When he turned again to face the room, he saw Timmons helping Spellman to a chair. Watching them, Becker took out his cell phone and called Hendrix in the lobby. He told him the situation, then put the phone away and approached Officer Spellman. The man’s eyes were glassy and vacant.
“What happened?” Becker asked him as gently as he could. He was vaguely aware that the air conditioner had come on again.
“He killed Rice,” Spellman said in a monotone. “He killed him, then took a shot at me. I jumped behind the desk there.”
“You sure you’re not hit?”
Spellman blinked, then ran a hand over his chest and stomach in a gesture that would have been comical under other circumstances. “I don’t think so.”
“No struggle?”
“No time.”
“What happened next?” Becker said.
Spellman motioned with a lift of his chin. “He went through the window.”
Becker frowned. “Isn’t that safety glass?” he asked, studying the jagged hole.
“Beats me. He just put his head down and rammed through.” Spellman swallowed and said, “I never saw anything like it.”
“Okay, you just rest a minute.” Becker picked up the cell phone and punched numbers. “Hendrix? Free up one of the elevators, we’ve got a man coming down. Any sign of the bomb squad?... Well, when they do, send ’em up, quick. And see if you can kill that a/c, we’ve got a search to do here.”
He signed off and turned to Officer Spellman. “You go on down to the lobby, sport. I’ll tell your people you did good.”
The cop nodded dazedly but made no move to get up.
“You need some help?” Timmons asked him.
Spellman blinked, then focused on him and said in a faint voice, “No. No, I can make it. Thanks, guys.” He rose unsteadily to his feet, took a breath, and made his way out the door. Moments later Becker heard the elevator ding at the other end of the hall.
“What about the body?” Timmons asked.
Together they turned to look at Officer Rice lying dead on the floor ten feet away.
“He’ll get a hero’s burial,” Becker said. “But right now we’ve got work to do.”
Both of them took a deep breath and directed their attention to the office. It was pretty much in order except for the floor on the left-hand side of the room, which was strewn with books and boxes apparently taken from a line of storage bins and shelves along that wall. It was clear that the two other cops had indeed interrupted the bomber as he was preparing a place to plant the device.
“Spellman was right,” Timmons murmured, looking at the items scattered about on the carpet. “The bomb’s here somewhere.”
Becker nodded agreement. But something was nagging at him, something at the back of his mind.
“We should have a while, though,” Timmons was saying. A drop of perspiration ran onto his eye, and he brushed it away with the back of his hand. “Like you said, it’d be set for the morning rush hour, right?”
Even as Timmons spoke, Becker noticed the lamp again. The lamp worried him. If there had been no struggle, why was it broken? Had the suspect knocked it over in his dive through the window?
The cell phone rang. Timmons waited for Becker to answer it and, when he didn’t, answered it himself.
Becker was still staring at the fallen lamp. Not only was it broken, it was unplugged. Unplugged and lying in the middle of the floor. Becker frowned and concentrated, letting his eyes sweep the room. The open bins, cluttered shelves, carpet, window, walls—
“It’s the chief, sarge,” Timmons said.
Becker’s gaze stopped on two small holes in the wall just above the baseboard, beside the window. He walked over to examine them. They were bullet holes, spaced no more than an inch apart.
Bullet holes?
“Sarge,” Timmons said again. “The chief wants to talk to—”
Becker squeezed his eyes shut, searching his memory. Whatever was nagging at him had been there since they first entered the room and found the dead officer. And something else, too, something Spellman had told them...
His eyes snapped open.
The shirttail. There hadn’t been a struggle, yet Spellman’s shirttail was all the way out and his hat missing. It was as if he had not yet finished dressing. And the body on the sidewalk, decked out in what looked like tennis whites—
My God, Becker thought.
Without even looking at Timmons, Becker reached out and snatched the phone from his hand. “Chief?” he said.
“What the hell’s going on up there?” Chief Wellborn demanded. He was outside; Becker could hear traffic noises in the background. “I got a dead body on the sidewalk, and the guard here says there’s another one up—”
“Let me speak to him,” Becker snapped.
The chief, who was not accustomed to being interrupted, said, “Now, just a minute, sergeant—”
“The security guard,” Becker shouted, his face red. “Put him on!”
After a short pause the guard’s voice came on the line.
“Mr. Hendrix, this is Tom Becker. I want you to look at the dead man’s face.”
“Look at his... I can’t. His arm’s in the way—”
“Then move his arm! Look at his face, and tell me if you recognize him.”
A long silence passed.
“Hendrix?”
Still no reply. But Becker could hear him breathing into the phone.
“Mr. Hendrix?”
“I see him,” the guard answered, in a strange voice. “I see his face now...”
“It’s one of the two cops, isn’t it,” Becker said.
He heard the guard swallow. “Yessir, it is. It’s the other one, the one who didn’t talk to you on the phone. Spellman.” Hendrix paused, then murmured, “Why’s he in his underwear? There’s a pile of clothes lying way over there, bundled up and tied with a pants leg...”
“Mr. Hendrix, listen to me a minute.” Becker’s eyes were shut again as he spoke. “The man I told you was coming down in the elevator. Did you see him get off?”
The guard hesitated. “I didn’t see him, no, but I’m sure he’s down by now. By the way, I got a maintenance guy working on cutting off the a/c, and there’s a bunch of cops on the way up to you right now.”
“The bomb squad?”
“No, just cops. From all over.”
“Great,” Becker mumbled. “Put the chief back on.”
When the phone had been handed over, Becker said, “Chief, we’ve got some trouble here. The body in front of you is a cop from an East Side station. The bomber shot him and his partner, too, and got away. We need to get the explosives team up here on the double, and we need to put out a call to all units, with the following description...”
He spoke a moment more, listened, nodded, and signed off. Then he turned to Ed Timmons, who looked a bit like a business student who had just wandered by mistake into a class on quantum physics.
“He changed clothes,” Becker explained. “After they surprised him, he put Spellman’s uniform on and threw him out the window.”
Timmons swallowed. “So... he shot both of them?”
“Looks that way.” Becker’s eyes roamed the room again, clicking off each item even as he spoke. “I imagine he shot Rice first, then swapped clothes with Spellman before shooting him. That’s why there was no blood on the uniform.”
“But we heard the shots. They were close together—”
Becker pointed to the two bullet holes in the wall. “Those were the shots we heard. I figure he used a silencer to kill the partners, then used Spellman’s gun to put two rounds into that baseboard later, just so we would hear them, to back up his story. Then he used the floor lamp to smash the window and threw Spellman’s body out.”