Worst Case

by James Patterson

  But then, the startled fury on the phone man’s face came back to him, and he was suddenly laughing. He had to stop this nonsense. He’d gotten off easy, Francis realized, considering how large the man was. He was lucky the guy hadn’t killed him.

  Besides, he wasn’t powerless anymore, was he? he thought as he found his valise. He patted it lovingly before he lifted it and continued his pilgrimage north.

  A snatch of grammar school Robert Frost came to him as he picked up his pace.

  He recited to himself, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

  Chapter 68

  “DADDY, DO MY ashes look okay? I told Grandpa to do a good job,” my five-year-old, Chrissy, said as we sat by the window inside the crowded Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.

  We’d just dropped off her siblings at school after church. Chrissy, who was in kindergarten now, luckily didn’t have to go in until noon. In our big family, one-on-one time was an extremely rare commodity. Not even a nasty killing spree would make me miss our Wednesday-morning Starbucks date.

  “I don’t know. Let me see,” I said, reaching across the table, holding her tiny chin in my hand as I peered at her. I couldn’t help but kiss her elflike nose. “They look great, Chrissy. Grandpa did fine. And they go really well with your hot chocolate mustache.”

  As she went back to her drink, I looked at the long line by the pastry case. Waiting for their morning fix of Seattle’s main export were nannies with infants, tired-looking construction workers, and tired-looking men and women dressed in business clothes. Maybe ten percent of them, along with one of the baristas, had ashes.

  I wondered with a cold chill if it was in the killer’s mind to shoot people who had ashes today. That he was going to do something was a given. Every indication was that today was the day. The only questions left were where and how.

  I rubbed my eyes before I lifted my coffee and took a large gulp. My blood caffeine level had hit record highs in the past couple of sleepless days, but it couldn’t be helped. After last night’s end-of-day task force meeting, I’d spent much of the night Googling everything I could on Ash Wednesday.

  Ash Wednesday was one of the most solemn days in the Catholic liturgical year. It was a day for contemplating one’s transgressions.

  But whose transgressions was the killer trying to point out with the slayings? The dead kids’? Society’s? His own?

  I caught my ash-streaked, mournful reflection in the plate glass.

  Well, I was certainly stewing in my own lapses this morning, I thought, looking away. For not already putting an end to this horrible case.

  As Chrissy played peekaboo with a neighboring toddler in a stroller, I checked my cell phone for the millionth time to see if I had missed any messages. I winced when only my Yankees-logo wallpaper appeared again. Emily had put an incredible rush on the print, but there was still no word.

  I spun my phone on the chessboard tabletop as I looked out the window down Broadway. I could feel the moments slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.

  Where and how? I thought. Where and how?

  Chapter 69

  MY CASE-DISTRACTED MIND still hadn’t come a hundred percent back online as I stepped with Chrissy into my apartment ten minutes later. Otherwise, I would have checked my caller ID before I snapped open my phone.

  “What’s the story?” I yelled into it.

  “What story?” my grandfather Seamus said. “Actually, who cares? Did you tell her yet?”

  “Tell who what?”

  “Mary Catherine, ya eedjit! See, I knew you’d forget. And with MC in such a riled knot of late. Does the song ‘Happy Birthday’ ring a bell, Detective?”

  “Holy sh—… ugar,” I said. “No. I forgot.”

  Eedjit was right! I thought. I’d blown this one big-time. I could at least have brought her back a muffin or something. What would Mary Catherine throw out of mine next? I wondered. I needed to address the situation, and pronto. I heard the tea kettle start to boil in the kitchen. Maybe I still had a shot.

  “I’m all over it, Father,” I said, hanging up.

  Mary was taking a mug down from the cabinet just inside the kitchen door.

  “Mary. There you are,” I said, surprising her with a hug.

  “Happy birthday!” I said as merrily as I could and went to plant a kiss on her cheek.

  But as it turned out, I was the one who got the surprise present.

  Mary Catherine turned her head, and our lips locked. At first, I pulled back as if I’d been Tasered, but then, before I knew it, my hand found the back of her neck and we were, well, making out would be the exact expression.

  Mary’s unheeded mug slid off the counter and shattered.

  I guess you could call it pretty hot-and-heavy making out.

  “Mary Catherine!” Chrissy called a second later just outside the kitchen door.

  Mary almost broke my nose as she ripped herself away from me. Her face was at least twenty shades redder than her strawberry-blond hair. My face felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t seem to close my mouth.

  “Goddamn you, Mike,” she said before she fled out the doorway. Was she crying? Why was she crying? I was having trouble enough breathing. I heard the hall bathroom door slam a second later.

  I was still standing there, brain-locked and blinking, when Chrissy came in. “Where’s MC?” she said.

  “I’m not sure. I broke a mug, Chrissy. Could you get me the dustpan?”

  Chapter 70

  I WAS DOWN on my hands and knees, dazed and sweeping up, when my cell rattled.

  “Hey, Mike,” Agent Parker said. “Get down here. I have news. I’m right outside your building.”

  “Thank God,” I said, dumping the last of the shards into the garbage. “I mean, on my way!”

  I quickly hollered, “I’m off to work, ’bye, Mary,” as I passed the still-closed bathroom door.

  Was that the right thing to do? I wasn’t sure. I’d never made out with my kids’ nanny before.

  I wiped the lip gloss off my chin in the elevator mirror on the way down to the street. Still tasting it, I pondered what the heck had just happened and how I felt about it.

  Like I needed something else on my plate at this juncture.

  “Goddamn you, Mike.”

  Chapter 71

  I CLIMBED INTO Emily’s double-parked Crown Vic. She was wearing a new white silk blouse and sleek beige skirt suit. With the case dragging on, she must have done some shopping, I realized.

  Was it me, or was the blouse showing some pretty nice cleavage? I wiped my eyes. What the hell was happening to me?

  “Feeling okay there, Mike?”

  “Never better,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”

  Emily handed me a folder.

  “We finally got the toxicology report back on the ashes found on the first victim, Jacob Dunning. Are you familiar with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy?”

  “Had one six months ago,” I said, nodding. “Doctor said I’m as clean as a whistle.”

  “Listen closely, wiseass,” Emily said, ignoring my acerbic wit. “Basically, individual elements reflect X-ray light in different patterns. They ran the ashes through the machine, and it turns out most of it is regular cigarette tobacco. The twist is that they found traces of some very interesting substances as well that came from the killer’s sweat.”

  “Like what kind of substances?” I said.

  Emily lifted a clipboard.

  “Several amphetamines and a drug called… Iressa. It’s a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer.”

  I rubbed my face as I nodded.

  “Hey, good work,” I said. “I’ll get Schultz to contact Sloan-Kettering and the other cancer centers and check out their patients. It’s starting to make a little more sense now in terms of motive. If this guy is terminal, maybe he made out some psycho bucket list. Maybe this is his way of going out with a bang.”

  “Funny you should say bang,” Emily said, po
inting to a name on the fax sheet. “Because the drugs aren’t the worst of it. There was evidence of something called pentaerythritol. It’s found in plastic explosives, Mike.”

  Chapter 72

  KIDNAPPING, CHILD MURDERS, and now plastic explosives? This nightmare case kept getting worse and worse. I unsuccessfully tried to wake myself out of it as Emily answered her encrypted cell phone.

  “Hold on, Tom,” she said into it. “Let me put you on speaker.”

  “We got the print back, Em,” FBI lab chief Tom Warriner said a moment later. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s a hit, but one that’s coded to COINTELPRO.”

  “Cointelpro?” I said.

  “The FBI’s counterintelligence program,” Emily said.

  “The section attached to this was run out of the New York office,” Warriner continued. “The Domestic Terrorism Squad from the sixties. The code name attached is Shadowbox.”

  “In Intelligence Squads, when the identity of a person is classified, they designate code names,” Emily explained with a roll of her eyes. “Like the CIA, the FBI spook division loves codes and passwords. James Bond, eat your heart out.”

  She aimed her voice at her phone.

  “So, what do you think, Tom? Our guy, this Shadowbox, was probably a confidential informant on a domestic terrorist group?”

  Terrorism? I was still trying to absorb the plastic explosives angle.

  “Most likely,” the FBI lab chief said.

  “So, how do we get a name to match the code name?” I asked.

  “I’ve tried twice to crack the old databases, but some COINTELPRO records seem to be missing,” Warriner said.

  Emily snorted.

  “I’ll bet. Into the ol’ memory hole you go. What the hell are we going to do? How do we get around that?”

  “I’ve been asking around, and the best lead I can tell you is that you guys should go see John Browning,” Warriner said. “He’s the former agent who ran the group out of the New York office from ’sixty-eight to ’seventy-four. I tried to call him, but there’s no answer at his house up in Yonkers. I worked with Browning on a few things when I was a rookie tech. Sarcastic pain in the ass, but a mind like a steel trap. If he can’t tell you who Shadowbox is, no one can.”

  Chapter 73

  THE CROWN VIC’S V8 screamed like it meant it as we zigzagged north up the crowded Saw Mill River Parkway. Danica Patrick had nothing on Emily Parker, I thought as I white-knuckled the door handle.

  Browning lived on a cul-de-sac near the Dunwoodie golf course. There was a U-Haul truck in his driveway. Please don’t be moved out, I prayed as we came to a hard stop behind it.

  A wiry, clean-cut sixty- or maybe seventy-something-year-old in a St. John’s University sweatshirt came out of the garage, carrying a box of model trains. I noticed he’d gotten his ashes today as well.

  “Help you?” he said, his intelligent blue eyes shifting quickly from me to Emily.

  “We hope so,” Emily said, showing him her tin. “Tom Warriner sent us. It’s about CO—”

  He lifted a pausing finger as a woman came out of the house across the street, carrying a tray of plants.

  “It’s about your, um, previous line of work,” Emily finished in a lower voice.

  “I see,” he said. “Come on in, then, I guess,” he said, waving us toward the open garage door.

  “Finally heading to Florida,” he said after he closed the garage door behind him. “Just sold to a rent refugee. Yuppie couple from Manhattan. Said they wanted their Yorkies to have some room to stretch out. I managed to raise four daughters here, so maybe it’ll work out for them.”

  “We need your help, John,” Emily said quickly. “We need to cut through a mountain of red tape, and we’re running out of time. In ’sixty-nine, you ran a CI named Shadowbox. His print just came up in the system. We think he has something to do with these kid killings that are going on in the city.”

  “I see,” he said, tapping a finger to his cheek.

  “If you want, you could call Tom to confirm my ID,” Emily said.

  “You kidding me?” Browning said, rolling his eyes at me. “I knew you were Government before your Mary Janes hit my driveway. Shadowbox’s name was Mooney. Francis Xavier Mooney. Pale college kid. Wore glasses. Smart, smart kid from a blue-collar family in Inwood. He went to Columbia but got in with some seriously radical people. After he got busted for dope, he advised us on a case we were building on an offshoot of the Weathermen terrorist group.”

  “Shit,” I said. “There’s that T word again.”

  Browning nodded.

  “One night he calls me late and tells me about a bomb-making factory his boys got going in an apartment in the Village. Said his buddies were about to blow up Grand Central Terminal. We go to raid the place and baboom! One of the jackasses running for the back window knocked over something he shouldn’t have and the place went up. Took down half the building. Four of them died. Mooney was torn up over it. Like he blamed himself. We took him out of the program after that. Last I heard of him.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh…,” the retired agent said, looking up at his garage ceiling. “It was in nineteen seventy. What’s that? Almost forty years ago?”

  His expression changed. He actually looked a little ruffled for a moment.

  “It was Ash Wednesday nineteen seventy. We called it the Ash Wednesday bombing. Terrorists and anniversaries. Not good.”

  I beat Emily by half a thumb press of my cell phone.

  “Get on this,” I told Schultz as he picked up at the task force. “The suspect’s name is Francis Xavier Mooney. Address most likely in Manhattan. He might have explosives. Tell them to beef up security at Grand Central. It may be a potential target. Call me back the second you have this guy’s address.”

  “How many he kill?” Browning said as we waited for his rattling garage door to go back up.

  “Two, maybe three kids,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Not surprised. Frigging nut case. Even after we hosed his friends from the rubble, he was going on about that freegan, tree-hugging crap. Be careful. Mooney’s an idealist. One thing I learned during my illustrious career is that they’re always the ones you have to watch the closest.”

  Chapter 74

  THE SKIES OPENED up as we tore back to the highway from the former FBI agent’s house. The thump of the speeding wipers almost managed to keep time with my racing heart. My adrenaline was jacked. Closing in on Mooney was better than drinking a case of Red Bull.

  My cell rang as we hydroplaned onto the parkway entrance.

  “Mike,” Chief Fleming said. “We just got the ten-seven on Mooney. He lives in Chelsea. Four-four-eight West Twenty-fifth. That’s between Ninth and Tenth about three blocks from the Fashion Institute of Technology.”

  “Finally!” I screamed. I repeated the address to Emily. After all the dead ends and frustration, for the first time in the case, we were on the hunt.

  “Since Mooney might still have a hold of Dan Hastings,” my boss continued, “the ADIC from the New York FBI office just authorized the Hostage Rescue Team to do the assault. They’re en route to Chelsea right now along with our bomb guys.

  “We’re still working on the no-knock warrant. Harry Dobbins, chief of the DA’s Homicide Division, wrote it up himself and is going to call me from Centre Street the second he can find a judge to sign it. Where are you?”

  “About thirty minutes out,” I said. “Where’d you get Mooney’s address? From a criminal record?”

  “No, get this,” the chief said. “His name popped up in the city social workers registration database. I just got off the phone with them. He’s part-time, and his record says that he’s an attorney with Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth, on Lexington. I’ve heard of them. A top-flight corporate firm. ESU’s on its way over there.”

  “Do you have their number?” I said.

  As I dialed the firm, I spotted the agonizingly dis
tant Manhattan skyline through a break of parkway trees. Goddammit. We needed to be there yesterday. Had Mooney struck yet? Would he hit his office? Were we too late?

  “Ericsson, Weymouth and Roth. May I put you on hold?” said a pleasant female voice.

  “Hell, no!” I yelled. “This is Detective Mike Bennett of the NYPD. This is extremely urgent. I need to know if Francis X. Mooney came to work today.”

  “Mr. Mooney? He’s one of our senior partners. I can patch you through to his voice mail,” the voice said.

  “Listen to me!” I screamed. “We have reason to believe Mr. Mooney is armed and extremely dangerous, suicidal, and homicidal. Has he come in? Yes or no?”

  “Oh, my God!” the woman said. “I’m not sure.”

  “Check now!” I yelled.

  The phone thumped down.

  “I just spoke to his secretary,” the receptionist said. “He’s not here. The office manager is right here, though.”

  “This is Ted Provencal,” said a man a moment later.

  “Mike Bennett from the NYPD. We have reason to believe that your coworker Francis Mooney is responsible for the rash of recent teenage killings.”

  I heard the man breathing heavily. He seemed stunned.

  “Francis?” he said. “Francis?!”

  “I know it’s a shock. But I need as much information about him as I can gather. Where is he right now?”

  “I don’t know. He has no meetings scheduled. Francis has been in and out recently. Ever since he was diagnosed with lung cancer, we rolled his casework back. He’s been on flex time.”

  So that explained the drug, I thought.

  “Mooney has cancer?” I said.

  “Stage four, non-small-cell,” the man said. “He found out three months ago. Too far gone to even do surgery, the poor guy. He was a two-pack-a-day man. We begged him to quit. Offered him incentives. It seemed so stupid for such a brilliant man.”