City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  “That’s still a lot of work.”

  Lucas turned away from the city. “Which is what they are paying us to do. Just put the victim files in motion, then come and get me,” he said. “Besides, we’re not going to do the sifting—I have someone who will.”

  “Are we allowed to—”

  But he stopped listening and hung up.

  He poured the rest of the coffee down his throat before reloading the machine with another packet of hotel-brand dark roast. Then he fired up the shower.

  54

  New Jersey

  The neighborhood was a no-nonsense example of postwar America; nice single-family dwellings with two-car driveways and perfect backyards for weekend barbecues. It was a working-class haven, houses decorated with too many Christmas lights, plastic Santas on stoops, and inflatable decorations from Costco dancing in the wind. The massive elm, oak, and chestnut trees that lined the street reached into the sky, their branches bare as they slept through what had to be the hundredth winter for some. If you squinted, you could see back in time, and through the lens of history it had once been a place like many others across the nation—a life to aspire to. Now, if statistics were to be believed, it was a place where the majority of households were barely hanging on to the American dream, their lives controlled by too much debt and not nearly enough sex.

  If not for the cop cars, black SUVs, government sedans, and the large armored cube van, it could have been just another morning in Jersey.

  Lucas and Whitaker walked up the shoveled path to the front door. They were insulated from the curious being held at bay behind a spiderweb of evidence tape that the Hoboken PD had strung around the property before the bureau arrived the night before. The FBI’s investigative team was still going through the place.

  As they approached the house, two bureau men in matching windbreakers came out with what looked like a waterproof plastic coffin. They didn’t bother nodding a hello as they slipped by Lucas and Whitaker on the narrow path, taking the case to the armored van.

  Whitaker was bringing Lucas up to speed. “The Jeep we found in the alley behind your house was stolen from an apartment garage about three miles from here. We figured out who Roberts was by running his prints. Incidentally, your sword-happy friend made our job of inking him a lot easier.”

  Lucas shook his head at that.

  Whitaker snorted once, then grimaced, obviously embarrassed at her laugh. “And the medical examiner said that he looked like he had been attacked by a lion. You know where I can get a dog like that? I would like to give it to my ex as a Christmas present.”

  That brought a small smile to Lucas’s lips. “I’ll rent him to you.”

  “Look at you, all smiley and shit.” They hit the stoop, and Whitaker held the door open for him. “Both Roberts and Atchison were exemplary officers. Zero on-the-job complaints. Atchison had one civil case involving a land issue with a neighbor. The owners of that house,” she said, nodding to the left. “He’s got an ex-wife in Pittsburgh and two grown kids, both out of state; one’s a pilot for Alaska Airlines, the other’s a nurse in California.”

  Whitaker followed Lucas as he went through the house, room by room. Agents were dissecting the residence one piece at a time, but they were being relatively neat. A few drawers were open; things were taken off shelves and left on tables; closet doors were open. But nothing a couple of hours of tidying up wouldn’t fix.

  The living room and dining room offered up nothing that hit Lucas as noteworthy. Typical nondescript big-box store decorating along with all the little bells and whistles that television convinced people they needed. There were a few photographs over the mantel—grade- and high-school photographs of Atchison’s daughters in various stages of awkward development, ending with two wedding photos. It could have been anyone’s living room. Anyone’s dining room. Anyone’s life.

  One of the upstairs bedrooms still had kids’ furniture and a closetful of clothes that were probably from when his daughters still lived here. There were jeans and sweatshirts and a tech hunting jacket in mossy oak and a dated blue-and-white waitress uniform. Some sneakers and a pair of winter boots. Nothing Lucas didn’t expect to find.

  The master bedroom could have been a hotel room for all the personal touches present. The only things that denoted individuality were a pair of prescription reading glasses and a book on the coming race wars.

  The master closet contained a lot of work shirts and jeans along with three off-the-rack suits—Atchison’s detective garb. But the room itself could have been staged for a television show. “Pretty boring guy,” Lucas said as they finished upstairs.

  Whitaker shook her head. “You haven’t seen the basement.”

  They headed down the carpeted stairs, rounded the wall, and cut through the house to the basement stairwell off the kitchen. The door had two security dead bolts and an electronic push-button lock that had been drilled out. “Took our guys half an hour to crack these,” Whitaker said.

  The basement staircase was decorated with a patchwork of cheaply framed photographs of Atchison that dated back at least three decades judging by the creeping male-pattern baldness. Each picture was identical in that Atchison held a rifle, albeit in varying format, caliber, and purpose. The majority had been taken at target ranges, but a few were hunting shots, Atchison proudly standing, kneeling, or sitting with freshly killed game. Mostly deer and bear with the odd moose thrown in. Nothing exotic. Nothing that couldn’t be found within a six-hour drive of the city; no elk or bighorn sheep or wild boar. Not one of him in uniform. Again, it could have been any staircase in the country.

  But Whitaker was right; the big payoff was the basement itself.

  The large room was finished in wood paneling from some time in the eighties, judging by the style. There was a small office in the corner that consisted of one old oak desk, a small two-drawer filing cabinet, and a keyboard that was missing a computer—no doubt ferried off to the FBI’s lab for probing. There was a Rhodesian flag hanging over the desk, flanked by larger American flags.

  The walls were lined with hundreds of rifles of every conceivable type, both restricted and non. Everything from shotguns to bolt-action hunting rifles to tactical arms was represented several times over, all oiled and dusted and neatly displayed like a store. It was impossible to miss the emphasis on assault weapons—a good 70 percent of the stock was designed to kill the maximum number of warm bodies in the least amount of time.

  Four agents were at work, inventorying the stock. It appeared as if they had made a 10 percent dent in the weapons; they were taking each one down, photographing it, recording the serial number, labeling it, placing it in a long polyethylene bag, then stacking it in a plastic coffin-case like the one Lucas had seen out front.

  “Any of these registered?”

  “Not so far,” Whitaker said. “They ran some random serial numbers, and a few turned up as stolen. We found sixty-one .300s.”

  “Do I need to ask the next question?”

  “You want to know about ammunition.”

  “I’m starting to like the way you do that.”

  Whitaker led Lucas to a door in the corner that could have been to the furnace room or a small bathroom. Whitaker opened it, cracked the light switch, and stepped back to let Lucas through.

  Once inside, Lucas fell back onto Maude’s standard response whenever presented with something in gross violation to the norm. “Wow.”

  “My exact thoughts when they brought me in here,” Whitaker said.

  The room was as large as the main body of the basement and filled with lines of heavy-duty metal shelving. Ammunition of every conceivable make and caliber filled the space, from small boxes of Winchester .22 Long Rifle to crates of Chinese 7.62. There was, quite literally, enough ammunition in there to start a military action almost anywhere in the world.

  “Any armor-piercing Nosler rounds?” he asked.

  Whitaker walked him down an aisle and stopped near the end at an empty shelf.
The label on the lip was handwritten in neat non-cursive and read: .300. Several photographs—stamped with the FBI evidence logo—sat on the shelf. Lucas picked them up and flipped through. They were shots of the same shelf, only in the photos the space was efficiently packed with unmarked blue plastic containers that looked roughly the size of shoe boxes. Three of the containers were white.

  “There were eleven thousand rounds of standard bench-load incorporating Nosler slugs here. Those three white containers you see had modified rounds in them—they’re at the lab, and so far, they match our guy. We don’t have metallurgy back yet, but on every other front they’re the same—including a ferrous kernel.”

  Lucas nodded as he examined the pictures. “And now we have powder load as well as cartridge and primer manufacturer.” He placed the prints back on the shelf and looked around the storage room. “So riddle me this, Special Agent Whitaker—”

  “Why would a police detective who also happens to be an arms dealer—the same officer who investigated the Margolis murder that we interviewed yesterday—come after your family?” she interrupted with one of her preemptive question hijacks. “I’m the question guru; you’re supposed to be the answer guy on the team.”

  Back in the main room, he took in the massive amount of firepower and continued thinking out loud. “How does a guy like this stay under the radar? This is on an industrial scale.”

  Whitaker nodded up at the Rhodesian flag. “He obviously had white supremacist leanings but managed to keep them to himself.”

  “Fried chicken comment notwithstanding,” Lucas offered.

  “He didn’t have an online presence. But he was definitely selling arms. Roberts, too, judging by what our people found in his garage. Not as big a cache as this, but about two hundred small arms, mostly machine pistols.” She picked up a battered Thompson machine gun, turning it over in her hands. “St. Valentine’s Day typewriter. Hard to go wrong with this thing.”

  “Selling them to whom? He was a cop.”

  “Like I am fond of citing, patriot militia enrollment has gone up by about fifteen thousand percent in the past decade, coinciding with the election of the country’s first black president—remember?”

  “Coincidentally, of course,” he said.

  “In all models, these groups are the greatest threat that exists to American security. They think they’re above the law because they’re white. And most of their members lack the critical-thinking skills to figure out that their belief systems are anti-American.” She waved a finger around the room. “Atchison had a good record and didn’t raise any red flags.”

  Lucas looked around, and it was hard to miss the paranoia. “Any financials?”

  Whitaker put the old blued Thompson back in the rack and shook her head. “Guy was pulling in a little over seventy-five K a year and, other than what you see down here, didn’t have any expensive habits. A Sam’s Club card and two Visas, never spent more than fifteen hundred bucks a month on his plastic. Mortgage was paid off three years ago. His truck is eight years old, and he bought it used. He’s got a little over eighty grand in his savings account. Safe in the corner over there contained a hundred and fifty grand plus change, all in hundred-dollar bills. That’s pretty much his life story.”

  Lucas took a look around the room and shook his head. “No, it’s not.” He walked over to the desk and sat down.

  Whitaker said, “His hard drive is encrypted. It’s basic software for Mac, but it will take some time for our people to crack. Apparently, Detective Atchison was relatively careful with his data.”

  Lucas went through the desk, but the drawers were empty. He was going to ask what the bureau had found in them but waited for Whitaker to do her thing.

  She turned to the men cataloging the weapons. “You have a list of the contents of the desk?”

  Without breaking stride, one of the agents nodded at a tablet atop one of the kit bags on the floor. “Right there.”

  Whitaker passed it to Lucas, and he flipped through the high-definition photographs. After a few images, he realized that Atchison had been a careful man; there wasn’t much in the way of incriminating evidence. There were no phone books or customer lists or invoices or any other information that had immediate value. The desk had contained a few manuals for different weapons systems, a dozen catalogs from survivalist supply stores, three binders of brochures, and a handful of takeout menus. The rest of the contents could loosely be classified under the dual heading of office supplies/drawer shit.

  Lucas pushed back from the desk, and the chair caught on the carpet beneath, pulling it back. There, on the floor, was a small yellow tag that had obviously been meant for the trash can. He stared down at it for a moment and felt the tumblers in his head go through their turns before they clicked in place. “Son of a bitch,” he said and picked it up. “It’s an inventory tag from a gunsmith.” He held it up so she could read it. “Your friend Oscar.”

  55

  The West Village

  Lucas and Whitaker sat in the Navigator while the SWAT team took the door off its hinges with a grinder. The heat in the SUV was dialed to full strength, but the windshield still fogged up without the grille to push extra air from the block through the vents.

  All efforts to contact Oscar via telephone and doorbell had been unsuccessful, and going by his unknown affiliation with Atchison, they were under the assumption that he wasn’t interested in playing footsie.

  The SWAT team slipped into the building, assault rifles at the ready, adrenaline and testosterone at peak levels. Lucas started counting off the sand in the hourglass.

  The subzero temperature was slowing everything down, from the SUV’s heater to time itself.

  “Graves is convinced that Oscar, Atchison, and Roberts are not related to our sniper. They’re collateral.”

  Lucas kept the timer in his head going as he answered her. “You know how I feel about Graves and his critical-thinking skills.” The loop of Atchison’s head disintegrating as he blew back over the sill of the door filled his mind like a scene out of a Tarantino script.

  “You have any ideas?”

  Lucas shook his head but kept his eye on Oscar’s door. “You mean other than Oscar’s dead inside?”

  “Jesus!”

  By the way she said it, he could tell that the thought upset her. Lucas just shrugged. “Things are starting to make sense on a certain level.”

  And that’s when the squad captain came out and waved an all clear. Whitaker and Lucas stepped out into the cold.

  When they were inside the building, the squad commander pulled them aside. “We found a body upstairs. A man.” His face played around with a few different expressions—none of them good. “Someone took their anger out on him.”

  The commander tried to stand in front of Whitaker, and Lucas could see that he didn’t think she could handle what had happened upstairs.

  She took a step closer to him and ramped up what looked like a snarl. She had a presence, and even in tactical gear, it was obvious that the smaller man didn’t want to go up against her.

  All he offered was, “You shouldn’t go up there.”

  Whitaker looked up to Oscar’s office above the machine shop. “No one goes up until the forensics team is done.”

  “We need to—”

  Whitaker cut him off. “I’m senior agent here. You do nothing until our people go through the place. Now, get your men out of here. I don’t want you fucking up my crime scene.”

  The squad leader stared at her for a few seconds before nodding. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s Special Agent, not ma’am.”

  “Of course, Special Agent Whitaker.”

  As they walked away, Lucas slapped her on the back. “And you said I don’t make friends.”

  “With you, it’s personality. With me, it’s good old-fashioned racism.”

  The CSI crew showed up, two vehicles filled with all manner of equipment meant to pull answers from the dead.

  Lu
cas was about to ask how long the caravan of death would take when Whitaker preemptively answered, “Two, maybe three hours.”

  He didn’t bother with the second question; he just waited for her response.

  She held up the hard drive he had asked for. “Have I failed you yet?”

  He tried not to smile as he said, “I need you to take me somewhere while the ghouls do their job with Oscar.”

  56

  Columbia University

  While they waited for the forensics unit to finish in the West Village, Whitaker and Lucas hit his office on campus. The school had settled into that between-time after exams and before Christmas where the only people on-site were those with something specific to do, someplace specific they didn’t want to be, or both.

  When they walked in, Debbie was at her permanent perch behind the desk. She uncharacteristically stopped her work and looked up at Lucas, ignoring Whitaker. “Dr. Page, how are you?” And by the way she said it, he could tell that even she had been rattled by the news of what had happened at his house the night before—the media was going bananas with the story.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Not a problem.”

  He turned to the three twentysomethings sitting on the leather sofa he had insisted the university provide; if he was going to have students bothering him, he needed somewhere for them to sit. It was also useful when he kept students waiting when he wasn’t in the mood to speak to them. Another of those win-win situations the school was so fond of pushing these days.

  Manuel Muñoz, Caroline Jespersen, and Bobby Nadeel were three of his grad students. Manuel was a tall, thin kid who Lucas strongly suspected had never seen a woman naked, at least not on this side of a computer screen. He was also one of the brightest systems modelers ever to have come through Lucas’s class. Caroline was completing her master’s and Ph.D. simultaneously because her scholarship was running out and she wouldn’t be able to afford any more semesters in school. She was curious and smart and funny as hell. Bobby came from a family that had pushed all their kids academically, and he had two dentists and a cardiologist as siblings—the pressure was most definitely on him to perform. He was on full scholarship, and the school had had Lucas approach him personally as an enticement. Bobby had that all-too-common combination of brilliance and dislikability that made him the perfect candidate for academic greatness. He was also smarter than almost anyone in the department—faculty or student.