John Abbott - Scimitar

“British, huh?” Hogan said, and looked shrewdly at the Turner kid, reminding him that the two dead ladies had been carrying British passports, no matter what anybody said.

“He’s a doctor,” the girl said.

“Here in New York?”

“No,” she said. “L.A.”

She gave him the name of the hospital where Sonny was in residence, and also the phone numbers Geoffrey had provided, and then she told him the Westhampton Beach police were looking into her mother’s disappearance and suggested that he might want to get in touch with them. Hogan said he would.

The coffee came some five minutes later, by which time Hogan had asked a police clerk to photocopy the faxed drawing of Sonny Hemkar and to check with the BCI for any criminal record on the guy. Like a family sitting down to breakfast together, the three of them drank their coffee and ate their cheese Danish at Hogan’s desk. The clerk came in just as Hogan was draining the last few drops from his cardboard container. He reported that Hemkar had no criminal record, was there anything else, sir? Hogan told him to call the hospital out there in L.A., see if they could fax them a photograph of this character, back up the drawing with something concrete.

“Could you call them now, please?” Elita said. “The police in Westhampton?”

“Sure,” he said, though that wasn’t what he really wanted to do right this minute. “Who was the person you spoke to out there?”

She gave him both detectives’ names, and Hogan placed the call, asking for either Gregors or Mellon, and was told they were both out in the field just now. Hogan left a number and asked that they call back. The sergeant who’d taken the call said he’d make sure they did.

“So,” Hogan said, and shrugged. “I’ll get to you as soon as I can.”

Actually, he didn’t much care about where the girl’s mother might be.

What he was eager to do now was talk to Nichols and Dobbs, tell them a fuckin’ Indian with a green scimitar tattoo had surfaced in New York.

By a quarter past nine that morning, the haze had burned off, and the day was clear and bright. The weather forecasters on all the morning talk shows had promised wonderful weather for the Fourth of July weekend, and it seemed that for a change they were going to be right.

In the harbor at the approach to the Hudson River, the Statue of Liberty held her torch aloft and seemed to bask in the rays of a beneficent sun.

In the men’s room supply closet on the second floor of the monument, Sonny sat in the dark with a dead body still making noises. An earphone button was in Sonny’s right ear, its connecting cable plugged into his Walkman radio. The radio was tuned to CBS, 880 on the dial, traffic and weather every ten minutes. Eating the hard roll he had bought yesterday, drinking from the container of orange juice, he listened to the weather report. He had been fearing more rain. He now heard that the day would be sunny and fair, albeit hot.

He did not mind heat.

Nothing could be hotter than the desert sands of Kufra.

In the darkness, he smiled a secret smile.

Then he bit into the roll again.

The return call from Detective Gregors out in Westhampton Beach came at ten minutes to ten. To Hogan, the guy sounded like a hayseed. You’d think Suffolk County’d have somebody spoke English like the cops in New York did. Instead, there was this kind of molasses-dripping drawl. A fuckin’ hick.

“We don’t have any paper on this Hemkar character,” Hogan said, “but...”

“Neither do we,” Gregors said.

“But we’re working some other murders that may be related.”

He went on to tell Gregors all about the two British ladies with the tattooed tits...

“No kidding?” Gregors said, obviously impressed and probably wide-eyed, the jackass.

... and the murdered cop from right here at Homicide North...

“Boy,” Gregors said.

Probably never saw a murder victim in his life, Hogan thought.

“Yeah,” he said, “and since Hemkar has the same tattoo...”

“Didn’t know that,” Gregors said.

Well, you know it now, jackass, Hogan thought.

“Yeah,” he said, “he does. So we’re thinking there might be some connection. Can you tell me a little more about the missing woman? I had the daughter in here a while ago, but she was a bit distraught, if you know what I mean, and I didn’t want to ask her too many questions about her mother. I think somebody’s been batting her around a little, she was wearing a shiner the size of Staten Island.”

“Didn’t have one when I saw her,” Gregors said, sounding surprised.

“Well, she’s got one now. Anyway, can you fill me in a little on the missing woman?”

“I’ll fax you what the daughter gave us, if you want,” Gregors said.

“Well, just give it to me on the phone, if that’s okay,” Hogan said.

“Sure. Just thought I’d save time. Let me get it for you.”

He was away from the phone for about three minutes, coming back with what Hogan guessed was a complaint form, and began to read from it like a kid reciting in class.

“White female,” he said, “thirty-nine years old, five feet seven inches tall, a hundred twenty-five pounds. Blond hair, blue eyes, no identifying scars, marks or...”

“Blond, did you say?”

“Blond,” Gregors said.

Hogan had suddenly remembered yesterday’s call from Homicide South.

He hoped to God he was wrong.

The two plainclothes cops standing on the Battery Park dock were from the First Detective Squad, here to check the identification of anyone going out to Liberty Island on the special ferry. This was now ten in the morning, a glorious day, and the cops were grateful for a cushy assignment like this one, which certainly beat looking down into the face of a stiff on a city pavement.

An earlier ferry had carried to the island forty-two Marine Corps Band musicians in their dress blues, three members of the President’s advance team, and four Secret Service men from the New York field office. Most of the people boarding the ferry now were from the three television networks and CNN, all of them wearing lucite-encased press cards, the rainbow peacock on the NBC tag, the black-and-white CBS eye on the Channel 2 tag, the big 7 on the ABC tag. Some of them were carrying cameras, others were carrying sound equipment, others seemed to be carrying only clipboards. All of them seemed happy to be outdoors on a nice day like today. Chatting amiably among themselves, here on a cooperative assignment where there was no sense of rivalry, the men and women boarded the ferry together with nine men wearing dark blue suits, white shirts, and muted ties.

The television people were savvy enough to know that these nine guys weren’t a baseball team. Whispers ran around that this was Secret Service, but the surmise was only two-thirds correct. Six of the nine were, in fact, Secret Service: Dobbs and the men he’d brought with him from Washington, D.C. The other three were CIA: Alex Nichols, Moss Peggot, and Conrad Templeton.

None of them knew that Sonny Hemkar was already on the island.

Hogan hated this part of police work more than anything in the world.

They stood together in the stainless steel silence of the morgue. There were stainless steel tables with stainless steel cups brimming with blood. There was a burn victim on one of the tables, his fists clenched, his hands raised in the characteristic pugilist position. There was the stench of putrefying bodies. The clock on the wall read twenty-eight minutes past ten. It had taken him ten minutes to get to the Park Avenue apartment and another twenty minutes to drive them down to the hospital. Hogan was here to show Elita Randall the head Homicide South had recovered.