“Sir?” the SWAT officer called.
“You knew about these motion detectors?” Bredloe called up in the darkness.
“Yes, sir.”
He wasn’t going to let them know he had been riled. “Nothing. Return to your posts. Let’s give him a little more time.”
He heard them moving.
He waited. The building was silent.
The airplane still lay on the tile. It annoyed him to think that a situation this serious could be reduced by those hot dogs into fun and games. He walked out to the center of the mosaic, causing the motion detectors to light the entry again. Keeping his eyes on the upper level, he bent to pick up the airplane, setting the flashlight down just long enough to tuck the paper into his jacket pocket. As he picked up the flashlight, the lights above him went out again, which puzzled him — he was still moving, so the detectors should have kept them on.
Suddenly he heard a mechanical sound from somewhere on the scaffolding, and then a loud bang behind him. He caught a brief glimpse of shadowy objects falling from above, like bats suddenly stirring from a cave, and tried to move out of their path — but the first of the bricks struck hard on his back and shoulders, making him shout in pain. He heard the tactical team shouting from above as he moved his arms up, trying to shield his head, but this only caused his forearms to be broken and his fingers smashed, so that he fired the gun even as his hand lost its grasp on it, and dropped the flashlight almost in the same instant. He doubled over, crying out for help, stumbling forward, and still the awful rain continued, bruising and breaking him. One glancing blow to his head hit hard enough to bring him dizzily to his knees, the next felled him completely, so that he sprawled against the white wings of Apollo’s horses, staining them with his blood, and lost consciousness as tiles of the sun god shattered all around him.
13
Monday, July 10, 7:25 P.M.
St. Anne’s Hospital
Pete Baird met Frank at the entrance to the waiting room. He looked shaken, and Frank was afraid that he had arrived too late.
Pete had been paging him, leaving messages on his home answering machine. Frank had heard Pete’s voice on the machine as he had followed Irene into the house, saying, “Bredloe’s at the emergency room at St. Anne’s — he might not make it,” and Frank had hurriedly picked up the call. Only twenty-five minutes had passed since then — but maybe it had been twenty-five minutes too many.
Pete must have read the fear on his face, though, because he quickly said, “No — we haven’t had any more news yet.”
“He’s still in surgery?”
“Yeah. It’s not looking good. Head injury and all kinds of bone fractures and cuts and bruises and God knows what else. Head injuries worry them the most. Miriam hasn’t even been able to see him yet — she’s really shaken up.”
Frank looked across the room and saw Bredloe’s wife, pale and silent, staring toward the doors that led to the surgery center. Next to her was Chief Ellis Hale himself, who sat stone-faced while one of his aides tried to calm a distraught Louise Oswald. Not far from them, several men from the division huddled together, speaking in low voices. Lieutenant Carlson, Jake Matsuda, Reed Collins, and others. They had seen him enter, but he had not been met with scowls or coldness — not even from Carlson. Like Pete, they had apparently decided to cease hostilities for the moment.
Frank turned back to Pete. “Was Miriam with him when it happened?”
“No — I thought she might have been, when I first heard it was the Sheffield. Captain had his picture in the paper over the weekend, ’cause he went with her to some shindig they had there on Friday. So I figured she had taken him back to the building for some reason — but that turns out not to be the case.”
“What happened?”
“The captain had a whole operation set up down there, and on short notice.” He described the precautions Bredloe had taken.
“So what was this anonymous caller meeting him about?”
“He wouldn’t tell anyone. According to the Wheeze, she came back from running an errand for him at a little after five o’clock, and he was on the cell phone with someone then. She locked her desk up and was ready to call it a day when the captain asked her to get Tactical on the line — one of many calls.” He paused, eyeing Frank speculatively. “She said he’d been acting weird ever since he talked to you.”
“Like everybody else in the department, the captain was upset about the Lefebvre case,” Frank said. “Now that you’ve remembered I’m working it, are you going to stop talking to me?”
Pete shrugged. “I wish you’d face facts, but — no, I was ready to call a truce anyway. Besides, Rachel found out I wasn’t speaking to you, and — let’s just say I thought I was going to need to check in here myself.”
“Remind me to thank your wife the next time I see her. But tell me more about what happened to the captain. Any idea who called him?”
“No. Pay phone at the bus station — too many prints to make it worthwhile dusting for them. The lab found one little area on it that had been wiped down and figured that the caller cleaned up after himself.”
“So Bredloe gets a call and just trots off to the Sheffield Club?” Frank asked. “That doesn’t sound like him.”
“No, but that’s just item one on a long list of things we haven’t figured out. We’re not even sure what happened after he was there. First, he keeps setting off the motion detectors and cameras in the entryway — all of which, we learned, was just installed today. So because of the lights attached to the motion detectors, it goes bright and dark and makes the marksmen’s work more difficult — they hardly adjust their eyes to darkness and suddenly it’s bright again. Then the captain says something that makes no sense to the marksmen — is this ‘their idea of a joke.’ Next thing they know, there’s this sound, and a pile of bricks falls down on him from some scaffolding.”
“The building had been searched, though—”
“All done by remote.”
“What? Remote-control bricks?”
“No — but there was this gizmo beneath the pallet they were on. Kinda like a miniature jack. Small, but strong enough to tip the pallet. It straightens up and suddenly the bricks are at an angle and falling. Lab hasn’t had much time to study it, but they think it’s homemade — not something commercially available.”
“So with luck they’ll be able to track down the sellers of the components.”
“Right. And track the buyer from there.”
“The cameras didn’t catch anyone setting up that device?”
“Well,” Pete said uneasily, “that’s another problem. Those cameras and motion detectors just arrived today — at the end of the day. Battery operated. And guess what was being taped on the machine? Nothing, that’s what. It was a dummy setup. I mean, the monitor worked, but the tape machine didn’t.”
“What did the security company have to say for itself?”
“You mean ‘Las Piernas Security’? There is no such security company. No one ordered those cameras or lights or monitor.”
“The construction crew allowed this phony company to have the run of the place?”
“Did a very good job of faking city papers, they claim. Apparently there had been complaints about building security all along.”
“Not hard to see why.”
“Something else — nobody can figure this out — there was a little remote-controlled fan.”
“What?”
“This other little gizmo reacts to a signal and turns a small fan on. But we can’t figure out what the fan was supposed to do.”
“So no one saw the cameras being installed?”
“Saw it, paid no attention. And although we got a description on the installer, it was pretty vague. White male, medium build, thirty to fifty — yeah, I know, but the age guesses were all over the place — light brown hair, brown eyes, mustache. About all we have to go on, though.”