“I’m curious about why you have Westchester County Airport on your computer screen.” Scarpetta didn’t want to discuss her blunders on CNN, and she didn’t want to talk about Carley or listen to Marino’s hyperbole. “Have you heard from Lucy and Jaime? I would have thought they would have landed by now.”
“You and me both,” Marino said. “Was doing a MapQuest, trying to figure out the quickest route, not that I’m headed there. It’s about them heading here.”
“Why would they be heading here? Do they know what’s happening?” Scarpetta didn’t want her niece showing up in the middle of this.
In Lucy’s former life as a special agent and certified fire investigator for ATF, she routinely dealt with explosives and arson. She was good at it, excelled at anything technical and risky, and the more others shied away from something or failed at it, the quicker she was to master it and show them up. Her gifts and fierceness didn’t win her friends. While she was emotionally more limber now that she was beyond her twenties, give and take with people still didn’t come naturally to her, and respecting boundaries and the law was almost impossible. If Lucy was here, she’d have an opinion and a theory, and maybe a vigilante remedy, and at the moment, Scarpetta wasn’t in the mood.
“Not here as in where we’re at,” Marino was saying. “Here as in them heading back to the city.”
“Since when do they need MapQuest to find their way back to the city?” Benton asked from the back.
“A situation I really can’t get into.”
Scarpetta looked at Marino’s familiar rugged profile, looked at what was illuminated on the computer screen mounted above the universal console. She turned around to look at Benton in the backseat. He was staring out his window, watching the squad emerge from the apartment building.
“Everybody’s got their cell phones turned off, I assume,” Benton said. “What about your radio?”
“It ain’t on,” Marino said, as if he’d been accused of being stupid.
The bomb tech in the EOD suit and helmet was coming out of the building, shapeless padded arms stretched out, holding a black frag bag.
“They must have seen something on x-ray they didn’t like,” Benton commented.
“And they’re not using Android,” Marino said.
“Using who?” Scarpetta said.
“The robot. Nicknamed Android because of the female bomb tech. Her name’s Ann Droiden. Weird about people’s names, like doctors and dentists with names like Hurt, Paine, and Puller. She’s good. Good-looking, too. All the guys always wanting her to handle their package, if you know what I mean. Must be a tough life, her being the only female on the bomb squad. Reason I’m familiar”-as if he needed to explain why he was going on and on about a pretty bomb tech named Ann-“is she used to work at Two Truck in Harlem where they keep the TCV, and she still drops by now and then to hang out with her old pals at ESU. The Two’s not far from my apartment, just a few blocks. I wander over there, have coffee, bring a few treats to their company boxer, nicest damn dog, Mac. A rescue. Whenever I can, if everybody’s tied up, I take Mac home so he’s not by his lonesome in the quarters all night.”
“If they’re using her instead of the robot, then whatever’s in that box isn’t motion-sensitive,” Scarpetta said. “They must be certain of that.”
“If it was motion-sensitive, I guess we’d be peeling you off the moon, since you carried it up to your apartment,” Marino said with his usual diplomacy.
“It could be motion-sensitive and on a timer. Obviously, it’s not,” Benton said.
Police kept people back, making sure no one was within at least a hundred yards of the bomb tech as she made her way down the building’s front steps, her face obscured by a visor. She walked slowly, somewhat stiffly but with surprising agility, toward the truck, its diesel engine throbbing.
“They lost three responders in Nine-Eleven. Vigiano, D’Allara, Curtin, and the bomb squad lost Danny Richards,” Marino said. “You can’t see it from here, but their names are painted on the bomb truck, on all the trucks at the Two. They got a little memorial room in there, off the kitchen, a shrine with some of the guys’ gear recovered with their bodies. Keys, flashlights, radios, some of it melted. Gives you a different feeling when you seen a guy’s melted flashlight, you know?”
Scarpetta hadn’t seen Marino in a while. Inevitably, when she came to New York, she was overscheduled and somewhat frantic. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be lonely. She wondered if he was having problems with his girlfriend, Georgia Bacardi, a Baltimore detective he’d gotten serious about last year. Maybe that was over or on its way to being over, and if so, no big surprise. Marino’s relationships tended to have the life span of a butterfly. Now Scarpetta felt worse. She felt bad about carrying a package upstairs without examining it first, and she felt guilty about Marino. She should check on him when she was in the city. She should check on him even when she wasn’t, a simple phone call or e-mail now and then.
The bomb tech had reached the truck, and her booted feet gripped the serrated tread on the ramp as she climbed up. It was difficult to see past Marino, out the window and down the street, but Scarpetta recognized what was happening, was no stranger to the procedure. The tech would set the frag bag on the tray and slide it back inside the TCV. Using the winch control, she would retract the steel cable to pull the massive steel lid back over the round opening, then replace the spider yoke and tighten it, likely with her bare hands. At most, bomb techs wore thin Nomex gloves or maybe nitrile to protect them from fire or potentially toxic substances. Anything heavily padded would make it impossible to perform the simplest task and probably wouldn’t save fingers in a detonation anyway.
When the tech was done, other cops and Lieutenant Lobo convened at the back of the bomb truck, sliding the ramp back in place, covering the containment vessel with the tarp, buttoning up. The truck roared north on the sealed-off street, marked units in front and back, the convoy a moving sea of rapid bursts of light headed for the West Side Highway. From there it would follow a prescribed safe route to the NYPD range at Rodman’s Neck, probably to the Cross Bronx and 95 North, whatever would best buffer traffic, buildings, and pedestrians from shock waves, a biological hazard, radiation, or shrapnel, should a device explode en route and somehow defeat its containment.
Lobo was walking toward them. When he reached Marino’s car, he climbed into the back next to Benton, a rush of cold air washing in as he said, “I had images sent to your e-mail.” He shut his door. “From the security cameras.”
Marino began typing on the Toughbook clamped into the pedestal between the front seats, the map of White Plains replaced by a screen asking for his username and password.
“Your FedEx guy’s got an interesting tattoo,” Lobo said, leaning forward, chewing gum. Scarpetta smelled cinnamon. “A big one on the left side of his neck, kind of hard to see because he’s dark-skinned.”
Marino opened an e-mail and loaded the attachment. A still from a security video recording filled the screen, a man in a FedEx cap walking toward the concierge desk.
Benton repositioned himself to get a better look and said, “Nope. Got no idea. Don’t recognize him.”
The man wasn’t familiar to Scarpetta, either. African American, high cheekbones, beard and mustache, the FedEx cap pulled low over eyes masked by reflective glasses. The collar of his black wool coat partially obscured a tattoo that covered the left side of his neck, up to his ear, a tattoo of human skulls. Scarpetta counted eight skulls but couldn’t see what they were piled on top of, just a linear edge of something.