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

by J. E. Fishman

  Diaz took a notepad from atop the dashboard and opened to a blank page. He handed it to Salinowsky with a pen. “Draw the layout of the kitchen. Mark exactly where the leg is.”

  “It’s hard to write with the cuffs on.”

  “Do the best you can.”

  With the motion of the truck and the frequent potholes, all of the lines got laid down wavy. Given Salinowsky’s condition, it may have turned out that way in any event, Diaz thought. But he was never planning to assign style points.

  They pulled up with sirens blaring, fire trucks already on scene. A familiar face approached as they got out, causing Higgins to break into a broad smile. “Great to see you on your feet, Lieutenant.”

  “Me, too,” Diaz agreed.

  Capobianco shook his head. “Thanks for easing me back into it, fellas.”

  “Never a dull moment in this game,” Diaz said, contradicting everything he’d believed until last week.

  “Don’t I know it,” Capobianco said. “Let’s get to work. Best approach is around the side door.”

  Higgins jumped back into the truck and Diaz walked around the corner with Capobianco, gently tugging along Salinowsky, whose leg Kahn had managed to piece back together. It wasn’t a good idea for Kahn to go out twice in one day after the stress of the bomb suit, so he’d returned to the station house.

  “Nice not to have a crater on this one,” Diaz said.

  “Yeah.” Capobianco strode along. “Well, it’s early yet.”

  They moved a couple of blue sawhorses aside so Higgins could back the truck right up to the sidewalk. Fowler was patrolling along the side of the building with the Labrador. Cai Yong shadowed them, acting as sweeper.

  The man who Salinowsky called Father Igor met Capobianco and Diaz out front, and he confirmed the location of the possible bomb. Father Igor stepped aside with Salinowsky, and the cops opened the truck doors and extended the ramp toward the shelter door.

  Diaz and Capobianco watched the screen as Higgins worked the controls to the HD1. It took fifteen minutes to guide the robot in front of the stainless steel cabinet in the pantry, another half hour to carefully empty the contents before they finally saw the prosthetic leg.

  When the robot had the leg on the ground, they called it back and rigged it with an x-ray panel. Then Higgins sent it back to shoot the pictures.

  “Son of a bitch,” Capobianco said a few minutes later, when they had the image up on a laptop computer. They saw wires and a blasting cap and electronic parts. The presumed C4 looked like a solid, misshapen log.

  Deciding to execute the RSP on site, they rigged the robot with a PAN and Higgins tried to get it into position with the remote control panel, but for that purpose even their smallest machine proved too bulky for the tight quarters of the pantry.

  Higgins looked pie-eyed from staring at the remote screen for so long. “We could just smack it around with the robot and get it to detonate,” he suggested.

  “What?” said Capobianco. “And blow up half the shelter? Besides, it’s a new robot. Take forever to requisition another one.”

  “I think I can get it from the doorway with the water cannon,” Diaz offered.

  Capobianco thought about it, nodded, and watched as Higgins helped him suit up.

  A few minutes later, beyond the noise of the air pump in his helmet, Diaz sensed the eerie quiet of the abandoned shelter, the bomb just lying there like a coiled snake.

  “Manny Diaz,” the voiceover in his head declared, “alone with danger.”

  He positioned himself as far away from the bomb as he could while still taking clean aim.

  The beauty of C4 was its stability. Separated from the blasting cap circuit, it would be no more dangerous than a ball of putty. Picturing the x-ray in his mind, he set up the PAN and drew a bead on the spot that he knew would give him the best chance to defeat the device without causing a detonation. Then he took cover and fired.

  TICK, TICK, TICK

  12.

  DAY SIX—Dark

  O’SHEA STARED INTO HIS untouched salad. Outside, in the early evening light, stray trash tripped down the sidewalks of the East Village. He was sitting across from Lewis Salinowsky at Veselka on Second Avenue. Ukrainian soul food, aroma of pig fat and vinegar. He’d watched Salinowsky consume a cup of borscht, six meatballs, several large pierogi, a stuffed cabbage, and a heap of fatty kielbasa without uttering a word. Now the man was poised to dive into some kind of apple turnover buried in whipped cream. He had his fork in the air when O’Shea pulled the plate away from him.

  “What the hell.”

  “Talk first. Then dessert. The taxpayer has to get his money’s worth.” O’Shea winked.

  Salinowsky set down his fork. “Give me the cherry.”

  O’Shea let him snatch it. He removed the dessert plate to a neighboring table and watched Salinowsky relish the unnaturally red fruit, chewing deliberately. Ten seconds later, a busboy cleared the plate, and a couple sat down. O’Shea looked contrite. “We’ll get you another. Start talking.”

  The meal had sobered up Salinowsky. He was still gaunt and pale, and he didn’t smell too hot, but his eyes no longer looked like those of a waste product.

  “Got nothing to tell besides what I told that Spanish cop.”

  “Who? Diaz?”

  Salinowsky shrugged. “I guess.”

  “The guy who saved your life, we’re talking about. Just another spic to you.”

  “Naw, I’m not that way.”

  “What way are you?”

  Salinowsky looked into his hands.

  “You’re a brilliant conversationalist, you know that, Lewis?”

  “I don’t get much practice lately.”

  “Tell me about this nurse, Sallye Ritchie.”

  He looked into his hands again. “That her name? I never knew the first name.”

  “This her?” O’Shea showed him a picture.

  Salinowsky pursed his lips. “Yeah, I suppose it is. I’d know for sure if you showed me her ass.”

  “I don’t have any photos of that. What’d she do for you?”

  “Man, I was in pain and half high on morphine. Far as I remember, she gave me a few rides is all.” His mind was working. Several thoughts seemed to play across his gaunt face. “Probably more fun for her than it was for me, but she marched around like it qualified her for sainthood. I remember that part.”

  “You think she has the potential to be violent?”

  “How the hell would I know? I saw her when she came in the room. That was it.”

  “Did she mention anyone else in her life—father, brother, boyfriend?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “What a help.”

  “She wasn’t there to shoot the breeze. Why don’t you ask the other nurses?”

  “We’re working on that. Did you know these other GIs, Littel and Horn?”

  “Were they in my unit?”

  “No.”

  “So why should I know them?”

  “She ever reach out to you after you left the hospital?”

  “Not at all,” he answered quickly.

  “You to her?”

  He hesitated. “I sent her a letter in Germany once, okay? Never heard back. After that it didn’t even cross my mind again.”

  “Did the letter have a return address?”

  “I guess so. Sent if from the post office where I keep my box.”

  Idiot, O’Shea thought. “That’s how they tracked you. Must be. Did you know that your situation wasn’t unique?”

  “Not until you told me.”

  “And the bomb? Any idea who planted it?”

  “If I did I would’ve shared by now. Had to be one of the guys who slept in the shelter last night or one of the guys who works there. Maybe they even did it after I left, for all I know. Wouldn’t let me into the cabinet last night.”

  “You said the leg you put on this morning came from the cabinet. That means the leg you got out of the cabinet was not the bo
mb.”

  O’Shea knew the logic of his own statement was impeccable. The bomb hadn’t been placed in the cabinet by the perp. It was the other one—Salinowsky having inadvertently switched. But the vagrant seemed to have trouble following. “Whatever,” he said.

  “Were there any new visitors to the shelter that you saw?”

  “There are always new visitors. You’d have to ask Father Igor who was who. I wasn’t in condition to observe much.”

  “After stopping at your dealer?”

  Salinowsky smiled. “Man I was high as an effing kite last night, wouldn’t have recognized my own grandmother.”

  “And this morning?”

  “I don’t have a good life like you, Detective. I do everything I can to dull the feeling.”

  O’Shea waved over the waitress. “Another piece of that apple thing for my friend. And a check.”

  She dropped the items in another minute. O’Shea put two twenties on the table and tore the receipt off the bottom of the check. He handed Salinowsky his business card.

  “Anything comes to you, don’t hesitate. I wrote down Diaz’s number on the back, if you’d prefer to talk to him. The guy who’s doing these bombings is still out there. You may save a life.”

  Salinowsky nodded and lifted his fork off the table, ready to dig in again. But O’Shea coveted the cherry. Before Salinowsky could react, he plucked it from the whipped cream and popped it into his mouth. It tasted more of sugar than fruit, but it hit the spot. He was still chewing when he pushed back his chair, nodded to the waitress, and left the drug addict to the remainder of his dessert.

  He may not see this guy alive again, but the NYPD would. They had a tail on him.

  SALINOWSKY LINGERED OVER THE APPLE strudel. His stomach felt like a brick but he was determined not to leave any for the dish washer.

  When he thought back over events of the past few hours, he decided that the whole day had been a gift. He hadn’t once hit the junk and he felt better than he had in weeks. Not that he expected his body to quit cold turkey, but the whole incident had instilled a strange kind of hope. Maybe, he thought, he’d even go back to his sister’s house. But then he remembered that some monster was trying to kill him—to blow him up of all things. He recalled hearing some of the guys in the shelter talking about those two explosions last week, seeing some headlines on the street. He had no way of connecting that to himself until the cops had mentioned the nurse, Sallye Ritchie.

  Limping back to the shelter, he tried but couldn’t even picture her face. The photo that the cop had showed him brought recognition, but he couldn’t conjure her in his mind now. He could still see her hands, though, translucent skin and bony fingers. The tendons worked up and down as she caressed him. He wondered whether he’d ever have another woman again.

  Salinowsky got to the shelter just before doors closed. They had a free bed for him and he couldn’t help noticing that the staff looked at him with a higher degree of compassion than before. But he was tired of being a pathetic creature. He would get his life together now, he told himself as he undressed.

  That night, alert for danger, Lewis Salinowsky slept with his artificial leg cradled in his arms.

  TICK, TICK

  13.

  DAY SEVEN—Light

  WHEN DIAZ GOT TO THE station house he found Kahn and O’Shea meeting in Capobianco’s office. The lieutenant waved him in and instructed him to close the door. There was no chair for him so he leaned against a filing cabinet, suddenly feeling very much like the junior man again.

  O’Shea began speaking. “Why I thought we should meet in person, rather than giving the lieutenant a fill over the phone, is that my lieutenant didn’t want yesterday’s excitement to overwhelm the fact that we still haven’t solved this case.”

  “Yeah,” Capobianco said, “I had a call from Inspector Brennan, too. Still, you guys did a helluva a job all around. I’m proud of you.” He leaned back in his chair. “But Brian’s right. All yesterday amounted to was a render safe on a lone device. It got us a step closer but it didn’t conclude anything.”

  Diaz folded his arms across his chest.

  O’Shea nodded to Kahn. “Have fun dressing up yesterday?”

  “Yeah, just like Halloween but without the shaving cream. It’s a real joy wearing that thing indoors, too. Multiplies the claustrophobia about thirty times.”

  “No natural light in that store,” Diaz added. “Scaffolding over the windows didn’t help either.” It had been worse for him in the basement shelter, where there were no windows at all, but Diaz chose not to mention that.

  “You wanna play hero, you gotta deal with these little discomforts,” Capobianco said.

  “I’m not arguing otherwise,” said Kahn. “Brian asked is all.”

  O’Shea cleared his throat. “So while you guys were making the streets safe in Gotham and recovering from the trauma, I had a sit-down with our favorite still-living vagabond.”

  “Go on.”

  “He doesn’t know shit. Spent more time eating the dinner I put on my T and E than giving up the goods on anyone or anything. He barely even remembers the nurse, if he’s telling the truth. And I have no reason to think otherwise. He was drugged up then and he’s drugged up now.”

  “The guy has PTSD,” Diaz said. “When he heard a bang outside yesterday he nearly jumped out of his skin.”

  “Self-medicating.” O’Shea nodded. “So when I was done with him, I gave the nurse a call. No disrespect to your prior interview, Diaz.”

  “None taken. Did you think she was nuts?”

  “I didn’t experience that.”

  “Maybe you gotta meet her in person.”

  “I’ll look forward to that day. She came across on an even keel and, like she did with you, she admitted to an affair with all three men. Beyond that she wouldn’t cop to having a clue about who’s doing this.”

  “She tell you about the battery?” Diaz asked.

  “Not voluntarily, but I asked who was beating her up. She gave me the same song and dance she gave you. Fell down the stairs.”

  Capobianco adjusted in his chair. “So what did you come here to tell us, Detective?”

  “Just to emphasize, like I said, that despite the heat you all experienced yesterday this case is cooling off quick.”

  “It’s the woman,” Kahn said. “She has to be the key to all this. Did we finally get someone up there to follow her?”

  “Not clear yet,” Capobianco said. “As of this morning the Mass state troopers and the FBI were still arguing over jurisdiction. Now that the targets don’t seem to be the recruiting stations, federal interest has cooled off. Meanwhile, the crimes are all local, so Mass-a-two-shits is reluctant to act against one of its own citizens without an arrest warrant, which of course we can’t get, since we have nothing to hold her on. Par for the course.”

  Kahn shook his head, equally unsurprised.

  “I do think we’ll get a search warrant soon,” Capobianco added. “DA’s talking to the judge this morning. So that’s where we’re at. But I don’t trust anyone in New England to do our work for us. Who here volunteers to pound on the nurse? I’m speaking figuratively, of course.”

  No one laughed. Diaz rocked to the balls of his feet. “I think I should go up there again. We were establishing some rapport, me and her.”

  “Take O’Shea with you. It’s a two-man job and I don’t want Fisco on my ass for leaving A and E out of it.” Capobianco turned to O’Shea. “Deal?”

  “You got it, Lieutenant.” O’Shea smiled. “Who doesn’t relish a road trip? And I’d like to see some of that rapport in action first hand.”

  Still no one cracked a smile.

  “I’ll call ahead and see if the Mass State Police are ready to back us up when the search warrant comes through. What about the homeless guy? We think he’s still a target?”

  O’Shea shrugged. “Depends on how determined the bomber is—or whether he even knows that we intercepted his latest device. Wit
h no explosion, I imagine it won’t get prominent play in the press. Usually it only makes the front page when you guys screw up. But you never know.”

  “Someone gonna protect Salinowsky?”

  “He’s not cooperating on that front, but I got a tail on him anyway, a detective from the Fifth. On the bright side, the guy’s not such an easy target now that he’s alerted. Not unless the bomber decides to change his MO.”

  “Worse than that, maybe the bomber will just move onto the next victim. And we’re in the dark on who that would be.”

  “The nurse only admits to these three, Lieutenant. You think there’s another?”

  “Seems like there’s always another, doesn’t it, guys?”

  THE RIDE TO MASSACHUSETTS IN an unmarked Crown Victoria was uneventful. O’Shea drove the whole way and they stopped twice, once to pee and again for lunch, which was fried clam sandwiches at a place that O’Shea knew in Hartford. They were in touch through Capobianco with the Massachusetts state troopers, who would meet them at the house with the warrant.

  “Let’s go to the hospital first,” Diaz suggested when they closed in on Bedford. “Maybe catch her off guard.”

  It pleased him very much to give O’Shea turn-by-turn directions the rest of the way—just like Kahn was always doing to him—and when they arrived at the VA hospital he instructed him on where to park, too.

  At the information desk this time they asked for admission to the ward, which necessitated a stop at the administrative offices. After a few phone calls for everyone to cover their asses, the detectives were in. Wearing hospital-issue IDs on lanyards around their necks, they took the stairs and strolled down the hall to the nurses’ station. Sallye Ritchie, they learned, was not scheduled today or the next. Diaz hated the sound of that. So far as he knew, an agreement to the tail hadn’t yet come through.

  “Who’s her boss?” O’Shea asked the middle-aged black woman who stood before them. She wore a name tag that said, “V. Burnes.”

  “That’s me,” she said, studying O’Shea’s badge.