F Train (5 page)

Exactly as she'd give her life for her husband or her daughter, she'd risk it for the African American woman slumped dead against the subway car window or wager it for the sake of John James Reilly's children. All the energies of motherhood harnessed a laserlike intensity in Flo Ott's determination.

The great city around her, and her beloved skin-close borough of Brooklyn, this world existed in an incessant, pounding, self-asserting motion like that pneumatic drill penetrating the concrete pavement down below in the street.

Utterly relentless.

The disappearance of spouses. Abused bodies of children. The deaths of strangers on the subway.

For all these truths, Flo was set to work a lifetime.

But for Howard Gerald, PhD, five minutes handed over to him felt like an eternity wasted, time lost forever.

Howie Gerald was a jerk.

He left her office the same way he entered, bouncing out like a beach ball in a suit and tie.

6:58
P.M.

From her office, Flo headed straight for the subway.

She carried Eddie's supper and in her pocket a thumb drive with all the photos to load on her home computer.

She rode the Q train headed out to Sheepshead Bay on the south shore of Brooklyn. She sat in the front car and watched the tunnel ahead, twisty and dark, shadowy, unidentifiable shapes looming up, then fading, intermittently illuminated in the sudden flashing of control lights.

Fast.

Slow.

Stop.

Go
…

Underground the subway seemed to seal you in stone as tight as a tomb. At an elevated station, Flo left the train and walked down two flights of stairs, heading straight along the Sheepshead Bay harbor-front boulevard to the nursing home.

A familiar route she'd taken a thousand times. Here the wind whipped in off the bay with a stinging spite, and the sky was black and unyielding.

She ducked into the nursing home, stamping the slush from her boots. The lobby was warm and cozy. Under the yellow light of a floor lamp, the receptionist at the desk looked up at Flo and smiled. The receptionist was reading the
Post,
open to a two-page color photo spread of seven bodies. Newspapers thought their reporters explained a story, when all they did was tell stories, articles strewn with unsolved details, a kind of journalism of fantastic intimacies.

“Hello, Mrs. Ott,” the receptionist said. “Rotten night, but you're looking good. What's on the menu?” Always kindly, always friendly, the woman at the desk was a good choice for a hard job, welcoming visitors to a house of permanent pain.

Flo appreciated her greeting. “Fried chicken this evening, and creamed corn and string beans.”

“That's wonderful.” The receptionist winked and smiled. “He'll love it.”

Flo had made the supper at a quieter moment almost two days before, but now this seemed more like years. She'd packed Eddie's meal in Styrofoam and kept it cold in her office refrigerator. Flo would heat it all up for him in the microwave.

Eddie barely whispered when he greeted her. “Honey, what's up?”

She glanced at the muted TV, a college basketball game in progress. “You've seen the news.”

“F train. Yours, right?”

“Mine.”

“Congratulations.
You'll be famous. Gas, is what they're saying.”

“Forensics confirmed it. Sarin. Knives, poisons, baseball bats, guns, all that stuff I'm used to. The gold standards. But gas, Eddie, gas is new. We've never had a gas massacre in Brooklyn. Just lots of lone suicides.”

Flo and Eddie had developed an
accommodation—he
said nothing that might shock or offend, and she was just as loving with him, a consequence of a growing quiet, an enforced serenity that simultaneously kept them together and pitilessly pushed them apart, tossing from solicitude to fatigue, until slamming into recoil.

Work was usually a safe topic, Flo's job a strange kind of oasis, a neutral zone. Here, and only here in this nursing-home room, mass murder on the New York subway was free of friction.

Slowly, Flo served his supper, her hand to his mouth with each forkful…fried chicken, corn, string beans.

“The TV,” Eddie said. “Look at him, that son of a bitch.”

The mayor of New York was moving his mouth without a sound. Flo left the volume off. She'd heard his spiel in person, and once was enough. The mayor had nothing to say that would help her.

The families of the dead were different. And tomorrow morning, she'd meet those grieving people.

7:20
A.M.

“Too bad,” Flo said. “You missed the all-time fruitcake yesterday. The mayor's consultant shrink.” She and Frank Murphy and Marty Keane were sitting in her office, finishing their coffees.

“The mayor and the commissioner retain him,” she said. “So he's ours to use, free for nothing, whenever we want. Mayor's treat.”

Frank rubbed his huge hands. “Can't wait.”

Flo smiled. “Comes with mass murder, Frank, especially before an election. Seven bodies, the mayor's got a trophy here.”

“And the families?” said Frank, placing those rock hands together almost as if in prayer. “When are the wakes?”

“Reilly's starts today,” said Marty. “Out by Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. Sconzo Funeral Home on Fourth Avenue, a block from the church.”

Flo turned off her computer. “We go now, pay our respects, and set up an appointment with his wife. Alone. Her husband was a professional, she'd expect nothing less from us.”

“How long before Dangler sniffs him out? About being a Bureau special agent and all.”

Flo shook her head. “The
Post
won't learn it from us, Marty, or from the Bureau. So far it's up to his family, it's up to Mrs. Reilly. Unless she wants to stay mum, and I pray she does.”

8
A.M.

In the car riding out to the Sconzo Funeral Home in Bay Ridge, Flo said, “Real psychos, Frank, in our experience, they work alone.”

“In our experience,” said Frank “Usually they do. But the guys who did the Towers, they couldn't have been sane. And Jonestown? Almost a thousand of them, all religious, all Americans, Flo, lining up to drink cyanide Kool-Aid, even killing their own kids. Revolutionary suicide. They all had to be totally wacko?”

“But in both cases nobody got away, and no perpetrator ever planned to get away. Dr. Gerald, in his great wisdom, didn't note how on the F train nobody but victims seems to have stuck around.”

“Our gasman,” said Frank, “or gasmen, they could've come from anywhere and be back in anywhere right now. Sunning themselves on a beach halfway round the world. No intention of setting foot in New York ever again. Crazy, right, Flo? Wacko like foxes, we can bet on it.”

“Forensics say more about the weapon, Marty? How about the bucket?”

“Forensics, they're crying in their beer, Flo. No prints. We got the manufacturer's name and that's about it, a start. A camping goods outfit in Oregon.”

“We're after it, Flo, don't worry.”

Frank said:
“Reconstruction,
Flo. The gasman wore an overcoat with inside pockets, specially sewn, for the chemical bottles and for the collapsible bucket. Planning, excellent planning for the hit and for the escape. Snowstorm, outdoor stations. Definitely not your average psycho's route. Nothing impulsive, no showing off, no bragging, no taunting. Not a peep out of them so far. They're pros, not nutballs.”

“It's a fair to good shot,” Flo said. “We've got an intelligent, motivated killer or killers. Possibly hired? And maybe Marty's right, maybe they're all somewhere on the other side of the world now. Life's a beach. And we have an FBI special agent who may or may not have known them. Then what about the woman?”

“This morning her employer called in.” From his briefcase, Frank Murphy took out the photo of the pretty, young African American woman slumped against a subway car window, a man's head in her lap, his right hand on a gun.

“Marie Priester was a paralegal at a big Wall Street law firm, Deutsch and Templer. Intelligent, discreet, a model employee and still single. She lived somewhere near—you guessed it—Coney Island. So she's on her way home here, obviously after a pretty long night out and with this guy maybe she's been on the town with. He's escorting her home. And now his wife is going to be crushed, Flo, she hears this, she's devastated all over again.”

“I'll do the talking with Mrs. Reilly.” Questioning the widow, a woman left alone with two small children, wasn't Flo's idea of fun, but the widow was family lead number one, her interrogation imperative.

“Flo,” said Frank, “one more point. You really can't see his off-hand in the first picture, Reilly's hand on her thigh, it's out of focus, but one thing is clear, he doesn't have his wedding ring on. The ring was in his right-hand jacket pocket, in that little pocket inside the regular pocket, the extra one for tickets and loose change.”

Flo nodded. “Playing hooky. Nothing about this or the widow is going to be easy. God's honest truth, Frank, I dread it.”

Other truths, the more permanent truths, were harder for Flo to pin down. The dead in the F train massacre photos gave off an aura of lost people, their tableau of terror a tale told in still undeciphered ideograms waiting for an interpreter with a key to unravel their stories like some ancient disaster, a Pompeii gassed and buried and now exposed.

A widow's tale to tell.

8:30
A.M.

In the lobby of the Sconzo Funeral Home, a navy-blue velvet board set behind glass listed three wakes and the chapel rooms assigned each of the deceased.

John James Reilly's coffin waited for his mourners in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.

Frank Murphy held open the chapel's heavy door and the three detectives stepped aside as two small children—a girl, a boy, ages about six and seven—left the chapel with an older man holding the children's hands.

For the first time in this case, Flo felt herself personally tipping into fear—not of the killer or killers, but of the immeasurable woe she now had to add to the widow's burdens.

The detectives entered the wake quietly, and with a long, soft sigh the door closed behind them. The Chapel of the Holy Spirit lay in semidarkness.

Heads bowed, Frank and Marty, a pair of good Irish Catholics accustomed to wakes, walked directly up to the open coffin, where they knelt next to an elderly woman saying her Rosary.

Flo approached the end of the third and last row of metal folding chairs, fifteen chairs in all, where the only mourner was a woman in black. In her thirties, blond hair cut short, an angular and pretty face, a slight build, slim shoulders, waist, and hips. The woman, her face immobile, looked up at her.

“Mrs. Reilly?” Flo said.

The woman nodded.

“I'm Detective Florence Ott.”

The widow slid over a seat and motioned for Flo to sit down.

A younger woman wandered in looking very upset. She sank to her knees in front of the coffin and began praying, then stopped abruptly, squinting at the open coffin before looking around and realizing she'd wandered into the wrong wake and was caught up in mourning for a total stranger.

Throughout this brief farce, John James Reilly's widow remained rigid, still as a statue, not looking at Flo or at the coffin, but somewhere off into an unfocused middle distance, into a future alone, only her and the kids.

“Mrs. Reilly, we want to say how sorry we are and pay our respects.”

“That's all?”

The widow didn't give Flo a glance.

“I'd like to talk with you alone, Mrs. Reilly.”

“Sure, why not? Come and see me, it's your job. You want to know about the bitch he was with, right?”

For a moment, Flo was taken aback. “We have several things to discuss, Mrs. Reilly.”

“It's all about the bitch, I'll guarantee you that much right now. Come to the house, okay, not here. The kids are at my father's place. I don't want them hearing anything. They're in enough pain. Someone from the Bureau coming, too?”

“No, just me.”

“Those shits. They'll be around eventually. They covered up for him long enough.”

Flo was unable to reply. Only instinct and habit moved her to the coffin to say a prayer. She knelt beside Frank and Marty and glanced down at John James Reilly, first at his face—good-looking, fair, still youthful even in death, eyelids closed, no sign of violence—and his hands folded over a rosary. On his left ring finger, a gold band.

“Better leave now,” Flo whispered to Frank.

Then, back outside in the car with her colleagues: “I'm on my way to her house. Put people on her, Marty, around the clock.”

“His wife? Think she's in on it?”

“I wouldn't have thought so. But seems she's kind of got a motive of sorts.”

11
A.M.

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn…

A three-story, two-family brick house. Arlene Reilly stood in the doorway, quiet and expectant as Flo Ott mounted the stoop up to the family's apartment.

Similar two-family brick homes lined the block. A pair of plainclothes police watched Arlene Reilly from a car parked in midblock.

Facing the street in Reilly's living room were two windows, in each frame a second set of aluminum storm windows.

“John James installed these storm windows every year on All Saints Day, always in time for winter. Even this winter, when he was so goddamn busy.”

Despite the widow's hurt and angry tone, Flo sensed coziness in the Reilly home. Several bookcases lined the hall and living room, the shelves heavy with volumes. Three leather easy chairs, a dark brown leather couch, an old oak coffee table, all well worn, a domain for children as well as adults. Through an open door, Flo saw the kitchen and heard the dishwasher humming. The eat-in kitchen overlooked the backyard.

Observing the homes of killers or victims, Flo never detected a constant. She saw residences high and low, townhouses and tenements, the backseats of cars and cramped trailers. A writer whose specialty was interviewing imprisoned murderers told her the only personal common denominator he observed in all killers was that every killer sported at least one tattoo, but that writer only interviewed men.

As she sat on the couch in Arlene Reilly's apartment, Flo's doubts about vengeance persisted. Still, there was no denying the anger in the widow's bloodshot eyes, no matter how drained and weary her face. Arlene Reilly was righteously pissed off.

“Like a coffee, Lieutenant?”

“That's okay, I don't want to—”

“No trouble.” Arlene Reilly seemed to welcome an opportunity to delay conversation. “Anyway I'd rather sit in the kitchen, if you don't mind the dishwasher.”

They sat at the kitchen table and she poured two cups of coffee. Flo said nothing, waiting for the widow to unload her burden.

Arlene Reilly looked at Flo over her coffee cup rim. “I'll just have to try and get used to him being dead. The way I had to get used to him having another woman. Except I never got used to it.” She smiled sadly and shrugged. “So what do you want to know?”

“That night, did he say where he was going? Were you at home?”

“I'm home every night. With the kids. And he was out most nights. Work, he said. And so you're wondering, how did I know?”

Flo didn't reply. Arlene Reilly clearly wanted to answer her own question.

“I discovered some pictures. And I'm no dope. That's how I found out. But I'm a mother and I'm still a Catholic, so divorce was out of the question. He was a good father to our kids. Only a lousy husband, that's all.”

“I know it's hurtful. And I'm very sorry. But you think we could see those pictures?”

“I burned them.”

“Could you describe them then? Please.”

“It was my husband and this woman, and a couple of shots with another man there, too. It looked like they were in a restaurant.”

“Who was the other man, did you recognize him?”

“No. But he wasn't white either. Chinese or some other kind of Asian. Maybe he owned the restaurant. I don't know.”

“Did your husband say what the work was, the work that kept him out at night?”

“Bureau work. He never talked details, he was totally loyal. And they were loyal to him, all his buddies. He could lie to me and they'd swear by it, every one of the creeps. But if he hadn't been out with her that night, he'd be here at home right now, I'm sure of it. I don't mean to say she had something to do with it, like she was a killer or anything like that. She's dead, too. God forgive me, but let's face it, she was a bimbo, a bitch without a conscience. And if he'd have been home in the middle of the night instead of running around with her, he'd be alive now. Our kids would still have a father. Instead they're scared, they're terrified after this, they think someone is going to kill them, too. I can just see it, months, maybe years of therapy trying to calm them down. But I don't want them taking pills. Can you understand, Lieutenant, can you see what I'm really up against here?”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Reilly. I know it's an impossible situation.”

“You can help me with one thing. Can you tell me what actually happened that night? I have a right to know, don't I?”

The widow sat stone still, never taking her eyes off her visitor while Flo related the circumstances of the massacre's events, as far as she and her colleagues were able to reconstruct the slaughter on the F train. Certain details, like an absent wedding ring, she omitted.

“See what I mean, Lieutenant? If it hadn't been for her—”

“Do you know where he was earlier that day?”

“Don't you know? They don't know at the Bureau?”

Flo hesitated a moment. Then: “They told us the last time they saw him was the week before it happened. When he took a week's leave.”

“He told me he was working all the time.” The tears welled up in Arlene Reilly's eyes. “See what I mean? This is how she did it to him. He wasn't working, he was partying with her, he was with that bitch the whole time.”

“He was never home?”

“He was home on the weekend. He took the kids ice-skating. He was here for Sunday dinner. You know, Lieutenant, I'm really all talked out now. I keep thinking about it anymore and I'll be an even bigger mess. We hardly ever saw him after the weekend, okay? Yes, he came home to change, sleep a few hours, and then whoops, got to run, honey, and off he goes again. Work, he said. And that's the way it was for months, not just last week…”