"There's a definite learning curve," I said reholstering my weapon. "I'm just glad we could finally work things out."
"Man to man," Seamus added behind me.
"Hey, it took a lot of guts to come over here. I respect that," Tommy Boy Flaherty said as we were leaving. "You ever need anything-anything-you let me know. That goes for you, too, Father."
"Back, Satan," Seamus mumbled as we took our leave.
I let out the breath of all breaths as I got the car started. Pulling my gun had been beyond reckless. What the hell had gotten into me? As we drove away, I suddenly got a proud pat on the cheek from Seamus.
"We'll make a man out of you yet, Mike, me boy," he said with a blue-eyed wink. "That's how you do things West Side-style."
Chapter 48
Naked in the dark, Berger kicked back on the leather recliner in his massive, magnificent library and hit the play button on his remote control.
There was a chirp and hum from the Blu-ray player and then the 103-inch Plasma blazed with a midday shot of the New York Public Library.
The camera shook a little from the first-person shot, but the picture and colors and sounds of the street were amazingly vivid. You could almost smell the hot pretzels and summer sweat.
It was the film of the first crime, the library decoy bombing that had been shot with a hidden fiber-optic camera. All of his work, of course, had been filmed.
Now it was time to edit it, clean it up, and polish, polish, polish.
As the images fast-forwarded and rewound, he thought of his school years at Lawrenceville, the premier boarding school near Princeton.
A pudgy and slow child, he had been enrolled by his father at the uber-preppy institution in order to make a gentleman out of him. But it didn't work out. Quite the contrary. By the time Berger entered ninth grade, his physique, unique artistic sensibilities, and uncommon interests had actually earned him an alliterative nickname that had caught on famously: Big Bellied Bizarro Berger.
He was seriously considering suicide for his fifteenth birthday, when he unexpectedly made a friend. His new roommate, Javier Souza, a diminutive boy from a wealthy Brazilian family, not only called him by his Christian name, but he turned out to share some of his strange, dark interests.
It was actually Javier who dared him to burn down the school library during the freshman class movie night the week before Christmas break. Wanting to prove his mettle, Berger had purchased a case of lighter fluid as well as some lengths of chain and padlocks to bar the building's exits.
If the suspicious owner of the Ace Hardware store in town hadn't contacted the headmaster, he would have gone through with his plan of wiping out the entire Lawrenceville class of '68. Instead, he was expelled, and if it hadn't been for a hasty and hefty donation by his father to the school, there might have been criminal charges.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda, Berger thought wistfully. He'd had such passion then. If it hadn't been for the hand of fate, he would become famous then. He would have instantly transformed from Big Bellied Bizarro Berger to The Boy Who Killed the Class of '68!
It was, of course, that singular near brush with greatness that drove him on his little project now. After all the failure and misery and confusion that had clouded his life, he'd finally, miraculously, gotten his gumption back.
In the light of the TV screen, he dabbed at a joyful tear as he watched the bomb get glued to the library desk.
What he had done already, the sheer wondrousness of it, no one could ever take away. No matter what happened next, he had triumphed.
Berger had finally done something that was truly his.
Chapter 49
Though it was only nine A.M., I felt punch-drunk by the time I pulled up in front of Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue to pick up Agent Parker at Penn Station. Horns honked as I blatantly and highly illegally sat in my cruiser in a no-standing tow zone, washing down a bagel with a Big Gulp-size coffee.
As the loud, cruel world rushed by the window, I slowly went over what had happened with the Flahertys the night before. Talk about fireworks! I'd broken a few laws there, hadn't I? Improper use of my firearm was a firing offense. Assault was a felony. But I guess the strangest thing about it was that it seemed to have worked. I'd finally spoken to Flaherty in the only language he seemed to understand. Why hadn't I just threatened his life from the get-go?
I shook my head. I'd actually out-crazied a Westie. Was that a good thing? I wasn't sure. Probably not.
The grind of the case wasn't exactly doing wonders for my mental well-being, was it? I needed a vacation. Oh, wait. I was already on one.
I flipped through the Post. On page three, a state senator from Manhattan warned that the NYPD had five more days to catch the culprit before he made a motion that the state police be sent in.
Sounded good to me, I thought, licking my thumb and turning the page. I would be more than happy to let a trooper from Schenectady take a shot at cracking the case. In addition to the mayor, the papers, and the department top brass, I was almost starting to want me off this case, too.
I knew the odds were we'd eventually catch up to this monster. I'd caught up to every one of them so far. I knew I should believe the numbers on the back of my baseball card, and yet I was getting very worried.
Especially about Angela Cavuto.
There had been no word yet from her kidnapper, no demands. No news was definitely not good news. The one bright spot was the new sketch of the kidnapper the department artist had made with the help of Mr. Cavuto. They'd red-balled it to the Public Info Division this morning to get it out on the newscasts, so maybe we had a shot. How much of one, I wasn't sure. But at least it was a start.
After another few minutes, I checked the time on my phone and got out of the car, leaving it right in the middle of the Seventh Avenue bus lane. If I got towed, maybe they'd let me get back to my vacation, I thought, as I took the escalator from the sidewalk down into Penn Station.
I really didn't think anything could cut through my darkening mood until I saw Emily Parker's smile and wave on the crowded underground train platform. She looked even better than I remembered, tall and porcelain-skinned, her eyes as bright and blue as ever. Her neatness and earnestness and energy were contagious. I think I actually smiled back as we came face-to-face.
We hugged, and she even gave me a peck on the cheek. Not exactly FBI protocol. It felt good.
"Finally some backup," I said, grabbing her bag. "Honestly, Emily, you are a sight for these sore eyes."
"It's nice to see you, too, Mike," she said giving my hand another squeeze. "It really is. I'm glad I came. You look great."
"Yeah, real GQ, I'm sure," I said, rolling my eyes "The bags under my eyes are bigger than your overnight."
"But such handsome luggage," she said, giving my cheek a playful tug.
I grinned back at her like a fool. Demonstrative attention from good-looking women was never a bad thing. Our reunion was off on the right foot. So far, so good.
"What do you want to do first?"
"Brainstorm," I said, leading her toward the stairs. "But we're going to need to use your brain. I fried mine about three days ago."
Chapter 50
Twenty minutes later, Emily and I were standing in the center of Major Case Squad's open bull pen on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza. Phones kept ringing across the stuffy, beat-up empty office space, with nobody to answer them. Every single one of the task force's forty-plus detectives was out chasing down leads on the now three- pronged case. There was no rest for the weary in this summer of insanity. Nor any in sight, for that matter.
Beyond the cluster of cluttered desks, we parked ourselves in front of a decidedly low-tech rolling bulletin board. Pushpinned onto it was a huge map of the city, along with the printouts of each crime and crime scene. In the very center of the board, the new Xeroxed sketch of the kidnapper stared back at us like a spider from the center of its web.
With her arms crossed, Emily stared at the board sile
ntly, absorbed, an art critic before a new installation.
"Give me the vitals on the abduction, Mike."
I slowly went through what had happened to Angela Cavuto.
"According to the father," I said, "our guy is white, right-handed, walks with a limp and a cane and is thin and about five eleven." Cavuto also said he was cultured and polished. Not only was he wearing a tailored suit, but he spoke quite convincingly about hedge fund investing."
"I can't believe it, Mike," Emily told me as she took a rubber-banded folder out of her bag. "I spent yesterday pulling reams of stuff about famous New York crimes, hoping this wasn't true, but I think it must be."
"What have you got, Emily?"
"I think this guy's done it again. This abduction is another copycat. A carbon copy, in fact."
"Of what? The Lindbergh case?" I said, confused.
"No. There was another heinous kidnapping way back in the twenties-in Brooklyn, no less. At the time, they called it the crime of the century. A sociopathic murderous pedophile named Albert Fish was dubbed the 'Brooklyn Vampire' when he abducted and killed a girl.
"And Mike, his MO wasn't just similar. From what you just told me, it was exactly the same. Posing as an employer, Fish answered the ad of an eighteen-year-old boy seeking work and ended up leaving with his ten-year-old sister under the pretense of taking her to a birthday party."
"F-off! No!" I yelled as I collapsed into a chair.
Emily nodded.
"Tell me, did he give the father something?" she said.
"Strawberries and some goop," I said.
"Pot cheese. Right. Shit! It's the same thing! The Mad Bomber, then the Son of Sam, now the Brooklyn Vampire. This guy's just pulled off a third famous crime. Mike, this isn't good. This Fish guy was evil personified. He made the Son of Sam seem like a volunteer at a soup kitchen. He was one of the worst pedophiles and child murderers of all time. He didn't just kill his victims. He would cannibalize them as well."
I punched the desk beside me, then my thigh. Then Emily and I sat there silently listening to the whoosh of the air duct. On the board, a picture of Angela from last year's Cavuto family Christmas card smiled at us from beneath a glittery halo.
Chapter 51
I was with Emily, putting on some coffee about an hour later, when I heard a strange, gut-wrenching call come over the break room's radio.
There was some kind of disturbance uptown. An unconscious, unresponsive child had been found in a store on Fifth Avenue. When I heard the name of the store repeated, my blood went cold.
"What, Mike? What is it?" Emily said, straining to listen.
"They found a little girl uptown at FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store across from the Plaza Hotel. Not good, Em. It's on the same block as the CBS Early Show, the locale of the bombing on Tuesday."
There was a more massive crowd than usual out in front of the landmark toy store when Emily and I arrived after a long, twenty-minute ride uptown. Two radio cars and two ambulances spun their lights in front of the freaked-out-looking tourists and moms and little kids.
A veteran Nineteenth Precinct sergeant whose eye I caught shook his dismal face before I was three steps out of my car.
I showed the cop the picture of Angela.
"Tell me this isn't her," I said.
"Marone a mi," the cop said, the smoke from his cupped cigarette rising like incense as he crossed himself. "It's her. They found her in the back. The clerk thought she was just sleeping."
Emily and I both turned as a car squealed up behind my cruiser. It was a black Lexus with tinted windows. I had my hand on my Glock when its door was flung wide open and a man got out. A man with red hair and even redder eyes.
It was Kenneth Cavuto, Angela's father.
"No!" I yelled as Cavuto bolted toward the store's entrance.
I managed to get there a second before him. No way could I let Angela's dad see his little girl. Not here. Not like this.
Apparently the distraught father had other plans. I'm not a small guy, but Cavuto shoved me off my feet like I was an empty cardboard box. I grunted as I fell forward and my chin hit the concrete.
I got back up and ran after Cavuto into the empty store. I bolted down some steps past museum-quality displays of giant stuffed animals: ostriches and horses and giraffes. I was scrambling past the Puppet Park when I heard a sound that stopped me.
It was a scream in a pitch I'd never heard before. I looked at Emily. She shook her head. We both knew what it was. It was the sound of Cavuto's heart breaking.
It took me, Emily, and three uniforms to get Cavuto off his daughter. I actually had to cuff him. He started crying soundlessly as he banged his head against the polka-dot-carpeted floor.
"Go out to your truck and get something to knock this poor son of a bitch out, would you?" I yelled at a gawking EMT.
I noticed only then that my chin was bleeding. I put my thumb on it to stop the drip as I turned and looked at the girl. She was sitting in a stroller with her eyes closed, her white-blond hair the same shade as the oversize polar bear on the shelf beside her.
I turned away and got down on my knees next to the father and placed my hand on his sobbing back.
I opened my mouth to say something. Then I closed it. What was there to say?
Chapter 52
The evening light was just starting to change as Berger steered the Mercedes convertible into the line for the car wash at East 109th Street. He stared up at the fading blue of the sky above the construction site across the street. What he wouldn't give to be in his tub right now, humming on Vitamin P as the sun descended toward the Dakota.
He turned as an unshaven bubble-butted old white guy knocked on his window. Berger thought it was a homeless person until he realized it was one of the car wash employees.
"What?" the guy asked in a Russian accent as the window buzzed down.
"The works," Berger said, handing him a crisp twenty.
"Interior vacuum, too?" Gorbachev wanted to know.
"Not today," Berger said with a grin before zipping the window back up.
Berger sighed as the machinery bumped under the car and began towing him through the spinning brushes and water spray. What a bust of a day.
The girl wasn't supposed to die. The plan had been to torture the parents over a two-day period with the ruse of a ransom and then kill her. But that was all blown to shit now, wasn't it?
It had been the Valium. The girl had had some kind of allergic reaction as he was taking her from the taxi to the Mercedes that he had parked in Brooklyn Heights. By the time they were back in Manhattan, she was gone. He'd screwed up, made his first mistake. He could kick himself.
Oh, well, he thought, as the lemony scent of soap filled the car. He had to stop beating himself up about it. No mission went perfectly. He smoothed out the fiber-optic camera cord sewn into the lining of his jacket. At the very least he'd gotten a little more footage.
Anyway, he didn't have time to dwell on his failures. So much to do, so little time to do it. He'd just have to go on to the next thing. He needed to keep heading in his two favorite directions, onward and upward, and hope it would all come out in the wash.
As the car wash spat him back out into the driveway, he rolled down the window and tossed something into the trash can by the fence.
The Elmo juice box spun as it arced lazily into the can's exact center. Boots the Monkey followed.
"Swish! Nothing but net, and the crowd goes wild," Berger said as he popped the clutch and squealed the Merc out into the street.
Chapter 53
After his preliminary, the ME took me aside by a stack of Buzz Lightyears and said it looked like an overdose of some kind. I turned away as a crying female ME assistant knelt by Angela, getting ready to move her. Her father, mercifully sedated, was out in an ambulance on East 58th. I wished I were as well.
"What do you think?" I said to Emily as we stepped along the rows of toys for the exit. "Does this dump fit in with the F
ish case in some way?"
"No, actually," Emily said. "They found his victim's remains in an abandoned house upstate. My gut says our unsub screwed up, probably botched the dosage, trying to keep her quiet."
"Sounds about right," I said as we arrived back out in the street. I was hoping the outside air would make me feel better, but the crowds and heat only made me feel shittier.
"Guess our copycatting friend isn't Mr. Perfect, after all," I said.
We left the agonizingly sad and angering crime scene about an hour later. I took Fifth Avenue south from FAO Schwarz and hooked a right at 34th, by the Empire State Building.
"It's weird," Emily said, squeezing the empty water bottle in her hand as she stared at the sketch. "He's definitely culturally sophisticated and yet he also has military training, judging by his bomb-making skills. Interesting combination."
"Don't forget. He's also quite the New York City crime buff," I said.
"Speaking of which," Emily said, turning and taking out a folder from her bag.
"You guys probably thought of this, but before I hopped on the train, I printed out a custom map for all the crime scenes of the Mad Bomber and the Son of Sam that I could scratch together off the Web. There are dozens in Manhattan, the Bronx-everywhere except Staten Island. It's a long shot, but beefed-up patrols at some of these potential target neighborhoods might get us some luck."
I smiled at the neat Google pin-pointed map and then at Agent Parker. Emily was exactly what this case needed: a new set of eyes, some new blood, some enthusiasm.
Back at the office, a stocky, young black detective dressed like Gordon Gekko all the way down to a pair of silk moire suspenders, almost tackled us as we got off the elevator. His name was Terry Brown, and he was the squad's latest rookie out of Narcotics.
"Mike, finally," Terry said, waving for us to follow him. "I just got through the toy store security tape. I think I might have something. You have to see this."
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