VC03 - Mortal Grace (67 page)

“Are you sure?” she whispered.

He nodded. “See you in seven minutes.”

“Seven minutes,” Maria echoed.

He tousled Scottie’s hair and patted Maria’s butt. Those seven minutes were going to be an eternity.

Today, instead of pulling away, Walter sat with the motor idling and watched his wife and son go into the building, Scottie tugging his mom forward, Maria with her diagonally slung little purse bouncing on her hip. You’d never have guessed they were each wearing seven pounds of explosives. They joined the scurrying stream of government employees that crowded through the door.

The metal detectors didn’t even notice them. That was the beauty of plastic explosives.

In the fourth-floor day care center for employees’ children, a tidal wave of kids was leaping and galloping and shrieking. Maria Egan checked to make sure nothing was showing under Scottie’s shirt. “Now, don’t touch it,” she reminded him.

The teacher came to greet them. “Good morning, Maria—and my oh my, aren’t we wearing a handsome shirt today, Scottie. What’s the big occasion?”

“I’m going to heaven in seven minutes,” Scottie boasted.

The teacher’s smile was sly as a jack-o’-lantern. “Well well well.”

“Now, Scottie,” Maria chided, “don’t tell stories.” She stopped and brushed the hair out of his eyes and kissed him. “I could murder you! Behave yourself. I love you, honey.”

Maria Egan didn’t look back. Her eyes were tearing and the hallway became a carousel blur as she hurried to the elevator and pressed 12. The Medicaid office was buzzing with prework chatter. She wasn’t in the mood. Not today.

She put on an all-purpose smile and sat down at her console and fired up the computer. She tried to forget the press of the plastic belt around her middle.
There’s still time. I could pick up that phone and dial 911 and call the whole thing off.

But she knew Walter would never forgive her. God would never forgive her. Corey Lyle, founder and leader of the Fellowship, would never forgive her. She forced her hands to stay on the keyboard. Her fingers flew. Glowing amber symbols cascaded across the monitor screen.

Oh, Lord
, she prayed,
please don’t let my little boy suffer, give the suffering to me!

A coworker looked over from the neighboring console. “You’re going like a house afire, Maria.”

“Lots to get done.”

“Relax a minute and tell me how your evening went.”

“Real nice—Walter and I took Scottie to the Fellowship meeting.”

“You sure love those meetings.”

“Corey Lyle was there and he personally received Scottie into the Fellowship.”

“You folks certainly seem to worship that man.”

“Corey Lyle is a saint.”

“I hear the government’s investigating him. Tax fraud.”

“The government burned Joan of Arc.”

“The government pays your salary, toots. By the way, I love your cardigan. Is it Penney?”

“What?” Maria tapped a wrong key and had to back up and delete. “Oh, thanks. It’s Sears.”

Down in the pickup truck, Walter Egan stared at the second hand of his watch as it crawled around toward twelve. On one knee he had placed a Polaroid of Maria and Scottie; on the other knee, the little white plastic box.

He tried to remember what Corey Lyle had said at the Fellowship meeting last night.
Fear is the enemy of perception. When you embark on the last and greatest adventure of your life
—
keep your senses open!

His senses were open, and terror was sluicing through them.

Dear Lord
, he prayed,
I’m a scared-shitless sinner and I’m never going to get through this without your help.

At that moment a red-breasted cardinal sailed down from a tree and lighted on the pickup hood. Walter’s jaw dropped. He realized that little bird was a sign from the Almighty.

I hope you mean it, Lord, because I’m taking that for a go-ahead.

He raised the Polaroid to his lips and kissed it. He moved the switch on the little white box ninety degrees clockwise, closing the circuit with a faint click.

The second hand of his watch touched twelve.

“Hello, God.” Walter Egan pressed the detonator button.

At 9:07
A.M.,
simultaneous explosions with the combined force of nine hundred tons of TNT ripped through the Medicaid office, the day care center, and the garage of the White Plains Post Office Building. Eighty-nine government employees and children were killed and over two hundred were injured. It was the worst peace-time disaster in the United States in eighty-five years.

TWO

Three years ago

Tuesday after Labor Day

L
IEUTENANT VINCENT CARDOZO STOOD
in the doorway of the Park Avenue bedroom, seeing the crime scene with his own eyes before technicians and photographers could stomp all over it.

The dead woman lay on the canopied bed beneath a comforter, her head propped on two pillows. Her skin was yellow. Her gray hair fanned out on the lace-fringed pillowcase. She’d never shown the gray publicly. A third pillow, curiously hollowed, had been placed beside her left arm.

Cardozo stepped across the doorsill into a whispering light that had the texture of fine rain. One foot fell with a click on polished oak parquet. The next fell silently on a deep-blue Persian rug. Slipping his hands into a pair of thin plastic gloves, he stepped around a bentwood rocker with a knitted afghan neatly hung over its back. He stopped three feet from the bed.

The woman’s eyes were shut. Her lips were parted, the line of the mouth relaxed, almost smiling. A speck of orange clung to the lower lip.

A half-filled tumbler sat on the nightstand. Cardozo bent and sniffed. Orange-colored, but not orange juice. Carrot. Pungent, sweet, just a shade short of repulsive.

The telephone had been knocked from the tabletop. The receiver lay on the floor, and periodically it gurgled like a strangling duck. Cardozo did not pick it up.

He scanned the room. The walls were painted soft violet, hung with richly framed landscapes and flowers and sunsets. The moss-velvet curtains were drawn, except for a window overlooking a dark courtyard. Even for four thousand dollars a month maintenance, even if you were a former Secretary of the United States Treasury, you couldn’t buy sun in a Manhattan courtyard.

Bottles of perfumes and lotions were neatly organized and displayed on a triptych-mirrored dressing table. A carved standing lamp cast a glowing circle of light on a faceless, curly-topped wig stand. He smiled.
That
was the woman whom newsmen had loved to photograph.

A tiny ormolu clock ticked softly on a small leather-topped desk. Cut flowers drooped from a narrow porcelain vase. An engraved crystal paperweight rested on a stack of unopened mail. A folio-size silk-bound engagement book lay open to the preceding week. The pages were blank.

He turned to the present week. There was only one entry, and it was for today:
Tuesday, September 8. Lunch, 1 P.M.
—
Jack
.

He searched past and future weeks. All blank.

He glanced up at the sound of a footstep. A very young-looking woman in the uniform of a New York City cop stood in the shadow of the doorway. She had tried to butch up her appearance by cutting her hair short, using no makeup, and clenching her jaw. He recognized Sergeant Britta Bailey from his precinct.

“Lieutenant—this is Jack Briar.” Her voice trembled, and Cardozo suspected that this might be her first homicide. “Mr. Briar found the bodies.”

A tall, ponytailed man in his thirties held out a hand. The hand was shaking badly and he had swollen, shell-shocked eyes.

“I’m very sorry,” Cardozo said.

Jack Briar nodded. “Thank you.”

“We’ll need a statement. Would you wait for me in the living room?”

Cardozo waited till Briar was gone. “There’s another body?”

Officer Britta Bailey nodded. She led him down a carpeted corridor through a high-ceilinged sitting room filled with antique needlepoint furniture and beaded lamps and age-spotted mirrors. With tasseled velvet curtains shutting out the bright September day, it had the clutter of an antique shop. Cardozo had heard rumors that former Treasury Secretary John Briar and his wife had profited from the bailout of a dozen Midwestern savings and loans. The sounds of traffic surging by down on Park Avenue seemed light-years away.

They went down a long hallway, the walls covered with framed photos of John Briar grinning at long-forgotten dignitaries. A uniformed cop stood outside a door. His face looked as though he’d just been force-fed a plateful of rat gizzards. Cardozo felt a trickle of foreboding. He pushed the door open.

He wrinkled his nose. A rancid odor floated in the dank, warm air.

He reached for the wall switch and flicked.

On the oriental carpet by the bed, crumpled between the lion’s paw of a black marble table and the silk seat of a toppled lyre-back chair, John Briar lay faceup in a scattering of books and magazines, shattered lamps and feathers. A goose-down pillow had burst and he had pulled it and the bedsheets with him.

His face was the color of yellow chalk. Beneath an unbelted satin robe, his body was appallingly skinny; ribs showed like white welts. His lips and nipples had drained of pigment. Thinning jet-black hair was slicked back from a high, amazed forehead. The roots were silver. A lump of hair-weave had matted halfway up the tangled strands. Mouth and eyes gaped in a scream of silent terror.

Cardozo felt his nerves clench. He wasn’t the block of ice he used to be. Reality was landing punches that he’d have blocked five years before.

He took his notebook from his jacket pocket and began jotting.

Sergeant Britta Bailey rapped on the open door. “Lieutenant, the crime scene team is here.”

Six dark-suited men and a woman hurried into the room. They snapped open their black carrying cases and went to work, collecting stain samples, dusting for latent fingerprints, searching with infrared light for suspicious fibers and oils and dirt and stains. With their silent purposefulness they reminded Cardozo of starlings gathering in a dead apple tree. Two men from the medical examiner’s office dragged a black plastic body bag into the room, straps trailing on the rug.

Cardozo stepped out of their way and crossed to the door. “You said you have a suspect in custody?”

Sergeant Bailey nodded. “If you’re a football fan, get ready for a jolt.”

She took him down another hallway and through a dining room, where the table was laid for six with linen and silver and china and crystal. Two uniformed officers stepped aside.

“I used to worship this guy,” she said. “Seriously.”

She pushed open a swinging door. They stepped into a dining room-size kitchen.

A heavyset man sat at the butcher-block table sucking spaghetti from a five-gallon pot. His fork and spoon made hungry scraping sounds on the stainless steel. His dirty blond hair needed a cut badly. He wore a loose khaki shirt, cotton trousers, and Top-Siders. Underneath all that loose cloth a lot of muscle moved and a lot more was held in reserve.

“Hello, Mickey.” Cardozo had never met Mickey Williams before, but he knew the face from photos and TV ten years back, when Williams had been a star running back for the Houston Oilers. Cardozo opened his wallet and flashed his ID. “Vince Cardozo, Twenty-second Precinct. I’d like to talk to you.”

Williams’s eyes came up and swung around, death-trance brown with icy black dots. He grinned. “Have a seat.” The voice was soft. A thick hand went out and pushed back a chair.

Cardozo sat. “How long have you been in this apartment, Mickey?”

Williams shifted. “Three, four days.”

Cardozo sensed something seriously out of whack. The voice was pitched like a child’s. The words were toneless, the affect flat.

“Are you aware that there are two dead people on the premises?”

Williams nodded. “Yes, sir, I’m aware of that. Johnny and Amalia.”

“Friends of yours?”

“Good friends. He was.”

“How many hours have you known of their deaths?”

“Since they died. I killed them.”

Cardozo angled his green Honda Civic into the alley. Britta Bailey held open the passenger door.

Mickey Williams, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun, stumbled into a stack of A-frame crowd-control barriers. His face colored. “Sorry about that.” He crouched and began restacking.

Funny guy
, Cardozo thought.
Doesn’t blink an eye at murdering two defenseless old people but goes to pieces when he makes a mess in an alley.
“Don’t worry about it now.” He steered Williams up the steps of the century-old East 63rd Street precinct building. One of the green glass globes was busted and the ironwork was rusting and the painted bricks were peeling.

Sergeant Bailey followed, a hand on her holstered service revolver.

The inside of the precinct was every bit as dingy as the exterior. Cardozo waved to the lieutenant working the complaint desk. Cops prided themselves on their cool, but not even ten-year men were immune to celebrity worship, and the lieutenant did a double take at the sight of the Houston Oilers’ former star.

“Come on.” Cardozo hurried Williams up the steel-banistered staircase. “Before they start asking for your autograph.”

“You kidding?” Williams had a wistful, “if only” look. “Nobody remembers me.”

“They’re going to remember you now.”

The marble steps leading to the third floor smelled of their weekly ammonia bath, but the cracks were grit-caked and filthy. On a bench in the hall a detective was taking a statement from a bag lady with Park Avenue diction.

“What’s this city coming to?” she wailed. “Twelve-year-old children carrying automatics on the Lexington Avenue
local
!”

Cardozo nodded. “You’re absolutely right, darling.” He opened a door and gestured Williams into the detective unit squad room. Mickey Williams’s legs and butt so stretched his seersucker trousers that the pocket linings showed as white half-moons.