“How many blankets were stolen…or lost…in January, would you remember?”
“Twelve.”
“And fourteen in February, you said.”
“Fourteen, yes.”
“Twenty-six altogether.”
“Yes.”
“A little less than it was in the last quarter.”
“I suppose it is, actually.”
“Well, it’s only thirteen a month so far…”
“That’s right, actually, yes.”
“So there’s been a drop from the previous quarter.”
“Yes, it would seem so.”
“Even though spring’s been a long time coming.”
“We can’t prevent the occasional theft, you know,” Laughton said. “There are nine hundred and twenty cots in this shelter, and our security is second to none. But our main concern, security-wise, is keeping the shelter drug-free, and protecting the men who come to us for help. But…excuse me, Mr. Meyer. Surely the theft of a few blankets isn’t worth all this time, is it? And these two people who were abandoned…well, surely this is an everyday occurrence.”
“Not if one of them dies,” Meyer said.
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at four o’clock the next morning, Eileen was dead asleep. She fumbled for the phone in the darkness, lifted the receiver, turned on the bedside light, and saw snow falling outside her window.Snow again?
“Burke?”
“Yes, sir.”
Deputy Inspector Brady on the other end.
“Meet me at three-ten South Cumberland,” he said.
“Hit the hammer.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He knew she didn’t have a siren in her personal car, he was merely expressing the urgency of the situation, hit the hammer. There was no traffic, anyway, at this hour on a Sunday morning, she made it to the scene in ten minutes flat. A crowd of police personnel was standing in the falling snow near the emergency service truck and the dozen or more motor patrol cars angled in against the curb. Inspector Brady was nowhere in sight. She spotted Tony Pellegrino among the mass of black rain slickers and hoods, short and wiry and wearing jeans and a blue windbreaker with the wordPOLICE lettered across its back in white. She walked over to him and asked him what the situation was.
She was dressed much as Pellegrino was, jeans and the blue uniform windbreaker with the identifying word across the back, no hat, red hair glowing in the light of the overhead street lamp. You weren’t supposed to try kidding a hostage taker into believing you were anything but a cop. The wordPOLICE across the back of the jacket let the taker know exactly where he stood; this wasn’t a game here, this was all about people who were being held captive, there were lives at stake here.
The situation here involved two lives, if you counted the taker’s. The team’s motto was Nobody Gets Hurt; the taker’s life was as important to them as was the life of any hostage. Pellegrino told Eileen that what had happened here, the taker was this guy who lived with his brother and the brother’s wife…the sister-in-law…and slept in the room next door to theirs, just down the hall. What happened was he woke up in the middle of the night to go take a pee, and all at once he went bananas and pulled a gun and threatened to kill both his brother and the wife…the sister-in-law…if the brother didn’t leave the apartment right that minute.
“The brother went out of there like a shot,” Pellegrino said. “Called nine-one-one from the phone booth on the corner. The Boss is in the building already, working the door. He said you should go up the minute you got here.”
The Boss was Inspector Brady.
“What apartment?” she asked.
“Four-oh-nine. You can’t miss it. There’s a hundred cops in the hallway.”
“Thanks, Tony,” she said, and walked away from him through the lightly falling snow. She found Brady on the fourth floor, just coming away from the door as she moved through the knot of uniformed emergency service cops. Brady had turned fifty-four last month, a tall trim man with bright blue eyes, a fringe of white hair circling his otherwise bald head. His nose was a bit too prominent for his otherwise small features; it gave his face a cleaving appearance. Like a ship under sail, parting the wave of blue uniforms in his path, he came toward Eileen and said at once, “A bad one.”
“Tony filled me in,” she said, nodding.
“Guy’s got the hots for his sister-in-law, plain and simple,” Brady said. “He heard them making love during the night and that set him off. Now the brother’s out of the apartment, he’ll either rape her or shoot her or both.”
“Older brother, younger, what? The taker.”
“Older. He’s thirty-two, the brother’s twenty.”
“How old’s the woman?”
“If you can call her that,” Brady said. “She’s only seventeen.”
Eileen nodded.
“Want to try the door?” he asked. “Be very careful. He may be on something, it’s hard to tell.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jimmy.”
“How far’d you get with him?”
“Nowhere,” Brady said.
This was a big admission for him. In the eight months since she’d begun working for Brady, nothing had changed her opinion of him as an egotistical sexist who used women on the door only when he felt a situation absolutely demanded it. For all his bullshit about hoping to expand the team so that it would one day include more than the two women now on it, he kept replacing burned-out male negotiators with new male negotiators, and when Martha Halsted flunked out the first time she had a real shot at the door, he began training not another woman but a man. The way Eileen saw it, Brady felt nobody did the job as well as he did, male or female. But he normally put a woman on the door only when the taker inside was another woman. It was rare that he trusted a woman to negotiate with a male taker. So why Eileen today? Was it because there was a potential rape victim in the apartment? Or was it because Jimmy had a hard-on and Brady was tossing him a juicy redhead? Some things in the police department never changed. She’d started the job as a decoy with Special Forces, and sometimes she felt like a decoy all over again. Nowadays, the guys on the job didn’t piss in a female cop’s locker anymore, but—
“Hello,” she said, “I’m Detective Eileen Burke, I’m a police-department negotiator.”
7.
THE LETTER FROM THE DEAF MAN had been delivered to the squadroom the day before, but Carella didn’t get to see it till eightA .M. that Sunday morning, when a uniformed cop from downstairs dropped it on his desk together with a lot of other stuff, including an announcement for the Detectives’ Benevolent Association’s Easter Ball. Carella wished that all he had on his mind was Easter, with spring just here and the streets covered with slush.
The letter was addressed to him.
Plain white envelope, no return address front or back.Detective Stephen Louis Carella typed on the front of the envelope, and then 87th Detective Squad and the Grover Avenue address. It was postmarked Friday, March 27. He knew who had sent the letter even before he tore open the envelope flap.
There was a typewritten note attached to a single sheet of paper. The note read:
The sheet of paper clipped to the note had obviously been photocopied from the book the Deaf Man had earlier recommended. It read:
“I fEAR ANexplosion” Tikona said. “I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.”