City of Windows--A Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Lucas smiled, and he could tell that half of his face was too tired to obey by the way Whitaker looked at him. “What if Doowack was the target?”

  Whitaker’s eyes narrowed for a few seconds as she connected the dots. Then she reached for the phone.

  It took her a few minutes to get through to one of the archivists back in New York, an agent named Carla Zubrowka.

  Whitaker knew her and got right to the point. “Carla, I have you on speakerphone with Dr. Page, who’s helping us—”

  “Sure. We met yesterday. What can I do for you?”

  “I need you to run down an offender history. His name is Donald Francis Doowack. That’s D-O-O-W-A-C-K. Deceased January 9, three years back. Possible resident of Carlwood, Wyoming. No last known address. No known aliases. That’s everything I can give you. Do we have anything on him in the system? And check the ATF’s database.”

  They could hear Zubrowka’s fingers doing the Big Data Dance on the other end of the country. “Here we are. Doowack, Donald F. White male. Sixty-one years of age at the time of his death. Petty criminal with a background of firearms violations—mostly parole problems. Did three stints in state penitentiaries, all under two years. The rest of his collars look more like warnings. That’s pretty much it. I’ll email you the package … now … let’s migrate over to the ATF’s system. Here we go.

  “Let’s … see … same arrests. Same charges. Doowack was also listed as an ATF informant for a short stint twenty years back.”

  It felt like someone snapped their fingers inside Lucas’s head. “Is there a record of his involvement in an ATF sting operation for illegal firearms modification?”

  “Give … me … a … seco—yep, right here. It’s a nineteen-year-old file. He purchased twelve AR-15s from a subject the ATF was interested in—name redacted. But I can tell you it was part of a broader investigation into a Christian Identity group in Wyoming called the Covenant of the New Order.”

  “Did this sting operation take place in the parking lot of a Waffle House?”

  “Let’s … see.” There was a pause that ended with, “How did you know?”

  This time, Whitaker got to say it. “Lucky guess.”

  70

  Whitaker dropped the phone back into her pocket after hanging up. “The high-value target wasn’t Doyle’s deputy.”

  “Apparently not, no.”

  “So Jameson was just a bonus? A twofer?”

  “Yep.”

  “And Doyle didn’t know that Doowack was the ATF informant who roped in Quaid?”

  “Again, no.”

  “And now we have a straight line from Doowack to the Quaids on Bible Hill, and the way he was murdered ties him to Hartke, Kavanagh, and Lupino in New York.”

  A nod this time.

  “Doyle said that Hartke was the man in charge?”

  “Yep.”

  “And he was killed first?”

  Another nod.

  “This is a revenge narrative.”

  “Looks like,” he said.

  “Jesus.” Whitaker sat down on the bed, which groaned again. “If Doyle’s telling the truth, and Hartke was in charge of the team that screwed up on Bible Hill, there are more people on our shooter’s list. Kehoe has to unseal the file so we can put the remaining agents in protective custody.” She looked over at Lucas. “You see any holes in this?”

  Lucas shook his head.

  “And you think that this is all about revenge?”

  “Occam’s razor.”

  Whitaker smiled at him. “You’re not as dumb as Graves says.”

  Lucas allowed himself a smile and took another slug of water. It tasted of cheeseburger and hotel room.

  71

  42,000 feet above sea level, over Iowa

  Lucas took a root beer from the minifridge and dropped back into the plush leather. Whitaker was zonked out in her seat across the cabin, head back, mouth open, doing a pretty good job of not snoring. They were well above the storm smothering the entire Northeast with more frigid temperatures and snow. Up here, the sky stretched into forever, and the stars blinked like musical notes. The darkness was dropping off behind them, the first hues of morning creeping into the sky ahead. He could still see the Orion OB1 Association off to his left if he turned his head. His focus automatically zoomed out, until he was looking at the constellation proper, its four brightest stars—Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, Rigel, and Saiph—enclosing the famous belt of the hunter. Supergiant Red, Blue, Gamma, and Kappa Orionis, among the most distant visible to the naked human eye. Lucas had been staring at that particular constellation since he was a child, and it never ceased to amaze him in its beauty, complexity, and deceptive permanence.

  There was a little bump of turbulence that shook the ice cubes in his glass, and he was back on the plane with Whitaker, his root beer, and a mind full of doubts. He checked his Submariner; the Gulfstream G550 would be touching down in New York in two hours, somewhere just after 9:00 a.m. He had been running on adrenaline again, and he was beat.

  When they had called Kehoe from Wyoming, he listened patiently as they ran through everything they had discovered. And when they were done, his voice kept the same stoic cadence it always had when he delivered the anomalous response of, “Fuck.”

  Kehoe was dismissive of Myrna Mercer’s claim that someone in the bureau might be involved. But even over the phone, Lucas could hear the circuits humming behind the façade of calm. Kehoe had always been of the self-contained variety, and sharing was not part of his general approach to management, but he wouldn’t be able to write anything off until they had the shooter in front of a judge. And that someone inside might be the problem wasn’t completely unthinkable.

  He had Lucas and Whitaker go over everything one more time and asked the right questions. Then he told them to get back to New York.

  Lucas knew that the first thing Kehoe did after they hung up was to call the director of the bureau to get the DOJ to unseal the files on Bible Hill. And as quickly as bureaucratically possible, teams would be dispatched to round up all the agents involved. While they were being shipped off to parts unknown, no doubt to live out the investigation in shitty motels under some variant of the name Smith, each and every one of them would be vetted to make certain they hadn’t been filling their off hours by hunting their former associates. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption since everyone on the other side of the Bible Hill mess was now dead.

  Lucas couldn’t see the statistical probability that there would be any more agents who had been involved in the Wyoming fiasco in New York; that three had ended up in the city was some kind of dumb luck.

  Before heading back East, Lucas and Whitaker had a quick meeting with the boys from the local field office in one of the lounges at the Jackson Hole Airport. All concerned traded what they knew, what they suspected, and what they were looking for—the Wyoming team having the least to contribute at this point. The local special agent in charge was a man by the name of Rod Ziegler, who struck Lucas as another no-nonsense type very similar to Whitaker. Before they had all gone their respective ways, Lucas and Ziegler had talked a little, exchanged cards, and promised to help each other out.

  The Wyoming office would do what the bureau was designed to—take apart the Bible Hill history one DNA strand at a time. And they would keep going until they found something useful.

  At this point, it was simply a matter of wearing down the leads.

  But that still left a lot of the heavy lifting to the New York office. At least for the immediate future. It was possible that now that they’d taken the shooter’s food supply away, he’d leave the area. But Lucas doubted it—this guy had put too much legwork into this to give up now. And he was very good at shifting his focus.

  72

  The Bronx

  Special Agent Grover Graves watched the three blacked-out Econolines disappear into the snow before they were at the end of the block where he knew they would turn left for their journey downtown. When the convoy w
as gone, he nodded a thank-you to the NYPD officers who had escorted him here, giving them a two-finger salute and a smile. They got in their cruisers and drove off.

  It was early morning now and it was bright out, but the sun was hidden behind a thousand miles of snow. Graves couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a bright blue sky, and in some remote part of his brain he wondered if he would ever see one again. If nothing else, this winter had taught him that there was no such thing as reliable when it came to the weather. Unless you were looking for more snow and cold.

  That was the last of them—a woman by the name of Wendy Carson—and she was their fourth pickup of the morning. Which meant they were done. The others were already in safekeeping, locked down under the watchful eye of the bureau. All over the country, local field offices were going through the same procedure, collecting alumni from some ancient bureaucratic SNAFU out West.

  Carson had been a hostage negotiator back in the day. But she had been retired for fifteen years and couldn’t have looked more surprised when Graves, ten federal agents, and six cops had shown up, demanding that she throw some pj’s and a toothbrush into a bag (and to stay away from the windows while doing it). She was now safe, and Graves could take a break.

  After a middle-of-the-night call from Kehoe (didn’t that fucking guy ever sleep?), Graves had spent the early-morning hours coordinating the pickups. He thought that Page and Whitaker were wrong, but Kehoe believed them, and that was all that counted. Maybe now Page would go back to gimping around his classroom where he belonged.

  If Page had one flaw, it was that he overthought things. Kehoe had put it in simple terms. Page saw the world as complicated because he was unable to see it as simple—it was just the way he had been built. Other people looked at flowers in the park and all they saw were pretty colors. Lucas saw nutrients in the dirt they grew in and the sunshine that fed them and the bumblebees that pollinated them. And then he’d focus on one element, like the bees, and obsess that from every conceivable mathematical standpoint they shouldn’t be able to fly. He would factor in components like lift and drag and gravity and windage and wingbeats per second, and he’d work out the math. All while everyone else was looking at the flowers.

  And that’s how he had found Bible Hill—while everyone else had been looking at what was there, Page had been looking at what wasn’t. Or at least that was how Kehoe had explained it.

  Graves wasn’t convinced that the shootings were connected to Bible Hill. Or anything else Page and Whitaker had dug up. That their three victims had worked together was no big surprise—the law enforcement gene pool was limited, and at a certain level, everyone had worked with everyone else. It was like one of those conspiracy corkboards, with the colored yarn connecting all the pushpins. Everyone knew, and had worked with, everyone else.

  Graves was pooped and needed a little downtime. He’d head home for a shower and a solid six before going back down to Federal Plaza to hump it through the next part of forever.

  He pulled out his Ray-Bans and they were cold on the bridge of his nose. He saw a bodega on the corner, which translated to coffee.

  Graves was used to long hours and late nights, but with the cold thrown into the mix, it took a lot out of him. The same thing happened in the piss-warm humid days of July. As he got older, the weather was more of an obstacle than he liked. He didn’t want to think of himself as aging, but trips to the doctor were getting closer together, and his hardware seemed to be breaking down in increments. Shit was starting to add up. A bad knee here, a lower back pain there. A cold last year that had taken three months to shake. Blood pressure that was a little higher than the doctor liked. Bouts of insomnia. And he was chowing down on Tylenol like they were fucking Tic Tacs, which he hadn’t started doing until last year. No, getting old wasn’t for pussies, they were right about that. But coffee helped, even if it was just a little warmth for the belly.

  The bodega was like a thousand others in the city, a space no larger than a small garage that held about fifty million things—all packed so tightly that you’d think it was some sort of a contest. Every neighborhood had one, and besides the indispensables like Tampax and condoms, they could always be counted on for cold beer in the summer and café con leche in the winter.

  The guy behind the counter was a skinny little Latin dude wearing a big furry hoodie, who looked like he wanted to be somewhere else. His indifference was shared by the cat asleep on the register. But the guy smiled at Graves, even if it was a little forced. “Yeah?”

  “I’ll have a coffee and a Powerball.” Graves liked the little joints and tried to spend a few bucks every time he went into one. Like everything else, they would eventually give way to progress.

  The man filled a paper cup, and Graves told him to leave the lid off. He cycled up a lottery ticket and Graves paid, scratched the sleeping cat behind the ear, pocketed the ticket, and left the little store.

  Back outside, the cold hit him, but the coffee was warming his hand and he stopped to take a sip.

  The cup touched his lips and he pulled in a sip, careful not to burn his lips.

  But he never finished swallowing.

  Or heard the shot that killed him.

  73

  Columbia University Medical Center

  While the bureau went into endocannibalism mode, devouring its own data in massive gulps, Lucas visited Dingo in the hospital. He was still in a coma but incrementally better. The few tempered statements the doctors slipped into their updates still hinted at the possibility of bad things to come, and Lucas understood that the situation was worse than they were letting on. They were fun that way. But they hadn’t mentioned a priest, a rabbi, or a lawyer, so Lucas was doing his best to be hopeful, which was some kind of a minor miracle.

  The bureau hive was humming, their anger now focused on Graves’s murder. They had opened a dialogue with the media in an effort to bring back a little useful information. They had finally released the names of the victims, and the public relations department had outlined things that the citizenry could do to help.

  Graves was in the morgue having his body violated by a stainless surgical blade and oscillating saw. The bullet had gone right through him. He was alive. And then he wasn’t. And that was that. Roll credits.

  He had died on one of the busiest corners in the Bronx, the instant of his death captured by a CCTV in the bodega where he had just purchased a coffee. Lucas refused to watch the footage—he wouldn’t learn anything from it—but he had been told that the round had punched through the coffee cup then gone right through his front teeth. Graves stood there on the sidewalk for a good second before his body got the message that it was dead and he fell over as the vestigial impulses sent to his muscles blipped out. It was a mental image that Lucas was having a hard time shaking. He had never liked the man and was now destined to remember him forever—as opposed to simply forgetting about him when he walked off this job. Horror—the gift that keeps on giving.

  Which meant that Lucas had been right; now that they had taken the last few people off the shooter’s shopping list, he had lashed out. Which was both good and bad. Up until now, he had shown a control and precision that had been all but impossible to crack. He had no doubt spent months on surveillance; everything from Hartke to Lupino to Kavanagh dictated it. But Atchison, the imam, and Graves were all put together in a limited time frame with little to no planning. He hadn’t made a mistake yet, but he would. It was only a matter of time.

  The thing that brought Lucas a modicum of peace was knowing that Erin and the kids were safe. Their shooter knew who he was, and his family was the easiest way to track him. With them gone, and Lucas in a hotel, he’d be off the guy’s radar.

  And everyone else on the job had been given directives to change their routines. Every agent on the case was staying with family, friends, or in a hotel.

  But that still left a lot of law enforcement targets out there. It was impossible to turn your head in Manhattan without seeing a unifor
med police officer. And when all you have is a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. Or a target.

  There were countersnipers positioned around the city, which was causing its own particular set of problems with reports of men with rifles on rooftops coming in around the clock. City hall and Federal Plaza were the most heavily guarded, with a dozen eyes covering all the nearby terrain.

  All because one man with a rifle was unhappy about something.

  Only it wasn’t merely something.

  It was Bible Hill.

  The slug that went through Graves had shattered the window of the bodega behind him, gone through the cash register, then detonated a coffee maker. All while barely missing a cat. It was the same meteoric round. Another elevated position. Another evidence-free crime scene. Another example of fancy footwork, supreme skill with a rifle, and the ability to adapt to a changing situational landscape.

  Same. Same. Same. Same. Over and over and over. Groundhog Day on perpetual loop.

  Lucas left Whitaker back at the office in the suit she had been wearing for the past three days. She was going through the Bible Hill files that Kehoe had received from the DOJ under a special warrant.

  There was no one left alive to bring attention to the case—and since Myrna Mercer had accepted a wheelbarrow of blood money in exchange for her silence—it was supposed to stay buried. Gone from public consciousness as if it had never really happened at all.

  Except that their shooter had a very definite set of feelings on the subject.

  Lucas was at the window, looking out on the city, while Dingo fought his invisible war, aided by the respirator and a litany of IV bags. His citizenship card had been delivered to the nursing station, and his passport was back at Lucas’s house. Along with Alisha’s final adoption papers. Kehoe was making an effort. Maybe a real stab at an apology after all this time. Maybe they were both letting it all go.