Seven Silent Men (24 page)

“How did you know about the Sewerage Department report?” Jez yelled to Yates over the motor roar.

“Remember I used to know everything?” Yates called back.

“Cut the crap.”

“I'm inquisitive. I read every report coming into the office that I can … including the one from the Sewerage Department.”

St. Ives shouted, trained his search beams on the line of large round holes in the wall to their right. Safra explained these were the mouths of the drainage pipes leading down from the hills above, intake pipes the timing device had opened and closed.

St. Ives, with another holler, turned his search beams straight up in the tunnel. On the ceiling far above was silt and mud … residue, Safra explained, from the highwater mark of the rampaging floodings.

The first stop, five miles from where they began under Warbonnet Ridge, was at the platform leading into the passageway that brought them out into the cave beneath the Mormon State National Bank, where a special team of FBI lab technicians was at work chipping away the caked mud that encrusted every surface.

Seven and a half miles farther downtunnel, St. Ives and Safra cut the motors, let their boats drift into an array of flares and electric lights. Yates and Jez saw scores of frogmen working in the shallow water, piling up sandbags and reenforcing walls of what seemed a wide, high cathedral-like structure.

This, St. Ives told them, was the bypass terminal beneath Lookout Bluff, a subterranean diversion point leading into Prairie Port's sewerage system immediately south and connecting to the spur tunnel running due west … the very spur tunnel built thirty-four years ago to drain out the caves and crevices beneath the western sectors of Prairie Port and which had remained sealed until the recent flood smashed it open.

“It will stay open a good while now,” Safra predicted. “Draining it out will take years.”

Yates asked, “What are the divers doing?”

“Buttressing for the backlash,” Safra told him. “We'll be trying to tap the underground mud crown west of the city within the hour. Drilling down into the mud dome and easing the pressure before it erupts. If it erupts before we drill, or if we misdrill and cause it to erupt, a river of mud could be coming in this direction. They're preparing for the river.”

The boats putted across the bypass terminal, entered the city's sewerage tubes.

“This is where your robbers went.” Safra was emphatic as he pointed ahead. “They rode the crest of the water through here and then on to the sewers ahead.”

“Why couldn't they have gone west, into the spur tunnel?” Yates asked.

“There wasn't enough room to get through on Friday night,” Safra said. “It wasn't until later, until the water began backing up in the spur tunnel and collapsing the walls, that there was enough room. Even so, area and velocity was with the sewage tubes. They acted like vacuums by then, sucked everything through with tremendous force … sucked tile right off the ceiling.”

Safra's flash beam swung up to the ceiling. Tile chip after tile chip was missing.

The motorboats came out onto the Mississippi River at the far southern end of Prairie Port … came out 21.6 miles downstream from Mormon State National Bank. A helicopter was waiting …

TEN

Teddy Anglaterra, ever since washing up dead on South Beach on Monday night, had been bureaucracy's child. South Beach was a county beach even though it fell within the city limits of Prairie Port. When Teddy's body, mistakenly thought to be alive, was picked up by the River Patrol ambulance, it should have been taken, dead or alive, to University Hospital, a county facility. Instead Teddy had arrived at Missouri Presbyterian Hospital, which was private. Had Presbyterian admitted Teddy and made out his death certificate, copies would have been sent to the appropriate city, county and state authorities. Since he had obviously been murdered, a state inquest would have been mandatory. Had the inquest decided further investigation was required, the matter would have fallen to the state police. Presbyterian Hospital, however, had refused to accept Teddy and ordered he be shipped to city morgue. And he was, in one of Presbyterian's own ambulances rather than in the River Patrol vehicle which had brought the body over originally.

City morgue was situated in the basement of University Hospital. The two facilities, while having direct access to one another, had separate entrances and receiving docks. Had Presbyterian's ambulance brought the body directly into city morgue, Teddy would have become exclusively a city case and the Prairie Port PD would have been notified. The ambulance, as was not unusual, delivered him into the main emergency room of University Hospital, which once again made Teddy a county ward. Seeing that the ambulance belonged to Presbyterian, the administrative nurse classified Teddy as “a Missouri Presbyterian Hospital patient-on-exchange, deceased” and made out the appropriate admittance papers but nothing else … no mandatory “suspected murder notification,” no “unidentified person report.” The nurse assumed, erroneously, that Presbyterian Hospital had followed correct procedure and notified all city, county and state agencies of the unknown murder victim.

Rather than perform an autopsy on an unidentified body, as it had the authority to do, University farmed the task out to city morgue, which more and more had begun to handle county cases such as this. The city medical examiner, rather than bring Teddy down into the basement morgue, took him up to the second-floor operating area in the hospital wing housing the state university medical school, where he performed the autopsy in front of a group of forensic students. Because it did not occur on its own premises, the morgue did not list the event on its daily log of autopsies … a log made available to law-enforcement agencies on request. The med school kept no records whatsoever on such educational procedures.

The medical examiner put a copy of Teddy's autopsy report in his own file in the basement and sent the original upstairs to the County Medical and Health Administration on the third floor of the building. Adhering to correct procedure, the M.E. notified no one else of the incident. A clerk in County Med and Health, assuming Presbyterian Hospital would make the necessary follow-up contacts on what was listed as Presbyterian's patient, did absolutely nothing except file the report in its own record room and send Presbyterian a brief teletype resume of the M.E.'s findings. Presbyterian had no record of the unidentified person referred to in the teletype and disposed of the communication.

Teddy, through it all, remained in a refrigerated locker on the second-floor hospital wing occupied by the state med school. Statistically he was a nonentity, had not been included on any city or county or state official tabulation of unidentified persons or murder victims—or even as a death, for that matter. The state police had put out a five-state make for Tedddy's fingerprints with instructions to contact city morgue if information was available, but that was the extent of it. This sort of macabre snafu in accounting for dead bodies had occurred before in Prairie Port. Occasionally an incident was publicized, but with little outcry ensuing.

At 11:50
A
.
M
. Wednesday, as Jessup, St. Ives and Safra helicoptered west toward the mud fields and Thurston drove Billy Yates into downtown Prairie Port, Teddy's body was identified in the med school's cadaver room by a short, muscular young man in a tight black T-shirt and sharply creased chinos who produced verification he was the decedent's nephew, Fred C. Anglaterra, of Sparta, Illinois. Fred, whose well-coifed hair was parted in the middle, volunteered no information as to how Teddy might have ended up in Prairie Port, nor was he asked. He merely filled out a med school release form stating he intended to take Teddy back home to Sparta for burial and that he had a hearse waiting outside. The med school had to summon its dean, who in turn signed a form releasing Teddy to the authority that in this instance held jurisdiction over the state and med school. Then the medical examiner made out his own forms that released Teddy to the agency that held sway over the morgue under these circumstances: the County Medical and Health department three floors above in University Hospital.

… Jessup, Safra and St. Ives watched the spinning bits lower, one by one, from a line of derricks set along a field not far from Laggerette Hunt and Ride Club, saw them chew into the ground and spin straight down, spin deeper, spin from earshot. For a long time silence held. Then a tremor was felt. Hissing echoed. Hissing from all sides of the field. The land quaked and rumbled. Mud geysered up from under the second derrick, spouted twenty feet into the air. The third and first and fourth derricks followed suit, erupted into towers of gushing mud. The pressure deep beneath the surface had been tapped, the incipient mud volcano neutralized.

… The clerk in the County Med and Health office stapled the release forms from the state med school and city M.E. to the county release forms, stamped and signed the form on behalf of the county, recorded the $50 in cash and $150 in traveler's checks that had been handed him and made out a receipt, gave the receipt and release forms and an out-of-state hearse permit to the short, muscular young man in the black T-shirt and chino pants.

… Happy de Camp and Ted Keon went over the latest data obtained at state police headquarters. Neither Teddy Anglaterra nor his vital statistics appeared on the long list of names or descriptions of persons reported dead or missing in the immediate five-state area since the robbery. Nor would they appear in the future. Except for two secondary sources of information which law-enforcement agencies seldom bothered searching, the files of Prairie Port's medical examiner and the County Medical and Health records, Teddy Anglaterra, dead or alive, did not exist.

Ailing, sixty-eight-year-old Wilkie Jarrel, bolstered by an unseen arm at his back, stood against a tree on his vast estate and for the first time in his life gave a press interview, telling a battery of television cameras that he would personally match all reward monies posted for information leading to the apprehension of the Mormon State robbery perpetrators. It was a matter any public-spirited citizen was obliged to become involved in if possible.

Teddy Anglaterra rode in the back of the rented hearse being driven by the young man in the tight black T-shirt, the corpse's self-described nephew. Beside the driver sat a much taller man. The two of them had dropped Teddy from the airplane into the Mississippi River on the previous Monday evening. Both were delighted with how things had gone.

Strom, pacing and poker-faced and puffing his pipe as he listened to Yates's detailed report on what had gone on at Warbonnet Ridge and in the tunnels earlier that day, was pleased. Pleased that so much relevant information had been garnered this early in the investigation. The time of the robbery was now established. The entire getaway route had been laid out. The source of the flooding was known and the means. Critical physical evidence had been obtained, a timing-control device and handcrafted fuses and wires and wire splices and blueprints and charts and everything else required to convert two old-fangled generators into motors and make them, with the other machinery in the Bonnet, operative. This new physical evidence might provide what the previous already in tow, the money sack and dollar bills and light bulbs and wire and segments of rubber boat, had not: a latent fingerprint. The new evidence might prove traceable to places or persons who could lead them a step closer to the unknown perpetrators, if not directly to the perpetrators.

Equally important for Strom, a profile on one of the actual robbery gang members was becoming clear, the so-called wizard of electricity. The wizard more than anyone or anything else kindled Strom's guarded optimism for a fast break in the case being within their grasp. He counseled Yates and Cub that the strictest confidentiality must be imposed on what they had just learned.

But Denis Corticun told the world.

ELEVEN

Haughty Denis Corticun, as Strom liked to call him, showed another face. After blowing up at Billy Yates and hurling harsh words at other personnel the Tuesday night of his return from Washington, he had become progressively more unhaughty. Granted, he was still wearing his pinstriped suit when, early the next morning, he went down to the eleventh-floor office and sought out Yates and openly apologized for being so nasty … the sight of the pinstripes did elicit a chuckle or two from several of the resident agents. But when he came down an hour later and reaffirmed that Strom had the final say with Romor 91 and vowed that he and his twelfth-floor personnel would assist the investigation in any way Strom wished, Corticun was in shirt-sleeves with his tie loose. Returning to the residency office several hours after that … accompanied by a brand-new switchboard and another teletype machine as well as seventeen autographed copies of J. Edgar Hoover's
Masters of Deceit
for the resident agents and seventeen tortoise-shell lockets with a picture of Edgar himself for their wives … Corticun was wearing a sweat shirt, jeans and tennis shoes. When he passed out the books and lockets, he was downright friendly with the men. Even joked and laughed. And his throat-clearing had disappeared.

Corticun became as convivial on the twelfth floor as he had been on the eleventh. He created in a short time both a physical and emotional environment of efficiency and care. The thirty incoming FBI agents meant to support the eleventh-floor residency were processed and billeted and given assignments and twelfth-floor desks and were eagerly at work within hours of their arrival. Twenty-five secretaries and stenographers from other offices were flown to Prairie Port until clearance could be gotten on local office personnel. Corticun gave the eleventh floor first priority on the steno pool. Gave the eleventh floor priority on almost everything. Went along with most suggestions from the eleventh-floor Caretakers while tending to the Prairie Port case load. Everyone from the twelfth floor liked Denis Corticun. Quite a few converts were being made on the floor below as well.