“Hey, Bennett. Glad you could make it,” Bryce said sarcastically as we went past him.
He must be a pretty good intel guy after all, I thought, nodding at him. It seemed that he, too, had heard the rumors about my upcoming demise as case lead.
I was coming around the back of the buslike medical examiner’s mobile command center when I saw the ME himself, Tom Durham, helping one of his assistants slide the first of the two stretchers with the already body-bagged suspects on them up a ramp to the vehicle’s back door.
“Hold it there, Tom,” I said to the NBA-tall medical examiner, whom I’d worked with a few times about a decade earlier, when I was in Homicide.
“Mike Bennett,” Durham said, peeling off his rubber glove to shake my hand over the corpse. “Well, well, out of the mists of time. You’ve put on weight.”
“Ah, c’mon, Tom,” I said. “You know how these blue and red lights always put on ten pounds. This is my partner, Emily. Any chance you find any ID on these two?”
“Nope. Not a thing. We already printed them, too, for that guy in the suit over there. No help there, either, apparently.”
“You mind if we take a quick peek at them?” I said.
“Nope,” Tom said, grabbing the body-bag zipper. “And neither will they, I imagine.”
I placed the video still of the darker kid next to the kid on the gurney. The kid’s head was grotesquely deformed from several gunshot wounds, but I thought the picture looked like him.
“What do you think?” I said to Emily.
“I think it’s him,” she said.
Tom looked over her shoulder.
“Me, too,” the ME said with a nod.
We quickly ID’d the other suspect as the second guy who dropped off the EMP device. We needed names, though. Somehow. There was no way I was going to allow this to be yet another dead end.
I thanked Tom, but instead of heading back to the car, I pocketed my phone and walked with Emily away from the police lights to the rocky edge of the island’s dark shore.
“Wait a second,” I said after a minute of looking out over the water. “Look.”
Across the quick current of choppy water, not too far away at the Manhattan base of the bridge, were the lights of our crisis post for the Yorkville disaster.
“The bastards were right here watching us yesterday, weren’t they?” Emily said in shock. “Watching us scramble. The panic. All those poor souls having to be evacuated from the hospitals. They just stood here happily watching the results of what they’d done.”
“And by leaving the bodies right here, I guess they want us to know it,” I said.
“I’m really starting to not like these fellas, Mike,” Emily said as she kicked a broken kayak handle into the water. “I mean, not even a little bit.”
Chapter 43
Several hectic hours later that day, at ten to one, Emily and I waited in a narrow, crowded hallway before a set of double doors on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza.
On the other side of the doors, we could hear a voice droning on as we hastily went over the final details of the report we were about to give to the police commissioner and acting mayor and various and sundry other officials.
The door of the thunderdome opened after a minute, and Chief Fabretti was there.
“Mike, you ready?” he said.
The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment.
In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.
But before I could answer the chief’s question, Emily and I were inside, front and center.
There were about twenty or thirty people up on the amphitheater-style seats surrounding us, a lot of tense-looking NYPD and FBI brass, and the acting mayor. Also some suits from the White House, we’d been told.
If I needed any further indication of what was at stake, I saw it on the whiteboard that the last speaker had been using. Two words had been written with a Sharpie in large black letters.
EVACUATION PLAN
“Who the hell is this again?” said the acting mayor over the rim of her eyeglasses.
The tall, long-necked, white-haired woman’s name was Priscilla Atkinson, and I almost felt like asking the Park Avenue — raised grande dame the same question, as her only experience before being named deputy mayor was running public events for the Central Park Conservancy.
Instead I began.
“Hi. I’m Detective Bennett. This is Special Agent Parker, and we’d like to bring everybody up to date on what we have so far.”
An aide whispered in the acting mayor’s ear.
“One question,” Atkinson said, interrupting me. “What’s going on, Detective Bennett? Who’s doing this to us, and why the hell haven’t you found them yet?”
Instead of pointing out that she’d just asked, in fact, three questions, I continued.
“I’m here to answer everybody’s questions, Ms. Mayor, okay? I’ve been informed that everybody has already been briefed about the EMP device we discovered. What you may not be aware of is that last night, we were able to obtain video footage of men — two men — placing the object on the East Side building’s roof.”
“Are they the same two men seen on the video at the train bombing?” said the commissioner from the row beneath the mayor.
“No, they’re not, Mr. Commissioner,” said Emily. “They were different men.”
“Have you ID’d them? Who the hell are they?” demanded the mayor.
“We’ve located them, ma’am,” I said, “and we’ve actually just ID’d them as two recent NYU grads.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“We don’t know. We found them this morning in a Dumpster at a construction site on Roosevelt Island, both shot multiple times in the head.”
That got the murmuring going.
“The men ran a marketing firm. They’re local kids with no terrorist ties,” Emily said before the mayor could jump in with another stupid obvious question. “We think they were hired by the people behind this.”
“So we’re still in the dark?” said Ms. Atkinson.
“Not entirely,” I said. “We scoured their Internet and phone records and discovered that both were paid large sums of money over the Internet through what seems to be the same PayPal account. With the help of federal authorities, we are in the process of tracking down the owner of the account.”
“Get to it, Bennett,” the commissioner said after a beat. “Keep us apprised.”
I nodded at him and at Lieutenant Bryce Miller sitting below the commissioner like the good little doggie he was.
Guess I’m still on the case after all, Brycey, I mentally texted him.
As Fabretti showed us the door, I saw one of the White House suits start BlackBerrying like crazy; I hoped they were putting some pressure on PayPal to cough up a name. The mayor nodded at us before she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Seeing the obvious great concern and worry in her suddenly old-seeming face, I felt bad for her. She was just as strained and concerned and tired as the rest of us. And that was saying a lot.
Chapter 44
That night at around 9:30, approximately fifty-five miles due north of New York City, Emily turned off her phone as I pulled my unmarked off a backcountry road into a remote campground at Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, on the border between Putnam and Dutchess Counties.