My cell phone rang a little after three o’clock that morning. Like most calls that come at ungodly hours, it was not good. It was from Neil Fabretti, the chief of detectives himself.
“Mike, sorry to bother you. I just got off the phone with the new mayor’s people. The gist of it is they’re beyond pissed at the pace of the investigation and want whoever’s on it off it and someone new put on pronto.”
Though I was a little stunned to actually hear it, part of me had been waiting for this call. I’d been on high-profile cases before, and I knew that now with several people dead, including the mayor, tens of thousands of people displaced, and millions more on edge, the pressure to do something, even unfairly sacrificing a convenient scapegoat like me, was immense.
Good investigations were about being patient and meticulous, but that wasn’t exactly a popular sentiment, I knew from reading yesterday’s New York Post headline, WHAT THE #$%@ IS BEING DONE?
When you lost the usually NYPD-friendly Post, you knew you were in deep trouble.
“Is that right?” I finally said.
“Yeah, well, I told them to pound sand,” Fabretti continued, surprising me. “I said that we couldn’t just go shuffling investigators around because of the pressure of the twenty-four/seven news cycle. I told them you were the best we had and that I was behind you one hundred percent, yada, yada, yada.
“But there’s a big meeting scheduled for one o’clock this afternoon at the commissioner’s office, and you need to be there for the investigation’s update with bells on, if you know what I’m saying. Nothing personal, but the reality is, if you want to keep being the lead on this, Mike, you got about ten hours to make something drop.”
“I’ll be there. Thanks for the ‘look out’ and the heads-up, Chief,” I said before I hung up.
Wide awake now, I knew it was time to make my own 3:00 a.m. calls to see if there had been any developments. Doyle and Arturo didn’t pick up, but I caught Brooklyn Kale burning the midnight oil at the NYPD intelligence desk we’d been assigned.
“Mike, thank goodness. I was just going to call you,” she said.
“What have you got, Brooklyn?”
“Something good for a change. We got video of the guys—two guys—bringing the EMP device into East Eighty-First Street.”
“Video?” I said. “But I thought the super said that the on-site computer where they store the feed was fried with the EMP.”
“It was, but we canvassed at the high-rise across the street, and it turns out their video is run by a national firm that backs up everything off-site. The security firm sent the film over about an hour ago. It’s beautiful. You can see the guys bringing in the box, Mike…the plates on the van they were driving—the whole shebang. Check your e-mail. I just sent a clip of it to you.”
I opened the video.
It was incredible.
I thought it was going to be the two men from the video of the train tunnel bombing, but it wasn’t. I watched in color as two young guys in a white van, college kids, maybe, pulled into the garage next to the building and unloaded the metal device onto a hand truck.
“The plates on the van look funny to you?” I said to Brooklyn as I hit Pause. “They’re New York State, but what are they? Commercial?”
“Yep. Already ran them. The van is from a Hertz location downtown—or at least its plates are,” Brooklyn said. “Doyle’s on the phone with the manager, who’s on his way in. The manager said you can’t rent without a credit card and a driver’s license, so we’re looking good on a potential lead there. I’ll hit you with it the second Doyle calls me back and I hear anything.”
“Great job, Brooklyn,” I said.
“One more thing, Mike, that just came up. May or may not be related,” she said. “Two young men were just found shot dead at a construction site on Roosevelt Island. I called the desk sergeant at the public safety department on the island, and he told me they don’t have ID on them, but the general description seems about the same as these two guys on the video. You want me to head out there or stay here coordinating?”
A lead was a lead, I knew from experience. Even if the suspects were no longer in a position to talk to us, they could still provide us with valuable information.
“No, you stay there,” I said. “I’ll grab Agent Parker and check it out.”