Without remorse - Tom Clancy [301]
'Look, I have no reason to believe that any of you has done anything wrong. I do have reason to believe that your friend has. What I'm telling you is this: you'll be doing him a favor by telling him to call me.'
'Who's he supposed to have killed?' Sam pressed.
'Some people who deal drugs.'
'You know what I do?' Sarah asked sharply. 'What I spend most of my time on here, you know what it is?'
'Yes, ma'am, I do. You work a lot with addicts.'
'If John's really doing that, maybe I ought to buy him a gun!'
'Hurts when you lose one, doesn't it?' Ryan asked quietly, setting her up.
'You bet it does. We're not in this business to lose patients.'
'How did it feel to lose Doris Brown?' She didn't reply, but only because her intelligence stopped her mouth from reacting as it wanted to. 'He brought her to you for help, didn't he? And you and Mrs O'Toole here worked very hard to clean her up. You think I'm condemning you for that? But before he dropped her off with you, he killed two people. I know it. They were probably two of the people who murdered Pamela Madden, and those were his real targets. Your friend Kelly is a very tough guy, but he's not as smart as he thinks he is. If he comes in now, it's one thing. If he makes us catch him, it's something else. You tell him that. You'll be doing him a favor, okay? You'll be doing yourselves a favor, too. I don't think you've broken the law to this point. Do anything for him now except what I've told you, and you might be. I don't usually warn people this way,' Ryan told them sternly. 'You people aren't criminals. I know that. The thing you did for the Brown girl was admirable, and I'm sorry it worked out the way it did. But Kelly is out there killing people, and that's wrong, okay? I'm telling you that just in case you might have forgotten something along the way. I don't like druggies either. Pamela Madden, the girl on the fountain, that's my case. I want those people in a cage; I want to watch them walk into the gas chamber. That's my job, to see that justice happens. Not his, mine. Do you understand?'
'Yes, I think we do,' Sam Rosen answered, thinking about the surgical gloves he'd given Kelly. It was different now. Back then he'd been distant from things - emotionally close to the terrible parts, yet far away from what his friend was doing, approving it as though reading a news article on a ballgame. It was different now, but he was involved. 'Tell me, how close are you to getting the people who killed Pam?'
'We know a few things,' Ryan answered without realizing that with his answer, he'd blown it after coming so close.
Oreza was back at his desk, the part of his work that he hated, and one reason he worried about striking for chief, which would entail having his own office, and becoming part of 'management' instead of just being a boat-driver. Mr English was on leave, and his second-in-command, a chief, was off seeing to something or other, leaving him as senior man present - but it was his job anyway. The petty officer searched on his desk for the card and dialed the number.
'Homicide.'
'Lieutenant Ryan, please.'
'He's not here.
'Sergeant Douglas?'
'He's in court today.'
'Okay, I'll call back.' Oreza hung up. He looked at the clock. Pushing four in the afternoon - he'd been at the station since midnight. He pulled open a drawer and started filling out the forms accounting for the fuel he'd burned up today, making the Chesapeake Bay safe for drunks who owned boats. Then he planned to get home, get dinner, and get some sleep.
The problem was making sense out of what she said. A physician was called in from his office across the street, and diagnosed her problem as barbiturate intoxication, which wasn't exactly news, and then went on to say that they'd just have to wait for the stuff to work its way out of her system, for which two opinions he'd charged the county twenty dollars. Talking to her for several hours had only made her at turns amused and annoyed, but her story hadn't changed,