City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  The rest of the personnel who had been involved in Bible Hill were all in protective custody now. There were four in New York City, and after the shooter was done here, Lucas had no doubt that he would have headed off to other pastures—the most likely being Houston, where three of the people involved in Bible Hill had ended up. That so many were in New York was some kind of a statistical anomaly.

  Lucas couldn’t stop the questions in his head.

  Or stop thinking about Bible Hill.

  It all started there.

  With Carl Quaid. And somehow, almost two decades later, it had morphed into a hunting trip in the concrete jungle.

  Outside, the snow still swirled down in clumps, burying the city in a new ice age. Most of Manhattan was crippled in one way or another, and basic infrastructure and core businesses were at the point where they could no longer operate effectively. The cabs and their Uber asshole counterparts were the only cars out—most drivers too afraid of the snow to risk the safari into the arctic wonderland; the waste management trucks weren’t running because the garbagemen couldn’t get through the banks to the curb to pick up the trash; delivery trucks couldn’t ford the narrow streets or the back alleys; grocery stores, markets, and restaurants were sold out of basics; and even the subway schedule was a mess; many of the outdoor trains were freezing up—particularly the electronic brake systems—and the chain reaction was affecting the entire transit system. In the simple jargon of a twenty-first-century urban planner, everything was fucked.

  But not to the man with the rifle. Half a week and he had won himself a place in history. This guy was the post office motto come to life—they’d be talking about him for years. He’d make it into the textbooks at Quantico. Leonardo DiCaprio would play him in the movie. He’d live forever.

  But who was he?

  And what was his connection to Bible Hill?

  And the Quaids?

  Myrna and her husband now had the unforgiving focus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation pointed at them. The Jackson, Wyoming, branch of the bureau, coupled with the men Kehoe had sent out, were digging up everything they could on the couple, all under the shadow of a warrant that Kehoe had long-armed to a federal judge, all backed up by what Lucas and Whitaker had learned from Doyle.

  It was all so fucking convoluted that Lucas wondered if there was a straight line anywhere in the equation.

  The roof across the street was six stories down and identical to five thousand others in the city, an empty flat space that supported a water tank and a bunch of HVAC units. Maybe an electrical panel and a forest of satellite dishes. And it was the perfect perch for a man with a rifle.

  Just like that tree-lined ridge back in Wyoming.

  Wyoming.

  The Quaids.

  The Mercers.

  A man with a rifle.

  It was there somewhere, hidden in the—

  And then he got it.

  It was right there.

  Like everything else on this one, it wasn’t in what was there.

  It was in what wasn’t.

  Lucas gave Dingo’s hand a squeeze and left the ICU.

  74

  26 Federal Plaza

  There is no other governmental agency as difficult to rile up as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but the killing of two of their agents had managed to accomplish precisely that. Electricity sparks in the dead air between angry people, and the rooms of the bureau offices were filled with determined human voltage.

  Lucas cornered Kehoe in his office. They talked it through, and when Lucas finished, Kehoe simply nodded and said, “Do it.”

  Again, the solution was to be found in the holes in the equation, not the parts they could see. Which required a whole new approach, one recalibrated to look in the places that weren’t technically places.

  Lucas spent an hour on the phone with Rod Ziegler, his new contact at the Jackson, Wyoming, branch of the bureau. Ziegler was the lead man interviewing the Mercers, which meant he had access to all facets of the investigation out there. What Lucas wanted wasn’t the usual information that they could find by simply logging in to the appropriate databases. No, Lucas needed a little legwork, persuasiveness, and the ability to think in abstract terms, all of which Ziegler had demonstrated at their meeting in the Jackson Hole Airport. When Lucas was done explaining what he wanted, Ziegler went off to locate the appropriate haystack in which to find their needle.

  That was four hours ago, and the interim had been spent running down the familiar dead ends that make up the bulk of most cases. Lucas and Whitaker were going through Oscar’s purchase records for the past year when Lucas’s cell lit up with Ziegler’s number.

  “Dr. Page here.”

  “Dr. Page, Rod Ziegler. I pulled all the bank records I could for the Mercers, and you were right, they’re cash kind of people. And you were right that even people who don’t like the government have to take a check on occasion, especially when they come from the government. We already had the appropriate warrants for the bank records, so that saved a lot of time. Like you recommended, I went to their actual branch in Milliner and pulled up everything in their file.

  “That chunk of settlement money is gone; I couldn’t find it anywhere. Federal law dictates that banks have to keep detailed records, including copies of all checks, for a period of seven years. But with server space being cheap, a lot of banks keep records longer than that; the Milliner branch had the Mercers’ records going back ten years, and the money has been gone all that time, so they cashed out more than ten years ago.”

  “And Grant Mercer?”

  “His mechanic business operated on a purely cash basis—not a single check deposited in all the ten years I could dig up. Paid all his business expenses with cash. Same goes for taxes and payroll. Never took a check. Never wrote a check.”

  “Except for his veterans benefits,” Lucas said.

  “That’s right. I stopped at the five-year mark like you specified and checked the back of every single check he cashed. You were right about that, too; Grant had someone else cash a few of his veterans benefits checks for him.”

  Lucas figured that Myrna would be the one to cash his checks, but with the two of them getting older, and the winters out there being what they were, there was every reason to believe that the Mercers didn’t go into town much in the winter.

  Ziegler continued, “I found the first countersignature fifty months back, in November. Over the next sixteen months, a man by the name of Kirby Clibbon cashed five checks for Grant Mercer.”

  Lucas could tell by the way Ziegler’s tone was changing that he was getting to the good part.

  Ziegler didn’t disappoint him. “Clibbon was with the 173rd Airborne.”

  Lucas thought back to the photos of Grant when he was younger, just a kid, all ribs and hope and smiles posing under a palm tree with an M16 in his hands, somewhere in Vietnam half a century ago. “That’s Grant’s old unit,” Lucas remembered out loud.

  Ziegler continued. “I spoke to all the tellers, and none of them really knew Grant all that well, but I pulled personnel records and found a woman who used to work there who has since retired. She remembered Kirby Clibbon. She said she used to see him around town with the Mercers’ daughter, Doreen. They dated for a spell.”

  And with that, the final pieces of the puzzle snapped into place, and Lucas snapped his fingers at Whitaker, who looked up from the file box taken from Oscar’s shop.

  “What can you tell me about this Clibbon guy?”

  Across the country, Ziegler flipped through his notes. “Clibbon, Kirby Jonathan. Born March 9, 1987. Lieutenant, 173rd Airborne. Two tours in Afghanistan. Honorably discharged four years and five months ago.”

  “That’s Kirby Clibbon? K-I-R-B-Y … C-L-I-B-B-O-N?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay, give me a second.”

  Lucas waited while Whitaker punched Clibbon’s name into one of the laptops. When she was done, she turned it so that Lucas could see t
he image. It was the same kid from the photo on the Mercers’ mantel—the picture of Grant at the old-timer’s event, a smiling country boy with a flattop beside him. “How long did he date Doreen Mercer?”

  “Not long. We found his old address through a local utilities company and talked to the landlord. He said Clibbon just canceled his month-to-month one day. Moved away to find work.”

  “When was that?”

  “Thirty-six months ago; January 9.”

  Lucas felt his rib cage drop by a full size. “That’s the day Deputy Jameson and Donald Doowack were killed.”

  “Yes, sir, it is.”

  Lucas wanted to reach through the phone and give the guy a kiss. “What did you find?”

  “I couldn’t come up with an address. No utilities. No tax returns. No library cards or email addresses. At least not in his own name. We were able to find an address for the Mercers’ daughter in D.C., so I looked for Clibbon there and came up with zip.”

  Lucas heard a but coming.

  “But what you said was bothering me—that we’d find what we were looking for in the spaces between the knowns; everyone has someone who knows where they are. It took two phone calls, a little foul language, and a nudge from a judge friend, but I found Clibbon. He’s on the mailing list for his old unit. It appears to be a business address, but at least you have a starting point.”

  “Where is he?”

  “About thirty blocks from where you are right now.”

  Lucas turned to Whitaker and tried not to let the adrenaline seep through his skin. He was about to say thank you and hang up when something hit him. “What did Clibbon do in Afghanistan?”

  Of course the only answer Ziegler could give was, “He was a sniper.”

  75

  The entire information-gathering apparatus of the Federal Bureau of Investigation fastened its sights on Kirby Clibbon, former Airborne sniper, current person of interest, and prime suspect in the murder of six law enforcement officers, one imam, and one former ATF informant.

  Contrary to how action movies portrayed omniscient government surveillance, Clibbon wasn’t instantaneously located by a drone and taken down by a tag team of Humvees filled with armor-clad storm troopers using shiny aluminum spearguns and high-def body cams. The ultimate collar would be done by six plainclothesmen while he was out buying a new skin for his iPhone. Or a SWAT team would be sent into his apartment while he slept.

  But before the wheels of justice moved in to take him down, they needed to be confident that he was their guy. That was not to say they would simply leave him out in the open without some kind of surveillance. Three pairs of agents were watching his apartment (he wasn’t home). Three more pairs were positioned around the garage where he worked as a general mechanic (he wasn’t there). And everyone in the city was looking for him.

  Lucas was asleep on the sofa in Graves’s old office when Whitaker blew in. “Wake up, Page.”

  Lucas opened his eyes and took a deep breath that he powered with a cat stretch. He blinked, made sure his prosthetic eye was aligned properly (when he slept with it in, it tended to dry out and rotate up to the left so it looked like his head had been wired by Tim Burton), and sat up, reaching for his Persols.

  Whitaker held out an FBI mug of coffee. Lucas took a sip and realized that his hand was cold.

  She dropped a pile of papers on the desk. “You were right. Clibbon is our guy.”

  Lucas ran his tongue over his teeth and took in another mouthful of coffee. He smiled and thanked her. “Were we able to place him at any of the sites?”

  “We found surveillance footage of Clibbon at number 3 Park Avenue. He didn’t go in, but he walked by twice on the day of the shooting. His boss checked the worksheets and said Clibbon was supposed to be out test-driving customers’ cars at those times.”

  With the influx of caffeine, the little spinning hourglass in his operating system stopped. “Any of the others?”

  Whitaker pulled a color photo from the stack of papers. “We’ve got this.”

  It was an image lifted from security footage from the Roosevelt Island tram. Lucas checked the time stamp; it had been taken twenty-eight days ago, at 6:23 a.m. Commuters huddled together, doing their best to keep civil while packed into a confined space with strangers, three hundred feet above a polluted river. One of them was Kirby Clibbon. He was sandwiched in between a small, thin man in glasses on one side and a heavyset black woman on the other. A tall man in a Russian fur hat stood behind him, earflaps buttoned up, buds plugged into his head—he was reading The New York Times. And a small woman with freckles and a parka with a fur-lined hood read a Robert Ludlum paperback a foot to his left. Clibbon was watching Carol Kavanagh, the ATF agent who would be shot on that exact tram, standing in that exact spot, three weeks later.

  Lucas handed the photo back. “One place? Maybe. Two? As statistically probable as me winning the Gregory Hines tap dancing award.”

  Whitaker fingered through the papers and came up with another photo. “What about three?” she asked. “This is from one of the cameras at LaGuardia.” She handed it over.

  The image was of a sedan—Lucas couldn’t tell the make—on a road beside the water. The license place was enhanced, but there was no way to see who was driving, the interior was hidden in shadow.

  “I can’t see a face,” said Lucas.

  “We ran the plate, and the car is the same one that Clibbon was supposed to be test-driving when he was spotted outside number 3 Park Avenue in that first photo. Belongs to a floor manager at ABC Decorating. The guy has no connection to Clibbon other than he sends his car there for servicing. There’s a key cutter at the garage where Clibbon works, and it’s no big stretch to imagine him making a copy and ‘borrowing’ the guy’s car at night while it’s parked in front of his house. This photo doesn’t place Clibbon in the vehicle, but it’s pretty damning in its own right.”

  Lucas handed it back. They were there, in the final stretch, making up for all that lost time.

  Even so, Lucas couldn’t help feeling like they were eight people too late.

  Kehoe came in. “Clibbon was spotted two blocks from his work. I gave the green light; SWAT’s taking him down.”

  76

  Midtown West

  Moses and Coco General Mechanics and Tire Wholesale was sandwiched between a parking garage and a sporting goods warehouse on West Forty-seventh between Tenth and Eleventh. There were six graffiti-covered bay doors and a single pedestrian entrance with Office painted overhead, highlighted by a large, red, asymmetrical arrow that jabbed down to the riot-gated portal. All six roller doors were down, but only one of the round exhaust vents puffed carbon monoxide into the atmosphere.

  Kirby Clibbon cut down the block, looking like any one of a thousand other people in the city at that particular moment—just a guy in his winter coat carrying a guitar case. The snow squeaked under the treads of his boots, and in the failing light of late afternoon, his shadow played along the snowbanks.

  He was halfway down the block—in front of the shuttered doors of Jax’s Sports—when he was boxed in by a pair of unmarked vans that plowed up onto the sidewalk, scattering garbage cans and snow mounds.

  His reaction time was good, and he dropped the guitar case just as the doors blew open and black tactical insects burst forth in synchronized aggression.

  The SWAT men swarmed over him like soldier ants taking down a spider.

  And it was finally over.

  77

  Precisely thirty seconds after Kirby Clibbon was arrested on suspicion of eight murders, the FBI opened the door to his apartment under the direction and protection of the appropriate warrants. They went through his home with the famous patience of their kind, dissecting the space one square inch at a time. They emptied the bookshelf, which contained mostly tactical manuals, although there were several classics, notably a first edition of A Rifleman Went to War, the iconic sniper’s tome. They packed up his laptop and external hard drives, his three
cell phones, and his address book. They took his journals and carted his filing cabinet away.

  Kirby Clibbon had a fascination with guns, and the offshoot of this was an apartment loaded with ammunition. The bureau people found nearly thirty thousand rounds, about evenly divided between the Winchester and Remington brands.

  But the big payoff came in the closet.

  They found the rifle behind the hangers of work shirts. It was locked into a custom rack with two hardened steel padlocks. It was a .300 Winchester Magnum. The bureau people would photograph it in situ before carefully removing and bagging it with latex-gloved hands so as not to disturb any trace evidence. But the real focus would be ballistics.

  It happened when they went to move the hangers.

  To call it a booby trap would be a misnomer. It was a simple and relatively crude invention using no more than four feet of piano wire, a twenty-pound sledgehammer head connected to a trigger on the clothes bar, and a little ingenuity.

  The tech who moved the clothes for the photographer heard the zing and had time to jump back, but the device had not been designed to harm people.

  The damage was not extensive. But it was enough to put a slight bend in the barrel.

  The rifle would never fire a round again.

  78

  CNN, Breaking News

  “We have new details regarding the suspect arrested by the FBI mere moments ago in Midtown Manhattan. Sources in the FBI confirm that the man apprehended is believed to be the sniper who murdered eight people, including six law enforcement officers—personnel from the ATF, FBI, NYPD, and a Wyoming Sheriff’s Department—a New York imam, and a Wyoming resident. The suspect’s name has not been released, but our sources tell us that he is a man in his late twenties with an extensive military record, reportedly an Afghanistan veteran.