“It’s going to get worse, Stan. I’ll break every bone in your body if I have to. So let’s cut to the chase.
“Stanley,” I said, “tell me about the bombs.”
“Jason, you have to stop this.” Tori came bounding down the stairs, holding a blue canvas gym bag. “You’re going to kill him.”
“You don’t die from a separated shoulder,” I noted, my knees pinning down Stanley’s arms. “Or broken fingers. Or a broken wrist. Does that wrist seem broken to you, Stan?”
I figured a fractured right wrist worked nicely with broken left fingers, making either hand unusable for a weapon, now or later. Stanley’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was moaning with pain. He was probably approaching shock. Tori was probably right.
“You’re going to give him a heart attack,” she said.
“Stanley. Stanley.” I smacked at his cheek lightly. “The bombs, Stan. What are you planning to bomb and when?”
Stanley Keane was fading in and out now. He was probably in excruciating pain. I’d gone overboard. I’d let my anger take over. But I didn’t care.
“Stop this, Jason. I may have found some things. Let’s go,” Tori said. “Please.”
“Go to the car,” I said. “You don’t need to be around for this.”
“No. I’m not leaving without you. Let’s go.”
“Not yet.” I got off Stanley and dragged him into the living room and propped him up in a chair. I went into his kitchen, grabbed a glass and filled it with water. When I returned to the living room, he was slumped forward, his chin resting on his chest, his breathing shallow.
I took a drink of the water, because I was thirsty. Then I threw the rest in his face.
It helped a little. He shook his head and managed to raise his eyes to mine.
“You decide when this ends,” I said. I removed the slippers from his feet. “Next up, I’m going to smash your toes into ground beef,” I said, showing him my boots.
“No, Jason. Stop this!” Tori shouted.
“You have… no idea,” Stanley mumbled.
“I know your company sold the nitromethane and Randy’s company sold the fertilizer. I know you’re building a bomb. And so do the feds. You know how the G is, Stan. You’ve probably given this a lot of thought. They’re a step or two behind, because they’re building a case for a search warrant and all that, but they’ll get there. You’re done. They’re on to you. There’s no way you and Randy and whatever nutjob group you’re a part of is going to get away with this. So tell me what you’re planning to do, and when, or walk with a limp the rest of your pathetic life.”
“I… don’t… need to know.”
I paused. So he was saying there was operational security, and only the game-day players would know the details. Always a good strategy to maintain confidentiality.
“You know plenty, you piece of shit.” I gripped his shirt. “I’m not leaving until you tell me.”
I didn’t really want to smash his toes. But this was my chance to learn some things. Maybe my only chance. So I threw him another shiver, reminding him of how much his shoulder hurt.
He let out a low cry, something primitive, a wounded animal, then he fell against the arm of the chair seething through his teeth. Now, I thought, I was hitting the limit. He wasn’t even crying out anymore, just panting and moaning. Too many things hurt all at once.
“You’re going to tell me. Since it looks like you’re about to pass out, I’m going to cut to the finale. The finale is I go to the kitchen, grab a butcher knife, and cut off your balls. You’ll bleed out on this chair while I watch.”
I looked at Tori, who stared at me with her mouth hanging open. She wasn’t sure what she was witnessing, or
whom
she was witnessing. I wasn’t either, not at that moment.
I
gave her a faint shake of the head, indicating I was bluffing. It didn’t change the expression on her face.
Stanley swallowed hard, then his eyes grew vacant. For a brief, panicked moment, I thought he had died. But he hadn’t died. He’d simply grown calm.
“I’m… sorry,” he mumbled. “So… sorry I wasn’t… there for you.”
“Sorry about what?” I asked, shaking his arm.
His face contorted. Tears came from nowhere and rolled sideways down his face, as his head lay on the arm of the chair.
“I miss you so… much,” he said. “I’m coming… to you… I’m coming…”
“He’s going into shock,” Tori said. “We need to get him to the hospital.”
I looked back at Stanley, who was looking in my eyes. “Kill me,” he said, with a surprisingly strong voice. “It doesn’t mat… matter any… anymore.”
“Tell me, Stanley. Whatever you’re doing, it has to stop.”
My tone had instantly changed from punitive and taunting to a plea. This man, I now realized, wasn’t going to talk. I could waterboard him and he wouldn’t crack. Whatever he was doing, he was committed to it.
What was he talking about? Some tragedy in his life? I didn’t know. But I did know that I wasn’t going to get him to talk, and I couldn’t just leave him here.
I scooped him up in my arms and headed for the door.
Tori found the nearest emergency room with her iPhone. I burst in and got someone’s attention right away. I told them my uncle had tried to move a refrigerator down to the basement by himself and he’d fallen down the stairs. I figured fractures to the wrists and hands, and a separated shoulder, told that kind of a story.
Stanley could tell a different story if he wished, but I couldn’t see him doing it. His hands were pretty dirty. Why call attention to himself?
I took the medical paperwork with me to a chair and then walked out of the place. Tori had the SUV running outside, and I jumped in.
“That… wasn’t right,” she said to me.
“I agree.” I looked right at her. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”
“That’s not what I—”
“I’m trying to save lives, Tori. This guy’s plotting to bomb something. I don’t have time for touchy-feely ACLU bullshit. You’re feeling sorry for that asshole?”
“That’s not the point—”
“It most certainly
is
the fucking point. What, you think I enjoyed that?”
She didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.
“Okay, so now I’m the sociopath,” I seethed. “I beat up a homegrown terrorist and I’m the bad guy. Lock me up, but let him plot a mass murder.”
She looked away. “Let’s just go home,” she said in a more subdued tone.
“Yeah, let’s do that. Thanks for coming along, Tori. You were a real help to the cause.”
She didn’t respond. There wasn’t much left to say. I wasn’t the least bit sorry for what I’d done. I only regretted that I didn’t get more out of him. In fact, I got basically nothing, other than confirmation that I was on the right track.
We drove awhile, back onto the main roads, and then the highway. I was exhausted from the adrenaline drain. My head was pounding, and my knee suddenly remembered how much it hurt.
“What’s in the gym bag?” I asked. “What did you get from the upstairs?”
“Anything I could sweep off his desk,” she answered. “A pile of papers that I didn’t have time to look at.”
“What about his cell phone or computer?”
“He didn’t have a laptop that I could see. Just a desktop that I couldn’t have carried if I wanted to. No cell phone that I could see. Really, I didn’t have time, Jason. It sounded like you were killing him downstairs.”
I didn’t have the energy to rekindle a civil-liberties debate. I just prayed like hell that she had found something good.
When we got back to my hotel room, I dumped everything out of the blue gym bag Tori had taken from Stanley Keane’s office upstairs. My initial optimism quickly dimmed as I pored over Stanley’s telephone and cable bills, a letter from his health care provider, a summary of year-end payroll for his company, and a notice from Publishers Clearing House informing him that he may have just won a million dollars.
But before I got to a second makeshift pile that appeared to contain similarly irrelevant stuff, my heart did a flutter. Among the pile was a pocket-sized map of the city’s downtown.
I unfolded it and spread it out on the table. It was limited to the commercial district, bordered to the west by the north-south bend of the river and to the east by the lake, covering twelve city blocks with the east-west leg of the river cutting it roughly in half.
I saw markings in red pen. There was a red X near the southern boundary of the district, by the Hartz Building at South Walter Drive. Next to it was the handwritten number 12. Then a red marker traveled north along South Walter to River Drive, then across the Lerner Street Bridge, and stopping at the federal building. There was an X placed at the federal building, as well as another X two blocks away at the state building. Next to both the state and federal buildings was the number 1.
“This is it,” I said to Tori, who was seated on the bed next to me now. “They’re going to blow up the Hartz Building and the state and federal buildings downtown.”
“The Hartz Building?” Tori said. “What’s that? Who’s in there?”
“No idea. I know a couple of law firms there.” I traced the route with my finger. “Assuming twelve and one are times, they’re going to hit the Hartz Building at noon—or midnight—and then hit the government buildings an hour later.”
That seemed odd. I’d never planned a bombing before, so admittedly I had little on which to base this, but I didn’t see why a multiple-strike attack wouldn’t occur simultaneously.
“The question is when,” said Tori. “Tomorrow, a month from now, when?”
That wasn’t the only question. But neither of us knew. And Stanley Keane was no longer available for our questions. Had we handled things differently at his house, we might have had time to review this map and then ask him about it.
But that was over now. No sense relitigating that battle.
“I’m calling the FBI,” I said.
I looked around and found my cell phone. As I reached for it, it began to buzz. I hate it when that happens.
But maybe not this time. The caller ID said it was Wendy Kotowski, my opposing counsel.
“Tomorrow morning, nine
A.M.
,” Wendy said to me. “The M. E.’s office. You’re one minute late and I lock the door.”
Wendy Kotowski, Detective Frank Danilo, and I huddled around a table in the office of the chief deputy medical examiner for the county, Dr. Mitra Agarwal.
“These,” said the doctor, “are photos of a man who hanged himself three weeks ago in a mental institution.” She pointed to the bruising on the decedent’s neck, which angled downward from each side of the neck to a point at the center of his throat.
“The force of gravity from the fall off the platform—this decedent jumped off a ladder—causes the ligature mark to form this V shape,” said the doctor. “His neck wasn’t broken. A hanging almost never results in a broken neck, certainly not from a fall of six feet or less. This decedent suffered no hemorrhaging in the strap muscles of the neck, which is consistent with a suicide. And here.” She showed another set of photos. “You see no ancillary bruising near or surrounding the ligature marks that would indicate any kind of a struggle. Not cuts or abrasions.
“This,” she concluded, “is a classic suicide by hanging.”
Okay. Fair enough. Now, I assumed, we were going to talk about our favorite dead lawyer, Bruce McCabe.
“And here are photographs of the decedent under examination, Mr.… McCabe.”
She dropped down two photographs, from slightly different angles, of Bruce McCabe’s neck and shoulder. My heart did a leap.
“Note the ligature marks are a straight line across his throat,” she said. “In addition,
the decedent suffered a broken neck. And we found internal hemorrhaging into the sternohyoid and thyrohyroid—the strap muscles of the neck.”
She threw down two more photos.
“And finally,” she said, “you see some other bruising and cuts near and around the ligature marks, including some on the chin and cheek. Evidence of struggle. He was desperately grabbing for the rope around his neck.”
I looked at Wendy, then at the doctor.
“Bruce McCabe didn’t commit suicide,” I said.
“Bruce McCabe was strangled from behind.” The doctor nodded. “He was dead long before they strung him up and hanged him.”
“Oh, come on, Wendy,” I said outside the M. E.’s office. It was a rare December day that the sun was out. A little snow had fallen last night, and it lit up under the sunlight. “The lawyer who tried to cover up what Kathy Rubinkowski was uncovering shows up dead just as I’m sniffing around? These guys are covering their tracks, circling their wagons.”
Wendy stood with her arms crossed and made sure I was finished before she answered.
“You’ve had this information for a while, Jason. You never said anything, wanting to maximize the element of surprise—but now,
now
you spring it on me and expect me to immediately embrace it? To lap it up like a dog?”
I shook my head. “I expect you to carefully consider it,” I said. “I expect you to evaluate it and realize that your cops may have rushed to judgment on my client. I’m not asking you to drop the charges, Wendy. I’m saying take a damn breath. Let’s suspend the trial or go in together and ask for a mistrial without prejudice. You have more than a good-faith basis to believe that you’re prosecuting an innocent person. I’ll have to go back and re-read the Constitution, but I think that’s something you’re not supposed to do.”
She shook her head. “If you’d given me the information sooner, I might have been able to process it, to investigate it. I would have done that, Jason. But you decided to hold this back and spring it—”
“You know damn well that if I brought my evidence to Nash before it was in solid shape, he would have bounced it in a nanosecond. With you cheering him on,” I added. “I couldn’t introduce this until I had more than speculation. I would’ve preferred to wait a little longer, but you rested your case and it was now or never. Every day I learn more, Wendy, and every day it supports what I’m saying more and more. Look at what you just showed me in there.”
“You’re welcome, by the way.”
“Yes, thank you for doing your job, even though we both know if you hadn’t, I would have subpoenaed Mitra and let the judge know you refused to help me.”