Slaughter (20 page)

Q
uinn and Pearl stood still, working the calculus of death. If the buildings had been brought down with bombs, there might still be a few of them around, timed to kill rescuers as well as trapped victims.

Quinn clutched Pearl's arm and turned her around. They passed a few rescuers going the other direction, toward the collapsed building.

One of them was a cop, covered with grit and what looked like dried blood.

Quinn blocked him, standing squarely in front of him and clutching both his shoulders. “Gas!” He shook the man. “We've gotta turn these people around!”

He simply stared at Quinn.

Seeing that the man was in deep shock, Quinn tried to turn him around, but he pulled away and resumed his shuffling walk toward the two buildings that had been reduced to ruins. Half pulling Pearl with him, Quinn started walking faster toward the NYPD sawhorses and yellow tape, and the seemingly impossible geometry of dozens of hastily parked vehicles.

“Gas!” Quinn shouted again, waving his free arm. “The gas lines are broken! We gotta get outta here!”

A few people heard him, then stood still and listened to see what he was yelling about.

When they finally figured it out, they began walking away from the collapsed buildings.

The smell of the gas was stronger now. And constant. More and more people left the scene of the bombing. Some began to jog. Any second another, even worse, explosion might occur.

Almost everyone, rubber-necker or rescuer, was moving away. Several NYPD cops were yelling as Quinn had, and waving their arms, trying to hurry people along. This wasn't simply someone who'd left the stove on without the pilot light. Cars within the crazy mosaic of parked vehicles tried to cut in on each other, fighting for distance. Metal screeched. Fenders crunched. A uniform was trying without success to recover some order in what had become a panic. He was knocked down by what looked like a football player dressed like a banker, then got up and ran after the man. One engine after another was starting up. People shouted. Starters ground. Horns honked.

“Every time an engine starts, there's a spark,” Quinn told Pearl.

“Thanks for that information,” she said.

The word spread quickly, and the word was
gas.
Everyone outside a vehicle was running now, picking up speed. Within seconds traffic jammed up and cars were being abandoned. Pearl stopped fighting Quinn and ran alongside him.

The screaming began.

Close behind them, the morning burst into flames.

 

 

Blocks away and upwind, the Gremlin sat at a rooftop restaurant window table and watched what was happening. He had a throwaway cell phone and was describing the scene to Minnie Miner, who sounded genuinely aghast.

The Gremlin knew he'd been on the phone long enough for GPS to pose a threat. He said good-bye to Minnie.

She said, “No, please! Tell me why you did this! Why in God's name did you do this? Please!”

He turned off the phone, then under cover of the tablecloth, used his butter knife to pry it apart. The cheap plastic case snapped open easily. With powerful hands, he broke the pieces into smaller pieces. He put the broken phone in his sport-coat pocket. When he got a chance he would fold a newspaper around the phone and drop it into a trash receptacle. Why not today's paper? He'd used the tablecloth so his fingerprints weren't on flat surfaces of the broken phone. All the dishes and flatware he'd used had already been picked up and transported from his table to the kitchen. He wasn't leaving any accidental clues.

Diners without window seats were drifting across the restaurant now to stand at the wide windows and gawk at the dark smoke rising from the city. He hoped Minnie's minions would get a lot of good video out of this. Maybe they'd use that asinine artist's rendering of him to show along with the video. It was an unflattering likeness, but that was the one thing he liked about it. It didn't resemble him at all.

He cautioned himself. Overconfidence could lead to minor missteps while he was focusing on avoiding major mistakes.

Though everything had gone as planned, he still had the broken cell phone in his pocket. For all the talking or listening it could do, it might as well have been a stupid drawing of a cell phone. But it could become evidence. It might be a good idea to buy yesterday's newspaper and turn the phone to trash as soon as possible. There were probably thousands of discarded copies of the
Times
on streets and in trash receptacles around the city, waiting to be picked up. In a few days they would be unfindable in a landfill.

And in a few days he should be able to view up close the wreckage his bombs had created.

There should be enough of the buildings left standing that they would provide almost an X-ray view. People's homes, people's lives, how people lived, how they died, all would be naked for observation and calculation. The guts of the bombed buildings, their lines of water, gas, electricity, would be visible. Secrets would be exposed.

How things worked.

This was very much like reverse engineering. Everything was a learning experience.

He decided to skip a second espresso and let someone else watch the city deal with its wounds.

That was what someone who cared might do.

Later he stopped at a park. There seemed to be no one else around, so he stood for a while and tossed the pieces of the shattered cell phone one by one into a lake, pretending he was feeding the ducks. Though there were no ducks.

Next time, he told himself, bring some bread crumbs.

Or some ducks, if any of them are dumb enough to eat plastic.

He laughed at his own humor.

There was, if one looked in the right places, some amusement in life.

Q
uinn looked up from what he was reading at his desk and saw Renz stomping into the offices of Q&A with a folded morning
Times
tucked under his arm. He drew the paper out as if removing a sword from its scabbard and slammed it down on Quinn's desk.

“See a fly?” Quinn asked.

“I see a goddamned hurricane!” Renz said. “It looks like a gigantic Minnie Miner.”

Quinn leaned back in his swivel chair. “She hasn't blown up any buildings.”

“She's about to blow up One Police Plaza—with me in it.”

“You're making a strategic mistake, Harley.”

“Which is?”

“Instead if concentrating on apprehending the Gremlin, you're concentrating on covering your ass.”

Renz propped his fists on his hips and walked in a tight circle. “I oughta fire you.”

“You don't really want to. Besides, I have a contract.”

“Then fulfill it.”

“Okay.” Quinn adjusted his tie knot and shrugged into his suit coat. Best to look like a detective, if that was your game. “Let's go,” he said.

“Where?”

“To look at some collapsed buildings.”

“They're still digging out the dead and wounded over there,” Renz said.

“Maybe somebody will dig out a clue.”

“Already we've got twenty-seven dead and sixty injured. What a hellish mess.”

“Like a war zone,” Quinn said.

“I'm thinking more of the political side.”

Quinn held his silence. Renz apparently didn't know that when you had dead and wounded, there was only one side.

As soon as they stepped outside, the heat hit them. They took Quinn's old Lincoln, with the air conditioner on high, and Quinn drove toward the disaster area.

For a while it seemed they were in normal New York traffic. Then, three blocks away, they began to see police barricades and detours and No Parking signs. They parked the car and went ahead on foot.

The two uniforms handling traffic and trespass problems recognized both the commissioner and Quinn, letting Quinn duck under one of the NYPD sawhorses and holding the yellow crime scene tape up so the corpulent Renz could get under it.

When they reached the corner they looked at the blocks of damage. The desolation caused by the original bombs was more than bad enough, but the gas explosions spread fire and more gas explosions, and damage that encompassed what seemed like the entire neighborhood.

Three bulldozers were roaring and snorting, working among the debris with cautious, elephantine delicacy, and Quinn could hear another close by. Workers with picks and shovels were making their way toward rescue or removal of dead bodies. That only twenty-seven had died was, in Quinn's mind, a surprisingly small number, considering the field of destruction they found themselves in. Certainly that number would grow.

“I know it's early on,” he said to Renz, “but has anybody come forward as a witness?”

“Only to be on TV or in the papers. Your people learn anything that might be helpful?”

“Might. Yeah. But it's a meager might.”

Renz said, “Maybe security cameras caught something.”

“If they didn't cook in this weather,” Quinn said. “I've got Sal and Harold looking into that.”

“So you haven't just been sitting on your ass.”

“Nope. Did I mention, I've got a contract?”

“Now I'd like for you to have a clue.”

After a depressing twenty minutes, during which everyone other than Renz moved wreckage to reveal more wreckage, one of the uniforms came over and told Quinn and Renz that the Gremlin had phoned in to the Minnie Miner show and claimed credit for the destruction of the buildings, as well as for the deaths. The call was, of course, brief and impossible to trace, but the voice tracks appeared to be the same. The Gremlin's, in both instances.

Quinn said, “Seems like a clue, Harley.”

Renz, flushed and puffed up from the heat and pervasive smell, called for his limo to pick him up.

Now that he'd delivered his message, Renz had little use for Quinn. He didn't so much as glance in Quinn's direction as the gleaming black town car with NYPD plates glided away.

Only to reappear on the opposite side of the bomb blast area and fire damage. Maybe Renz had thought of something helpful. A clue.

 

 

Quinn watched Renz from half a block's distance. Renz was out of his car and talking to a woman with a microphone. Another woman was frantically leaping around the limo with a small camera, finding good angles for shots of Renz.

Renz was helping her as much as possible. He removed his suit coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He found a high spot in the debris so the photos would have a flattering upward angle. For some shots, he propped his fists on his hips and raised his chin. A portly Mussolini.

Quinn watched and waited for a while, but he never saw Renz actually touch anything.

That was Renz's talent.

T
hat evening, in his office, Renz was less circumspect in talking to Quinn. He knew there were no hidden video cameras or recorders here. And like a beast in his lair, he was most comfortable in familiar surroundings.

The conversation was so amiable that Renz gave Quinn one of his best cigars and fired up an identical one for himself. He confided to Quinn that the cigars were illegal and from some South or Central American country that Quinn had heard of only in a Woody Allen movie. Now they were partners in crime.

Quinn sat in a comfortable leather armchair, holding the cigar and a glass ashtray. The armchair faced Renz's desk, behind which sat Renz. If the desk had been any bigger, Quinn thought, he might need to shout to be heard.

“Now that we're off the record we can talk,” Renz said.

Quinn didn't remember anything about being on or off the record, but he let it slide.

Renz tilted back his head as if about to administer eye drops. He made a perfect O with his lips and blew an imperfect smoke ring.

“Are we really getting any traction in finding this Gremlin bastard?” he asked. “Something or somebody we can toss to the media wolves?”

Quinn blew a perfect smoke ring. “Tell them we're making progress.”

“They won't believe me.”

“They won't believe you no matter what you say, so why waste the truth on them?”

Renz chewed on his cigar but didn't take smoke into his mouth. “This Gremlin guy would be easier for us to get a line on if he was a professional. But real experts in those fields always peg him as a talented amateur. New to his work, maybe, but he knew or learned enough about killing that he manages to make the hit and then get away unseen.” Renz produced a white handkerchief as big as a surrender flag and wiped his forehead and neck with it. Watching him made Quinn realize the office had gotten much warmer. It might have been the cigars, or the futility.

“For instance, he knew how to neutralize all those elevator safety brakes in the Blenheim Building,” Renz went on. “All those floors.” He tapped ashes from his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and made a face suggesting he was nauseated. “God! All that bone sticking through flesh. And the fires! The arson guy said it took some knowledge and some jerry-rigging to bring off what this guy has done. Imagine the planning, learning what those buildings are made of, when and how they were constructed—their materials and vulnerabilities. He must have made studies before he made plans.”

“You would think so,” Quinn said.

“He knew where the flammable wooden support beams and joists were,” Renz said. “How the fire would dance its way through the place. Which walls were load-bearing. Everything that'd cause the fire to feed on itself and turn buildings into ovens.”

“Fire seems to fascinate people who like gadgets.”

“Does it follow that people who like gadgets like to kill?”

Quinn thought about that. “People who like gadgets want to know about how the insides of things work. They can only gain that deeper understanding through careful observation and examination. Which is why our gremlin has a compulsion to disassemble things so he can study them. Even women.”

“So he thinks that by abduction and torture he can learn about women?” Renz looked skeptical.

“Only some things,” Quinn said. “Other things he'll learn in other ways. We have to learn those things, too, if we're going to find him.”

“It sounds reasonable when you say it,” Renz told Quinn. He snubbed out his cigar.

Quinn took that as a signal from Renz that their tête-à-tête was finished.

Quinn didn't think so. Still seated, he said, “There is something you might toss to the circling news vultures, Harley. Tell them we're studying closed-circuit security camera stills and videos of people at the Taggart Building fire. The people in the street, observing the flames. Images from before, during, and after the explosions and fire. We think we might be able to do a facial match with the killer and the artist's rendering. Mix in a picture of Kray as a youth, and we may come up with some positive identification.”

Renz looked surprised. “Are we doing all that?”

“As soon as you supply the cameras and cassettes.”

“Nobody uses cassettes anymore,” Renz said.

Quinn ignored him and stood up. He knew Renz had the political clout to get whatever he needed to get something done in a rush. The man had his connections. That was how it worked. The favor would also subtract from Renz's stock of favors owed. Some might sniff weakness, but who knew if there really were such images that hadn't been destroyed?

Renz stood up and said, “You are really a prick, Quinn.”

As Quinn was leaving, he paused at the door and said, “Nice cigar, Harley. But it's only that.”

When Quinn arrived at Q&A, he found Jerry Lido there, along with Pearl and Fedderman.

Sal and Harold were still occupied interviewing witnesses to the bombing and burning. Sal had called earlier and talked to Pearl. She'd told him two witnesses had surfaced and reported glimpsing a child of about twelve running and dancing through the flames. Neither witness had gotten a good look at the quick, lithe figure.

Pearl gave Sal and Harold names and addresses and sicced them on the witnesses.

 

 

“Could have been a small adult,” said one of the witnesses, a hard-looking but glamorous woman named Philipa.

“Or a large child,” Harold said.

They were in her living room, in a modest but cozy ground-floor apartment that looked out at ankle level at passersby on the sidewalk. It was on the upwind side of the field of wreckage left by the explosions and fire. Half the buildings on the block looked untouched, in contrast to the others.

Harold wondered about Philipa's ethnicity. She had a certain earthy magnetism that intrigued him. When she caught Harold staring at her breasts, she gave him a look that startled him with its clarity of meaning. She knew what he was thinking she was thinking, but he was wrong.

Exactly.

“I was just curious about your ethnicity,” he said, laying it all out there. “Where you're from.”

“Philipistan,” she said. “And before you ask, yes, I am named after my country.”

“Like Odessa,” Harold said.

Sal glared at him. “Or Miss Australia.”

Philipa's husband entered the room then, and that was that.

“I wasn't here during the event,” he said. Meaning he had nothing to add, and neither did his wife. Interview over.

Harold thought “event” was an odd thing to call a bombing and conflagration. And to Harold, the man didn't look at all Philipistanese. More Irish.

“Thanks for your cooperation,” Sal told the husband, feigning dead seriousness. He gave the wife one of his cards. “If you remember anything else, please call.”

As Philipa accepted the card, she glanced at him, then up and to the side. Something in her eyes sent the ancient wordless message: I know you know I know . . .

“Where exactly is—” Harold began, as Sal pushed him out the door to the hall.

Back in the unmarked, with its engine and air conditioner running, Sal riffled through the many interviews. What he and his fellow detectives were doing didn't seem productive, but he knew how some small item or phrase, or even silence, could unexpectedly yield up a fact or physical piece of evidence. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. Some people thought doing that could help to make a headache go away. Sal wasn't one of those people. His headache had a name: Harold.

They drove for a while, Sal behind the wheel. He knew that sooner or later something would click. The trick was to recognize it when it happened. The legwork of the investigation was only beginning. When a little time had passed, the same witnesses could be interviewed again. Differences or contradictions in the results could be useful.

Sal continued to drive what he thought was the perimeter of the recent catastrophe. Harold sat and fiddled with his iPhone.

Fifteen minutes passed before Harold spoke: “It's nowhere on Google.”

“What's that, Harold?”

“Philipistan. As far as Google's concerned, it doesn't exist.”

After a while, Harold muttered, “Those countries come and go. Sometimes they even overlap.”

Back at Q&A, Quinn sat slouched in his desk chair and listened while Sal and Harold read their reports in noticeably weary voices. Quinn didn't mind, not only because he wasn't doing the drone work on the Gremlin chase, but because he believed that sometimes what's not noticed in one sense is noticed in another. Listening to reports differed a shade from reading them to oneself. Quinn had once persuaded Pearl to touch her tongue to a sheet of paper to see if it tasted the same as the rest of the paper in a tablet. The papers had tasted the same, but Quinn pretended that one was more acidic than the other, which convinced a suspect to roll over and implicate his codefendant in a series of burglaries.

I know that you know I know . . .