The Eighth Day (20 page)
THE WALDORF-ASTORIA has legendary security and means of egress. It has been a favorite of presidents since it opened back in the thirties. FDR’s private armored train car would be shunted under the hotel in the vast underground rail network that comprises New York’s Grand Central Station. Roosevelt’s custom-made Pierce-Arrow was off-loaded onto a specially constructed secret elevator right under the Waldorf and opened onto the street. It was the safest way to enter New York City. Of course, that level of protection was only afforded to heads of state. Tonight, the security of the main ballroom was in the hands of the normal hotel dicks and whatever odd security men came with the participants.
Dennis had reviewed the venue for two days. Three of his men were on detail this evening. He wasn’t pleased with the hotel’s refusal to install metal detectors. They felt the nature of the festivities, tied to the price of a ticket, made it unlikely that anyone in the crowd would pose a problem. Dennis was there as another set of eyes. Cynthia had been taking treatments well. The biggest and most dangerous was scheduled for tomorrow. Having a job to keep him occupied tonight helped him fight off the sense of helplessness a mere man is prone to feel in the face of an act of God. So there he stood, his particular brand of therapy being to scan the crowd for the author of the poison inkjet letter.
His “cop’s sense” bristled—out of a sea of faces in attendance to honor Taggert for the benefit of the Work with Pride Foundation, one man stood out. His appearance was just unkempt enough to tell the ex-detective that $250-a-plate dinners were not this guy’s normal social activity. He also didn’t seem to be with anyone at the table.
Speaker after speaker respectfully stood and awaited their turn at the dais to praise not only the foundation’s efforts to help homeless people attain and maintain good, steady jobs, but also the merits, generosity, and overall good fellowship of Miles Taggert.
Miles could run for Pope after this
, Dennis thought, as he observed his bearded suspect and a few others. Dennis walked over to Harvey Davis, one of the ex-cops he wrangled to be on Taggert’s detail. Harv was a photographer of sorts, and Dennis had him get a press pass.
“Hey, Harv, snap a few of the beard at table fifteen in the back. I got a feeling.”
“Yeah, I noticed him, too. Wonder who’s watching the farm while he’s here?”
Harvey stepped away, shooting toward the stage, disconnecting any attention to the beard with the interaction he and Dennis just displayed. A minute later, he casually turned and snapped the shot with a long telephoto lens from across the room. No one even noticed at the beard’s table.
As the event came to a close, Miles Taggert was barraged by do-gooders and well wishers wanting to connect with the man of the hour and bask in his glow. Dennis and his three men formed a Secret Service–style perimeter around Taggert. People were shaking his hand or speaking to Miles over, under, or through his or his men’s outstretched arms. As they proceeded toward the door, the people at table fifteen approached to congratulate Taggert. Dennis noticed the beard moving closer. He spent half his attention on him but continued to scan the rest of the crowd. After all, the cost of being wrong about the beard could be a dead Miles Taggert.
When the beard moved in a little too close for comfort, Dennis applied his considerable weight and muscle behind his request. “Do you want to step back, please?” As he placed his hand on the beard’s torso to accentuate his command, he detected something hard. He immediately called out to Benton and Davis, “He’s packing!” The two bodyguards immediately formed a barrier between him and Taggert. Harv proceeded to usher Miles out unceremoniously, a move the rest of the partygoers and admirers considered downright rude.
Dennis looked the beard in the eyes. He sensed a coldness and distance that gave him more impetus to further invade the man’s space. “Keep your hands at your side. Step to the rear of the room please.”
The beard stood frozen with a look of confusion on his face; his body stance hinted at the desire to run, but the combined girth of Mallory and Benton effectively sealed the tiny opening between tables in which he would have to pass. Their cop’s sixth sense, turning on all eight cyclinders, they moved on the beard as one. The man’s one second of hesitation was not tolerated well by the former cop who was used to having his wishes granted—one-way or the other. He chose the other. Benton got hold of the beard’s arm. Swinging him around, he grabbed the collar of his shirt as Dennis reached behind his rumpled sport coat only to find … a Blackberry. Steered by Benton’s hand on his belt and collar, the beard was thrust up against a column as Dennis continued patting him down, and then spun him around announcing, “He’s clean.” Dennis handed him back his digital palm-thingy and asked to see his identification.
“Are you cops?” the beard asked.
“Don’t worry about us, pal, worry about your situation,” Benton said.
“You aren’t cops, and you have no right to search me. I am leaving now and if you try to stop me I will have you brought up on charges.” With that, the beard adjusted his wrinkled and frayed sport coat. He tucked his checkered shirt into his faded, black jeans. Those second-hand-store Levis didn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, go with the old, brown dirt-caked walking shoes that had seen better days. Definitely not the ensemble one wears to a high-society shindig.
That night, Tom (aka the beard, aka Voyeurger) went home and got online. The scuffle with Taggert’s security guards made a choice he had been agonizing over for the past week easier. The path of least resistance was the key to success. Those bonehead security jerks had proven a little too resistant to his plan to strike out for the cause.
SABOT: That is a shame.
Voyeurger: I will move on to target two.
SABOT: Keep me informed.
Voyeurger: Will do.
∞§∞
A day later, Dennis received a call from the Waldorf’s head of security. A .25 caliber Saturday night special was found taped under a table in the ballroom. Table fifteen.
“Son of a bitch!” was Harv’s reaction as he fished out six pictures of the beard from his desk drawer and headed to the scanner.
The bitmapped printout of the beard was forwarded to Joe Palumbo’s desk from the New York office. His decision to help out a cop who helped him one July day fifteen years ago was an idea that was starting to look better and better.
At Joe’s direction, the bureau immediately input the picture into their image recognition system. There it was compared and cross-checked with millions of National Crime Information Center pictures, as well as hundreds of thousands more from other world police organizations. Unfortunately, the NCIC computers didn’t make a high-confidence match. Joey knew that if every state department of motor vehicles had digitized photographs for every driver’s license in their database, the search would have been almost foolproof. But, that was a political issue. Although the mood of the nation was in favor of tightening up a little on personal liberties since 9/11, state DMVs fell under the issue of state’s rights, a thorny constitutional issue in the best of times.
At his office at GlobalSync, Dennis Mallory conducted a meeting of his team. He had already handed out six different computer projections of the beard—without his beard, with different hair colors, with and without glasses, and other options.
Benton spoke for the team. “Dennis, go home. We know how to do all this. You should be home, waiting for word, or at the hospital.”
“I know, but I can’t do nothing there but just sit around feeling helpless. Normally they do this while you’re awake—it’s amazing. But Cynthia is claustrophobic. The machine they’re using is more intimidating than an MRI, and she can’t last ten seconds in one of those. So they sedated her, she should be up in a few hours. So I figured …”
“You figured you’d break our balls a little. Listen, Miles will chopper straight to the house in the Hamptons tonight. Harv gets there an hour ahead. I am in the copter with him and then he’s nestled tight for the weekend. So forget about this and go be there when Cynthia comes out of it. Send her all our love, too.”
“Thanks. I hate feeling useless. This whole thing is just … well, thanks guys, if anything shakes call me.”
Alone in the elevator, Dennis started reviewing the events of the last few weeks. Miles had proven to be a man of, and beyond, his word. He took up Cynthia’s cause as though she was his own mother. Today, three of the world’s top radiotherapists were at her side, employing a technique the Detective Endowment Association medical plan wouldn’t cover. They used 201 beams of deadly radiation. Each beam’s dose was a minute fraction of the strength that healthy tissue would find lethal. By using computers and other gizmos, the beams would then converge somewhere within her head. At that intersection, their strengths would combine and affect only the targeted blood vessels that made up her AVM. That made this “gamma knife” technique a kind of sharpshooter picking off the dangerously abnormal blood vessels in crowds of healthy ones. The process was very expensive and not an easy list to get on. Once again, were it not for Miles Taggert’s substantial weight as a benefactor to the university and his subsequent clout with the directors, doctors, and companies responsible for the Stereotactic thingamajig, they would not be involved with this level of medicine at all.
From Dennis’s side of the bargain, the guys had all been doing a good job. With the big exception of letting the beard slip through their fingers, their police work was flawless. Now, if Cynthia had a good outcome with this procedure, she will have avoided the invasive brain surgery that, with her other conditions, would almost certainly be fatal, and all this would have been worth it.
When he arrived at NYU Medical Center, he bought some blue flowers in the lobby. He headed up to the floor where his wife, his love, his partner for the last thirty-eight years was recuperating. The instant he entered the room and caught sight of her lying there, a shapeless lump under the sheets, wired to the electronic equipment all around her, his eyes welled up. She was so brave. He had been shot three times in the line of duty. He had received five department commendations for bravery, three awarded by three of the four mayors that had spanned his career. He was brave by accident. Each time was a surprise; he had not expected to get shot that day. Cynthia, on the other hand, faced her dragon, looked it right in the eye, and went forward fearlessly.
No, that’s not true. She experienced fear, but she was brave enough to not let it stop her.
Dennis didn’t know if he would have had the grit to look into the maw of eternity with the dignity and calm she exhibited. Unlike him, she quietly steeled herself, without anger, agitation, or any of the male testosterone-laced peer pressure that always diluted his initial instinct to run and hide under the covers. As he tiptoed over to her, she appeared as if she were about twelve years old and in the middle of a sweet dream. He caressed her hair with gentleness out of character with his big, meaty mitts. At that moment, she
was
his little girl and he was her daddy. This was as vulnerable as he’d ever seen his wife and it brought up feelings that he’d only known with his Kelly when she was much younger. He wanted her to have no pain, no fears, no worries—all the unreasonable requests a father would make to God as he sits marveling at a sleeping daughter.
She began to stir. Dennis withdrew his hand, fearing he had brought her back to
this
reality, with all its pain and scary, grown-up consequences. He placed his palm on her pale hand and focused on it, trying to direct into her any life energy and other stuff he never believed in ’til now. Her eyes opened and he was glad that he was there. He liked being the first thing she saw.
“Hi, baby. You did great!” This was the same thing he’d said to Cynthia’s opening eyes back when Kelly was born and she awakened after her caesarean delivery. He kissed Cynthia on the forehead. She felt warm and smelled of some kind of ointment. She managed a smile. He placed his head next to hers and stayed bent over like that, in silence, for more than thirty minutes.
Within an hour, Cynthia was talking. Even though the test results wouldn’t be known for a week, they dangerously entertained the notion of a European holiday, perhaps a house in Italy, possibly sharing it with her sister and brother-in-law. She and her sister were the only two left in their family. It would be good for them to spend time together, now that they realized how precious time was.
And so the night progressed. Eventually she fell off into a restful sleep. After a while, he stopped hearing the soft beep of her heart monitor. He slept in the chair that he had moved close to her bed, awaking whenever he shifted only to realize he wasn’t in their own bed. Cynthia awoke around 4 AM. Automatically, as happens after years of sleeping together, Dennis slowly awoke looking right at her.
She had a look of contentment as she lay there and just looked at him for a long time, then smiled. “Hey, handsome, I’m hungry. What does a girl have to do to get bacon and eggs around here?”
Appetite being one of the best signs of recovery, he determined a little thank-you prayer to God was appropriate.
IT HAD BEEN TWO WEEKS since Cynthia’s procedure and the news was looking good. Although the doctors made the usual disclaimers about being vigilant against any recurrences, it was as clean a bill of health as anyone given her history could expect. Dennis wanted to shake the hand of every doctor and nurse involved. Instead, he wrote a check for two thousand dollars to the National Institute for Neurologic Disorders and Stroke.
In keeping with that good news, there came another break in the case. Benton had shown several photographs of the beard to the office workers of the Work with Pride Foundation. The staff didn’t recognize him as anyone who purchased a ticket. Dennis experienced an inspiration only bestowed on a cop who has had his antenna fine-tuned to crime as long as he had.
Did anyone report losing a ticket?
Indeed, someone did recall a man who claimed to have lost his ticket. His name was Enrico Hernandez of the Bronx.
Dennis went to Enrico’s Body Shop at 2935 Southern Boulevard. There he found Enrico screaming at a guy who was having difficulty smoothing the Bondo on a hammered-out fender of an ’87 Impala with a sanding wheel. The man was making a mess of the compound filler. Eventually, Dennis got Enrico to focus on the missing ticket.
“Yeah, I lost the ticket, but the girl at the table outside remembered me and let me go in.”
“Why did you go to the dinner?”
“You see this neighborhood? The homeless people here were coming out of the woodwork. This Work with Pride thing really helped them. Two of their guys work across the street. I might hire one myself next month. So, yeah, I wanted to go and support them.” He then gave an exasperated gasp as he yelled to the worker, “Hey pendejo, large slow circles, por favor!” He waved his hand in big round motions to emphasize his point to the hard-of-Spanglish. Dennis tried to get him back on track.
“Did you know Mr. Taggert?”
“Who?”
“The man that was being honored that evening.”
“Oh, him. No. I was there because they give Jimmy an award.”
“Who’s Jimmy?”
“One of the guys from across the street. I chased him away a few times. I mean every day he was here with his hand out. After a while it got to be too much, you know?”
“Tell me about it.”
“Then one day I don’t see him come around anymore. I figured he’s dead. Then he shows up one day working across the street for Julio. Now, he brings me coffee most mornings, says it makes him feel good to hand me a cup, instead of the other way around.”
“Yeah, I remember that guy. They gave him that plaque.”
“You were there?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were a cop!” Enrico said with a laugh.
“You’re good. No, I retired three years ago.”
“So why you asking me all these questions?”
Dennis pulled out the picture of the beard. “You ever see this man?”
“No.”
“We have reason to believe he was in the office when you went to purchase your ticket.”
“Let me see that again. Yeah, now that you mention it, he looks like the guy that was hanging out while I was there. I remember thinking he looked too clean to be homeless, but not by much. I thought he must have been a new program member.”
“When did you lose your ticket?”
“Don’t know. Could’ve been anytime before the dinner.”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
“The day I got it. Then I forgot about it until that night.”
“Did you have any robberies or break-ins during that time?”
“No.”
“Mind if we check your home?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Agent Brooke Burrell exited her car first. The NYPD Tactical Patrol Force emptied out of a step van as five more agents surrounded her. She knocked on the door. Enrico answered as expected, it being 6 AM, after all.
Holding up a folded piece of paper, she identified herself. “Mr. Hernandez, I’m Agent Burrell of the FBI. I have a warrant to search these premises for material evidence in a matter of national security. Would you step aside, Sir?”
Maybe because he was groggy, or maybe because he was pissed at being awakened, or maybe it was just that no woman was going to come into his castle and start giving him orders in his underwear, he responded, “Hell no, get away from my house!” He attempted to shut the door. All Brooke had to do was tilt her head toward the door to get the three big bulls in flak jackets and helmets to slam a battering ram into the door, smashing it open. Two more team members hustled a bikini-brief-clad Enrico to the floor and cuffed him. Bringing him upright and sitting on his couch, the forensic teams went to work straightaway, dusting for prints and retrieving fibers. One cop secured the unwilling Enrico’s fingerprints.
When Brooke left two hours later, Dennis, who had watched the operation go down, took the opportunity to cross the street and introduce himself. She was smaller than he expected; more refined than the policewomen he had known in New York. She greeted him with a welcoming smile.
“Hello, Mr. Mallory, nice to meet you.”
“Pleasure. How did it go?”
“Like in the book. Got a lot of latents. Maybe one of those prints will be your bearded wonder’s.”
“How was Hernandez?”
“He chose the hard way, but we persuaded him to see our point. He’s just an angry citizen. He’ll get a suspended sentence for obstruction and no jail time.”
“Thanks for all your help,” Dennis said. This agent was no older than his daughter.
“No problem. I hear you were an above-grade cop.”
“I had my moments. You’ll let me know if you turn up any interesting evidence?”
“As long as my supervisor approves, you’ll know what I know.”
“Thanks.”
“One latent print lifted from Enrico’s drawer matched an ex-Army Corps of Engineers grunt named Thomas Regan,” Brooke Burrell told Mallory a few days later in her FBI office. “He received the Purple Heart for being wounded during the invasion of Grenada while attempting to rescue medical students who had been taken hostage. The Army photo of him was a rough match to the pictures Harv took, when you allow for the twenty-five years, twenty pounds, a beard, and thinning hair that separated them. His last known address was in Thousand Oaks, California, in 1989. No record since. No credit cards, no license, no police records, and no death certificate. He just vanished into the American fabric.”
“Until he went shopping in Enrico’s dresser drawer.”
Burrell nodded. “So Regan risks a break-in and covers his tracks for the sole purpose of stealing a 250-dollar ticket to a high-society wingding?”
“This guy is focused and dedicated. I have to assume he has thought this out. I can’t believe he left a partial. Probably missed it in his wipe down.”
“You think he’s that careful?”
“The .25 caliber revolver that was found in the ballroom was wiped clean. And that would have been before he intended to use it.”
“It isn’t a dead match but it looks like your ‘beard’ is Thomas Regan. We’ll have all the airports and train and bus stations alerted with composites.”
Brooke’s cell phone rang. “Yes, he’s here right now.” She passed the phone to Dennis. “It’s Special Agent in Charge Palumbo.”
“Hello, Mallory here.”
“Mr. Mallory, we’ve never met, but Jack Flanagan asked me to extend the professional courtesy. How are they treating you back there in New York?”
“Like a VIP. Can’t complain. I’m guessing this is not a customer satisfaction survey.”
That got an audible laugh. “Fair enough. The fact is that your lead is bringing us into an area of national security. I might not be able to keep the door swinging both ways much longer.”
“I hear you. I won’t expect anything further, then.”
“Of course, I now also have to make a pitch to appeal to your sense of patriotism. If you find out anything that can help us, you’ll be forthwith.” Joey employed the grammar of New York cops to stress his point.
“Of course. And thank you for everything you’ve done to help me thus far.”
“We are all on the same team here.”
“Do you want to speak to Agent Burrell?”
“I’ll call her back later. You be good … oh, how’s your wife?”
That genuinely surprised Dennis. “Why, fine thank you. I’m touched that you asked.”
“From what Flanagan said, she’s one tough lady.”
“Amen to that, brother.”