“Gooood,” he said. He had a long way to drive to his two-story house and he’d rather not field-dress her here.
Catherine Baker Martin’s cat watched out the window as the truck pulled away, the taillights getting closer and closer together.
Behind the cat the telephone was ringing. The machine in the bedroom answered, its red light blinking in the dark.
The caller was Catherine’s mother, the junior U.S. Senator from Tennessee.
CHAPTER 16
In the 1980s, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures were in place to deal with a kidnapping affecting a member of Congress:
At 2:45 A.M. the special agent in charge of the Memphis FBI office reported to headquarters in Washington that Senator Ruth Martin’s only daughter had disappeared.
At 3:00 A.M. two unmarked vans pulled out of the damp basement garage at the Washington field office, Buzzard’s Point. One van went to the Senate Office Building, where technicians placed monitoring and recording equipment on the telephones in Senator Martin’s office and put a Title 3 wiretap on the pay phones closest to the Senator’s office. The Justice Department woke the most junior member of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to provide the obligatory notice of the tap.
The other vehicle, an “eyeball van” with one-way glass and surveillance equipment, was parked on Virginia Avenue to cover the front of the Watergate West, Senator Martin’s Washington residence. Two of the van’s occupants went inside to install monitoring equipment on the Senator’s home telephones.
Bell Atlantic estimated the mean trace time at seventy seconds on any ransom call placed from a domestic digital switching system.
The Reactive Squad at Buzzard’s Point went to double shifts in the event of a ransom drop in the Washington area. Their radio procedure changed to mandatory encryption to protect any possible ransom drop from intrusion by news helicopters—that kind of irresponsibility on the part of the news business was rare, but it had happened.
The Hostage Rescue Team went to an alert status one level short of airborne.
Everyone hoped Catherine Baker Martin’s disappearance was a professional kidnapping for ransom; that possibility offered the best chance for her survival.
Nobody mentioned the worst possibility of all.
Then, shortly before dawn in Memphis, a city patrolman investigating a prowler complaint on Winchester Avenue stopped an elderly man collecting aluminum cans and junk along the shoulder of the road. In his cart the patrolman found a woman’s blouse, still buttoned in front. The blouse was slit up the back like a funeral suit. The laundry mark was Catherine Baker Martin’s.
* * *
Jack Crawford was driving south from his home in Arlington at 6:30 A.M. when the telephone in his car beeped for the second time in two minutes.
“Nine twenty-two forty.”
“Forty stand by for Alpha 4.”
Crawford spotted a rest area, pulled in, and stopped to give his full attention to the telephone. Alpha 4 is the Director of the FBI.
“Jack—you up on Catherine Martin?”
“The night duty officer called me just now.”
“Then you know about the blouse. Talk to me.”
“Buzzard Point went to kidnap alert,” Crawford said. “I’d prefer they didn’t stand down yet. When they do stand down I’d like to keep the phone surveillance. Slit blouse or not, we don’t know for sure it’s Bill. If it’s a copycat he might call for ransom. Who’s doing taps and traces in Tennessee, us or them?”
“Them. The state police. They’re pretty good. Phil Adler called from the White House to tell me about the President’s ‘intense interest.’ We could use a win here, Jack.”
“That had occurred to me. Where’s the Senator?”
“En route to Memphis. She got me at home a minute ago. You can imagine.”
“Yes.” Crawford knew Senator Martin from budget hearings.
“She’s coming down with all the weight she’s got.”
“I don’t blame her.”