Tick Tock

by Patterson, James

  The no-frills Irish pub hadn’t changed a bit. I went to the jukebox and put on “The Black Velvet Band,” which was the theme song of my childhood.

  My NYPD detective father, Tom Bennett, used to bring me here on Saturdays sometimes when my mom went to visit her sisters back in Brooklyn. He’d ply me with Cokes and quarters for the pinball machine as he drank with his fellow Irish cop cronies. They used to call my dad Tony Bennett sometimes for his occasional habit of breaking into song when he was three sheets to the wind.

  My mom and dad died in a car accident on the way down to their Florida condo the week after I graduated from college. They were buried together out in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, but it was here that I came when I wanted to visit.

  Something, maybe the dustup with the Flahertys, was reviving a lot of my melancholy Irish childhood. My current professional woes certainly weren’t cheering me up. I could handle having the press coming after me—that was their job. But getting the back of the commish’s hand was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  Or, hey, maybe I was having a midlife crisis. One night all alone in the big city, and I was sinking quickly into dad-olescence. I decided to roll with it. I continued to the bar and ordered us two shots of Jameson and two pints of Guinness.

  “Let me guess. This is St. Patrick’s Day in July,” Emily said.

  I winked at her and dropped the shot glass into the pint glass and tipped it back until the only thing left was the foam on my lips.

  “Just trying to wake up,” I said, wiping the back of my hand over my thirsty mouth. “What are you waiting for?”

  She rolled her eyes before she dropped her depth charge as well and sucked it back with impressive speed.

  “Hey, you got a little something on your lip,” I said right before I kissed her.

  I don’t know which of us was more shocked at my forwardness. To top things off, she started kissing me back, but I suddenly broke it off.

  “Okay, then,” she said, looking at me funny. “You feeling all right, Mike?”

  I shrugged. It was a good question. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a good answer. Like the rest of the city, I was having one weird summer.

  “Maybe we should call it a day,” I said, dropping a couple of twenties on the bar and heading for the door.

  Emily followed me back out, and we drove back to my building in silence. When I reached for the car door, it was Emily’s turn to lean in and kiss me. There was a pregnant, hot, wavering moment when I thought some clothing was going to get torn, and then she ripped her tongue out of my mouth and shoved me toward the door.

  Wiping lipstick off my face, I looked over at my building, where Bert, the doorman, stood avidly watching the proceedings. Of course now the son of a bitch was at the door.

  “Hot and cold, cold and hot,” she said. “I don’t know, but I guess this just doesn’t feel right for me right now, Mike. I don’t know what it is, but I feel like we’re not doing ourselves or each other justice. You should probably get out of here before I do something we’ll both regret,” she said.

  I nodded. I knew what she meant. We were friends, not to mention intuitive work partners. If we went much further, we’d be putting that in jeopardy. Or something. Right?

  I wasn’t sure how to reply, so I just said okay and opened the car door.

  It was right then and there, standing in the street with Emily’s brake lights flashing off, that it occurred to me. Justice. Some synapse in my brain finally fired, and the connection we were looking for materialized in my mind like a constellation from a group of random stars.

  “Emily, wait!” I yelled as she pulled away.

  She didn’t stop. I actually had to run after her. If it hadn’t been for a red light, she would have gotten away.

  “Are you crazy?” she said when I opened her door.

  “Listen. I got it. You were right. It is the family dynamic,” I said as the light turned green.

  “What?” she said as a cab honked behind us.

  “What?” she said again after she’d pulled the FBI sedan to the curb.

  “It’s the mothers,” I said, leaning across her and grabbing the interview sheets we’d been working on. I pulled out two of them, my finger racing down the rows.

  “Look here. The mothers. Mrs. Morales and Angela Cavuto’s mother, Alicia, both went to the same school. They both went to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”

  “Holy shit,” Emily said. “Wait.”

  She shuffled some more sheets.

  “Here it is. Right here! Stephanie Brill, the girl who died in the bombing at the Grand Central newsstand went to John Jay as well. Her stepmother said she had taken classes there before dropping out. Is it a city school or something?”

  “Yes. And think about it. Criminal justice—that would totally jell with where you might find someone obsessed with crime! This is it, Emily. I’ll call the squad and Miriam. We need to bring the mothers in tomorrow first thing.”

  Chapter 64

  EMILY AND I WERE at my desk rereading homicide folders and sharing a Red Bull by eight-thirty a.m.

  Every once in a while, I looked up from my case file and found myself glancing over at the back of Emily’s still shower-wet coppery brown hair. Things were definitely looking up. Now that I’d finally made a much-needed breakthrough, we were back on track.

  When I glanced over at her again, I found myself wondering what the line of her bra strap beneath her white blouse would feel like under my finger.

  My shenanigans were acting up again apparently. Bad shenanigans.

  “What? What is it?” she said, slowly turning and completely busting me. Feds can be pretty crafty, too, apparently.

  I shook the empty Red Bull can in my hand without blinking.

  “Coffee?” I said.

  I had just grabbed a couple of mugs when Miriam came in through the Major Case Unit’s battered bullpen door.

  “You need to make some calls and stall the morning meeting,” I said before she made it to her cramped office. “Did you get my texts?”

  “Don’t worry. I got your texts,” she said, dropping her bag onto her desk. “All eight of them. Tell me something, though. What if this John Jay thing is a spurious connection, Mike? What if nothing comes of it?”

  “Then we get drop-kicked off the case as scheduled,” I said. “What do we have to lose?”

  “I don’t know. My next promotion?” Miriam said dismally.

  As I left, I knew she was only kidding. My boss was as stand-up as they come. She hadn’t once brought up how slowly things were going, despite all the heat she was getting. Which was a lot, considering our squad room was a short elevator ride away from the commissioner’s office upstairs.

  Emily and I didn’t waste a moment getting the rest of the task force up to speed on our newest theory during the morning skull session. Most of the cops coming off the night shift even stayed for the festivities.

  “In reviewing the cases, Detective Bennett and I discovered a number of traditional offender personality types that just didn’t fit together,” Emily said in front of the cluttered case board. “So we decided to look more closely at a link between the victims, and last night, we think we found one.”

  “What link?” Detective Schaller from Brooklyn North said.

  “We’re not exactly sure yet,” I said, “but it turns out that the Grand Central bombing victim Stephanie Brill went to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the same time as the mothers of both the murdered little girl, Angela Cavuto, and the Bronx stabbing victim, Aida Morales.”

  “The mothers of the victims went to John Jay?” said newbie Detective Terry Brown. “So our guy kills the kids for maybe like a revenge thing or something? That’s cold.”

  Some confused grumbling from the packed room full of cops and Feds followed, but I noticed more than a few thoughtful nods. There weren’t many wallflowers in our open-forum meetings. The fact that no one in the room full of dedicated professio
nals could come up with a glaring reason that my idea was stupid was a good sign. Maybe we were onto something after all.

  Spoken too soon, I thought, as a scrub-faced young female ATF field agent, sent in to bolster our Bomb Squad, cleared her throat.

  “New York City actually has a college for criminal justice?” she said.

  “Gee, pa, those skyscrapers look just like corn silos, don’t they?” some NYPD veteran detective from the back of the room chimed in.

  “That’s enough, people,” I said over the chuckles. “I know you’re all about as punch drunk-on this as I am. But things are finally coming into focus.”

  I pointed toward the caseboard at the picture of the cop killed in the Grand Central bombing.

  “We all know why we’re here. It’s time to bring this thing home.”

  Chapter 65

  TWO TEAMS OF MAJOR CASE DETECTIVES were immediately dispatched to the bursar’s office at John Jay to go over student records. Emily and I had to stay back for the 9:30 meeting we had set up with the two victims’ mothers, Alicia Cavuto and Elaine Morales.

  We’d just been notified by security downstairs that the women had arrived, when a tall, gawky woman with a striking resemblance to Caroline Kennedy came into the squad room and headed directly to my desk. Her name was Jessica Cook, and instead of American royalty, she was the cybergeek cop assigned to the task force from the Computer Crimes Unit.

  “Mike, Emily, I think I got something on the John Jay lead already,” she said. “A nibble, at least. Come and check this out.”

  We rushed with her across the hallway to Computer Crimes and into her closet-size cubicle. Tacked to the wall above her monitor beside a South Park calendar was a crayon drawing of a racing cop car with the words NYPD MOM on the door.

  “I’ve been busy hitting deeper and deeper serial-killer fan sites ever since I started impersonating some of the names from the David Berkowitz correspondence,” Jessica said as we stood in front of her screen. “The worst by far is this feed called DankDungeonNYC. I just got this instant message from a new friend who calls himself Manacle Max after I mentioned I was a John Jay grad.”

  I read off the screen.

  John Jay? U must know the Collector then. What an admirable freak. Always wants the worst. Always pays top dollar.

  “This is incredible,” Emily said.

  “Type in something like ‘I haven’t seen the Collector in years. What’s he up to these days?’ ” I said.

  Jessica put it in and hit enter.

  The message spat back a moment later

  After he was fired u mean? Nothing was the last I heard, the lucky prick. I wish I was independently wealthy. Enough about him. Let’s meet. U said u have atrocious homicide scene shots? So do I. I’ll show u mine. U show me urs. LOL!.

  “Fired? He worked there!” Emily cried. “He was an employee or a professor at John Jay. Has to be!”

  “NYPD Mom to the rescue,” I said, giving Jessica a high five.

  Chapter 66

  BEYOND ENTHUSED FOR THE FIRST TIME since the case began, I sped with Emily back to the squad room. When we turned the corner, the elevator door at the end of the hallway opened.

  A wiry male uniform from the HQ security detail downstairs exited with a tall, white woman and a squat Hispanic woman in tow. Both women looked tired and lost, completely grim-faced. I didn’t have to read their visitor badges to know they were Mrs. Cavuto and Mrs. Morales.

  Emily ushered them into one of the interview rooms as I ran and poked my head into my boss’s office.

  “Computer Crimes just pulled a lead off a serial killer site that’s making John Jay look even better,” I called to her. “Some freak let it be known that some other rich freak who liked to collect sick, bloody crime-related shit was working there at some point but got fired. No name yet, but we’re about to sit down with the mothers of the two victims to see if they can fill us in.”

  “What are you waiting for?” Miriam said, lifting her phone. “Get into that interview room and start pumping. I’ll tell Brown to start scouring the staff rolls for people who got canned.”

  I turned off my phone as I entered the interview room, where Emily sat with the distraught mothers. Attractive, stylish, blond Mrs. Cavuto looked like she was taking the loss of her four-year-old daughter fairly well until you picked up on her extremely glassy eyes and sloppily applied makeup. Stocky, in a striped MTA uniform shirt, Mrs. Morales just looked like she wanted to hit someone.

  As I sat, I could see from Emily’s face that something very good was up.

  “Mrs. Morales, please tell my partner what you just told me,” Emily said.

  “Alicia and I actually know each other,” Mrs. Morales said, patting Mrs. Cavuto on the elbow. “Back in the nineties, we took a night class together at John Jay.”

  I shot Emily a look, squashing the urge to give her a high five. They’d been in the same class! This really was the connection we’d been gunning for! We’d struck absolute gold!

  “Not only that, but our teacher was a sick, slimy weirdo. His name was Berger. Professor Berger.”

  “Berger,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Mrs. Morales said, nodding.

  “It’s true,” Mrs. Cavuto said, quietly looking up at me with her empty blue eyes.

  I thought of something then.

  “His name wasn’t Lawrence, was it? Lawrence Berger?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Morales said, nodding vehemently. “That was it. Lawrence Berger.”

  “Excuse me one second,” I said, popping out the door and poking my head back into Miriam’s office.

  “The lid just ripped off this thing. We got our Lawrence! Tell Brown to look for Berger. Lawrence Berger. He was a professor at John Jay.”

  I rushed back into the interview room. “I can’t tell you how important the info you just gave to us is,” I said. “Do you have any idea why Berger would do something like this? Hurt your families?”

  “It’s because we got the twisted son of a bitch fired. He got canned ’cause we objected that he was getting his rocks off,” Mrs. Morales yelled, standing up.

  “Come again?” Emily said.

  “He set up a secret video camera in the ladies’ room next to the class,” Mrs. Cavuto said. She took a tissue out of the box on the table and began shredding it.

  “Exactly,” Mrs. Morales said. “There were strange noises from time to time in the ladies’ room, and finally one day in the cafeteria between classes, Alicia and I and a woman named Stephanie put our heads together and realized we had all heard it. We took it to the administration. A week later, Berger was investigated, found out, and ultimately fired.”

  “Wait. What about Stephanie? Stephanie Brill, I think it was. Where is she?” Mrs. Cavuto said. “Did he go after Stephanie’s family? She signed the complaint as well.”

  “Stephanie Brill died in the recent bombing at Grand Central,” Emily said.

  “He comes up to my neighborhood and stabs my daughter?” Mrs. Morales said, staring at us in disgust. “He didn’t even have the cojones to come after me?”

  “What was the name of this class?” I said.

  “Abnormal Psychology,” Mrs. Cavuto said, meticulously tearing her tissue.

  There was a knock, and my boss threw open the door and gestured for me to come with her.

  “This is it, Mike,” Miriam said, handing me a printout. “We’ve got an address on Lawrence Berger. You’re heading uptown, the Upper East Side. The son of a bitch lives on Fifth Avenue.”

  Chapter 67

  “LADIES, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING,” said a linebacker-size Emergency Service Unit sergeant as he folded open the rear of a shiny black Ford Econoline SWAT van in Central Park an hour later.

  Two more vans just like it were parked in a wagon circle in our staging area behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than two dozen Emergency Service cops and members of the FBI New York Hostage Rescue Team and NYPD Bomb Squad were now r
eady to close this case with extreme prejudice. With one cop already dead and a perp with sophisticated bomb-making skills, all stops had been pulled out to take Lawrence Berger down.

  Emily and I climbed into heavy Kevlar vests as a short, grizzled, wiry black man with huge forearms and a Bic-shaved jarhead shook our hands painfully.

  “Agent Hobart!” the Hostage Rescue Team leader introduced himself in a drill sergeant’s near-scream. He tilted the Toughbook computer on his lap in our direction.

  On it were photographs of Berger’s elaborate prewar building a couple of hundred feet to the east. Close-up shots showed its even more impressive stone penthouse. It was amazing, like a monumental baroque palace in the sky, complete with columns and setbacks and gardens.

  “Feast your eyes on Berger’s quote unquote apartment,” Hobart called out. “It’s a three-level, seven thousand-square-foot penthouse.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Seven thousand square feet? In the Silk Stocking District? How was that even possible? I thought.

  “That’s right,” Hobart said, eyeing me. “I said seven thousand square feet.”

  “Shit, boss. I gotta get me a gig at John Jay,” called back an Odd Job–looking, stocky Asian cop sitting in the van’s passenger seat.

  “Shut up, Wong,” Hobart said savagely. “These shots were just taken from our scout snipers on the roof of the building across Seventy-seventh Street. As you can see, all the drapes are drawn, so no help for us there. The building super told us there’s at least seven bedrooms, three hundred and sixty degrees of outside terraces, two separate staircases, and even an interior elevator. It’s basically a maze. A nightmare for a breach and search.”

  “But great for cocktail parties, I bet,” Wong said.

  Hobart gave him a dirty look before continuing.

  “The super also said Berger’s a recluse, and he hasn’t seen him in years. Said he hires his own contractors and staff who must have signed confidentiality agreements because they don’t even talk to the doormen about what goes on up there. Berger basically does whatever he wants because he’s, by far, the largest shareholder in the co-op. We’ve also been up on his phone for the last hour. No incoming or outgoing calls. Quiet as a mausoleum.”