She coughed once again and glanced at the oxygen tank on the passenger’s seat.
No.
No time to stop.
“You all right, Detective?” the officer asked over the line.
“Fine.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Homeowner was a wit in the crane collapse this morning. Unsub got his address. Planted an IED — the acid, not explosives. I mean it, don’t get close.”
“Roger that.”
A skidding turn.
“I’ll be there in fifteen,” she said and disconnected.
Then she turned her head slightly and said to the passengers in the backseat, “How you doing there?”
The woman, sitting directly behind her, said, “I think I’m going to be sick. I’m sorry.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Okay.”
“And you, sir?”
“I’m fine. I like your car.”
In the rearview mirror, Sachs could see the couple. She looked peaked. He was gazing over the interior of the Ford as if he were a prospective buyer.
The man was the workman — the witness — the unsub had just tried to kill.
The call Sachs had received in the town house had come from him. He identified himself as one of the workmen at the site that morning. She decided to interview him herself and drove to Queens.
She had been nearly to the house when she’d placed a call.
“Hello?” It was the voice of the witness she was on her way to meet.
She identified herself. “I just want to make sure you’re home. I’m almost there.”
There’d been a pause. “Well, didn’t he call you?” the worker asked.
“Who?”
“The other detective. He called me after you did. I assumed he’d tell you I gave him a statement, you know. There’s no need for you to come.”
Jesus... Sachs felt the jolt in her belly. Ignoring a sharp urge to cough, she had slammed the accelerator down. “Get out of your house. Now.”
Of course: the call had been from the unsub or an associate — somehow, they’d gotten the worker’s name and number and learning that he’d seen something, the man had to die. She knew the cast investigating the crane attack, and nobody would have called a witness without coordinating with Sachs.
“What do you—?”
She had said, “It wasn’t a cop. It’s the killer. You’re in danger. He knows you’re a witness. Get out now!”
“Oh, Lord.”
“I’m almost there. Go out your back door, walk through the yard of the house behind you to Twenty-Fourth. I’ll meet you there.”
How would he come at them? she’d wondered. No idea, so she called in both ESU — NYPD’s SWAT team — and reported an IED to Central and Bomb Squad.
She had then just arrived at the address and, scanning for any hostiles, skidded around the corner onto 24th. There they had clambered into the backseat — to the extent that an extremely pregnant woman could clamber — and Sachs spun tires, released ghosts of blue smoke.
Now she was en route to the local precinct, where she’d leave them in protective custody and then she herself would race back to the bungalow to walk the grid there.
And confront the fumes again; she’d been right about the MO; Unsub 89 had left an IED in the house. An acid bomb.
And with that thought, her lungs ironically began another bout of coughing.
She hit fifty again, balancing urgency with the conditions of one of her passengers: both the pregnancy and the nausea.
In the lot of the precinct, she stopped near the front door, turned to them.
“It’s poison?” the wife asked. “Acid?”
“That’s right.”
She began to cry.
“And you’re sure he put it inside?” From the husband.
“Yep, it’s detonated. It’s all through your house. Officers’ve seen the fumes.”
“Christ,” he muttered. “If we’d been inside...” He then asked, “This is all because I saw his SUV? That’s what I told him I saw.”
“Could you have gotten a look at him planting the device he used to sabotage the counterweights?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember anything like that.”
“How close were you to the crane?”
There was hesitation as the husband and wife glanced each other’s way. Apparently, her question surprised them, as if she were missing some detail that they both knew.
The man said, “Well, pretty close. I was the operator.”
24
Sachs said, “I thought the operator died.”
“What?” Garry Helprin’s face was confused briefly. Then it went still. “That was Leon Roubideaux who died. Beam man. Nobody better.” A grimace, laced with anger. “He was in the building, the twenty-first floor. Tried to run a plank to the tower, to rig an arresting cable. It was crazy. Wouldn’t’ve worked. But... He was a friend.”
“I’m sorry.” The image returned: the rebar, dark with blood, flecked with bits of flesh and brain. “You climbed down before it fell?”
His wife, Peggy, said, “He rappelled.”
Sachs lifted an eyebrow.
“Rock and mountain climbing’re my hobbies. I keep three hundred feet of line in the cab. Just in case. I mean, the just-in-case I was thinking of was that the stairwell got damaged or there was a fire. Never thought I’d have to bail out of a crash.”
“Can you tell me anything about the man who called, claiming he was a detective?”
“Not much. No foreign accent, or accent from here, like Southern or Boston. Said his name was Adams, I think. Didn’t really say anything about himself.”
“Caller ID?”
“It said ‘NYPD.’ No number. That’s why I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Easy to set up a phone to do that. Happens all the time. And what did you tell him? That vehicle you mentioned?”
Her pad was out and a pen.
“A beige SUV, I don’t know what kind, with Connecticut plates parked at the side of the site. Why I noticed it, it was parked in a funny place, not the lot reserved for workers. But I knew it was one of the crew ’cause there was a hard hat on the dash. We sometimes leave ’em there so the traffic cops know we’re working and give us a break.”
“What else did you see?”
“In the back there was a cardboard box, three feet square, eighteen inches high, maybe. No markings I remember. Some serious black gloves that went up to your elbows, a pair of what looked like expensive binoculars — I don’t know what brand — and a paperback book. Couldn’t see the cover very well, but it was bright: red and orange. Only one letter of the jacket you could see: ‘K.’ The last letter of the title.”
“You’ve got good eyes.”
“Crane operators — always looking.”
“Any drink cups or cans?”
“No. Or food wrappers.”
“Bumper stickers?”
“Don’t think so.”
What about Garry’s sighting bothered the unsub enough to try to kill him?
Gripping his wife’s hand, Garry asked, “When can we go back inside?”
“You can’t go back. I want you to leave town until he’s caught. Disappear. I want him to think you’re dead.”
The man nodded. “So he won’t know I told you what I saw.”
“Exactly.”
“Just leave?” his wife whispered. “No clothes? No money, nothing?”
“Whatever’s in your wallet or purse. That’s it.”
They looked at each other. She said, “Benji can pick us up. We can stay with them in Syosset.”
Garry was staring out the window. He said in a low, angry voice, “He killed her.”
Sachs lifted an eyebrow.
“Big Blue. That’s what I named her. After Paul Bunyan’s ox. We put up thirty-four buildings together.”