Resolved, p.9
Resolved, page 9
The FBI man was describing the Unsub now, the “unknown subject” in their queer parlance. A white male, over forty, it seemed, strongly built. This was conjecture, based on the report of witnesses who had survived the explosion that destroyed a Madison Avenue bus. Apparently, the Unsub had boarded the bus at Thirty-fourth Street just before rush hour, shoved a time bomb under his seat, and exited at Fortieth Street. The bus had been crowded, and, of course, all the people who had sat next to him were dead, but an exhaustive canvass of everyone who had been at the Fortieth Street stop at around the right time, together with interviews of the survivors of the bus blast, had produced the sketch now projected on the screen in front of the detectives: a white everyman with a thickish neck, a ball cap, and sunglasses, essentially useless for identification but all they had.
A map of Manhattan next appeared on the screen, marked with the location of the six Manhattan bombs: the courthouse parking lot; Baxter Street; the midtown bus; a subway car at Eighty-Sixth Street; a bakery truck on Greenwich Avenue in the Village; and a movie theater on Lexington and Thirty-Fifth. There did not seem to be a pattern in the targets, the timing of the explosions, or their location. The terror was as random as the weather, its author of no discernable political or religious persuasion.
They had done a psychological profile of him, too. A loner, they thought, not political, a grudge against society, a careful worker, probably college-educated, an American, may have been institutionalized at some point, either between jobs or a nightshift worker. They didn’t think this series of bombing was the work of a foreign terrorist cell. Next, the FBI man talked about the Horowitz connection. Judge Horowitz’s car had been blown up in the courthouse parking lot, killing an officer. Nine days later, the judge had been killed by a large bomb placed underneath a truck on Baxter Street and detonated by radio control as he drove by it in his brand new Lincoln. Theory: Horowitz was the target, and the other explosions were distractions. The judge’s cases had been examined all the way back to his service in municipal court. Any convict he had ever sent to jail and was presently at large had been interviewed. His personal life had been minutely examined. The only halfway interesting suspect was Feisal ibn-Salemeh, presently incarcerated at Auburn, whom Horowitz had sentenced. But ibn-Salemeh seemed to have no contacts outside the prison. An exemplary prisoner, according to the prison, and a useful source of information about terror far from Manhattan. For a number of reasons, the American intelligence community did not wish to put the screws to Mr. ibn-Salemeh, and so the word came down from the highest levels that he was not to be unduly disturbed.
Another chart flashed on the screen. This displayed the names of the fifty-three people who had died in the six explosions, with lines showing how they were connected. There were a lot of lines, unfortunately; there always were. Raney stared at the reproduction of the slide provided with his handout. If six degrees of separation connected any two inhabitants of the planet, it was likely that fifty-six out of the city’s nearly eight million would be connected in some way. It didn’t necessarily mean much, although it had to be checked out. For example, two partners in a jewelry business had been killed in two separate blasts; a man killed in the bakery truck, Hassan Daoud, had once appeared as a witness before Judge Horowitz in a case involving that same ibn-Salemeh. Raney remembered that one—he had been the detective on the case. A minor drug dealer, Jongo S. Wallace, had also been killed in the bakery truck explosion, just walking by on the street. He had also once appeared as a prosecution witness before Horowitz.
The bus and the movie theater had yielded a total of sixteen victims with some connection to the criminal justice system. Raney scanned the names. A couple seemed familiar. Steve Lutz, for one, a lowlife and a part-time snitch. Raney recalled Lutz, a minor character in the drama of the late Felix Tighe, a reluctant prosecution witness. That got him thinking about Mary Chalfonte again. The case was cooling already. All they had was a few white cotton fibers and some could-be-anybody descriptions. Chalfonte seemed clean, no girlfriends they could find, no money troubles, the man seemed both devoted and destroyed by what had happened. So a wandering serial killer had caught up with Mary; she who’d escaped the clutches of one maniac had, through the mysterious workings of chance, been picked by another. Like the people killed in the bombings, bad luck was the only real connection.
The FBI man finished and was replaced by a colleague, who had diagrams of bombs to show. Apparently Manbomber was something of a genius in this line. The devices were all powered by RDX, a military explosive, mixed with plasticizing wax at nine to one, a combination known as Composition A3 that was normally used in artillery shells. Where did it come from was the question. The obvious place to get it was scavenging from military stores, but small quantities could be manufactured in a kitchen, if you knew what you were doing or were very lucky. This guy knew what he was doing. The FBI man guessed that the stuff had been homemade. Acetone peroxide had been used as a booster. This was a dangerous and unstable substance much favored by terrorists the world over. The bombs had been detonated by standard blasting caps, triggered by either timers, radio receivers, or trembler switches. They thought that the devices used had been carefully homemade from parts recovered from junk appliances, and hence untraceable.
The head of the FBI’s terrorism task force, a rock-jawed, graying man named Earl Brannock, now took the podium to sum up. The Unsub was a white American, middle-aged, unemployed or a night-shift worker, probably unmarried. He may have spent time in mental institutions, but was probably quite intelligent, maybe college-educated. He had a high level of technical skill and may have trained in the armed services. The bombings were random and seemed to express nothing more than a general rage at the people and places of Manhattan. He may have had some contact with the criminal justice system. All these leads were being checked out. He wanted the detectives to keep alert, to report any suspicions no matter how far out. We’re going to catch this guy.
After that, the chief of detectives made a brief statement: thank you, thank you, all work together, total commitment by NYPD, spirit of cooperation, know you have a lot to do, but details will be drawn from all detective squads in the city, notifications already on their way. We’re going to catch this guy.
The meeting broke up. On his way out, waiting for the elevator, Raney fell in with Roy Arnolf, a detective he’d worked with in the old days at the Five in lower Manhattan. He remembered that Arnolf had been with the joint FBI-NYPD Antiterrorism Task Force for a couple of years.
“So, Roy, we gonna catch this guy?” he asked.
Arnolf snorted. “Yeah, if someone drops a dime on him or we get real lucky. He tries to rob a bodega with a bomb in his pocket.”
“That’s it?”
“Hey, how else? The explosives are untraceable. Like he said, you can make RDX from common chemicals or smuggle it in. What’re we gonna do, inventory every shell and mine in every military in the world? He’s making the detonators from scratch, just like the Unabomber used to do, and he never would’ve been nailed if he hadn’t sent in that letter to the papers and if his brother hadn’t recognized his particular brand of looney tunes. George Metesky, the Mad Bomber—he wrote letters, and he had a hard-on for Con Ed, so they caught him through employee records. The original Arabs on the World Trade Center were a bunch of amateurs. We traced them through the truck they used. So it’s the usual thing, we get him with snitches or some bonehead mistake. Anyway, all this,” he gestured broadly at the milling detectives, “is for popular consumption, so the bosses can say we’ve got two hundred of our best men on it.”
“So basically you’re saying an arrest is expected soon.”
This raised a sour laugh from Arnolf. The elevator came and they got in and talked about other things for the ride down.
Felix liked the work. He especially liked having a place of his own and spending money and no fixed hours. It was practically the best deal he had ever had since he left his mother’s house. The apartment Rashid had found for him was on Thirty-Sixth and Tenth, a fourth-floor walk-up in what started out as a Hell’s Kitchen tenement, but was now a Clinton studio, mod. kit. strt. vw. He had plenty of new clothes, in a variety of styles—work clothes, business dress, tourist getups. He fancied himself now a master of disguise. He had a blond wig and a false beard, and a number of distinctive hats. Fooling the schmucks of the world had always been one of his prime delights, and now he was being paid to do it, and blow some of them up in the bargain. It was a boy’s dream come true. Why Rashid was employing him in this way he never asked, nor did he care. He thought it had something to do with religion, that Arab shit, although Rashid did not seem to pray or perform any rituals, like the Muslims in the joint did. But who knew what the miserable little fuck got up to? Felix himself had no use for religion, which he conceived as mere lists of things you couldn’t do. His mother had been religious in a way, a devout Satanist, but there they had lists of things that no one else was allowed to do, which you had to do, which sucked, too, as far as Felix was concerned. He had never found an object of worship more worthy than himself.
Rashid was a pain in the ass and would get his when Felix was good and ready, but he had to admit that the bastard knew what he was doing. He had provided Felix with a phony job, at Haskell’s, a heating and cooling contractor where the two Spanish guys worked, which was some kind of front operation. So Felix had pay stubs, and a fake SSN, with which he got his gas, power, and phone turned on. Also, Rashid let him make his own decisions about where and when to bomb, only specifying general targets—a bus, a train. This was to cover the actual revenge targets, Horowitz and some Arab guy who needed to be clipped for some Arab reason. Felix didn’t much care, and he’d applied the method of settling some scores of his own. It was no problem following a particular guy until he boarded a bus or a train, and leaving a package under a nearby seat.
One thing Rashid had taught him that was useful: always use unidentifiable components. He’d found the stout cardboard box behind a liquor store, a long thin one that had held expensive scotch. The stolen bomb slipped neatly into it, and he’d wrapped it with brown paper from grocery bags and strapping tape. There was a tiny hole in one side, through which one could stick a stiff wire and flick the arming switch. He checked his new watch—almost 2:30. He left the apartment with the thing in an athletic bag. He was dressed in green coveralls, a green ball cap with a company logo stitched to it, and work boots—a dumbass on the way to or from some night shift. His car was around the block, a dark blue Crown Vic six years old, but in good shape. Another Rashid purchase, anonymous and efficient. He turned it on and checked the taillights and brakelights. He definitely did not want to give a bored cop some excuse to stop him, even though he was white.
He took the tunnel to Queens, nearly deserted at this hour, and drove at a little under the posted speed limit, making a full stop at every stop sign, to an address in Rego Park, a two-story brick bungalow with a fig tree in the front yard and a statue of the Virgin glowing under the sodium lights. He went through the chain-link gate, propped his package up against the door, armed it, and left. The guy would come out in the morning to get his paper and good night, Irene. Felix wished that he could be there to see it, to see the expression on the cop’s face before it melted off his skull, but he figured you couldn’t have everything.
6
LIEUTENANT JIM RANEY PICKED UP THE CALL ON HIS POLICE radio on his way to work the next morning. They gave the address and said there was one man dead. Raney felt his stomach knot; he knew the address well and could figure out who the dead person was. With siren and lights he made it to Sixty-Sixth Avenue in Rego Park, Queens, in eight minutes, and found fire trucks, an EMS vehicle, blue-and-whites blocking either end of the street, and a couple of unmarked police vehicles. The firefighters were finishing up, coiling their hoses, watched by knots of people from the neighborhood, staring from behind hastily stretched tape lines. There was smoke in the heavy air, a stench of burnt wood and asphalt shingle. Raney parked, clipped his shield to his jacket, and walked toward the house, crunching on broken glass. He noticed that nearly every window on the block had been blown out, giving the rows of modest brick homes the blank-eyed look of tragic masks.
The target house had lost its façade and almost the entire front room. A scorched upright piano sagged over a dark void, from which thin smoke emerged. Most of the ground floor had collapsed into the basement. Raney saw a carpet he recognized, impaled on floorboards. The statue of the Virgin that had stood in the little front yard was lying in scorched pieces. Also in the front yard: a paramedic picking red globs up with tongs and placing them carefully in a yellow rubber body bag. Raney’s gorge heaved and he had to look away and take deep breaths.
“Pretty bad, huh?” said a voice behind him. It was Rafael Beale. Of course! Raney now realized, with something of a shock, that the crime had taken place in his own bailiwick.
“Hell of a blast. Lucky there’s only one vic, but he’s really dead. There isn’t a piece of him wouldn’t go through a one-inch hole. Guy’s name was…” He looked at his notebook.
But Raney had the name: “Pete Balducci.”
“Yeah,” said Beale, surprised. “How did you know?”
“He was my first partner, right after I got my detective shield. In the Five, downtown in the city. He retired like twelve years ago. Christ, I’ve been in that house a thousand times. Shit!”
Randy kicked at a piece of debris.
“Sorry about that, Loo. And the remarks, I didn’t know—”
“That’s okay, Beale. We have anything so far?”
“Not much. I talked to the arson guy from the FD. He’s scrambling around down there in the scene. The special unit from the bomber task force is on route.”
“They think it’s the guy?”
“Well, it’s early yet, but the FD says it was definitely a big, high-explosive-type bomb, like the six we got over in the city. Anything new on all that the other day? At One PP?”
“We’re looking for a white guy, forties, muscular. He might have a hard-on for the criminal justice system, the feds think, but really, bottom line, who the fuck knows? Anything come back on the canvass yet?”
“Nobody saw shit,” replied Beale, “which figures, a neighborhood like this goes to bed early. It looks like the perp came by at night, left the thing by the front door. A motion detector on it…”
Raney cut him off. “Yeah, well, we might as well get back to the house. This case is going over to the task force.”
Beale said something else, but Raney didn’t hear him. The word “random” was buzzing in his mind, a word that Special Agent Bannock had used often in his presentation. Terror was random by definition: that’s what made it terrifying. The universal goal of any terrorist was that no one in the target population be able to predict who might be the next victim. The task force had analyzed the connections among the victims and came up blank. Raney had seen the charts. So it had to be random that Felix Tighe’s ex-wife, and a witness who had testified against him, and the cop who had arrested him had all been killed. Just a coincidence…
“Loo, are you okay?”
Raney snapped out of his reverie. “What?”
“I been talking at you for five minutes and you were someplace else.”
“Sorry, Beale, I was just thinking about Pete. I need to call some people, get with the family and all. He’s got two daughters, grandchildren.”
His eyes drifted over the scene: the crime scene technicians, the firemen, the medics, all picking at the ruin. It seemed mindless and far too weak a response, as measured against the enormity of what had happened. September 11 again, in miniature. At some level he understood that this is what you did because it was all you could do—put things in little labeled bags, a pathetic attempt to reorder chaos. He saw an unmarked van pull up at the head of the street. Three men and a woman emerged, and Raney felt relief, tinged a little with shame.
He said, “Meanwhile, there’s the task force guys. Let’s turn this over and get out of here.”
Marlene is selling a dog to an airport security man from New England. Selling dogs is not something she likes to do particularly, but it’s necessary and she’s good at it. She briefly reflects on how much of her life has been consumed (often she uses the word “ruined” to herself) by tasks where these three things are true. Also, Billy Ireland is impossible at sales. His chief sales tactic is “take it or leave it, asshole”; often they leave it. He regards any criticism of his trainees—real, implied, or imagined—as a personal affront. So Marlene does the selling. It’s not hard, since there is something of a seller’s market in this kind of dog nowadays.
The customer is a big, middle-aged white man with a wary look, and the dog is a medium-sized brown dog, with a black muzzle, floppy ears, and an eager expression. Marlene has noticed this before: the dogs know they are being talked about.
“Well, I don’t know,” says the man. “I was expecting a purebred, you know. Five thousand dollars…that seems steep for a dog that…well, it looks like a mutt.”
“That’s because she is a mutt, Mr. Willowes,” says Marlene. “She’s also a talented bomb sniffer, trained right here. She has a good disposition, she’s only three years old, and she’s a good worker. Aren’t you, Violet?”
Violet agrees with this assessment by wagging her tail. Marlene goes to a wooden filing cabinet and takes from it a waxy red cylinder. “This is commercial dynamite,” she says, “but she’ll find all the conventional military and industrial explosives. I’ll give you a demo.” She takes a tissue from a box on her desk and wipes the dynamite stick, as if polishing it for the Terrorists’ Ball. Then she hands the tissue to Willowes. “There’s a flagstone path outside and a drystone wall on the other side of the yard. Go hide this, and give me a yell.”
