by David Wind
My original intentions had been to determine if Lia Thornton was a suspect. But Amanda was right as well—Lia was Scotty’s friend and he wanted to help her, I would do no less.
“I’ll talk to her and let you know.”
“Be gentle with her, Gabe.”
“I will.” I picked up my overnight bag and went into the building. One nice thing about coming to the offices at night is the lack of people. It’s late enough so the tourists who visit the observation deck were gone and ninety-five percent of the people who worked here were gone as well.
The elevator was empty and the trip was fast. On my floor, I headed straight for my office door. Reaching it, I dug out my keys and unlocked the door, except the key caught on something and wasn’t turning.
I dropped my bag, used my left hand to hold the door handle steady and jiggled the key. It took a couple of tries before it turned and the tumblers clicked. I pushed the door open and bent to retrieve my bag.
In that instant, bent over my bag, the world blew up. I was flung across the hall and smashed into the far wall. Groggy, I stared where my door had been and found a haze of smoke filled hallway. Then I heard the loud blaring of the fire alarm just before a deep black tunnel sucked me in.
Chapter 51
I came out of the blackness hearing my name called, but could not make out the voice through the ringing in my ears. I opened my eyes, blinked away the stinging and tried to focus. The smell of burning wood and paper mingled with the stench of C-4 explosive.
I concentrated on my name, and when my eyes cleared, I found Gina’s face close to mine. Kneeling next to her was a paramedic. The hallway was crammed with firemen. There was a blood pressure cuff around my right arm.
“Can you hear me,” Gina asked.
I nodded and instantly regretted the movement which set off a sledgehammer in my head. I closed my eyes and willed it away. “How long?”
A smile of relief broke across her mouth and the lines bracketing her eyes eased. “Fifteen minutes—Jesus, you were out. The paramedic wants to finish looking you over.”
He was young and concerned. As he bent toward me, I moved my legs and arms, clenched my fists and tried to sit up. The paramedic pressed a hand against my chest. “Wait.”
I didn’t argue. He took my pulse and used his stethoscope. The cold tip touched my skin, and I looked down to find my jacket and shirt had been shredded away by the explosion. Then he pumped up the wrap on my arm and timed my heartbeat as it deflated.
When he pulled the stethoscope from his ears and inspected my face, he said, “Not bad. My partner’s bringing up the gurney now. It’ll be just a few more minutes.”
“Not on your life.” I struggled to a sitting position: the ringing in my ears was down a few decibels. I’d been through things like this before and knew it would pass.
“Gabe,” Gina began.
“I’m fine. I just need to get to my feet, help me.”
Shaking her head, she put out her arm, which I grasped at mid-bicep and hauled myself up. A wave of dizziness hit. I leaned back against the wall until it passed, pulled off the blood pressure wrap and dropped it on the floor. “Did anyone get caught in it?”
“Just you, tough guy, but you showed them, eh?”
“Yeah, I showed them. How did you know? It just happened.”
She gave me a surprised look. “Are you kidding? Where’ve you been since nine-eleven? If a bomb explodes within twenty miles of the city, every agent gets immediate notification. I was working late at the office,” she added.
Which explained how she’d gotten here so fast; her offices weren’t far away. I looked at the firemen who worked in my office.
“Can you do anything without involving half the city’s resources?” Chris shouted, marching down the hallway to inspect me from head to toe. “Good to see you still among the living. You okay?”
“Better than I was supposed to be.” I looked at the twisted remnants of the steel frame door which looked like an artist’s nightmare of an abstract sculpture. “They used a shaped charge, set to detonate as I stepped through. I’m sure that’s what he’ll find,” I said, waving a hand at the Bomb Squad Inspector, who was squatting on his haunches and running a gloved hand over the metal edges of the doorframe.
“How’d they miss?” Chris asked as he surveyed the door.
“Their bad luck. I pushed the door open as I bent to get my bag. The door saved me—the bag too.”
Chris took a dozen steps and scooped up what had once been my overnight bag. “This one?”
“That one.”
He glanced at the remains of the bag and then eyed me. “Looks like your hair, amigo.”
A sweep of my hand across the top of my head yielded nubs of burned hair. My scalp hurt like hell. “Perfect!”
Then the paramedic was dabbing at my face. I jerked away, but his other hand held me tight.
“Easy, it’s just some antibiotic ointment. Your head and face were hit by glass shards. I don’t know how they missed the rest of you.”
I stood still while he treated the cuts. When he was done, I turned to Chris. “You may want to have the bomb boys go to my apartment.”
Nodding, he turned toward my office. “You still have the armory in there?” He went on to answer the question himself. “Of course you do. We’ll need to get this boarded up.”
“The building people will handle it,” I said as another thought hit. “Shit! I need to call Femalé.” I pulled the cell and started to dial but the ringing in my ears was still louder than what I might hear on the phone. I handed Chris the phone. “Call her. Make sure she’s alright.”
“I’ve got her,” Gina said, her cell phone already at her ear. Chris and I waited until she ended the call. “She’s fine. I told her you’d call her later.”
The three of us stood in silence while the firemen triple checked everything before signing off to the waiting police team. Once they had trudged out, Chris said something to the Bomb Squad inspector, and then turned back to us.
“He needs to wait for the crime scene people to do their thing. He’ll make sure a patrolmen stays until the door gets boarded up. We can go.”
“I’ve got some clothing in there.”
Chris stepped in front of me. “It’s warm outside. You’ve got enough pants left to be decent. No one goes in until Crime Scene is done.” He shrugged off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders.
There would be no arguing on this point. “Then I need to go to my place.”
In unison, Chris stepped to one side and Gina to the other and we started down the hall. Gina’s arm went under the jacket and around my waist. Her warm hand felt good against my skin. When we reached the elevator, Chris opened his cell phone, dialed and asked for the bomb squad.
He was talking to them when the elevator doors opened, Chris signaled us to wait. He finished the call and motioned us into the cab. “They’re on their way. We’ll meet them there. And Amigo,” he said, his voice turning coarse, “I want to know what happened today.”
During the ten-minute drive to my place, I gave Chris the full story of what had transpired in Miami without giving up Rice’s name. That was mine. We reached my building to find the bomb boys, and their big black truck had beaten us and they were already upstairs.
When we stepped onto my floor, one of the cops motioned us to a halt while two other members of the team worked on the door. There were five Bomb Squad men; all dressed in black heavy duty armored suits. One black suited figure was running a chrome snouted sensor along the edges of the door, while the other watched the readout.
After tracing the tip over the area twice, the cop set down the device and turned to the others. “We’re clear here.”
“Are you going to clear out the tenants?” I asked.
“Let’s see what we find first. Joe, keys”
When the cop produced a master key ring and stepped forward, I pulled the key from my pocket and tossed it to him.
H
e caught it and stepped to the door. Even though the door had shown no trace of explosive, everyone stepped away except for the cop who inserted the key and waited five seconds before turning it. He pushed the door open a fraction of an inch. When nothing happened, he snaked a scope through the crack and spent two minutes looking at his screen.
He pronounced the entrance clean and the team went in. Four minutes later, two of the cops came out, went to the steel container they’d brought with them, and carried it back into the apartment.
“You were right,” Chris said, stating the obvious.
“Why doesn’t that make me feel better?”
“You’re alive aren’t you?” Something in Gina’s voice made me look at her. Lines of concern were grooved on her face. I pulled her to me and stroked her cheek with the back of my fingers. She caught my hand and brushed her lips across my knuckles.
“I’m alive. You don’t have to worry; it takes more than what they have to kill me.”
Her neck arched back, her Neapolitan eyes glowed. “What I worry about is my choice.”
Two black armored warriors came through the door then, carrying their container and followed by the other three. The last one came over to us. “Captain,” he said, nodding to Chris. “They left a hell of a package in the bedroom. Two sticks of C-4 rigged to a trip wire across the bedroom doorway set eight inches off the floor. The rest of the apartment was clean.”
“Thank you, Haines,” Chris said.
I echoed Chris’s thanks and waited for the team to carry the box to the elevator. When they were gone, we went inside and I headed straight to the liquor cabinet and poured three glasses of twenty-one year old McClellan’s.
We drank in silence. But when the glasses were empty, Chris said, “I want to put a car downstairs to keep an eye on things.”
“No offense, but I’d rather you didn’t. Let’s play this close. These guys already know they blew it—no pun intended. They won’t take another shot, not yet. Now they’ll wait until they’re sure they won’t miss.”
“And you’ll do what?”
I’m sure I looked ridiculous, standing there with an empty glass, a few strands of material dangling from my shoulders, my hair singed and an idiotic grin on my face, but I didn’t give a damn. “I’ll bring it to them first.”
“Damn it, Gabe, I’ve already buried one friend, I don’t want to bury another!”
I grasped Chris’s shoulder and squeezed. “You won’t. But you have to trust me.”
“Not an easy task, amigo.”
“You’ll find a way. Go home to Amanda; she’ll be waiting to hear what happened.”
“Call me in the morning.” He looked at Gina. “See if you can talk some sense into him, please.”
She gave him a half-smile and kissed his check. “I intend to,”
Alone, Gina turned to me. “You’re not going to let him help, are you?”
“If I do, it puts his job on the line, and I won’t let him do that. You want to say your piece now?”
She gave me a long and searching gaze. “What can I say to get through the mad you’ve got building? And it is building isn’t it?”
“Not anymore. It already reached the top.” The anger roiling me since this morning in Miami had grown from a bubbling mass into a white-hot spear.
“So what’s the plan?”
“Take a shower, get into some clothing and go to work—get a haircut?”
“Alone?”
“Which part?” I asked.
She smiled and unbuckled my belt.
“Be gentle, I was just in an explosion.”
<><><>
An hour later, Gina, Femalé and I were in my small office off the bedroom. Femalé had called at least five times while Gina and I had been celebrating the fact I was still alive and all my body parts were attached and functioning—I was more than a little surprised that all I felt were a few small aches. After a decent interval, I’d called Femalé and told her to come over. She’d made it in less than fifteen minutes, and brought coffee as well, which was good, because we hadn’t put any up.
After filling Femalé in, I gave them a detailed report of my time in Miami and Palm Beach—more than I had Chris—and added the name I’d gotten from Fuhrman. Then I told them what Chris had learned about the eight-hundred number and asked for ideas.
“Kick it back to Mancuso,” Gina said. “He’ll be able to find out everything.”
“And he’ll act on it before he gives it to me. We both know that. Femalé, any thoughts?”
Femalé tugged on one of her braids. “If they keep their information digitally, we might be able to sneak a look.”
“Who’s we?”
“A figure of speech. I’ll try. If not I’ll ask Arnie Steeplechase for a hand.”
“Good idea.” I needed to talk to Arnie and find out what he’d come up with.
“What was the name Streeter gave you?” Gina asked.
“He was dying. He mumbled a couple of things.” closing my eyes, I put myself back on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. “He said Brandin first, then Veranamin, then Vo, but he died before he could finish.”
“Not much,” Gina said.
“What I don’t get,” Femalé ventured, “is how all of this ties into Scotty Granger. I’m trying to wrap my mind around the idea that you tangling with a pimp the night before Scotty was killed is part of Scotty’s murder.”
I’d always found Femalé to be like a cat worrying at a ball of string. She would pull at it, tug it, kick it around until she understood every aspect of the string so she could unwind it. For her, this case was no different.
“It’s connected, circuitously. Mancuso asked me the same thing, and the best answer I could give him at the time was my gut told me it was.” I stopped talking, picked up the coffee and drank. Then I stood and began to pace.
“But there’s more than just my intuition. Take the events. I spot Streeter working a girl whose picture is hanging at Save Them. We fight and he’s arrested. He makes bail the next morning. Scotty is shot before he makes bail so Streeter’s not connected. Are we on the same page?”
Both women nodded.
“Whoever shot Scotty did so in rage. It wasn’t just a hit, the shooter wanted to wipe Scotty from the face of the earth, but why? That question may be the most important one of all, but we’ll leave that for later.”
I walked to the window and stared out while gathering my thoughts. “While I was in the middle of questioning the Angels, I started to get the phone calls warning me off. I believe the first one was someone Streeter had called—the others were different. Then there was the showdown at the Looker’s club and after that, the sniper at Lia Thornton’s apartment.
It was all connected because it happened while I was focusing on the killer being someone from the play. But what I’d missed was that the warnings had nothing to do with Scotty’s murder, they were all about Streeter and the girl, Margaret Ann McNickles, who had been an abducted girl who Streeter had ‘bought’.”
I waggled a finger in the air. “Even more significant, Streeter’s people—the real dealers in these kids—thought I was going after Streeter to find the girl who might lead me to them. That’s why she ended up in the Hudson. My guess is Streeter got the order to kill her to stop any backtracking we might do. But they couldn’t know I wasn’t looking hard for her, I was looking for Scotty’s killer—she and Streeter had happened before that.”
Gina started to speak. I held up my hand. My mind was flowing clearer and faster than it had since I’d walked into Scotty’s apartment Monday morning and I wasn’t about to stop.
“They’ve been following me, warning me off in ways they believed would scare me, because they didn’t want to take me out and create more problems for themselves. But after finding Streeter and Fuhrman, I became too much of a risk. I’m sure Fuhrman called Rice after my visit.
Femalé, you asked how this ties into Scotty. That’s the easy part. One of these pedophilic basta
rds—and there are a lot of them—is the same one who abducted Scotty’s sister, twenty-six years ago! That’s how things are starting to tie in. The killer knew Scotty was looking for him and was collecting information on him. And he was getting scared.”
Turning to Gina, I added, “You brought up coincidences the other day. I said there were none. What happened with Scotty is what most would call a coincidence—two paths converging at the same point in time—but, there were specific causes.
When I went to Scotty’s apartment the day after he was murdered, the police seal had been broken and someone had gone into the apartment and had taken the contents of several files. My guess is it was Charles Rice—he’s Parodi’s ‘Charles’.”
For all my mental gymnastics, the two women gave me a blank stare. “I didn’t put it together until tonight. Forget your preconceived ideas of what should be and consider this.” My voice turned rough with emotion. “Charles Rice was the man who bought Thomas Fuhrman off from his investigation into Elizabeth Granger and, in fact, sent so much business Fuhrman’s way he was able to unload his agency and retire at fifty-one.”
I let my words settle in. “And Charles Rice—whoever he is—works for the man who abducted Scotty’s sister. He also handles other girls, like Margaret McNickles.”
“Sweet Jesus.” Gina’s eyes went distant as she digested what I’d said. Femalé’s large eyes reflected belief.
“Without them having any idea, they spun themselves in a circle and told me what was happening.”
“You think Rice killed Scotty?” Gina asked.
“Rice is a pro. With Rice, it would have been one or two to the body and one to the head. He would never have turned the place upside down to make it look like something it wasn’t. There would be no need—the police would chase their tails till doomsday trying to figure it out; but the politician would have done it that way. He would have done a fast search for anything incriminating. But he knew he didn’t have a lot of time which is why Rice came back and went through the files for him.”
Femalé’s eyes shifted up and left as she chased an idea. “Why would he risk killing Scotty—the politician I mean? It was so long ago.”
