A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (17 page)

“You don’t have to believe to go.”

“All the same. Thanks.” Manis practically choked on the word. He slipped the fiver into Salinowsky’s cup and turned to depart.

“No atheists in the foxholes,” Salinowsky said behind him.

Manis didn’t turn back around. He repeated to himself, trying to get the accent: “No ate-ee-ists in da fox-oles.”

When he rounded the corner, he immediately typed St. Euph’s into his smart phone, lest he forget it. Not every day you came across a name as unusual as that. He’d look it up after Sallye left town and plan a visit there real soon, maybe skip showering as early as tomorrow morning in order to blend in when the time came.

AT THE BOMB SQUAD OFFICE
, Diaz took a pile of photos and set them aside on the big break-room table—the same table where the guys on duty took most of their meals. Between the epidemic of flu and the epidemic of bomb calls, he had the place to himself.

The pile contained the crime scene photos from the Horn and Littel cases. In two days they’d become so familiar that he could no longer milk anything from them, couldn’t look at them fresh. But some new pictures had arrived—the super-close-up lab photos taken with that static camera set-up they had at the lab.

In the old days, he was told, the bomb techs used to spread out the evidentiary fragments on this very table, trying to reconstruct the bomb. Nowadays, with the demands of modern forensics, the techs couldn’t touch the evidence. So, other than rare occasions when they visited the lab, they had to confine themselves to pictures.

He spread out the new ones on the table and began poring over them. They showed every piece of the device that had survived the explosion and every fragment of Albert Horn’s artificial legs, even his shoes.

Rather than sort them by left and right leg, as CSU had arranged them, Diaz decided to sort them based on whatever common elements he could discern. So he put shots of the feet next to one another, for example. CSU had photographed the feet with the shoes both on and off. They’d organized the rest of the legs on a tray like shards of pottery from an archaeological dig, arrayed as they thought they might fit together. Diaz placed pictures of the upper parts of the legs in their own pile and sorted out what the CSU techs took for the middle portion.

Altogether, it added up to a lot of images, every angle of every piece included. If you weren’t looking for something in particular, the repetitiveness might make you space out real quick, but Diaz had something specific in mind. He was looking at the serial number on a piece of composite from one leg and trying to locate the matching piece on the other leg. Presumably the manufacturer stamped the serial number in the same place on every leg. So if he found the matching piece without a serial number, it would tell him which leg had contained the bomb.

He hunched over, resting the index finger of each hand on corresponding spots and peering from one to another, and he was so deep into it that he startled when Morris called, “Mariah Primm for you, Manny!”

Diaz straightened up and headed for his desk. “Mariah?”

“Senior tech at CSU?”

“She asked for me?”

“Sergeant Kahn is out. She says it’s about the veterans case.”

“Oh, okay. Roger that.” Diaz picked it up and said his name into the phone. There was no small talk, Primm being the clinical type.

“We’ve had some success reconstructing the Littel bomb. As you probably know, like with Horn there are some cell phone parts but not enough to suggest an entire phone there.”

Diaz’s heart sank. “So…no remote detonation?”

“I didn’t say that. Something very interesting is going on here, apparently. On site your team located a blasting cap, an SCR, an arming switch. All very minimal.”

“Power source. We found a battery, too, right?”

“Yes, but not a cell phone battery.”

“Yeah, we thought it was too big for that. If it’s not from the cell phone, I’m guessing it was part of the prosthetic, the battery that powered the arm.”

“Precisely, a six-volt.”

“Hold on.”

Diaz jogged back to the break room and gathered up the photos. He rifled through them at his desk. He’d been focused on the serial number issue, but this was far more important. Now that he looked carefully at remnants of the wiring in Littel’s device, something jumped out at him.

“Whoever made this bomb wired it to the battery that was already in there,” he said.

“Yes. Clever. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

Diaz reflected. “I’ve seen car batteries used, radio batteries, flashlight batteries. Cell phones, of course. Can’t say I’ve seen anyone use the battery from a mechanical limb. Dr. Primm, do you know exactly what it’s doing in there—in normal circumstances, I mean.”

“It powers the sensors and, more importantly, it needs that capacity to work the motors that bend the arm and fingers.”

“Oh, sure. Makes sense. And, from the perspective of a bomb maker, plenty of juice to set off the C4 as a bonus. So what’s with the cell phone parts—did it power the cell phone, too?”

“It’s not remote detonation, Detective. No sign whatsoever of a receiver.”

So for sure he’d been wrong. “There goes one of my theories.”

“What theory is that?”

“I’ve felt pretty certain from the start that this wasn’t a suicide. So I figured it had to be remote detonation.”

“Not by cell phone, Detective. But from what we can tell, this bomb wasn’t detonated by a direct application of force on the part of Littel, either.”

“You’re saying it’s not remote but, at the same time, he
didn’t
pull the switch?”

“That’s correct. Maybe there was no switch to pull. It seems that the main trigger here is the GPS module from a cell phone. As I said, there’s no receiver. Our working theory is that the precipitating factor was Mr. Littel walking into some GPS coordinates.”

“You mean it was programmed to go off in a particular geographic spot?”

“Seems that way. The cell phone parts are part of the bomb, but it’s not remote detonation by phone call.”

Diaz broke into a broad smile. If it proved out, this meant he was right about the veterans after all. He’d have to get this to Kahn stat. He repeated for clarity, “So the guy carrying the bomb hits preprogrammed GPS coordinates and the bomb triggers.”

“Simple as that. At least that’s our theory. Our digital team is still trying to crack the code for how this device was set up. They’re poking around inside the chip, which is delicate, as you can imagine. They don’t want to corrupt it.”

“No matter, doesn’t sound like suicide to me.”

“Me neither, Detective.”

Just then Diaz saw Kahn come in. He tried to catch his attention, but the sergeant walked straight to Morris, said something Diaz couldn’t hear, went into Capobianco’s empty office, and closed the door.

“What all this means, if we’re right,” Diaz said into the phone, “is that there’s a perp still out there.”

“And if he hasn’t run out of victims,” Primm affirmed, “he could be building another bomb.”

KAHN SAT BEHIND THE LIEUTENANT’S
desk, door closed and blinds drawn, staring at the telephone. He couldn’t picture Capobianco lying in bed, could only see him in shirtsleeves with his tie undone, standing by the couch in his living room, red in the face. Maybe he didn’t need to hear about this now—about a cop in his squad who might be heading for trouble. No one had been hurt yet, after all, and maybe no one ever would be.

On the other hand, one thing Kahn could see clearly in his mind was Diaz strolling up to that messenger bag in front of the cathedral like he knew exactly what was inside—and he couldn’t have known. Kahn saw him produce the Leatherman knife. He saw him hesitate when Kahn called to him in anger, hunch up his shoulders, then drop to one knee and proceed as if a superior officer hadn’t just advised him to stand down. He heard Diaz explaining what he’d looked up in the dictionary, which concerned Kahn more than anything—seemed to suggest a detective on the hunt for nothing but an excuse to go his own way. Then Kahn’s thoughts coalesced around the voluntary report from Hernandez, this most troubling news of Diaz walking fine lines within feet of speeding traffic.

Suicidal? Maybe. Reckless? Most definitely. And Kahn kept thinking:
not on my watch, not on my watch.
He had a responsibility here. If Cap were back in the precinct house, easy enough to punt Hernandez to him. But that wasn’t how the situation shook out. He picked up the phone and called the lieutenant.

“Cap here.”

“You sound more yourself.”

“It’s good to hear your voice without my ears ringing, Kahn. And I’m damn sick of sitting around. It has me feeling marginalized, tell you the truth.”

“Then I can help.”

“News on the twin bombers?”

“Not exactly. Between us and A and E we’ve hoovered up enough evidence in the past three days, but it doesn’t lead anywhere so far.”

“Confirmed C4 with a military taggant, right?”

“Yes, sir. Burbette’s trying to run down the source.”

“Find an NSN number or IMEI on the phone?”

“No, Cap. We got cell phone parts but none of the right ones for that.”

Capobianco started to say something else, hacked, got out a few words, and went into a full-out coughing jag. When he’d recovered, it seemed like a good time for Kahn to change the subject.

“I’m thinking of taking Diaz off the case.”

“Diaz? Why? The reprimand wasn’t enough? Breaking procedure again?”

“Not precisely.” Kahn told him about what Hernandez had reported, the detective out in the middle of the night, playing in traffic.

“You shitting me?”

“I wish.”

“Last I saw him he seemed fine. Now—is he that far gone?”

“This case strikes close to home, I think. It’s dredged up something in him.”

“But St. Pat’s was before this case.”

Kahn once thought he’d want Capobianco’s job in a few years. Now he wasn’t so sure. “Maybe the kid had a premonition, Cap. I dunno. I have no experience with this kind of thing. But I’m beginning to think he could need a psychiatric evaluation.”

“We can put him in for that,” Capobianco thought aloud. “Probably requires giving him leave. Can it wait until the squad’s back at full force? Still got a lot of people out sick.”

“Your call. I’m just sharing the facts. The kid’s got a short fuse of late, arguing with me, arguing with O’Shea.”

“Well, is he arguing about the case or about the weather?”

“About the case.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad. Everyone has their own style.”

“True enough. It’s walking at night in the middle of the West Side Highway that has me spooked.”

“He’s walking in the middle? I thought you said on the shoulder.”

“Middle...shoulder—”

Just then the door burst open.

SALLYE RITCHIE SAT BROODING OVER
a cooling mug of coffee in Warren Manis’s apartment, her senses dull, her thoughts diffuse. She had her elbows resting on his small kitchen table, and she held the mug up to her mouth too long, her lower lip clinging to the hot ceramic near the broken skin where he’d hit her. It stung, and she pulled away, setting down the mug and pondering. This time last year he’d given her a shiner that she couldn’t hide for weeks at work, had to concoct a story about hitting her face on the steering wheel in an auto accident. The other nurses looked at her cross-eyed for a while, but she had few friends close enough to press her. More troubling, those few who did know her well also knew that she’d acquired this measure of abuse on a trip out of town. They didn’t know how or why, but they had to suspect something more than her lame explanation.

Now the split lip. She’d be back among the nurses tomorrow morning peddling another bullshit story to save face. But this time memory of the last incident might make their inquiries more insistent. All of them—including Sallye—had been trained to spot domestic abuse. For patients who came through the emergency room door, all were mandatory reporters. For a colleague, however, they’d have to tread more lightly. Still, Sallye knew it couldn’t go on much longer. She’d have to rid herself of the obsessions that she’d allow to creep into her life, into her long relationship with this strange man.

Strange but not a stranger. She’d known him so many years now. How odd to carry on with such intimacy yet with so little depth of understanding.

She set down the coffee mug and cruised the apartment perimeter, opening cabinets and drawers, browsing books, seeking clues to the creature who Warren had become. For if she’d ever known him, she suspected that she no longer did. He’d morphed under pressure the way a diamond emerges from coal, but he hadn’t turned into a beautiful gemstone, just into something misshapen, deformed. Yet she remained fixated on him, the same way a person couldn’t easily avert her gaze from a bad car accident, wanting to set eyes on that appalling thing while also wanting not fully to see it. The exception being that she’d had a hand herself in this particular wreck.

The inside of the apartment showed few hints of Manis’s inner self. Nothing unusual in the books or the few pieces of bric-a-brac. There were two photographs on display: a faded picture of his mother in front of a ranch house and one of Sallye holding a non-alcoholic beer in the lounge on the Eskan Village Air Base in Saudi Arabia. An army brat, she felt as comfortable there as anyplace—which wasn’t necessarily saying much. She’d never felt an attachment to physical locations. Home wasn’t four walls or a bed or a geographic spot. From her earliest days it was her father’s lap, her mother’s, or the knee of one of their friends. She felt warm and safe there and she yearned for it even after she’d grown up. That desire had become something deviant, she knew, this thing she did to men when no one was looking.

Deviant, yes, society would say so,
but the behavior was nothing that she could help.

Behind a beaded curtain in Warren’s apartment, she located the door that she’d seen many times before but had never passed through. The doorknob was locked and a padlock hung closed in place at her eye level for good measure. She’d asked about this door before, even tried to suss out the size of the room on the other side when they sometimes wandered the empty warehouse next door. But he wouldn’t tell her what was inside. Now she rested a hand on the doorknob and put a hip to the door, but it was solid, unyielding. She jerked the padlock. Nothing.