A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1

by J. E. Fishman

  “Phone records?”

  “Not yet. But I got his cell phone out of evidence and the lab made it work. Turned out the battery contacts were just jogged loose. I checked the recents. He seems to be a light user. Last one he called was his sister, not long before he blew himself up.”

  “You interview her yet?”

  “Just a few words over the phone. She’s pretty broken up. I have an appointment in a couple of hours.”

  “I sent an EDC team out there yesterday,” Kahn said. “The canine alerted in a few spots in the suspect’s apartment, but the sweeper didn’t find anything. He must’ve had the bomb in there, but he didn’t build it there.”

  “So where’d he build it?”

  “Good question.”

  “Maybe someone else built it.”

  “Well, someone else somewhere else—or him somewhere else. It may be a crazy world, but I’ve yet to see a bomb that constructed itself.”

  AN HOUR OR TWO LATER, O’Shea called Kahn while he and Diaz sat over pizza on Hudson Street. Kahn had a plain slice and Diaz was tucking into a slice with ricotta, vegetables and sausage.

  “How do you eat something like that?” Kahn said.

  “I put it in my mouth and chew.”

  “I mean, it’s so heavy. Doesn’t it make you feel bloated?”

  “What am I, a woman at her time of the month?”

  “Ah, youth. You going for the tiramisu for dessert?”

  “You tell me how to do procedure, you tell me how to drive, you tell me what to say...now you’re gonna tell me what to eat?”

  Kahn laughed until his phone rang. When he heard it was O’Shea, he put it on speaker.

  “So we tracked down the serial number from that prosthetic,” O’Shea said. “It was manufactured by Prosthetic and Sensory Aids Services—part of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Appears to be legit.”

  “Is it possible someone snuck a bomb in there during the manufacturing process?”

  “These things are made one hundred percent in the States, I think. I’ll have to get with Burbette, see if FBI can send some agents to poke around the factory—or however that works.”

  “They should take an EDC team.”

  “Burbette will know that.”

  “So we think the bomb was in the leg?”

  “That one or the other one. Where else? No evidence he was carrying anything.”

  “They found the theater tickets, right?” Diaz asked. Kahn had given him a fill on the conversation he’d missed.

  “Yeah, they found ‘em,” O’Shea confirmed. “In his shirt pocket. Why?”

  “Just wondering whether his boss’s story holds up.”

  “It does. I was there again today. Any theories on how much C4 this would’ve required?”

  Kahn looked at Diaz, who frowned in thought for a second, then said, “Not much. Half a pound more or less would’ve done the trick.”

  “So it’s plausible that he had the device hidden in one of the legs?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. At least, maybe, the guy didn’t lack for imagination.”

  DIAZ WALKED TO THE STATION at Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue to catch the Number 1 Train. There was a newsstand there and he noted that tabloid headlines had already moved on from the Times Square bomber to the trumped-up adventures of reality-show celebrities. He bought a Snickers bar and slipped it like contraband into the side pocket of his coat.

  The station platform smelled vaguely of urine, always a mystery to Diaz how someone could find the appropriate moment to do that in a place that he’d never seen empty at any hour. Maybe it wasn’t a human source. Maybe it was from the accumulated droppings of a million rats.

  Having grossed himself out, he decided to consume his snack on the train and not before.

  Diaz yawned while trying not to breathe too deeply. The day had been filled with running around, two sweeps, two false alarms, lunch with Kahn. Since the sergeant had chosen to fill him in on the conversation he’d missed with O’Shea and Burbette, Diaz figured maybe he’d begun working his way out of the doghouse. Wanting badly to make a positive contribution, he got back to thinking about the case.

  Usually, as every detective knew, the most direct explanation of events was the most likely. If you were carrying a bomb, for example, there was a pretty good chance that you knew you were carrying it. They called them suicide bombers because someone with an IED strapped to his chest didn’t expect to report back to the safe house. Yet, as every detective also knew, sometimes things out of the ordinary did happen. Betting on the odds wasn’t the same as finding the truth.

  In the Horn case a couple of things didn’t add up so far. Say the suspect makes up an excuse for leaving the office early. That puts him in control of the timing, for one thing, no matter whether he planned it weeks in advance or made a decision ten minutes ago. And if he’s on the verge of blowing himself up, how much of an excuse does he need with the boss? He’s not in a jail at 1440 Broadway. He can walk out whenever he wants. A suicide isn’t going to worry about getting his next paycheck docked for skipping work.

  Plus, it didn’t go down that way, from what Horn’s boss had said. Supposedly he’d offered Horn the tickets at the last minute, claimed in fact to have pushed them on him. This could mean that the boss was involved, but why make up that whole story? Again, why not just have Horn walk out the door, down to the recruiting station and press the button? So Diaz couldn’t help but presume that Albert Horn didn’t know beforehand that he was minutes away from blowing himself to smithereens.

  Of course, he might’ve been awaiting inspiration, and just when he looked up and saw the recruiting station, inspiration struck. It seemed to Diaz a strange way to go about things, though, to carry around a concealed bomb, awaiting a moment of opportunity, and then blow yourself up in futility out on the sidewalk with no good target in proximity. It could be that O’Shea was right—and maybe the simplest explanation was that an accident occurred while carrying the bomb in the direction of the recruiting station. But, still, it bugged Diaz to think that here’s the recruiting station a couple of blocks from Horn’s office all the while, yet he waits for the moment when his boss gives him a pair of tickets to Spider-Man before executing his plan. People weren’t always rational, but this just seemed too screwy to Diaz.

  Now, on the rocking train, he unwrapped his Snickers bar and his mouth watered at the smell of the chocolate. He bit into it, chewing slowly.

  What if Horn was being chased? Diaz thought. Perhaps the boss set him up by sending him on an errand to the theater with someone on his tail. Horn saw his pursuer and feared him, so he triggered the explosion out on the sidewalk rather than allow himself to be taken.

  Right. Diaz rolled his eyes to himself. The guy was in the middle of a John le Carré novel. He blew himself up to avoid getting stabbed by the poison umbrella.

  Diaz shook that thought from his head and tried to think where the core of this case truly lay. Set aside the locale—which wasn’t all that unusual, federal installations being natural targets for terrorists—and concentrate on the unique aspect of this thing, which was the artificial legs.

  Just before he’d left the station house, Kahn told Diaz that CSU had reported some more information. What they could piece together from the legs, they said, showed one with more burn marks than the other.

  Diaz thought of the serial number that he’d found. It made sense for the manufacturer to have put a serial number on every device, for the same reason manufacturers slapped serial numbers on so many things. But Albert Horn had two prosthetic legs and they’d so far discovered only one remnant with a serial number on it.

  That left three possibilities. Either the piece with the second serial number had been obliterated. Or despite their best efforts they’d failed to find the part out on the street. Or the part of the leg where you’d normally find the serial number had been tampered with to the extent that the serial number wasn’t
on that leg at all by the time Albert Horn passed in front of the recruiting station.

  Therefore the most obvious explanation was that the leg without the serial number contained the bomb. And—though CSU hadn’t said so—Diaz was willing to bet that the parts with the most damage came from the leg without the serial number. If he could confirm that, he’d be far from knowing everything, but he’d know something. He’d know for sure which of two legs carried the bomb. And that would be a start.

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK,

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

  4.

  DAY TWO—Dark

  AT SIX O’CLOCK IN THE evening, Brian O’Shea and Detective Second Grade Adeela Payne pulled up in front of a small, detached cottage on 210th Place in Hollis, Queens. It was a solid middle class neighborhood of well-kept houses, modest street trees and patches of lawn—winter brown in the cold—which were adorned most commonly with only a bush or two near the foundation.

  O’Shea had recruited Payne to join him for reasons that under other circumstances might be classified as discriminatory. Even presuming that Albert Horn’s family would view the proceeding as friendly, O’Shea figured, the sight of a freckled redhead cop and, say, another straight-laced white guy in a suit might not yield maximum cooperation. A black woman detective, on the other hand, in this neighborhood would likely tease out higher quality interaction.

  You never advertised this kind of thinking, of course, but it was a given in the department. For a case with a Haitian angle, you solicited a Haitian cop for help when possible. When you were dealing with religious Jews, you grabbed a guy who was a member of that tribe. You didn’t have to explain why to your colleague. Everyone just got it. In fact, not long ago Payne had invited O’Shea into an arson investigation involving a group of Irish immigrants. Like attracted like. It wasn’t racism, just the way of the world, the path of least resistance in support of the common good. Cases got assigned at random, but within reason the lead detective could then pull in whatever help he needed. Their choice wasn’t always ethnically motivated, but race or ethnicity could be a factor in the calculations more times than they’d generally like to admit.

  Kyle Butterworth, the brother-in-law, greeted the detectives in a white t-shirt and baggy jeans. He lingered a few beats too long behind the storm door before pulling it open, O’Shea thought. With only peremptory words, Butterworth escorted them several feet into a modest living room filled with upholstered furniture too large for the space and dominated on one wall by a giant flat-screen television. They had the local Fox News station playing, but the daughter, upon seeing the cops, used the remote to turn it off. She looked angry as only a teenager could, in a way that seemed to reduce someone else’s misfortune to little more than a matter of her own embarrassment or inconvenience.

  Albert Horn’s sister, Lydia, on the other hand, appeared genuinely distraught. Wearing office clothes, she didn’t seem to be crying just then, but she held a fistful of tissues as big as a baseball and dabbed her rheumy eyes a moment after shaking hands with the detectives, as if shielding herself from the reality in front of her. She had the look of a trapped animal about to be pounced upon by predators, like she was working every minute to hold her viscera inside.

  “We’re sorry for your loss,” O’Shea began, making a point of directing his attention to all three people when he said it.

  Butterworth, a muffin top hanging over his belt, rested his butt on the armrest beside his wife, who sat on the couch. Their daughter, introduced as Shawna, occupied a reclining chair off to one side.

  O’Shea, by prior arrangement, allowed Payne to take the lead. “Would it be okay if we sat?” she asked.

  Lydia said sure, but there were only two spaces—the cushion next to her and an open chair. Payne, much to O’Shea’s relief, sat right next to Lydia. He took the other spot and did his best to blend into the background, just observing.

  “We realize,” Payne began, “that this is a tragedy for everyone involved.”

  “When are they gonna give us back Al’s body?” Butterworth asked.

  Payne made brief eye contact with O’Shea. “We don’t have control of that, exactly, but we’ll look into it for you.”

  “Thank you,” Lydia said. “We’d like to bury him soon.” She wiped her nose and dabbed her eyes.

  “That’s understandable,” Payne said. “I have to get one thing out of the way. I have to ask about all of your whereabouts yesterday.”

  They found out soon enough that Shawna had been in school all day, Butterworth had been at work, and so had Lydia.

  “We were on the phone together, though,” she said. “Me and Al.” She related their conversation, his feelings of discomfort the past month or so, his alienation from work. “Then it just cut off.” She gasped.

  “Did he say he had to go?”

  “No. He was, like, in mid-sentence. I thought the call had just dropped.”

  Payne looked at O’Shea, sharing a thought across the middle space. No cry of “Allahu Akbar” on this one.

  “So he was feeling upset when you spoke, but he didn’t mention anything about hurting himself or others before the phone cut off? Can you tell us anything else about your brother’s state of mind recently?”

  “Grumpy,” Butterworth interrupted. “Not himself. Didn’t want to talk much.”

  “Was he usually more talkative?”

  “Not really,” Butterworth conceded.

  “I’d say he was down,” Lydia said, “maybe even depressed. He told me he was getting flashbacks from combat.”

  “Was he acting out, doing anything to suggest violence?”

  “No, ma’am. He was fundamentally a gentle sort. I know that seems strange to say—”

  “Don’t worry about how it seems.”

  “You’d think someone who joins the army would have a more accepting attitude toward violence, is all I mean. Al didn’t. He hated it.”

  “Never would talk about the army, not to me,” Butterworth said.

  “Did he have friends?” asked Payne.

  “Not many,” Lydia said.

  “Any new ones recently? Anyone suspicious or who might give you concern?”

  “You mean who would’ve sought to do him harm?”

  “That or who might have held a grudge against the government of some kind.”

  “Terrorists?”

  Payne nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Uncle Al a terrorist!” Shawna exclaimed. “This shit is just crazy.”

  Lydia paused for a minute to hush her daughter with a look. She returned her attention to Payne. “I could understand why you’d ask that, but no, there was no one.”

  “Did he receive any packages recently?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Okay.” Payne placed her hands on her knees. “Do you mind if we look around the house?”

  Butterworth stood. “They came through yesterday with the dog.”

  “We’re not looking for explosives. Just for clues to why he might’ve—to why this might’ve happened to him.”

  “Suit yourself,” Lydia said. “We got nothing to hide.” She folded forward and began quietly weeping.

  “Don’t mess anything up,” Butterworth said. “You can see that we keep a neat house.”

  Payne stood up and O’Shea followed her lead. In the doorway to the kitchen, however, he stepped ahead, putting her between himself and Butterworth. Payne understood the signal. She stopped in her tracks so that Butterworth nearly bumped into her.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Butterworth, we find it’s best if the people living in the home don’t follow us around. If we got a warrant, that’s how we’d do it. And with your consent we’d like to proceed the same way, being as respectful as possible with your things, of course.”

  Butterworth hesitated, but just for a moment. “Okay,” he said, and retreated back to the living room. He looked uncomfortable but not nervous. O’Shea didn’t think he had much to hide, maybe a
hash pipe or the footprints to a few porn websites.

  They began in the attic and worked their way down, not finding anything pertaining to Horn at all. Half an hour later, they returned to the living room and asked to see his apartment. The family had the television back on.

  “It has a separate entrance,” Lydia said. “Outside. But there’s a door through the kitchen.” She went and opened it for them, but didn’t follow.

  Inside they found two rooms and a bathroom. The curtains were drawn and the place smelled musty. Only a handful of outfits hung in the clothes closet. The bookshelf featured mostly self-improvement books, easy paths to wealth and happiness, that sort of thing. O’Shea pulled out three books at a time to look behind, but found nothing. A montage of family photos hung on a wall, everyone smiling.

  “He was a good looking guy in his youth,” Payne said.

  “His youth?” said O’Shea. “The man didn’t make it out of his thirties, poor S.O.B.”

  On the night table rested a bottle of Ambien, and in the space below stood three flask-shaped bottles of peach brandy, one half empty.

  “Brandy and sleeping pills. Heckuva combination,” O’Shea said.

  On a wall to the side of the bed hung a frame with four medals. O’Shea recognized two: the Purple Heart and the bronze star. The Purple Heart—okay, you could get that for a scratch, though of course Horn had suffered much worse. But the bronze star didn’t get bestowed upon a man who merely went along to get along. This man had performed an act of serious bravery at some point.

  O’Shea thought of the conversation with Diaz this morning. These guys who’d once laid it all out there for their country were a different breed, he thought, different even than patriotic law enforcement types such as himself. He should have greater sensitivity to where Diaz was coming from, even while allowing the possibility that the bomb tech could be wrong. After all, even a war hero could lose his oars, maybe especially a war hero, coming back to loneliness, reminded every day that he’d given his legs for a country whose main act of collective sacrifice had been to go shopping. Being a combat vet didn’t make you right, but maybe it earned you the kid gloves.