Alert: (Michael Bennett 8) (13 page)

“We all will if that man in there even glances at the laundry of any female member of this family,” chimed in Fiona.

“Forever!” said Chrissy.

“Forever? Wow, okay, ladies. I’ll work on it. Sheesh,” I said, slowly backing away.

“Hey there, Martin. How’d the first day go?” I said back in the kitchen.

“Ah, they’re great, so they are,” said Martin. “They complained a bit about the running around, what with the rain and all, but that’s natural. Listen, I think that little one there—Trent, is it?—has some real potential as a footballer, especially for a three-footed Yank, but what are we talkin’ about my day at work for? I heard it on the radio. They hit us again, have they?”

I nodded.

“Is it bad?”

“It’s pretty bad, Martin,” I said.

“And I thought the troubles in Northern Ireland were bad. Who’s doing it? Is it those al Qaeda nut jobs again, do ya think?”

I shrugged.

“We don’t know yet.”

“Well, I thought it best to keep the TV off on account of the youngest ones,” Martin said. “I thought you’d handle the situation best.”

“Good call, Martin,” I said.

And now for another, I thought, taking out my phone and hitting a speed-dial number.

“Hey, Tony,” I said. “I’d like to get four large pies, one plain, two sausage, and one with pepperoni.”

“Mike, whatcha doin’? Don’t bother with that. I got dinner covered. I’m making them some smoothies with Caesar salad.”

“Hey, that’s perfect, Martin,” I said. “We’ll have everything with the pizza.”

“MMM, THIS PIZZA
sure is good,” I said in the dead silence to break the ice.

It certainly needed some breaking. I looked around the table at the kids with their faces downturned at their food. It was suddenly Buckingham Palace formal and pin-drop silent with Martin having joined us for dinner.

“Fine. I’ll say it if no one else will, Dad. Are we all going to die or what?” said Brian around a mouthful of pepperoni.

“What?” I said, glaring at him.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bridget.

“Oh, it’s nothing really, little sis. We’re just under attack by a bunch of insane terrorists again,” Brian said, staring at me like it was my fault. “Not for nothing, Dad, but if we have to move again somewhere, you can count me out. I’m going to lie about my age and join the marines or something.”

“Relax,” I said, looking around the table. “There was a blackout on the East Side. They think somebody did it deliberately. That’s all. We don’t know who’s doing it, okay? It’s a mess, and we need to pray for a lot of poor people who are affected, but it’s okay. Honestly.”

“Okay?” said Juliana. “First they blow up a train tunnel, then they kill the mayor, and now—”

“You’re going to pass the garlic salt, young lady, and we’re all going to have some nice dinner-table conversation,” I insisted loudly.

I guess I was a little louder than I intended to be, because everyone stared at me like I was nuts. Except for Martin, who, I could see, was trying hard not to laugh at me and the rest of us Bennett lunatics from behind his napkin.

In the awkward silence, I suddenly tossed out an even more awkward conversation starter.

“Hey, how about those Yanks, Eddie, huh? Pettitte’s looking sharp, isn’t he?”

Eddie stared at me quizzically, as though I had just grown another head.

“Well?” I said again, louder.

Eddie put his slice down on his paper plate carefully.

“I don’t know, Dad,” he said slowly. “He’s retired.”

That’s when Martin couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. Seamus joined him. Then everybody else.

“Go ahead. Yuck it up, everybody. See this, Martin? It’s laugh-at-Daddy time here at the Bennett abode. It’s a common dinnertime stress reliever,” I said, sticking out my tongue at them before I started laughing at myself. “Works every time.”

I leaped up immediately three minutes later when the phone rang. It was Mary Catherine, I saw on the caller ID in the living room. Finally! I was so eager to talk to her that I managed to hang up instead of pick up, and I was placing the handset back down when she called back.

“Finally, Mike! Oh, you had me so worried!” Mary Catherine said. “I had the damnedest time getting through. I just saw the news. What’s going on? Tell me everybody is okay.”

“We’re all fine, Mary Catherine. Everybody is as healthy and sarcastic as ever,” I said.

“But what is this EMP bomb? What about the nuclear stuff they were saying on the news?”

Even after I explained it to her as best I could, she—like everyone else—didn’t seem very reassured.

“How’s things on your end?” I said, changing the subject.

“The new buyer is looking very serious. I’ll know on Monday,” she said.

I could hear the smile in her voice.

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” I said, hearing music in the background. “Are you celebrating already?”

“Oh, no. That’s just some Australians reliving the eighties.”

“Any room for an American?” I said. “I could be there in six hours. I do a killer Depeche Mode.”

Mary Catherine laughed.

“Wow, how I wish I were there with you, Michael. I can’t tell you how much I miss those kids, too. All of them.”

“All of them?”

“Oh, Michael, you’ll never know. Every little stinker in the bunch. It’s killing me not being there. What did that oil-spill CEO guy say? ‘I want my life back.’”

“I want our life back,” I said.

There was a pause.

“I have to go,” said Mary Catherine.

“So do I,” I said.

There was a pause.

“Why haven’t you hung up yet?” I said.

“I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

We laughed. There was another pause.

Then it happened.

“I love you,” I said.

I heard a gasp and then a loud earful of dial tone a second later.

What the hell are you doing? I thought, smiling at my reflection in the TV screen.

I’m reliving the eighties, all right, I thought as I realized that I had butterflies in my stomach. I felt like I was about sixteen. I liked it.

“Detective Bennett, what have you finally gone and done?” I mumbled as I stood.

MY CELL PHONE
rang a little after three o’clock that morning. Like most calls that come at ungodly hours, it was not good. It was from Neil Fabretti, the chief of detectives himself.

“Mike, sorry to bother you. I just got off the phone with the new mayor’s people. The gist of it is they’re beyond pissed at the pace of the investigation and want whoever’s on it off it and someone new put on pronto.”

Though I was a little stunned to actually hear it, part of me had been waiting for this call. I’d been on high-profile cases before, and I knew that now with several people dead, including the mayor, tens of thousands of people displaced, and millions more on edge, the pressure to do something, even unfairly sacrificing a convenient scapegoat like me, was immense.

Good investigations were about being patient and meticulous, but that wasn’t exactly a popular sentiment, I knew from reading yesterday’s
New York Post
headline,
WHAT THE
#$%@
IS BEING DONE
?

When you lost the usually NYPD-friendly
Post
, you knew you were in deep trouble.

“Is that right?” I finally said.

“Yeah, well, I told them to pound sand,” Fabretti continued, surprising me. “I said that we couldn’t just go shuffling investigators around because of the pressure of the twenty-four/seven news cycle. I told them you were the best we had and that I was behind you one hundred percent, yada, yada, yada.

“But there’s a big meeting scheduled for one o’clock this afternoon at the commissioner’s office, and you need to be there for the investigation’s update with bells on, if you know what I’m saying. Nothing personal, but the reality is, if you want to keep being the lead on this, Mike, you got about ten hours to make something drop.”

“I’ll be there. Thanks for the ‘look out’ and the heads-up, Chief,” I said before I hung up.

Wide awake now, I knew it was time to make my own 3:00 a.m. calls to see if there had been any developments. Doyle and Arturo didn’t pick up, but I caught Brooklyn Kale burning the midnight oil at the NYPD intelligence desk we’d been assigned.

“Mike, thank goodness. I was just going to call you,” she said.

“What have you got, Brooklyn?”

“Something good for a change. We got video of the guys—two guys—bringing the EMP device into East Eighty-First Street.”

“Video?” I said. “But I thought the super said that the on-site computer where they store the feed was fried with the EMP.”

“It was, but we canvassed at the high-rise across the street, and it turns out their video is run by a national firm that backs up everything off-site. The security firm sent the film over about an hour ago. It’s beautiful. You can see the guys bringing in the box, Mike…the plates on the van they were driving—the whole shebang. Check your e-mail. I just sent a clip of it to you.”

I opened the video.

It was incredible.

I thought it was going to be the two men from the video of the train tunnel bombing, but it wasn’t. I watched in color as two young guys in a white van, college kids, maybe, pulled into the garage next to the building and unloaded the metal device onto a hand truck.

“The plates on the van look funny to you?” I said to Brooklyn as I hit Pause. “They’re New York State, but what are they? Commercial?”

“Yep. Already ran them. The van is from a Hertz location downtown—or at least its plates are,” Brooklyn said. “Doyle’s on the phone with the manager, who’s on his way in. The manager said you can’t rent without a credit card and a driver’s license, so we’re looking good on a potential lead there. I’ll hit you with it the second Doyle calls me back and I hear anything.”

“Great job, Brooklyn,” I said.

“One more thing, Mike, that just came up. May or may not be related,” she said. “Two young men were just found shot dead at a construction site on Roosevelt Island. I called the desk sergeant at the public safety department on the island, and he told me they don’t have ID on them, but the general description seems about the same as these two guys on the video. You want me to head out there or stay here coordinating?”

A lead was a lead, I knew from experience. Even if the suspects were no longer in a position to talk to us, they could still provide us with valuable information.

“No, you stay there,” I said. “I’ll grab Agent Parker and check it out.”

TWENTY-SIX MINUTES
after I hung up the phone, I sat in my unmarked on Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, staring at the garish neon lights as they geysered and flashed silently on the beautiful people-filled billboards above the worn and empty concrete canyons of Times Square.

As the song says, New York City never sleeps, but between 4:15 and 4:30 a.m., it sometimes takes a quick catnap. Even so, it was weird seeing Times Square devoid of people. Not to mention quite off-putting under the horrible circumstances.

I saw that Emily’s hair was still wet from her shower when she finally appeared at a run from her glass-fronted hotel. I smiled to myself as she pulled the car door open. The sight of her was anything but lonely.

“Let me bring you up to speed on some economic forensics I did on the mayor’s shooter, Alex Mirzoyan,” Emily said, thumbing her smartphone as we headed east for Roosevelt Island.

“First, the good news. That robotic gun-aiming device used in the mayor’s assassination is highly specialized, and we were able to track down the manufacturer. The company is giving us some pushback after we asked for their customer list, but we have the US attorney drawing up a warrant, and I think we’ll be making progress there.”

“What about the ownership of the apartment the shooter was in?” I said.

Emily scrolled through screens on her phone.

“No dice there, unfortunately. Apparently, the owner is a Columbia University international law professor who’s in Brussels for a semester’s sabbatical. It doesn’t seem like he’s involved. He rented it out anonymously for a thousand dollars a week through one of those Internet house-swapping services to a fake e-mail address that Mirzoyan must have set up called woopwoop-two-two-six at AOL dot com.”

“Well, it eliminates me as a suspect, at least,” I said, shaking my head. “My fake e-mail address is woopwoop-two-two-six at
Yahoo
dot com.”

“Very funny,” Emily said, tapping her smartphone screen again. “But what’s more promising is some weird stuff we found with Mirzoyan’s finances. Last week he opened a PayPal account that had three thousand dollars wired into it, which he immediately withdrew from a bank in South Miami.”

I glanced over at her.

“Expense money?” I said. “So he could come up to New York?”

“Could be. Like we’re doing with the rifle company, we’re in the process of having the attorney’s office try to persuade PayPal to tell us who the mysterious someone who wired the money is.”

WE WERE IN
Queens twenty minutes later. I got turned around after I got off the first exit of the Midtown Tunnel and wandered around the industrial maze of Long Island City for a bit.

“How are we lost, Mike?” said Emily, yawning. “I thought you were Mr. Native New Yorker.”

“I am, Emily, but this isn’t New York, it’s Queens,” I said, making a U-turn. “I mean, we just passed Forty-First Avenue and Twenty-First Street—or was it Twenty-First Avenue and Forty-First Street? Cops from other boroughs usually have to leave a trail of doughnut crumbs behind them in order to find their way back out.”

“What is this crazy place, Mike? Roosevelt Island, I mean,” Emily said as we rolled south under several varieties of train and car underpasses and finally swung onto the small, two-lane Roosevelt Island Bridge.