“Eleven thirty.”
“Eleven thirty so soon?” Martin said, checking his phone. “Well, let’s see. The kids are all fed, teeth brushed, and sacked out, et cetera. I got the boys’ laundry done. The girls didn’t have any. They never do. Funny. I had the boys running sprints down in the park. While I had Trent doing calisthenics, Eddie lost the soccer ball. We looked and looked but couldn’t for the life of us figure out where it had gone to. The Hudson River? But I told Eddie not to worry. I have plenty of practice ones I can bring from my dorm tomorrow.
“I wanted to do vegetarian for the crew, but Seamus came by and insisted on making turkey clubs. He’s quite a heavy on the mayo and bacon, if you want my opinion. Especially for a man of the cloth. That’s about it. So if there isn’t anything more, I’ll be on me way.”
“Nice try, Martin,” I said, my head still spinning from his dispatch. “Only place you’re going, kid, is the couch,” I said, pointing toward the living room. “There’s blankets and a pillow on the top shelf of the hall closet.”
“I couldn’t impose,” said Martin, yawning again. “Besides, I have an eight o’clock exam.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll wake you up and drive you to campus.”
“In your cop car?” said Martin, excited. “Get out! Never been in a fuzzmobile. That’ll be a gas, so it will. Will you hit the siren and lights?”
“If you’re good, Martin. Now, good night.”
I smiled as he left. There was at least a little silver lining in all the current chaos. Seamus had hit one out of the park by finding Martin.
He really was a great kid. It was especially funny how he was running the couch potato out of the boys. They griped, but if Ricky’s request for a FIFA Soccer PlayStation game for his birthday was any indication, Martin was starting to grow on them as well.
I made the mistake then of glancing at the mail table.
There was a letter on top addressed to me, and I stood there staring at Mary Catherine’s familiar perfect handwriting.
One part of me wanted to tear it open immediately and devour it, but something else told me, “Not so fast.” Maybe it was just my exhaustion, but I suddenly felt like there was something ominous about it, as if the news in it actually might not be so good.
Mary Catherine and I had become so close recently. Closer than ever. And yet here we were, still with an ocean between us. Her last call especially spooked me, how comfortable she seemed running her mom’s hotel. I couldn’t stop thinking that somehow we were drifting farther and farther apart.
Bottom line was I couldn’t deal with bad news. Definitely not now.
I left Mary Catherine’s letter on the mail table untouched and quietly turned off the light in the hall as I headed to bed.
Chapter 71
As it turned out, I actually ended up using my lights and siren to deposit Martin back at Manhattan College after all.
We didn’t have time to stop for coffee as I slalomed the Chevy at speed through the West Side Highway traffic, but I could see by the size of the whites of Martin’s eyes when I screeched to a stop under the elevated subway tracks on Broadway and 240th Street, near the Leo Engineering Building, that he was pretty wide awake.
There was actually a method to my mad dash to Riverdale. There’d been a breakthrough on the case. Robertson had done it. He had found a plate on a surveillance camera near the drop.
Thirty-First Street and Dyer Avenue was a boxed-in intersection; 31st Street, like most of the odd-numbered cross streets in the Manhattan grid, runs one-way to the west. If a car had come to drop off the package, it had three options when leaving: west, north, or south.
As it turned out, two of the exit routes — the ones to the west and to the north — actually had surveillance cameras pointed at the street. The camera aimed at the western route was highly visible on the corner. The camera to the north was much less visible, so that’s where Robertson had concentrated his search.
The last pickup on the box had been at 5:00 p.m., so Robertson had recorded the plate of every car that had stopped at the intersection since then. More than two hundred plates. From the DMV database, he got a list of names, then cross-referenced them with everything we had on all three outstanding cases, every lead and tip. Finally, at six fifteen this morning, something popped. A name.
A Russian name.
Dmitri Yevdokimov was a Russian immigrant with no priors. His name had been on the list of the more than nine hundred anonymous tips that had come in after the publication of the subway bomber stills.
The anonymous caller had said that Yevdokimov resembled the younger of the two subway bombers from the paper and that he was a chess genius with such a negative, unpleasant, antisocial personality that the Russian-accented caller said he “wouldn’t put it past the bastard to blow up the city.”
The note on the follow-up report by the FBI agent who’d worked the lead stated that Yevdokimov had been interviewed and had provided a solid alibi for the morning of the subway bombing.
But now that his car had been found a block from the drop site, it was time for a follow-up interview, I thought as I ate a light on Bailey Avenue and roared east.
Arturo and Robertson were already on scene with an ESU breach team at Yevdokimov’s last known address, in the East Bronx. The entire block and most of the neighborhood were slowly and meticulously being surrounded by half the department. Since the bloody fiasco in Queens, we were expecting the unexpected, and no one was taking any chances.
I’d gotten as far as East Tremont Avenue when my cell rang with Arturo’s number.
“What?!” I yelled.
“We bagged him, Mike! We were just setting up when a car turned the corner, and Doyle verified the plates. We swooped in as he was getting out of his car. Not a shot fired. ESU has him on the ground, and Mike, listen. There was another guy with him. It could be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We may have just ended this!”
“Great job, Arturo. I hope you’re right. I’m about five minutes out. Where are you taking him? The Four-Five?”
“Yep. The Four-Five. We’ll meet you there,” said Arturo.
Could it be that we actually caught this guy? I wondered as I tossed my phone into the passenger seat. I screeched around a double-parked fish truck and turned on the jets, the siren screaming.
“Let it be. Let it be. This must be the answer. Let it be,” I sang hopefully as I pinned it up East Tremont.
Chapter 72
The forty-fifth Precinct station house, near City Island, was on Barkley and Revere Avenues. I parked and flew up the stairs to the DT department on two and found Arturo and Robertson outside the detective CO’s crowded office. I happily greeted them as well as Brooklyn and Doyle, who were just inside with an ESU sergeant and the precinct captain.
“It looks like them, Mike,” was the first thing out of Arturo’s mouth. “No facial hair, but they look like the suspects from the subway bombing.”
“Anything on the other guy yet?” I said. “Tell me there’s a Facebook selfie of him holding a bunch of plastic explosives.”
“His name is Anatoly Gavrilov,” said Brooklyn. “Like Dmitri, he’s claiming he doesn’t know what the hell is going on — that they’re just cousins who work together as computer programmers and were coming back from a night on the town. They claim they’ve worked for plenty of Wall Street firms, which, from our preliminary look into it, might actually be true. Odd, though, since I wouldn’t exactly peg these two on first glance as Goldman Sachs consultants.”
“You had to see the guy’s house, Mike,” said Arturo. “Hoarders, except organized. Stacks upon stacks of labeled plastic containers of comic books, chess magazines, newspapers — mostly Daily News dating back to the fifties.”