I dropped a five into the offering box and lit candles. Kneeling down before their ruby glow, I closed my eyes and said prayers for the dead and most especially for their families. I knew all too well how completely devastating death could be in a tight-knit family. I could only guess at a parent’s depth of despair that the loss of an only child would bring.
As I was crossing myself, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Seamus.
“Good man. Just the lad I was looking for,” he whispered. “I need a volunteer. Will you do the first reading or bring up the gifts? Your choice.”
“Bring up the gifts,” I said.
“Actually, you’ll have to do both. I lied about that choice thing. Let’s get this show on the road.”
The mass seemed more solemn and sadder than usual. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the killer out of my thoughts even when Seamus whispered the High Latin phrase used on this solemn holy day.
“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,” he said as he administered the ashes.
From dust we are born and to dust we shall return, I thought. It was the same thing written on the blackboard next to the first poor young man’s corpse.
Please, God, help me to stop the sick individual who is responsible for all this death, I prayed as I walked back to my pew with the cross on my forehead.
As I knelt down, I realized I was marked the same way the kids had been. My forehead seemed to burn. I could almost sense Jacob Dunning and Chelsea Skinner in the shadows around me. Behind my closed eyes, I could see the face of Dan Hastings, whose fate was still unknown.
Dear Lord, I prayed, I can’t let them down.
Chapter 67
FRANCIS X. MOONEY was passing the Flat Iron Building when he shook some Dexadrine tablets into his hand. As he made it across the street into Madison Square Park, he reconsidered, dropping them into a corner trash barrel. He didn’t need any speed today.
His blood felt like it was singing. In fact, everything that presented itself to his heightened senses seemed significant. The ornate architecture on the facades of the Beaux Arts buildings of lower Broadway, the scent of grease and sugar from the curbside doughnut carts, the filth-covered sidewalk beneath the soles of his shoes. None of it had ever been so vivid.
The case he carried was becoming heavier. He had to move it to his other hand every other block. Sweat from his exertion was actually making his shirt stick to his back. Still, no way would he call a taxi. His last walk, his last pilgrimage, had to be on foot.
He’d always loved the city. Walking its endlessly fascinating streets had been one of his life’s greatest and simplest pleasures. The French actually coined a word for urban strollers, flâneurs, people who derive pleasure from observing the urban scene completely objectively and aesthetically.
But that was the problem, he thought as he walked on. He had been objective for way too long.
At the corner of 25th and Fifth, he suddenly stopped. A woman was approaching the side alley of a run-down building, carrying a white garbage bag.
“Excuse me,” Francis called as he jogged over. “Miss! Miss! You there!”
She stopped.
“How dare you!” Francis said, pointing to a Diet Coke bottle clearly visible beneath the thin plastic garbage bag she was holding. “That’s recycling. You’re throwing out recycling!”
“What are you, the garbage police?” she said. She gave him the finger. “Get a life, you pathetic freak.”
Francis thought about shooting her. His Beretta, locked and loaded, waited at the top of the valise. Blow the smugness and the woman’s ugly face clean away, kick her into the stinking alley, where she belonged. Suddenly aware of the passing pedestrians, he got a grip instead. He wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. He had much bigger fish to fry.
But he just couldn’t help himself when he stopped for the second time, on 33rd, one block south of the Empire State Building. Putting down his case, he halted before the telephone company’s idling box truck on the corner.
“Excuse me!” he said to the oaf eating his breakfast behind the driver’s side window. He rapped sharply with his Columbia ring on the glass right beside the jerk’s face. “I said, excuse me!”
The phone guy threw open the door and leapt out onto the sidewalk. He had a shaved head and the shoulders of a defensive lineman.
“Fuck you knocking on my window for, dog?” he bellowed, spitting doughnut crumbs.
“Fuck you idling your truck for, dog?” Francis shot back. “You’re violating Section twenty-four-dash-one-sixty-three of the New York City Administrative Code: ‘No person shall cause or permit the engine of a motor vehicle, other than a legally authorized emergency motor vehicle, to idle for longer than three minutes while parking.’ You see that poison coming out of your tailpipe there? It includes chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and acetaldehyde, not to mention particulate matter that can lodge deep in your lungs. It kills people, heats up the environment, too. Now shut it—”
The gaping, wide-eyed phone company man let out a kind of snort as his huge hand suddenly reached out. He snatched Francis’s tie and swung him around in a full three-sixty before letting him go. Francis actually went off his feet as he slammed into a newspaper box on the corner. He skinned his chin and the palms of his hands as he went ass over tea kettle onto Fifth Avenue. Horns honked as Gotham Writers’ Workshop pamphlets fluttered past his face.
Turning, Francis got a good mouthful of particulate matter–laced exhaust as the fleeing phone truck left rubber. He coughed as he pulled himself back into a sitting position on the curb.
There were pebbles embedded in his bleeding palms, a streak of something black and wet across the forearm of his tailored suit jacket. He looked down at the torn knee of his Savile Row pants. For a moment, he was back in the schoolyard again, picked on and knocked down by assholes who were bigger and older. Like it did then, the misery of feeling powerless began to bubble up.
But then, the startled fury on the phone man’s face came back to him, and he was suddenly laughing. He had to stop this nonsense. He’d gotten off easy, Francis realized, considering how large the man was. He was lucky the guy hadn’t killed him.
Besides, he wasn’t powerless anymore, was he? he thought as he found his valise. He patted it lovingly before he lifted it and continued his pilgrimage north.
A snatch of grammar school Robert Frost came to him as he picked up his pace.
He recited to himself, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
Chapter 68
“DADDY, DO MY ashes look okay? I told Grandpa to do a good job,” my five-year-old, Chrissy, said as we sat by the window inside the crowded Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.
We’d just dropped off her siblings at school after church. Chrissy, who was in kindergarten now, luckily didn’t have to go in until noon. In our big family, one-on-one time was an extremely rare commodity. Not even a nasty killing spree would make me miss our Wednesday-morning Starbucks date.
“I don’t know. Let me see,” I said, reaching across the table, holding her tiny chin in my hand as I peered at her. I couldn’t help but kiss her elflike nose. “They look great, Chrissy. Grandpa did fine. And they go really well with your hot chocolate mustache.”
As she went back to her drink, I looked at the long line by the pastry case. Waiting for their morning fix of Seattle’s main export were nannies with infants, tired-looking construction workers, and tired-looking men and women dressed in business clothes. Maybe ten percent of them, along with one of the baristas, had ashes.
I wondered with a cold chill if it was in the killer’s mind to shoot people who had ashes today. That he was going to do something was a given. Every indication was that today was the day. The only questions left were where and how.
I rubbed my eyes before I lifted my coffee and took a large gulp. My blood caffeine level had hit record highs in the past couple of sleepless days, but it couldn’t be helped
. After last night’s end-of-day task force meeting, I’d spent much of the night Googling everything I could on Ash Wednesday.
Ash Wednesday was one of the most solemn days in the Catholic liturgical year. It was a day for contemplating one’s transgressions.
But whose transgressions was the killer trying to point out with the slayings? The dead kids’? Society’s? His own?
I caught my ash-streaked, mournful reflection in the plate glass.
Well, I was certainly stewing in my own lapses this morning, I thought, looking away. For not already putting an end to this horrible case.
As Chrissy played peekaboo with a neighboring toddler in a stroller, I checked my cell phone for the millionth time to see if I had missed any messages. I winced when only my Yankees-logo wallpaper appeared again. Emily had put an incredible rush on the print, but there was still no word.
I spun my phone on the chessboard tabletop as I looked out the window down Broadway. I could feel the moments slipping away from me, and there was nothing I could do.
Where and how? I thought. Where and how?
Chapter 69
MY CASE-DISTRACTED MIND still hadn’t come a hundred percent back online as I stepped with Chrissy into my apartment ten minutes later. Otherwise, I would have checked my caller ID before I snapped open my phone.
“What’s the story?” I yelled into it.
“What story?” my grandfather Seamus said. “Actually, who cares? Did you tell her yet?”
“Tell who what?”
“Mary Catherine, ya eedjit! See, I knew you’d forget. And with MC in such a riled knot of late. Does the song ‘Happy Birthday’ ring a bell, Detective?”
“Holy sh— . . . ugar,” I said. “No. I forgot.”
Eedjit was right! I thought. I’d blown this one big-time. I could at least have brought her back a muffin or something. What would Mary Catherine throw out of mine next? I wondered. I needed to address the situation, and pronto. I heard the tea kettle start to boil in the kitchen. Maybe I still had a shot.
“I’m all over it, Father,” I said, hanging up.
Mary was taking a mug down from the cabinet just inside the kitchen door.
“Mary. There you are,” I said, surprising her with a hug.
“Happy birthday!” I said as merrily as I could and went to plant a kiss on her cheek.
But as it turned out, I was the one who got the surprise present.
Mary Catherine turned her head, and our lips locked. At first, I pulled back as if I’d been Tasered, but then, before I knew it, my hand found the back of her neck and we were, well, making out would be the exact expression.
Mary’s unheeded mug slid off the counter and shattered.
I guess you could call it pretty hot-and-heavy making out.
“Mary Catherine!” Chrissy called a second later just outside the kitchen door.
Mary almost broke my nose as she ripped herself away from me. Her face was at least twenty shades redder than her strawberry-blond hair. My face felt like it was on fire. I couldn’t seem to close my mouth.
“Goddamn you, Mike,” she said before she fled out the doorway. Was she crying? Why was she crying? I was having trouble enough breathing. I heard the hall bathroom door slam a second later.
I was still standing there, brain-locked and blinking, when Chrissy came in. “Where’s MC?” she said.
“I’m not sure. I broke a mug, Chrissy. Could you get me the dustpan?”
Chapter 70
I WAS DOWN on my hands and knees, dazed and sweeping up, when my cell rattled.
“Hey, Mike,” Agent Parker said. “Get down here. I have news. I’m right outside your building.”
“Thank God,” I said, dumping the last of the shards into the garbage. “I mean, on my way!”
I quickly hollered, “I’m off to work, ’bye, Mary,” as I passed the still-closed bathroom door.
Was that the right thing to do? I wasn’t sure. I’d never made out with my kids’ nanny before.
I wiped the lip gloss off my chin in the elevator mirror on the way down to the street. Still tasting it, I pondered what the heck had just happened and how I felt about it.
Like I needed something else on my plate at this juncture.
“Goddamn you, Mike.”
Chapter 71
I CLIMBED INTO Emily’s double-parked Crown Vic. She was wearing a new white silk blouse and sleek beige skirt suit. With the case dragging on, she must have done some shopping, I realized.
Was it me, or was the blouse showing some pretty nice cleavage? I wiped my eyes. What the hell was happening to me?
“Feeling okay there, Mike?”
“Never better,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”
Emily handed me a folder.
“We finally got the toxicology report back on the ashes found on the first victim, Jacob Dunning. Are you familiar with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy?”
“Had one six months ago,” I said, nodding. “Doctor said I’m as clean as a whistle.”
“Listen closely, wiseass,” Emily said, ignoring my acerbic wit. “Basically, individual elements reflect X-ray light in different patterns. They ran the ashes through the machine, and it turns out most of it is regular cigarette tobacco. The twist is that they found traces of some very interesting substances as well that came from the killer’s sweat.”
“Like what kind of substances?” I said.
Emily lifted a clipboard.
“Several amphetamines and a drug called . . . Iressa. It’s a chemotherapy drug for lung cancer.”
I rubbed my face as I nodded.
“Hey, good work,” I said. “I’ll get Schultz to contact Sloan-Kettering and the other cancer centers and check out their patients. It’s starting to make a little more sense now in terms of motive. If this guy is terminal, maybe he made out some psycho bucket list. Maybe this is his way of going out with a bang.”
“Funny you should say bang,” Emily said, pointing to a name on the fax sheet. “Because the drugs aren’t the worst of it. There was evidence of something called pentaerythritol. It’s found in plastic explosives, Mike.”
Chapter 72
KIDNAPPING, CHILD MURDERS, and now plastic explosives? This nightmare case kept getting worse and worse. I unsuccessfully tried to wake myself out of it as Emily answered her encrypted cell phone.
“Hold on, Tom,” she said into it. “Let me put you on speaker.”
“We got the print back, Em,” FBI lab chief Tom Warriner said a moment later. “You’re not going to believe this. It’s a hit, but one that’s coded to COINTELPRO.”
“Cointelpro?” I said.
“The FBI’s counterintelligence program,” Emily said.
“The section attached to this was run out of the New York office,” Warriner continued. “The Domestic Terrorism Squad from the sixties. The code name attached is Shadowbox.”
“In Intelligence Squads, when the identity of a person is classified, they designate code names,” Emily explained with a roll of her eyes. “Like the CIA, the FBI spook division loves codes and passwords. James Bond, eat your heart out.”
She aimed her voice at her phone.
“So, what do you think, Tom? Our guy, this Shadowbox, was probably a confidential informant on a domestic terrorist group?”
Terrorism? I was still trying to absorb the plastic explosives angle.
“Most likely,” the FBI lab chief said.
“So, how do we get a name to match the code name?” I asked.
“I’ve tried twice to crack the old databases, but some COINTELPRO records seem to be missing,” Warriner said.
Emily snorted.
“I’ll bet. Into the ol’ memory hole you go. What the hell are we going to do? How do we get around that?”
“I’ve been asking around, and the best lead I can tell you is that you guys should go see John Browning,” Warriner said. “He’s the former agent who ran the group out of the New York office from ’sixty-eight to
’seventy-four. I tried to call him, but there’s no answer at his house up in Yonkers. I worked with Browning on a few things when I was a rookie tech. Sarcastic pain in the ass, but a mind like a steel trap. If he can’t tell you who Shadowbox is, no one can.”
Chapter 73
THE CROWN VIC’S V8 screamed like it meant it as we zigzagged north up the crowded Saw Mill River Parkway. Danica Patrick had nothing on Emily Parker, I thought as I white-knuckled the door handle.
Browning lived on a cul-de-sac near the Dunwoodie golf course. There was a U-Haul truck in his driveway. Please don’t be moved out, I prayed as we came to a hard stop behind it.
A wiry, clean-cut sixty- or maybe seventy-something-year-old in a St. John’s University sweatshirt came out of the garage, carrying a box of model trains. I noticed he’d gotten his ashes today as well.
“Help you?” he said, his intelligent blue eyes shifting quickly from me to Emily.
“We hope so,” Emily said, showing him her tin. “Tom Warriner sent us. It’s about CO—”
He lifted a pausing finger as a woman came out of the house across the street, carrying a tray of plants.
“It’s about your, um, previous line of work,” Emily finished in a lower voice.
“I see,” he said. “Come on in, then, I guess,” he said, waving us toward the open garage door.
“Finally heading to Florida,” he said after he closed the garage door behind him. “Just sold to a rent refugee. Yuppie couple from Manhattan. Said they wanted their Yorkies to have some room to stretch out. I managed to raise four daughters here, so maybe it’ll work out for them.”
“We need your help, John,” Emily said quickly. “We need to cut through a mountain of red tape, and we’re running out of time. In ’sixty-nine, you ran a CI named Shadowbox. His print just came up in the system. We think he has something to do with these kid killings that are going on in the city.”