The Eighth Day

by Tom Avitabile

  “You saw him?” Darrel said.

  “Danny, my conductor, had that end of the train.”

  “Can you ask Danny to come to this car, please?”

  The brakeman leaned over and spoke into the train’s intercom. “Danny, come to the west end.”

  Dennis continued, “Why fare beater?”

  “He looked disheveled, like a nut case. He jumped on right before the doors closed. These guys try to time it when we’re looking the other way. It’s stupid, but they think they can fool us.”

  “So did this guy pay his fare?”

  “Danny didn’t mention anything, so I assume he did.”

  Danny came into the car at the far end and approached the men. Darrel held out his badge and identified himself and Dennis as his partner. Dennis liked this kid. He thought fast and learned even faster.

  “Did you see this man tonight?”

  “Let me see those others?” Danny reached for the rest of the pictures on the motorman’s pedestal in the cab and inspected the shots. “It’s hard to say for sure but he looks like a guy we had on the last trip.”

  “Was he traveling alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he pay his fare?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anything unusual about him, anything that stuck out?”

  “No, not that I was looking. He just sat there, hand on his chin, looking out the window, you know, like he had something on his mind.”

  “But you weren’t looking?” Darrel said.

  “Well, he was breathing heavy when he got on, just made the train.”

  “Do you remember what stop?”

  “Let’s see, it had to be before Deer Park, ’cause I went up front when we passed Divide, the switch tower east of Bethpage. Yep, he got on at Wyandanch. I remember now, ’cause I announced Farmingdale next stop as he was running up the steps. I had to toggle the doors not to hit him as he jumped on.”

  “Does this train stop at Wyandanch?” Dennis asked, pointing down at the floor.

  “Yeah, we make Wyandanch at …” he checked his schedule, “14. 1:14 AM.”

  “When’s the next train back to NY?”

  “That would be the 2:20.”

  “Looks like we’ll have an hour in beautiful downtown Wyandanch,” Darrel said.

  “Don’t say I never took you to all the swankiest places,” Mallory said. “Let’s sit.”

  They distanced themselves from the crew and any other passengers and sat in the middle of the car. “So why are you—we—after this guy?” Darrel asked as the train made every stop a train could make in the middle of the night.

  “I work as head of security for a big high-tech concern. I think our bearded wonder may be the author of some threatening letters that have been ruining my CEO’s granola and yogurt every once in an AM.”

  “Where did you get the flattering pictures?”

  “One of my guys snapped him at a charity event honoring my boss. After the party was over, we found a .25 under a table.”

  “You think he was there to cap your guy?”

  “I didn’t see anybody else there who would risk getting gun oil on their Halstons and Purinas … or whatever they were wearing.”

  “Great.”

  “What?”

  “You’re telling me this guy could be A and D. You still carry?”

  “Wouldn’t leave home without it,” Dennis said, referring to the snub-nosed .38 clipped to his belt. That accessory was almost surgically attached for life to anyone who was ever a cop.

  “Good, ’cause if we find him, this nut job may own more than one pop gun.”

  When Dennis and Darrel got off the train, there were only three cars parked in the garish green of the sodium-vapor lit lot. One other person, a woman, got off the train with them and went straight to her car. Dennis noticed a private cab idling at the bottom of the station steps. He asked Darrel to jot down the plate numbers of the cars remaining in the station, and then he approached the cab driver.

  “You been on all night?”

  “Since eight.”

  “You see this guy?” He held up a picture.

  “No. Who’s that guy?”

  “Somebody we’re looking for as a material witness.”

  “I knew you guys were cops.”

  “You’re good! Any other drivers or companies on tonight?”

  “Just John.”

  “Can you call John?”

  “He’s doing a bar run.”

  “Call him, we’ll wait.”

  ∞§∞

  The 2:20 AM pulled out of the station headed for New York without Dennis and Darrel. John, the other cab driver, hadn’t returned to the station yet. Seemed his bar call was a businessman from up island, Port Washington, who was feeling no pain. He probably saved his own, as well as some other poor bastard’s, life that night by calling a cab and not driving himself home.

  It was 2:40 when John finally showed up.

  “Yeah, this guy. He was in a real hurry. Said his battery died. He gave me a twenty for an eight dollar fare.”

  “Why would he do that?” Darrel asked.

  “We made the station just as the train was about to pull out. I guess he didn’t want to wait for his change.”

  “Where did you pick him up?”

  The driver looked at his trip sheet. “115 Hedgerow. Off 25A.”

  “Take us there.”

  Along the way, Dennis woke up three members of his team. Stakeout was a word they hadn’t heard in years.

  Arriving at the address, Dennis got out of the cab, handed the driver a twenty, and asked him to wait a few minutes. The place seemed quiet as he scanned it for any signs of life. Even in the dark he could make out the distinctive lines of the old beat-up ’67 Camaro. He approached it and opened the door, half expecting an alarm. In fact, the overhead dome didn’t even light. He tried the headlights, nothing.

  “Dead battery, all right.” He hitched his head toward the ramshackle house. “I wonder if he prefers the French Country motif in his interior decorating?”

  “Why don’t you wait until they show this lovely home in Architectural Digest?” Darrel said. “Or get a warrant.”

  “You wouldn’t want to go get a coffee right now would you, Officer Spoon?”

  “So you could maybe do a little B&E while I was away?”

  “Detectives don’t ‘break-in and enter,’ Officer.”

  “In that case, cops don’t drink coffee,” Darrel said with an absurd grin. Dennis chuckled as he realized the irony of the situation. The good news was that having an active-duty cop at his side had gotten him this far. The bad news was that this cop could arrest him for snooping around someone else’s private property. It really sucked not having a tin any longer.

  He handed the cab driver another twenty and asked him to wait until either the guy came home or his men arrived. Dennis took three steps, snapped his fingers, and returned to the driver’s side window. “Do you have a flashlight?”

  Dennis walked back to the gray primer-painted Camaro. Smudges of red-orange body filler were the remains of a long-abandoned attempt to battle the rot. Focusing the flashlight beam at the registration sticker, he jotted down the number. He then stepped onto the decaying porch. Using the flashlight, he peered through the window, scanning what appeared to be the kitchen … and living room and bedroom of this one-room shack. It was obvious this “house” hadn’t seen a woman’s touch in decades, at least not any kind of woman like Cynthia. There were magazines and catalogues on the kitchen table and piles of dishes and aluminum foil TV dinner trays in the sink. A knapsack was on the coffee table in front of the couch, and Dennis thought he caught a glimpse of a scurrying mouse. The couch was ragged and worn and busted on the end, which was probably the spot where the beard always sat. Bingo! On the wall there was a document in a frame. He squinted but couldn’t make it out. “Hey, Darrel, could you come up here for a moment?” Reluctantly, Darrel approached. “Can you read the writing in
that frame on the wall?”

  “Hold on,” he said with a sigh that signaled I can’t believe I’m doing this! Squinting his twenty-something eyes, he read, “Honorable discharge … Corporal … Thomas … Robert … Regan.”

  “That’s my guy!”

  “So, are we going to call the FBI?”

  “It’s late, let’s let them sleep. I’ll call one of my guys, Benton, to come get us in the morning. Besides, the feds are following their own leads. In fact, they just might drive up any second. You shouldn’t be so anxious to see them anyway.”

  “Why not?

  “Because, technically, you just violated a law.”

  “Why did I even think I liked you?”

  “Come on, admit it, I have a winning personality.”

  “Okay, it’s your show ’til 8 AM. Then I think we should call the feds.”

  “Thanks for joining in on this.”

  “Dennis, if your hunch is right and this guy is one of the terrorists, it’s any cop’s wet dream to nab the bastard.”

  By daybreak, Dennis and Darrel were heading back to Manhattan in Benton’s car. Davis and another member of the team had taken a position 300 yards away from Regan’s house in the opposite direction from which he was likely to return if he came from the station. Dennis and Darrel caught some shut-eye while Benton crawled through the early rush-hour buildup.

  At 8:10 AM Dennis called Burrell but she was out of reach. Instead, he left a message with her subordinate, Agent Rauch. “We found Thomas Regan’s house, here’s the address …”

  After he hung up with Dennis, Rauch started looking through his case log. There was nothing about a Thomas Regan or anything about GlobalSync or Dennis Mallory. What he didn’t know was that all of this was ordered held tight by the director and he was not in the loop. So he followed procedure until he could speak to Burrell, who was taking her yearly physical. He picked up the phone and called the FBI New York Operations Center.

  They also followed a standard operating procedure when responding to the requests of agents for support, surveillance, or scheduling. In this instance, because the proximate field agents out of the Long Island office were all otherwise engaged, and due to the fact that Rauch didn’t call this in as “arrest with all due haste,” and because, as he understood the retired cop, this had something to do with a “favor” and was not connected to an ongoing case, the next surveillance team up on rotation was advised to take the job. That team, however, couldn’t get to the location for three hours. As the book dictated, the local police force was called. They dispatched one of their radio cars to the location and instructed their officer to observe and report only until the FBI duly relieved him.

  When the blue-and-white Wyandanch police cruiser pulled up, the officer driving spotted Davis’s car parked up the hill. He drove up to the car and got out.

  Resting his hand on the butt of his .38, he leaned toward the open driver’s window. “Gentlemen, can I help you this morning?”

  Davis flashed his Detective’s Endowment Association retirement card. The cop was put off. He usually only saw a DEA card when he pulled over an ex-dick for speeding. It usually worked. After all, any cop who planned to live long enough to be retired figured he would need the same courtesy someday. So he always allowed the perk, hoping the gesture would be returned to him in about thirty-five years. But this was different. This was an FBI stakeout. No ex-cops could be allowed to interfere with that. “Sorry, you’ll have to move.”

  “Did they tell you who we are sitting on, and why we are looking for him?”

  “They mentioned him, and they mentioned the FBI, but they didn’t mention you. So please go somewhere else, ’cause as of now, this is an active investigation scene.”

  “Look, we’ve got sixty-two years between us as cops. This is our guy. We found him.”

  “I respect that and all, but you are going to have to move. Sorry.”

  ∞§∞

  Tommy got a lift from the station and was dropped off at the Milk Barn on 25A, half a mile from his house. It was nine in the morning and he’d been up all night. It had certainly been worth it. He hadn’t observed any change in the security at the tank farm facility. This made him very confident about tonight’s mission. After selecting his groceries, milk, two microwavable bacon-and-egg burritos, and a six-pack of Coke, he threw down a fifty-dollar bill, more of the largess from his mailed-in proceeds, and exited, not waiting for change or a receipt.

  Tommy was trudging up the hill behind his house when he spotted the cop car a block away. Although groggy, his sixth sense stopped him cold. For a few minutes, while his mind raced with scenarios, he saw no other activity, just a cop sitting in the car. Am I being paranoid? How could anyone have found out about me? He was sixteen hours away from his greatest personal triumph … one that would make the Sperling bombing, with its eight dead and thousands displaced from toxic clouds, look like a footnote in the history of the great struggle. After toying with the idea of just walking home and playing the odds that this was a cop napping on the job, he erred on the side of safety. He eyed a gas can on the side of the old shed he was behind.

  ∞§∞

  “Goddamn it!” was all that Dennis could manage when Davis reached him by phone to report that he was rousted from his perch by a local cop. Dennis immediately called Agent Burrell. This time she picked up her cell.

  “Brooke, I told your guy my guys would wait for your team to show up. How come you sent in the locals?”

  “Dennis, it wasn’t me. All I can tell you is that it was a procedural snafu. But it’s all academic now.”

  “Do I want to hear this?”

  ∞§∞

  Dennis saw the fire equipment and hoses being loaded back onto fire trucks as he pulled up to Regan’s house. A garage, or something, was totally burned to the ground two houses down from Regan’s. Dennis knew exactly what happened. Regan got spooked by the blue-and-white unit and started the fire to distract the local cop. Regan then slipped in and out of the house. Interestingly enough, the Camaro was gone. As Dennis approached the FBI team, he was hoping they had already impounded it.

  “No, we didn’t,” an angry Brooke Burrell, said. “It wasn’t here when my team arrived. The tags came back registered to a woman in upstate New York, who’s been dead for twenty-five years.”

  “So a fire just happens a hundred feet from a stakeout and somehow the subject has time to jump-start his car and leave without being noticed?”

  A fire chief wearing a white hat passed them. He held a scorched gas can gingerly, using a branch stuck through its handle to avoid smearing any latent fingerprints. “My guess is we found the accelerant. It was lying at the point of origin.” He continued over to his red GMC Suburban.

  “Can I at least look inside?”

  Brooke glared at him. “No … but I can escort you.”

  Inside, Dennis immediately noticed something missing. “There was a backpack here on the table last night.”

  “I am not going to ask how you know that.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Brooke, stop playing ‘by the book’ with me. Your pages got too many holes in ’em. And for your information, Lady Justice, all I did was look through the window with a flashlight.”

  “Sorry, Dennis. I don’t want some lawyer throwing out evidence when we catch this guy.”

  An FBI agent in a mask and rubber gloves approached them. He eyed Dennis and delayed speaking.

  “It’s okay, he’s cleared.”

  “This guy was a science nut or something. We found receipts for gyroscopes, magnets, batteries, and the like.”

  “Agent Burrell, I think you should call in the bomb squad. Do a trace element check for explosives.” Mallory realized he sounded like he was ordering her and hoped she didn’t take it that way.

  “Already called in. We’ve got his computer on the way to the Electronics Crime Lab. And we are getting prints, tire tread, and fiber samples. Washington is getting his military service and medica
l records from the Department of Defense and we’re pulling pubic hairs off his soap for DNA samples.”

  “Pleasant thought, Brooke.”

  As they walked outside, Dennis spied an agent bending over with a pair of forceps and placing a small piece of paper into an evidence bag.

  “May I see that?”

  The agent deferred to Burrell and she nodded.

  “Burger King, Vince Lombardi Rest Area, NJT. Dated today. 2:33 AM.”

  “Jersey?” Dennis turned around and faced the four plaster casts that were starting to set in the tire ruts where the Camaro had been sitting. “Our boy reached in his pocket for his keys and the last thing he put in fell out. The receipt!” Dennis then noticed a Quickstart battery jumper on the side of the driveway. A note found a few feet away read, “I’ll pick it up tomorrow afternoon. Arnold.”

  “Let’s be here when Arnold comes to get it.”

  “Already on it.”

  “I have to think this through. Brooke, can I come by your office later and see what more you have?”

  “Sure. Sorry about the snafu.”

  “It didn’t always go perfect for me either.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Observations

  BACK AT THE GLOBALSYNC OFFICE, Dennis used the low-tech comfort of a blackboard and chalk to figure out if there was a pony somewhere in the pile of Thomas Regan’s horseshit. The good news was that his protectee, Miles Taggert, had very little contact with, or reason to ever be in, New Jersey. Still, his team had the GlobalSync building and both of Taggert’s residences locked down.

  Since the empirical evidence pointed to the fact that Miles was not a likely target of this nut, Dennis was free to dabble in a little extra-credit thinking. He was, at the end of the day, still a cop, and Thomas Regan was a crime waiting to happen. He could no sooner drop this than walk away from the trail of an eight-point buck on a beautiful day.

  His main question was how and why a man would board a train on Long Island, east of New York, and wind up, at 2:33 in the morning, west of the city in New Jersey … at a rest area that can only be reached by car, no less. Why return to Long Island only to disappear? Why risk arson and boldly steal his own car right out from under the cops? He needed something desperately enough to risk capture … what was there last night that wasn’t there this morning? The backpack! He needed the backpack. Now it made sense. Forensics showed positive results for plastic explosive residue on the kitchen table and towels. “Suicide bomber?” he said out loud.