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

by J. E. Fishman

  “I’ve been reading up at night, trying to figure these guys out.”

  “A little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. Ain’t that what you told me? Quote unquote: a danger to himself and others.”

  Kahn set down his pen. “Okay, Diaz. What’s your theory?”

  “I don’t have one yet—not a complete one. But I don’t see a sane veteran blowing himself up on the street.”

  “Sane, no. Who says these guys are sane? They’re the exceptions in society, like all bombers. In this case, they’re probably suffering PTSD.”

  “Guys I know with bad combat stress can barely wipe their asses. Friends of mine with that can’t get through the night, spend all their time just trying not to drive away their last family member, if they can even think that far ahead.”

  Kahn gestured with his pen. “These two guys—both lived alone.”

  “Horn had his sister and she seemed to care for him. He had his niece, something to live for.”

  “Maybe he just snapped.”

  Diaz twisted his mouth to one side. “Snapped and happened to have some C4 lying around? These guys with PTSD ain’t big planners. They’re just trying to get through the day. And you can’t hold down jobs like these two had with more than a mild case.”

  “So they had a mild case.”

  “I’m telling you, Sandy. You don’t commit an act of violence like this with a mild case. Maybe you punch someone out in a bar, but you don’t blow yourself up.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me. These ain’t spur-of-the-moment explosions. Someone had to plan these things, like any bomb.”

  “So maybe it isn’t combat stress. Maybe it’s political.”

  “Nobody’s issuing any statements, though.”

  “Their acts are their statements. The recruiting stations.”

  Diaz shook his head. “Neither one went inside. Littel was across the street. Why would you do that? Can they be that stupid? It almost seems like spontaneous combustion.”

  “Yeah,” Kahn agreed earnestly. “Their limbs blow up and their own human lives just happen to be in the way.” He scratched his chin. “Maybe they really don’t want to hurt anyone else. Like those Tibetan monks who set themselves on fire to make a point.”

  “So what’s their point?”

  Kahn counted on his fingers. “War is bad? Life sucks? The army didn’t treat them right? The Veterans Administration isn’t doing enough to help them?”

  “But there’s no record of either of them holding a gripe. O’Shea says Littel’s ex-wife didn’t report anything that would lead you to believe the man would commit premeditated violence. She said the guy was pretty well adjusted. In fact, she was the one who had the affair that caused the marriage to bust up.”

  “Maybe that made him bitter and he didn’t share.”

  “Right,” Diaz said sarcastically. “The shy and retiring type who turns violent.”

  “Don’t knock it. Fits the profile of a lot of bombers. Think Ted Kaczynski.”

  “He’s sitting in his cabin writing manifestos, though. These guys are going to work every day, keeping their heads down. They didn’t leave behind any signs.”

  “The work thing could be a cover, like I said before.”

  Diaz continued to think aloud. “It could also explain why someone’s choosing them. They’re less likely to arouse suspicions. They’re blending in.”

  “Still, even if they’re being chosen that doesn’t mean they also aren’t complicit. Osama chose KSM, who also chose himself.”

  “Maybe it’s blackmail. Maybe they know something and they’ve been persuaded to take what they know to their graves.”

  “What—like black ops?”

  “It would explain why nobody’s creating propaganda around it.”

  “Conspiracy.” Kahn shrugged. “That’s always one possibility. Or, more likely, Littel was just imitating Horn’s actions.”

  “With C4? On such short notice?”

  “I admit that line of thinking is thin. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t directly involved in their own destruction.”

  “But it doesn’t mean they are involved—that’s all I’m saying—other than as victims. I know I got a bias, but if these guys just want to check out with a political statement, why not commit suicide and leave an angry note? O’Shea said Horn has the bronze star—a friggin’ war hero. Both of them, they’re American soldiers, and American soldiers are trained to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.”

  Kahn closed his report folder. “There you go again with that army idealism. You heard about that American soldier—right?—the one who walked through the Afghan village and murdered more than a dozen women and children in cold blood?”

  “That guy snapped.”

  “Maybe these guys did, too. Snapped a long time ago, acquired the C4 or were persuaded to acquire it, and now they’re finally acting on it.”

  Diaz bit his lip. Could he be that far from the truth on this one? Could preconceived notions about a soldier’s sense of honor be interfering with his judgment? He thought of last night, pulling the gun on Jennifer’s date. Hell, he could’ve killed the S.O.B while the jerk stood their buttoning his cuffs. He was on a hair trigger sometimes—couldn’t these other guys be, too? But not with an IED. An IED wasn’t even like a grenade—something that someone else made and that you could buy on the black market. These guys were hiding bombs in their false limbs—custom-made bombs.

  “I’m not buying it,” Diaz said. “There’s something else going on here. I don’t know what.”

  “I’m willing to listen, Manny, if you figure it out before the rest of us. I’m willing, but—” Kahn broke himself off.

  Diaz watched the sergeant’s mind wander and come back inside the truck and settle again on the report in his lap. Self-editing. Why? Diaz couldn’t know for sure, but he suspected it had something to do with the reprimand. He’d given himself a reputation with that damn package by the steps of St. Pat’s. Now every minute Kahn expected him to run off the rails.

  DESPITE THE BRIGHT SUN, MANIS had his coat closed against the chill as he sat on a low wall of black polished granite in front of 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. A post office resided inside the Social Security building there, and Manis watched its patrons come and go. One of these patrons, he hoped, would be a homeless man named Lewis Salinowsky, subject of the third picture on Manis’s workshop wall and the only one left whose face he hadn’t yet crossed out with a big red X.

  More than two years ago, Salinowsky, motivated by love or by some similar delusion, had penned a long letter to Sallye Ritchie, a nurse who now worked for the Veterans Administration in a hospital near Boston. Salinwosky hadn’t been aware of the nurse’s current location, so he’d addressed the note to her last known workplace, the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. It had taken the letter nearly eight months to catch up to Sallye’s forwarding address, and five months ago she’d carried the note to Brooklyn in her purse with the sole purpose of using it to taunt Manis. That note had set Manis on his path of revenge, the post office box number written with a trembling hand in the return address field. And that note, he hoped, would now lead him to the man Sallye had always described as most virile of all her paramours.

  Manis had been staking out the post office for the past two days, knowing that the federal government mailed most veterans’ benefits checks around the first of the month. He’d left Sallye asleep in his apartment, presuming she wouldn’t climb from bed until noon, when the post office would close for the day—Saturday.

  It didn’t take long for his bet to pay off. At a few minutes past ten, a lanky man in grimy clothes limped toward the front door and Manis followed at a safe distance. He watched the man go to the proper mailbox, but apparently he found nothing inside except junk. Salinowsky couldn’t hide the disappointment on his face as he dumped his mail into the trash bin and wandered toward the door.

  Unlike Horn, he had a pronounced limp. He pull
ed at an eyebrow and then fell into a trance before recovering himself, exiting the post office and heading up the street. He walked east and Manis followed—Worth Street to Leonard, up from there to a bench in Columbus Park with a cup and a sign.

  Manis waited awhile until Salinowsky got comfortable. The park was quiet, despite the improved weather. In half an hour, the beggar had garnered no more than a few coins.

  At eleven o’clock, Manis went up to him with a dollar in hand. “Nice day to be outside,” he said, stuffing the dollar into the cup.

  “Unless you got no choice,” Salinowsky said. “Be cold tonight.”

  “You have nowhere to go?”

  “I didn’t say that.” For the first time, Salinowsky looked up. Nothing in his face suggested any suspicion that the man in front of him wished him dead. But his cheeks twitched as if demons ran through his skull. He was too busy battling threats from within to perceive any from outside.

  Salinowsky had what appeared to be several days’ growth of blondish-gray beard, but his hair looked reasonably clean, Manis thought. His bloodshot dull blue eyes, however, betrayed premature age and unhealthiness.

  Manis reached into his pocket and produced a five-dollar bill. This was no time to be stingy. “I wonder,” he said, “where does a man like you sleep most nights?” And when Salinowsky looked quizzical he added quickly, “I’m looking for a cousin of mine who lives on the street around here.”

  Salinowsky squinted. “What’s his name?”

  “I’d rather not say. I don’t want anyone tipping him off.” Manis waved the bill. “Do you stay someplace with other people who’re in your situation?”

  “I do,” Salinowsky admitted. He cast his gaze down again, which gave Manis a chance to study the lower part of the artificial leg that poked out between his pants and his dirty brown shoes. He’d seen the leg before, surreptitiously photographed it on the street when he’d tracked Salinowsky once before to another begging spot before later losing him. At that time, the vagrant had it displayed across his lap while he slept. Salinowsky got more pictures than he’d ever need. It was the same prosthesis, he was sure. Now he only wanted the address to plan an overnight visit and place his device.

  “Please,” Manis said, lying easily. “He’s a veteran and he’s fragile, my cousin. I want to bring him home.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to go home. My sister wants me to go home, but I won’t.”

  Manis took a stab. “He sent a request to me from some city shelter.”

  “That dump’s up on Stanton.” Salinowsky shook his head. “I won’t stay there. I stay in the church shelter most nights, St. Euph’s over on Allen Street.”

  “Ah, no.” Now that he had a location, Manis sought quickly to bring the conversation to its conclusion. “I’m sure he won’t be there. He doesn’t believe in any church.”

  “You don’t have to believe to go.”

  “All the same. Thanks.” Manis practically choked on the word. He slipped the fiver into Salinowsky’s cup and turned to depart.

  “No atheists in the foxholes,” Salinowsky said behind him.

  Manis didn’t turn back around. He repeated to himself, trying to get the accent: “No ate-ee-ists in da fox-oles.”

  When he rounded the corner, he immediately typed St. Euph’s into his smart phone, lest he forget it. Not every day you came across a name as unusual as that. He’d look it up after Sallye left town and plan a visit there real soon, maybe skip showering as early as tomorrow morning in order to blend in when the time came.

  AT THE BOMB SQUAD OFFICE, Diaz took a pile of photos and set them aside on the big break-room table—the same table where the guys on duty took most of their meals. Between the epidemic of flu and the epidemic of bomb calls, he had the place to himself.

  The pile contained the crime scene photos from the Horn and Littel cases. In two days they’d become so familiar that he could no longer milk anything from them, couldn’t look at them fresh. But some new pictures had arrived—the super-close-up lab photos taken with that static camera set-up they had at the lab.

  In the old days, he was told, the bomb techs used to spread out the evidentiary fragments on this very table, trying to reconstruct the bomb. Nowadays, with the demands of modern forensics, the techs couldn’t touch the evidence. So, other than rare occasions when they visited the lab, they had to confine themselves to pictures.

  He spread out the new ones on the table and began poring over them. They showed every piece of the device that had survived the explosion and every fragment of Albert Horn’s artificial legs, even his shoes.

  Rather than sort them by left and right leg, as CSU had arranged them, Diaz decided to sort them based on whatever common elements he could discern. So he put shots of the feet next to one another, for example. CSU had photographed the feet with the shoes both on and off. They’d organized the rest of the legs on a tray like shards of pottery from an archaeological dig, arrayed as they thought they might fit together. Diaz placed pictures of the upper parts of the legs in their own pile and sorted out what the CSU techs took for the middle portion.

  Altogether, it added up to a lot of images, every angle of every piece included. If you weren’t looking for something in particular, the repetitiveness might make you space out real quick, but Diaz had something specific in mind. He was looking at the serial number on a piece of composite from one leg and trying to locate the matching piece on the other leg. Presumably the manufacturer stamped the serial number in the same place on every leg. So if he found the matching piece without a serial number, it would tell him which leg had contained the bomb.

  He hunched over, resting the index finger of each hand on corresponding spots and peering from one to another, and he was so deep into it that he startled when Morris called, “Mariah Primm for you, Manny!”

  Diaz straightened up and headed for his desk. “Mariah?”

  “Senior tech at CSU?”

  “She asked for me?”

  “Sergeant Kahn is out. She says it’s about the veterans case.”

  “Oh, okay. Roger that.” Diaz picked it up and said his name into the phone. There was no small talk, Primm being the clinical type.

  “We’ve had some success reconstructing the Littel bomb. As you probably know, like with Horn there are some cell phone parts but not enough to suggest an entire phone there.”

  Diaz’s heart sank. “So…no remote detonation?”

  “I didn’t say that. Something very interesting is going on here, apparently. On site your team located a blasting cap, an SCR, an arming switch. All very minimal.”

  “Power source. We found a battery, too, right?”

  “Yes, but not a cell phone battery.”

  “Yeah, we thought it was too big for that. If it’s not from the cell phone, I’m guessing it was part of the prosthetic, the battery that powered the arm.”

  “Precisely, a six-volt.”

  “Hold on.”

  Diaz jogged back to the break room and gathered up the photos. He rifled through them at his desk. He’d been focused on the serial number issue, but this was far more important. Now that he looked carefully at remnants of the wiring in Littel’s device, something jumped out at him.

  “Whoever made this bomb wired it to the battery that was already in there,” he said.

  “Yes. Clever. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

  Diaz reflected. “I’ve seen car batteries used, radio batteries, flashlight batteries. Cell phones, of course. Can’t say I’ve seen anyone use the battery from a mechanical limb. Dr. Primm, do you know exactly what it’s doing in there—in normal circumstances, I mean.”

  “It powers the sensors and, more importantly, it needs that capacity to work the motors that bend the arm and fingers.”

  “Oh, sure. Makes sense. And, from the perspective of a bomb maker, plenty of juice to set off the C4 as a bonus. So what’s with the cell phone parts—did it power the cell phone, too?”

  “It’s n
ot remote detonation, Detective. No sign whatsoever of a receiver.”

  So for sure he’d been wrong. “There goes one of my theories.”

  “What theory is that?”

  “I’ve felt pretty certain from the start that this wasn’t a suicide. So I figured it had to be remote detonation.”

  “Not by cell phone, Detective. But from what we can tell, this bomb wasn’t detonated by a direct application of force on the part of Littel, either.”

  “You’re saying it’s not remote but, at the same time, he didn’t pull the switch?”

  “That’s correct. Maybe there was no switch to pull. It seems that the main trigger here is the GPS module from a cell phone. As I said, there’s no receiver. Our working theory is that the precipitating factor was Mr. Littel walking into some GPS coordinates.”

  “You mean it was programmed to go off in a particular geographic spot?”

  “Seems that way. The cell phone parts are part of the bomb, but it’s not remote detonation by phone call.”

  Diaz broke into a broad smile. If it proved out, this meant he was right about the veterans after all. He’d have to get this to Kahn stat. He repeated for clarity, “So the guy carrying the bomb hits preprogrammed GPS coordinates and the bomb triggers.”

  “Simple as that. At least that’s our theory. Our digital team is still trying to crack the code for how this device was set up. They’re poking around inside the chip, which is delicate, as you can imagine. They don’t want to corrupt it.”

  “No matter, doesn’t sound like suicide to me.”

  “Me neither, Detective.”

  Just then Diaz saw Kahn come in. He tried to catch his attention, but the sergeant walked straight to Morris, said something Diaz couldn’t hear, went into Capobianco’s empty office, and closed the door.

  “What all this means, if we’re right,” Diaz said into the phone, “is that there’s a perp still out there.”

  “And if he hasn’t run out of victims,” Primm affirmed, “he could be building another bomb.”