Rocco flipped through the Metro-North employment file of Walter Blunt and found an address in Queens. “Looks like Forest Hills,” the lieutenant said. “Does that help?”
“I can give it a try.”
“Okay,” Rocco said. “Three minutes and we’re downstairs to meet Scully. We’ll take off as soon as an officer shows his face to hang with Alex. One of you see whether Motor Vehicles has anything on their site?”
“I’m hunting, but most of the official stuff like that is only going to be available to us Monday morning,” I said. “We’ll be stiffed for now on government records.”
“Where else can we get photos?”
“The girl who was in today—Lydia’s roommate,” Rocco said. “Mike’s right. Bring her back over here and nail down a description of the guy she saw fighting with Lydia. Drag her boyfriend in, too.”
“How come no one has mentioned the word ‘guns’?” I asked. “With NorthStar in his background, he’s bound to be armed.”
“That’s our worst nightmare, Alex. It’s on all of our minds,” the lieutenant said, wringing his hands. “But at this very moment, there’s not a thing we can do about it, except prepare all the details coming in on the search.”
“And clear the terminal,” I said. “For whatever good that will do.”
“Monday morning may be too late to pull all this information,” Rocco said. “I’ll get a man assigned to contact all the agencies and business links first thing tomorrow. Somebody has to be minding the store on weekends. Meanwhile, the stationmaster is trying to find out where Blunt’s mama is and to locate his siblings—see whether they’re still around.”
“Anybody check Match.com? ‘Likes track rabbits; likes to dance. Could be terminal.’ There are all kinds of selfies on those sites,” Mike said. “We can’t meet the feebs without a photo. They’re bound to have one they’ll want to shove down our throats to show how superior they are.”
This time I heard footsteps approaching the room.
A young woman entered, wearing a Metro-North police uniform, with the nameplate Y. FIGUEROA on her chest, below several merit decorations. She held up a hand to all of us. “Police Officer Yolanda Figueroa.”
The lieutenant introduced himself to her and to everyone else in the room.
“I’m your charge,” I said, eyeing the Glock holstered on her hip. She was shorter than I by two or three inches, with curly black hair and light brown skin. “I’m Alex Cooper.”
“Good to know you.”
“Same here. Nice of you to do this.”
“All right,” Rocco said. “Let’s get you guys going. Time’s running out on us.”
I shut down the computer and pushed back from the table, standing up between Pug and Mike.
“Not you, Alex,” Rocco said, pointing to the chair I’d been sitting in. “Commissioner Scully was firm about that.”
“He was what?”
“You’re to handle all the interagency contacts, if you want to stay here till we close the terminal. Do all the research you can for us online. Put your tail in that chair and Officer Figueroa here will make sure you’ve got everything you need.”
I couldn’t protest to Keith Scully if he wouldn’t give me an audience. “The district attorney is so not going to like this,” I said, doing a slow burn as I seated myself again. “You know how he hates to be the last to know what’s going on.”
“Yolanda just needs to make sure you’re boarded on the nine fifty-nine to Vickee’s house. See if she can teach you to scramble up some eggs for breakfast. Chances are Mercer and I will be there in the morning for a victory celebration,” Mike said, flashing a grin at me. “You’ve been grounded, Coop. Sit down and fasten your seat belt.”
THIRTY-SIX
“Are you in a safe place?” Paul Battaglia asked.
“Completely fine,” I said. “I’ve got a terrific policewoman keeping me company in the situation room, helping me surf the Internet for more info about Blunt. I wanted to tell you what’s going on here and give you the number for this landline.”
I was fiddling with my cell phone, which I’d placed on the tabletop, but it was showing no signs of life in this inner sanctum of the terminal.
“Thanks.”
“And that Scully has cut me out of the program, Paul. I was thinking maybe you could give him a call, let him know that you’d prefer I stay on the case, in the meetings with the FBI and all that, rather than sticking me up here in an isolation booth.”
“The commissioner’s in a better position than I am to know what’s going on. All I want from you is a steady flow of information. If Scully and his men get lucky, I need to be up to speed for the media. You understand that?”
“Of course I do.” I left out the observation that Battaglia was all about smoke and mirrors. The substance didn’t matter at all if he had the appropriate sound bites when the time came.
The team had been gone only about ten minutes when I heard footsteps again. I turned my head to look in the doorway and saw that Mike had returned.
“Hey, did you forget something?” I said, happy to see him. “Coming into the girls’ locker room without knocking? Scully wants us up here because Yolanda and I are such delicate—”
“Scully’s the man, Coop. You wanna step out here for a minute?”
“Is this my ticket to ride?”
Mike rolled his eyes and motioned to me. “Over here, please.”
Yolanda was on her feet. “Are you taking her somewhere, Detective? ’Cause I need to stay with her.”
“You sit tight. I just have some instructions to relay from the police commissioner. We’ll be right here in the hallway, and I’ll deliver her back to your capable hands.”
I got to my feet and walked toward Mike, talking to Yolanda. “Didn’t you ever see High Noon? The sheriff thinks he’s the only guy who can save his town. Has to put the little woman on the last train out of Hadleyville to keep her away from danger. There’s always a final speech with these guys when they suit up to meet the gunslinger,” I said. “I guess I’m headed for that train.”
Mike grabbed my arm and pulled me into the hallway, laughing at me. “Don’t flatter yourself, Coop. You’re no Grace Kelly.”
“You find the gunslinger?” I asked, as Mike closed the door behind me. “Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
“I’ve got a confession to make.” He backed me against the wall, in between a pair of rusted steam pipes. “I have to tell—”
“Just don’t start with a ‘come to Jesus’ speech now, okay? I am so not in the mood for that.”
“I know.” He was running his fingers through his hair.
“You’ve got serious work to do. You’ve got to find this sick bastard before he hurts somebody else. So if you’re up here to feed me more bull—”
“I lied to you. That’s what I want you to know.”
“Somehow, I think I did know that, Detective. I can’t believe that I actually fell hook, line, and sinker for the old ‘sick mother’ bit.”
“Look, I did get the twenty-one-day rip, okay? That was all true. The commissioner wanted me publicly hung out to dry.”
“Thank you for that really pleasant reminder of your affair.”
“It’s not fair to call it that, Coop.”
“No, but it’s more tasteful than the alternative.”
“I went to Ireland first, okay? You know that part is real.”
“Phone calls from Dublin numbers. Postcards stamped and marked from Derry and from Ballydesmond. Brilliant tradecraft, Mr. Bond. Must be true then, mustn’t it?”
“You and that hair-trigger temper. If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be almost attractive.”
“But it’s not the least bit attractive. It’s just all I’ve got in me at this point. So why not step aside,” I said, pushing against Mike’s chest, “and go find Nikolay Blunt. Why does any of this matter right now?”
“’Cause it’s been eating at me, okay? I hate to see you this way, this woun
d up. You’ve been working like a dog on these murders, and you should be with us when we get this guy.”
I raised my eyes to see if Mike was joking. “For real?”
“Yeah. But I’m not in control of that. I’m working on Scully, Coop. I really am.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Okay, I’ll buy the part about the three-week rip in Ireland. And the lie?”
Mike leaned one hand against the wall, beside my right shoulder, while the other continued to brush back his hair. “You know about the ILP?”
“Sure.” He was talking about the International Liaison Program, an intelligence initiative with the NYPD, formed after 9/11 as a counterterrorism plan. The department recruited officers from within specialized units to be stationed abroad in eleven cities—everywhere from Moscow and Lyons to Tel Aviv and Manila.
“I’m not a likely candidate for intel, am I?” Mike laughed nervously.
“Skip the false modesty, Detective. You’re the smartest guy I know—about some things.”
“Turns out Scully had a plan for me. I mean, the rip could have been just for a week and he would have been satisfied. But he suspended me for three so guys in the department would know I really got stung.”
“Then the vacation?” I asked, still feeling my anxiety over the added separation. “The four-week joyride with your cousin that you tacked on to it?”
“That part never happened, kid.”
“Want to tell me where you were?” I was tapping my fingers against the rusted pipe.
“Look, Scully made me—”
“Where were you?”
“Rhode Island. Newport, Rhode Island,” Mike said, almost sheepishly.
“Damn. I could probably have seen you if I stood on one of the tables at the Bite. A yachting adventure, perhaps?” Steam was more likely to come out of my ears than from the pipes alongside my head.
“The Naval War College. In Newport.”
“Really?”
“The college ran a special program this summer. A monthlong course in counterterrorism techniques. They offered Scully five spots, and I got lucky.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that—?”
“Secrecy was the hallmark of the whole thing. There are only two or three bosses in the entire department who know the names of the participants. The other detectives are the ones doing two-year stints abroad, brought back in from Singapore, Cairo, and Mumbai. Nobody wanted to blow their cover, and connecting me to any of them could have served to do that.”
It was my turn to be sheepish. “I—I wish I had known.”
“Do you understand what a risk Scully was taking? I stepped on my private parts with that psycho judge—all my own doing—and there was the police commissioner himself, wanting to rehabilitate and send me back to learn the most state-of-the-art techniques in fighting the bad guys. I mean the big bad guys.”
“Who better to train than you? So much of it is military, paramilitary stuff. You’re ahead of the curve on that to begin with.”
“We did the first week in Newport,” Mike said. “Then we were each sent out in the field. I was actually in a new office that opened in Kfar Saba.”
“Where’s that?” I felt so petty and small for having held a grudge for the last few weeks.
“It’s a suburb of Tel Aviv. The NYPD has a one-man office there,” he said, lifting my chin with his forefinger to get me to make eye contact with him again. “I’m not kidding you, Coop. That’s why I couldn’t call or write to you. It was a crazy time for everyone involved.”
“I understand that now.”
“There was actually chatter about a threat from Hezbollah, with a very soft target, and I got to work through the entire operation.”
“That must have been great.”
“You know what it’s like to save lives, Coop. Well, I don’t. I always get there too late, you know? Damage done. Bring on the body bags.” Mike was trying to get me to smile, to lighten up. “This time I helped do that, and I gotta tell you it feels better than anything else.”
“So you were successful.”
“And here’s how we knew it. Because nothing happened. Nothing.” Mike paused, grimacing at my forlorn expression. “How’s that for a good day on the job, Coop?”
“It should make you very proud of yourself,” I said. “It makes me proud of you.”
“Then stop sulking.”
“Why’d you choose this moment to tell me?”
“’Cause the last thing I wanted to do the other night was to walk into that crime scene at the Waldorf and find you there. I—I didn’t know what to say in front of everyone else.”
“Your mother’s heart condition kind of rolled off your tongue.”
“Okay, okay. I owe you.”
“You owe me nothing. It just sort of unnerves me that you can be so facile when you lie.”
“I didn’t think I had a choice. I figured you’d call me out ’cause I had no business being at a homicide in Manhattan South. Out of bounds for me. Not my jurisdiction.”
“You tap-danced around that pretty well, too.”
“Scully didn’t want me there because of the dead girl. It’s only that the president is coming to the hotel and he’s going to have me working with the terrorist task force from time to time, whenever he hears there’s new thinking, new methods of policing to bring to the table.”
“This killer,” I said, squirming a bit to get Mike to move back from me, “this Blunt guy, you think he’s involved with terrorists? Is that why you came back to talk to me? Or are you just trying to tie up your string theory? Try and control me like a big puppeteer?”
“No strings on you, Coop,” Mike said, stepping away. “Blunt’s acting more like a crazy man, not that the two are mutually exclusive. But this is the greatest train station in the world, and if his plan is to paralyze this city, he’s going to start that from right here.”
In the narrow hallway beyond the situation room, I was able once again to hear the loudspeaker system from the concourse below.
The lady with the automated voice had been given the night off. Someone from law enforcement had taken control of the microphone.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’d like your attention, please,” the deep baritone greeted evening travelers. “Due to some emergency repairs that need to be made on the tracks this weekend, Grand Central Terminal is going to be cleared earlier than usual.”
“Thanks for coming up to try to make this right,” I said.
Mike held a finger over his lips, telling me not to talk.
“The last train will leave the station at ten P.M. That is ten P.M. We suggest you check schedules for the next train to your destination. Again, please check the schedules. After ten P.M., there will be city buses outside the terminal on the Lexington Avenue side to take passengers to the outer boroughs, where you can pick up your connections. And remember, folks, if you see something, say something.”
“That will make some commuters most unhappy,” I said.
“It’s meant to start them moving and fill the trains without causing a stampede. Nobody wants to alarm them before we need to.”
“Hardly necessary to add any fuel to the fire after today’s headlines and the news about Lydia.”
“Cops are herding people out of the food court already and planning to shut the doors—at least the ones that shut—a little before the clock strikes ten.”
I made an attempt at good cheer. “Thank you—I mean that—for letting me know about the last month, about the great big white lie. It’s for such an important reason that you were gone,” I said. “I should have trusted you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice broke in again. “Time to step lively. Your attention, please. Grand Central Terminal will be shutting down at ten P.M. this evening.”
“How about if I throw in some bacon with the eggs?” I asked.
“Crisp. You know the way I like it.” Mike patted down my hair and kissed me on the crown of my head. �
��I’ll see you on your way home. Thanks for listening.”
“Then you just wait here for him to do something else?”
“Oh, no. We’ve got some messages planned to go out over the loudspeaker shortly after ten o’clock, designed to rattle the cage of Nikolay Blunt, wherever he is in this maze. We need to smoke him out, Coop, and bring him down. His killing spree is over.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
I had given up finding any more information online about Nikolay Blunt and was about to call it a night. “Ready to go, Yolanda. Who takes me down to the detail who’s driving me to Vickee’s house?”
She picked up the landline to call her command, spoke to someone on the other end, then answered me. “My partner is on his way up to fetch us,” she said. “Seems Lieutenant Correlli has the suspect’s sister in the station. They want you to talk to her before you head home. Do you mind?”
“It’s exactly what I’d prefer to do. It makes me feel useful.”
I thumbed through Walter Blunt’s Metro-North employment records. It listed three children as his dependents at the time he was employed here. Nikolay was the eldest, with a younger brother and sister.
I studied the senior Blunt’s file until Yolanda’s young partner appeared in the doorway. “I’m supposed to bring you to down to the stationmaster’s office, okay?”
“Should we take the laptops?” I asked Yolanda.
“You can leave your stuff here, Ms. Cooper. I think your supervisors want to fill you in on what’s been going on. Then I’ll escort you back up along with the young lady you’ll be interviewing. They want you to keep working up here, ’cause it’s good space and it’s away from the commotion on the concourse.”
“Commotion?”
“You know. They’re trying to shut this place down soon.”
I gave Yolanda a thumbs-up. “Looks like I bought myself an invitation to work in the sandbox with the guys. Do you want to wait for me here?”
“I’m on you like glue, Ms. Cooper.”
We wound our way back to the elevator. The young cop unlocked it with what looked like a master key, and it creaked its way down to the bottom of the ramp below the main floor.
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