Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  “No, he got along well with everyone,” she said tearfully. “He was a good man, very easy going and well liked.”

  “What about on the job? Any problems there?” Lara asked.

  Darla shook her head. “None. He loved what he did. He’d always wanted to be a police officer. He would have told me if he was having any problems.” She closed her eyes for a moment and when she opened them her anguish was evident. “He should have been in his car someplace in the neighborhood when the bomb exploded, but he’d gone into the precinct to grab a new shirt from his locker because he’d spilled coffee on himself while driving.” A sob escaped her. “I just can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “Did he ever frequent Smoothie Heaven on 34th Street?” Nick asked.

  Darla shook her head. “No. We rarely went into the city and when we did it was usually to see a show.” She raised her hands to her face and began to weep again as her mother awkwardly patted her shoulder.

  Eventually she stopped and lowered her hands. “I need answers,” she said as they were finally finishing up the interview. “I need to know who did this and why. I need to know something that makes sense.” Huge tears trekked down her cheeks and her mother plucked a tissue from a nearby box and handed Darla one.

  “We’re going to try to get those answers for you, Darla,” Lara said. “I promise you we aren’t going to rest until we have your answers.” What she couldn’t promise was that the answers would really make any sense.

  They left the house with grief clinging to them and it didn’t release them as they went on to the next family and the next. By the time they were ready to interview the last family on their list it was almost four o’clock and an impotent rage battled with a soul-sickness inside Lara.

  So much anguish and so many lives changed forever. The people who had been killed had been sons and daughters, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers and those who remained behind couldn’t make sense of the sudden tragedy that had occurred with no warning.

  “What kind of asshole does something like this?” Nick asked as he angled into a parking space at the curb in front of their last stop. “What in the hell could be the motive for somebody planting a bomb to kill people?”

  Lara didn’t reply, but she certainly felt his frustration. The same emotion burned hot in her chest.

  So far their interviews had yielded nothing of interest to the investigation. She wondered what was going on back at headquarters. Had anyone on the team found something that might break the case wide open? God, she hoped so.

  Since the moment she’d exploded out of the car at the horrible scene at the 34th Street bombing, her heart had been tight in her chest and a sense of thrumming urgency had been a constant companion. The police precinct bombing had only added to the bubbling cauldron of stress.

  They got out of the car to speak to Police Officer Janet Wayfield’s parents. According to Christina’s notes, Janet had only been twenty-two years old at the time of her death and she’d only recently joined the police force. She had been single and had lived with her parents, Adam and Cheryl.

  Adam answered the door. He was a tall, thin man who looked as if a strong gust of wind would blow him away. His face held a gray pallor and his lower lip trembled slightly as he introduced himself.

  He ushered them into a neat, homey living room where Cheryl Wayfield sat in an overstuffed chair that threatened to swallow her slight body.

  Her brown hair was a ratty mess and her blue eyes burned with a fevered light. Nick and Lara sat on the sofa facing her and Adam stood at the side of his wife’s chair.

  A bookshelf stretched across one wall and on the shelves were photos of their daughter. Janet as a baby, in a Girl Scout uniform, wearing a pink prom dress and finally a photo of her as a proud NYC police officer. There would be no wedding pictures in the future, no photos of smiling grandchildren. A life cut too short and the pain of that loss resonated through the entire house.

  As Nick gently asked some general questions about Janet, it was obvious that Cheryl grew more and more agitated.

  “Did Janet have any enemies? Did she maybe mention somebody she was having problems with?” Lara asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Cheryl replied and leaned forward. “Absolutely not,” she repeated, her voice growing more strident. “Janet was a lovely girl. She got along well with everyone. Don’t you dare try to make this her fault.”

  “Agent Grant didn’t mean to imply anything like that,” Nick protested quickly.

  “No, I...” Lara began.

  “Why are you here?” Cheryl interrupted and glared at Lara. “Why are you torturing me with all of these stupid questions? What difference does it make now?”

  “Cheryl, honey...” Adam said gently. He placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder but she shrugged it off.

  “She’s gone. She’s dead...my only child is lost to me forever. Get out.”

  She got to her feet and pointed a trembling finger at the front door as tears rapidly chased each other down her cheeks.

  “Cheryl, please,” Adam protested. “They’re only trying to help.”

  “Help? How in the hell are they going to help us?” She whirled on him, her eyes flashing with anguish and anger. “Don’t you try to shush me, Adam. I don’t want these people in my home anymore.” She looked back at Nick and Lara, who had gotten to their feet.

  “I want you both out of here right now,” she railed. “Don’t sit there and tell me how sorry you are for my loss. You know nothing about my loss. Now get out of my house.” She fell back into the chair and cried, her keening sobs following Lara and Nick out of the house.

  Cheryl Wayfield didn’t know it, but Lara somewhat understood her pain. Although Lara’s daughter was still alive, the little girl was as lost to her as Janet was to Cheryl.

  The ride back to headquarters was once again a quiet one. Not only did they carry the weight of grief from speaking to the families of the lost ones, but also the frustration of learning nothing that would help take the investigation to a new level.

  It was almost five o’clock when they walked back into CMU headquarters and Victoria beelined toward Nick. “Good, you’re back,” she said briskly. “Nick, they’ve called a cross-agency meeting to begin in half an hour. I want you and Xander to be there. The bigwigs are on the warpath and demanding updates. Xander is waiting for you in the break room.”

  “Okay,” Nick replied and took off.

  “Lara, I want you and James to check out a tip that just came in. We received a call from a man named Drew Anderson. He’s the manager of a drugstore not far from the police station and he says he has a customer we might be interested in. He wouldn’t give any more information over the phone and he wants to meet in a coffee shop down the street from the store where he works. Christina has the particulars in her office.”

  James and Lara headed down the hallway to the room where Christina sat in front of half a dozen computer screens. On several of the screens she was monitoring news stations, on others she was in the middle of conducting searches and finding information relevant to the current investigation.

  She looked frazzled and jumped up from her desk as a nearby printer spewed out a piece of paper. “Drew Anderson wants to meet you at the Spoon and Cup Coffee Shop in Brooklyn Heights. I’ve got the particulars for you right here.” She grabbed the sheet of paper and handed it to Lara.

  “What do we know about Drew Anderson?” Lara asked with a touch of wariness. The last thing she wanted was to be part of tomorrow’s headlines where a bomb exploded in the Spoon and Cup Coffee Shop.

  “He’s forty-seven years old and has been the manager at the drugstore for a little over fifteen years. No criminal past and he lives with a wife named Holly. From everything I checked out he appears completely legit,” Christina replied. “There’s nothing suspicious in his credit re
port, nothing anywhere to raise any red flags.”

  Lara looked down at the picture of the man Christina had gotten from somewhere off the internet. He appeared thin and was clad in a light blue button-down shirt and wore dark-rimmed glasses. He looked like the kind of man who would be found in the back of a bookstore or library...or the kind of man who built a bomb in his basement?

  “A drugstore where supplies for a Mother of Satan bomb could be bought,” Lara said. The exhaustion she’d come in with after talking to the grieving families disappeared as a new excitement thrummed in the pit of her stomach.

  “Maybe this Drew Anderson is the link we all need,” Christina said, her dark eyes snapping with energy.

  “This definitely sounds promising,” James agreed. “What about this Spoon and Cup place?”

  “According to its website it specializes in gourmet coffee and appears to be a neighborhood hangout,” Christina replied. “From what I could find about it, it looks legit, too.”

  “Let’s go.” Lara was eager to find out what the drugstore manager had to tell them. Hopefully this was the break in the case they needed.

  Chapter Six

  “We’ve already interviewed so many witnesses, but none of them had anything worth reporting. This has got to be our lucky break,” James stated with optimism ringing in his voice. That optimism was one thing Lara liked about him. No matter how overwhelming the odds seemed against them, James always saw a bright side.

  The rest of the ride was accomplished in relative silence. She parked the car down the block from the Spoon and Cup Coffee Shop, a little hole in the wall place next to a tattoo shop. “He’s got to have something big for us otherwise he wouldn’t have called in and had us meet him here,” James said.

  “We’ll see soon enough,” Lara replied, although anxious energy danced in her veins. James’s enthusiasm might have been contagious if she wasn’t the seasoned pro that she was. “You know as well as I do that things don’t always pan out the way we want them to.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m just trying to stay as optimistic as possible under the circumstances.”

  They got out of the car and walked toward the coffee shop. Despite Christina’s assuring words about the man and the place, Lara wanted to make sure this wasn’t some sort of a trap. Sadly in this day and age, law enforcement officers never knew what they were walking into. A simple house call could become a cop massacre.

  There was nothing on the street or sidewalk to give her pause. But before they reached the business’s front door she touched James’s arm to stop him.

  “We go in fast and alert.” She placed her hand on the butt of her gun and James did the same. The accelerated beat of her heart pumped loud and clear in her ears, a reminder that danger might only be a single breath away.

  They swept through the front door and Lara quickly scanned the scene. There was one man behind the long counter, a man and woman at one of the small tables, and Drew Anderson in a booth with a Styrofoam coffee cup in front of him advertising the establishment.

  Nobody else appeared in the place and Lara relaxed a bit, although she never completely let down her guard. The air smelled of fresh coffee and her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, when she’d grabbed a protein bar to eat on the train on the way into work.

  Seeing nothing suspicious they walked toward the man in the booth. He looked at them expectantly as they slid into the booth opposite him and introduced themselves.

  “Drew Anderson,” he replied and pushed the center of his dark-rimmed glasses to set them more firmly on the bridge of his nose. “Thank you for meeting me here.”

  “Why here?” Lara asked as she and James scooted into the booth seat opposite him. “Why not meet us at the drugstore?”

  “I didn’t want to meet with you where I work and I definitely didn’t want you coming to my home. I was also afraid to say too much on the phone.” His face flushed slightly. “I might be paranoid, but this could be serious business. I don’t want any of this to come back on me.”

  His nervousness was evident and Lara knew the best way to handle him was to be a calming influence. “We appreciate you talking to us, Mr. Anderson.”

  “I wasn’t sure what to do, but people are always saying if you see something, say something.” He turned his coffee cup around, as if unsure what to do with his hands.

  “It’s good citizens like you who make our jobs easier,” she replied smoothly. He gave her a grateful smile. “So, can you tell us why we’re here?”

  She shifted her gaze around the room once again, but the couple at the table was completely engrossed in their conversation and the man behind the counter was busy fixing a pot of fresh brew.

  Drew sat back in the booth and pulled out a slim briefcase. He opened it, took out a couple pieces of paper and then looked up at them once again. “Anyone at the store will tell you I’m not only a bit of a control freak, but I also suffer from more than my share of obsessive-compulsiveness. I like lists and I spend a lot of time studying our inventory.”

  “I’ve been told I’m a bit of a control freak, too,” Lara replied, hopefully building trust with him.

  Once again he offered her a small smile. “I keep meticulous records, particularly when it comes to certain items that we sell. I was going over some of those records this morning and realized we have a customer who has bought both acetone and hydrogen peroxide in unusually big amounts.”

  All of Lara’s nerves fired up. She exchanged a pointed glance with James, who also wore a tense anticipation in the set of his broad shoulders and the ticking pulse in his jaw.

  “As I’m sure you know, those ingredients are used in bomb-making. I saw the news and put one and one together, then called you immediately.”

  “Do you have a name for us?” James asked the store manager.

  “I do. He used a credit card for his latest purchase. All of his other transactions were in cash,” Drew replied.

  “How do you know that?” she asked. Would a bomb maker really use a credit card to buy his supplies? Hell, she supposed anything was possible. Anybody buying supplies who wanted to lessen their odds to be caught would have used cash. Maybe this guy thought using a credit card one time wouldn’t raise any brows.

  “When I found the credit card receipt I went through store surveillance tapes and saw him. Then I searched the tapes over the past month to see how often he’d been in and what he bought. Over the last thirty days he was in a total of five times and each time he bought several large bottles of acetone and several bottles of hydrogen peroxide.”

  “So, you have his name and address?” Lara asked. The thrumming inside her had reached a fever pitch. This sounded legit and it definitely sounded promising.

  Drew looked down at a piece of paper. “His name is Howard Dennison. My name won’t be used in any news reports or anything like that, will it?” he asked worriedly.

  “We’ll try to give you complete anonymity,” James replied.

  Drew hesitated a moment and then passed the sheet of paper with the man’s name and address across the table. “The bombs were horrible things. I watched it all on the news and it sickened me and my wife. I’m just trying to be a good citizen,” he said.

  “And we appreciate it, Mr. Anderson,” Lara replied.

  “Here’s a picture of him taken from the surveillance footage. I’m sorry but it’s pretty blurry.” He slid another sheet of paper across the booth.

  He was right, the photo was damned blurry. All Lara could really make out was dark hair and a medium build. “Do you have a copy of your surveillance footage?” she asked.

  Drew smiled again and pulled out a CD. “I thought you might want it.”

  “Ready?” she asked James. They had all the information they needed from Drew.

  “Ready,” J
ames replied. The two agents got up from the booth.

  “Thank you again, Mr. Anderson. We’ll be in touch if we have any more questions,” Lara said.

  Before they left the shop they both got a cup of coffee to go. Lara looked longingly at one of the premade ham and cheese sandwiches in a refrigerated display case but this definitely wasn’t the time to take a lunch break, no matter how brief it might be.

  Her head spun with possibilities as she thought of the information they had just learned. Howard Dennison had bought two of the main ingredients that could be used to make TATP, the same bombs that had taken out a smoothie shop and a police precinct. For most of the transactions he’d paid cash.

  Thank God he’d used a credit card for his most recent buy and thank God Drew Anderson had obsessive-compulsive issues, otherwise Dennison might not have been identified at all.

  “This sounds good,” James said when they were back in the car and headed to Howard Dennison’s address.

  “Yeah, it does. Call Christina. We need her to find out all she can on Howard Dennison and she needs to get a search warrant out here.” Although she told herself not to get her hopes too high, adrenaline whipped through Lara at the thought of taking down the mad bomber and ending at least this wave of senseless deaths in the city she loved.

  As she drove, she sipped the black coffee, feeling like a warrior gathering strength before a big battle. The coffee was hot and strong and a welcomed jolt of caffeine that further fed her energy rush.

  “If Howard Dennison is responsible for the precinct bombing then I wonder if we’ll be able to tie him to the 34th Street one, as well,” James said.

  “I just wish we could get a handle on why those particular locations were targeted.” She tapped her finger impatiently on the steering wheel as she stopped for a red light. “If two police stations had been bombed then it would be easy for us to assume that the bomber has an axe to grind against law enforcement, but the smoothie shop throws that theory all to hell.”

  “And leaves us with no real working theories. There, on the left,” James said and pointed to the large apartment building where Howard Dennison lived.