by Robert Pobi
Graves stopped but didn’t stick out his hand. “Glad you found the time.”
Lucas nodded but didn’t say anything.
“That thing you do is still pretty impressive.” The little blip of incomprehension common to everyone who had seen Lucas work ticked over his features. “I thought that maybe”—Graves put his hands on his hips, pushing back the flaps of his wool jacket—“fame had worn down the edges, taken away a little of your smarts.”
Lucas let the silence hang between them for a few seconds. “No, you didn’t. You were wondering if having my head opened up has had an effect on my ability to outthink you.” He smiled at Graves. “It hasn’t.”
Graves headed down the hall, walking fast enough that it was obvious he was trying to lose Lucas. “For some reason, Kehoe thinks you are an asset. I don’t know why. He said I was to extend you every courtesy, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with your shit.”
“Actually, Graves, that’s exactly what it means.”
The gray wool on Graves’s shoulders hitched up with the shrug.
Lucas switched gears, opting for a topic that Graves could handle. “Have your people come up with anything?”
Without stopping or turning, Graves raised an arm, pointing to one of the screens up at the far end of the war room; a photo of the Frenchman Kehoe had shown him the night before smiled back from the plasma. “I thought Kehoe brought you up to speed.”
“He did. But I’m not convinced you know what you’re doing.”
At that, Graves stopped, and Lucas had to put on the brakes in order not to ram into him.
Graves turned around and took a step toward him, closing the distance. “I know you’ve been gone for ten years; I know you were some kind of hot sauce back in the day; and I know your Wikipedia page paints you as some kind of latter-day Dr. Emmett Brown. But this is the here and now, and personally, I don’t want to have to hold your hand. We know who did this. And we know why. So you can end with the speculation. I know you and Hartke went back, but this wasn’t a personal vendetta against him. This was business. Hartke was a victim of opportunity. We got this.” He started back on his way.
Lucas realized that bickering like kids wouldn’t get them anywhere. “What is the signal-to-noise ratio in Hartke’s file? He was on the job for what, twenty-eight years? That’s a lot of time to make enemies. Have you cross-referenced his record against the parole registers? Gun nuts, ammo-sexuals, the regular gamut of crazies? Anti–law enforcement groups? Antiestablishment groups?” He hoped that straight-up logic wasn’t too abstract a concept. “Anyone he collar fit the profile?” These were all obvious questions, but Lucas took nothing for granted with Graves.
“No one Hartke collared has the requisite skill set to do this. We’ve six-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconed it, and none of the cellmates or family members of people he put away fit the bill. As far as the rest of the spreadsheets go, nothing has come up. We’ve checked the parolees, social media ranters, and people who have sent threats to the bureau. He was just a random victim.”
Lucas was put off by the narrow bandwidth Graves was using; he had made his mind up about too many things. “Has the NYPD given us any added value?”
Graves shook his head and opened a door to a glass-walled conference room where half a dozen agents were correlating digital imagery—the twenty-first-century equivalent of a corkboard. “We’ve got some solid ideas on this one.”
“Such as?”
“Just take a look around.”
Lucas reached for the tray in the middle of the runway-sized conference table and poured himself a mug of coffee. He walked around the room, taking in what they had. There was no mistaking how they were looking at this, and it was shortsighted. The Frenchman appeared to be the sole focus of the investigation, and Lucas wondered how this was possible if Kehoe were not behind the idea.
Graves began his monologue in a voice Lucas was certain he’d practiced in front of the mirror. “We didn’t get much from the roof other than a gait measurement that suggests our guy is somewhere between five foot two and five foot ten, depending on long-bone length. Which fits with Froissant’s height of five foot eight.”
“Along with most of the people in the country over the age of thirteen,” Lucas said.
Whitaker finally spoke up. “What about surveillance footage?”
Lucas realized that he had been focusing on Graves so acutely that he had forgotten about her. He had to start paying attention to that—he was back among people, not sequestered alone with his own thoughts all the time. Their effectiveness—and maybe even their lives—would depend on it.
“One elevator and four staircases lead to the access floor to the roof. We ran the footage back twenty-four hours in each stairwell and the elevator, and no one went up who didn’t come down. No one we couldn’t identify and no one who wasn’t supposed to be there except some girl delivering lunch for a deli who grabbed a smoke, probably because it was too cold to go outside.
“Security guard did his rounds right on the clock. The only person who went up on the roof proper was a guy from maintenance to add fuel-line antifreeze to the generators. We checked him out, and he’s completely clean and had nothing to say when he was questioned. We can place him on the ground floor at the time of the shooting; he’s on camera in one of the hallways.”
Lucas tried not to look like Graves was full of shit; someone had been up on that roof. “And in the two-plus hours between the murder and our arrival?”
“Nada.”
Lucas turned to a portrait of Froissant pulled from a French society website. It was not dissimilar to many others he had seen. Froissant was standing on the steps to a theater or opera house or investment firm in a suit that cost as much as a nice vacation somewhere sunny. He had that natural grace of a man bred to inherit an empire, which he was. This was not the kind of guy who threw it all away based on the internal ravings that came from an invisible man in the sky. “And you’re really convinced that this is your shooter?”
Graves sat down on the edge of the conference table, crossed his arms, and went back into condescending lecture mode. “French authorities saw a spike in his visits to extremist websites and Twitter accounts after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and they started paying much closer attention. But the line between religious curiosity and budding terrorist isn’t always clear, and by the time they realized he might be radicalized, he was gone.”
“How’d the French lose him?”
“They didn’t watch him all the time; apparently, they still believe in personal freedoms over there.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking.”
“Neither can I,” Graves said.
“I noticed you said, ‘they believe’ and ‘he might be’; neither remotely approaches proof of guilt.”
“Both the DHS and the DOJ believe; so does the administration in Washington—all of which are good enough for me.”
Lucas knew that arguing with Graves was pointless. What could you say to someone who felt that belief was a component of truth?
Lucas steered Graves away from the circumstantial and focused on the concrete. “Did you ever find the slug?” After everything Graves said so far, he expected him to shake his head.
“That’s where things get interesting. We dug it out of the sidewalk. It wasn’t a PAR round. The slug was a copper-alloy-jacketed .300 Winchester Magnum with a ferrous core—”
Now Lucas understood why Kehoe had said the round went through the car—it was armor-piercing.
“The bullet was manufactured by Nosler, part of their AccuBond line—but the iron-alloy kernel is a modification.”
Graves went to a screen and clicked up a page of text. “Kehoe wants you to take a look at this.” Graves tapped the screen and read the report. “Metallurgy on the slug came back, and that ferrous core isn’t regular iron or mild steel; it’s an unusual combination—91 percent iron, 7.65 percent nickel, and an unusually high iridium content, a concentration of 11.3 par
ts per million.” Graves looked up at Lucas. “What does that tell you?”
By the way he asked the question, Lucas could tell he thought it was a test. But there was only one kind of metal that could have properties anywhere near that, and it wasn’t fabricated in some guy’s workshop; it was smelted in the cauldrons that had formed the universe. “It’s meteoric in origin.”
Graves nodded, and it was hard to miss the disappointment in the action. “What does that tell you?”
“Does Froissant have any experience on long guns?”
“There’s a photo of him with one in the file.”
“That’s a shotgun, not a rifle.”
“Look, Luke, we’ve put a lot of time into—”
“That’s Dr. Page. And a lot of time and the required time are two different things.” Lucas thought back to the images of Froissant at the opera. “If he just wanted to kill a random citizen, why the theatrics? Why that rooftop?”
Graves thought about that for a moment before giving what was quickly becoming his signature move—a shrug. “I don’t know.”
“I can’t see some billionaire playboy hanging out on that roof yesterday, balaclava or not. You don’t learn to handle a weapons system in acutely humid subzero temperatures unless you spent a lot of time in a similar environment—not France.”
Lucas took a sip of coffee. “Think about that round.” The big payoff would be in the guy who modified the ammunition. Not many people could turn regular ammunition into armor-piercing rounds. And the ones who could would be expensive. “Making certain that Hartke died was important to him. He wanted Hartke dead. In specific.”
Graves stopped going through the photos. “If he had hit a housewife from Astoria, would you be on board?” The sentence was still hanging over his head in a dialogue bubble when a junior agent ran into the room and asked for everyone’s attention.
The hive stopped work for a moment as he said, “Someone with a rifle just shot a woman on the Roosevelt Island Tramway.”
Graves was professional enough not to smile, but Lucas could see that it was a real effort.
17
Whitaker plowed east on Grand, pushing the big Lincoln through the still falling snow with the same combination of ease and aggression she had demonstrated on the ride downtown. Graves was in the lead car, alpha male in his rightful place, but it was clear Whitaker could outdrive him. The command vehicle, ambulances, and SWAT team were en route from their various dispatch points, everyone racing for the FDR, where they’d swing north to the tram terminal at Sixtieth Street and Second Avenue.
“What’s between you and Graves?” Whitaker asked as she pulled the Lincoln up the ramp in a series of tight fishtails that she fought by stomping down on the gas and countersteering. “You sleep with his wife or something?”
Back out in the world, the snow reflected what little ambient light was able to reach over the skyline, and it looked later than it was. The twenty-first was the next day, and from there on out, every day they moved forward on the calendar would provide a few more joules of vitamin D.
Lucas watched the support vehicles in the mirror for a moment before answering. “Graves is a classic example of the Dunning–Kruger effect in action; if he doesn’t know something, he thinks it’s not important. At least he’s diligent in his stupidity.”
“Oh, good. I thought it might be something personal.” She shook her head. “What about you and Kehoe? What’s going on there?”
“I killed his brother.”
She paused to take that in for a few moments. “You just can’t stop yourself from making friends, can you?”
“I’m not here for my personality.”
“No shit.”
He turned back to the storm outside, thinking that it was smarter to keep his mouth shut. Or maybe he should just tell them to fuck right off.
Even though it was an hour-plus later than their trip downtown, the FDR was as deserted as the West Side Highway. The plows had done their job, but the storm was laying down more snow and very few cars were out. Instead of the usual field of taillights stretching into the distance, only a few red eyes blinked back through the haze.
Lucas checked the clock on the dash and did the math. Thirteen hours and ten minutes, give or take, since the previous night’s killing. Which wasn’t a lot of time if this was the same shooter. But Lucas could already feel the relationship building between him and the man with the rifle; it felt like the same guy. Hitting a moving target in a storm seemed to point to their boy.
Lucas kept turning the thirteen hours and ten minutes over in his head. A lot could happen in that time. But Hartke’s killing wasn’t the kind of demonstration most people could follow by getting up the next morning and doing it again.
Whitaker pulled off the FDR and followed Graves west on Sixtieth, their speed down now that they were off the expressway. Lucas could see the circus of flashing lights four blocks up, and the adrenaline hit him, manifesting itself in a low-grade fear that he was working with people who were making all the wrong choices. But the subtext in Kehoe’s sales pitch had been pretty clear; Lucas was here because he would see things differently.
They slid to a stop with the rest of the vehicles in their procession, and Lucas was outside before Whitaker. Snow swirled around him, and for an instant the world was gone. He took a few steps forward and almost ran into Graves, who materialized like a big black ghost. A troop of FBI parkas developed behind him, more shadowy figures birthed from the snow.
“You,” Graves said, jabbing a finger into Lucas’s chest, “follow me.”
The cops had closed the street, and the police cruisers that were there to quarantine the scene had to park away from the tram terminal building. There was a single path that cut through the square, a deep trough carved by one of the small sidewalk plows.
The building itself was a concrete engineering feat that rose through the static like an old-time dial-up internet image. A patch cleared near the walkway was occupied by an ambulance sitting at a steep angle, its nose halfway up a bright white snowbank. A paramedic sat in the driver’s seat, the engine idling. Two uniformed officers stood at the back door. Everyone looked like the bogeyman had just visited.
The media crews were laying siege to the crime scene, and Lucas could see them testing the resolve of the NYPD officers who were in charge of keeping them out. There were hushed conversations, a few shouting matches, and a cameraman near the corner looked like he was a few harsh words away from getting shot.
The countersnipers had been deployed—after all, it was reasonable to believe that the killer wanted to flush out more game.
Lucas followed Graves up the concrete, making sure to use the handrail as he jumped two steps at a time when pushing off with his good leg, one at a time with his prosthetic. A police officer outfitted in a departmental parka and an AR-15 stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. He had the kind of face that belonged on the prow of a Viking longboat. His tag read Sorenson, and his big handlebar mustache—either light blond or gray—was covered in frozen perspiration.
Graves introduced himself with a badge and a curt nod. “FBI.”
Sorenson nodded. “We were told.” He then went into a quick report as he opened the door. “Passenger on the tram coming in from Roosevelt Island was shot. There were two officers on the car with her, but they couldn’t do anything; it’s all on camera.”
Graves looked at Lucas, but his question was pointed at Sorensen. “A woman?” It was hard to miss the I told you so in his voice.
“Yes, sir.”
Upstairs, the scene was as organized as anyone could hope for. Passengers were in the ticketing/waiting section of the terminal, giving statements, clouds of vapor rising into the frozen air. The low-frequency hum of shock was the only sound generated by witnesses standing around, looking like dejected models for Degas’s L’Absinthe. A pile of cell phones lay on a tarp on the floor; crowd-sourced social media justice could destroy an investigation, especially wh
en video was taken out of context—without facts or perspective, herd-thinking digilantes often railroaded innocent people with their ad hoc determination to assign blame.
Sorenson led Graves, Lucas, and Whitaker through the turnstiles to the tram car hanging in the bay. Two more officers with AR-15s stood by. Another pair of officers stood off to the left, both splattered with blood, looking defeated.
The art direction on the tram was straight out of an abattoir. The doors were closed, but it wasn’t hard to see that someone’s morning commute to the city had been irrevocably fucked. The center-front window had a fist-sized hole punched through at the five-foot mark and another drilled through the back window. Blood was sprayed over the broken glass, the cracks filled with black. A body lay on the floor in a wide pool of dark red smeared with foot- and handprints. The corpse wore what had once been a white parka.
Sorenson signaled the blood-spattered cops to come forward. Their names were Bolan and Washington. Both were with the Twenty-sixth.
Washington did the talking. “Yes, sir?”
“This is Special Agent Graves, FBI.”
With the introductions laid out, Graves went to work. “What happened?” He tilted his head toward the tram.
Washington went into recall mode. “She was standing up front, facing west. My partner and I were off to her left, talking shop. About halfway through the trip, we took a rifle round through the front window. Hit her right in the face. The slug went right through her head and out the back of the car. Missed everyone else. Just fucking boom and a pitcher of blood.” He held up his hands as if seeing them for the first time. They were caked with flaking red pigment. “The civvies went apeshit. She was dead before she hit the floor.” He glanced sideways at the tram car. “Called it in thirty-five, maybe forty seconds after the shot. Everyone was on the floor, screaming, crying. We all thought we were dead.” He looked out to where the river was beyond the storm. “By the time we got here, our guys had arrived.” The sounds of more approaching sirens could be heard outside, rising above the whistle of the wind zipping through the concrete bay.
