A heartbeat after the elevator doors opened, Nero barked twice.
“That was fast,” Cody said.
“It’s not that,” the officer said. “That double-bark means explosives.”
The building’s alarm siren sounded, squawking the warning to residents to evacuate. There were no other doors on the penthouse floor. Cody could only hope the co-op owners weren’t so jaded by false alarms after 9/11 that they would ignore the alarm.
Nero, unfazed by the raucous squawking, led them directly to the front door of the penthouse, passing by the janitorial closet and the service entrance without a glance.
He pawed at the front door, and growled, looking at the five men escorting him as if to say, “Your move! My work here is done.”
Cody called for the Mark V to be sent up. Then he signaled for the K-9 officer to take Nero and the super to safety, took the pass key and moved his hand toward the double lock.
“Aren’t you going to wait?” Bergman said, eyeing the door warily.
Cody shook his head. “It won’t be the door,” he said. “These two were exhibitionists. That’s one thing I understand about them. They’d want us to see the stage they’ve set first.”
All the lights in the luxury penthouse were on. But the two detectives could discern at a glance that the main room was empty of anything unusual. The ticking sound emanated from the door to the right of the large room.
“You do the honors,” Cody said, gesturing for Bergman to record their entrance as he himself had done Saturday morning at La Venezia.
Bergman nodded, and took out the digital recorder while Cody moved to the picture window and glanced down at the street where he could see the residents filing out beneath the canopy in various states of disarray. He signaled to Bergman to get started.
“It’s Thursday, November 1 ^ st,” he began, “and we’ve entered the penthouse of the late Ward Hamilton…”?
They found Patricia in the barber’s chair, nude, bound, and gagged with a lacy brassiere. Her eyes shouted her relief as she saw the detectives, without a thought for her nakedness. Cody removed his windbreaker and positioned it across the woman’s body as he squatted to examine the device beneath the chair.
“We’ll get you out of here in a sec,” he said to the grateful publicist, whose chest was still heaving with fear.
The bomb squad officer gestured for Cody to step back, but not before the Captain could see the device’s timer counting down from 00:03:00. The demolitions guy saw it too. “We don’t have time to fuck around here,” he said.
Cody was busy freeing Patricia legs.
The bomb-exploding robot rolled through the door.
Its keeper, an East Indian officer in full Hazmat gear whose badge read Krishna Daipur, read the situation at a glance and opened his olive-green notebook. “Disarm or contain?”
“Contain! No time to disarm!”
“Very well, sir,” the Officer Daipur said. “But there can be no certainty of successful containment…”
“Just do what you have to do,” Bergman ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Daipur said, dropping his helmet mask into place.
Once Cody untied the bra from her mouth, Patricia Robert, the only survivor of the diabolical Ward Hamilton and Victoria Mansfield, would not stop screaming.
“Get her out of here,” Cody told Bergman. “Now!”
Bergman already had the terrified woman by the arm and was rushing her to the door.
At the same moment, Officer Daipur was delicately lifting the explosive device from its place beneath the chair. The robot’s abdominal cavity swung open, catching Cody’s windbreaker as Bergman was hustling Patricia toward the door.
Patricia screamed again, this time a mixture of rage and embarrassment as the jacket was nearly wrenched from her sobbing frame. Exchanging a hapless glance with Cody, Bergman quickly disentangled it and restored her dignity.
Cody could see the fear etched in the eyes of Officer Daipur, behind the mask, as the man stood in place, trying not to look at the half-naked woman.
The device’s timer read 00:01:05.
“Is the building clear?” Daipur asked Cody, unaware of the incongruence of his logic.
“Fuck the building!” Cody’s eyes were intent on the timer, as he held the robot’s door open.
Daipur set the bomb gingerly inside.
Its device read 00:00:45.
Cody swung the hatch closed while Daipur quickly armed the robot.
The officer glanced down at his watch.
Then it occurred to him that Cody was still in the room. “Captain, exit the room immediately,” he ordered. “This is my job.”
Cody ignored him, mesmerized by the timer which was counting down to zero.
The robot shuddered, lifting inches off the floor as the device exploded, muffling the sound as though it were in the next borough.
“Jesus,” Daipur exclaimed. “That was enough TNT to blow up the whole fucking block.”
“I’m sure that’s what the devils were hoping for,” Cody said.?
At Kate Winters’ insistence, the ceremony for Dr. Song Wiley was minimalist chic. It was sponsored by the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, at its retreat center on E. 51 ^ st Street next to Greenacre Park. Song’s only religion was her yoga, and she had practiced ashtanga at the center four times a week. The Neptune Society, which she and Kate had joined together three years ago, had already supervised her cremation. Wolfsheim, of course, had reserved Dr. Wiley’s brain and internal organs in case they were required as evidence.
Kate, alone, would spread her ashes at midnight from the Circle Line where they’d had their first official date.
Over Kate’s protest, the Chief had insisted on closing the Park for two hours so the memorial service could be held beside the waterfall. Looking uncomfortable in their funeral garb, all the members of TAZ were on hand to support Kate.
The Friends’ director chanted one of the sutras, surprising everyone with its power-and brevity. Then Kate, looking elegant and composed, approached the microphone. She was wearing a green silk suit that blended in perfectly with the flora of this quiet oasis in the midst of a never-quiet metropolis.
“’The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon,’” Kate began. “You loved to quote that, and I never ceased wondering what it meant. But one thing I always knew: When you first took my hand, you put a song in my heart.”
She addressed the photograph of her friend and lover that had been placed strategically by the falls beside the gigantic bouquet Cody had ordered for the occasion. “Now you live only in my heart, and my heart will be full with your song until the day I die.”
Then she turned off the microphone and gave herself to the comforting embraces of her teammates. She’d been a member of TAZ only a few days, but they were now her family.?
Stinelli rarely attended TAZ social events, preferring to meet its captain on his own turf. But this was an exception. He shook hands with everyone on the team, and put his arm around Kate. “I’ve seen evil in this town,” he said, “but I’ve never seen it like this.”
She knew what he was referring to. This morning Annie reported finding a bullet-shaped plastic mold in the Hamilton’s Sub-Zero freezer.
Simon confirmed the count for him. In Androg’s Unholy Week of Murder, Raymond Handley was Number One, Uncle Tony Number Two. Steamroller Jackson was Number Three and Song Number Four; the newspaper clipping found with Jackson’s body had Hamilton’s fingerprints on it. Jake Sallinger was Number Five. Victoria Mansfield Number Six. Hamilton “didn’t count” because he killed himself, just as Melinda Cramer didn’t count because she was “just practice.” Cody was intended to be Number Seven, but just in case he survived Patricia Roberts was his designated replacement-the “seventh way” of death.
And she would have taken all the neighbors with her. and exploded Hamilton’s deadly numbers sky high.
“I told you he was fucking with me from the beginning,” Cody said to Stinelli.
“What do you mean?”
“I asked Bergman here to call the Staten Island Fairy, who mentioned that Handley had a sister. Turns out Handley had been estranged from her. Her name was Melinda, until she married a whipdick actor whose last name was Cramer. She dumped the actor after three months, but kept the name because she and her brother had developed bad blood between them.”