"Sam," said Arlene. Kurtz was surprised that Samantha had taken Arlene out for fieldwork and never told him. Evidently, a lot had gone on at the agency that he'd been oblivious to.
"Back to the office?" asked Arlene.
"Back to the office," said Kurtz. "But go through a Burger King or something on the way." It had been more than thirty hours since he'd eaten anything.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Arlene loaded O'Toole's hard drive data into her computer, and then added the digitized scanned material. Kurtz understood just enough to know that essentially she was creating a virtual computerO'Toole'sinside her own machine, but separated from Arlene's own programs and files by various partitions. The parole officer's computer memory didn't even know it had been hijacked.
"Oh," said Arlene, "I finished the research into Big John O'Toole, his brother the Major, and the amusement park search. I think you'll be pleased with some of the connections. You can read it while I open this stuff."
Kurtz looked on his desk for new files, but there weren't any.
"I e-mailed it to your computer. The files are waiting there," said Arlene. Her cigarette glowed.
"My desk is five feet from yours, and you e-mailed it to me?" Kurtz was finishing the big burger they'd picked up during the drive over.
"It's a new century, Joe," said Arlene.
Kurtz's head hurt too much for him to start expressing his opinion on that happy revelation. He fired up his computer, downloaded the files, and opened them while he ate and sipped a Coke.
Big John O'Toole had been a street cop in Buffalo for almost twenty years and had remained a uniformed cop the entire time. He was a sergeant and three months away from retirement when he'd been shot and killed four years ago, during a drug-bust gone wrong according to the Buffalo News . O'Toole had been acting alonestrange for a sergeant with that seniorityinvestigating a series of car burnings over on Hertel, in a neighborhood famous for torching their cars for insurance, when he'd seen a heroin deal going down and tried to make the arrest by himself. One of the three suspectsall had escaped despite a huge manhunthad got the drop on O'Toole and shot him in the head.
Weird , thought Kurtz. An experienced cop, even a uniform, trying to bust several drug dealers without calling for backup? It didn't make sense.
There were several related stories, including one covering Sergeant John O'Toole's huge funeralevery cop in Western New York seems to have turned out for itand Kurtz recognized a slightly younger and somewhat thinner Officer Margaret O'Toole standing in the rain by the crowded graveside. He remembered learning once that she had been a real cop, working Vice at that time.
Kurtz skimmed through the rest of the Big John O'Toole stuffmostly citations, occasional community related stuff going back more than a decade, and follow-up stories on the fruitless search for his shootersand then went on to the hero-cop's older brother, Major Michael Francis O'Toole.
Separate photosthe two didn't seem to have been photographed togethershowed that the brothers looked vaguely alike in that blunt Irish way, but the Major's face was broader, tougher, and meaner than the cop's. Arlene had somehow gotten into military recordsKurtz never asked her how she did such thingsand he printed these pages so as to read them more easily.
Michael Francis O'Toole, born 1936, enlisted in the Army in 1956, a series of American and European base assignments, then his first tour in Vietnam in 1966. This O'Toole had worked his way up through the ranks, been sent to OCS in the early sixties, and was a captain during his first combat tour. There were various citations, medals, and details of heroism under fireone time running from a landed command helicopter, under fire, to rescue one of his wounded men who had been left behind during a confused evacuation. His specialty had been working with ARVNArmy of the Republic of VietnamKit Carson Scouts, the high-morale, American-trained Vietnamese troops
who did scouting, interrogation, and translation for the army and CIA in-country. O'Toole had been shipped Stateside after a minor injury, promoted to Major, promptly volunteered to return to Vietnam, landed at a forward area in the Dan Lat Valley, stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and had lost the use of his legs.
That was the end of Major O'Toole's active military career. After a stint in a Virginia V.A. hospital, O'Toole retired from the Army and returned to his family's hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Then there were some 1972 virtual newspaper clippings about Major O'Toole in Neola, New York, a little town of about twenty thousand people about seventy miles south of Buffalo, along the Pennsylvania border. The Major had opened a major southeast Asian import-export business there along with his Vietnamese partner, Colonel Vin Trinh. They called the little business the South-East Asia Trading Company, SEATCO, which sounded like just another stupid military acronym to Kurtz, who'd had his share of them during his stint as an M.P.