A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (18 page)

Warren’s behavior had changed of late. She still appeared able to lead him around by the nose whenever she wished, but something under the surface had shifted, like a fault line that you couldn’t see just yet but that you could feel, could sense in your viscera. A workshop, he called it, but what made it secret? What he had in there, she thought...it meant something to him. Something, after all this time, that she now felt compelled to learn.

In a kitchen drawer filled with junk she found a large paperclip. She worked it around in the doorknob lock, prodding and twisting. The knob rattled but the paperclip didn’t catch anything inside that she could lever. She tried the padlock and found it even more resistant. She needed something stiffer, went to her bag and found a cuticle trimmer in her manicure kit.

She tried the padlock again, got a little more play but couldn’t make it trip open. Encouraged, however, she inserted the tool into the doorknob. It went farther in and she seesawed it while wiggling the knob. Pop! Suddenly the knob turned freely. The surprise of it made her spine tingle.
Halfway there.

Sallye walked the perimeter of the apartment, listening for him. He was a volatile fellow and she couldn’t predict how he’d react if he found her in the forbidden room. If she got the padlock open, she thought, she’d have to be satisfied with a quick gander inside, then get out of there and know she could go back anytime if the contents interested her.

Returning to the door, she parted the beaded curtain and began working the padlock again, pushing and pulling the block as she jammed the tip of the cuticle trimmer around inside. She was sweating now, some beads of the curtain sticking to her neck where they lay across the dampening skin, tugging ever so slightly at her as she moved her shoulders, prodding with the tool.

She felt like she was getting somewhere, the tumbler succumbing slightly, the tool going a little deeper, achieving a bit more angle. She sensed the trap of her own tunnel vision as she vigorously twisted at the keyhole, the lock inches from her face, but the danger had receded to the back of her mind. She could hardly feel the beads of the curtain tapping upon her neck one moment, then lifting off of her skin, almost of their own accord. Meanwhile Sallye prodding the lock, twisting, probing…

A voice from behind froze her. It came from Warren in an unfamiliar tone. Sonorous, penetrating her skin. It said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

DIAZ IGNORED THE LOOK OF
shock on Kahn’s face. Kahn had had his feet up on Capobianco’s desk, and he dropped them to the floor like he’d been caught humping a freshly dead jellyfish.

“I knocked,” Diaz said. He was too excited to retreat. “There’s a break in the case.”

“How do you mean?” Kahn said, still with the phone in his hand, still discombobulated. “They collared someone?”

“No,” Diaz conceded. “Nothing like that. A technical break.”

“Let me get the lieutenant on.” Kahn set down the receiver and pressed a button on the desk set.

“Diaz,” Capobianco said through the speaker. “Still got all them fingers?”

“I’m sorry about the cathedral thing, Lieutenant. No excuses.”

“Forget it. It would’ve been your funeral, not mine. Don’t do it again, though. It makes Kahn nervous. And he’d hate having to inform the next of kin.” He chuckled. More supportive than Kahn, more magnanimous, Diaz thought.

“Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said. “I promise.” He could practically see Capobianco winking at him.

“So...the breakthrough, Diaz.”

He told them about the conversation with CSU, how the likelihood seemed high that the bombings were initiated by GPS coordinates. Bottom line: suicide not probable.

“Explains why the devices aren’t so packed with shrapnel,” Kahn said. “Maybe they’re not meant to kill anyone else. It’s flat-out assassination.”

“How’d the bomber know what coordinates to put?” Cap asked.

Diaz said, “I guess he could’ve programmed every army recruiting station into the chip.”

“Every one in America? Or—more likely…”

“The bomber is tracking the movements of his victims.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Capobianco said.

“Worth a look,” Kahn said. “And sort of like what Manny’s been saying all along.”

Finally a word of support from Kahn. Diaz thought it was too hard-earned, but he’d take it.

The conversation wrapped up. Through the speaker, Capobianco said, “Get back to work, Diaz. You’re officially out of the doghouse.”

FEELING MORE SATISFIED THAN HE
had in a long while, Diaz took himself to lunch at an Italian red sauce joint on the corner of Hudson and Jane Streets. He ordered a bowl of stracciatella, chicken parmigiana, and a side of ziti. As he sopped up the last of the sauce with a crust of bread, he thought with satisfaction that the new theory had come back around to his position, vindicating his faith in the two alleged perps—at least for the moment. Then he thought of the bomber possibly tracking his next victims. And for the first time in a week the voice in the back of his head repeated, “Danger lurks.”

He caught the waiter’s attention and called for the check. The waiter, exchanging glances with his boss, shook his head. “It’s on us, chief.” They knew they’d just fed a cop.

Diaz was placing a twenty on the table anyway when the phone rang, a blocked number. He picked it up. “Hullo.”

“Detective Diaz?”

“That’s me.”

“Nunez here. How you doing?”

“Great, but I’ll get better. You find anything out?”

“Sure as shooting. Your two boys—Horn and Littel—both passed through Landstuhl Hospital within a year of each other.”

Diaz stood to go and glanced at his watch, phone cradled against his shoulder. “That’s it?”

“What did you want in two days, for me to solve your case for you? It’s a start, isn’t it?”

“Captain, don’t most amputees from Central Command pass through Landstuhl?”

“Sure, okay.”

“So, much as I appreciate the news, I probably could’ve guessed as much without you telling me.”

“You could’ve guessed but now we know for sure. You’re asking for favors and all of a sudden you don’t like what I’m giving you. You know, Diaz, I got a pile of paper on my desk two feet high and none of it has anything to do with the NYPD.”

“Hold on. No offense, Captain. I’m just a little pumped up. We’re starting to narrow this thing down.”

“So you don’t need me anymore.”

“We need you more than ever. We’re pretty sure there’s a third party out there blowing up these veterans. He’s hiding the bombs in their prostheses somehow.”

A pause. “In their new limbs? They didn’t suffer enough? Sick bastard.”

“Good if we could end his streak. Help me think this through.”

“Okay.” Despite his protestations, Nunez seemed to be enjoying this. He jumped right in. “Landstuhl’s one common thread, maybe. If the C4 also came from a base in Germany, then it has to do with a point of contact that these guys shared. Maybe it’s someone they pissed off.”

“That someone is in the States now, so it means he got discharged from the army and came back home.”

“Or he was a contractor. Don’t count out that possibility.”

“Special Ops?”

“Those guys are usually inside. Besides them, only types I know with authorized access to C4 are EOD and combat engineers. Doesn’t mean he was authorized, of course, but that’s most likely, unless someone just went and lost a load. The sappers might use contractors. Or, like you said, he’d been inside and got discharged.”

“How you doing with that list of everyone in the area who had access to U.S. Army C4?”

“I’m getting to it. Bound to be a long list.”

“We’ll narrow it down once we have it.”

“Okay, Diaz. Give me a few minutes to get back to you.”

“That quick? You meant a few days, didn’t you, Captain?”

“A few minutes...a few days. Hell, could take a few years. But I’ll see what I can do.”

Diaz had second thoughts. “Here’s another idea, then. Can you get the patient charts from these two men?”

Nunez hesitated. “That’s confidential information, Diaz.”

“They gave up their privacy rights when they died.”

“Hmm. I like the way you think.”

WHEN THEY MET AGAIN IN
O’Shea’s office in Alphabet City, Diaz felt more like a part of the team, and it relaxed him. He leaned back and levered his chair on its two back legs.

“So maybe it’s not suicide,” O’Shea said in a conciliatory manner.

Diaz appreciated that, because he knew it had been said for Kahn’s benefit.

“Looks like assassination now,” the sergeant agreed. “And Diaz has a bit more that he’s been saving for us. Wouldn’t tell me in the car.”

“Out with it,” O’Shea said into Diaz’s smile.

Now, for the first time, Diaz revealed that he’d been having conversations with a high-up military police officer in Germany. Kahn may have suspected as much, but O’Shea looked impressed.

“If the C4 came from Germany and the victims both passed through Germany,” he said, “seems like a high probability that there’s a connection there to the bomber.”

“Exactly,” Diaz affirmed.

“So who touched both these guys at Landstuhl?” O’Shea asked.

“Lots of possibilities,” Kahn said. “Doctors, nurses, security guards, cleaning staffs.”

“Physical therapists,” O’Shea added. “Shrinks.”

“I don’t think these guys get much physical therapy until they arrive stateside,” said Diaz. “Shrinks are a possibility, though.”

“The place is probably a beehive. How do we narrow it down?”

“I got the MP working on a couple of fronts.”

O’Shea leaned back in his chair, ran his fingers through his red hair, blew a breath at the ceiling. “Damn far from solving this thing and the bomber’s still out there, could strike any minute. There’ll be hell to pay if another one of these guys blows up.”

“I hear the governor has called in the National Guard to stand in front of every recruiting station,” Kahn said. “They should be hitting the street right about now.”

“Like they would’ve stopped either of these two guys?”

“Must be quite a few of those offices.”

“More than a dozen in the five boroughs.”

“That’s not so bad. We can suggest they turn the entire block around each one into a no-go zone.”

“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?