Tick Tock (14 page)

The screen door opened a few moments later, and the fat kid who’d been terrorizing my family stepped out onto the deck. His pudgy jaw dropped in a cartoonish gape when he saw me and his dad down on the deck conversing over the barrel of my Austrian semiauto.

“Uh… yes, Dad?” he said, fear in his voice.

“Come here,” Flaherty senior said.

Quick as a snake, Tommy Boy moved out of my grasp before the kid had made two steps. Before I could tell what was going on, he lifted his portly son up and threw him off the deck. Instead of landing in the pool, like I was expecting, the heavy teen slammed into the side of it with a cracking sound before he fell face-first onto the backyard concrete. Right away he started bawling.

Christ, I thought, standing there shocked, with the gun still in my hand. Now, that’s what you call tough love.

“Dad!” young Sean cried from his knees as blood poured out of his nose. Behind him, water began to trickle out of the crack he’d made in the plastic pool.

“Don’t you ‘Dad’ me, you little punk. Stay the hell away from this man’s kids, you hear me?”

“But, Dad,” Sean wheezed. “You told me to teach them a lesson.”

“Yeah, well,” Tommy Boy said, giving me a sheepish look. “Lesson learned. You don’t hurt little kids, shithead. I have to actually explain that to you? Here’s the new orders. If one of Mr. Bennett’s kids skins his knee, you better have a Band-Aid handy. Any of them gets hurt again, you’re going to spend the rest of your vacation in the hospital.”

“Yes, Dad,” Seany moaned as he ran up the deck stairs and back inside.

“Honestly, Bennett,” Flaherty said with his palms up. “I’m sorry about the whole thing. It really is my fault. My wife went to Ireland for a week to bury her mother. Guess
I’m not so great at this dad thing. Everything’s just gone to Hell without her here.”

“There’s a definite learning curve,” I said reholstering my weapon. “I’m just glad we could finally work things out.”

“Man to man,” Seamus added behind me.

“Hey, it took a lot of guts to come over here. I respect that,” Tommy Boy Flaherty said as we were leaving. “You ever need anything—anything—you let me know. That goes for you, too, Father.”

“Back, Satan,” Seamus mumbled as we took our leave.

I let out the breath of all breaths as I got the car started. Pulling my gun had been beyond reckless. What the hell had gotten into me? As we drove away, I suddenly got a proud pat on the cheek from Seamus.

“We’ll make a man out of you yet, Mike, me boy,” he said with a blue-eyed wink. “That’s how you do things West Side–style.”

NAKED IN THE DARK, Berger kicked back on the leather recliner in his massive, magnificent library and hit the play button on his remote control.

There was a chirp and hum from the Blu-ray player and then the 103-inch Plasma blazed with a midday shot of the New York Public Library.

The camera shook a little from the first-person shot, but the picture and colors and sounds of the street were amazingly vivid. You could almost smell the hot pretzels and summer sweat.

It was the film of the first crime, the library decoy bombing that had been shot with a hidden fiber-optic camera. All of his work, of course, had been filmed.

Now it was time to edit it, clean it up, and polish, polish, polish.

As the images fast-forwarded and rewound, he thought
of his school years at Lawrenceville, the premier boarding school near Princeton.

A pudgy and slow child, he had been enrolled by his father at the über-preppy institution in order to make a gentleman out of him. But it didn’t work out. Quite the contrary. By the time Berger entered ninth grade, his physique, unique artistic sensibilities, and uncommon interests had actually earned him an alliterative nickname that had caught on famously: Big Bellied Bizarro Berger.

He was seriously considering suicide for his fifteenth birthday, when he unexpectedly made a friend. His new roommate, Javier Souza, a diminutive boy from a wealthy Brazilian family, not only called him by his Christian name, but he turned out to share some of his strange, dark interests.

It was actually Javier who dared him to burn down the school library during the freshman class movie night the week before Christmas break. Wanting to prove his mettle, Berger had purchased a case of lighter fluid as well as some lengths of chain and padlocks to bar the building’s exits.

If the suspicious owner of the Ace Hardware store in town hadn’t contacted the headmaster, he would have gone through with his plan of wiping out the entire Lawrenceville class of ’68. Instead, he was expelled, and if it hadn’t been for a hasty and hefty donation by his father to the school, there might have been criminal charges.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda, Berger thought wistfully. He’d
had such passion then. If it hadn’t been for the hand of fate, he would become famous then. He would have instantly transformed from Big Bellied Bizarro Berger to The Boy Who Killed the Class of ’68!

It was, of course, that singular near brush with greatness that drove him on his little project now. After all the failure and misery and confusion that had clouded his life, he’d finally, miraculously, gotten his gumption back.

In the light of the TV screen, he dabbed at a joyful tear as he watched the bomb get glued to the library desk.

What he had done already, the sheer wondrousness of it, no one could ever take away. No matter what happened next, he had triumphed.

Berger had finally done something that was truly his.

THOUGH IT WAS ONLY NINE A.M., I felt punch-drunk by the time I pulled up in front of Madison Square Garden on Seventh Avenue to pick up Agent Parker at Penn Station. Horns honked as I blatantly and highly illegally sat in my cruiser in a no-standing tow zone, washing down a bagel with a Big Gulp–size coffee.

As the loud, cruel world rushed by the window, I slowly went over what had happened with the Flahertys the night before. Talk about fireworks! I’d broken a few laws there, hadn’t I? Improper use of my firearm was a firing offense. Assault was a felony. But I guess the strangest thing about it was that it seemed to have worked. I’d finally spoken to Flaherty in the only language he seemed to understand. Why hadn’t I just threatened his life from the get-go?

I shook my head. I’d actually out-crazied a Westie. Was that a good thing? I wasn’t sure. Probably not.

The grind of the case wasn’t exactly doing wonders for
my mental well-being, was it? I needed a vacation. Oh, wait. I was already on one.

I flipped through the
Post
. On page three, a state senator from Manhattan warned that the NYPD had five more days to catch the culprit before he made a motion that the state police be sent in.

Sounded good to me, I thought, licking my thumb and turning the page. I would be more than happy to let a trooper from Schenectady take a shot at cracking the case. In addition to the mayor, the papers, and the department top brass, I was almost starting to want me off this case, too.

I knew the odds were we’d eventually catch up to this monster. I’d caught up to every one of them so far. I knew I should believe the numbers on the back of my baseball card, and yet I was getting very worried.

Especially about Angela Cavuto.

There had been no word yet from her kidnapper, no demands. No news was definitely not good news. The one bright spot was the new sketch of the kidnapper the department artist had made with the help of Mr. Cavuto. They’d red-balled it to the Public Info Division this morning to get it out on the newscasts, so maybe we had a shot. How much of one, I wasn’t sure. But at least it was a start.

After another few minutes, I checked the time on my phone and got out of the car, leaving it right in the middle of the Seventh Avenue bus lane. If I got towed, maybe they’d let me get back to my vacation, I thought, as I took the escalator from the sidewalk down into Penn Station.

I really didn’t think anything could cut through my darkening mood until I saw Emily Parker’s smile and wave on the crowded underground train platform. She looked even better than I remembered, tall and porcelain-skinned, her eyes as bright and blue as ever. Her neatness and earnestness and energy were contagious. I think I actually smiled back as we came face-to-face.

We hugged, and she even gave me a peck on the cheek. Not exactly FBI protocol. It felt good.

“Finally some backup,” I said, grabbing her bag. “Honestly, Emily, you are a sight for these sore eyes.”

“It’s nice to see you, too, Mike,” she said giving my hand another squeeze. “It really is. I’m glad I came. You look great.”

“Yeah, real
GQ,
I’m sure,” I said, rolling my eyes “The bags under my eyes are bigger than your overnight.”

“But such handsome luggage,” she said, giving my cheek a playful tug.

I grinned back at her like a fool. Demonstrative attention from good-looking women was never a bad thing. Our reunion was off on the right foot. So far, so good.

“What do you want to do first?”

“Brainstorm,” I said, leading her toward the stairs. “But we’re going to need to use your brain. I fried mine about three days ago.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Emily and I were standing in the center of Major Case Squad’s open bull pen on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza. Phones kept ringing across the stuffy, beat-up empty office space, with nobody to answer them. Every single one of the task force’s forty-plus detectives was out chasing down leads on the now
three-
pronged case. There was no rest for the weary in this summer of insanity. Nor any in sight, for that matter.

Beyond the cluster of cluttered desks, we parked ourselves in front of a decidedly low-tech rolling bulletin board. Pushpinned onto it was a huge map of the city, along with the printouts of each crime and crime scene. In the very center of the board, the new Xeroxed sketch of the kidnapper stared back at us like a spider from the center of its web.

With her arms crossed, Emily stared at the board silently, absorbed, an art critic before a new installation.

“Give me the vitals on the abduction, Mike.”

I slowly went through what had happened to Angela Cavuto.

“According to the father,” I said, “our guy is white, right-handed, walks with a limp and a cane and is thin and about five eleven.” Cavuto also said he was cultured and polished. Not only was he wearing a tailored suit, but he spoke quite convincingly about hedge fund investing.”

“I can’t believe it, Mike,” Emily told me as she took a rubber-banded folder out of her bag. “I spent yesterday pulling reams of stuff about famous New York crimes, hoping this wasn’t true, but I think it must be.”

“What have you got, Emily?”

“I think this guy’s done it again. This abduction is another copycat. A carbon copy, in fact.”

“Of what? The Lindbergh case?” I said, confused.

“No. There was another heinous kidnapping way back in the twenties—in Brooklyn, no less. At the time, they called it the crime of the century. A sociopathic murderous pedophile named Albert Fish was dubbed the ‘Brooklyn Vampire’ when he abducted and killed a girl.

“And Mike, his MO wasn’t just similar. From what you just told me, it was
exactly
the same. Posing as an employer, Fish answered the ad of an eighteen-year-old boy seeking work and ended up leaving with his ten-year-old sister under the pretense of taking her to a birthday party.”

“F——off! No!” I yelled as I collapsed into a chair.

Emily nodded.

“Tell me, did he give the father something?” she said.

“Strawberries and some goop,” I said.

“Pot cheese. Right. Shit! It’s the same thing! The Mad Bomber, then the Son of Sam, now the Brooklyn Vampire. This guy’s just pulled off a third famous crime. Mike, this isn’t good. This Fish guy was evil personified. He made the Son of Sam seem like a volunteer at a soup kitchen. He was one of the worst pedophiles and child murderers of all time. He didn’t just kill his victims. He would cannibalize them as well.”

I punched the desk beside me, then my thigh. Then Emily and I sat there silently listening to the
whoosh
of the air duct. On the board, a picture of Angela from last year’s Cavuto family Christmas card smiled at us from beneath a glittery halo.

I WAS WITH EMILY, putting on some coffee about an hour later, when I heard a strange, gut-wrenching call come over the break room’s radio.

There was some kind of disturbance uptown. An unconscious, unresponsive child had been found in a store on Fifth Avenue. When I heard the name of the store repeated, my blood went cold.

“What, Mike? What is it?” Emily said, straining to listen.

“They found a little girl uptown at FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store across from the Plaza Hotel. Not good, Em. It’s on the same block as the CBS
Early Show,
the locale of the bombing on Tuesday.”

There was a more massive crowd than usual out in front of the landmark toy store when Emily and I arrived after a long, twenty-minute ride uptown. Two radio cars and two ambulances spun their lights in front of the freaked-out-looking tourists and moms and little kids.

A veteran Nineteenth Precinct sergeant whose eye I caught shook his dismal face before I was three steps out of my car.

I showed the cop the picture of Angela.

“Tell me this isn’t her,” I said.

“Marone a mi,”
the cop said, the smoke from his cupped cigarette rising like incense as he crossed himself. “It’s her. They found her in the back. The clerk thought she was just sleeping.”

Emily and I both turned as a car squealed up behind my cruiser. It was a black Lexus with tinted windows. I had my hand on my Glock when its door was flung wide open and a man got out. A man with red hair and even redder eyes.

It was Kenneth Cavuto, Angela’s father.

“No!” I yelled as Cavuto bolted toward the store’s entrance.

I managed to get there a second before him. No way could I let Angela’s dad see his little girl. Not here. Not like this.