City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “In shock.” She dug her face into his collar.

  “And you?”

  “I can’t tell.” They stayed like that for a handful of heartbeats before she pulled back and looked up at him. “What are you going to do?”

  He held her at arm’s length in the middle of the street as the snow came down and the various branches of the Manhattan law enforcement community scuttled about in their tasks. “I quit.”

  “You can’t, Luke. If you do, I’ll never sleep again.”

  “I already did. I handed in my badge. I promised I’d be home for the holidays. I promised that you wouldn’t go at it with Alisha alone. They”—he nodded in the general direction of the flashing lights off to their left—“don’t need me. You and the kids do.”

  It was hard to miss that she was a little pleased with that. But then her features tightened, and she said, “You can’t quit now. I understand why. And it’s not just Dingo. It’s you. You need to do this. And now I need you to do this. So I’m screwed no matter how I look at it. You go after this guy and you find him and you lock him up.”

  He was still staring at her, wondering what specific magic had brought her into his life, when Kehoe’s SUV hit the roadblock on the corner and the duty cops the bureau were now using as support personnel waved him through.

  Lucas told Erin to go be with the kids as the Lincoln moved slowly down the street. It pulled up in front of Whitaker’s vehicle, nosing into the spot where the EMS guys had loaded Dingo into the ambulance. Lucas walked over, his processor trying to find a logical route out of all of this. He didn’t have a lot of options. Not if he wanted to stay true to the man he had fought so hard to become.

  Kehoe got out and, even after a day of madness, still managed to look like he had been plucked from the pages of a men’s style blog. He walked over and took up a spot beside Lucas, against the hood of his SUV—which was an easy way to keep the warmth up.

  “What happened here, Page?”

  Lucas looked around. The media had set up shop on both ends of the block, prying into events with their lights and curiosity. “Detective Atchison and another man broke into my house and tried to kill my family. My friend stopped them with a fucking sword and is now probably going to die. Atchison had enough life in him to come after my wife and my little girl, and when he stepped outside, our shooter took his head off.” That was as short and sweet as he could come up with. The adrenaline had leached from his pores, and he was feeling the chemical letdown replace it.

  The FBI’s crime-scene boys and girls were going through his brownstone, applied FBI particle theory in action. The snow was still dropping from the sky, and it wasn’t making things even a tiny bit better.

  “I’m sorry, Luke.” Kehoe removed his gloved hands from his pockets and crossed his arms over his chest.

  Lucas thought about that. “I’m still too angry to be sorry.”

  They watched the cleanup boys bring a body out on a stretcher.

  “Whitaker and I spoke to Atchison last night. What the fuck is all this about?” Lucas watched Kehoe for signs of movement behind the machinery. There weren’t any. “What did I do that would make the guy come after my family, Brett?”

  “We’ll find out,” Kehoe said. There was genuine concern in his voice. Or at least more well-orchestrated manipulation.

  “Why was the shooter watching my house?” Lucas had a mix of emotions swirling around in his head over that one. It was hard to miss the bittersweet reasoning—because of the shooter, Erin and Alisha were still alive. He, too.

  Graves’s vehicle was waved through the roadblock at the end of the street.

  Kehoe looked over at the van where Lucas’s family were. “How is Erin?”

  “A man with a sword sticking out of his chest had his head blown off in front of her kids, Brett. That’s how she is.”

  “She knows this isn’t your fault.”

  “No, she doesn’t. Because it is. If I hadn’t gone back to work for you, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation while dead men are being wheeled out of my house in pieces. She has every right to be angry.”

  “What can I do?”

  Lucas looked over at him. “Dingo has been in immigration limbo for three years. Punch it through.”

  “Look, I don’t think—”

  Lucas cut him off. “I’m not done.”

  Kehoe stopped. After what had happened, he owed it to Lucas to at least listen. “Of course.”

  “I want you to get Dingo his citizenship. And I want Alisha’s adoption cleared. After tonight, I doubt the courts are going to find us to be safe guardians. Erin will be crushed. It’s not a complicated case, Brett. Her father will be in prison for the next five decades for killing her mother. She has no aunts or uncles or grandparents, and that poor kid spent three days alone with her dead mother lying naked on the bedroom floor.”

  Graves came over, nodding a lackluster hello to both of them.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Kehoe said.

  Lucas turned to him and stood up to his full height, a good four inches over the man. “No, you won’t. You want me to come back? You want to catch this guy? Then you fucking get this done. Otherwise, you can hand this over to Graves here and see what happens. I want both those things taken care of by breakfast. I don’t care how you do it, just get it done.”

  Kehoe nodded. “I will do my best.”

  Kehoe was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar.

  “Give me back my badge.”

  Graves reached into his pocket and pulled it out. “Kehoe told me to deliver it.”

  Lucas shook his head. “I hate being predictable.”

  52

  Columbia University Medical Center

  The surgical ICU was relatively quiet during the early hours of the coming day. The room was round, with a nursing station in the center. More than two dozen beds were parked against the curved outer wall, chariots designed to not deliver occupants to the afterlife. Five nurses attended to the nuts and bolts of the surgically reassembled humans, and a single uniformed officer stood watch over Dingo’s bed. Other than Lucas, there were no visitors.

  The cop took a break to give him a little privacy with his friend. Not that his presence here did any good. Or bad. But the act of being here somehow calmed the old demons clawing out of the locked closets in his head. And maybe Dingo was absorbing some of the hope that was being sent his way.

  Dingo did a pretty good impression of a human distributor cap wired into a bank of NASA diagnostic systems. The collage of monitors displayed every possible numerical value his body was capable of producing, some of them represented on more than one screen. He was doing an effective job of looking dead. The surgeon who plucked the five copper-jacketed .45 rounds out of his sternum said that a lot of things needed to line up if he was going to make it. But he was fit and obviously no stranger to punishment, which were both pluses. The surgeon gave him a one-in-three chance of making it through the next twenty-four hours, a one-in-two chance in making the twenty-four beyond that, by which time, he would fall into the likely-to-survive category. The good news was that as of now, all his major organs were online and enthusiastically working toward the single goal of keeping his body on the green side of the grass.

  Being back in a room like this was doing all kinds of black magic on Lucas. It was the Ghost of Christmas Past mixed with the Ghost of Christmas Future, and neither the memories nor the possibility were places he wanted to visit. Doing this once was more than enough for anyone. That Dingo was lying there felt like letting someone else go to prison for a crime he had committed.

  The whole exercise drove home that he was too old for this business. It wasn’t just the damage to his body—he could get used to that. No, it was the beating his mental state was taking. He was having trouble seeing the forest for the trees, and that never happened to him. And that he was thinking about himself more than Dingo made him ashamed.

  Lucas watched the numbers dance acro
ss the bevy of monitors, and he couldn’t help but fit them into a pattern. It had no real value as a diagnostics tool, not in any way he could understand, because some values were rising while others were decreasing. But it enabled him to build a short-term model of how a human being came back online, even if he knew nothing about what was happening. He trusted the software—and the nursing minions moving noiselessly through the ICU—to do that. But he couldn’t turn off what he was built to do—see patterns.

  In the patterns, there was direction. Order. Predictability.

  Kehoe’s men found the shooter’s lair right where Lucas had said they would. Another rooftop perch where very little had been left behind. In this case, as in the others, very little meant nil. Which was some kind of a miracle because less than six hours before, the shooter had been hiding between a pair of backup generators at LaGuardia.

  While Dingo was in surgery, ballistics came back on both of the night’s victims—Lupino and Atchison—and it was that same weird bullet. A copper-jacketed hunting round modified to contain a morsel of the building blocks of the universe.

  Which meant that Lucas was on the guy’s radar.

  But the shot that had taken out Atchison was different from the others in that there had been no surveillance involved. There hadn’t been time. The building where the shot had come from was a last-minute choice.

  Until now, Lucas knew the shooter put a lot of time into surveillance. He had mapped out Hartke’s and Kavanagh’s and Lupino’s schedules—which meant he had months of footwork into this. But taking Atchison out had proved that he could do this on the fly. Which elevated his threat factor by orders of magnitude.

  And that brought Lucas to the next set of questions. Had Detective Atchison been on the killer’s shopping list before tonight, or had he been an addendum? Was this tied to the Margolis murder—where a truckload of ammunition disappeared? With Atchison being the lead detective in the Margolis case, the power of coincidence seemed a little overstated. Or was Atchison added to the list simply because he was part of the law enforcement gene pool? Had the shooter been protecting Lucas? His family? Or had he simply been making a point? And if so, what was said point? That he was everywhere? All-knowing? All-seeing? Unstoppable?

  Because, if Lucas really thought about it, the shooter looked like he was all those things.

  Only he wasn’t.

  He was a human being. Which meant he had a flaw somewhere.

  Why had Atchison come for him? It made no sense from any kind of a logistical standpoint. Lucas was only involved in the periphery of the investigation. If they wanted to try to scare investigators away, they should have gone after Graves or Kehoe. Hell, any of the other agents would have made a bigger splash than Lucas.

  Lucas stood up and put his hand on Dingo’s arm. He felt cold. Lucas leaned over and gave his friend a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  Out in the hallway, Whitaker was thumbing through email. She stood up and pocketed her phone. “How you doing?”

  “The man who saved my family is an inch away from dying. That’s how I am.”

  As they headed to the elevator, Lucas put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry about that. I’m tired.”

  “So how about we get you some sleep?”

  “That’s the best suggestion I’ve heard in a while.”

  53

  The Park Lane Hotel

  Lucas had managed a little more than two hours of sleep before the monsters in his head started picking the locks. He woke in the dark, and it took him a few seconds to gather the strength to push himself up in bed. The hotel was a mid-priced joint that checked all the boxes and had the added plus of being not far from either his house or the hospital where Dingo was facing down the reaper, which somehow offset the feeling he had entered the witness protection program. Erin and the kids were at their beach house, where they’d stay until this nightmare was put to bed.

  He stretched, knowing he needed more sleep but understanding that it was a lost aspiration. He kicked off the covers and had to manually untangle the top sheet from his prosthetic before he swung his legs over the side of the bed; he always left his leg on when he slept away from home. His head felt crammed with warm ball bearings, and his eye felt as if it were being held in with roofing nails. But at least he could stand.

  Lucas peeled back the curtains and stared out at the still-dark city, buried in what looked like a hundred feet of winter. Everything was under snow, a component that time, patience, and tens of thousands of man-hours would eventually dent with New York’s basic nature: sheer relentlessness. But until then, it would be an eerie in-between world that looked almost deserted. People were out, but nowhere near the usual pedestrian time-lapse that he was used to. Vehicular traffic was running at a weak 30 percent, cabs and Uber drivers doing their best against the deep drifts in a competition with errant SUV owners.

  Even from four floors up, it was apparent that no one on the street texted or yakked into cell phones; it was just too fucking cold.

  After a coffee, he texted Whitaker to let her know he was awake. If she was up, she’d call. If not, he’d grab a cab down to Federal Plaza.

  He was sitting there, wondering if he had the strength to stand, when the phone rang. It was Whitaker.

  “What did you find out about the second man at my house last night?”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  “Sure. Sorry. Whatever.” He resented feeling like the life he had ordered was out of stock, but it was too early to be rational. At least until he pumped more coffee into the tank.

  She switched to business mode. “The guy is—was—Atchison’s partner, Detective Alex Roberts.”

  “He was in on the Margolis investigation.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Any idea why he came after my family?”

  “Not yet. But we tossed Atchison’s house, and it fills in a few blanks.”

  From the tone of her voice, he could tell it was more of the same—pieces of a puzzle that were facedown. “When can you be here?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Make it twenty; I need a long shower.”

  “No problem. Are you all right?”

  He had been ready to walk away from it all. Take his wife and kids and head to Bimini until the FBI collared this asshole. But Erin didn’t trust anyone like she trusted him, and she’d only start sleeping better when this guy was out of his head. So he had sent her and the kids out to Montauk.

  The kids liked it out at the beach, even in the middle of winter. And Kathy, their neighbor out there, would help Erin pick up the slack left in Lucas’s wake—she was a retired schoolteacher (and the beneficiary of a very healthy life insurance policy from a very unhealthy third husband) who loved the kids as if they were her own.

  After getting Erin and the kids off to Montauk, he spent some more time with Kehoe, followed up by his visit with Dingo. “I’m good. But I need to stop listening to both Kehoe and Graves; the signal-to-noise ratio is too interbred. I have some ideas that I want to pursue, but I need a little help.”

  “You going Johnny Utah on me?”

  Lucas thought back to Erin’s John McClane comment and wondered how come the people who came into his life always had the same worldview. “I’m just not willing to waste time pursuing avenues that will be nonproductive.”

  “Kehoe wants you to see Atchison’s place over in Hoboken.”

  “What about the Frenchman?”

  “He said Graves could take care of that.”

  “Graves couldn’t sink a canoe with a hand grenade.” Lucas stood and walked over to the coffee maker. “I need all the files on our victims.” The coffee filter was a commercial single-portion tea-bag affair encapsulated in a heat-sealed plastic bag. “Sorry, can you hold on?” he asked and put the phone down. Things like opening little plastic sachets were impossible without two hands, and using his metal prosthetic required a little attention or he’d end up with coffee all over the floor. Wh
en he was done, he plopped it into the little machine and added a bottle of water from the tray on the table. He hit the On button and picked the cell back up. “I want everything our people can dig up on the victims. All of it. From junior high records right up through last pay stubs. Credit card statements, phone bills, bank statements, loan applications, insurance claims—every last fragment of data that you can get your hands on. Go back as far as you can.”

  “That’s a lot of information.”

  “We also need to look at the FBI’s National Data Exchange.”

  Whitaker interrupted him. “We’ve run this through N-DEx ten different ways and come up with nothing. This guy hasn’t—”

  Lucas cut her off. “I’m not interested in the similar crimes we’ve found; I’m interested in the ones we haven’t. This isn’t his first time doing this; you don’t make those four shots without a lot of experience. He’s done this before; we just don’t know where.”

  The coffee maker was farting and burping, and Lucas turned back to the view of the park. He was enjoying the scenery until he realized that he was standing in a window. “How many law enforcement agencies are there in the U.S.?”

  “About eighteen thousand, including local PDs, sheriff’s offices, official state agencies, and other miscellaneous organizations.”

  “With that many sources, some crimes aren’t getting reported. There’s bound to be data loss—we just have to find it. I bet there are a few small local PDs that just don’t have the time or the budget or the inclination to report to the federal government.”

  “You want us to call eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies and ask if they haven’t reported any crimes? That’s insane.”

  The coffee maker wheezed out one final sputter, and Lucas lifted the mug. “We won’t have to. We’re looking within a very specific set of parameters. We need someplace with a harsh winter and a largely rural population, someplace without a lot of incentive to report their business to the feds.” He took a sip of the coffee and walked back over to the window. “We’re looking for a law enforcement agency that doesn’t have the resources to file with the database—they lack the interest, or they don’t understand the process. They won’t be regular contributors.”