Bad Blood (16 page)

As two other men began to shovel piles of rubble, the hog with the hose started to spray it all down.

KD asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

Teddy interrupted him, “They gotta keep the crap wet or we’ll choke to death. It’s routine.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve got to sift through this again when we get it upstairs,” the detective said.

Teddy raised one of his arms to stop the guys. “I thought you were finished.”

KD looked to Mike for help. “We’ve gone through it twice the best we can in this light. We got a couple of tarps spread out behind the crane up in the yard. This all has to be examined more carefully.”

“What have you found so far?”

“Pieces of flesh,” KD said. “Can’t even smell it in here over the dynamite.”

“Salt and pepper?” Mike asked, referring to the mixed races of the victims.

“Yeah. Got some teeth, some strips of clothing. I’m telling you, shoot me the next time I complain about working a scene in some roach-filled ten-by-
twelve room in a flophouse. This explosive stuff is a nightmare.” KD pointed down the tunnel behind me. “The bomb squad makes the focal point of the blast about twenty feet back, but the fragments go a helluva long way from that.”

“You locate any device? Got any ideas?”

KD bent over and with his gloved hand lifted a stick of dynamite from a cardboard box between the two sets of tracks. It was about eight inches long and one and a half inches in diameter, wrapped in a waxed paper that seemed to be oil-stained from the nitroglycerin inside.

“We’ve got some detonating cord in the mess,” he said. “It was probably laced through the sticks of dynamite. All on its way to the lab.”

Mike looked around at the remaining piles of debris. “So what do you want these guys to do?”

“Shovel it onto the car and take it to the conveyor belt,” KD said, his annoyance obvious in his tone. “I just don’t want them hosing it down yet, destroying any evidence.”

Mike nodded to Teddy, and the men resumed their work.

KD stood next to the second muck car, running the beam of his flashlight back and forth along its length as the rubble was thrown onto it. Something glinted from the ashes and he called out for the guys to stop.

“What is it?” Mike asked, stepping forward to watch as KD picked up the object.

“Looks like a belt buckle.” He held it up for us to see, a silvery metal clasp with bits of shredded leather extending from its sides.

“Give me that light again,” Mike said, pulling a pair of rubber gloves from his rear pocket and practically sticking his nose into the soot-filled car. “Right here.”

KD focused his powerful beam over Mike’s shoulder, as I squatted beside him.

I covered my mouth with the plastic mask that hung around my neck as I stared at the thick, white finger that sat atop the pile.

“Bag it, KD. It’s no bomb that ripped that digit off,” Mike said. “Look at it, Coop.”

He scratched the ashes away from it, exposing the tip of the dirt-encrusted nail down to the beefy knuckle that had caught his attention.

“What do—”

“Too even. Damage from an explosion would be much more ragged. My money’s on a serrated knife,” Mike said. “Somebody sliced this guy’s finger off while he was still breathing. Sawed it off like a hunk of steak.”

“What do you figure, Mercer?” Mike asked. “You think the minute she’s through making love, Coop gets out of bed and heads for the locker room?”

Mercer was pouring drinks in my den as I walked in from the bedroom. I had changed into a collared T-shirt and jeans and was toweling off my wet hair. “Clean is good, Mr. Chapman,” he said. “I wasn’t down in the shaft half as long as you two and I can’t wait to get that smell out of my nose either.”

“You take more showers than any broad I know. Don’t you like it with a little dirt on your uniform, like you just stole second, sliding into base? Be a little daring?”

“I’m taking a break from daring for the long weekend. What did the ME say?”

“Ah, Ms. Cooper is going into her Vineyard tranquillity mode. A walk on the beach, late-afternoon massage, sunset swim. Enough to make you forget the island of Manhattan is about to implode. You remember the drill, don’t you, Mercer?”

“This is all about Joan’s wedding, guys. It’s not too late to change your minds. I can make room for you at the house.”

Joan had come to know Mike and Mercer almost as well as I did. And although the small guest list was a mix of her family and friends, she had sincerely wanted them there with us. Mike was still trying to cope with Val’s sudden death when the invitation came and told Joan that he didn’t want his mood — gloomy and remote — to put a pall on her happiness. Mercer wouldn’t think of going without Mike.

Mike steered the subject back to the water-tunnel death investigation. “Dr. Kestenbaum says antemortem amputation. Hemorrhage in the adjacent tissue. Believes it’s this one,” he said, flexing the first knuckle next to his thumb. “Duke Quillian — that’s a confirmation on the DNA from the mobile lab — was alive when that finger took a walk from the rest of his hand.”

“Any prints on file?” I asked.

“Nope. Never been collared.”

“You figure how we missed a connection to Brendan yet?”

“I’ve been going over and over the possible links all day, since I heard the news. It intrigues me as much as it does you. But there’s not even one damn phone call that suggests that the brothers talked to each other in the last year.”

“Any word on the tire iron?” I asked, sitting on the sofa with my Scotch.

“Like the proverbial hound’s tooth, Alex,” Mercer said. “Nothing on it.”

“Don’t take it too personally, kid,” Mike said, switching the channel from the news to the final few minutes of
Jeopardy!
“That was just a get-out-
of-our-hole signal to all of us interlopers.”

“Those hogs don’t want us down there,” Mercer said. “It’s like they think they’re going to handle this entire investigation themselves. What happened in Water Tunnel Number Three stays in Water Tunnel Number Three. No one we talked to saw people near the shaft at the time the damn thing fell, there’s no video cameras on top, and the cops were all so busy keeping the reporters out of the yard that they weren’t any better at figuring what went on.”

“We’ve got subterranean jurisdiction, don’t we?” Mike asked, restoring the sound with the clicker just as Alex Trebek turned to the big board for the last question.

“Battaglia? If there was an intergalactic crime and a light beam from another planet bounced off the sidewalk in Manhattan, he’d claim jurisdiction. Six hundred feet down? Not an issue.”

“I’m counting on it. Nothing worse than finding a suspect, convicting him of the bombing, and watching while some legal asshole takes this all the way to the Supremes claiming we got no standing south of the subway system. Those are your people, Coop. That’s what they do with a friggin’ law degree.”

“Feathered Friends,” Trebek said. “We haven’t seen this subject in a while, gentlemen. Feathered Friends.”

“I’m out,” Mike said, getting up and walking toward the kitchen. “I’m a city boy. The only bird I know is the pigeon. DNA all over my car and occasionally on the top of my head.”

“Twenty bucks,” I said. “Everybody plays.”

“Speaking of birds, you got anything to eat? Cheese and crackers?”

“Not even that. Sorry. I’ll order in from P. J. Bernstein’s whenever you’re ready.”

“Known as the Lord God bird for its stunning plumage and great wingspan, it was thought until recently to be extinct,” Trebek read aloud from the square blue answer board.

Two of the contestants couldn’t even fake their expressions into a bluff. The third scrawled a short answer on his screen.

“You got it, Coop?” Mike asked, leaning in the doorway of the room.

“Not a clue.”

“Peking duck,” he said.

“Great wingspan and stunning plumage?”

“Not Trebek’s bird. The question is, what do I want Mercer to buy me for dinner?”

“You two need to get a little more religion in your lives,” Mercer said as Trebek subtracted two thousand dollars from the winnings of the Nashville firefighter who had taken a stab at the dodo. “What is the ivory-billed woodpecker?”

“The Lord what?” Mike asked. “You bird-watching on the side?”

“You have to know the swamps and tupelos of Alabama,” Mercer said. “My granny Wallace told me all about it when I was a kid. Got its name ’cause that’s what folk use to cry out when they saw the creature. She had a stuffed one in the attic that she got at a flea market, used to scare me half to death.
Lord God bird
is right.”

“You can do better than dinner from the deli, can’t you now, Mercer? Shall we upgrade to Chinese?” Mike asked.

“Fine with me,” Mercer said, and I opened the drawer of the side table to find the Shun Lee Palace menu.

Mike’s beeper vibrated on the bar as I took a food order from each of them. There was no point in placing it until he returned the call. He stepped into the living room and came back several minutes later.

“Don’t light any candles or dust off the crystal, Coop. I’m out of here.”

Mercer was on his feet at once. “Where to?”

“Westchester County Sheriff’s Office. Two guys were picked up an hour ago at the Kensico Dam,” Mike said. “It’s a major stop on the Croton Reservoir system that brings water to the city. Used wire cutters to get through the chain-link fence.”

“Sandhogs?” I asked.

“Hardly. Saudi nationals. One of them had a map of the entire system, right down to the hole on West Thirtieth Street.”

“Explosives?”

“No sign of any blast equipment on or around them, and the driver who was waiting for them got away. They’re not talking, but someone called in an anonymous tip fifteen minutes ago. Says the men were planning a chemical attack — dumping a bacterial pathogen in the New York City water supply.”

I had cleared security for the nine-thirty flight from La Guardia to Martha’s Vineyard. It was Friday morning — still no update from Mike — and although I had looked forward to my friend Joan Stafford’s wedding for several months, it was hard to think about anything except the events of the last twenty-four hours.

Most of the passengers in the lounge were watching the television monitor that was mounted on the wall. The same reporter who had covered the tunnel-explosion story, Julie Kirsch, was now on location on a thickly wooded hillside in Valhalla, the Westchester suburb in which Kensico was located.

“Too early to know yet,” Kirsch said, in response to a question that the anchor had posed. “New York City police officials have been working through the night with local authorities to get answers to some of those questions, but there’s just no way to say whether the two incidents are connected.”

Glancing at her notes, Kirsch went on, “While the threat of biological and chemical terrorism has been of great concern to the government, most experts are telling us today that the risk of individuals succeeding at some kind of deadly mass dissemination is quite small.”

“Why is that, Julie?” the studio voice interrupted.

“Simply because of the enormous volume of water that flows into the city from upstate. The counterterrorist agents I’ve talked to this morning agree that the toxic effect of the chemical would most likely be diluted by the billions of gallons before any real harm was done. I’d like to take the viewers back to the news of the grim discovery made inside the tunnel in Manhattan yesterday.”

Most likely
were not the two most encouraging words I’d rely on before drinking from the tap in my apartment anytime soon.

Julie Kirsch’s cross-examiner pressed for more detail. “Before you do, would you tell us exactly what kind of agent might be used for such a chemical attack? We all recall the deadly sarin gas in Tokyo.”

“Well, I’ve been asked not to alarm our viewers unnecessarily,” she said, hesitating before she went on. “For example, one gram of typhoid culture dropped into a water system would have an impact roughly equal to forty pounds of potassium cyanide. Or, a person drinking a few sips of untreated water from a reservoir this size that had been contaminated by
Salmonella typhi
would become deathly ill.”

I was grateful when the U.S. Airways gate agent interrupted the news program with her boarding announcement.

The fifty-minute flight over Long Island Sound on the cloudless morning offered spectacular views of the seascape that was so familiar to me from years of commuting to my favorite retreat — the coastline of the North Fork, Montauk Point, the short hop to Block Island, and the descent to the Vineyard as the forty-two-seat turboprop crossed Cuttyhunk and circled the cliffs of Aquinnah.

My caretaker had parked my convertible at the airport, and I put the top down for the short ride to my home. The path curved alongside the bike trails that cut through the forests of West Tisbury, then climbed the gently winding slopes of Chilmark, lined with stone walls that had been built hundreds of years ago to separate each farmer’s land from the next.

I was so pleased to be hosting the wedding for Joan and Jim, even though it was a bittersweet reminder that my own engagement had ended so tragically shortly after I’d graduated from law school. Once it wouldn’t have been possible for me to think of standing on the site where Adam and I were to have been married and celebrating someone else’s happiness. But in the last couple of years, I had found solace and strength in great friendships, and fortitude from the experiences of the women who entrusted their lives to me every day that I went to work.

I parked next to the barn, pausing before going into the house, looking out over the meadow and the sea, a view that never failed to restore my spirit.

The answering machine was choked with messages. I kicked off my shoes, opened the French doors that led to the deck, and sat on the steps surrounded by pale blue hydrangea bushes while I played them back.

“It’s me. We got here last night. Call me the very minute you get in.” Joan’s voice was as vibrant as she herself had been ever since Jim had proposed.