Without remorse - Tom Clancy [283]
'It won't matter - getting them out, unless ...'
'I know.' The thing that kept following him around, Kelly thought. There was only one way to make it stop. Running couldn't distance him from it. He had to turn and face it.
'Well, Henry, that little job was taken care of this morning,' Piaggi told him. 'Nice and clean.'
'They didn't leave -'
'Henry, they were two pros, okay? They did the job and now they're back home, couple hundred miles away. They didn't leave anything behind except for the two bodies.' The phone report had been very clear on that. It had been an easy job, since neither target had expected anything.
'Then that's that,' Tucker observed with satisfaction. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a fat envelope. He handed it to Piaggi, who had fronted the money himself, good partner that he was.
'With Eddie out of the way, and with that leak plugged, things ought to go back to normal.' Best twenty grand I ever spent, Henry thought.
'Henry, the other girls?' Piaggi pointed out. 'You've got a real business now. People inside like them are dangerous. Take care of it, okay?' He pocketed the envelope and left the table.
'Twenty-two's, back of the head, both of 'em,' the Pittsburgh detective reported over the phone. 'We've dusted the whole house - nothing. The flower box - nothing. The truck - nothing. The truck was stolen sometime last night - this morning, whatever. The florist has eight of them. Hell, we recovered it before the all-points was on the air. It was wise guys, had to be. Too smooth, too clean for local talent. No word on the street. They're probably out of town already. Two people saw the truck. One woman saw two guys walking to the door. She figured it was a flower delivery, and besides she was across the street half a block away. No description, nothing. She doesn't even remember what color they were.'
Ryan and Douglas were listening on the same line, and their eyes met every few seconds. They knew it all from the tone of the man's voice. The sort of case that policemen hate and fear. No immediately apparent motive, no witnesses, no usable evidence. Nowhere to start and nowhere to go. The routine was as predictable as it was futile. They'd pump the neighbors for information, but it was a working-class neighborhood, and few had been at home at the time. People noticed mainly the unusual, and a flower truck wasn't unusual enough to attract the inquiring look that developed into a physical description. Committing the perfect murder wasn't really all that demanding, a secret known within the fraternity of detectives and belied by a whole body of literature that made them into superhuman beings they never claimed to be, even among themselves in a cop bar. Someday the case might be broken. One of the killers might be caught for something else and cop to this one in order to get a deal. Less likely, someone would talk about it, bragging in front of an informant who'd pass it along to someone else, but in either case it would take time and the trail, cold as it already was, would grow colder still. It was the most frustrating part of the business of police work. Truly innocent people had died, and there was no one to speak for them, to avenge their deaths, and other cases would come up, and the cops would set this one aside for something fresher, and from time to time someone would reopen the file and look things over, then put it back in the Unsolved drawer, where it would grow thicker only because of the forms that announced that there was still nothing new on the case.
It was even worse for Ryan and Douglas. Yet again there had been a possible link that might open up two of their Unsolved files. Everyone would care about Raymond and Doris Brown. They'd had friends and neighbors, evidently a good minister. They'd be missed, and people would think what a shame it was... But the files on Ryan's desk were for people about whom no one but police officers cared, and somehow that only made it worse because