Tick Tock (18 page)

I shook the empty Red Bull can in my hand without blinking.

“Coffee?” I said.

I had just grabbed a couple of mugs when Miriam came in through the Major Case Unit’s battered bullpen door.

“You need to make some calls and stall the morning meeting,” I said before she made it to her cramped office. “Did you get my texts?”

“Don’t worry. I got your texts,” she said, dropping her bag onto her desk. “All eight of them. Tell me something, though. What if this John Jay thing is a spurious connection, Mike? What if nothing comes of it?”

“Then we get drop-kicked off the case as scheduled,” I said. “What do we have to lose?”

“I don’t know. My next promotion?” Miriam said dismally.

As I left, I knew she was only kidding. My boss was as stand-up as they come. She hadn’t once brought up how slowly things were going, despite all the heat she was getting. Which was a lot, considering our squad room was a short elevator ride away from the commissioner’s office upstairs.

Emily and I didn’t waste a moment getting the rest of the task force up to speed on our newest theory during the morning skull session. Most of the cops coming off the night shift even stayed for the festivities.

“In reviewing the cases, Detective Bennett and I discovered a number of traditional offender personality types that just didn’t fit together,” Emily said in front of the cluttered case board. “So we decided to look more closely at
a link between the victims, and last night, we think we found one.”

“What link?” Detective Schaller from Brooklyn North said.

“We’re not exactly sure yet,” I said, “but it turns out that the Grand Central bombing victim Stephanie Brill went to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the same time as the mothers of both the murdered little girl, Angela Cavuto, and the Bronx stabbing victim, Aida Morales.”

“The
mothers
of the victims went to John Jay?” said newbie Detective Terry Brown. “So our guy kills the kids for maybe like a revenge thing or something? That’s cold.”

Some confused grumbling from the packed room full of cops and Feds followed, but I noticed more than a few thoughtful nods. There weren’t many wallflowers in our open-forum meetings. The fact that no one in the room full of dedicated professionals could come up with a glaring reason that my idea was stupid was a good sign. Maybe we were onto something after all.

Spoken too soon, I thought, as a scrub-faced young female ATF field agent, sent in to bolster our Bomb Squad, cleared her throat.

“New York City actually has a college for criminal justice?” she said.

“Gee, pa, those skyscrapers look just like corn silos, don’t they?” some NYPD veteran detective from the back of the room chimed in.

“That’s enough, people,” I said over the chuckles. “I know you’re all about as punch drunk-on this as I am. But things are finally coming into focus.”

I pointed toward the caseboard at the picture of the cop killed in the Grand Central bombing.

“We all know why we’re here. It’s time to bring this thing home.”

TWO TEAMS OF MAJOR CASE DETECTIVES were immediately dispatched to the bursar’s office at John Jay to go over student records. Emily and I had to stay back for the 9:30 meeting we had set up with the two victims’ mothers, Alicia Cavuto and Elaine Morales.

We’d just been notified by security downstairs that the women had arrived, when a tall, gawky woman with a striking resemblance to Caroline Kennedy came into the squad room and headed directly to my desk. Her name was Jessica Cook, and instead of American royalty, she was the cybergeek cop assigned to the task force from the Computer Crimes Unit.

“Mike, Emily, I think I got something on the John Jay lead already,” she said. “A nibble, at least. Come and check this out.”

We rushed with her across the hallway to Computer Crimes and into her closet-size cubicle. Tacked to the wall
above her monitor beside a South Park calendar was a crayon drawing of a racing cop car with the words NYPD MOM on the door.

“I’ve been busy hitting deeper and deeper serial-killer fan sites ever since I started impersonating some of the names from the David Berkowitz correspondence,” Jessica said as we stood in front of her screen. “The worst by far is this feed called DankDungeonNYC. I just got this instant message from a new friend who calls himself Manacle Max after I mentioned I was a John Jay grad.”

I read off the screen.

John Jay? U must know the Collector then. What an admirable freak. Always wants the worst. Always pays top dollar.

“This is incredible,” Emily said.

“Type in something like ‘I haven’t seen the Collector in years. What’s he up to these days?’ ” I said.

Jessica put it in and hit enter.

The message spat back a moment later

After he was fired u mean? Nothing was the last I heard, the lucky prick. I wish I was independently wealthy. Enough about him. Let’s meet. U said u have atrocious homicide scene shots? So do I. I’ll show u mine. U show me urs. LOL!.

“Fired? He worked there!” Emily cried. “He was an employee or a professor at John Jay. Has to be!”

“NYPD Mom to the rescue,” I said, giving Jessica a high five.

BEYOND ENTHUSED FOR THE FIRST TIME since the case began, I sped with Emily back to the squad room. When we turned the corner, the elevator door at the end of the hallway opened.

A wiry male uniform from the HQ security detail downstairs exited with a tall, white woman and a squat Hispanic woman in tow. Both women looked tired and lost, completely grim-faced. I didn’t have to read their visitor badges to know they were Mrs. Cavuto and Mrs. Morales.

Emily ushered them into one of the interview rooms as I ran and poked my head into my boss’s office.

“Computer Crimes just pulled a lead off a serial killer site that’s making John Jay look even better,” I called to her. “Some freak let it be known that some other rich freak who liked to collect sick, bloody crime-related shit was working there at some point but got fired. No name yet,
but we’re about to sit down with the mothers of the two victims to see if they can fill us in.”

“What are you waiting for?” Miriam said, lifting her phone. “Get into that interview room and start pumping. I’ll tell Brown to start scouring the staff rolls for people who got canned.”

I turned off my phone as I entered the interview room, where Emily sat with the distraught mothers. Attractive, stylish, blond Mrs. Cavuto looked like she was taking the loss of her four-year-old daughter fairly well until you picked up on her extremely glassy eyes and sloppily applied makeup. Stocky, in a striped MTA uniform shirt, Mrs. Morales just looked like she wanted to hit someone.

As I sat, I could see from Emily’s face that something very good was up.

“Mrs. Morales, please tell my partner what you just told me,” Emily said.

“Alicia and I actually know each other,” Mrs. Morales said, patting Mrs. Cavuto on the elbow. “Back in the nineties, we took a night class together at John Jay.”

I shot Emily a look, squashing the urge to give her a high five. They’d been in the same class! This really was the connection we’d been gunning for! We’d struck absolute gold!

“Not only that, but our teacher was a sick, slimy weirdo. His name was Berger. Professor Berger.”

“Berger,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Mrs. Morales said, nodding.

“It’s true,” Mrs. Cavuto said, quietly looking up at me with her empty blue eyes.

I thought of something then.

“His name wasn’t Lawrence, was it?
Lawrence
Berger?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Morales said, nodding vehemently. “That was it. Lawrence Berger.”

“Excuse me one second,” I said, popping out the door and poking my head back into Miriam’s office.

“The lid just ripped off this thing. We got our Lawrence! Tell Brown to look for Berger. Lawrence Berger. He was a professor at John Jay.”

I rushed back into the interview room. “I can’t tell you how important the info you just gave to us is,” I said. “Do you have any idea why Berger would do something like this? Hurt your families?”

“It’s because we got the twisted son of a bitch fired. He got canned ’cause we objected that he was getting his rocks off,” Mrs. Morales yelled, standing up.

“Come again?” Emily said.

“He set up a secret video camera in the ladies’ room next to the class,” Mrs. Cavuto said. She took a tissue out of the box on the table and began shredding it.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Morales said. “There were strange noises from time to time in the ladies’ room, and finally one day in the cafeteria between classes, Alicia and I and a woman named Stephanie put our heads together and realized we had all heard it. We took it to the administration. A week
later, Berger was investigated, found out, and ultimately fired.”

“Wait. What about Stephanie? Stephanie Brill, I think it was. Where is she?” Mrs. Cavuto said. “Did he go after Stephanie’s family? She signed the complaint as well.”

“Stephanie Brill died in the recent bombing at Grand Central,” Emily said.

“He comes up to my neighborhood and stabs my
daughter?
” Mrs. Morales said, staring at us in disgust. “He didn’t even have the cojones to come after me?”

“What was the name of this class?” I said.

“Abnormal Psychology,” Mrs. Cavuto said, meticulously tearing her tissue.

There was a knock, and my boss threw open the door and gestured for me to come with her.

“This is it, Mike,” Miriam said, handing me a printout. “We’ve got an address on Lawrence Berger. You’re heading uptown, the Upper East Side. The son of a bitch lives on Fifth Avenue.”

“LADIES, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING,” said a linebacker-size Emergency Service Unit sergeant as he folded open the rear of a shiny black Ford Econoline SWAT van in Central Park an hour later.

Two more vans just like it were parked in a wagon circle in our staging area behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than two dozen Emergency Service cops and members of the FBI New York Hostage Rescue Team and NYPD Bomb Squad were now ready to close this case with extreme prejudice. With one cop already dead and a perp with sophisticated bomb-making skills, all stops had been pulled out to take Lawrence Berger down.

Emily and I climbed into heavy Kevlar vests as a short, grizzled, wiry black man with huge forearms and a Bic-shaved jarhead shook our hands painfully.

“Agent Hobart!” the Hostage Rescue Team leader introduced
himself in a drill sergeant’s near-scream. He tilted the Toughbook computer on his lap in our direction.

On it were photographs of Berger’s elaborate prewar building a couple of hundred feet to the east. Close-up shots showed its even more impressive stone penthouse. It was amazing, like a monumental baroque palace in the sky, complete with columns and setbacks and gardens.

“Feast your eyes on Berger’s quote unquote apartment,” Hobart called out. “It’s a three-level, seven thousand-square-foot penthouse.”

I couldn’t believe it.
Seven thousand square feet? In the Silk Stocking District?
How was that even possible? I thought.

“That’s right,” Hobart said, eyeing me. “I said seven thousand square feet.”

“Shit, boss. I gotta get me a gig at John Jay,” called back an Odd Job–looking, stocky Asian cop sitting in the van’s passenger seat.

“Shut up, Wong,” Hobart said savagely. “These shots were just taken from our scout snipers on the roof of the building across Seventy-seventh Street. As you can see, all the drapes are drawn, so no help for us there. The building super told us there’s at least seven bedrooms, three hundred and sixty degrees of outside terraces, two separate staircases, and even an interior elevator. It’s basically a maze. A nightmare for a breach and search.”

“But great for cocktail parties, I bet,” Wong said.

Hobart gave him a dirty look before continuing.

“The super also said Berger’s a recluse, and he hasn’t seen him in years. Said he hires his own contractors and staff who must have signed confidentiality agreements because they don’t even talk to the doormen about what goes on up there. Berger basically does whatever he wants because he’s, by far, the largest shareholder in the co-op. We’ve also been up on his phone for the last hour. No incoming or outgoing calls. Quiet as a mausoleum.”

“Kind of looks like one, too, doesn’t it?” I said.

Hobart nodded.

“If it were up to me, I’d go in at two a.m. with night vision. As it is, we’re going to cut the electrical power to the apartment right before we breach, in case Mr. Mad-Bomber-Ass got something rigged.”

Hobart turned and addressed the crowd of black-clad men around us.

“Remember, people, once the door is down,” he called out, “three teams will split up. One per apartment floor. Berger Meister could be anywhere, hiding God knows what, so I want room-to-room sweeps that the fucking upstairs maid would be proud of. Also, check with your team’s bomb tech before you even think about touching anything. Capiche? Good. Now it’s hurry-up-and-wait time. All we need is the green light from the pencil pushers.”

For the next fifteen minutes, we listened to the SWAT guys lock and load and exchange terms like “tactical action parameters,” “secure coms,” and “mission capabilities.”
Sitting on a greasy steel bench along the wall of the stifling van, Emily and I tested our earpiece radios and quick-checked our own weapons.

I glanced out the van’s one-way tinted window a hundred feet to the west, where the Ancient Egyptian stone obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle stood against Central Park’s bright blue sky. On the path beside it, a pudgy female jogger went by, followed by a dog walker pulling a ten-dog pack.

I don’t know which was higher, the temperature, my adrenaline, or the tension. I was pumped that we were finally onto Berger, but also wary. I’d seen Berger’s meticulous handiwork firsthand. Not only was he smart, efficient, and completely cold-blooded, but we had zero intel about the place where he was holed up.

We weren’t pulling a crackhead out of a closet, I thought, staring at the photo of the creepy penthouse. It was more like we were reaching into a black hole in the ground to pull out a viper.