainless steel tables with stainless steel cups brimming with blood. There was a burn victim on one of the tables, his fists clenched, his hands raised in the characteristic pugilist position. There was the stench of putrefying bodies. The clock on the wall read twenty-eight minutes past ten. It had taken him ten minutes to get to the Park Avenue apartment and another twenty minutes to drive them down to the hospital. Hogan was here to show Elita Randall the head Homicide South had recovered.
She looked at it and gasped.
Covered her face with her hands.
Nodded into her hands.
And turned away and ran out.
“Thanks,” Hogan said to the attendant, and followed her out to the corridor, where she stood sobbing in Geoffrey’s arms. “I’m sorry about this,” Hogan said. She nodded, kept sobbing. “I’d have given anything not to have...”
“I know,” she said, sobbing.
She was thinking that she’d been to bed with the man who’d killed her mother. She was thinking she would never go to bed with another man as long as she lived.
“Miss Randall,” Hogan said, “if you feel up to answering a few questions, I’d like to...”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m all right.”
“’Cause I’d like to get started on this right away,” he said. “I tried to reach Nichols and Dobbs,” he said, turning to Geoffrey, who’d met them yesterday, “but they’d already left for the island. Liberty Island,” he explained. “So what I want to know... is that drawing a good one? The composite? ’Cause if it is...”
“Not particularly, no,” Elita said.
“What I’m asking, if I had copies of that drawing messengered out to the island, would it help our people out there? Would they recognize this character from the drawing alone? When he pops up? If he pops up.”
“I don’t think so,” Elita said. “Not from the drawing alone. I know him, but I’m not sure anyone who didn’t know him...”
“Because what it is, we’re having trouble getting that hospital out there to cooperate. All we want is a photograph of the guy, but you’d think we were asking them to fax us his kidney or something. Which brings me to my next question. Would you recognize this character if you saw him again?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Randall, do you want to help us catch him?”
“Yes.”
“Would you be willing to come out to Liberty Island?”
“Why do you want her out there?” Geoffrey asked.
Hogan hesitated. He knew he’d be placing the girl in harm’s way, and ethics demanded that he tell her what she might be getting into. At the same time...
“It’s my guess he’ll be heading out there,” he said. “One way or another, he’ll get on that island, is my guess.”
“Why would he want to do that?” Geoffrey asked.
Hogan hesitated again. This kid was from the British Consulate. How much of this did he want going out over the international wire? He decided to level with them both.
“We think he’ll be trying for the President,” he said.
Elita looked puzzled. Geoffrey was already nodding.
“To kill him,” Hogan said. “He’ll be trying to kill President Bush.”
“I thought so,” Geoffrey said.
They all fell silent. A doctor in a white coat, a stethoscope hanging out of his pocket, came down the corridor, pulled open the heavy door to the morgue, and went inside. There was the sudden whiff of decomposing bodies as the door whispered shut.
“If the picture’s no good to us...” Hogan said.
“I know what you want,” Elita said.
“Just stay with us,” he said. “Point him out if he shows his face.”
She nodded.
“That way, we’ll maybe have a slight edge.”
She was still nodding.
“Will you do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
“Good,” he said.
Heather Broward was positioning the Marine Corps Band on the level above the podium. Three musicians deep, fourteen musicians wide, a human wall of red, white and blue above the red-white-and-blue bunting draped on the wall behind the podium. The podium itself had been hung with similar bunting on its sides and above the Presidential Seal on its face, but nothing could disguise its primary function. A Coast Guard cutter was moving in a circumscribed circle out on the water, waving off any boats approaching the island, but its presence was hardly necessary; every precautionary measure had been taken to circumvent any water-borne snipers.
“Which one of you is the leader?” Heather called up through a bullhorn.