“I thought a bosun worked on a boat,” Pug said. “Wish I had a cocktail, too.”
“Different kind of boson.”
“There’s a really good wine store right off the concourse downstairs,” I said. “I could go down for a couple of bottles.”
“We’ve got a long night ahead,” Mike said. “I’ll pass for now.”
“You don’t know the first thing about physics. How’d you get that right?”
“’Cause this stuff fascinates me. This guy Higgs? Super-brainiac. He’s a Brit.”
“Oh, I guess you met him on your extended vacation abroad.”
“No fair, Coop. I told you there’s an explanation.”
“So, Higgs?”
“Came up with this theory fifty years ago, explaining how particles smaller than atoms got mass, traveling through a field.”
“What field? Where’s the field?”
“The Higgs field. You can’t see it, Coop. He named it fifty years ago, but nobody found proof of it till 2012.”
“Like a field in his backyard?” Pug asked. “A football field?”
“Stay tuned, Pug. I’ll get to you next.”
“You can’t see the field?” I asked.
“You’re yawning at me in the middle of a Higgs boson moment, Coop? Didn’t they teach you at Wellesley how rude that is?” Mike said. “Anyway, you may be able to see the field briefly, but it’s so unstable that it disappears.”
“Like you this summer. Unstable and disappearing.”
“I’ve got one word for you, Coop,” he said, changing the channel from Jeopardy! to another news network. “Limerence. It explains everything.”
“Lay off her, Mike,” Mercer said. “Why don’t you hit the road, Alex?”
“I will in a few minutes.”
“So I got hooked on Higgs, which led me to the string theory.”
“As night must follow day, I guess.”
“Hey, you know how strongly I feel about coincidence? That there’s no such thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, string theory is like a genius’s way of ordering the universe the same way I happen to think, okay? Simple as that.”
“The string theory says there are no coincidences?”
“No, no, no. It says all objects are comprised of vibrating filaments—strings. That the entire universe is made up of all these invisible strings, holding it together.”
“Really?” I said, pushing back my chair. “I’ll never drink again. This is so weird. I can’t see these strings, either, can I?”
“They’re subatomic, Coop. Smaller than the size of an atom. They’re everywhere, and of course you can’t see them. But they’re the reason that nothing is random. All this energy is connected. There is no such thing as coincidence.”
“So will you guys think I only put in half a day if I call it a night now?” I asked. “I feel more useless than a subatomic particle.”
“I’ll walk you down,” Mercer said.
“Imagine, guys. I used to complain because Mike wouldn’t talk about anything except murder. In hindsight that was pretty stimulating compared to physics.”
“It’s all connected to this pattern, Coop. There’s a relationship here we just haven’t made yet.”
“Strings?”
“Make fun of me, kid. None of what’s been going with these homicides is coincidence.”
“I get that, Detective Chapman. Where’s the string that ties all this together?”
We’d been talking so loudly that we didn’t hear footsteps approaching the room. There was a knock on the door before Rocco let himself in.
“We got a game changer, guys,” he said, dropping a stack of papers onto the table with each hand. “We got a name.”
It was as though an electrical charge raced through the room, slicing the tension and exhaustion, filling the space with energy.
“Yes!” Mike shouted at top volume. “What’d you get?”
“A hit on the DNA from NDIS.”
“He’s in the national data bank?” I asked.
Rocco Correlli pressed the fingers of his right hand onto one of the piles of paper. “Yeah, they just faxed the results up to me via the stationmaster. Maybe you can walk us through this.”
“Happy to,” I said, my heart pounding as the adrenal started to pump. “What’s his name?”
“Nicholas,” Rocco said. “Nicholas Blunt. Twenty-nine years old.”
“We’re out of here,” Mike said, holding out his hand. “You got addresses? Let’s get this motherfucker off the street.”
“No address.”
“Can’t be.”
“It is, Chapman. At the moment, that’s what it is. No current address.”
“Do we just go back to figuring how he chose his victims,” I asked, “or is there any reason to connect him to Grand Central? To think he’s targeting it?”
“Every reason to connect him,” Rocco said.
Mercer didn’t move a muscle. His left shoulder was against the window over the operations room, his eyes fixed on the men inside. “Why’s that?”
“Blunt grew up here, according to the stationmaster. I mean right here, in this terminal. His father was a hostler.”
“Hustler?” Mike said. “What difference does that make?”
“I didn’t say hustler. It’s hostler—with an o.”
The four of us looked at Rocco with blank stares.
“His old man drove the locomotives from their platforms out to the roundhouse. Turned them around, tuned them up, and brought them back for the next part of the trip. That’s all he did, every day of his working life.”
“You mean he was an engineer?” Mike asked.
“Hostlers never leave the station. They’re engineers, but all they work on are trains in the rail yard. Grand Central was his life.”
“And his son?” I asked.
“Nicholas Blunt grew up in this place. Every minute he wasn’t in school, he was hanging out with his old man. He knows more about this terminal and each piece of track that runs in and out of here than anyone on the planet.”
“Sometimes I hate it when I’m right,” Mike said.
“Scully’s on his way up with the city head of the FBI,” Rocco said. “They won’t wait till two A.M. to close Grand Central. We’ve got two hours to get everyone out of here, best we can.”
“It’s not possible,” I said.
“It better be, Alex. By ten tonight, we’re in lockdown.”
THIRTY-FIVE
“Let’s get Coop on her way,” Mike said.
“I’d like her to tell me what this DNA stuff means first, okay? There’s pages of it,” Rocco said. “Then the guys can take her out of here.”
“I’m not going. I know these cases as well as anyone.”
“No time to get stubborn,” Mercer said.
“Let’s see how this develops. I’ve still got my uses, don’t I?” I smiled, trying to diffuse the tension.
“Then get an officer up here, Loo,” Mike said, turning to me. “And you do have your uses. Loop in the Thatcher family, then we’ll get you a laptop and you can be our researcher on whatever comes up.”
“Oh, great. You’re looking for the killer, and I’m in charge of Google Alerts?”
“You stay close to anyone who’s got a badge and a gun, okay?”
Rocco seemed surprised. “No heat?”
“I’ve never had a gun, Loo. Fortunately, Battaglia doesn’t believe in letting his legal staff carry. I’d probably have taken Mike’s head off by now.”
Each of the men had tried dialing out on his cell—Mercer to update his boss at the Special Victims Unit, Mike to check in with his lieutenant at Manhattan North, and Pug to notify his team who were still hunkered down at the Waldorf.
“There’s no reception here,” Rocco said, pushing the spider-phone toward Mercer. “It’s built like a bunker on purpose. You’ve got a couple of different landlines to use.”
Mercer had one h
and on the receiver. “Do we have a plan, Loo? Are you going with Blunt as a person of interest?”
“What’s his criminal history?” Mike asked, pointing to the sheaf of papers that Rocco Correlli had passed to me. “How can he be in the data bank and not known to the department?”
“Too many questions at once,” I said, pulling my chair closer and starting to plow through the information about Nicholas Blunt. “He’s not KTD because he’s never been arrested.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The match isn’t arrest-based. That much is clear.”
“Case-to-case?” Mike asked. “DNA from semen in an unsolved rape?”
Rocco was talking over my head. “Person of interest is an understatement. We’ve got his blood on the curtain at the Waldorf and in the sink on Big Timber. Alex, can we call him a suspect? It’s okay legally?”
“Go for it, Loo. I don’t care if you tag him as the perp. As long as the public puts a name and face to the guy who’s running around out there, and they understand that he’s horribly dangerous,” I said, scrutinizing the FBI lab records. “It’s not seminal fluid. The DNA came from a swab. From saliva.”
“An investigation?” Mike asked. “What state?”
“Not an investigation. Voluntary. It’s connected to some kind of job he was working about three years ago.”
“Keep reading.”
“NorthStar. That’s the name of the company that submitted the sample,” I said. “The DNA report itself is not very complicated, Loo. The paperwork is thick because it’s all the lab notes confirming the matches. All they need is the headline you got. The blood found at two of the crime scenes belongs to Nicholas Blunt.”
“That’s helpful. I thought I’d be swimming in double helixes all night.”
“So I guess finding out more about Blunt is my first Google assignment. Where’s the laptop I’m supposed to use?”
“Coming up any minute,” Rocco said.
“You don’t need a search engine for that,” Mike said. “NorthStar. One word, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a security contractor, mostly for overseas work in the most hostile territories in the world.”
“Like Blackwater?” I asked. I remembered stories about the private firm that was created to support government troops abroad after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
“A lot like it, but much smaller.”
“Tough guys, no?”
“Blackwater had a lot of former military experts,” Mike said. “Smart founders who recruited some very experienced men—and yeah, some hard-hitters. At one point they were up to eighty thousand employees worldwide. They got into some hot water and had to rebrand.”
“But legit?” I asked.
“Mostly. They had a slew of government contracts,” Mike said, as the door opened and a Metro-North cop entered the room with three laptops. “Blackwater actually trained Navy SEALs and military SWAT teams. I don’t know if they’re completely out of that business, after allegations of shooting civilians in Iraq, or if they just regrouped under a new name.”
The newly arrived Metro-North cop was obviously tech-savvy. He began setting up the laptops and connecting them to a power source under the table. I slid one over in front of me and turned it on.
“NorthStar hasn’t been around for that long. Does the same kind of thing as the old Blackwater. High-threat protection. I don’t think the government uses them much, but they provide security for a lot of business entities—like oil companies—that work in risky third-world countries or war zones.”
“NorthStar swabs their employees for DNA?” I asked. “For identification purposes?”
“Yeah, in the event any of the workers go DOA. Their profiles are already in the data bank. The military does the same thing.”
“So what else can we find out about Nicholas Blunt?” I said, typing his name into the search function.
Mercer sat down opposite me. “I’ll do NorthStar.”
It was Rocco Correlli’s turn for the landline. He called the head of the Metro-North police and asked his questions after the formalities were done. “I need an officer to be assigned to a prosecutor working in the situation room tonight. Pronto. Got someone for me?”
“I get the feeling I’m going to have a new best friend any minute now,” I said, scrolling down through all the Blunts whose names appeared on my screen.
“Excellent. I’d like that as soon as possible,” the lieutenant spoke into the mouthpiece.
“I can’t believe how many Blunts there are.”
“Nicholas?” Mike asked.
“I’m trying to eliminate by age. The people-finder search engine has more than thirty of them, and at first glance, nothing’s a match.”
I reached for the stack of papers again and tried to find the original submission request.
“So NorthStar opened its doors about eight years ago,” Mercer said. “Usual vague stuff on the website. More than fifteen thousand employees on missions around the world, mostly in Asia or Africa.”
“Would Blunt have needed military experience?” I asked. “We could get a load of information about him that way.”
“Not necessary, the site says. In fact, most of the employees don’t,” Mercer responded while writing numbers on a pad. “Could you get a man on military records, Loo? I’ll call NorthStar headquarters, though I’m not likely to get anybody at a corporate firm after hours on a Friday night. The feds will probably cut through that faster than we can.”
“This will help, guys,” I said. “Having a eureka moment.”
I stood up, waving the paper in my hand.
“What?”
“Surname Blunt. Given name Nikolay.”
“Don’t we already know that?” Mike asked.
“Father’s given name is Walter. Mother’s given name, Zoya. The spelling of Nicholas is eastern European,” I said. “Probably Russian. Zoya’s a Russian name, too.”
“And Blunt?” Rocco asked.
“Could be just plain old English,” Mike said. “Or Ellis Island neutral. Not everybody came through with all their vowels intact, Loo, like you did.”
“So?”
“So I’m getting from Coop the idea that we ought to look for a link between our Russian victim and Mr. Blunt.”
“That’s where I’m headed, Mike,” I said.
“That’s challenging, don’t you think? Lydia Tsarlev’s from Russia, and it’s possible this Blunt kid may have Russian roots. I can get that far. Next step is to see whether he’s got a psych history of any kind, or other witnesses who’ve heard about the voices in his head. The whole scenario could get really scary with a schizoid Soviet who’s been playing paramilitary enforcer. A Putin puppet with a grudge of some kind.”
“Slow it down, Mike,” I said.
“Hey, every one of those ‘Stans’ has some disgruntled former Soviets. I was mostly just relieved that the name attached to this DNA wasn’t Arabic.”
“The master of political incorrectness, Detective. The prosecution rests.”
“Strings, Coop. They’re all coming together for me. Hustler, hostler. Nicholas, Nikolay. Same bastard, whatever he calls himself.”
“You’re thinking the guy hearing voices in Lydia’s apartment is Blunt?” Rocco asked Mike and me.
“Better than a long shot,” Mike said. “We need a picture bad, Coop. We need to get the roommate to give us a scrip and to stick around to identify a photograph of him as soon as we get one. It can’t be a coincidence that the guy fighting with Lydia in her bedroom, trying to enlist her to join his cause—well, it’s got to be related.”
“Didn’t the roommate say he had no accent?” Rocco asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But who knows where he was born? Or his mother? I’m just telling you guys not to ignore that possible Russian background connection as we go forward.”
“Who asked me if there’s a plan?” Rocco said.
“I did,” Mercer said.
“Give it another five minutes. Then we go back downstairs to meet with Scully, who expects to be here before eight thirty. Get me everything you find online.”
“Here he is on Facebook,” I said. “Nik Blunt.”
“How do you know it’s our guy?” Rocco asked.
“There are a few others, but all spelled the traditional English way. And only one who listed the Animal Liberation Front as his favorite organization, Loo. How’s that for a start?”
“Does he have any friends, or did he kill them all?” Mike asked. “I knew putting you on Google was the right move. You’re a total geek, Coop.”
“This Nik Blunt hasn’t posted anything in two and a half years.”
“Not even photos that give an idea where he was then?”
“The Great Dismal Swamp.”
Mercer looked up from his laptop. “You got to be kidding. There’s such a place?”
Mike said, “North Carolina,” at the very same moment I said, “Virginia.”
“Which is it?”
“North Carolina,” Mike said. “Acres of swampland. Like a national refuge now. If there’s some kind of animal you never wanted to meet? It’s there. Blackwater set up headquarters in the Great Dismal to train their men, prepare them for conditions in Iraq, if that gives you any idea of how dismal it is.”
“The larger part of it’s in Virginia,” I said. “It’s probably where NorthStar trained its people, too. There are no clear faces in the photo, but lots of men in camo.”
“Suddenly stepping in on my military expertise?”
“It’s my literary bent, Mr. Chapman. The swamp was the subject of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel,” I said, knowing the subject would interest Mercer. “The Great Dismal was a refuge for runaway slaves.”
“C’mon, guys,” Rocco said. “Anyone come up with a photograph of Blunt’s face yet?”
“Not finding one,” I said.
“What do the employee records show for his family’s address?” Mercer asked. “For the father?”
“He’s dead, and the mother moved somewhere upstate,” Rocco said.
“I want the address from when his father worked here,” Mercer said. “We can figure a high school location from that and maybe find a yearbook picture.”
Terminal City Page 27