Spectrum (The Karen Vail Series) (25 page)

Vail straightened up. “Speak of the devil—anything on Danzig? Any reason why he’d want to kill Greek women and an Italian mob capo?”

“Still in the wind. And no, we couldn’t find any connection.”

In the next instant, Vail saw, over Russo’s left shoulder, a commercial jet whiz by, way too low and—

“Holy shit!”

The north tower of the World Trade Center swallowed the large airplane. As Russo spun around, Vail felt a vibration shake the window, followed immediately by the sound of an explosive impact—

“What the hell did I just see?” Vail said. “It looked like—it was—Jesus Christ, a plane flew right into the building. How the hell … ?

Russo grabbed his two-way radio as Vail pulled out her phone and started dialing.

“Manhattan South homicide lieutenant to Central.” He proceeded to report what Vail had seen as her phone call connected.

“Agent Vail for the ASAC … No, get him on the phone right now—it’s an emergency.”

He was on the line less than five seconds later.

Vail related what she had seen.

“Are you sure? A passenger jet?”

“That’s what it looked like. It happened so fast, it was flying real low and then—”

“You have eyes on the tower?”

“I do, sir. I’m—I don’t know, three-quarters of a mile away.”

“Stay there. Monitor the situation. I’ll call you for updates. We’ll get in touch with the FAA, see what the hell’s going on. Navigational malfunction, whatever—wait, hang on.”

Navigational error? It flew right into the damn building.

Muffled voices, then her ASAC: “Just got word American Flight 11’s been hijacked.” To someone else: “Is that eleven? Did eleven hit the towers? … Yes or no? … What do you mean they don’t know?” She heard him yell something to someone, then the line disconnected.

Vail could not tear her eyes from the orange flames and dense gray smoke billowing from the tower, the fire and blackness spreading to the floors above and below the jumbo jet’s point of entry.

Russo lowered his radio. “Sanchez,” he called into the hallway. “Get over to the Twin Towers. A plane hit the building, they’re gonna need help evacuating.”

He started to back out of the room. “I’m going over there, see what I can do to help. You’ll be able to wait here with the body till CSU gets here?”

“At the moment, my orders are to stay put. My ASAC wants me to be their eyes till they get up to speed on what’s going on.”

Russo looked back at Doris Vassos’s body. “Try to give her everything you’ve got. She deserves no less.”

“Of course.”

Russo left and Vail tried to keep her gaze from moving back to the window, but she couldn’t help herself. The steady flow of smoke was building into a dense, relentless plume that was blowing out across the Hudson.

The drone of sirens rose and fell as emergency response vehicles whizzed by. Off to her left and looking like children’s toys, FDNY engines raced down Broadway, followed by two ambulances.

Focus, Karen. There’s nothing you can do about the fire. But you can help Doris Vassos. And other women who are being targeted by this UNSUB.

Vail turned away from the window and tried to clear her thoughts. If she was ever going to get her mind off what was happening outside, she needed to look around the apartment and create some form of record for Detective Slater when he arrived.

She slipped on Russo’s gloves and searched the place, finding a PDA, unopened mail, a half-read paperback novel by John Lescroart—and a Canon EOS SLR camera. She looked it over, turned it on, and checked to see how many shots she had left on the roll: nineteen. Not exactly procedure—using the victim’s camera to shoot crime scene photos—but she would not be destroying any evidence, so it would do.

She first spent a couple of minutes looking through the PDA, lingering on Vassos’s calendar. Nothing jumped out at her. Then again, before she knew more of who the woman was, important entries could look like innocuous notes, devoid of meaning.

Returning to the bedroom, she began snapping photos of the body and the room from wide-angle perspective shots to closeups of the wounds, using the remaining photos with care. After capturing the scene as best she could, she pulled a pen from her pocket and gently parted Vassos’s strands of hair along the posterior aspect of her skull.

And there it is.

As she revealed the design drawn in marker, any doubt as to whether or not Vassos was murdered by the same killer vanished. She shot a few pictures of it, then set the camera on the floor and examined the illustration. The UNSUB had sketched the familiar X, along with the capital letters E, I, D, and a lowercase h.

Vail stood there staring at the letters. She tried, once again, to under-stand the pattern. D could stand for Danzig—if he was in fact the killer. But what were the other letters? His first name was Victor, yet there was no V. And Danzig was an alias. Did they ever find out what his birth name was? There was no way she would bother calling now to find out.

As she mused on the lettering scheme, a thought occurred to her: the last victim, Megan Kostas, had a g. This is an h, the one prior—Herod—was an f.

Is it possible that he’s numbering his victims? Why letters instead of numbers? And why did the first victim have a d instead of an a? Unless the d was meant to be an a, but was poorly written—or misinterpreted.
She would have to ask Russo or Slater to check that against the Manos crime scene photos. But it still would not explain Crinelli and the r.

And even if he was numbering his kills, it did not add up. They had five confirmed victims, but h was the eighth letter of the alphabet. Agent Safarik’s admonishment about finding the killer’s first victim rattled around her thoughts. Finding that first victim could be key, he had told her.

Manos may not have been the first—Vail had considered that many times—but could she have been the fourth?

The increasing clamor of sirens pulled her attention back to the fire. She glanced at her watch. It was nine o’clock and the black smoke continued to course skyward. She could see the clear delineation of the entry point of the plane in the tower’s skin, a diagonal rip covering several floors.

Despite the continuing waft of smoke, Vail no longer saw flames. Per-haps the building’s sprinkler systems were keeping things under control until the fire department could hook up their hoses. But how did that even work in a skyscraper, let alone one that was 110 stories? She had never pondered that.

However they fought a fire in a building of this size, she hoped they got it under control fast. The smoke was so thick that there was no way anyone trapped on those floors could breathe. She imagined people were already evacuating the tower—but what about those in the offices where the plane entered? Dead, extinguished on point of impact.

Vail played the image back in her mind. She still found it difficult to believe: the jet flew directly into the side of the building and was literally swallowed up inside the huge structure. She shook her head in disbelief.

What could explain that? Navigational or instrumentation error? Two dead or incapacitated pilots? Or was it purposeful, some sort of suicide attack—”

As that thought formed, she saw what looked like another plane approaching the towers from the opposite side. It disappeared from view and then—“Oh my god. What the hell?”

An enormous mass of fire and flame exploded from the outer edge of the south tower, gathering and then pluming upward like a mushroom.

We’re being attacked. This is a goddamn terrorist attack.

Vail instinctively reached for her Glock—and then realized it would do her no good. Her jaw slack, she watched helplessly as the cloud rose, expanded, and consumed.

I can’t stay here. I’ve gotta go—I’ve gotta go.

Vail ran to the hallway, stopped and went back into the kitchen, found cellophane tape—as good as she could do under the circumstances—then pulled off her crime scene booties and gloves. She started to close the front door behind her, but hesitated before the latch engaged. She didn’t know if she should lock it or leave it open to permit her return.

Lock it. Worry about getting back in later. Secure the scene best you can.

After pulling it shut, Vail unrolled the tape and sealed the joint, covering both the jamb and the door’s edge. There would be little chance that someone could open it without tearing it—and leaving sign that the crime scene had been disturbed. She pulled a pen from her pocket and scribbled her initials at various points along the strip, then headed for the elevator.

Outside, she hit the ground running, checking over her shoulder for taxis, but finding them full or moving swiftly in the opposite direction. She jogged on, turned onto Church Street, and headed toward the Twin Towers.

VAIL STOPPED SEVERAL police officers who were en route to the trade center complex. They directed her to assist with the evacuation effort, where they were attempting to channel people to areas where they could get away from the immediate vicinity or seek medical attention if they had been injured or suffered smoke inhalation. With thousands of people still in the building, the job was enormous—and things were still in disarray as law enforcement got its bearings and established a coordinated response.

As she neared the towers, she had to step around debris that had been thrown off when the jets impacted the buildings. The gray and black smoke continued pluming up and out, but also downward, soot-thick and obscuring in its intensity.

Firefighters stood ready beside their vehicles, jackets on and equipment in their hands.

“I’m FBI,” Vail said. “What’s the plan?”

The man’s nametag read, “Brennan.” He brought a hand up to the bill of his helmet to get a view against the smoky glare. “We got several companies in there, they’re going up as far as they can to bring people out.”

“Both towers?”

“Both,” Brennan said. “Pretty fuckin’ dangerous in there, shit’s falling all over. Even the lobby—the windows are blown out, I heard over the radio that jet fuel shot down the elevator shaft, caught fire, and exploded.”

“But the people at the top—”

“Everyone above the impact zones is trapped. Twenty-something floors of people in tower one, fifty floors in tower two, and we can’t get ’em down. Elevators are out and the stairs are useless. Staircases were built with sheetrock, not concrete, so anything above the fires, they’re just toast.”

“You know the place pretty well.”

Brennan kept his gaze on the buildings, watching the conflagration. “I’m with Ladder 1, seven blocks from here. We’re out at the towers every week, sometimes five times in a shift. I know those buildings like nobody else. And I can tell you this: way these buildings are built, those people up there, they ain’t got no way to get out.”

Vail’s throat constricted from the soot and debris floating down in a continuous stream. She swatted away as much of it as she could. “Roof evacuation?”

“With all that smoke, I doubt they can land. A day like this, roof landing’s out anyway, because of the antennas and all the other crap they got up there. Just can’t see. Chopper goes down … definitely don’t need that shit on top of all that other shit.”

People continued moving past her as two more FDNY engines maneuvered into place.

“We’re just trying to get the fires out, get as many people down as we can.”

“How are you going after the fire?”

Brennan looked at her for the first time. “Only thing we can do. Elevators are out, we have to walk it. With all that gear—maybe seventy pounds of it—we gotta haul up eighty flights in tower one alone.”

Walk up eighty flights? That’s gotta take an hour, if not more.
“What can I do?”

“Nothing, right now. We’re awaiting orders to go in. Idea’s to get people out and away from the buildings. So wanna make yourself useful, make sure people move along. We don’t want them stopping to watch.”

Brennan got a call over his radio. He listened for a moment, then turned to his men. “Okay, that’s us. Let’s go!”

Vail thanked Brennan, wished him luck, and watched as the men huffed it forward, toward the awninged entrance to 1 World Trade Center. She ventured closer, directing onlookers to clear the area for arriving emergency vehicles.

As she moved to within half a block, she craned her head up toward the impact zones—and something whacked her on the arm, knocking her back onto her ass.

“What the—”

A body struck the pavement at her feet, pancaking upon impact and spattering blood and tissue across her clothing.
Oh my god—

She scrabbled backward, away from the remains, just needing to get away, to somehow wipe that image from her mind. She had viewed several corpses during her time in law enforcement, but this was different. This was something she could never forget.

She rolled onto her hands and knees and got up, expecting more bodies to rain down on her. She sprinted toward the nearest building’s edge, ten feet away, and looked up again.

Several people were hurtling down from the upper stories, dark forms bicycling through the air, free-falling, plunging toward the pavement a hundred stories below.

In a momentary clearing of smoke, she could see dozens more perched on the edge of the structure, above the gaping holes torn by the jets, and she realized they were pondering their fate: burning alive in an oven-like fire or leaping, ending it all in a matter of seconds. Frightening, but painless.

How could this be happening?

Vail ran forward, into the rubble-strewn plaza, skirting chunks of concrete, strips of metal, paper, glass, and body parts—and engaged a throng of people, moving them along, onto the street, channeling them away from the complex.

As they stumbled past her, she heard people saying what she had been thinking: this can’t be happening.

Twenty-five minutes later, she heard a chest-pounding rumble that sounded like an avalanche. She looked up to see an expansive cloud of dust and debris moving down from above. On a nearby police radio Vail heard, “She’s going! Tower one’s coming down—evacuate, evacuate!”

Vail could not move.
It’s falling? How—