A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1

by J. E. Fishman

  KAHN SAT BEHIND THE LIEUTENANT’S desk, door closed and blinds drawn, staring at the telephone. He couldn’t picture Capobianco lying in bed, could only see him in shirtsleeves with his tie undone, standing by the couch in his living room, red in the face. Maybe he didn’t need to hear about this now—about a cop in his squad who might be heading for trouble. No one had been hurt yet, after all, and maybe no one ever would be.

  On the other hand, one thing Kahn could see clearly in his mind was Diaz strolling up to that messenger bag in front of the cathedral like he knew exactly what was inside—and he couldn’t have known. Kahn saw him produce the Leatherman knife. He saw him hesitate when Kahn called to him in anger, hunch up his shoulders, then drop to one knee and proceed as if a superior officer hadn’t just advised him to stand down. He heard Diaz explaining what he’d looked up in the dictionary, which concerned Kahn more than anything—seemed to suggest a detective on the hunt for nothing but an excuse to go his own way. Then Kahn’s thoughts coalesced around the voluntary report from Hernandez, this most troubling news of Diaz walking fine lines within feet of speeding traffic.

  Suicidal? Maybe. Reckless? Most definitely. And Kahn kept thinking: not on my watch, not on my watch. He had a responsibility here. If Cap were back in the precinct house, easy enough to punt Hernandez to him. But that wasn’t how the situation shook out. He picked up the phone and called the lieutenant.

  “Cap here.”

  “You sound more yourself.”

  “It’s good to hear your voice without my ears ringing, Kahn. And I’m damn sick of sitting around. It has me feeling marginalized, tell you the truth.”

  “Then I can help.”

  “News on the twin bombers?”

  “Not exactly. Between us and A and E we’ve hoovered up enough evidence in the past three days, but it doesn’t lead anywhere so far.”

  “Confirmed C4 with a military taggant, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Burbette’s trying to run down the source.”

  “Find an NSN number or IMEI on the phone?”

  “No, Cap. We got cell phone parts but none of the right ones for that.”

  Capobianco started to say something else, hacked, got out a few words, and went into a full-out coughing jag. When he’d recovered, it seemed like a good time for Kahn to change the subject.

  “I’m thinking of taking Diaz off the case.”

  “Diaz? Why? The reprimand wasn’t enough? Breaking procedure again?”

  “Not precisely.” Kahn told him about what Hernandez had reported, the detective out in the middle of the night, playing in traffic.

  “You shitting me?”

  “I wish.”

  “Last I saw him he seemed fine. Now—is he that far gone?”

  “This case strikes close to home, I think. It’s dredged up something in him.”

  “But St. Pat’s was before this case.”

  Kahn once thought he’d want Capobianco’s job in a few years. Now he wasn’t so sure. “Maybe the kid had a premonition, Cap. I dunno. I have no experience with this kind of thing. But I’m beginning to think he could need a psychiatric evaluation.”

  “We can put him in for that,” Capobianco thought aloud. “Probably requires giving him leave. Can it wait until the squad’s back at full force? Still got a lot of people out sick.”

  “Your call. I’m just sharing the facts. The kid’s got a short fuse of late, arguing with me, arguing with O’Shea.”

  “Well, is he arguing about the case or about the weather?”

  “About the case.”

  “That doesn’t seem so bad. Everyone has their own style.”

  “True enough. It’s walking at night in the middle of the West Side Highway that has me spooked.”

  “He’s walking in the middle? I thought you said on the shoulder.”

  “Middle...shoulder—”

  Just then the door burst open.

  SALLYE RITCHIE SAT BROODING OVER a cooling mug of coffee in Warren Manis’s apartment, her senses dull, her thoughts diffuse. She had her elbows resting on his small kitchen table, and she held the mug up to her mouth too long, her lower lip clinging to the hot ceramic near the broken skin where he’d hit her. It stung, and she pulled away, setting down the mug and pondering. This time last year he’d given her a shiner that she couldn’t hide for weeks at work, had to concoct a story about hitting her face on the steering wheel in an auto accident. The other nurses looked at her cross-eyed for a while, but she had few friends close enough to press her. More troubling, those few who did know her well also knew that she’d acquired this measure of abuse on a trip out of town. They didn’t know how or why, but they had to suspect something more than her lame explanation.

  Now the split lip. She’d be back among the nurses tomorrow morning peddling another bullshit story to save face. But this time memory of the last incident might make their inquiries more insistent. All of them—including Sallye—had been trained to spot domestic abuse. For patients who came through the emergency room door, all were mandatory reporters. For a colleague, however, they’d have to tread more lightly. Still, Sallye knew it couldn’t go on much longer. She’d have to rid herself of the obsessions that she’d allow to creep into her life, into her long relationship with this strange man.

  Strange but not a stranger. She’d known him so many years now. How odd to carry on with such intimacy yet with so little depth of understanding.

  She set down the coffee mug and cruised the apartment perimeter, opening cabinets and drawers, browsing books, seeking clues to the creature who Warren had become. For if she’d ever known him, she suspected that she no longer did. He’d morphed under pressure the way a diamond emerges from coal, but he hadn’t turned into a beautiful gemstone, just into something misshapen, deformed. Yet she remained fixated on him, the same way a person couldn’t easily avert her gaze from a bad car accident, wanting to set eyes on that appalling thing while also wanting not fully to see it. The exception being that she’d had a hand herself in this particular wreck.

  The inside of the apartment showed few hints of Manis’s inner self. Nothing unusual in the books or the few pieces of bric-a-brac. There were two photographs on display: a faded picture of his mother in front of a ranch house and one of Sallye holding a non-alcoholic beer in the lounge on the Eskan Village Air Base in Saudi Arabia. An army brat, she felt as comfortable there as anyplace—which wasn’t necessarily saying much. She’d never felt an attachment to physical locations. Home wasn’t four walls or a bed or a geographic spot. From her earliest days it was her father’s lap, her mother’s, or the knee of one of their friends. She felt warm and safe there and she yearned for it even after she’d grown up. That desire had become something deviant, she knew, this thing she did to men when no one was looking.

  Deviant, yes, society would say so, but the behavior was nothing that she could help.

  Behind a beaded curtain in Warren’s apartment, she located the door that she’d seen many times before but had never passed through. The doorknob was locked and a padlock hung closed in place at her eye level for good measure. She’d asked about this door before, even tried to suss out the size of the room on the other side when they sometimes wandered the empty warehouse next door. But he wouldn’t tell her what was inside. Now she rested a hand on the doorknob and put a hip to the door, but it was solid, unyielding. She jerked the padlock. Nothing.

  Warren’s behavior had changed of late. She still appeared able to lead him around by the nose whenever she wished, but something under the surface had shifted, like a fault line that you couldn’t see just yet but that you could feel, could sense in your viscera. A workshop, he called it, but what made it secret? What he had in there, she thought...it meant something to him. Something, after all this time, that she now felt compelled to learn.

  In a kitchen drawer filled with junk she found a large paperclip. She worked it around in the doorknob lock, prodding and twisting. The knob rattled but the paperclip didn’t cat
ch anything inside that she could lever. She tried the padlock and found it even more resistant. She needed something stiffer, went to her bag and found a cuticle trimmer in her manicure kit.

  She tried the padlock again, got a little more play but couldn’t make it trip open. Encouraged, however, she inserted the tool into the doorknob. It went farther in and she seesawed it while wiggling the knob. Pop! Suddenly the knob turned freely. The surprise of it made her spine tingle. Halfway there.

  Sallye walked the perimeter of the apartment, listening for him. He was a volatile fellow and she couldn’t predict how he’d react if he found her in the forbidden room. If she got the padlock open, she thought, she’d have to be satisfied with a quick gander inside, then get out of there and know she could go back anytime if the contents interested her.

  Returning to the door, she parted the beaded curtain and began working the padlock again, pushing and pulling the block as she jammed the tip of the cuticle trimmer around inside. She was sweating now, some beads of the curtain sticking to her neck where they lay across the dampening skin, tugging ever so slightly at her as she moved her shoulders, prodding with the tool.

  She felt like she was getting somewhere, the tumbler succumbing slightly, the tool going a little deeper, achieving a bit more angle. She sensed the trap of her own tunnel vision as she vigorously twisted at the keyhole, the lock inches from her face, but the danger had receded to the back of her mind. She could hardly feel the beads of the curtain tapping upon her neck one moment, then lifting off of her skin, almost of their own accord. Meanwhile Sallye prodding the lock, twisting, probing…

  A voice from behind froze her. It came from Warren in an unfamiliar tone. Sonorous, penetrating her skin. It said, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  DIAZ IGNORED THE LOOK OF shock on Kahn’s face. Kahn had had his feet up on Capobianco’s desk, and he dropped them to the floor like he’d been caught humping a freshly dead jellyfish.

  “I knocked,” Diaz said. He was too excited to retreat. “There’s a break in the case.”

  “How do you mean?” Kahn said, still with the phone in his hand, still discombobulated. “They collared someone?”

  “No,” Diaz conceded. “Nothing like that. A technical break.”

  “Let me get the lieutenant on.” Kahn set down the receiver and pressed a button on the desk set.

  “Diaz,” Capobianco said through the speaker. “Still got all them fingers?”

  “I’m sorry about the cathedral thing, Lieutenant. No excuses.”

  “Forget it. It would’ve been your funeral, not mine. Don’t do it again, though. It makes Kahn nervous. And he’d hate having to inform the next of kin.” He chuckled. More supportive than Kahn, more magnanimous, Diaz thought.

  “Thanks, Lieutenant,” he said. “I promise.” He could practically see Capobianco winking at him.

  “So...the breakthrough, Diaz.”

  He told them about the conversation with CSU, how the likelihood seemed high that the bombings were initiated by GPS coordinates. Bottom line: suicide not probable.

  “Explains why the devices aren’t so packed with shrapnel,” Kahn said. “Maybe they’re not meant to kill anyone else. It’s flat-out assassination.”

  “How’d the bomber know what coordinates to put?” Cap asked.

  Diaz said, “I guess he could’ve programmed every army recruiting station into the chip.”

  “Every one in America? Or—more likely…”

  “The bomber is tracking the movements of his victims.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Capobianco said.

  “Worth a look,” Kahn said. “And sort of like what Manny’s been saying all along.”

  Finally a word of support from Kahn. Diaz thought it was too hard-earned, but he’d take it.

  The conversation wrapped up. Through the speaker, Capobianco said, “Get back to work, Diaz. You’re officially out of the doghouse.”

  FEELING MORE SATISFIED THAN HE had in a long while, Diaz took himself to lunch at an Italian red sauce joint on the corner of Hudson and Jane Streets. He ordered a bowl of stracciatella, chicken parmigiana, and a side of ziti. As he sopped up the last of the sauce with a crust of bread, he thought with satisfaction that the new theory had come back around to his position, vindicating his faith in the two alleged perps—at least for the moment. Then he thought of the bomber possibly tracking his next victims. And for the first time in a week the voice in the back of his head repeated, “Danger lurks.”

  He caught the waiter’s attention and called for the check. The waiter, exchanging glances with his boss, shook his head. “It’s on us, chief.” They knew they’d just fed a cop.

  Diaz was placing a twenty on the table anyway when the phone rang, a blocked number. He picked it up. “Hullo.”

  “Detective Diaz?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Nunez here. How you doing?”

  “Great, but I’ll get better. You find anything out?”

  “Sure as shooting. Your two boys—Horn and Littel—both passed through Landstuhl Hospital within a year of each other.”

  Diaz stood to go and glanced at his watch, phone cradled against his shoulder. “That’s it?”

  “What did you want in two days, for me to solve your case for you? It’s a start, isn’t it?”

  “Captain, don’t most amputees from Central Command pass through Landstuhl?”

  “Sure, okay.”

  “So, much as I appreciate the news, I probably could’ve guessed as much without you telling me.”

  “You could’ve guessed but now we know for sure. You’re asking for favors and all of a sudden you don’t like what I’m giving you. You know, Diaz, I got a pile of paper on my desk two feet high and none of it has anything to do with the NYPD.”

  “Hold on. No offense, Captain. I’m just a little pumped up. We’re starting to narrow this thing down.”

  “So you don’t need me anymore.”

  “We need you more than ever. We’re pretty sure there’s a third party out there blowing up these veterans. He’s hiding the bombs in their prostheses somehow.”

  A pause. “In their new limbs? They didn’t suffer enough? Sick bastard.”

  “Good if we could end his streak. Help me think this through.”

  “Okay.” Despite his protestations, Nunez seemed to be enjoying this. He jumped right in. “Landstuhl’s one common thread, maybe. If the C4 also came from a base in Germany, then it has to do with a point of contact that these guys shared. Maybe it’s someone they pissed off.”

  “That someone is in the States now, so it means he got discharged from the army and came back home.”

  “Or he was a contractor. Don’t count out that possibility.”

  “Special Ops?”

  “Those guys are usually inside. Besides them, only types I know with authorized access to C4 are EOD and combat engineers. Doesn’t mean he was authorized, of course, but that’s most likely, unless someone just went and lost a load. The sappers might use contractors. Or, like you said, he’d been inside and got discharged.”

  “How you doing with that list of everyone in the area who had access to U.S. Army C4?”

  “I’m getting to it. Bound to be a long list.”

  “We’ll narrow it down once we have it.”

  “Okay, Diaz. Give me a few minutes to get back to you.”

  “That quick? You meant a few days, didn’t you, Captain?”

  “A few minutes...a few days. Hell, could take a few years. But I’ll see what I can do.”

  Diaz had second thoughts. “Here’s another idea, then. Can you get the patient charts from these two men?”

  Nunez hesitated. “That’s confidential information, Diaz.”

  “They gave up their privacy rights when they died.”

  “Hmm. I like the way you think.”

  WHEN THEY MET AGAIN IN O’Shea’s office in Alphabet City, Diaz felt more like a part of the team, and it relaxed him. He le
aned back and levered his chair on its two back legs.

  “So maybe it’s not suicide,” O’Shea said in a conciliatory manner.

  Diaz appreciated that, because he knew it had been said for Kahn’s benefit.

  “Looks like assassination now,” the sergeant agreed. “And Diaz has a bit more that he’s been saving for us. Wouldn’t tell me in the car.”

  “Out with it,” O’Shea said into Diaz’s smile.

  Now, for the first time, Diaz revealed that he’d been having conversations with a high-up military police officer in Germany. Kahn may have suspected as much, but O’Shea looked impressed.

  “If the C4 came from Germany and the victims both passed through Germany,” he said, “seems like a high probability that there’s a connection there to the bomber.”

  “Exactly,” Diaz affirmed.

  “So who touched both these guys at Landstuhl?” O’Shea asked.

  “Lots of possibilities,” Kahn said. “Doctors, nurses, security guards, cleaning staffs.”

  “Physical therapists,” O’Shea added. “Shrinks.”

  “I don’t think these guys get much physical therapy until they arrive stateside,” said Diaz. “Shrinks are a possibility, though.”

  “The place is probably a beehive. How do we narrow it down?”

  “I got the MP working on a couple of fronts.”

  O’Shea leaned back in his chair, ran his fingers through his red hair, blew a breath at the ceiling. “Damn far from solving this thing and the bomber’s still out there, could strike any minute. There’ll be hell to pay if another one of these guys blows up.”

  “I hear the governor has called in the National Guard to stand in front of every recruiting station,” Kahn said. “They should be hitting the street right about now.”

  “Like they would’ve stopped either of these two guys?”

  “Must be quite a few of those offices.”

  “More than a dozen in the five boroughs.”

  “That’s not so bad. We can suggest they turn the entire block around each one into a no-go zone.”