Step on a Crack (22 page)

THE HEAD NURSE, SALLY HITCHENS, came in at 4:30 a.m. She smiled as she helped me to stand up. She’d take care of my Maeve now, she promised as I stood disoriented and crazy-eyed over my wife. She’d protect her and keep her for as long as it took.

I
walked
the thirty blocks home from the hospital, the cold burning my skin in the predawn dark. A bartender, slamming closed the steel shutters of a bar on Amsterdam Avenue, crossed himself as I passed.

All the kids were up in the living room as I stumbled in.

I was instantly surrounded by them as I sat down. I thought I had purged away some of the pain from hours before, but I was deluding myself. My heart got heavier and heavier as my eyes slowly passed over each of my kids’ faces. My sorrow was as dense as a black hole as I looked upon the tears in my little Chrissy’s eyes.

Death notices are perhaps the hardest of realities for homicide detectives. Now, here I was having to deliver one in my own living room, to my own kids.

“Mom’s gone to heaven,” I finally said, gathering them in my arms.

“Mom’s in heaven now, guys. Say a prayer.”

After rising from their sobbing ranks, I stumbled into the kitchen and broke the news to Seamus and Mary Catherine.

Then I went into my room, quietly closed the door, and sat on the edge of my bed.

When Seamus came in, maybe ten hours later, I was still sitting there in the same clothes and hadn’t slept.

That’s when he sat down next to me.

“When I lost your grandmother,” he spoke very quietly, “I was ready to murder. The doctors who’d told me she was gone. All the people who came to her wake. Even the priest at her funeral made me unbelievably angry. Because of how lucky they were. They didn’t have to go home to an empty apartment. They didn’t have to listen to the roar of silence as they took down her abandoned things. I even seriously thought about picking up the bottle Eileen had pulled me out of. But I didn’t. Do you know why?”

I shook my head. I had no idea.

“Because of how insulting it would have been. Not to Eileen’s memory, I realized, but to Eileen herself. That’s when I realized she hadn’t really left for good. She’d just gone on ahead a little.

“One thing Eileen had taught me by her example was that you get up and put your clothes on and do what you can do until the day you don’t get up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Maeve isn’t really gone. She’s just ahead, waiting for you, Mike. That’s why you can’t shut down. We Irish don’t always succeed, but we’re pretty decent at grinding it out.”

“Grind it out until you’re dead,” I said blankly after a moment. “Gentle words of inspiration from Seamus Bennett. You’re the new Deepak Chopra.”

“Ah, sweet, undiluted sarcasm,” Seamus said, punching my knee softly as he rose. “That’s the lad. Maeve’d be proud of ya. Music to her Irish ears.”

So after I took a shower, we made arrangements. Or, I should say, Seamus and Mary Catherine did. They called the church and then the funeral home, and I just nodded or shook my drooping head.
Grind it out until you’re dead
.

IT WAS STONE WALL to stone wall with friends and relatives inside Holy Name Church two days later for Maeve’s funeral. At the wake the night before, and now here at the church, my wife had managed to draw a crowd that rivaled the one at St. Patrick’s for the First Lady, despite the fact that there wasn’t a news van or celebrity in sight.

In the sea of sad faces, I made out her former coworkers, past patients, even most of our snooty neighbors. Not only did most of my Homicide squad show, but most of the NYPD, it seemed, was there, giving their support for a brother in blue.

At the wake, so many people had shared touching vignettes I’d never heard before about Maeve. Story after story about how she had comforted their kid or wife or parent as they were wheeled into surgery or giving birth or dying. The compassion she showed at the hardest of moments. The strength she’d provided when people were most alone.

There are times when New York can be the loneliest place on earth, but as I watched Seamus in his robes come down from the altar and encircle Maeve’s casket with incense and heard the sincere weeping of the people behind me, I could feel a sense of community that I would put up against the smallest of small towns.

After the Gospel, Seamus did the eulogy.

“One of my favorite memories of Maeve comes from, of all places, Ground Zero,” he said from the pulpit.

“We were both volunteering on the
Spirit of New York
, moored off Battery Park City, helping to give out hot meals to the rescue people. It was during the fourth game of the 2001 World Series, and I was on the open top deck of the boat, comforting a distraught battalion chief who had lost one of his men, when we heard this earsplitting howl from below deck. We thought someone had been shot or fallen overboard, but when we arrived below in the dining room, all we could see was Maeve, wearing headphones, jumping up and down so hard she was nearly rocking the boat.

“ ‘Tino Martinez tied it up,’ she was screaming. ‘He tied it up!’

“Someone got a TV and set it up on the buffet table. Now, I’ve listened to people say that they’ve never heard Yankee Stadium louder than when Derek Jeter hit that walk-off home run in the tenth to win it, but they weren’t any louder than the group of us crowded around that beat-up set. When I think of Maeve, I will always see her in the middle of those tired men with her fist pumped in the air. Her energy and hope and life transforming that black place and time into something unique, something I think on the verge of holy.”

Seamus’s cheeks clenched then. He, along with the rest of the church, was losing it.

“I won’t lie to you. I can’t say why God would take her now. But if the fact that she was sent here among us doesn’t point toward a loving God, then I can’t help you. If we bring away anything from today, it should be the lesson that Maeve herself showed with every full, spent day of her life. Hold back nothing. Leave nothing in the tank.”

All through the church everyone, including myself, was crying shamelessly. Chrissy, beside me, brushed my overcoat out of the way and wiped her tears on my knee.

The sun came out for the burial at Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester. The kids filed past Maeve’s casket with roses. I almost lost it again behind my sunglasses when Shawna kissed her flower before she put it down with the rest. And again when the high, bittersweet skirls of an NYPD piper’s “Danny Boy” blew off the headstones and frozen ground.

But I didn’t.

I asked myself what Maeve would do, and I swallowed my tears and hugged my kids and promised myself and my wife that I would somehow get us through.

I’D OFFERED TO stay home from work with the kids, who were off on Christmas break, but Seamus and Mary Catherine wouldn’t hear of it.

“Sorry, fella,” Seamus told me. “These kids need to be spoiled like no one has ever been spoiled before, and with the mood you’re in, you’re going to have to leave that job to me and Mary C. Besides, you need to get outside of yourself there, Mick. Throw yourself into something positive. Stop sitting around and go and collar those pathetic mopes who jacked the cathedral.”

“ ‘Collar the mopes’?” I said with a faint grin. “ ‘Jacked’?”

“So I watch
NYPD Blue
now and then,” Seamus said with a fantastic roll of his eyes. “Is it a sin?”

So the Monday morning after the funeral, I arrived back at my desk inside Manhattan North Homicide in East Harlem. Harry Grissom, my boss, and the rest of my squadies were irritatingly supportive and polite. Who would have ever thought that you’d miss being the butt of practical jokes? Soon enough, I thought, knocking the dust off my mouse.

I put in calls to Paul Martelli and Ned Mason. And I learned that nothing really new or promising had been discovered. Every square inch of the church’s granite, marble, and stained glass had been searched and dusted for latent prints, but there had been nothing. These criminals had been extremely tidy.

There had been some excitement when a hijacker’s body was found in the archbishops’ crypt under the altar, Martelli told me, but it ended when it was discovered that the man’s hands and head, along with any chance at identifying him, had been removed by his cold-blooded partners.

No traces of explosives had been discovered in the church either, so it seemed that Jack’s threat about blowing everyone to smithereens had been just a bluff. Another hand he had won.

I found a Post-it on my computer to call Lonnie Jacob, the NYPD CSU investigator working the car dealership where the sedan had crashed. Around noon, I lifted the phone and dialed the fingerprint lab at One Police Plaza.

“Mike,” Lonnie said after he answered. “I was just about to call you. I just did it.”

“Did what?” I said.

“It wasn’t easy, but by sodium hydroxiding our John Doe’s hands, I was able to dry them out and peel off the top layer of his charred skin. The second dermal layer is harder to ID because there’s this kind of doubling of the ridges, but at least we have something. I already spoke to my contact down in Latent Prints at the FBI. Should I fire it down to DC to cross-reference?”

I told him yes, and he told me he’d call me back with the results. These criminals had gone nutso about covering their tracks-which could only mean they were definitely trying to hide something.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, word got back to us that when the police commissioner heard the meager results of our investigation at St. Patrick’s he had a simple response:
Do it again. Do it better
.

First, the Emergency Service Unit guys returned to the cathedral and repeated exactly what they had done to stabilize the crime scene. They even checked for booby traps and hazmats again.

NYPD detectives, along with the Crime Scene Unit-
CSU, not CSI
-did another thorough search for evidence like latent prints and fibers. Everything was swabbed down a second time for DNA. A check was made to see if any religious relics had been defiled-anything that might provide a psychological or behavioral clue.

Everything
that could be checked was examined a second time.

Bloodstains.

Hair, fibers, and threads.

Loose glass-from windows, bottles, eyeglasses.

Firearms.

Tool marks, evidence of flammable liquids.

Controlled substances found anywhere, but especially in the archbishops’ crypt, where the hijackers hid out before the attack.

Two patrolmen were stationed at St. Patrick’s solely to act as messengers to get any evidence to the labs as quickly as possible.

And after three more exhausting days, the end result-not a clue about Jack and his team.

I FELT TOO COOPED UP sitting in the squad room, so I decided to go for a ride one morning. I smiled, looking out at the chaotic hustle and bustle of loud vehicles and even louder pedestrians surging around St. Patrick’s when I pulled up on Fifth Avenue in front of it. Our city had survived riots, blackouts, 9/11, Mayor Dinkins, and now this, I thought as I headed up the cathedral steps.

The church was closed to the public for repairs. The uniformed Midtown North cops stationed at the door stepped aside when I showed them my tin.

I walked up the center aisle and genuflected before sitting in the front pew.

I sat looking out on the solemn, austere, empty church. You’d think I’d be sick of churches by this point, but for some reason, I felt comforted just being there in the candle-scented darkness. I felt oddly consoled.

My high school graduation from Regis had taken place here. I smirked, remembering how wretched at Greek and Latin I’d been. One thing, though, perhaps the only thing I’d picked up from the Jesuit priests who taught us was their stress on the importance of
reason
. Time and again, they preached the necessity of using our God-given rationality in order to cut through to the essence of things. I guess it was the reason I chose philosophy as my major when I went on to Manhattan College, a small, very fine school in the Bronx. And the ultimate reason I had become a detective.
The need to get at the truth
.

I stared up at the main altar, thinking about the case.

We knew the
when, where, what, why
, and
how
. The only thing left was the
who
.

Who would have done it? Who was capable of the brilliance, and the brutality? Men with a lot of will, for one thing, I decided; and men not afraid to use extreme violence as a means to a selfish end.

They had killed five people during the siege. An ESU officer and FBI agent had been shot in the tunnel firefight. A priest had been shot in the side of the head “by accident,” according to Jack. John Rooney had been executed at point-blank range. Interviews with the hostages who had witnessed it confirmed that.

Finally, I thought about the mayor.
Why had they stabbed Andrew Thurman to death
? The cigarette burns over his arms meant that he’d also been tortured. These men were nothing if not efficient. Why change their killing method for the mayor? It would seem that shooting a man, however unpalatable, was better than stabbing him, right? Why get personal with the mayor?

I laid my hands against the polished wood in front of me as I squeezed the rail hard.

There was a reason. I just didn’t know what it was.

Yet.

I stopped by the row of votive candles at the Lady Chapel before I left. I lit one for each of the souls that had perished here, and an extra one for my wife. The dollar bills made a shuffling sound in the silence as they dropped into the offering box.
Angel wings
, I thought, stifling a tear. I hunched onto the velvet kneeler, closed my eyes against my clenched fists.

Dear Maeve
, I prayed.
I love you. I miss you terribly
.

I was still waiting to hear from Lonnie about the prints, and when I returned to my desk he still hadn’t called. I poured myself a coffee and stared out my window at East Harlem as I waited.

In an empty lot right across from the precinct, kids had set some already discarded Christmas trees on fire, their charred trunks like a pile of black bones.

There was still a lot of investigating left to do. We knew the makes of the guns left behind by the kidnappers, and maybe that would turn into something. We’d found shells and spent cartridges. And half a dozen guns that shot rubber bullets. That was an interesting twist for me. They’d thought to bring crowd-control weapons. We still needed to figure out exactly how they had stored oxygen tanks in the river. Not that it really mattered.

I was hip-deep in hostage interview reports when the phone on my desk rang two hours later.

“Sorry, Mike,” Lonnie told me with disappointment. “Nothing doing. No hits on the prints. The dead guy doesn’t have a criminal record.”

As I laid the phone back into its cradle, looking at the tiny black holes in the earpiece, I thought I caught Jack’s cocky laugh.