“Yeah, that’ll really make people feel safe. And all the bomber has to do is reprogram the device so the GPS gives it more leeway. If it’s assassination, this nut could tweak his MO easy enough, doesn’t have to blow up these poor suckers right where he did before.”
“He may blow his cover along with it.”
“How do you figure?”
“He wants us to think these guys are terrorists, take the attention away from where it really belongs.”
“So, now that we know that they’re not terrorists, how does that help us? I think it makes our job harder in some ways. We’re looking for a lone maniac.”
Kahn shrugged. “Our job is no harder than it ever was. But now we got a working theory that the maniac has a connection to Landstuhl. What’s Burbette doing these days? Isn’t he officially supposed to be working that angle?”
“He tells me he’s getting nowhere,” O’Shea said, “caught in the sticky tape of bureaucratic inertia. It’s on your MP, Manny. Back channel.”
“My specialty,” Diaz said. He looked at Kahn, who rolled his eyes. But the grimace on the sergeant’s face had a smile peeking through it.
AFTER KAHN AND DIAZ LEFT, O’Shea went into the next room, where four of his investigators sat at a large folding table with dueling laptops. He’d recomposed himself for their benefit, but deep down he felt an unusual level of concern. He thought of the lab results and Diaz’s army connections and couldn’t avoid the conclusion that this investigation may be getting away from him. There was no harm in his having been likely wrong about the suicides. In this business, it didn’t matter where you started—only where you finished. But O’Shea didn’t feel like he was driving his own bus anymore. Diaz’s initiative was carrying the Bomb Squad well into AES territory, and if O’Shea ended up with a back seat in his own investigation, Capobianco’s squad threatened to rob the investigations squad of its glory.
Not that O’Shea cared much about the credit himself. He liked his job, and for all intents and purposes he was exactly as most people saw him: not stupid or uncaring, but not a conniver either, just naturally relaxed under pressure. No matter the case, he went home and slept well every night. But he couldn’t say the same for Ray Fisco, the commander of AES. Fisco, a striver, always had an eye on the next rung of the ladder. When you’re in that position, you have to look out for danger from above and from below, which put you on full alert every second. Lately Fisco had been fielding too many unsolicited calls from the guy whose job he wanted, Inspector Rex Brennan. Didn’t help that Joe Capobianco, head of the Bomb Squad, reported to the same guy.
O’Shea walked around the table, picking up papers and peering at them, sneaking peeks over everyone’s shoulder. While Diaz and Kahn were off chasing glory, he and his team had undertaken the mind-numbing scutwork that led to most arrests. They had reams of information listing every armed services veteran who received disability benefits in the New York City area, looking for some common pattern that also fit Horn and Littel. It would’ve been nice if some dweeb in Washington had ever produced a list of veterans who were missing limbs. Then O’Shea’s team would only need to cross-check that with the benefit recipients to find a manageable group. But no such luck. They were having to dig for every individual detail and create their own database. At least, O’Shea thought, they’d had the good sense early on to filter out anyone who’d left the armed forces before the first Gulf War.
And now they had the Landstuhl connection—but it wasn’t like the Veterans Administration had that stamped next to anyone’s name, either. O’Shea thought with a sigh that he’d have to report soon to Fisco, and what would he tell him.
He watched one of his men stand from his chair with his hands laced behind his neck, stretching. Must’ve been catching because within seconds the other three cops emulated the first. They looked like a bunch of college kids who’d just pulled all-nighters, hair mussed and eyes bugging out of their heads. O’Shea had read recently that being too sedentary could kill a man. Who said a desk job at the NYPD wasn’t as dangerous as walking the beat?
MANIS DIDN’T HIT SALLYE, DIDN’T raise a finger to her right then. He took forceful hold of her upper arm and pulled her away from the door, grabbing a strand of the colorful curtain as he did so, beads clattering to the floor. They crunched underfoot as she turned around.
“What are you doing?” he repeated.
She started to apologize but caught herself. He’d scared her for a change, but all she had to do was re-establish the pattern. “You’ve got something to hide in there. I don’t like you keeping secrets from me.”
Manis let go her arm. “Come live here. I’ll clean out the workshop and that can be your space.”
“You’d do that?”
“Only for you.”
“You’re pathetic.”
“Am I? Give me that!” He snatched the cuticle cutter from her hand. In one motion he took it into his fist, wrapped the other arm around her waist, and held the sharp instrument within an inch of her right eye. “How’s it feel?”
It didn’t feel good. She blinked and her eyelashes brushed the pointed end, but then she managed to twist away and push past him into the center of the room.
“That lock,” Manis said, tossing the cuticle tool to the table, “it can’t be picked.”
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Out on an errand. I thought you’d sleep later. You usually do.”
“Something got me out of bed early.” She didn’t want to tell him about the bad vibe he’d been throwing off, how it had risen in intensity all year, how it was beginning to scare her. “What kind of errand?”
“You’re a needy woman, Sallye. It’s not so easy to satisfy you. Takes a lot of groundwork.” A thought crossed his mind. He added, “No ate-ee-ists in da fox-oles.”
Sallye furrowed her brow. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m re-acquiring a New Yawk accent. Isn’t that what gets you excited?”
“That’s a joke, not an accent. You sound like one of those kids from Our Gang or something, not like the big strong men who walk the streets around here.”
“Most of them don’t have it either.”
“That’s why I’m selective. So sue me.”
“Why does it matter, anyways, the way a man talks? I’ve never understood it.”
She walked to the photo he had of her, picked it up, stared into her own younger eyes. “They make me feel like a girl again, that’s why. I lost my virginity at fourteen to a guy in my father’s platoon. A guy from the Bronx. You remember him.”
That cut him deeper than she expected. He dropped his voice. “You were a virgin, eager to move along. You wanted it.”
She set down the photo.
“I couldn’t control myself.”
She shrugged. “I was nearly full grown. But also a baby with a deep yearning to be touched. That note my mother sent, when you were in the sick bay and my father and the rest of the platoon had shipped out... What did it say?”
“You never read it?”
She shook her head. “I was a good girl.”
“Your mother gave you to me. She saw me as your salvation.”
“She was always off somewhere, probably getting her own.”
“So was your father. She hoped I’d grow you up.”
She snarled. “You did a job of that, didn’t you?” Then suddenly she wanted to drop all of it, get away from the subject. She asked herself aloud, “Why am I revisiting this anyway?”
Manis set his jaw. “Same reason you tell me all your other tales. Because it turns you on.”
When he said that she knew she’d miscalculated. For some reason, the story had helped him recapture something he’d misplaced. It made him bolder. He reached out and touched her hurt lip, forced his thumb between her teeth. She pushed him away. “It does turn me on. Makes me hornier than the sight of you today ever will.”
“But you’re here, aren’t you? And the man I wa
s—he’s in the past. No ate-ee-ists in da fox-oles.”
“Stop saying that. You sound like a turd.”
“I didn’t back then?”
“That man, Warren… He caressed me down to the bone, made me come alive, made me…” She stopped.
“Made you what?”
“Made me feel at home. Then you shipped out, you bastard.”
“Not by choice.”
“By the time he came back, I was a different person. We both were.”
“I wish I could have that girl again.”
She watched Manis rake his eyes over her. He reached for her robe but only got the belt. It detached as she spun away, and she clutched the robe closed.
“I said it’s no longer the same,” she said.
That seemed to give him a pang. He grimaced like he had a stitch somewhere. He went red in the face.
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and shivered, longing with every fiber of her being for that which she’d lost.
“You’ve never mentioned me to anyone, have you?” Manis asked. “Then or now.”
He had her there. She’d never told a soul about him—not here, not in Boston, not in Germany. Their relationship was like a small fire in a dangerous place. One draft of oxygen and it might spread out of control.
She said, “Did I ever tell you about Lewis?” She saw him flinch. That reaction she’d seen before. The name caught him like a bullet to the gut.
“Only a thousand times.”
“He was the closest I ever had to the perfect lay, you know.” She closed her eyes. “A real man, he was, solid as a rock. All of him. And he had that accent, too. Not like you do it—”
“No ate-ee-ists in da fox-oles.”
“Would you shut up already with that!” She had to go soon, would put herself on the night train to Boston. This thing they had between them, it was heading for the danger zone, would reach that point one day soon and she’d regret that she let it get that far. But not yet. She couldn’t resist using him. Passion stirred deep within her.
She sauntered over to the unmade bed, rested the tips of her fingers on the balled comforter. “I can see him there.”
“So can I,” Manis said.
“Not an ounce of fat on him. Not like you, chubs. A real man, firm and hard and well endowed.” She closed her eyes. “Take off your clothes and lie down, Warren.”
“I won’t do it this way again with you. I won’t.”
She walked to him and took hold of his belt buckle.
“Unlike the others, Lewis knew from the start that I wanted him. He was awake. Alert.”
“What difference does it make?” Manis said. “You’ll never have him again.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s dead. He will be.”
“All of us will be. So what! He’s alive in me now. Do you want to do it or not? I’ll tell the story different this time. Give it all to you.” She dropped her robe to the floor, placed one foot on the edge of the bed, and stood there in all her scrawny sexuality, showing him her womanhood.
Seeing his anger grow evoked the old pattern for her, made her yearn for the violence that would follow—the ecstasy and the explosion.
She went into a trance, thinking of the old Warren and all he’d meant to her, of his fine eyebrows—Manis now had scars where his eyebrows should be. Of his five o-clock shadow on her soft young skin—the dark rough stubble as opposed to when she met Manis again on the base, years later, his new bushy beard already showing gray in it. Of the enormous feeling of Warren inside her those first few occasions when they’d lain together.
But at the same time that she was thinking of the old Warren, she narrated to the new one the story of her secret romps with Lewis in a room on the second floor of the hospital, how she got him, half dazed, to prop himself up on his one good leg and hold her up with one arm while his other hand grasped the handrail of the bed, how she’d allowed him to rediscover his manhood and violate her in every orifice. And how she’d cried out in pleasant surprise, almost getting caught by the supervisor.
Oh, how I’d cried out, thought that very moment would be the end of me.
She was crying out now, something calling from her viscera, the hurt and the pleasure and the loneliness. She writhed underneath Manis. Afraid. Tried to escape the blows that she’d invited, but it was no use.
Then she lost consciousness.
When she opened her eyes in the apartment in Brooklyn, she hurt up and down. It was early evening. Her eyebrow was cut and her nose was broken. Blood had dried all over the sheets, and Manis was gone.
Then she realized where to find him—back in the secret room.
Its padlock hung unlatched, but the handle wouldn’t budge. Light splashed under the closed door, and through the seams she heard a shuddering high-pitched whine. It sounded like power tools.
AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK, THE TEMPERATURE dropped and clouds rolled in. A clipper system blew down some snow, but not enough to stick, just the right amount to dash the hopes of anyone who dared to anticipate spring. National Guard troops paced the sidewalks in front of every recruiting office within seventy-five miles of downtown Manhattan, with the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut getting into the act, ignoring the fact that no one had any evidence of a threat within their states.
Generally speaking, Bomb Squad detectives had no time to process the high drama quotient that had begun to weigh on this case. That afternoon, members of the squad got summoned to fourteen suspicious package calls in three hours, two of them falling to Kahn and Diaz. How Diaz had squeezed in the leisurely lunch, he didn’t know. Now he sat dog-tired in the break room, waiting for the microwave to cook his ramen snack. He’d gone off duty ten minutes ago, but he needed a fillip before hitting the street.
Through the doorway he heard someone say, “Manny still here?”
He jumped up and went into the squad room. It was the phone for him. Nunez.
Diaz looked at his watch. Second call in less then twelve hours and ten o’clock at night in Germany. This had to be good news.
“You’re a hard worker, Captain Nunez.”
“You told me it was a matter of life and death.”
That response made Diaz miss the military, where they’d bury you in paperwork to replenish your pencil supply but when lives got put on the line everyone snapped into action. Not that his Bomb Squad colleagues didn’t take their jobs seriously, but Diaz just didn’t always sense the balls-to-the-wall urgency. An abundance of caution seemed to hang over every action.
Nunez cut right to it. “Got the patient charts we talked about.”
“That easily?”
“Took some doing, some sneaking around. Let’s just say this conversation is deeply off the record.”
“Confirmed.”
“Also couldn’t help myself so I crunched some of the data for you. Your men Horn and Littel...eight persons involved in their cases overlapped.”
“That many?”
“Hospital only has a few hundred rooms. Of the eight—all doctors and nurses—one is deceased, five are still at the hospital in Landstuhl, one male doctor has now been assigned to the Sternberg Army Hospital in Luzon, Philippines, and a female nurse works stateside at the VA Medical Center in Bedford, Mass.”
“The five who still work at Landstuhl, they take any leave lately?”
“I’m checking on that. According to the work schedules I’ve seen so far, it seems unlikely that any of those five would’ve been able to blow someone up in New York over the past two months. Maybe if the devices were manufactured and placed well in advance…”
“I doubt that. It’s hard for me to imagine that they were stable enough to take the punishment of daily use for too long without going off on their own or malfunctioning.”
“So most likely we can rule out the ones still working at the hospital.”
“The one who’s deceased—”
“A plastic surgeon.”
“We know he�
��s dead for sure?”
“A she, not a he. Fifty-five-year-old woman in the middle of a shift. Complained of stomach pains and three minutes later keeled over with a massive coronary. It all happened in front of six colleagues. I’d safely posit that they’re not all in on a conspiracy to fake her demise.”
“Man, it’s gotta be pretty bad if you collapse right in the hospital and they can’t save you.”
“Maybe they were all waiting for an appropriation from Congress,” Nunez deadpanned.
Diaz made sure that the MP heard him laugh. “And the doc in Luzon?”
“I have a call in. Rather not give his name unless there’s something there, considering how I got this information.”
“Okay. What about the nurse in Massachusetts? You got a name and address?”
“No home address, no. She calls herself Sallye Ritchie.”
TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK
8.
DAY FOUR—Dark
DIAZ HAD HIS APARTMENT KEYS in his hand when he heard a thud. He cocked his ear to the closed door and listened with more care. Two voices. He was sure one belonged to Jennifer. The other had a deeper pitch. It took him only a second before he concluded that it belonged to the guy from last night.
Now he heard more thumps, softer, a rhythm to them. Giggling. Soft talking. Moaning. He pictured two legs of the couch tilting up and falling back with each thrust. He could barge in and catch them both bare-assed, watch the arrogant guy retreat, have another uncomfortable conversation with J-Fo. What the hell would that accomplish? She’d chosen this guy, and Diaz had no designs on her. It was an inconvenience, sure, but after what had already transpired, why not let the woman have her fun?
He slipped the keys back into his pocket and retreated, taking the stairs down. The voice in his head said, “On nights like this, Manuel Diaz wondered whether the only kind of luck he ever had was bad luck.” Hell, he’d been wearing a smile on his face when he reached the door, best mood that had possessed him in weeks, ready to show his roommate that he could be as pleasant as the next guy, not just all negative. Why this night of all nights does he have to come home to the sound of Jennifer’s lovemaking?
A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Page 15