More Twisted

partner with a lifted eyebrow; he’d just arrived and hadn’t heard Silverman’s theory yet.
    “The message we got from the dead CI—how Doyle’s going to kill Pease.”
    The captain had heard about the biblical passage but hadn’t put much stock in it. “So how?” he asked skeptically.
    “Doctors,” Silverman announced.
    “Huh?”
    “I think he’s going to use a doctor to try to get to Pease.”
    “Keep going.”
    Silverman told him about the anagrams.
    “Like crossword puzzles?”
    “Sort of.”
    Noveski said nothing but he too seemed skeptical of the idea.
    The captain screwed up his long face. “Hold on here. You’re saying that here’s our CI and he’s got a severed jugular and he’s playing word games?”
    “Funny how the mind works, what it sees, what it can figure out.”
    “Funny,” the senior cop muttered. “Sounds a little, whatsa word, contrived, you know what I mean?”
    “He had to get us the message and he had to make sure that Doyle didn’t tip to the fact he’d alerted us. He had to make it, you know, subtle enough so Doyle’s boys wouldn’t figure out what he knew, but not so subtle that we couldn’t guess it.”
    “I don’t know.”
    Silverman shook his head. “I think it works.” He explained that Tommy Doyle had often paid huge fees to brilliant, ruthless hit men who’d masquerade as somebody else to get close to their unsuspecting victims. Silverman speculated that the killer would buy or steal a doctor’s white jacket and get a fake ID card and a stethoscope or whatever doctors carried around with them nowadays. Then a couple of Doyle’s cronies would make a halfhearted attempt on Pease’s life—they couldn’t get close enough to kill him in the safe house, but causing injury was a possibility. “Maybe food poisoning.” Silverman explained about the sepsis anagram. “Or maybe they’d arrange for a fire or gas leak or something. The hit man, disguised as a med tech, would be allowed inside and kill Pease there. Or maybe the witness wouldbe rushed to the hospital and the man’d cap him in the emergency room.”
    The captain shrugged. “Well, you can check it out—provided you don’t ignore the grunt work. We can’t afford to screw this one up. We lose Pease and it’s our ass.”
    The pronouns in those sentences may have been first person plural but all Silverman heard was a very singular “you” and “your.”
    “Fair enough.”
    In the hallway on their way back to his office Silverman asked his partner, “Who do we have on call for medical attention at the safe house?”
    “I don’t know, a team from Forest Hills Hospital, I’d guess.”
    “We don’t know who?” Silverman snapped.
    “I don’t, no.”
    “Well, find out! Then get on the horn to the safe house and tell the babysitter if Pease gets sick for any reason, needs any medicine, needs a goddamn bandage, to call me right away. Do not let any medical people see him unless we have a positive ID and I give my personal okay.”
    “Right.”
    “Then call the supervisor at Forest Hills and tell him to let me know stat if any doctors or ambulance attendants or nurses— anybody —don’t show up for work or call in sick or if there’re some doctors around that he doesn’t recognize.”
    The young man peeled off into his office to do what Silverman had ordered and the senior detective returned to his own desk. He called a counterpart at the county sheriff’s office in Hamilton and told him what he suspectedand added that they had to be on the lookout for any medical people who were close to Pease.
    The detective then sat back in his chair, rubbing his eyes and massaging his neck. He was more and more convinced he was right, that the secret message left by the dying informant was pointing toward a killer masquerading as a health care worker. He picked up the phone again. For several hours, he nagged hospitals and ambulance services around the county to find out if all of their people and vehicles were accounted for.
    As the hour neared lunchtime, his phone rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Silverman.” The captain’s abrupt voice instantly killed the detective’s sleep-deprivation haze; he was instantly alert. “We just had an attempt on Pease.”
    Silverman’s heart thudded. He sat forward. “He okay?”
    “Yeah. Somebody in an SUV fired thirty, forty shots through the front windows of the safe house. Steel-jacketed rounds, so they got through the armored glass. Pease and his