Billionaire Blend (A Coffeehouse Mystery) (2 page)

T
welve

F
IFTEEN
minutes later, we were dressed and on the street. “Are you sure your friend is on duty?” I asked Mike, lips quivering from a full-body shiver. “It
is
the middle of a dark and frigid night.”

Okay, it was closer to 4:45
AM
—but it was darn cold.

My Greenwich Village neighborhood was deserted. The sky was rolling with low-hanging clouds, and the winter air was bitter with arctic blasts. Pulling me close, Quinn tried to shield me from a brand-new one. Grateful, I held on, clutching my tote bag (of culinary insurance) on one side, trying to leach a little of the man’s heat on the other.

“DeFasio’s in charge of the Bomb Squad,” Quinn explained, long arm around me, “so I guarantee he’ll be there. After the incident in front of your coffeehouse, I expect his ‘Italian Squad’ will be burning the midnight napalm.”

I hoped Quinn was right.

For weeks, Eric Thorner had come to my coffeehouse like clockwork. Every day, he arrived at the same time, except on the day of the bombing. My barista Esther had even pointed it out. “He’s early,” she’d announced in surprise, but with so much chaos after the car bomb, no one (not even yours truly) had managed to count that fact as important.

Yet it was
highly
important.

“If the bomber had counted on Eric Thorner to follow his usual schedule, then the car bomb should have gone off in some
other
location,” I’d explained to Quinn back in my kitchen. “Maybe there was another target—a specific building or office complex. Maybe other people should have been in that car. Wherever that vehicle
should
have been, the people there need to be warned. They need to take precautions.”

Quinn had played devil’s advocate, pointed out the explosives might not have been triggered by a timer. The Boston Marathon bombers had used a cell phone to detonate their pressure-cooker devices.

“How would that work?” I’d asked.

“The bomber would simply dial it up and
boom
!”

I didn’t know which trigger Eric’s car bomber had used and neither did Quinn. But we both knew one thing: if lives were still in danger, we had to do something
.

As we hurried along Hudson, I riffled my memories for any past dealings with the “Italian Squad,” as Quinn had called them. The moniker was no joke; it came right out of New York City’s history, when the Mafia used sticks of dynamite to terrorize and extort immigrant merchants and residents. An Italian-American police lieutenant had formed the squad to stop these outrageous acts, which made it the city’s first Bomb Squad.

Over the years, as the bombers’ identities changed, so did the squad’s nicknames: “Anarchist Squad,” “Radical Squad.” These days, members of this century-old unit were kept busy with all of the above: terrorist threats, gangland violence, and suspicious packages galore.

With their proximity to my coffeehouse, I sometimes noticed squad members stopping in. They always arrived in pairs, kept to themselves, and seldom socialized.

Unlike regular cops, who appeared constantly aware of their surroundings, Bomb Squad detectives always seemed preoccupied—and (frankly) their military tattoos combined with the insignia on their jackets gave me the shivers. All NYPD special units had their own patches, of course, but this one was the weirdest I’d ever seen. That recollection, along with a subzero gust, set my lips quivering again.

“W-would you tell me one last thing before w-we get there?” I asked.

“If I can.”

“Your friend, the head of the A-Team. What’s he like?”

“Dennis the Menace?” Quinn snorted. “I wouldn’t call him my friend; he’s more of a colleague. I don’t think DeFasio has any friends.”

Great, a hardcase.
“But you’ve worked with him?”

“Once, a few years back . . .”

As Quinn told the story, the two had first met over a car bomb case. Quinn had been running an informant undercover as part of his work investigating drug rings in the Bronx. One morning, the informant started his Caddy and the car filled with smoke; a fire erupted, and he barely escaped with his life. In the burned-out remains of his car, police found a bomb strapped to the starter.

“Lucky for Leroy, the device failed to detonate properly. But now I had a problem: someone knew my guy was a snitch and was trying to kill him . . .”

Other bombs began turning up—in a crack dealer’s van, a tricked-out SUV, and a bookie’s BMW. Only one of those devices detonated; it killed a freelance pimp. That death was what led to Quinn’s first encounter with DeFasio.

“By then, DeFasio had examined the unexploded bombs and noticed all of them used cheap, green wires to connect the explosive material to their timers. These wires were used mostly for teaching purposes, which is why DeFasio figured them to be the work of a trade school student . . .”

The two began canvassing schools and found one that used the exact same type of cheap, green wire, even handed out spools of it to its students. Quinn cross-checked their files with arrest records and within twenty-four hours, he had a dozen leads. In another twenty-four he’d scooped up a suspect.

“DeFasio had gotten me the best clue—from the bombs themselves,” Quinn explained. “The perp turned out to be a friend of some gang members who were angry about the invasion of their drug-dealing turf. When we raided the gang’s den, we found dozens of devices, all of them primed. They were constructed so poorly that there was no safe way to defuse them, so DeFasio and the guys in his unit put on bombproof suits and loaded them onto a containment truck.”

Quinn shook his head. “I was sweating, but DeFasio was
giddy
the whole time. I didn’t understand why until he took me up to the squad’s training field where we detonated the things, one after the other. He was like a kid with firecrackers, recording each explosion and chuckling with his guys over the instant replays. When the fun was over, DeFasio and his guys took me to a favorite hangout called St. Mulligan’s Pub for a supper of Frito Shepherd’s Pie—that was a first—and a long night of Irish Car Bombs.”

“Irish Car Bombs? I hope you mean—”

“Boilermakers made from Guinness stout, Baileys Irish Cream, and Jameson whiskey.” Quinn paused. “I was younger then.”

You were happier then, too,
I thought
.

Okay, so this wasn’t the time or place to discuss my observation, but I couldn’t help noticing how animated Quinn had been during his story, how alive and upbeat. For a few minutes, the beleaguered Washington G-man was gone and the vital New York cop I knew and loved was back.

I vowed to point this out to Quinn—later. Right now, we were turning onto West 10th Street, a quiet, residential boulevard where the lights of the Sixth Precinct burned brightly. This Bauhaus-style brick box doubled as the headquarters for Squad 228 (the A-Team’s official designation).

“A kid with firecrackers,” I murmured. “Well, at least you’ve answered one of my questions.”

“What’s that?”

I gestured to one of the precinct’s garage doors—the one standing next to a basement entrance labeled
Bomb Squad
. Painted against a sky blue backdrop was the unit’s insignia: The central figure was a mustachioed man, dressed in black, complete with eye patch and long, dashing scarf. Between his legs was a tubular-shaped bomb, which he rode Dr. Strange-love style. Under him floated a clock face set at five minutes to midnight. The iconic Manhattan skyline (including the now-annihilated World Trade Towers) stood in the background.

To me—and probably much of the general public—the insignia’s depiction of daring whimsy in the face of impending death was oddly confounding, even disturbing. In truth, it perfectly illustrated the squad’s worldview.

But their strange logo was quickly forgotten. Loud voices drew our attention, and they were getting louder by the second.