A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Read online

  “Of course you will.”

  Capobianco used his department-issue Blackberry to call his chief, who worked out of the Forensic Investigations Division in Jamaica, Queens. The clerk who answered said the inspector, Rex Brennan, was in with the chief of detectives at One Police Plaza and not to be disturbed. “Hold on,” the clerk said.

  In a minute, the phone rang through without introduction.

  “Gowen here.” Slick how they’d shunted him off. “How you been, Cap?”

  “Just swell.”

  “I heard you were down for the count with the Spanish flu.”

  “Bird flu, actually. I’m all right.”

  “On the job?”

  “Sure, in a manner of speaking. Listen, I was calling Brennan because we got a situation in Times Square.” He coughed—great moment for that. “I thought the mayor and you other big shots should know before the whisper war gets going.”

  “I’m on it. Just heard on the radio. The chief and the captain are in with the mayor. Brennan may darken your door if it gets bad. What can you tell them?”

  “Seems contained.” The lieutenant shared all that he knew. “I’ll be on scene myself in half an hour.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know if anything else is expected of you. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Sure thing.” As if Capobianco had called him directly. Or maybe Gowen really thought he had. Monkey in the middle.

  The current commander of the Bomb Squad ran to the bathroom and splashed some water on his face, went to the closet and pulled out a gray suit. His shirt was open and the slacks unbuttoned and he had one sock on when Jill walked in.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Bombing in Times Square.”

  “Bad?”

  “One dead.”

  “Who called you?”

  “Kahn.”

  “Let him handle it. He’s capable.”

  “It’s high profile.”

  “Tough. You’re not going. You’re too sick.”

  “Jill!”

  “I mean it, Joe. Don’t be stupid.”

  “They’re expecting me.”

  “He called here? The land line?”

  Capobianco blinked.

  Jill went to the phone and pressed star-six-nine. “Sandy, it’s Jill.” Pause. “You, too. Listen, Cap can’t make it today. He’s running a hundred and four. I stepped out for a sec and I caught him getting dressed, but he looks like death warmed over. Can you handle it without him?” Pause. “That’s what I figured. Keep him in the loop so he doesn’t drive me crazy, but don’t call more than once every couple of hours, ‘kay?”

  She hung up. “That was easy.”

  Capobianco bent over to fix his left sock and dizziness overcame him. Feeling a creeping despair, he admitted to himself that he was no Hank Gowen. He collapsed into the nearest chair and let his throbbing head loll off to one side.

  WITH THE CLOUD COVER AND the rain and the time of year, it turned dark at four o’clock that night in the shadows cast by the high-rises. The crew had set up floodlights, so they kept on working.

  Diaz knew he’d have a crick in his neck tomorrow from all the time spent staring down at the ground, but the adrenaline kept him going for now. At Kahn’s instruction he’d used string to mark off the quadrants—two strings at right angles crossing where Albert Horn’s body had lain.

  Soon after they’d removed the wallet, Horn’s corpse had been taken away, leaving only some blood and blast stains in the center of the sidewalk and a crater in the concrete no more than an inch deep. But initial fragmentary evidence showed signs of high explosives, so Diaz had used a handheld HEPA evidence vacuum around the seat of the incident, bagging and labeling the cartridge for the CSU lab.

  Curiously, the detonation had produced a pretty small initial blast radius, Diaz thought. No wonder collateral damage was so minor. Maybe the guy got nervous and hit the button too soon. Maybe he planned to go through the army’s recruitment office door and give the commander a bear hug, but he chickened out or ran into technical difficulties. Or maybe he just didn’t know how small a blast zone he’d create. Not, it appeared, a very professional job in any case.

  The four men had lined up shoulder-to-shoulder and walked the first two quadrants already. There was trash along the curb and in the plaza, which complicated things. They picked through carefully, going along an inch at a time, turning over everything. CSU would shovel it up later, give it another going over, but the Bomb Squad team wanted to see the pattern in which remnants had been thrown from the blast site. They hit pay dirt right away, what appeared to be the suspect’s cell phone, though it may have come from someone who passed close to the explosion. Hassan waved it at them. He pressed the ON button but it wouldn’t boot up, so he bagged it.

  When they finished the second quadrant, Diaz straightened up, stretched his back, looked around. Cai and Hassan and Kahn and Burbette were all stretching their own backs and limbs in the crinkly white Tyvek suits, each looking worse for the wear of the past couple of hours. They’d placed markers where they’d gathered anything interesting, and they carried plastic bags that they’d labeled with corresponding letters. Nobody had much yet, including Diaz, which was strange because bombs meant for terrorist purposes oftentimes contained large amounts of shrapnel that the bomb maker packed around the explosive charge in order to maximize casualties. Diaz had only found a few ball bearings so far, along with some gnarled pieces of lightweight metal that may or may not have had anything to do with the bomb.

  Exchanging glances, they all went back to the blast site and shouldered up at the wedge of Quadrant Three. Diaz bent from the waist and continued searching. Under an empty Doritos bag by the curb he found something interesting, a three-inch chunk of molded white composite, solid with a curve in it. Cai found another and Kahn found a smaller piece. They continued to drop markers as they went, following the trajectory across Forty-Third Street. When they paused, Diaz more carefully examined the few fragments he had, tried to fit them together, but to no avail. He re-bagged them. Then Hassan, who was crouched to Diaz’s left, found the first piece of a cell phone under a table in the plaza, right by an aluminum chair leg. That was curious. Could Horn have been carrying two phones? It might indicate a remote detonation. Diaz held it up for others to see.

  “Anyone else find cell phone pieces?”

  Kahn said, “I got a bunch of them. No SIM card yet.”

  His phone rang and he walked off, returned a minute later. “That was O’Shea,” he told the others.

  O’Shea was a leading detective from AES. “Brian?” Diaz said, glad to hear it. “He’s working this?”

  Kahn nodded. “Turns out our man Horn had a pair of prosthetic legs.”

  “Interesting.” Diaz held up the evidence bags. “That explains this odd substance, I guess. Looked like pieces of a toaster at first.”

  “You find all kinds of strange shit on the streets of Manhattan.”

  “How many ball bearings or similar, all together?”

  “Only a few.”

  “Me too. Helluva bomb maker.”

  “Yeah, well, thank God for that, huh?”

  “So you think it was the legs?”

  “Could be. It explains where they went, that’s for sure.”

  “What evidence did you gather at the seat of the explosion?”

  “Ran the HEPA vac,” Diaz reported. “I swabbed for lab tests, too. We’ll see.”

  “Yeah,” Burbette jumped in. “I also did an ETK, but…damnedest thing. I can’t get a reading on the spot—maybe the rain. You guys need a break?”

  Diaz reached up and worked his neck. “I got a couple more hours in me.” The others agreed. They went back to their slow walk, finally found the giveaway on the legs: a pair of artificial feet clad in rubber-soled shoes. They also found some more parts to the prostheses, now that they knew what they were.

  Half an hour later, Cai cried out. He had the remnants of an electric blasting cap—t
he crimp and grommet with two partial leg wires protruding. “Man, I almost stepped on the damn thing, blended in with the sidewalk. I’m going blind from staring.”

  But finding that part encouraged them all. They’d piece this thing together, Diaz thought. They always did eventually.

  In the Fourth Quadrant they worked their way from the “seat” to the tables by the plaza. Under an abandoned wool scarf, Diaz found a plastic fragment with a serial number on it. Hot damn! He felt a warmth rise in his chest, and his mind went to the first World Trade Center bombing. After that attack, one of the Bomb Squad detectives found the VIN from the van that the terrorists had rented, leading to quick arrests. In this case, of course, they already knew who’d carried the bomb, but a serial number could still be a big deal, lead in all kinds of directions. Still, Diaz tamped himself down, trying not to manifest too much excitement. He decided to wait until they wrapped up to tell Kahn, didn’t want to come across as an overeager rookie.

  The detectives didn’t find much else of note, a few more pieces that looked like they came from the prostheses, some bits of cell phone, a couple inches of wire. It would all get turned over to the lab for analysis.

  Kahn gave the signal an hour later and they called it quits, went to the trailer, and stripped off their protective coverings. When Diaz mentioned the serial number, Kahn nodded his approval and said, “We’ll prioritize it for O’Shea.” Nearly as an afterthought, he added, “Nice work.”

  Diaz didn’t mind the faint praise. They were all tired and damp.

  Kahn offered him a lift but he chose to walk alone to the subway just up the block. Away from the cordoned area, Times Square manifested the usual bustle. All around him Diaz caught snatches of conversation about the bombing, saw people shaking their heads, lifting their eyebrows, clasping their coats closed out of self-protective instinct.

  He paused at the top of the subway stairs to read the second-floor news crawl across the street. It said: BOMB IN TIMES SQUARE…ONE DEAD.

  Some days on this job, Diaz thought, were just too surreal.

  He turned and trotted down into the subway.

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK,

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

  2.

  DAY ONE—Dark

  IF YOU MULTIPLIED “PLAIN” TIMES “dull” and divided by the square root of “nondescript,” you’d get the sum of the apartment that Manny Diaz shared with his roommate in Washington Heights. The outside appearance was of an unadorned square box clad in tan brick. Inside was a two-bedroom with galley kitchen and a small living space on the fourth floor. The living room and eating area looked out through the fire escape across Bennett Avenue at similar boxes, and both bedrooms gave on the same perpetually shaded, equipment-stuffed airshaft.

  Still, it sported a Manhattan location, only a few blocks from the Number 1 train, and Diaz could jog along the Hudson River Greenway through Fort Washington Park when he felt like it.

  Also, his roommate—found through Craig’s List—always paid her share of the rent on time. And as a bonus, though light-skinned she was otherwise the spitting image of the singer Jennifer Lopez. Diaz considered J-Lo the most beautiful woman in the world. Although his roommate’s last name was Foster, her first name was Jennifer, too, so he sometimes playfully called her J-Fo. The occasional banter aside, they’d never had a thing together and they hardly saw one another for the first six months of her tenure, Jennifer mostly spending time with her boyfriend, who had a nicer pad somewhere farther downtown. Diaz didn’t feel too bad about that, as this was primarily a business transaction. And, besides, for a good long time he’d avoided worrying at all about relations with women. Still, there was something gratifying about having her around now and then, and his heart skipped a little tonight when he got home and saw her bedroom lights glowing.

  “Hey, Jennifer,” he said on the way to his own room. He felt too tired from work to be playful with nicknames.

  “What’s up, Manny.”

  He saw through the corner of one eye that she wore a loose-fitting t-shirt and terrycloth shorts. Though it was near forty degrees outside and raining again, in the building dry heat piped up endlessly.

  Diaz replaced his damp clothes with an NYPD t-shirt and torn jeans, threw his socks into the laundry pile in his closet, and went to the bathroom. He was standing over the toilet with his joint in his hand when he saw that the bottom drawer to the vanity had been left half open. That was Jennifer’s drawer, the bigger one, filled with things only women needed, but now on top of the feminine hygiene products lay a vibrator. Diaz couldn’t help but look. The thing was gigantic and pink and had certain other attributes that emphasized sexual pleasure without great subtlety. He finished peeing and slid the drawer closed with his foot, amused, thinking only that after a period of acclimation Jennifer had finally begun making herself more at home. Good. It sure beat bunking with another guy.

  In the living room, Diaz threw open the window for fresh air. He needed dinner somehow but felt exhausted from the day. There was beer in the fridge and a couple of takeout containers.

  He twisted the top off of a Bud Light. “Hey, J-Fo! Did you eat?”

  “Yeah. Chinese. You can have the leftovers if you want.”

  “How much?”

  She appeared in the doorway and leaned one shoulder against the jamb. No lipstick, toenails painted pink, hair a little wild. Still beautiful. “Don’t insult me.”

  “I’m not. But we made a rule—no food raids. What’d they get you for?”

  “I don’t know...ten, twelve.”

  Diaz went to his room and fished a five-dollar bill from his dresser.

  Jennifer took it from him and folded it in half. “I left my boyfriend.”

  “Yeah? When was that?”

  “Two weeks ago. Why I’ve been around a bit more after work. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while.”

  “So it’s a bad thing?”

  “Not really.” She ran her fingers through her hair and shook it. “I guess it means maybe the rules will be a little harder for me to follow now that I’m around more. It’s easy to follow rules when you’re not around, right?”

  “Hell, Jen, I’ve never been big on rules anyway. It just seemed like a good idea when we didn’t know each other.”

  She laughed, tried to hand him back the five, but he wouldn’t take it.

  “That rule didn’t change yet,” he said, waving her off. “Like a beer?”

  “Sure. Mind if I watch you eat?”

  Diaz lifted an eyebrow. “Not if I can watch you back.”

  AFTER DIAZ SCARFED THE BEEF chow fun, they popped another couple of beers and played Mario Kart on the Wii with their bare feet splayed against the edge of the chest that they used for a coffee table. She was pretty good with the virtual wheel, outraced him as often as not.

  When they grew bored, Diaz went to the fridge again. “Only one Bud left. We can share.”

  “You take it. It’s your beer.”

  “It was.” He chuckled. Then he looked down at the bottleneck. “Maybe it’ll help me sleep.”

  She sat up. “I saw on the news about that thing in Times Square. Were you part of that?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I can’t really talk about it. What did the news say?”

  “Some guy blew himself up.”

  “They got that right. So what do you think I saw?”

  “A body? In pieces?”

  He pebbled his chin and nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Is it freaky? Did it disturb you?”

  “Not as much as seeing buddies of mine get blown up.”

  She shuddered. “How can you even look at any of that?”

  He pictured Albert Horn lying on his back on the bloody blackened sidewalk. “You look but you don’t look. In a way, you deconstruct it.”

  “What does that mean?” She drew her feet to the couch and hugged her knees.

 
“You have to see the individual parts sometimes and ignore that it was once a person. There’s nothing you can do to help him except try to catch the bad guys.”

  “But it was a suicide bomber, they said. He was a bad guy himself.”

  “Maybe. But even so, suicide bombers rarely act alone. Can we talk about something else? How about your work?”

  “What? Selling insurance? That’s just a job. It’s not worth re-living.”

  “Somebody has to do it.”

  “But we don’t have to talk about it.”

  Diaz washed out his food container and threw it into the recycle. He sat at the table to finish his beer, couldn’t get the image of Albert Horn out of his mind, all of a sudden.

  Jennifer lay down on her back on the couch, facing him. “Did I make you mad?”

  “Nah. Just thinking.”

  “Can I change the subject?”

  “All right.”

  “So I’ve been wondering what you meant about the rules. When I came you said it was best to have things a certain way, so we both knew where we stood, respected each other in the apartment. The thing is, my circumstances have changed now, you know?”

  “How so?”

  “I told you. No more boyfriend.”

  He gave her a long look. She was lying modestly, had her legs closed. She draped one arm up over her head and flopped her wrist across the armrest behind her. Her body language was insouciant, but her eyes told a different story. She studied his face like she wanted to know an answer before she asked the question.

  “I’m kinda tired,” Diaz said, pushing unwelcome images of that afternoon from his mind. “Why don’t you just spit it out. You planning to move?”

  “Nothing like that. I like it here. I’m just wondering—we originally said no visitors—but now that I’m single again, would it be okay if I brought a guy up now and then? I’d feel safer here and I promise to be very respectful.”

  Diaz picked at the label on the Budweiser. “Respectful of what?”

  “Of—I don’t know—your rights.”