A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (12 page)

“That’ll be for the lieutenant to decide. You did the right thing, Hernandez. From here we’ll have to play it as it lays.”

Kahn left him standing on the sidewalk and headed back toward the precinct house. He had no bandwidth for handholding Hernandez just now, felt the downward tug of managerial responsibility like a weight on his back. No wonder Cap had gone gray at the temples in just nine months on the job. Maybe they should give these guys psych tests before taking them into the squad.

He walked slowly, staring at his feet. Diaz had always been a little too much his own man, but since the Times Square bombing he seemed to be growing an enormous chip on his shoulder. No—Kahn caught himself—it started before that with the package by the steps of St. Pat’s. Deep down Kahn knew that Diaz meant well, had passion, cared about what he was doing. But if the detective had begun to go rogue, it would be Kahn’s job to rein him in before someone got hurt.

LEWIS SALINOWSKY WAS SLICING POTATOES
when Father Igor strolled into the church kitchen. He liked the deacon, who wasn’t an actual priest but whom Salinowsky insisted on calling Father out of respect. Father Igor ran the charitable end of St. Euphrosyne Ukrainian Church. In that position, he’d given the vagrant a lot of breaks in the past year, paid him a little sometimes for his “volunteer” kitchen work, made sure his bunk in the shelter kept him away from the creepiest individuals. Now Salinowsky was eager to ask another favor of his benefactor.

“You’re at it early,” Father Igor said, brushing a shock of blondish gray hair off of his own forehead. He had a clipboard in his other hand, had come to count the stocks.

“Too cold this morning for panhandling,” Salinowsky said truthfully. He set down the knife, wiped his hands on his apron, and pointed to the mound on the chopping block. “That’s thirty pounds there, in case you were wondering.”

“Well done, Lewis.”

Salinowsky’s shoulders hurt. He’d been sitting, and the stainless steel counter was too high for sustained work from there. Now he stood, a little shaky.

Father Igor reached out to catch him, but Salinowsky steadied himself without assistance. The blister in his stump was bad, though. He did his best to ignore it. “That methadone clinic you turned me onto,” he said, “I’m planning to go this week. Check it out.”

“I’m glad to hear that. You deserve better for yourself.”

Salinowsky nodded, knowing he’d raised the subject of the clinic only to suck up a little. “You’ve been very kind to me,” he added.

“Nothing you wouldn’t do for me if the situation were reversed.” Father Igor blinked slowly, as if letting a split-second of meditation pass.

“I never volunteered for anything in my life except for the army,” Salinowsky conceded.

“That was enough. No one’s keeping score.”

“I am, though. I owe you big time, Father, and I have another thing to ask.”

“Oh?”

“Someone’s been messing with my stuff.”

The vagrants slept in a big room, thirty cots lined up like checkers with a small locker at the foot of each. They couldn’t leave anything outside the locker when they left the premises in the morning. That’s why the ones who traveled heavier never came to stay at St. Euph’s. They used the City shelters or slept on the street.

“Here or outside?” Father Igor asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re missing things?”

Salinowsky shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s more of a feeling.” He scratched his arm, getting the creepy-crawlies just to talk about it.

Father Igor studied him. “Tell you what. You promise me—
promise me
—that you’ll go to the methadone clinic this week and I’ll make a space for your things.”

“It’s a deal.” Salinowsky rocked in his eagerness. “Can I go get them?”

Father Igor nodded. Salinowsky felt eyes on his back as he hobbled out to his regular cot and gathered his possessions from the footlocker. There wasn’t much, just two armfuls. He hugged them to his chest.

“There’s a place in the pantry with some room,” Father Igor said. “I’ll show you.”

DIAZ ENTERED THE SQUAD ROOM
while Kahn was on the phone. Since last night, a feeling of resolve had settled in his gut. He accepted the incident of Hernandez seeing him out there on the parkway as a wake-up call. The time had come to stop allowing his emotions to rule him so. What had gotten into him of late, he didn’t know. He’d been reporting to work under a cloud of dread for weeks, like the department was going to crush all life out of him, like he had to flail just to get his breath. But he now hoped being caught out last night by Hernandez would serve as a tap of the reset button. No more indulging his instincts, good or bad. Keep the head down, do the job, get on with it.

“Detective Diaz,” Morris called. “I have Donald Burbette of FBI on line three. He asked for Kahn but said he’d settle for you.”

Settle.
How was that for a fresh start? Diaz swallowed hard, forced himself not to go straight from being settled for to second-class citizenship. Of course he was second choice. The detective sergeant outranked him. “Sure, I’ll take it.”

He went to a free desk and picked up. “Diaz.”

“What happened...Kahn out for donuts?”

“I dunno. He’s on the phone. How you doing, Don?”

“Peachy. Trying to spread the info around here, in case someone besides O’Shea is capable of an insight.”

“I’m game.”

“Lucky for us the army’s trying to be better about controlling its most dangerous weapons. Or maybe that was just the cause of the week when this batch of C4 came through. Either way it’s my good fortune to report that they were able to track the taggant from Horn’s device specifically to the Grafenwohr Army Training Center in Germany.”

Diaz nodded to himself. It was a one-in-a-hundred break, but the history of law enforcement was rife with them. “The seven-oh-second EOD is there. Any known connection to Horn?”

“Negative.”

“Engineers? They have access to C4 sometimes.”

“Well, we know our man is cavalry, so no.”

“He passed through Germany, though. All the seriously injured do, coming out of the Middle East. They fly them into Ramstein and patch them up at Landstuhl Medical Center.”

“You been to any of those places, Diaz?”

“All of them. Not as a patient in Landstuhl, though. Went to visit friends a couple of times. It’s pretty surreal.”

“All war is surreal.”

“This is like dying and going to heaven. One day you’re eating dust and getting shot at. The next day or soon thereafter you’re lying in this sterile environment, crisp clean sheets, people being all civil to you and shit. But, just like heaven, no one wants to go there voluntarily. Know what I’m saying?”

“No doubt our man Horn didn’t choose that stop for himself. The hospital, I mean.”

“Who does? Some of these guys would be better off dead. I had a guy beg me to shoot him once, put him out of his misery.”

“Did you do it?”

“Course not. I called over the medic. Guy’s living in Indiana now, has a decent job. It hurt worse at the time than the damage turned out. Sometimes, though, it’s the other way around. They save more guys in the field today than ever before.”

“Modern medicine.”

“One way to look at it. Or maybe it’s so the politicians can see lower numbers on the KIA report.”

“Hell, that’s cynical, Diaz. Maybe we need you in the FBI. Any theories on how Horn might’ve gotten a hold of the C4? Not like they keep a few bricks in the dispensary of Landstuhl.”

“No. Any reports of a theft?”

“You kidding? There are so many moving parts in the army. They probably lose ten million bucks worth of crap every day and don’t know it.”

“You don’t have to tell me. I remember them giving cash out to the Sunnis. You had guys earning twenty-five grand a year carrying around trunks with half a mil. Someone wants to make a bomb and sees some bricks of C4 piled up in a warehouse...he probably can’t resist temptation either.”

“And Albert Horn couldn’t resist temptation?”

Diaz bristled. “I didn’t say that. My gut—I still don’t like him for this. I don’t know why. Maybe someone tricked him or something. Anyway, pretty hard for a serviceman to bring C4 home to the States from abroad. Vast majority come home on commercial airliners unless they’re in super bad shape.”

“Maybe he took special medical transport, given his condition.”

“Probably did, but there would be a ton of people around, and he wasn’t exactly mobile at the time, probably snowed on drugs, too.”

“I see what you’re saying. You know what would help us, Diaz? If you have any old army connections you could exploit.”

“I don’t understand. How’d you get your information?”

“Through channels, but that’s all I have. It’s not like interviewing men on the street—get my meaning? It’s as if I had to solve a murder in the corporate headquarters only by interviewing the people in the communications department.”

“You want me to do an end-run.”

“I wouldn’t call it that and it’s up to your superiors. But it strikes me that you might have a few friends who would be willing to go off the reservation in the interest of justice. If I’m out of line—”

“No.” Diaz’s mind started chugging. “I do know some guys. I’ll think it over.”

“All right. I’m still working my end, of course. Pass along the information to Kahn, will you? And lemme know if you turn over any rocks and find something underneath.”

AT TEN O’CLOCK THAT MORNING
, Warren Manis returned from an early outing with a spring in his step. It had taken a long time to locate his third victim, a homeless veteran named Lewis Salinowsky. This wasn’t like Horn or Littel, where the stalker could work from knowledge of an office or a home address. It was more like catching a single fish in the vast ocean, and Manis felt damn proud for having gotten this far.

It helped that he had a flexible schedule due to his own disability. Though educated as a mechanical engineer, Manis had most recently worked as a union machinist until the belt of a grinding machine seized and mauled his left hand. He lost two and a half fingers in the accident—the ring finger and middle finger and half of the index finger. As a consequence he now had persistent phantom feeling in the two wholly missing fingers, an erogenous zone in the notch, and disability checks for life. He also worked as night watchman for the warehouse attached to his apartment. He got the apartment for a nominal rent, took in a small paycheck, and had no one looking over his shoulder so long as the place didn’t burn down or get robbed.

The ground-floor apartment, which once served as the manager’s office of a Nineteenth Century sailing loft, had old wide-board pine floors and red brick walls. Manis hung his coat on a peg by the front door, walked across the large open room, and plugged his digital camera into the computer on his desk. Within minutes the printer spit out a series of crisp photos of a prosthetic leg that attached to a transfemoral amputation.

Manis seized the pictures and opened the padlock to his secret workshop. He spread out the photos on his workbench and proceeded to study them. Salinowsky had a relatively simple prosthesis manufactured from space-age materials. A soft high-tech foam lined the socket, Kevlar reinforced the harness, and carbon-fiber composites made the pylon especially light. The challenge would be getting the replacement leg to weigh close to the same while still being able to support half of Salinowsky’s body. Manis had some ideas for improving the harness in a way that would create the illusion of lightness. Also working in his favor was the fact that Salinowsky was a psychotic drug addict. If he noticed the discrepancy at all, he’d probably attribute it to his distorted mental state. At least, Manis hoped so, because this one was going to be tricky.

A MOMENT AFTER HANGING UP
with Burbette, Diaz sat staring into the middle space, thinking of who he might know stationed in Germany. He made a few phone calls to old buddies, picking their brains about mutual acquaintances, and finally got the perfect name: an army guy, formerly EOD, who’d burnt himself out in that MOS and gone on to become a captain in the MPs. He was still based, someone said, at Grafenwohr. In a few more minutes, Diaz had the captain’s mobile number.

He set down the phone and gathered himself just as Kahn, across the room, did the same at his own desk. Kahn got up and walked past Diaz, nodded a good morning, but kept going, headed for the break room. There was something in Kahn’s look—something a little uncomfortable, a little mysterious—that made Diaz decide not to share what he was doing just then, see whether he got anything first, see how it played out.

The guy in Germany was named Victor Nunez—pronounced Noons. Diaz’s source had made a point of saying that there was no tilde over the n. Nunez picked up on the second ring and immediately said, “Hold on.”

When he finally returned Diaz launched right into dropping names and established his bona fides as former EOD himself. “What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Nunez said. He had a southwestern accent that struck Diaz as almost too carefully cultivated, like the dropping of that tilde. Never mind. Diaz wasn’t exactly Señor Español himself.

“It’s not ‘Lieutenant’ no more. ‘Detective’ now.”

“Oh. Busted?” Nunez laughed.

Diaz had already explained that he’d left the army. He tried to laugh back but couldn’t put his heart into it. “Not busted, just climbing a different silo these days. You got a minute to talk?”

“Tell you the truth, I’m jammed up, couple of guys in the office here. Can I call you later?”

“With all due respect, I’d rather not. We have a situation here. Can’t say yet whether it’s national security, but it involves a bombing in New York, possible terrorism.”

“No shit. Hold on, then.”

Diaz waited a moment while Nunez cleared his office. He came back quicker this time.

“You called my personal cell. Any chance you can call me on the land line?”

Diaz shook his head, though of course Nunez couldn’t see that. “Not to start off all negative on you, but I’d rather not. What I’m about to ask you...it may be better kept off the grid.”