F Train (4 page)

The mayor's shrink, Flo thought—a spy from the mayor's
Alice in Wonderland
world, and for a moment she was transported to that fantasy tale. Alice said: “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change. I don't like to go among mad people.” Cheshire Cat explained: “Oh, you can't help that. Most everyone's mad here.” And the cat disappears, laughing maniacally. “You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself.”

As the television lights dimmed, the mayor shook Flo's hand, gave the DA a playful jock's punch on the shoulder, and walked out without another word.

Wonderland.

3:30
P.M.

In the office, retired FBI special agent Raymond O'Hara handed Flo Ott a sheaf of drawings.

“I've been working at home on these, Lieutenant. Getting it all down while my memory is still fresh. I don't know how much help this'll be, but whatever I can do—”

“You're terrific, Raymond. We're lucky it was you there. Not some civilian.”

Earlier, however, she'd waited before returning Raymond O'Hara's first call and accepting his suggestion that he come to her office with his version of a
reconstruction.
She wasn't entirely convinced the retired special agent wouldn't probe for more information NYPD preferred not to reveal to anyone, including the FBI, and certainly not at this early stage in the investigation.

In person, O'Hara struck her as a sincere man. She could empathize with his caffeinated behavior, teetering on the edge of his chair.

“I've always thought, Lieutenant, it's important to get your first impressions down as soon as possible. You know, just say it out straight, get it right down there fast when you first observe a crime scene or examine a body. Later, you go back and adjust, let others put their views in, and so forth. Then if you're way off, you correct. Anyway the point is, here's my
reconstruction.
I got to admit, I didn't sleep too well. And my wife, Mary Margaret, I'm being frank with you here, she really doesn't want me doing this either, says it's not my place anymore…”

Flo smiled and stayed silent, deferring judgment until she heard Raymond O'Hara's hypothesis.

“Actually, Lieutenant, I got two versions for you here. Two takes on the situation, different sets of drawings.”

“You covered homicides with the Bureau?”

“Not really. Indirectly. The Bureau doesn't get that many, not like you people, and my time with a murder was back when I was young, when I was still your age. Look, if you think I'm wasting your time, Lieutenant, just tell me to beat it. My skin is thick.”

“You got to be kidding, Raymond. I should take you to lunch.”

Raymond O'Hara beamed and lay out his sketches on Flo's desk, side by side, first take, second take.

“First, here's what I saw, pretty much like your real pictures. My take, right off the bat, what happened right before the end, before anything we can see now.”

His first drawing was a reasonable representation of the photographic diagrams in Flo's computer of the death scene, minus the name labels.

Raymond O'Hara's second set of sketches had a more intriguing aspect.

“The man with the gun, for me, straight off, he's your story. What is he? What's that name you got there—”

Flo zoomed in on the photo of the dead FBI special agent on her computer screen for O'Hara.

“John James Reilly,” O'Hara said. “Now is this Reilly guy just what he appears to be—armed, fast, alert—special kind of character, nothing in common with the other victims? Only just happened to be there. Or is he representative of all the victims? Or maybe he's only like some of them. And if so, which ones? Or—and this isn't entirely impossible either—is he really closer to whoever did it, maybe even one of them?” Raymond O'Hara paused, as if waiting for Flo's approval, her permission to continue.

Flo nodded, nothing more, no revelation that John James Reilly was a special agent from the Bureau, albeit off-duty and on leave. This wasn't public knowledge, so O'Hara had no idea yet.

“My take on this guy. Our man here, this Reilly, he sees people falling over in front of him. He senses movement behind him, maybe even hears a shout. All this is almost instantaneous. He's in great shape, he's got sharp instincts, and probably good training, too—military, maybe—so he has his weapon out, and then he's facing the source of the movement, the noise. But he succumbs, he collapses from the gas. Gas, I've always thought it was gas. At this point, they're at or approaching a stop. The guy or guys who put the gas there, they hop off. They're masked, and then they're gone. My guess? The Fourth Avenue stop, where it's snowing like all get-out, and your tapes probably show almost nothing. Nothing there, am I right? Just a helluva lot of snow. And you've checked out Reilly, he had a permit for the gun?”

Flo made a noncommittal gesture.

O'Hara didn't push. “The guy or guys who did it, they're just waiting for a night like this, heavy snow and out they go, then boom, they hit. They get on at the stop just before Fourth Avenue, at Smith and Ninth, where the station is also outside, and nothing there, too, but snow all over the place. So why the hell are they doing this? A test run, maybe a probe? A warning shot across the bow? They had no idea who was in that subway car, and it didn't matter to them. And our man with the gun, he had no idea who they were. He just happened to be there, and that almost happened to be their bad luck. Another two seconds of consciousness, and our man with the gun might have plugged someone.”

“So far, Raymond, I can't poke any big holes in this version. What's your next take?”

“Trickier, a lot trickier. Reilly knows who they are. And they know who he is. And he's the target. Why? Okay, we're only on page one. This second route is much more demanding.”

“And what about this man, Raymond?” Flo pointed at O'Hara's representation of the victim with his nose over the end of his seat, the man called Sidney R. Davidov, ex-convict. “Was he trying to stand up, get a good look at someone? Unlikely he fell over a seat and just landed like that. Or was he trying to stand up to get off? Or was he the target and he recognized them and he was going for them?”

“Tell me something, Lieutenant, just this little bit, I understand you can't release details, but…was he armed, too? This Davidov guy.”

Flo hesitated, then shook her head.

“Then I'd say first, Lieutenant, with no other details, he's not top priority. Not this guy. If he was armed and he knew them, he might go for them. If he was unarmed and knew them, more likely he'd try to get away. In which case, he's heading in the wrong direction. He was looking toward that bucket when he toppled over. My guess now, without further details? He didn't know them. He's only trying to stand up and see what's going on. Or get off soon and, boom, he keels over.”

“Raymond, far as it goes, I think we're in agreement here. But it's worth everything to hear it from someone like you, the first one there. It's a confirmation. Can we call you back? And I'm serious about lunch, Raymond, I owe you.”

“Anytime. I'm retired, I got nothing to do.”

5:20
P.M.

Alone in her office—only photographic evidence of the F train corpses for company, ghostly images projected on the wall—Flo could focus, uninterrupted, no distractions at least for a few moments.

She stood and walked around the room and returned to her desk, watching the dead out of the corner of her eye.

The dead demanding justice.

She heard, and only a slight awareness here, a distant jackhammer, four stories below somewhere out in the street, an implacable steel bit pneumatically pounding through concrete, incessant, persistent, unrelenting, as if to get down to some buried truth and expose it to daylight.

Then, interruption.

Reality resumed. An occurrence at the door: mayor's promise fulfilled in the flesh. Time for the unavoidable appointment with Dr. Howard Gerald, criminal psychologist.

“Just call me Howie,” the short, plump man said, bouncing into her office like a beach ball in a suit and tie. “You don't have to call me doctor. And please, don't get up, Lieutenant.”

Adjusting his bifocals, the mayor's man, psychologist Howard Gerald, PhD, moved with a display of great deliberation from projected photograph to photograph, his nose inches from the wall, his shadow obliterating crime scene images as he progressed.

“I'm beside myself,” he said, “absolutely beside myself with horror. How can I ever ride the subway again, and not,
not
picture this, this obscenity, this grotesquerie, this— Words simply fail me.”

Howard Gerald carried a double mocha decaf latte and a prune pastry, a hunk of Danish about the size of the pigeons roosting on Flo's office windowsill.

“Want a piece?” He hefted his pastry.

“No, thanks, I'll wait for supper.”

“Then please excuse me.” Howie Gerald attacked his pastry. “But I have to finish this, before”—he nodded at the wall display of death—“before I look at them again, and then it's bye-bye, appetite. You don't really sit with these bodies around you all day up on the wall, do you, Lieutenant?”

“Until we arrest the killers and close the case, they're not going anywhere.”

The mayor's favorite psychologist rolled his eyes, his attention returning to the prune pastry as he consumed it with the assiduous deliberation he then devoted to examining the death scene projection on the wall, aiming a sharp assessor's squint at the massacre tableau, picture by picture, while slurping the last of his double mocha decaf latte. When he concluded the full circuit, he shook his head and sighed. “I just don't know how you can live with this, Lieutenant, I really don't.”

Flo regarded her visitor calmly and said nothing. She wasn't about to provide ammunition for the commissioner or the mayor.

“Did you know, Lieutenant, that the deadliest day in this city—since September 11, that is—was July 10, 2004? Eight murder victims,
Florence—remember
that day?—eight separate homicides. But
this,
this truly takes the cake here. Seven in one blow. Now, I'm a really huge believer in statistics, Florence. You find statistics useful?”

“Juries prefer evidence.”

The psychologist smiled. “But they have to, don't they? No choice. Personally, I find statistics fascinating.” He leaned back in his chair, placed his hands together as if in prayer, and slowly drummed his fingertips. “For example, Florence, the fact that more homicides are committed in Brooklyn than in any other borough, now that's really interesting. It must say something, I mean besides the fact that Brooklyn has more people. And more people are murdered on Saturdays, did you know that? And roughly a third of all murders in New York stay totally unsolved. True fact, honest to God. Hundreds, even thousands of killers go waltzing off on their merry ways totally scot-free. A peculiar statistic, most unwanted, and that the mayor definitely wants to see improved.”

“Don't we all, Howie?”

“Well, that's our job, Florence. And did you know…”

Howard Gerald, PhD, was enjoying his lecture as much as he enjoyed his prune pastry, steadily drumming fingertips on fingertips in a strange kind of prayer, the instructive voice of doctorate authority rolling on and on.

“When it comes to killing, men overwhelmingly prefer guns. But women murderers, they make homicide a fifty-fifty choice, between knives or guns. And now we have this one, a gas job. So who uses gas, Florence? The gas is where we start. Gas is key here, it's definitive.”

“Absolutely, Howie, let's start with gas.”

He smiled approvingly, teeth bared, large teeth, bright white and far apart, reminiscent of tombstones designed for a cemetery somewhat larger than his mouth. Flo winced, moving her chair back. A curious smell escaped his mouth, like a grave left open too long, or simply the combination of too much prune and mocha.

“Well, how's this…” Howard Gerald's tone turned philosophical, fingertips beating a rhythm of wisdom into the informative flow of one-way discourse. “…Just for starters, Florence. Suicides often use gas. Head in oven. Legs sprawled across a kitchen floor. Come to think of it, kind of like this diagram here, although of course on a much smaller scale. Quiet, clean, efficient, that's your gas suicide victim, no matter how unstable. Now as for mass killers, they do tend to be psychopaths. I can see no sane or rational motive behind this monstrous event on the F train. Unless of course it's somehow political, in which case, all bets are off. I can never really draw conclusions about people from their strengths. Don't get much from that. Weaknesses are far more revealing. Any claimants call in?”

“All fake. They just take up everyone's time. Worthless.”

“Tips?”

“Only emails and also useless. Crackpots.”

“Typical.” The psychologist removed his bifocals and polished the lenses with his tie.
“Statistically,
the public is pretty useless most of the time, if not a downright pain in the ass. But this witness I've been told about, the first one on the scene. I'd like to see him, Florence. Can you set up an interview for me?”

“When's good?”

“What a question. I'm up to my eyeballs in psychotics, no joke. The department's psychologist-at-large, and I'm the only one around, I'm all over the place. Rockaway yesterday, South Bronx tomorrow. But your F train case is
our
top priority. So you just be sure, absolutely sure, Florence, you only have to whistle and that's it, I'm running straight over wherever you set it up.”

“Thanks, Howie. I'll whistle.”

Too often she saw the Howard Geralds of this world use truth the way media like the
Post
shaped it, truths splintered into suitable shards to propel a patron's agenda. Flip gestures, incendiary sound bites, slyly trimmed photos, the shams stirred and spiced a brimming hot pot of grievances. Flo realized the dangers of spewing fractions of truth around a city where four million out of eight million people hung on by their fingertips day after day, consumed in simply surviving. She believed in real truth as a vital principle: she was ready to give her life for it, but only if the truth had a real value.