“So, gentlemen …”
Villada nodded to Ortiz.
Ten seconds later, Biggs was telling them that Frank Holt’s real name was Jerome Hoskins and that he worked for a company called Wadsworth and Dodds, back East in the big bad city.
CARELLA FINALLY REACHED Captain Mark William Ridley at a little past six that evening. He was cognizant of the fact that it was already midnight in Binsfeld, Germany, but when he’d tried earlier that day, he was informed that the captain had still not returned to base.
Now—at six-oh-six exactly on the face of the squadroom clock—Carella listened to the captain’s voice coming over the line from somewhere outside Frankfurt, explaining at great length that Spangdahlem’s commanding officer, the brigadier general in charge of the 52nd Fighter Wing, had decided to divide more or less evenly among the base’s five thousand U.S. active-duty military members and their seven thousand dependents, the holiday season’s twelve-day sequence that had begun on December 21, the start of Hanukkah, and would end on New Year’s Day.
“That is because our wing mission is to be constantly ready at all times to promote stability and thwart naked aggression,” he said.
“I see,” Carella said.
“In order to achieve U.S. and NATO objectives,” Ridley added, “yessir.”
Carella wished the man didn’t sound as if he’d been drinking.
“I drew December 21 to December 27,” Ridley said. “I just got back from Italy fifteen minutes ago. Did I understand you to say you are a detective, sir?”
“Yes, I am,” Carella said.
“Why are you calling me here in the Rhineland, may I ask, sir?”
Carella was calling to tell him his sister was dead.
He took a deep breath.
He guessed he’d performed this drill a hundred times before, perhaps a thousand times before, telling a wife or a mother or a father or a son or a brother or an aunt that someone near and dear was suddenly, inexplicably dead, and then listening to the silence or the tears or sometimes the hysterical laughter that greeted this unexpected, unwanted news from a total stranger, he guessed he had spoken these same damn more or less identical words a million times before it sometimes seemed.
Ridley was silent for several moments.
Then he said, “It comes in bunches, don’t it, sir?” He sounded suddenly quite sober. “First my wife leaves me …”
He fell silent again.
Carella waited.
“I’m sorry,” Ridley said.
Carella suspected he was crying, but he could hear no tears over the crackling line. He waited.
“Captain,” he said at last, “I wonder if I could ask you some questions. I know this is a bad time …”
He let the sentence trail.
Ridley said nothing.
“Captain?” Carella said.
“Yes. Yes, sure,” Ridley said. “Go ahead. Sure. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“We read some letters you sent to your sister …”
“Yes, we corresponded a lot.”
“In one of them, you made reference to one ofher letters …”
“Yes.”
“… where she told you she’d be flying a job early in December …”
“Yes.”
“… which apparently she felt would change her circumstances considerably, was how she put it in the letter to you, which you were quoting.”
“Yes.”
“What was that job, Captain Ridley? Would you know?”
The captain was silent.
“Sir? Apparently she wrote to say she’d be moving East sometime after this job …”
“Yes.”
“… be there long before Christmas, in fact, was apparently what she wrote to you, if your letter was quoting her exactly.”
Again, the captain was silent.
“You see, sir, she was killed just before Christmas, and we were wondering if this job she flew had anything to do with her murder.”
“How was she killed?” Ridley asked.
“Someone stuck an ice pick in her,” Carella said.
And waited.
“She was flying dope,” Ridley said.
“To Mexico, is that right?”
“Yes. Four runs.”
“On December seventh, she flew to Mexico for the last time, is that right?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
“There was an entry in her calendar.”
“She called me right afterward.”
“Called you there in Germany?”
“Yes.”
“To say what, Captain?”
“That she’d flown the four runs, and they turned out to be a piece of cake.”
“How do you know they were drug runs?”
“She told me.”
“On an open phone?”
“No, in one of her letters. After I warned her not to do anything that might get her in trouble. She assured me these would be short flights, simple pickups and deliveries. Just like chickens or sandals, she said. Just like that.”
“Where was she flying? From where to where?”
“Texas to Mexico to Arizona.”
“What kind of pickups and deliveries?”
“Money for drugs.”
“How much money?”
“They didn’t tell her. It was in locked suitcases.”
“What drug? Heroin? Cocaine?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think she knew, either.”
“Who was she working for?”
“A man named Frank Holt. He was the one who gave her the suitcases with the money in them. He was the one buying the stuff.”
“Who is he, do you know?”
“Some guy she got introduced to in a bar in Eagle Branch. This is why I thought it all sounded so risky. I mean who the hellwere these people? She said they were okay. Ordinary guys, she told me. Guys trying to make a buck. One of them was a Texas Ranger she’d dated once or twice. The guy who introduced her to Holt.”
“What washis name? The Ranger?”
“Riggs? Briggs? Something like that.”
“How much were they paying her?”
“Alotof money.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred thousand dollars.”