by Dan Mahoney
“The Bomb Squad.”
“Hold on. I’ll make the coffee.”
Seated on stools across from each other at the lab table, McKenna and Thor didn’t pass a word until the second cup. McKenna had mentally catalogued every fact he knew in the old case, but it took some time to reconcile what he knew about Mullen with the present scenario. It didn’t make sense to him, so there was only one conclusion. There was a lot about Mullen that the NYPD should have uncovered sooner in its investigation of him and his activities. McKenna didn’t relish telling Thor this conclusion, but was sure he wouldn’t have to. The Icelander would see it for himself.
“Mullen was an unusual case right from the start,” McKenna explained. “He was born in Canada in 1952, but came south in ’72 and joined our army when many young American men were heading north to dodge the draft. Spent three years and wound up being assigned to a demolition unit. Did well, rose to the rank of sergeant. He got an honorable discharge, becoming a U.S. citizen along the way. Then he joined the NYPD in 1975. Also did well with us, at first. Made detective in 1981 after just six years on the Job. He was assigned to the Bomb Squad in 1982 and was promoted to detective second grade in 1989. Then he was arrested in 1991 and surprised everyone when he jumped bail. Our Internal Affairs Division has been trying for years to track him down and get him, but he’d vanished without a trace.”
“Until now,” Thor observed wryly.
“Yes, until now.”
“Obviously, some mistakes have been made.”
Right on the money, McKenna thought. “I know.”
“Feel like talking about them now?”
“No, but it has to be done. Where do you want to start, his background investigation?”
“Yes. I’m assuming your people weren’t as thorough as they should have been when they conducted it.”
“It was supposed to be thorough and I’d assumed until now that it was. Apparently, I was wrong.”
“Because Mullen never was who he seemed to be?” Thor guessed.
“That’s my bet now.”
“Wasn’t his original background investigation rechecked after he was arrested and jumped bail?”
“Again, I’m assuming it was, but it was never one of my cases,” McKenna said, feeling embarrassed.
“What were the circumstances surrounding his arrest?”
“Beginning in 1990 our Internal Affairs Division began getting reports of shakedowns of prostitutes by someone with a detective’s shield. The shield number the guy was using was 391, so they knew it was a phony. That number had belonged to a detective who had been killed in the line of duty in 1931 and it had never been reissued.”
“So they knew the shield was a phony, but were they smart enough to realize they were dealing with a real cop?”
“Yeah, they knew. Mullen set it up real good and he was fairly careful, but they knew. He showed the girls he shook down that he knew too much about police procedure to be anything else.”
“Tell me how he did it.”
“He would check into a nice hotel, paying cash. Then he would call one of the more expensive services and have them send a girl over. He’d have all the things in his room to put the girl at ease, because every once in a while the Public Morals Division sets up a sting to close down a call-girl operation. They use undercover cops posing as traveling businessmen looking for some fun, but the girls are wise to that stunt and know what to look for in a legitimate customer before they’ll talk business.”
“Luggage in the room, clothes unpacked and in the closets, airline tickets on one of the dressers, some business correspondence lying around?”
“You ever do any public morals work?” McKenna asked, surprised that Thor knew the game.
“In my younger days, before I got well known here.”
Must have done a pretty good job at it, McKenna thought, just like Mullen did. “Anyway, Mullen set some pretty good props. Had the luggage, had the clothes unpacked in the room, and had a rental car contract on the bed indicating he’d rented the car in a city a couple of hundred miles from New York the day before. Once the girl was satisfied that Mullen wasn’t an undercover, she’d tell him how much whatever he wanted to do with her was going to cost him. As soon as she got the words out of her mouth, he’d pull out his phony shield and tell her she was under arrest for prostitution.”
“But he’d give her an out?” Thor surmised.
“Yeah, he’d tell her what a shame it was that a nice girl like her making a couple of thousand a night would have to spend a couple of wasted, unpleasant days in jail.”
“And she’d make an offer?”
“Yeah, but never enough. His price was always fifteen hundred to let her go. Naturally, she’d agree and he’d have her call her service or her pimp to get the money right to the room. He pulled that stunt eleven times that we know about before he was bagged.”
“And probably many more that you don’t know about,” Thor said.
“Probably, but he was too greedy and kept at it for too long. Finally, IAD went out on a limb and started dealing directly with a couple of the services. They didn’t like doing it because it appeared that the department was implicitly condoning prostitution, but they had no other way to get Mullen. The IAD people told the girls that if they were being held up by Mullen, they should ask for Benny when they called their dispatcher to have the money sent over to his room. Then the dispatcher would call an IAD team waiting in the Midtown area.”
“How long did it take them to get him after that?”
“A couple of months, but then they took him in his hotel room without a whimper while he and the girl were waiting for the money to arrive. The arrest got a lot of press and caused quite a stir in the department.”
“What was he charged with?”
“Grand larceny by extortion, bribery, and official misconduct. Two felonies and a misdemeanor, enough to rate a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bail. He lost that when he jumped bail and disappeared.”
“You mentioned that you knew him,” Thor said.
“Met him a few times before he was arrested. Once at a union picnic and once at a retirement party.”
“What was your impression of him?”
“I’m gonna seem like a dope to you, but he seemed like a pretty good guy to me. He was a bruiser with a ready smile and lots of jokes. That’s why his arrest caught a lot of people off guard, including me. He was popular, hard-working, and good at his job.”
“He would be,” Thor commented. “He was good enough to fool Meaghan and catch her off guard, and it seems to me that she was a pretty sharp girl. What were his politics?”
“I don’t know.”
“Any family?”
“I know I’m beginning to sound monotonous, but I don’t know that either.”
“I know. It wasn’t your case,” Thor said, smiling. “Now, just one more question. You detect any sign of a brogue in him?”
What a question! McKenna thought. I told this guy that Mullen was born in Canada, but he’s not buying it. Thor’s made the jump that Mullen isn’t just now IRA, but that he always was, that Mullen’s original background investigation when he came on the Job and the subsequent investigation after he was arrested were both shoddy or conducted by incompetents. Unfortunately, it looks like he was right. “No, I didn’t hear it. He’s been hiding the brogue from me and probably everyone else.”
“I bet Meaghan caught it,” Thor said, causing a number of speculations to jump into McKenna’s mind at once. Meaghan was good at hiding her own brogue and might recognize someone else doing the same thing. Is that one of the reasons she’s dead? he wondered.
McKenna’s ruminations were cut short by the ringing of the phone. At that moment, it was a welcome sound. He didn’t want to give Thor another “I don’t know” to one of his questions. He got up and picked up the phone. “Detective McKenna.”
“Is it him?” Brunette asked.
“It’s him.”
“Damn
! Who else knows?”
“Just Thor and me.”
“Can you keep it out of the press for a while?”
“Why? Think he’ll run to someplace we can’t get him?”
“Yeah, we don’t want him popping up as a guest of Cuba, Libya, Iraq, or Iran.”
“I’ll run that by Thor,” McKenna said.
“You know a guy named Dennis Hunt?”
“No.”
“Well, you will. He’ll be on a plane tonight with Mullen’s personnel folder and the case folder on his shakedown scam and disappearance.”
“Who is he?”
“Mullen’s old partner in the Bomb Squad. A pretty sharp guy.”
Good idea, McKenna thought. Dennis Hunt should know more about Mullen than most other people on earth. “Does Mullen have any family in town?”
“An ex-wife in the Bronx and two kids. Both boys, ages ten and twelve. She got a divorce when Mullen took off, but she’s still living in her old house. Want them put under surveillance?”
“Full blown. Do her phones too, if you can.”
“Consider it done. Anything else?”
“Remember the Dwyer case?” McKenna asked.
“Sure. I remember any case you didn’t solve. Why?”
“Because he did that one, too.”
“Good God!” Brunette said, despair in his voice. “He did a sex murder while he was still on the Job?”
“Yeah, we’re gonna take a beating on this one.”
“If we deserve it, we’ll have to thicken our skin, put on our helmets, and take it. What’s your read on it?”
“We deserve it,” McKenna stated.
“Okay. Glad we got that out of the way. What else do you need? The Dwyer case folder?”
“That and anything else you can think of that I didn’t.”
“You got it.”
“Any parting words?” McKenna asked.
“Get Mike Mullen, whatever you have to do.”
It was just what McKenna wanted to hear.
It was another long, busy night. McKenna found that a three o’clock sunset was disorienting, and he lost track of time as he and Thor worked and planned.
The first order of business was Chris O’Malley. He was still passed out in his chair when Thor and McKenna returned to the apartment, so they carried him down to Thor’s car and then up to his room at the Saga.
Next came the first of many unpleasant tasks of the evening. Thor called the medical examiner and authorized the release of Meaghan’s body. Then he drove McKenna to a funeral home whose owner was a friend of his. McKenna selected a casket for Meaghan, bringing one of his credit cards to the limit. That was only the beginning. McKenna wanted Meaghan’s body restored to a condition in which her mother would recognize her, but after Thor showed the mortician photos of what had been done to her, another one of McKenna’s cards was maxed.
After arriving back at the presidential suite, McKenna called Father Maher. Expecting the worst while hoping for the best, Ryer Maher accepted the news stoically. “When will her body be arriving in Ireland?” he asked.
“I should be bringing her home the day after tomorrow,” McKenna told him.
“You’ll be in Belfast for the funeral?”
“Belfast? I figured I’d be taking her home to Dublin,” McKenna said.
“Dublin isn’t home, it’s just where my family’s living for the moment,” Maher explained. “Most of our relatives are still in Belfast, and that’s where our family plot is. There are generations of our people buried there.”
“Okay, Belfast it is. I’ll be there.”
Maher graciously thanked McKenna for his work before hanging up, giving a few compliments that McKenna didn’t feel he deserved.
“What next?” McKenna asked Thor.
“Janus.” Thor called his boss at home and fifteen minutes later Janus joined them. The Icelandic chief was in a good mood when he arrived, but he became pensive as Thor reported on the day’s developments. “You have a plan to get this guy?” he asked Thor.
“I don’t, but Brian has a few things for you to consider.”
Janus looked mildly surprised at Thor’s statement, but it lasted only for a moment. “Let’s have it, Brian.”
“First of all, I’ve got a tough request. Both Ray and I would like you to sit on the Mullen news for a while.”
“You mean not give it to the press? Not tell our sometimes vindictive reporters that you’ve identified the man who pulled the first political bombing in our history, not to mention the first sex murder in twenty years?”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t want me to tell them that this man was a New York City detective—better yet, a Bomb Squad detective. You want me to keep this news to myself, even though every reporter in the country calls me twice a day for news in this case?”
“Exactly.”
“How long would you like me to sit on this?”
“As long as you can. I’d sure like to get a week of looking for him before he knows we’re on to him.”
“Okay,” Janus answered at once. “What else?”
Now that wasn’t so hard, McKenna thought. The next one should be a snap. “Thor’s of the opinion that the Brits haven’t been completely forthright with him.”
“Of course they haven’t. Why should they show all their cards to us? After all, they know the bomber isn’t in Iceland and there wasn’t much Thor could do to get him.”
“But now things are different.”
“Yes, now they are. Now we’re holding some pretty strong cards.”
“I agree,” McKenna said. “But if we’re gonna find Mullen, we need the Brits completely on board.”
“What do you need from them?”
“I need O’Bannion implicated in this. I need everything they know about him.”
“That might be difficult.”
“Getting the information from them?”
“No, proving the connection to O’Bannion. I’m sure they’ve been trying to implicate him in this thing since it happened. Don’t you think it would be quite a feather in their cap to publicly connect the Irish minister for finance to a terrorist bombing?”
“That’s one of the problems we’re gonna have with the Brits. I’m sure they attach more importance to implicating O’Bannion than they do to finding the bomber.”
“But you don’t?” Janus asked.
“No. I couldn’t care less about O’Bannion.”
“How about you, Thor?” Janus asked.
“It would be nice to get both of them, but not essential.”
“What is essential?”
“Getting Mullen, if I had to choose. He’s the one who murdered three people. O’Bannion would only be responsible for two of them,” Thor answered, then turned to McKenna. “I guess you’re planning to use whatever you can develop from Hackford and Rollins to blackmail O’Bannion.”
“Yep. If the Brits have been doing their homework and if O’Bannion is involved, I’m going to pressure him into giving up Mullen.”
“And then let O’Bannion off?”
“If that’s the deal we make with him.”
“The Brits will never go along with that,” Janus said.
“Then we’ll cut them out and go it alone, if that’s all right with you,” McKenna said.
“You mean not tell them about Mullen?”
“Not exactly. I’d like you to tell them we’ve got the bomber identified, but they have to play ball to get his name.”
“That’s a decision that’s going to have to be made at the highest levels of the British government,” Janus said.
“I know. I hate to put you in this position because I’m sure the proposition has to be explained to the highest levels of your government for approval first.”
“When it comes to crime in Iceland, you just did that,” Janus said. “And you’ve got my approval.”
Fourteen
MONDAY, MARCH 9TH—KEFLAVÍK, ICELAND
McKenna had been worried about recognizing Dennis Hunt at the airport, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. He knew that Hunt had to be the man who got off the plane with Vernon Geberth at 7:00 A.M. Neither McKenna nor Thor had known that Vernon was coming.
Vernon looked good, like a retired weight lifter passing his time as a successful businessman, which was exactly what he was. He was dressed in a European-tailored suit, wore expensive Italian loafers, carried a burnished leather briefcase, sported a Florida tan, and comported himself like the man in charge.
Dennis Hunt, on the other hand, looked like somebody who worked for Vernon. As they came off the plane, he was nodding his head and paying close attention to whatever Vernon was saying to him. He was in his fifties, a tall man in reasonably good shape, but, when it came to clothes, he certainly wasn’t in Vernon’s league. Searching for bombs and dismantling them if and when they were found was a dirty job, and the members of the Bomb Squad weren’t known as slaves to fashion. There was nothing slovenly about him, but he wore his suit like a set of coveralls and carried his old, battered briefcase like a tool box.
Vernon was warmly greeted by Thor and McKenna, and then he introduced Hunt to them. Hunt was politely deferential, but McKenna got the impression that he was uncomfortable and didn’t want to be there. In contrast, Vernon was in his element—the recognized expert on murder making a house call to dispense his wisdom to the less experienced and less enlightened. In Vernon’s case, that meant everyone else because he had the gift—he could get into a killer’s head and fathom his motivation. Thirty years’ experience working homicides, an eye for detail, and a master’s degree in clinical psychology gave Vernon the ability to study crime scene photos and then tell exactly what the killer was thinking when he did those horrible things to his victims. “When did you find out you were coming here?” McKenna asked him.
“Ray called me yesterday afternoon and told me what you had cooking here. Asked me to get involved. I told him I was already involved, that Thor had already sent me some photos of Winthrop and Meaghan. Kinda surprised him, but he offered me a free trip with expenses and here I am.”