City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “Be specific.”

  He nodded at the file. “Our victims.”

  “Hartke and Kavanagh were targeted.”

  “Why?”

  There was something behind Kehoe’s voice, something that Lucas couldn’t place, and it bothered him.

  “It’s an awful lot of fancy footwork that has no understandable benefit.”

  Kehoe seemed to mull that over for a few seconds. “Is it possible this is a coincidence?”

  “A man with a rifle shooting two random individuals who both happen to be on the job? Out of a city of nine million people with roughly fifty thousand individuals employed in law enforcement? It’s such a long shot that it technically doesn’t exist. One is a possibility. Highly unlikely, but possible. Two? No computer model would give you odds on it.

  “Kavanagh and Hartke are connected; I don’t think the only commonality is that they both carried a badge. I can think of a thousand easier ways to kill someone without having to go through these gymnastics. He’s making a point.”

  “And the Frenchman?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Without a message delivered to the media, this won’t help a terrorist organization. It’s off-brand.”

  Kehoe pulled his gloves off, one finger at a time. “And Graves?”

  “He’s nothing else if not consistent.”

  “You two getting along?”

  “Graves and I will never be simpatico.”

  “Can you work with him?”

  Lucas rotated his head just enough for Kehoe to see both eyes, and from the angle he knew that his prosthetic was doing that disjointed Marty Feldman chameleon thing. “I can work around him. But that’s not the point, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want to tell me what’s really going on, Brett?”

  Kehoe’s focus went from Lucas’s left eye to his right, then back to the left. “Since no one has claimed this guy, we don’t know what he wants, other than depopulation. What’s his mission statement?”

  Lucas held up Kavanagh’s file. “He’s taking trophies. Specific trophies.”

  Kehoe’s mouth pursed into a clenched fist for an instant, but before his eyes caught up to the expression, it melted away and he sank back into the seat, once again exuding armored confidence in a very nice suit.

  “If I’m wrong, you still have a very big problem on your hands.” Lucas nodded at the file in his hand. “But this isn’t some jihadi. This is a man with a different message.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m sure you have qualified people who can give you educated opinions.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Lucas locked Kehoe in another cockeyed stare. Right here, right now, there was only one thing he was certain of. “I don’t know.”

  21

  Whitaker stood inside the roof access door as the forensics team went over the scene. They operated on the directives of anal-retentive garbage pickers, depositing every scrap and morsel of detritus they could find into little polyethylene bags with gloved fingers, forceps, and tiny shovels. They were dealing with snow five feet thick in some places, looking for anything that might help point a finger at the invisible man with a rifle.

  Graves had been certain that Page was full of shit, which was counterproductive at this point; especially since he had been right about everything so far, including victimology. What was it with those two, other than a double dose of toxic masculinity? Did owning a penis really reduce human beings to chest-thumping simians? Then again, Whitaker had worked in places populated exclusively by women before, and the takeaway was that they were just as bad at bickering—they were just sneakier and meaner about it.

  When the SWAT ninjas popped the door and barreled out into the storm, they found a single path shoveled through the snow. It snaked from the door, around the staircase, to behind the pair of HVAC pumps on the northeast corner of the roof—a position too high to be seen from any of the nearby buildings. It faced the river, and the tram, and when you were up here you realized it was the perfect spot for what had happened. Another mark for their shooter.

  And for Page.

  Whitaker wanted to believe all the things Kehoe told her about Page, but it wasn’t an easy task. Whitaker was educated—a 3.7 GPA at UIC—and she knew better than to believe anecdotal evidence. So she had reserved judgment until she saw Bionic Boy in action. And those fifteen minutes on the bridge had certainly convinced her that there was something rare about Dr. Lucas Page, supreme grouchiness notwithstanding.

  Very few people could stand out on the span for more than a minute and a half without their nipples turning into upholstery buttons. Along with the cold, there was the wind, snapping sleeves and pant legs like karate chops. If Page noticed the weather, he didn’t show it. And the way he dialed into the environment and measured space pushed the whole exercise into voodoo territory.

  Kehoe had described Page’s gift—after all, what else could you call it?—as simple acute spatial awareness, nothing more than a very precise sense of comparison. Apparently, his intuitive understanding of geometry converted the landscape to numerical values. Combined with the awkward (which was really a euphemism for nasty) way he interacted with people, Whitaker would understand a diagnosis of Asperger’s.

  And what looked like a quiet anger could also be a litany of other things. Maybe he suffered PTSD. Maybe he was just a misanthrope.

  No matter what it was, the way he handled numbers was spooky.

  According to Kehoe, Page simply took a reference unit—something as simple as a sidewalk slab, a manhole cover, or even a brick in a building—and converted it to a unit of measure. So many units of measure from point A to point B. If deconstructed, so many bricks spanned a foundation stone, so many foundation stones a building. On and on, until everything in his visual path was simply a number in relation to all the other numbers his software generated. It was an instantaneous process, and Kehoe sounded more than a little perplexed when Whitaker asked him to explain it more clearly.

  But when you started to read his file, his skills became less unsettling than his past, which read like a Thomas Hardy character sketch—minus the whimsy. You could look back in history at all the poor fuckers who had compounded a string of minor misfortunes into one major fuck-you at the Game of Life and not find a purer example of really bad things happening to relatively good people.

  After the screaming was over, five people were dead—two of whom had simply evaporated from the known Newtonian universe. Page was in a coma, missing some of his long bones and one of his eyes. They had written him off. At least the realistic ones had. Yet here he was, braving elements, insulting people, and conjuring numbers faster than the most sophisticated software on the planet.

  Whitaker watched the team at work, one of the techs scanning the snow with a metal detector. The wind blew straight in the door, and she realized that her shoulders were so tensed that her collarbones framed her jaw. She forced herself to relax, and a fistful of snow fell off her scarf, into her collar. She danced to shake it out before it melted, and Graves let out a little laugh beside her.

  One of the techs came inside, interrupting the empty air that Whitaker didn’t want to fill. He went straight to Graves with an ion mobility spectrometer. “The shooter was definitely here. In that northeast corner by the HVACs.” He held up the sniffer and tilted the screen toward them. All the values were in the red. “The wind up here isn’t helping our cause, but the snow on the ledge in the corner buried the needle. The signature is heavily degraded—like I said, the wind is murder—but I took six samples. Blowback is heavier on the lee side of the shot, indicating the same heavy crosswind. But it’s definitely gunpowder.”

  The tech handed the scanner to Graves. Maybe now he would give Page a little respect.

  Whitaker smiled. “I wonder if Page ever gets tired of being right?”

  Graves concentrated on the screen for a few seconds longer before looking out at the rooftop and the city b
eyond. “Everyone gets lucky.”

  She thought about Page’s file. “I guess,” she said and walked away.

  22

  Whitaker and Lucas were stopped at a light on the way back to the office. Pedestrians crossed in front of the hood, a herd of bundled-up Michelin Men looking for someplace warm.

  Whitaker thrummed the wheel with her fingers. “This guy doesn’t even exist.”

  “Sure he does.”

  “He’s shot two law enforcement officers. That’s all I see.”

  “We know a lot more about him; we just don’t know what any of it means.” As he watched the people move by, wrapped in their protective insulation, he wondered what this guy wanted. What he was trying to say. Would he start sending manifestos to the newspapers? Or would he be one of those silent types? Kehoe’s words at the tram scene came back to him: mission statement.

  “Such as?” Whitaker didn’t sound convinced.

  “He has a message—political, social, or economic—there’s just too many criteria in his selection of victims for him not to have a goal. There’s a core slogan in this. A reason.

  “Both victims are New Yorkers. We can pull focus to a macro view and find that they’re both Americans, which is why Graves is sticking with the radicalized Frenchman idea. But go back to New Yorkers. Both were law enforcement officers; both were most likely killed with the same weapon and same type of ammunition; both were killed in extremely adverse winter conditions; both were shot through glass; both were murdered at rush hour; both were out of uniform. So we know the guy does his homework. He studies his victims. He works well under stress. And he’s put a lot of planning into this.

  “Then what do we know about his weapons system? If he was using a semiauto platform, it’s easy to lose a shell with six feet of snow all around in poor lighting conditions and a lot of wind—a setting like that rooftop last night. So he’s probably using a bolt-action rifle. Remington 700 is a good guess. And he’s not using a noise suppressor, which says he’s not concerned about sound.

  “But most importantly,” he added, nodding at the white world outside, “it’s his choice of shooting conditions—this weather. Those deer-hunting rounds are second. This isn’t some rich kid with a roomful of trophies next to his wine cellar. This is a guy who has spent a lot of time in the outdoors. In the winter. He didn’t learn to shoot like this in the desert. He’s comfortable in weather that scares Frosty the Snowman.”

  The light changed, and Whitaker eased forward with the rest of the traffic. “You mean like Siberia?”

  “Nope.” Lucas looked at the frozen world beyond the windshield and shook his head. “This guy’s homegrown.”

  23

  26 Federal Plaza

  The bureau had a gag on the victims’ names, and the news had resorted to a combination of gossip, hearsay, conjecture, and plain old bullshit. But they knew that the victims were in law enforcement, and all the major networks were running lead stories on the New York sniper. Without much to go on, they had reverted to tried-and-true journalistic gimmicks. CNN ran the same empty speculation on loop, coming up with very little in the way of real journalism; Fox had opted for the easy money, simply making shit up.

  The shooter was a trending fixture on the social media feeds, generating a slew of hashtags and misinformation.

  #nycshooter and #nycsniper topped the list.

  But most of the hashtags were bereft of ingenuity or decorum.

  #fuckfaceshooternuts

  #dropdempigs

  #eatleadcoppers

  #youcanrunbutyoucanthide

  #deathfromabove

  Anti-government militia groups had birthed their own labels, singing the sniper’s praises as he rose up against the tyranny of the government.

  #nycriseupagainsttyranny

  #donttreadonmebecauseishootback

  But the social adulation was not an across-the-board phenomenon, and many were quick to label the sniper as a Muslim extremist.

  #nycterrorist

  #raghedsniper [sic]

  Others accused him of being a black activist, intent on advancing a race war.

  #jigaboowitharifle

  #negroshooter

  They generated clicks and followers and opinions and anger and trolling and finger-pointing and memes.

  What they did not generate was any kind of meaningful discourse.

  Kehoe and Graves were in a meeting when Lucas and Whitaker arrived. Kehoe was against the conference table, cradling an FBI mug of what had to be tea. He had a pile of papers at his hip. If one ignored the computer-pushing sales rhetoric of the last thirty years and looked only at the facts, the bureau generated more paper in a month than it had through any eight combined years prior to 2001. The leveling of the World Trade Center had propelled the bureau into its most paranoid and active period of data harvesting since the 1960s, and one of the office sayings was that the FBI killed more trees than suburban sprawl, Dutch elm disease, and IKEA combined.

  Lucas folded himself into an Aeron and poured a coffee from the tray on the table. He slid it across the polished surface to Whitaker, who smiled a tired thank-you.

  He poured one for himself and grabbed a plastic-wrapped sandwich without checking its contents. Then he sat back, took a deep slug of coffee, and willed the warmth to his leg. The stunt on the bridge had been an exercise in thermal masochism and had taken a toll he didn’t expect. When it was really cold, the humid Manhattan kind that rat-chewed its way down to the major bones, the already lousy circulation in his left leg became less effective. That had been two hours ago, and his leg still felt borrowed from a corpse.

  Graves took a seat on Whitaker’s flank, across from Lucas.

  Kehoe put the tea down. “What can you tell me? Start with absolutes, move down to certainties, and finish off with I-thinks—strong I-thinks. Where are we on our radicalized French national?”

  Lucas watched Kehoe, searching for giveaways. All he saw was a supreme poker player at work.

  Graves went through the broad strokes regarding what his people had put together, only going into detail when Kehoe asked a pointed question. Other than timelines and a list of investigative avenues that had turned up nothing in the way of relevant leads, he had little to offer. He gave a professional summary of both crime scenes and victims but not much in the way of deductions.

  “The Frogs gave us a pretty solid folder, but we can’t find Froissant. They have been monitoring his family members, all email, phones, and mail. The guy has stepped into the great unknown.” Graves nodded over at Lucas. “We’re canvassing anyplace he might hide out in New York. All the upscale hotels; with a bankroll of more than a billion dollars, our behavioral guys don’t think he’d be in a Motel 6 in Jersey. That being said, they don’t think he’ll stay at the Plaza, either. This is the kind of guy who is used to buying security, so we went through all the upscale rentals citywide—starting at ten grand and moving up to a hundred and fifty K a month. So far, we’ve found nothing through the obvious agencies, including Craigslist and Airbnb.”

  Whitaker shook her head. “When you have a billion plus in the till, Airbnb probably isn’t the obvious choice.”

  Graves shrugged. “Neither is killing people. If he’s using his own money, he’s carrying it with him. Or he’s plugged into a network. We’ve gone back through the entire family’s banking records, out to distant cousins and friends. Nothing points to money ending up stateside, not even if it’s been hopscotched.” The FBI could search almost any offshore bank via the DHS and NSA. The ones they couldn’t audit had nothing to do with any form of refusal—any bank that said no to the United States government found itself slowly, but assuredly, smothered under a barrage of citations, audits, litigation, and other well-orchestrated negative pressure. No, checking every single bank was difficult because international money migration was a constant game of investigative Whac-A-Mole—in the speed-of-light economy of e-commerce, bank accounts opened and closed on a second-to-second basis.

/>   “Our people have crunched the numbers a dozen different ways, and if he’s bare-bonesing it, he needs half a million dollars, which is enough to show up somewhere. If he’s going full tilt, it could be upwards of fifteen mil.”

  Kehoe raised a question. “Cryptocurrencies?”

  Graves shook his head. “Only thirteen percent of terrorists and terrorist cells worldwide rely on cryptocurrency. But this guy wasn’t raised in the backwoods of Carbombistan; he was raised with electricity and light bulbs—”

  “Cut out the editorializing,” Kehoe offered in an irritated voice.

  Graves nodded in deference and continued, “We’ve checked anyone within five hundred miles of Manhattan who is capable of lending that kind of financial support. It’s been short-listed to twenty-eight individuals, including two Saudi princes, one son-in-law to the Kuwaiti royal family, and an assortment of wealthy sympathizers. They’re all on our scope. We’re also watching all mosques in the area that are known for preaching what could be classified as radical views.”

  Kehoe turned to Lucas. “But you’re not convinced that this is our guy.”

  By the way Kehoe phrased the question, it was obvious that he expected Lucas to speak up.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “All because of a little snow?” Graves said.

  “This is someone who was born shooting in this kind of weather.”

  That looked like what Kehoe had been expecting, and he nodded a thanks before turning to Graves and saying, “You focus on Froissant. Page is going to pursue his hunch with—”

  Lucas spoke up. “It’s not a hunch. It’s—”

  Kehoe cut him off. “Page and Whitaker will pursue his hunch. Give them what they need. But until this guy is in a cell, I want you functioning on a conjoined brain—as soon as one of you learns something, the other does, too.”

  Kehoe pointed a well-manicured index at Lucas. “You have any ideas where you want to go on this?”

  “We start with ballistics. Very few people have the requisite know-how to convert a hunting round into an armor-piercing round. This wasn’t a hobbyist; this was a little old guy with a mile and a half of machinist manuals in his skull.”