The remote.
Where was the remote?
His right hand probed the sheets beside him, fingers wide, his breath coming in short, sharp explosions.
Not there!
Not there!
He cried out in a slurred, mutilated voice. “Alice! Alice, where are you!”
Silence in the room. No whisper of rubber soles coming down the hall. The machinery beeping. The bars of sunlight inching across the ceiling. The pain growing…
He would have to get up and find the remote.
He set himself, sat up, his balance reeling, the IV stretching as he did so, the tall stand rattling. He swung his long hairless legs to the right and pushed himself to the edge of the bed, slipped forward on the edge; his bony bare feet touched something soft.
Warm.
He looked down.
Alice, the duty nurse for the six-to-twelve shift, was lying on the floor beside his bed, on her back, staring up at the same slow golden bars of yellow light that were inching across the ceiling of Crucio’s hospital room in Butte, Montana.
She was not seeing them.
Her throat had been opened like the lid of a jewel box, showing a trove of rubies. Her eyes had been scooped out, and from underneath the fan of her white-blond hair a lake of bright-red blood was spreading outward. Crucio looked out at the open door into the hallway. Another nurse was lying there, her legs splayed open, thighs streaked with red, blood running from underneath her skirt.
Crucio recoiled, pulling himself back into the bedcovers. The phone. He moved to his left, reaching out for the phone.
There was a dark shape sitting in the chair in the corner of the room. In the half-light Crucio could see the phone in the man’s lap. His leathery hands were folded over it. On his right wrist he wore a turquoise bracelet. His legs were crossed. He wore black jeans and cowboy boots tipped with silver. His face was in the shadows.
“Moot?”
The figure raised the phone and used a long-bladed, ivory-handled stiletto to slice the line. Then he stood up and stepped into what was left of the dying sunlight.
“Please. I need the morphine. I need it bad.”
The black figure spoke to him, a whisper, hoarse and low. “Trinidad, Crucio. Do you remember Trinidad?”
“Trinidad? No. I don’t remember Trinidad.”
“You will remember it, Crucio. I will help you.”
9
Dalton sat back in Mickey Franco’s chair in one corner of the huge cubicle-crowded Cleaners’ Sector, sipping a black coffee and staring at the entry screen warning on his computer. He had decided to begin with facial-scan records of arrivals in London on or about the third of October, looking for anyone remotely resembling Porter Naumann. Although he knew in his gut that Porter had not killed his family, even the remote possibility had to be eliminated.
He brought up a full-face of Porter from his ID packet, and hit the scan button on the Entries portal. Fifteen minutes later he hit End Scan and logged out. Naumann had not arrived in any formal entry port anywhere in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales from the third of October until the seventh, and on the seventh he was dead in Cortona. That was at least some comfort.
If not Naumann, how about this old man in black going by the name of Sweetwater? With neither a face nor, in Dalton’s view, a reliable name to start with, he had to narrow his search field.
Since Dalton’s inquiry involved locating an individual who was possibly implicated in the death of a senior field officer, he felt reasonably justified in going into the IRS mainframe. He set up search parameters for a male, late fifties to early eighties, six feet or better, no obvious disabilities, typed in the name “Sweetwater” and hit Enter.
The mainframe response a few moments later surprised him. There were 1,638 living males in the age range selected going by the Sweetwater name, all of them scattered across the Great Plains states and down into the American Southwest. Rather than dig through the particulars of each case, he punched in a search for each subject’s SSN card and waited for the mainframe to retrieve them. Each SSN card was linked to a digitized photo of the taxpayer in question. The sources for these were varied and often came from state driver’s licenses or passport shots: it had been his experience that the shots were often out-of-date, but it was the best way he knew of to search for the face of a U.S. citizen, far better than the Department of State or each of the fifty-two state motor vehicle mainframes, because every taxpayer in America was in the IRS files. Not even God kept better records than the IRS. It occurred to Dalton that if the IRS had been tracking terrorists instead of taxpayers, the World Trade Center would still be standing.
While he waited for the shots to come up, he was painfully aware that he actually had no clear idea what his target looked like, having never gotten a good look at his face. Still, he had a gut feeling he’d know the man when he saw him. The screen flickered and he was looking at hundreds of digital shots, arranged by state and county.
He looked at every damn one; it took him forty-three minutes.
None of them looked even remotely similar to his target.
He had no idea why he was so certain he hadn’t found the man’s face somewhere in these shots, since he had never actually seen his target’s face. But something was missing in all of these men.
Intensity.
Malice.
Some indefinable but unmistakable quality of latent aggression that the man in Carovita had radiated in his solitary silence, a quality that these men lacked.
Okay, thought Dalton, speaking half-aloud, let’s take a look at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. See if they have any Sweetwaters on file. And they did. They had all 1638 of them.
Useless.
Utterly useless.
Now what?
The guy was going by the name of “Sweetwater.” But neither the IRS nor the BIA had any record of him. Yet Dalton was morally convinced the guy was a Native American. From the States, not Mexico or Central America.
And if this really was the guy who had shown up at Joanne Naumann’s town house in Belgravia last week, he was also a pathological sadist.
It was true that most stone-cold killers are born that way. But the good ones, the ones who last, get training, they find some discipline and control, or it gets pounded into them by other equally hard men, either in the armed forces or the cops or in a federal prison. If they don’t get discipline, they get caught and killed long before they reach seventy years. So perhaps our guy was either in prison or in the military.
He minimized the BIA and IRS search pages and logged on to the Military Service Records database. He typed in a search string for a Sweetwater, male, with an age-identifier range of sixty-five to seventy-five.
FILE NOT FOUND
Fine.
Not the military. The cops?
He logged over to the city, county, state, and federal law-enforcement personnel database and tried again.
FILE NOT FOUND
How about prison?
He logged onto the National Corrections database, which included state and federal prison records for the entire country.