Without remorse - Tom Clancy [240]
'What are you saying, Eddie?'
'I'll make your damn delivery while Henry gets his shit back together. How hard is it? Shit, you got broads doing it for you' Show a little panache, Morello thought, show them I have what it takes. Hell, at least he'd show the guys in Philly, and maybe they could do for him what Tony wouldn't do. Yeah.
'Sure you want to take the chance, Eddie?' Henry asked with an inward smile. This wop was so easy to predict.
'Fuck, yeah.'
'Okay,' Tony said with a display of being impressed. 'You make the call and set it up.' Henry was right, Piaggi told himself. It had been Eddie all along, making his own move. How foolish. How easily dealt with.
'Still nothing,' Emmet Ryan said, summarizing the Invisible Man Case. 'All this evidence - and nothing.'
'Only thing that makes sense, Em, is somebody was making a move.' Murders didn't just start and stop. There had to be a reason. The reason might be hard, even impossible to discover in many cases, but an organized and careful series of murders was a different story. It came down to two possibilities. One was that someone had launched a series of killings to cover the real target. That target had to be William Grayson, who had dropped from the face of the earth, probably never to return alive, and whose body might someday be discovered - or not. Somebody very angry about something, very careful, and very skilled, and that somebody - the Invisible Man - had taken it to that point and stopped there.
How likely was that? Ryan asked himself. The answer was impossible to evaluate, but somehow the start-stop sequence seemed far too arbitrary. Far too much buildup for a single, seemingly inconsequential target. Whatever Grayson had been, he hadn't been the boss of anyone's organization, and if the murders had been a planned sequence, his death simply was not a logical stopping place. At least, Ryan frowned, that was what his instincts told him. He'd learned to trust those undefined inner feelings, as all cops do. And yet the killings had stopped. Three more pushers had died in the last few weeks; he and Douglas had visited every crime scene only to find that they'd been two quite ordinary robberies gone bad, with the third a turf fight that one had lost and another won. The Invisible Man was gone, or at least inactive, and that fact blew away the theory which had to him seemed the most sensible explanation for the killings, leaving only something far less satisfying.
The other possibility did make more sense, after a fashion. Someone had made a move on a drug ring as yet undiscovered by Mark Charon and his squad, eliminating pushers, doubtless encouraging them to switch allegiance to a new supplier. Under that construction, William Grayson had been somewhat more important in the great scheme of things - and perhaps there was another murder or two, as yet undiscovered, which had eliminated the command leadership of this notional ring. One more leap of imagination told Ryan that the ring taken down by the Invisible Man was the same he and Douglas had been chasing after, all these many months. It all tied together in a very neat theoretical bundle.
But murders rarely did that. Real murder wasn't like a TV cop show. You never figured it all out. When you knew who, you might never really learn why, at least not in a way that really satisfied, and the problem with applying elegant theories to the real-life fact of death was that people didn't fit theories terribly well. Moreover, even if that model for the events of the past month were correct, it had to mean that a highly organized, ruthless, and deadly-efficient individual was now operating a criminal enterprise in Ryan's city, which wasn't exactly good news.
'Tom, I just don't buy it.'
'Well, if he's your commando, why did he stop?' Douglas asked.
'Do I remember right? Aren't you the guy who came up with that idea?'
'Yeah, so?'
'So you're not helping your lieutenant very much, Sergeant.'
'We have a nice weekend to think about it. Personally, I'm going to cut the grass