F Train (10 page)

“But,” Frank said. “Big but. No reason for wiping out people with no connection to each other. So he's after a pair. Or one in a pair. Or the loner.”

“Right,” said Flo. “He hits his target. Or targets. And the others are collateral damage, regrettable, but necessary. In fact, maybe even not so regrettable, because the extras only make our job that much tougher.”

“You're right,” Marty said. “These crab cakes are delicious.” He helped himself to seconds. “Got to take my kids here, they'd love this.”

“And don't forget more seaweed,” said Frank. “It makes all the difference.”

Flo added more seaweed. “The careful planning here. The executioner has been following his target. He knows he—or she—will be on the subway. And he even knows when. He can't do all that alone. He's got to have helpers. And there have to be ways they link up.”

Frank nodded. “They're on their cells. Encrypted. Throwaways.”

“They get on the F downtown, maybe Borough Hall, maybe before. Maybe even together, but I guess probably not. They get on separately and for now I'll go with two of them. They didn't get on after Borough Hall, there's nothing on the station tapes after that. They step off at Smith and Ninth right into the snowstorm. Fade to white. Is the canal down there already frozen?”

“Not yet. We just saw it an hour ago.”

“Chemicals and the bottles that held chemicals,” Flo said. “They could've thrown those into the canal, whatever they had left.”

Frank waved his chopsticks. “Used to be the Gowanus was nothing but chemicals. Drop a match in it and blew-eee. More than a few bodies, too. But no fish.”

Flo leaned back in her chair. “For me, at least now, it boils down to an unavoidable question. Why Reilly? Why would someone want to kill a Bureau special agent? Unforgiving vengeance is all the killers are asking for, if the Bureau ever takes over.”

“Right,” said Frank. “Instead of only ordinary schleppers like us.”

They let the remark seep in. They knew that solving this case was also about their sense of self-worth. Pursuing the most brutal perpetrators was a fuel driving them forward. They weren't working for anyone's ideological or religious agenda. They found their own places in the world far from politicians and media and financial ambition. And this was still the best place for them to be, regardless.

“How about the Russian?” Marty said. “He could have ticked some people off. Besides his wife. Maybe when he was locked up in Dannemora.”

Frank finished off a shrimp dumpling. “And then maybe they have the Bastards to deal with. Could be as bad as the Bureau, those guys, even worse.”

“Definitely worse,” said Flo. “We're not excluding the Russians.”

“And those post office guys?” Frank said.

Flo put her chopsticks down. “Ordinary Joes, nothing really unusual about either of them. So far. Sangiamo, the fat guy, married, two kids in New Utrecht High. And his mother's always lived with them. He used to own a pizza joint in Bensonhurst, then went bust, maybe eating too much of his own stuff. Worked years paying off the sharks for all his loans. Known as ‘a big bag of bullshit' at GPO, but basically an ineffective, harmless guy. Always his momma's boy. The black guy, Samuel Charters, works with Sangiamo. Married, a kid at Brooklyn College, another in Brooklyn Law. He had some big insurance policies, so his wife is cleaning up. He played the market every spare minute he had, his nose was in the stock tables. Basically, a plugger. His wife, Annie, leads the choir at the Second Baptist Church of the Heavenly Host in Bed-Stuy, where she grew up. Ordinary Joes, both these guys.”

Frank shook his head. “Except they worked at the PO. And we know how crazy some of them can be.”

“Postal killers,” Flo said. “Exactly that, just crazy. They flip out. They're hardly ever careful planners. And they're always loners. The mayor's kind of guy, his magic rabbit plucked out of a hat.”

Frank nodded. “The solitary wacko he's so fond of. So we're back to John James Reilly.”

Flo said, “What we know so far—and no thanks to the Bureau—is he covered some foreign delegations at the UN Which means, he could tail. He could read mountains of transcripts and translations and spot what was valuable. Analyze the few treasures he found under tons of useless information. And he could follow it up. He could talk, he was gifted. Even better, he could win confidence and get others to talk. Because he knew when to stay silent. A good listener. He was ambitious. He must have run some big risks. So we're back with the Bureau, dependent on whatever they're willing to tell us.”

“Who gets the honor?” Frank said.

Marty looked at Flo. “You?”

“I should. And I will. But we don't hold our breath betting on the Bureau. They got the president on their side and there's no telling what he's up to or what he'll do next. Always ready to interfere, his kind, anytime there's an opportunity to play tough and strut. And when, inevitably, the chief screws up, he can blame the Bureau. Or blame New York City. Always somebody they can destroy. The Bureau's got to be thinking this. The president can turn the F train massacre completely political, out of nowhere, out of thin air, just make it all up. My guess? The Bureau people want to distance themselves from their late colleague. Further, the better. John James Reilly, renegade special agent, rebels like him, they're always trouble, too ambitious, cocky daredevils out of control. Like that Deep Throat guy way back when. He was Bureau, too, and a big shot high up. Total loose cannon. Anyway, that's my take. But it's no excuse. No matter what, don't worry, I go to the Bureau.”

Silence. They stared out at the arctic wastes enveloping Smith Street.

“Pretty godawful out there,” Flo said.

Marty leaned over and wiped the window. “Below zero, what the paper predicts, with the windchill factor.”

Gingerly, Frank started a last cup of hot jasmine tea. “Another gravedigger's ass.”

More silence. And the weight of the frozen city pressing in on them. Deaths on subways, in the streets, killings in the earliest hours, sufferings endured, families devastated, women tortured by betrayal, and the city pushed on relentlessly, wrapped in swirling snow, wintry gusts pounding into the expectations of three homicide detectives finishing their tea in the Lemon Grass restaurant, Smith Street, Brooklyn.

8:40
P.M.

Flo Ott wasn't a regular patron of Brooklyn bars, but here she was in another gin joint.

She found bars anywhere to be generally sad places, one of the few pontifications from Howard Gerald, PhD, with which she concurred.

But homicide investigations sometimes led her—and her bar crawl native guide, Frank Murphy of the rock-sized fists—through strings of saloons just as unavoidably as victims' bodies stopped off on coroners' autopsy tables before ending their journeys in graves. Throughout Flo's pursuit of truth, bars and murders were too often natural complements.

The cocktail bar in the downtown Brooklyn Marriott was large and did a good business. As in most hotel bars, prices at the Marriott were on the high side, but not as stiff as in Manhattan.

Bucky Skelly, one of several bartenders, had been working there since his retirement from the NYPD Brooklyn a year before.

A crowd of customers clustered at one end of the bar near the restaurant. The opposite end next to the lounge was quiet, only one customer. Skelly was changing glasses for the man and pouring him a double vodka and lime on the rocks as Flo Ott and Frank Murphy sidled up onto nearby stools.

Skelly was expecting them. For Flo, he built a fresh lemon-and-lime tonic topped with mint, and for Frank he poured a bottle of Harpoon ale. “To your health.” He tapped the bar with his knuckles, indicating these were on the house. Skelly was a large, darkly Celtic-looking man with an unsmilingly severe block-of-beef face and a Marine Corps burr of gray hair. “Take your time here,” he said. “I got a whole shift ahead of me.” Although he was talking to Flo and Frank, both detectives had the impression his words were also meant for the other customer at their end of the bar, the man sitting with his elbows on the polished teak, holding his glass with both hands in front of his face, peering into it with an anxious look like a fortune-teller seeing something dim but undeniably dreadful in a clouded crystal ball.

The man was short and wiry, his face watchful and intelligent. He wore a navy cashmere blazer, pearl gray silk tie, Gauloise-blue shirt.

Flo didn't think he looked like the type who spent a lot of time sitting around bars drinking alone. But New York was always like that, full of unexpected types.

“You expect them soon?” Flo said to Skelly.

“The Russians?” he said. “Later, if they show up at all. They usually sit in the back of the lounge, right over there.”

The lounge, on the other side of a glass wall right behind them, looked almost half as large as a basketball court. Tables for two lined three sides and in the center were three isolated islands for larger groups, each with a long sofa, coffee table, several armchairs. The lounge was carpeted and quiet, too brightly lit for intimacy, more like a caterer's hall than a cozy rendezvous spot.

Bucky Skelly lowered his voice and leaned forward over the bar. “The Russians usually take over that last couch section, opposite end from the entrance out to the lobby. They don't mind the bright lights, it's like they're hiding out in full view. The old guys sit on the couch with their backs to the entrance, and the young muscle face them, watching the door. It's the quietest spot, right in the rear there. And the Russians take it over. They even pay us to move people.”

The lone drinker nearby laughed, nervously. “They take over any goddamn thing they like,” he said, and raised his glass to Flo and Frank. “Hi, I'm Paul…Kaner.” He let his voice drop when he spoke his last name, the way celebrities sometimes do when they're trying to appear modest, and he enunciated each syllable as though he were releasing perfectly formed smoke rings into the cocktail bar air.

Flo glanced at Bucky Skelly for an explanation, and the bartender regarded her and Frank in a strange way as if to give the impression he approved of the man's intervention and they would do well to listen to him.

“I have,” Kaner said, “or rather I had an antiques store on Atlantic Avenue. Strictly quality, no fakes. The must-shop stop for every home owner in the Heights and the Slope.” He released a soft, sibilant, self-deprecating half-laugh. “Every home owner with taste, that is. A respected business.” He sipped his vodka. “The shop still looks like it used to look, it's still there. Only it's no longer mine.”

“What happened?” Flo said.

“Our friends from off the steppes are what happened, the Cossacks are what happened. Ask Bucky.”

“They made him sell,” said Bucky. “The dead one, Davidov, was in on it.”

“In?” A sudden note of anguish choked Paul Kaner's voice. He drained his drink and pushed his empty glass forward. “Another round, Bucky, for all of us, please.”

“This one's on us,” Frank said. “We owe.”

“Most kind.” Paul Kaner watched as Bucky the bartender fixed their drinks. “That's better. Just please don't think I go around wherever, hustling drinks.” He held up his full glass ceremoniously, his hand tensed and slightly trembling. “Bucky and I go way back, don't we, my friend? Never a burglary or a stickup in my shop, and I had Bucky to thank for that. Until the Cossacks came along and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it. Not even Bucky and his old friends. The Russians got the whole shebang, and you better believe the dead one was in on it, right up to his shifty motherfucking eyeballs. I've got a confession to make. It often happens on your third double vodka.” He took a long sip of his drink. “But first, tell me something…you ever kill anyone?”

“What?” Flo was unsure whether she'd heard him correctly.

“Have you ever,” Paul Kaner repeated, each word a perfect smoke ring, “killed anyone?” He resumed his fortune-teller's pose, holding his iced glass with both hands in front of his eyes, gazing into it as though looking for an image of someone being killed.

Flo didn't answer. Her business wasn't his business.

For the second time, Paul Kaner released a small, sibilant half-laugh. Another sip of vodka and lime, and he explained: “Truth told, it's certainly a question you could ask of a lot of people though, isn't it, not just cops. Doctors, nurses, all those veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan and from God only knows where else. Not to mention drunk drivers and Russian ‘businessmen.' Hell, why not take tobacco company lawyers, they've killed millions. And drug companies, God save us from those bloodsuckers. Then of course we have the good old liquor
manufacturers.”
He raised his glass. “I mean where do you stop, really? When you come right down to it, exactly where do we draw the line? There must be killers all over the place. It's a pretty crowded field, isn't it, so what's just…one more killer?”

Flo looked questioningly at Bucky Skelly, and while the bartender didn't say a word, the look in his eyes showed Flo he wanted her and Frank Murphy to hold their fire and play along with Paul Kaner. There'd be a payoff.

“Murder is a serious crime,” Flo said. “Well defined in law.”

“No doubt, and I don't mean to cast aspersions on your profession. Or make your job any harder than it must already be. I'm just saying that, as a killer, I'd be one of who knows how many. And in some pretty esteemed company actually. Just look at some of our presidents. Maybe if that boy from Texas had fallen off the wagon, he wouldn't have enjoyed killing so much. He could have just drunk himself to death and spared God knows how many people out there around the planet. So back to brass tacks: what I'm really driving at here is as a killer I'd have lots of fine company now, wouldn't I?”