Run For Your Life

Chapter 45

Sitting in the quiet of his apartment’s shaded living room, the Teacher chucked his Treo across to the couch, and knocked back the last of the Daumas.

He grinned as a ball of sweet fire softly exploded in his stomach. He flipped on the TV set and channel surfed. Not only NY1, but the national networks were all over the hotel and subway shootings.

The people on the street looked solemn, downright paranoid. God, this was fun, he thought. Fucking with their heads was so addictive. He started laughing when a very concerned-looking cop was interviewed. Was that MIKE10? The asshole who just so lamely tried to get him to stop?

He held his sides as the hilarity of it all suddenly overwhelmed him. Tears actually came out of his eyes.

“Better than Disney World on the Fourth of July,” he said to the screen as he wiped at a joyful tear.

He clicked off the set with the remote and extended the recliner all the way back, thinking about the Frenchwoman he’d killed. She’d been even more attractive than a fashion model – curvier, less plastic, with an air of real sophistication. She’d virtually lit up the room with her sexuality and femininity.

Now she was as dead as the guys in the Pyramids. As dead as the dark side of the moon. Dead and gone forever and ever, amen.

It served her perfectly goddamn right, her and all the rest who thought they could skate through this life on their looks and bank accounts. Pride goeth before the fall. Make that the trigger pull in this case.

Deluded freak? he thought, recalling the cop’s text message as he closed his eyes. Now, now. Wasn’t that a tad harsh?

After all, one man’s deluded freak was another’s avenging dispenser of justice – swift, final, and complete.

Chapter 46

The eleven P.M. news carried wall-to-wall coverage of the shootings. Both reporters and anchors seemed quite critical of the way the NYPD was handling the case. ABC actually interviewed people on the street about whether they thought the cops were doing enough.

I watched a skinny taxpayer waiting for a bus answer with a sneer and a thumbs-down.

“They stink,” he said. “My four-year-old daughter could catch this guy.”

“So what are we waiting for?” I growled at the screen. “Somebody bring that kid in here.” I balled up my sandwich wrapper, tossed it at the still-yammering jerk, and turned away, rubbing my eyes into the back of my skull.

I’d already sent the Teacher’s mission statement and our IM exchange over to Agent Tom Lamb to see if the FBI’s document division could cull out some new insights, but I hadn’t heard back. Gabrielle Monchecourt, Martine Broussard’s stewardess friend, was ready to look at photos of airline personnel, in hopes that she could match the Teacher to the pilot she’d seen at a party. But we were still waiting for those photo ID books, and she was scheduled to get on a plane to Paris in the morning.

And if our shooter stayed true to his history, the new day was going to bring more than just a sunrise. Time was of the essence, as my seventh-grade teacher, Sister Dominic, had often reminded us.

I finally decided it was time to go from proactive to in-your-face active. I sent a couple of Midtown North guys to pick up Mlle. Monchecourt and take her to Kennedy Airport. Then I started calling airline corporate security people. I’d already talked to them umpteen times, but now I made it clear that if those photo books weren’t available when she got there, the NYPD was going to assume that some insider was protecting the shooter, and those airlines would be shut down until the situation got straightened out. Probably it would take several days.

That got through to them. By midnight, my guys at Kennedy reported back that our witness was going through photos.

I decided to take a break before I collapsed. I announced to everyone within earshot that my cell phone would be on. Then I headed home to check on the sick.

I arrived at my apartment in the nick of time. As I walked in, I found Seamus in the dining room, pouring a shot of Jameson’s into a plastic Curious George cup.

“Shame on you, Monsignor,” I said. “We have big-people glasses in the cabinet over the fridge. You can set me up one, too, while you’re at it.”

“Very funny,” Seamus said. “As if it was for me! That poor lad Ricky’s throat is so sore, I thought I’d give him a little Galway remedy, as they say. There’s nothing a spot of Jameson’s and some warm milk and sugar won’t cure.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “Did you fall down the altar steps?” I said, pulling the bottle away from him. “Your little Galway remedy will land us in family court. I can’t believe I actually have to say this out loud: Don’t give the children any whiskey!”

“Oh, well,” Seamus said with wounded dignity, grabbing his coat. “Have it your own foolish way. Tell Ricky to bear up like a man. Seamus out.”

I reluctantly decided I’d better not have a drink after all and put away the whiskey, then checked in again with my detectives out at Kennedy. The Air France stewardess had gone through both the Delta and Aer Lingus books, but didn’t recognize anyone.

British Airways was still holding out. They had the pilot book ready to show, but were still waiting for final permission from their CEO, who was on holiday somewhere in the Italian Alps.

“Right, of course,” I said. “Everyone prefers the Italian side nowadays. Saint Moritz is so over. Tell him when the next victim goes down, we’ll have the crime-scene photos sent up to his suite with his morning espresso.”

After I hung up, I made the command decision to stay and sleep under my own roof. I went into my bathroom to take a quick but glorious shower. But when I pulled back the curtain, I almost had a heart attack instead.

My five-year-old, Shawna, was sleeping in the tub.

“What are you doing in here, daisy flower?” I asked, lifting her out. “When did pillows become tub toys?”

“I just don’t want to make any more messes for you to clean up, Daddy,” she croaked.

She started shivering as I tucked her back into her bed. Gazing down at her, I asked myself the question that kept coming back to me time and time again over the last year. What would Maeve do? I grabbed a flashlight from the pantry, went back to Shawna’s room, and whisper-read her one of her favorite Magic Tree House books until she fell back to sleep.

“How’m I doing, Maeve?” I asked after I stepped out into the hall. “And don’t worry. It’s okay to lie.”

Chapter 47

After showering, I found Mary Catherine in the kitchen, taking sheets out of the dryer.

“For God’s sake, Mary, it’s one o’clock in the morning,” I said.

“Has to be done,” she replied, striving valiantly for her usual crispness, but with her weariness showing underneath.

I stepped in to help her fold, and she went over the sick list.

“For the moment, everybody seems fairly stable,” she said. “All the puking seems to have run its course, thank the Lord, but now the bug’s rising into their lungs and nasal passages. We’ll be out of tissues by noon tomorrow is my guess.”

“On it,” I said. In the morning, I’d send Seamus out to our Costco in Jersey to fill up the van. Boy, did our doorman love it when he saw that coming.

When the laundry was done, I took the basket from Mary Catherine’s hands and said, “Why don’t you get some sleep now?”

But I couldn’t persuade her to leave. She insisted on sleeping in a chair in the living room in case somebody needed her. Too tired to argue, I took off my suit jacket and plopped down in the chair opposite. What the heck, I was already dressed for the next day. I was going to be one wrinkled detective – Cathy Calvin wouldn’t have approved – but I needed to be ready to go the second I heard any news.

Everything in my body ached. I was so exhausted that even with all the stress and adrenaline and anticipation of the case, my eyelids clunked shut like they were made of lead.

“I always knew coming to America would pay off big,” Mary Catherine said after a minute. “All the sweet perks. Like, is it kiddy vomit I’m smelling, or has Yankee Candle come out with something new?”

“Neither, young lass,” I said, smiling with my eyes still closed. “That’s the refreshing aroma of my Yankee sweat socks that I forgot to toss in the laundry. I told you that you should have left when you had the chance. G’night.”

Chapter 48

The Teacher awoke with a start – sat bolt upright, gasping for air, his heart thumping.

Sleeping peacefully had never been a problem for him, but now that was ruined. Every time he started to drift off, that cop’s phrase, “manifesto of nonsense,” rang continuously like a gong through his head.

Bennett was just messing with him, he assured himself fiercely. But doubt kept creeping into his thoughts, driving his anxiety and making it impossible to rest. What if his message hadn’t been clear enough? With his head buzzing, he couldn’t decide. He checked his alarm clock and gritted his teeth. One A.M. How could he perform tomorrow if he was up all night worrying?

He plumped his pillow and closed his eyes again, turning to one side and then the other, trying to get comfortable. For five minutes, he tried concentrating on his breathing. But it was hopeless.

That goddamn cop had gotten to him.

He sat up again and finally got out of bed. Somehow, he needed to burn off this bad energy.

Through the south-facing window in the living room, he could see the Empire State Building, illuminated with red lights. Across the street at the modeling agency, a party was going full tilt. There was plenty of action out there – plenty of ways to scratch an itch like his.

Maybe a walk, he thought. A little stroll around the block.

He dressed and was twisting the front doorknob open when he realized he’d forgotten something – his guns. He couldn’t believe it! That was a measure of how rattled he was.

He stepped back into the office and reloaded both Colts, then threaded their baffled stainless-steel suppressors – Swiss-made, top-of-the-line Brügger and Thomets – to the barrels. He strapped the weapons around his waist and pulled on a coat.

Dangerous world out there, he thought as he quickly descended the tenement stairwell toward the street.

Never know who you might run into.

Chapter 49

Pierre Lagueux, fashion photographer extraordinaire, felt like a joy-filled bubble as he walked down the back stairs of the West Side Models agency.

Not just any bubble, either. High as he was on some top-grade MDMA, the drug otherwise known as Ecstasy, he felt like a très chic bubble of Cristal champagne.

It was almost unfair how well life was working out for him, he mused. Only twenty-seven and already rich. Handsome, heterosexual, French, and very, very talented at taking pictures. The hardest part about being him was – the thought made him giggle – waking up.

He had a real eye, they said. They, meaning the people in the fashion world who actually counted. In spite of his youth, the word icon was being whispered. His name was dropped in company with Ritts, Newton, Mapplethorpe. Sorry, fellas, move over. There’s a new enfant terrible in town.

And best of all, the parties. Tonight, already a fabulous dream, was just beginning, and how many more would he have? He could practically see them in an endless array stretching out before him. As long, elegant, and dark as the row of designer suits in the gymnasium-sized closet of his loft down on Broome Street.

All around him, the world breathed, Yes.

He stepped out onto the street. The night was young – just the way he preferred his ladies. Like the barely legal, new Ford Nordic blonde he’d just “met” in the back stairwell. He could actually fall in love with her, if only he could remember her name.

“Pierre?” a woman’s voice called.

He craned his neck, raising his stubbled face toward the sound. It was she – his new nameless lovely, as statuesque as the figurehead of a Viking ship, standing on the fire escape above him. Or was she an actual flying Val-kyrie? As high as he was, it was hard to tell.

“Catch!” she said.

Something sailed down toward him, dark and diaphanous, and settled into his outstretched hands – a warm, wispy weight that was barely there. A feather from an angel wing? No, better. Thong panties. What a wonderfully American parting gift! How Girls Gone Wild!

He blew her a kiss, removed the silk handkerchief from the breast of his cashmere Yves Saint Laurent sport coat, and inserted the undergarment in its place. Then he continued on his way to Tenth Avenue to cab to his next soiree.

He was midway up the east side of the block when he spotted a man standing alone on the sidewalk, alongside the train overpass.

A fellow reveler, was Pierre ’s first thought. But then he saw the guy’s serious face.

He stared unabashedly. He was always on the lookout for a striking photo image, always honing his eye. That was probably the reason he would be immortal. And this figure – there was something tragic in the way it stood against the dark, otherwise completely empty street. It was the essence of noir. So Hopperesque.

But more still, there was also something about the man’s eyes. A startling, yearning intensity in them.

As mesmerized as he was, it took Pierre a good thirty seconds before he saw the two silenced pistols the man was holding beside his thighs.

What?

Pierre ’s drug-addled mind scrambled for comprehension. The girl in the stairwell, was the first thought it grasped. Was this an angry rival?

“Wait!” Pierre said, raising his hands placatingly. “She said she had no boyfriend. Please, monsieur, you must believe me. Or perhaps you are her father? She is young, yes, but very much a woman? -”

The Teacher shot him twice in the crotch with the suppressed.22, and once in his throat with the.45.

“Not even close, French fry,” he said, watching the worthless hedonist bounce face-first off the sidewalk.

He knelt beside the fallen man and pulled his hair back from his forehead. With his teeth, the Teacher uncapped a Sharpie and began to write.

Chapter 50

As the Teacher headed back into his building, the last thing in the world he expected was the small, attractive blond woman who rose up furiously from the outside steps.

“I finally found you, you son of a bitch!” she screamed.

Holy crap! the Teacher thought, panicked. It was his publicist, from his former life – the life he’d abruptly abandoned when he’d started on his mission two days ago.

“Wendy,” he said soothingly. “I’ve been meaning to get back to you.”

“How gallant of you,” she fumed. “Considering I called you thirty-six fucking times. Nobody no-shows the Today show! You’ve ruined yourself! Worse, you’ve ruined me!”

He glanced around nervously. Standing out here arguing wasn’t cool. If somebody hadn’t already discovered the dead Frenchman, they would any second now.

But then he realized that she was falling-down drunk, with bloodshot eyes and a smell like a brewery. A plan snapped into his mind. Perfect.

“I can do better than explain, Wendy,” he said, with his most charming smile. “I’ll make it up to you, ten times over. Got an e-mail that’s going to blow your doors off.”

“Make it up to me? How are you going to un-demolish my business? You know how hard I worked to get you booked? At this level, you don’t get a second chance. Now I’m over.”

“I’m talking Hollywood, baby. I just heard from the Tonight Show,” he lied. “Leno’s hot to have me on. It’s going to fix everything, Wendy. I promise. Hey, come on upstairs with me. I’ll cook you breakfast. You loved it when I did that last time, right? How about some fresh Belgian waffles?”

She turned away from him, trying to remain angry. But she failed, and started slurring out words in drunken honesty.

“You don’t know how much I missed you. After that night we had, and then you didn’t call me, and? -”

The Teacher put his finger to her lips. After a few more seconds of resistance, she nibbled his first knuckle.

“We’ll have a better time tonight,” he said. “If you’re really good – or should I say, really bad? – I’ll even warm the syrup,” he said, deepening his killer smile.

Finally, she smiled back. She removed a compact from her purse and touched up her hair and makeup. Then she took his hand and walked upstairs with him to the apartment.

Inside, he locked the door behind them.

“What’s it going to be first?” he said. “Food or e-mail?”

“I want to see that e-mail. Are you kidding?” she said, kicking off her high heels excitedly. “I can’t wait!”

“It’s in here. Follow me.”

As they walked through the spare room doorway, her gaze flicked across the corpse on the bed. She took two more steps before she stiffened and spun back to stare at it, abruptly seeming sober.

“Oh, my God!” she breathed. “What is that? What’s going on here? I don’t understand.”

Unceremoniously, the Teacher shot her in the back of the head with the silenced.22. Then he dragged her into the hall closet, dumped her Manolo Blahniks on top of her, and shut the door.

“Yeah, well,” he said, wiping his hands. “It’s a long story.”

When he fell back into his bed, his eyelids suddenly felt like manhole covers, and his breathing slowed to its usual peaceful rhythm.

Who needs warm milk? he thought as he softly faded into sleep.

Chapter 51

When my cell phone went off, it took me a second to distinguish the sound above the constant hacking of the Bennett sick ward. I groped for it in a stupor, noting that the time was just after three A.M. For all my big hopes, I’d gotten maybe ten minutes of real sleep.

“Yeah, Mike, Beth Peters here. Sorry to wake you, but we just got word. A fashion photographer, shot dead on a sidewalk in Hell’s Kitchen. Looks like you-know-who.”

“I’m just waiting for my chance to send you-know-who to you-know-where in a handbasket,” I said grimly. “Any witnesses?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “But one of the uniforms said he actually wrote some kind of a message. I didn’t quite catch that part. You want me over there, or? -”

“No, you mind the store,” I said. “I’m closer. Give me an address.”

After talking to Beth, I called Chief McGinnis, hoping I’d get the chance to wake him up to deliver the latest happy news. Unfortunately I had to settle for his voice mail.

Unbelievable, I thought, putting away my phone. The shooter seemed to be speeding up, shortening the interval between kills – giving us less time to figure things out. That was the last thing we needed now.

“Don’t tell me you have to go back in,” Mary Catherine said, still camped out in the chair opposite mine.

“This city never sleeps and apparently neither does its latest psychopath.” I heaved myself to my feet and rooted around the darkened room until I lucked onto my keys, then opened the lockbox in the closet to get my Glock.

“Are you going to be all right?” I asked her. It was a pretty stupid question. What was I going to do if she said no?

“We’re fine,” she said. “You be careful.”

“Believe me, if I get near this guy, I won’t give him a chance to hurt me.”

“Driving, too,” Mary Catherine said. “I’m concerned. You look like you just crawled out of a crypt.”

“Gee, thanks for the compliment,” I said. “If it’s any consolation, I feel even worse.”

I proved it immediately by walking smack into my front door, before I remembered I had to open it first.

But in the elevator down, I started looking on the bright side. At least this time, the guy had the decency to murder somebody on the West Side, so I didn’t have far to drive.

Chapter 52

The crime scene techs were still stringing yellow ribbon when I arrived at the murder site on 38th Street.

“Nice work,” I said to one of them. “Tape’s looking sharp. How’d you score a new roll?” A little hamming it up for the waiting cops and techs is pretty much expected from the arriving homicide detective, and, as loopy as I felt, I was more than happy to oblige.

“You gotta know the right people,” a burly guy with a mustache growled back. “This way, Detective.” He lifted the waist-high plastic ribbon to make it easier for me to limbo underneath.

“I mean, this is what I call a crime scene,” I said. “Garbage in the street? Check. Lifeless citizen? Check? -”

“Wiseass detective? Check,” Cathy Calvin called from behind the barricade.

“Backstabbing reporters, present and accounted for,” I continued, without looking at her.

An Amtrak on its way to anywhere but Hell’s Kitchen gave a tap of its horn as it rumbled beneath the sidewalk train bridge we were standing on. I had a sudden impulse to vault off the bridge onto its top. I’d always dreamt of riding the rails.

“Even moody, cine noir sound effects,” I said, giving the techs a satisfied nod. “You know how much money a Hollywood studio would have to spend for this kind of authenticity? You guys have really outdone yourselves. I honestly couldn’t have asked for better.”

On the way over, I’d learned from Beth Peters that the victim was a heavy in the fashion industry. I’d started to wonder if this situation had parallels to the Gianni Versace murder – if the Teacher was some twerp on the outskirts of the rich and famous, who’d decided to reach out and grab his fifteen minutes of fame the hard way.

The hard way for other people.

I squatted down and looked at the corpse. Then I jumped up and stumbled backward, suddenly and totally wide awake.

“4U Mike, YFA!” was written across the victim’s forehead in Magic Marker.

As I looked up and down the shadowed street, I realized that my hands were trembling. They wanted to draw my Glock and kill that son of a bitch. I clenched them into fists in order to still them. My gaze turned back to the young man lying on the sidewalk. I cringed at the sight of his blood-drenched crotch.

I cursed myself for provoking the Teacher, but then I stopped beating myself up. He would have killed again anyway. He was just using a cheap, ugly pretext to cast blame on me.

I’d wait until I came face-to-face with him. Then I’d turn loose my rage.

Chapter 53

When I got back to my building, even my doorman Ralph knew better than to mess with me. It must have been the stark expression on my face.

Upstairs, I made sure all the locks on the doors and windows were secured before I found my bedroom.

It was going to require smelling salts to wake me come morning, but I did not care. I was not going to brush my teeth. I barely had the energy to take off my shoes. I was going to fall into my bed and sleep until someone wrenched me out of it with great physical force.

I had just pulled my beloved body pillow to my chest when I heard the giggling. It was coming from the other side of the bed.

No, I prayed. Please, Lord. No.

The pillow was tugged out of my grip. A wide-awake Shawna lay there staring at me with a beaming smile.

“Sweetie, this isn’t your bed,” I pleaded softly. “This isn’t even the bathtub. Do you want a pony, Shawna? Daddy will get you a whole herd of ponies if you let him have some rest.”

She shook her head, immediately getting into the spirit of this new game. I felt like weeping. I was doomed, and I knew it. The problem with the youngest kids in a big family is that by the time you’ve gotten to them, you realize it’s actually easier to do things for them than to sit around and agonizingly wait for them to do things for themselves. They instinctively know this. They sense the emptiness in threats the way an ATF dog can detect explosives. Resistance is futile. You are theirs.

As this was going through my mind, I heard more giggling, then felt the movement of something small climbing into the bottom of my bed. I didn’t even have to look to know that Chrissy was getting into the act. She and Shawna were as thick as thieves.

Next, tiny hands separated the largest and second largest toes of my right foot.

“Toe pit sensitivity training,” my daughters screamed in glee as they wriggled their fingers between my toes.

I couldn’t take any more, and I sat up to tell them they had to go back to their own beds. But I stopped when I saw the undiluted delight radiating off them. What the heck. At least they weren’t puking.

Besides, how could you argue with a light beam and an angel?

“All right, I’ll show you some sensitivity training,” I mock-threatened.

Their happy shrieks threatened to shatter the light fixture as I tried the Vulcan nerve pinch on both of them simultaneously.

A few minutes later, after an elaborate ritual of arranging stuffed animals and squish pillows, I managed to tuck in my daughters next to me.

“Tell us a story, Daddy,” Chrissy said as I collapsed again.

“Okay, honey,” I said with my eyes closed. “Once upon a time, there was a poor old detective who lived in a shoe.”

Chapter 54

“Bennett? You there?!”

I lunged up from the mattress, hand groping for my service weapon, as a shrill voice drilled a hole in my right eardrum. Then I realized with bewilderment that I was in my own bedroom filled with morning sunlight, not some murky, death-harboring alley of nightmare. My cell phone, folded open, was resting on my pillow beside where my head had been. One of my kids must have answered it and helpfully stuck it next to sleeping daddy’s ear.

“Yeah?” I said, lifting it with an unsteady hand.

“Nine o’clock meeting at the Plaza, and I don’t mean the Oak Room,” Chief of Detectives McGinnis snapped, and hung up as sharply as he’d spoken.

Not only did I make it into my unmarked Chevy in ten minutes flat, I was even showered and dressed. I got the car rolling and dug for the Norelco I kept in the glove compartment, feeling like I’d died and gone to heaven. I must have gotten close to five hours of real, delicious sleep.

I strode through the doors of One Police Plaza with a full forty seconds to spare, and took the elevator up to twelve, to the same cramped conference room where the first task force meeting had been held. The same tired and wired-looking cops were sitting there. I poured myself a coffee, grabbed a chocolate glazed, and took my place among them.

Right on time, McGinnis came barreling in, holding a copy of the Post above his head. “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” the headline read, below the surveillance video shot of the Teacher.

“The answer is yes,” he announced, tossing the paper across the conference table. “We had an Air France flight attendant pick out our shooter an hour ago.”

Spontaneous applause ripped through the room. Thank you, God, I thought, punching fists with Beth Peters beside me. I was so juiced, I decided to let slide the way that McGinnis had said we, with no mention of exactly who we were.

Our lead had paid off! Now we actually had a real shot at this animal.

“Suspect’s name is Thomas Gladstone,” McGinnis said, handing out printouts from a large sheaf. “He’s a former British Airways pilot – lives in Locust Valley, out on the island.”

Locust Valley? I thought. Wasn’t that the place where everyone’s name sounded like Thurston J. Howell III? Pilots made decent money, but they weren’t anywhere near that level on the food chain. I wondered if that explained some of the upscale targets. Maybe Gladstone had gotten snubbed at Polo and 21, or something along those lines, and decided that undertipping just wasn’t going to cut it in terms of showing his dissatisfaction.

“We’ve got a triggering incident, too,” McGinnis said. “Turns out Gladstone was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow to New York last week, but they caught him drunk and he got the ax. And we just found his car, littered with parking tickets in the Locust Valley commuter lot.”

I nodded grimly. Now we were getting somewhere. Losing a job was high up there on the list of why people went on rampages.

“We have an arrest warrant yet?” I said.

“We will by the time we bag this skell’s sorry ass,” McGinnis said. “ESU’s waiting downstairs. Who’s up for a little trip to the Gold Coast?”

I shot up out of my chair with the rest of the surrounding cops, grinning. I’d never even touched my coffee, but for some reason I felt completely refreshed.

Chapter 55

Locust Valley ’s town square seemed to consist solely of slate-roofed antiques shops, boutiques, and salons. Our designated staging area was a parking lot on Forest Avenue behind something called a “coach and motor works.” Call me a philistine, but it looked suspiciously like a gas station to me.

Nassau County Bureau of Special Operations and even some Suffolk County Emergency Service police were already there waiting for us. When a cop killer is involved, interdepartmental cooperation is more than a given.

“Morning, guys,” I said, and gathered everybody over by my car for a briefing.

The Nassau crew already had surveillance set up around Gladstone ’s four-acre property. There were no signs of activity there, and no one had gone in or out. Calls to the inside of his house were picked up by the answering machine. Gladstone had a wife named Erica and two co-ed daughters, I learned, but they hadn’t yet been located.

Tom Riley, the Nassau Special Ops lieutenant, tossed digital photos of the front and back of Gladstone ’s house onto the hood of my Chevy. The place was a gorgeous sprawling Tudor with a covered patio and a swimming pool in back. The landscaping was immaculate – Japanese maples, chrysanthemums, ornamental grasses. Definitely not the kind of house one usually associated with homicidal maniacs.

Studying the layout, we talked strategy about how to enter. There would be no attempt to negotiate. We’d gotten the arrest warrant, and we were going in. But considering the firepower Gladstone had, plus the fact that he’d already iced one cop and put another into a coma, no precaution was overlooked.

We decided that a breach team would storm the front door while snipers covered the narrow facing windows. If Gladstone showed his face in one, he’d be going down.

Since this was my case, I claimed the honor of following right behind the breach team to search the second floor.

“That door looks pretty solid,” I said. “What are you going to use? A battering ram?”

A young, muscular NYPD ESU sergeant held up a sawed-off shotgun and racked its slide.

“Brought my skeleton key,” he said, smiling around a chaw of tobacco. He actually seemed to be enjoying himself. I was glad he was on my side.

As the team geared up to start moving, I reached into my jacket and dropped another photograph onto the hood of the car. It was a picture of Tonya Griffith, the young woman transit cop Gladstone had murdered.

“Just a little reminder of why we all got out of bed this morning, gentlemen,” I said. “Let’s ring this scumbag’s bell.”

Gladstone ’s house was three blocks away, on a wooded street called Lattingtown Ridge Court. Our vehicles pulled out of the parking lot and cruised there, lights and sirens off.

As we arrived, I gave the green light over the radio. Two Emergency Service diesel trucks suddenly swerved into the driveway and across the lawn. A half-dozen tactical cops spilled out from behind them. Within seconds, I heard two crisp explosions – the front door hinges being shotgunned off.

As the cops shouldered the door aside and piled through it, yelling and tossing flashbangs, I flung open my car door and rushed in with them. I took the stairs two by two, with my Glock drawn and my heart pulsing like a strobe light.

“Police!” I screamed, kicking open the first closed door I encountered. It was a bathroom. There was nothing inside. Nobody. Curtain rings jingled as I ripped down the shower curtain. Just a shower caddy filled with shampoo bottles.

Damn! I thought, rushing back out into the hall, swinging my pistol from side to side.

Where was Gladstone?

Chapter 56

The framed photographs of well-dressed, smiling people that lined the hallway rattled as I stormed along it.

“Police!” I yelled again. “We’re all over you, Gladstone. This is the police!”

At the far end was another door, this one slightly ajar. I tightened my grip on the Glock’s trigger and rammed the door with my shoulder.

It opened into a large, tray-ceilinged master bedroom suite. I cleared the corners first, scanned the bed, and…

My face jerked away in shock, as if I’d been punched. My gun almost slipped from my fingers before I managed to shove it back into its holster. Then I covered my nose and mouth with a hand as the vile coppery scent of blood and death washed over me.

We were too late.

This guy, I thought.

“Oh, my God,” a woman breathed from the hall behind me. It was Beth Peters, frozen with shock.

This guy.

I stepped out into the hall and got out my radio.

“Up here,” I said weakly. “Second floor.”

“Do you have him?” McGinnis yelled.

“No,” I said. “Not him.”

What we had was a bound, half-naked woman on the bed, drenched in a bloody sheet. Through the open doorway of the bathroom beyond I could see a woman’s foot hanging over the tub rim. Another young woman, a girl really, lay facedown in blood beside the toilet, hog-tied with lamp cord.

Shaking my head, I approached the bodies for a closer inspection. The two women in the bathroom were barely in their twenties. Both of them were completely naked. The woman in the bedroom was older – maybe their mother, Erica Gladstone. My gaze caught a wedding photo lying in a corner, its glass cracked from being knocked to the floor. I picked it up and held it beside her lifeless face. She was so battered, it took me a full minute to confirm it was a match.

I couldn’t believe it. Gladstone had shot and killed his wife and their two daughters. His own flesh and blood.

Other cops were coming into the room now. I could hear their exclamations of horror and disbelief behind me. I stayed where I was, staring at the blood-soaked carpet and sheets.

This was the worst crime of all, an atrocity, an outrage against humanity. God, I wanted to get my hands on this sick prick. Better yet, get him in the sights of my Glock.

Chapter 57

It was eleven thirty A.M. when the Teacher stopped in front of an electronics store at 51st and Seventh. All the TVs that he could see through the big plate-glass windows were tuned to the Fox News Channel.

“Spree Killer Update,” scrolled across the top and, “Live from Locust Valley, Long Island ” across the bottom.

Hey, I know that place, he thought, smiling, as he watched the cops swarming on the lawn in front of the mansion.

Well, how about that? Score one for the gumshoes. They’d actually caught his scent. He’d started to wonder if they ever would.

But it didn’t really matter. He’d have to be a little more careful now, but he’d still be able to get all his work done. They were playing checkers while he was playing grand-master chess.

“Mommy, Mommy! Look, look!” a small Indian kid said as he pressed his face up against the store window in front of an Xbox 360. “Pokémon, Pikachu, Squirtle!” he cried.

His sari-clad mother slapped him on the backside before yanking him away down 51st.

Watching them go, the Teacher remembered the day, long ago, when he’d gone with his mother to get the last of their belongings from the lousy row house he’d grown up in. His dad had stood in the doorway, drinking a bottle of Miller beer and holding back the Teacher’s little brother, who was crying and straining to go with Mommy.

“No, buddy,” his dad kept saying. “You’re Daddy’s boy now, remember? You’re going to stay with me. It’s okay.”

But it wasn’t okay, was it? the Teacher thought.

He shook his head in disbelief, remembering how he’d just sat there in the cab of the moving truck. At first, he’d been embarrassed that the neighbors would see, until he realized they weren’t his neighbors anymore. After that, he’d actually been happy. He’d had to share a room with his stupid little brother, but now he was going to go with his mom, and he’d have his own room. His brother was a baby, he’d decided.

The Teacher’s cheeks bulged as he let out a long breath.

No, it wasn’t okay, he thought, shaking off the memory. But it was getting there. It would all be as okay as it was ever going to be, very soon.

He looked at himself in the plate-glass reflection. He was clean-shaven this morning, wearing a skintight Armani blazer over his tall, tapered frame, with a white silk shirt open at the throat and crotch-biting Dolce and Gabbana jeans – over-the-top, go-f-yourself, moneyed sex and style. Real Tom Ford.

Screw that stubbly-faced, Unabomber-look-alike picture of him on the covers of the Daily News and the Post, he thought. The only people who’d glanced twice at him on the sidewalks this morning were horny-looking forty-year-old ladies and hornier-looking gay men.

Nothing had changed. He would go over like Rover.

He took out his Treo, double-checked his next target, and adjusted his pistol at the small of his back before stepping out into the sidewalk crush.

This was a real good one coming up – somebody who’d been in dire need of his comeuppance for quite some time.

The Teacher put a little pep in his step as he flowed east with the sheltering crowd.

Chapter 58

Within half an hour of our storming the Gladstone mansion, news vans had outnumbered Range Rovers on Lattingtown Ridge Court. Alongside the barricades, I counted at least four newsies, pointing their surface-to-air-missile-like shoulder cams at the house. I felt like calling in air support. We were under siege.

I gladly handed over the master bedroom to the arriving Nassau County Crime Scene guys.

“So, is it true? A trifecta on the Gold Coast?” one of them said with a shake of his head. “I knew that was Dominick Dunne out by the mailbox.”

Downstairs, the law enforcement were standing in clusters, smoking, drinking coffee, and wisecracking like bad guests at the world’s worst cocktail party.

I waded through them and scanned the photographs on the walls in the family room. I took down three that I thought we could use in tracking Gladstone. He looked like a pilot, handsome, flat-bellied, and steely-eyed. Even his grin seemed muscular, that of a man who always got what he wanted.

“Hey there, you sick son of a bitch,” I said to him.

I couldn’t help looking at the rest of the pictures. Little girls at picnics, preteens at the beach, young ladies graduating from high school. The Gladstone daughters had been beautiful, but nothing compared to their mother, Erica. Black-haired and pale-eyed with high cheekbones, she looked like a queen from a fairy tale.

But the grille of her Lincoln Navigator was sticking into the room, thrust through the shattered wall beside her studio-photographed portrait.

Too bad Sophocles had come in at the last minute and written the fairy tale’s ending.

I located the home’s office past some French doors near the front of the house. I used the fax machine to send the pictures to the deputy commissioner of public information so he could get them out to the press, then I sat down at the antique desk and started opening file drawers.

Right off the top, the Amex bills were staggering. Four-hundred-dollar hair appointments here, three-thousand-dollar charges to Bergdorf Goodman there. Mrs. Gladstone paid more for skin care than I had for college tuition. Apparently, being rich was extremely expensive.

After a few minutes more of searching, I finally found what I was looking for – charges to both the 21 Club and the Polo store.

I also found something in the bottom file drawer that, at first, I thought was some kind of contract. Actually, it was. A contract of divorce.

Bingo, I thought. That helped to explain things more. Two factors commonly made people go berserk – divorce and getting fired. Gladstone had experienced both within a short time period.

But what I really needed was something that would tell me where Gladstone might be hiding, and where he might strike next. I kept looking.

It was twenty minutes later when I found a book of press clippings on one of the built-in shelves. It contained mostly local newspaper society clippings. Erica at charity functions, sometimes with, but mostly without, her prince of a husband. The most recent one showed a picture of Erica draped in satin, tulle, and diamonds at a Wall Street AIDS benefit, at Manhattan ’s Customs House.

A silver-haired man was holding her near-naked waist. His name, I read in the caption, was Gary Cargill.

It took me less than a second to make the connection that Cargill was the name at the top of the divorce papers.

Yet another crushing blow to Gladstone ’s ego. His wife had started seeing her divorce attorney.

Suddenly my eyes opened wide. If I was as crazy as Gladstone and I’d been raked over the coals like him, who would I want to take out?

I dropped the book as I spun around and grabbed for the phone.

“What city and listing, please?” asked the phone company information computer in a gratingly calm voice.

Mine was much more frantic.

“ Manhattan!” I yelled. “A lawyer named Cargill!”

Chapter 59

“So you’ve decided it’s time for you and your wife to part company,” celebrity divorce attorney Gary Cargill said with all the grave emotion that the statement and his five-hundred-dollar consultation fee deserved.

“But for me and my hedge fund to keep company,” said Mr. Savage, Cargill’s latest client. In his casual, devil-may-care designer outfit, Savage looked loaded, like a real winner. Gary thought he recognized the face from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place it. Fortune magazine?

Ah, hedge fund, Gary thought. The two sweetest words in modern English.

“That’s why I came to you,” Savage went on. “I’ve heard you’re the best. I don’t care how much it costs, either, so long as that whore doesn’t get one red cent.”

Slowly, ruminatively, Gary leaned back in his cashmere-upholstered office chair. His meticulously designed, oak-paneled office resembled the library of an English country manor, but with extra features. Country manors usually didn’t command floor-to-ceiling forty-story views of the MetLife, Chrysler, and Empire State buildings.

“I can assure you that you’ve come to the right place,” he said.

Then he frowned as the light on his Merlin interoffice phone began to blink. He had explained emphatically to the temp his one cardinal rule – never, ever, ever interrupt him when he was meeting with a client for the first time. With the amount of money these fish spent, you couldn’t even imply you had other clients. Didn’t she understand that he was about to hook a whale here?

The BlackBerry on his belt suddenly vibrated, startling him again. What the hell was going on? He glanced down at it in annoyance.

There was a message from the temp, entitled 911.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Savage,” he said. “I left instructions not to be interrupted.” He rolled his eyes, one wealthy, important man to another, bemoaning the quality of help these days. “If you’ll excuse me for just a second.”

He opened the phone and scanned the message.

NYPD called. Your client could be the Killer! Get out of there!

He heard a strange coughing bark, and the BlackBerry suddenly leaped out of his hand.

Wiping particles of plastic and glass out of his eyes, Gary tried to focus on the client. Mr. Savage was standing now. He tucked a long pistol into his belt, then turned and lifted the travertine coffee table behind him. It must have weighed well over a hundred pounds, but Savage reared back and threw it effortlessly through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. A deafening explosion of shards of flying glass sent Gary to his knees, scrambling to hide behind his desk.

“C’mon, Gary. Don’t tell me you didn’t think it would all come back to haunt you?” the man yelled over the wind that suddenly roared through the office. Paralyzed, Gary watched legal papers fly off his desk in an eddy over Park Avenue.

“Noooo!” he suddenly yelled, making a desperate try to run. He got as far as the edge of his desk before the Teacher shot out both his kneecaps with the silenced.22.

The pain was more incredible than Gary had ever believed possible. He tottered to the edge of the glassless window and almost fell through, just managing to wrap an arm around the metal frame. He clung there for dear life, staring four hundred feet down to the concrete and crowds on Park Avenue.

“Here, let me give you a hand,” the Teacher said, stepping over. “No, hold that thought. Make it a foot.” Viciously, he stomped the heel of his Prada wingtip into the trembling lawyer’s chin.

“Noooooo!” Gary screamed, as his grip tore loose and he plunged downward.

“You said that already, fucker,” the Teacher said with a laugh, watching the body twist and tumble through the last few seconds of its life.

When Cargill finally smacked into the plaza out in front of the building, the impact sounded more like a TV set than a person exploding.

The Teacher strode to the office door and swung it open. In the corridor outside, some people were running in panic, while others sat frozen, shivering like trapped rabbits behind their desks.

He trotted to the rear stairs with the gun held by the side of his leg, wondering if there was anyone stupid enough to get in his way.

Chapter 60

Even after a ninety-mile-an-hour ride back into the city, I still couldn’t believe it. Gladstone had actually been in Cargill’s office when I’d called! I’d missed stopping him by seconds.

I screeched up in front of the Park Avenue office building. Behind the crime scene tape lay a lot of glass and one very, very dead lawyer.

“Shot him in the kneecaps first, then must have thrown him,” Terry Lavery said as I walked up. “I’m not the biggest fan of lawyers either, but sheesh.” I followed his gaze up the sheer glass face of the building to the gaping empty rectangle near the top.

“Any idea how he got away?” I said.

“Came down the service stairs. We found some clothes in the stairwell. He had his choice of exits. There’s seven from the basement and four from the lobby. Must have changed and got out before the first radio cars got here. How long can this guy stay so lucky?”

Beth Peters came over to join us. “You hear the latest?” she said. “Dozens of sightings of Gladstone in the last hour. From Queens to Staten Island. Some woman even claimed he was in front of her on line at the Statue of Liberty.”

“I heard on 1010 WINS that a bunch of those clubs over on Twenty-seventh in Chelsea were closed last night because everyone’s too afraid to go out,” Lavery said. “Not to mention the Union Square Cafe waiter who actually stabbed a suspicious customer at lunch because he thought he was the killer.”

Beth Peters shook her head. “This town hasn’t been this jumpy since the Dinkins administration.”

My phone rang again. The readout told me it was McGinnis. I took a deep breath as I flipped it open, guessing I wasn’t going to like what he told me.

I was right.

Chapter 61

Rush hour was in full swing by the time the Teacher got to Hell’s Kitchen. A kind of pity had overtaken him as he’d gazed sympathetically at the clogged, screaming traffic before the Lincoln Tunnel.

The sight was almost too painful to behold. The bovine faces behind the windshields. The glossy billboards that dangled above the congestion like carrots beckoning trapped, witless donkeys. The Honda and Volkswagen horns feebly bleating in the polluted air like sheep being led to slaughter.

Something out of Dante, he thought sadly. Or worse, a Cormac McCarthy novel.

“Don’t you know that you are made for greatness?” he’d wanted to shout at them as he skirted the plastic bumpers and overheating SUV grilles. “Don’t you know you were put here for something more than this?”

He climbed the stairs to his apartment, now wearing the blue Dickies work clothes that he’d changed into before he’d escaped. He knew it was a pretty lame disguise, but the fact of the matter was, it didn’t have to be that great. With its millions of people and exits and entrances and subways and buses and taxis, the city was virtually impossible for the police to cover.

The cops had been actually screeching into the plaza in front of the building entrance as he’d left the stairwell. He had simply walked through the bank attached to the lobby and used its exit to the side street.

He sighed. Even the ease with which he’d gotten away was somehow making him feel blue.

Safely inside his apartment, he pulled his recliner over to the window and sat. He was tired after his walk, but it was the good kind – the manly, righteous exhaustion that came from true work.

The sun was starting to set over the Hudson, its light washing the faded tenements and warehouses with gold. Snatches of memory came to him as he gazed at it.

Scaling chain-link fences. The heat of the concrete through his sneakers. Stickball and basketball. His brother and he playing in one of the rusted playgrounds alongside Rockaway Beach.

Those were from his old life, his real life, the one he’d been ripped out of when his mother kidnapped him and took him to rot on Fifth Avenue.

The irrevocable nature of what had happened to him pierced him like a heated needle. There was no going back, no do-over. His life, so crammed full of all the crap that was supposed to make him happy, had been ultimately and completely worthless.

He cried.

After a while, he wiped his eyes and stood. There was still work to do. In the bathroom, he turned on the tap in the tub. Then he stepped into the spare room and lifted the corpse off the guest bed.

“One more,” he whispered to it lovingly. “We’re almost done.” With a tender, caring smile, he carried it to the bathtub.

Chapter 62

Half an hour later, the Teacher went to the kitchen and took a pint bottle of Canadian Club whisky out of the cabinet above the sink. Carrying it in both hands almost ceremoniously, he stepped into the dining room.

The corpse was now respectfully arrayed on top of the table. He’d washed it in the tub, even shampooed and combed the blood and brain matter out of its hair before carefully dressing it in a navy suit and tie.

The Teacher had also changed into a suit, tasteful black, appropriate funeral attire. He tucked the bottle of whisky into the inside pocket of the dead man’s jacket.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss the pale, lifeless forehead.

Back in the kitchen, he took his Colt pistols off the counter and quickly loaded and holstered them. The cops would be here anytime now.

He removed a full red plastic fuel can from beneath the kitchen sink and carried it into the dining room. The strong, faintly sweet smell of gasoline filled the entire apartment as he soaked the body, making the sign of the cross – starting at the forehead, spilling fuel down to the crotch, then shoulder to shoulder across the chest.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he said solemnly.

He looked at the face one last time, the sad blue eyes, the half frown on the rigid mouth. Sobbing quietly, he backed to the apartment’s front door, sloshing a generous gasoline trail across the hardwood floor behind him.

The Zippo he took from his pocket had a marine insignia on it. He wiped his cheeks with a deep breath and placed the cool brass of the lighter to his forehead for a moment. Had he forgotten something?

He booted the empty gas can back toward the dining room, thumbed back the lighter’s starter, and tossed it with a deft casualness, a winning card onto a gigantic pot.

Not a thing, he thought.

The loud basslike whump blew his hair back as a ball of flame shot back into the apartment like a meteor. The dining room went up like a pack of matches.

For another few seconds, he stared, mesmerized, at the ink-black smoke freight-training from the doorway.

Then he closed the door, took out his keys, and locked up tight.

Chapter 63

The doorman of 1117 Fifth Avenue wore a suit and hat that were the same exact hunter green as the awning.

“Can I help you, sir?” he asked as I walked into the lobby.

“Detective Bennett,” I said, showing him my badge. “I need to see Mr. or Mrs. Blanchette.”

Erica Gladstone, the murdered wife in the Locust Valley mansion, had turned out to be one of the Blanchettes. Her father, Henry, ran Blanchette Holdings, the private equity and takeover firm that made companies, and even hedge funds, tremble.

I was there to notify them of Erica’s death, and maybe pick up a lead on their berserk son-in-law.

The elevator up to their penthouse apartment had fine wood paneling and a crystal chandelier. An actual butler in a morning coat opened the front door. Behind a wall of French doors to his right, steam rose from a rooftop swimming pool – an Olympic-sized, infinite-horizon number that seemed to meld into the unspoiled, twenty-story vista of Central Park trees that lay beyond.

“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette will be downstairs in a moment, Detective,” the sleek butler said with an English accent. “If you would follow me to the living room.”

I stepped into a silk-wallpapered chamber the size of an airplane hangar. A gallery’s worth of professionally lit paintings hung from the double-height walls above designer furniture and sculptures. I gaped at a Pollock the size of a putting green, then exchanged eye contact with a massive stone Chinese dragon that could not, no way, have fit into the elevator.

The duplex would have been the slickest, most opulent, luxury apartment I’d ever laid eyes on without the pool. And I read Architectural Digest. Well, at least every time I went to Barnes and Noble.

“Yes? Detective Bennett, is it? Henry Blanchette. How can I help you?” The speaker was a short, amiable man in running shorts and a sweat-soaked New York Road Runners T, coming through a door. I was happily surprised that he seemed more like a kindly accountant than the Gordon Gekko type I’d been prepared for.

“What’s this about?” an attractive, fiftyish platinum blond woman demanded sharply, stalking into the room behind him. She wore a makeup bib over a melon-colored silk dressing robe. Both Mrs. Blanchette’s appearance and her attitude were more like what I was expecting.

I inhaled deeply, bracing myself. There’s no easy way to tell someone that their child is dead.

“There was a shooting,” I said. “Your daughter, Erica, was killed. She died instantly. I’m terribly sorry.”

Henry’s mouth and eyes seemed to triple in size. He stared at me, confused, as he stumbled back against the edge of a mod-looking mohair club chair. His wife sank, dumbfounded, onto an antique chaise.

“What about the girls?” Henry said softly. “I haven’t seen them in years. They must be grown now. Do they know?”

“Jessica and Rebecca were murdered, too,” I had to tell him. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

His wife gasped, her eyes filling with tears. Henry brought his hand up as if to say something, then lowered it.

“I’m afraid it gets worse still,” I said, dropping the third and final bomb in my arsenal of grief – getting it over with as quickly as I could. “We believe they were shot by your son-in-law, Thomas Gladstone. And that he’s also responsible for the string of killings that have been going on around the city.”

Mrs. Blanchette’s tears stopped like a faucet, and now I could see nothing in her face except rage.

“I told you so!” she screamed at her husband. “I told you marrying that trash would be…” She collapsed again, unable to continue.

The billionaire hung his head, staring into the Oriental carpet between his sneakers as if trying to read something in the pattern.

“We had a falling-out,” he said.

He seemed to be talking to himself.

Chapter 64

“It’s not fair, Henry,” Mrs. Blanchette wailed. “After all my… What did we do to deserve this?”

I had a hard time believing what I heard. But people handle grief in strange ways.

“Is there someplace where your son-in-law could be hiding out?” I said. “Another apartment in the city? A vacation house, perhaps?”

“Another apartment! Do you have any idea how much we paid for the Locust Valley house we bought Erica?”

In her mind, clearly, somebody like me wouldn’t have an inkling about that sort of thing. I turned to her husband.

“What was the nature of the falling-out?” I asked.

Mrs. Blanchette rose from her chair like a boxer after the bell. “What possible business is that of yours?” she said, glaring at me.

“As you can see, my wife’s quite upset, Detective,” Mr. Blanchette said, without lifting his eyes from the carpet. “We both are. Could you question us later? Maybe after we’ve had a little while to…”

“Of course,” I said, leaving my card on the sideboard. “If you think of something that might help, or you want more information – anything I can do – please call, okay?”

As I stepped out of the elevator downstairs, I spotted the green-uniformed doorman talking Spanish with one of the maids, laughing and probably flirting.

They got quiet as I walked over to them and showed him my shield again.

“Detective Bennett, remember?” I said. “Can I ask you a few questions? Won’t take a minute.”

The maid edged away, and the doorman shrugged. “Sure. I’m Petie. What can I do for you?”

“You know Erica Gladstone?” I said.

“Ever since she was a little girl.”

“What happened between her and her parents?”

Petie suddenly looked as green as his jacket. “Ah, I never heard nothin’ about that, amigo,” he said. “You’d have to ask them, you know? I just work here.”

I put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Look, I understand the secret code – don’t talk about the tenants. Relax. I don’t need you to testify in open court. I need you to help me nail this nut job who’s going around shooting everybody. We think it’s Erica’s husband, Thomas Gladstone.”

“Chingao!” the doorman said, his eyes widening in shock. “Oh, my God! For real?”

“For real. Come on, Petie. Let’s get this guy.”

“Yeah, yeah, you bet,” he said. “Erica, okay, let’s see. She was a wild kid. Real wild. Drugs. A couple of rehabs. We’re talking before her sweet sixteen. When she’d come home from Sarah Lawrence, we had standing orders not to let her in if nobody else was home.”

“Then she seemed to straighten out. She married some blue-blood kid from her daddy’s firm, had a couple of daughters. But all of a sudden, she got divorced and took up with the second husband, the Gladstone guy. He was the pilot on the father’s corporate jet, was what I heard. The parents went ballistic, especially the Lady of the Manor, as we call her. She got Gladstone fired, and cut Erica off at the root.” The doorman shook his head knowingly. “Shooting smack when you’re thirteen is one thing, but, by God, you sleep with the help, you’re dead meat.”

“Did Gladstone and Erica ever come here?” I said.

I could tell from his face that he wasn’t happy about answering this one, but he looked down at the gleaming marble chessboard lobby tile and nodded.

“One Thanksgiving. I don’t know, maybe three years ago. Them and the daughters showed up, dressed to kill – bottles of champagne, big smiles. I figured they’d been invited and I sent them on up. But five minutes later, they came back down again, and the girls were crying like babies. Then that old witch actually tried to get me written up because I didn’t call first. Yeah, sorry. My bad for thinking you’d maybe want to see your only daughter and grandchildren on Thanksgiving.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Petie,” I said. “You just told me what I wanted to know.”

This was the next place that Gladstone would hit, I could feel it. He’d been saving the Blanchettes, especially the mother. He was going to pay her back, make damn sure she realized he existed.

I was nervous about even having the thought, for fear of a jinx, but I was pretty sure I’d finally done it – finally gotten one step ahead of our shooter.

Outside, I called Beth Peters on my cell.

“Good news,” I said. “Get hold of the ESU, and everybody haul ass over here to Eleven-seventeen Fifth. It’s stakeout time.”

Chapter 65

As the Teacher walked along Tenth Avenue looking for a taxi, he passed a bar that had a fake wagon wheel out front and a row of Harleys parked beside it. The sad old Irish song “The Streets of New York” was spilling out from its doorway into the street. Still feeling his own grief after the “funeral,” he decided to step inside.

Maybe that was just what he needed – a drink.

The young woman behind the scarred pinewood bar had the arms of a football player and metal rings piercing various parts of her face.

The Teacher ordered a Bud with a shot of Canadian Club, and nodded to a group of ironworkers having a retirement party in the shadowed backroom.

When his whiskey came, he knocked it back. Here’s to you, buddy, he thought, fighting another round of tears.

He was on his second shot and Bud when news of the spree killer came on the TV. He thought about asking the bartender to turn it up, but then decided no. Attracting unneeded attention was a bad idea.

“Fucking cops,” a gruff voice suddenly said beside him. The Teacher turned to see a monstrous ironworker, with eyes as red as his long, Viking hair. “Here’s an idea, flatfoots. How ‘bout taking your heads out of your fat, doughnut-padded asses and just catch the sick son of a bitch already.”

“Sick?” the Teacher said. “Ballsy, is what I say. He’s only offing rich, yuppie assholes. He’s like a vigilante. Doing this city a favor. What’s the big deal?”

“Vigilante? What are you? His PR guy?” the tattooed welder said, glaring malevolently. “Friggin’ goddamned freak. I’ll rearrange your face. I swear to God, I will. You must be as sick as he is.”

“Jesus, what the hell am I saying?” the Teacher said, clapping his hands to his face in chagrin. “I just came from a funeral. I guess I’m still all fucked up about it. You’re right. I’m really sorry. It’s wrong to even joke about the tragedy that’s going on. Let me buy you a beer.”

“A funeral, huh? That’s tough,” the big guy said, softening.

The Teacher motioned to the Lordess of the Rings for two more. When the drinks arrived and he set one in front of the welder, he seemed to trip clumsily and sent a barstool crashing to the floor.

“Oh, no,” the Teacher moaned. “Sorry. I guess I’ve had a couple too many.”

“Yeah, you better start taking it easy, pal,” the welder said, and bent down to pick up the fallen stool.

The Teacher broke one bottle over the back of his head, driving him to the floor, and the second across his stunned face. The bleeding man hardly had time to groan as the Teacher stretched his forearm across the tarnished brass footrail and broke it with a ferocious stomp. It sounded like two pool balls knocking together.

So much for not attracting attention, he thought as he backed for the exit.

“Repeat after me, carrottop,” he called from the doorway. “Not sick, just ballsy.”

Chapter 66

It took five minutes for the Emergency Service Unit guys to get to the Blanchettes’ building. After Steve Reno and I walked through the exits and entrances, we decided to suit up a cop as a doorman, put another in the lobby’s coatroom, and station a team of commandos in an unmarked surveillance van across the street beside the park.

After triple-checking that our trap was set, I put Reno in charge and decided to quickly do something I’d been needing to do for a long time.

The sun was going down over Jersey when I pulled up my unmarked car beside Riverside Park, behind my building. I walked along a path, crossed a desolate ball field, and crouched down beside an oak sapling in a clearing that faced the Hudson. I cleaned up some cigarette butts and an Aquafina bottle at the base of the tree, tossed them into the bag I’d brought, and then sat down.

The fledgling tree was the one my kids and I had planted after my wife, Maeve, had died. She was actually buried in the Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester, but whenever I needed to speak to her, which was pretty often, I usually ended up here. Most of the time, I’d just sit, and after a while it would almost be like she was there with me – just out of sight behind me, the way she’d been on the countless picnics we’d had here with our incredibly motley crew.

When I glanced back over my shoulder at my apartment house, I could see two of my kids in the kitchen window. Fiona and Bridget, was my guess. Maybe they were missing their mom as much as I was. Wishing she was still around to take care of them, cheer them up, make things right again.

I waved up at them. They waved back.

“We’re hanging in there, babe,” I said to the wind. “By a toenail, maybe, but what can we do? I love you, though, if that’s any consolation.”

When I went up to my apartment, Mary Catherine met me at the door. Something was wrong. I could see a troubled look wavering there in her usually stoic blue eyes.

“What is it, MC?” I said.

“Seamus,” she said gravely.

I followed her into my bedroom. Seamus was beached on top of the covers. His eyes were closed and he looked even paler than usual. For a second, I honest-to-God thought he was dead. Then he let out a string of gasping coughs, his thin chest shaking beneath his Roman collar.

Oh, Lord, I thought. Really not good. He’d finally caught our flu. Which, for an eighty-plus-year-old like him, was extremely dangerous. It suddenly hit me how stupid I’d been to even let him come around. I panicked for a second. What would I do if I lost him, too?

But I would lose him anyway, one of these days, an evil little voice whispered in my ear. Wouldn’t I?

I shook off the thought, went to the kitchen, and got the bottle of Jameson’s from the cupboard. I poured a couple of fingers into a Waterford crystal tumbler and added some heated milk and sugar.

“God love ya, boy,” Seamus said to me, after taking a couple of sips. “Now give me a hand out of bed, and I’ll be on my way back to the rectory.”

“Just try to get out of here, old man,” I said. “I dare you. Lay there and finish your medicine before I call an ambulance on you.”

Chapter 67

I was still standing over Seamus when my oldest boy, Brian, ran in.

What now?

“Dad! Mary Catherine! In the kitchen! Quick!”

I raced after him into the hall. The kitchen had gone dark. That was all we needed right now – some kind of blackout. Damn prewar building’s wiring was falling apart just like everything else. It would probably start a fire. I sniffed for smoke in the walls and tried to remember where I’d put the fuses.

“Psych!” yelled all my kids as the light flicked on.

On the kitchen island, two plates were set up with Tombstone pizzas on them. They’d even made a salad. Trent was pouring Diet Cokes with the dish towel draped over his arm, like a three-and-a-half-foot-tall sommelier.

“Now, hold on a second. You guys are supposed to be in bed,” I said as Mary Catherine and I were ordered to sit. “And what did you do with all the dirty dishes?”

“Chill, Pops. It’s all being taken care of,” Jane said, pushing in my chair for me. “We’re feeling better now. We decided you and MC need to take a load off already. You work too hard. You guys should learn to relax a little.”

After we were done, coffee was prepared, and we were led into the living room.

What happened next was incredible. The vacuum came on. Assembly lines formed. Toys and art supplies miraculously rose from the floors and furniture and returned to their proper places. One of my little jokers started to sing “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from Annie as he scrubbed at a puke spot with a wet paper towel, and the rest of them joined in.

As I sat there on my beat-up sectional, sipping my too-sweet coffee, something brightened in my chest. Though Maeve was gone, she had accomplished a miracle. She’d taken the best of herself – her sense of humor, her love of life, her ability to do for others – and somehow injected it into my silly kids. That part of her would never die, I realized. That could never be taken away.

“Dad, stop! This is supposed to be making you happy,” Julia said.

“What are you talking about? I’m thrilled,” I said, wiping my wet face. “It’s just the Pine-Sol. It always irritates my eyes.”

Chapter 68

It was coming on eight P.M. when I got back to the Blanchettes’ building on Fifth. I parked at a hydrant on the Central Park side, and before crossing the street I rapped a hello on the party rental van where the Emergency Service Unit guys were staked out.

My buddy Petie, the doorman, waved to me as I stepped under the awning. He had a new partner with him now. I grinned when I saw the face underneath the ridiculous green hat. It was ESU Lieutenant Steve Reno.

“Good evening, sir. May I get you a psycho?” he said, touching the hat brim with a white glove.

“I wish somebody could,” I said. “No sign, huh?”

“Not yet, but I did make ten bucks in tips. Mike, did you know these Blanchette people are holding a charity fund-raiser tonight? How does that make sense when our guy’s only joy in life is offing filthy rich New York types?”

I was stunned. “Are you kidding? A fund-raiser? Is that right, Petie?”

He nodded. “It’s been scheduled for months. Too late to cancel.”

I shook my head. I still couldn’t believe it.

“Which part of ‘your psychopathic son-in-law is coming to gun you down’ aren’t they getting, do you think?” I said as I headed for the elevator. Not to mention that they just learned that their daughter and granddaughters had been brutally murdered.

When the butler opened the penthouse door, I spotted Mrs. Blanchette out by the pool. A maid was standing beside her, and an elderly Latino man in maintenance clothes was sitting at the pool’s edge, apparently about to slide into the water.

“What’s going on out there?” I said.

“Mrs. Blanchette dropped an earring in the deep end,” the butler explained as the maintenance guy submerged himself.

“Why don’t they just drain it?” I said.

“It wouldn’t be refilled by the time the first guests arrive at nine, sir. Mrs. Blanchette insists on tea lights during the cocktail hour.”

“Of course,” I said. “The tea lights. What was I thinking?”

The butler’s face had a peculiar, pained expression. “Detective, perhaps you should have a word with Mr. B.,” he said. “I’ll fetch him, shall I?”

I nodded, wondering what that was about. As he hurried off, I walked out to the pool to try to talk sense to Mrs. Blanchette.

“Ma’am?” I said.

She whirled around like a sequined cobra. The contents of the big martini glass she was holding sloshed onto the maid’s dress. I could tell from her eyes and her breath that she’d already downed several of them. Maybe drinking and staying busy were her ways of working through her grief.

“Get me another one,” Mrs. Blanchette said impatiently, thrusting the glass at the cowed maid. Then she turned her attention to me.

“You again. What is it now?” she said.

“I must not have been clear about the danger you and your husband are in,” I said. “Your son-in – I mean, Thomas Gladstone – is targeting you, without question, as we speak. It’s not a good time to have people over. I’m going to have to ask you to postpone.”

“Postpone?” she said furiously. “This is the Friends of the Congo AIDS Benefit – in planning for the last year. Steven is flying in from the coast just for tonight. Sumner actually cut his vacation short. Do I have to supply last names? There’ll be no postponing anything.”

“Mrs. Blanchette, people’s lives are at stake here,” I said.

Instead of responding to me, she ripped a cell phone from her bag and flipped it open.

“Diandra? Hi, it’s Cynthia,” she said. “Could you put Morty on?”

Morty? Oh, Lord, I hoped it wasn’t the Morty I thought it was. I didn’t need that name dropped on me. Not even an ounce of it.

She stalked away, talking. The maintenance guy, up for a breath of air, stared at her back and muttered a Spanish word that was not used in polite company.

“You said it, amigo,” I told him.

When she came back a moment later, she shoved the phone at me, with a look of triumph on her face.

“Who is this?” came a harsh male voice.

“Detective Michael Bennett.”

“Listen up, Bennett. This is Mayor Carlson. There’ll be no more crazy talk of canceling this event. We can’t cave in to terrorism.”

“It’s not exactly caving in to terrorism, sir.”

“That’s how it will look. Besides, my wife and I are attending, so that’s an end to it. You call the commissioner and tell him to beef up security. Do I make myself clear?”

Right, I felt like telling him. A highly visible police presence will really be great for our trap. What did another bunch of dead citizens matter, compared to twisting by the pool with the A-list?

But those were the kinds of thoughts I grudgingly had to keep to myself.

“Whatever you say, your honor,” I said.

Chapter 69

As I walked back inside, I met the butler returning with Henry Blanchette. I’d never seen a more unhappy-looking man.

“I’m sure you’re finding my wife’s behavior somewhat odd, Detective,” he said.

“That’s not my job to judge.”

“She has a very hard time dealing with stress,” he said with a sigh. “There’ve been times in the past when much slighter things than this have pushed her over the edge. She goes into denial, drinks, and takes pills, and she’s impossible to deal with. But soon she’ll break down, and then I’ll take her to a discreet clinic, where they know her well. So if you’ll just bear with us for a little while longer.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, actually feeling sorry for Henry. On top of his own grief and the danger of the situation, he had a crazy woman on his hands.

For the next half hour, I followed the mayor’s orders. I called Chief McGinnis, and within minutes a dozen plainclothes cops and detectives arrived on the back elevator along with the caterer.

I finagled the guest list from the butler and stationed two cops at the penthouse door with it, although it wasn’t like they’d really need to match names to faces, what with all the Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street celebs due to arrive. I got several more men to pose as waiters, and even posted a couple of detectives outside by the roof pool. With this maniac, who knew? He might try to scale the building like Spider-Man, or maybe paraglide onto the roof.

Then I made a security check, going upstairs and wandering through the cavernous duplex apartment. This place could have fit even my family comfortably, and would still have a few rooms left over. I passed by his-and-her master bedrooms, marble bathrooms that ancient Roman emperors would have found plush, a white-on-white French château-inspired library with an ornate, coffered ceiling. Any minute, I expected to turn a corner and find gold and gems just dumped out onto the oriental rugs like pirate treasure.

I was passing by yet another bedroom when I heard human sounds. It was probably just one of the platoon of maids, but better safe than sorry. I drew my Glock and held it down beside my thigh.

But instead of a maid, it was Mrs. Blanchette that I glimpsed through the doorway. She was sitting on a small canopy bed, crying. Her husband arrived at her back and embraced her, his cheeks wet. She rocked back and forth, keening, her fists squeezing and pulling at the bedspread as he whispered in her ear.

This was their daughter’s room, I realized as I reholstered. I regretted all the negative thoughts I’d had about her. Despite appearances and her bristly personality, the woman was going through hell. A place I knew all too well.

I retreated as quietly as I could. At the top of the stairs, I spotted a photo of Erica, with a man I assumed was her first husband. They were walking with their daughters on a glowing white-sand beach beside deep blue water, laughing, the wind whipping their hair back.

As I stared, I thought of all the pictures I had of Maeve and the kids. All the happy moments, frozen and captured forever. That was it, wasn’t it? What life was all about. What could never be taken away. The moments shared with family and the people you loved.

Chapter 70

I coordinated security from the Blanchettes’ grand-hotel-sized kitchen – the farthest, most out-of-the-way corner of it that I could find. The last thing I needed was to be standing by the penthouse’s front door when the mayor arrived, so hizzoner could give me another earful.

Despite the short amount of time we’d had to beef up security, we’d managed to do an excellent job. Fortunately, the employees of the Blanchettes’ upscale catering firm had worked UN events and presidential fund-raisers, so we were able to get background checks from the Feds without too much fuss.

It was the guests and hosts who turned out to be the pain in the butt. When we insisted on bag checks at the door, I thought some of them would have to be sedated. We reached a compromise only when a borrowed metal detector was shuttled up from the Manhattan criminal courthouse, on the order of Mrs. Blanchette’s good friend the mayor.

About the only high note came when the Cajun head chef, Maw-Maw Josephine, heard that one of the Midtown North detectives had volunteered down in the Big Easy after Hurricane Katrina. Next thing we knew, all us cops were getting hooked up with as much gumbo, shrimp, and corn bread as we could stuff ourselves with.

It was ominously quiet during the first hour, as the most favored guests arrived for the pre-event private dinner. Of course I was relieved that everyone stayed safe, but on the other hand, I was hoping Gladstone would make a move so we could nail him to the floorboards. His unpredictability was burning a slow hole through the lining of my stomach. Or was that Maw-Maw’s Tabasco jambalaya?

I’d just done my hundredth radio check with the bored-stiff ESU gang across the street at Central Park, when Beth Peters rang my cell phone.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she said excitedly.

“What? We got him?”

“Get over here to West Thirty-eighth near Eleventh Avenue, and maybe you can tell me,” she said.

What the heck did that mean? And West 38th? That was where the French photographer had gotten whacked.

“Come on, Beth, no games,” I said. “What’s going on?”

“I’m honestly not sure, Mike,” she said. “I just really need you over here. The scene’ll be easy to spot. It’s the building with all the fire trucks out front. Oh, yeah, and the horses.”

Horses?

Chapter 71

The top of the Hell’s Kitchen tenement was still smoldering when I pulled my Chevy up on the sidewalk behind a FDNY rescue truck.

Beth Peters came over to meet me as I climbed out, blinking in astonishment at what I saw.

“I told you, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said.

She’d been true to her word. A herd of spooked-looking horses was milling around on the sidewalk beyond the fire lines. As she and I followed a smoke eater into the building, he told us that a stable of Central Park buggy horses was right next door to the blaze.

Well, why not horses at this point? I thought. We already had an outlaw and gunfighting. All I needed was a white hat. Maybe I could borrow one from that Naked Cowboy lunatic in Times Square.

The walls of the top-floor apartment were even more blackened than the Cajun shrimp I’d just eaten. Beth talked to some CSU techs in the wasteland of one of the torched rooms, then handed me a dust mask before guiding me to a scorched lump of ash in the center.

My stomach clenched like a fist as I stared down at a badly burnt body. The fire had charred and melted its features into a horror movie rictus.

“I had the techs take some dental shots. And we got Thomas Gladstone’s dentist, out in Locust Valley, to e-mail us his X-rays,” Beth said. “The ME’s pretty sure it’s a match.”

The surprise of seeing the horses was nothing by comparison to that. My jaw just about went unhinged.

“You’re telling me this is Gladstone?” I said.

“One and the same.”

I know it’s not right to disrespect the dead, but I couldn’t deny that I was pleased. This ulcer-inducing case was finally over. In fact, I couldn’t help smiling, and I let out a long sigh of relief as what felt like a piano was lifted from my back.

“What do you know?” I said. “He offed himself, huh? Literally went down in a blaze of glory. Thank God it’s over.”

But Beth was shaking her head. I’d spoken too soon.

She crouched beside the corpse and moved her gloved finger to a small circular hole in the temple. Then she showed me the bigger hole on the other side of the head, a jagged exit wound.

“Shooting yourself is pretty easy, but shooting yourself and then setting yourself on fire, well, that’s a notch trickier,” she said.

“Maybe he did it the other way around,” I tried desperately. “Torched the place first, then boom.”

“So what happened to the gun? Even if it melted, there’d be traces left, but the techs haven’t found any. Plus Cleary says there’s fly larva embedded in the left upper arm. That means he’s been dead for two, maybe three days. And that means? -”

“ Gladstone couldn’t have killed all those people,” I finished for her. I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes.

“Sorry, Mike, but he’s not our shooter.”

I cursed under my breath. If it wasn’t Thomas Gladstone, then who the hell was it?

“That’s not all,” Beth said, standing. She led me to a closet with a barbecued door and walls.

I winced at the slight young blond woman crumpled up inside it. The fire hadn’t gotten to her too badly, but she was still very dead – shot in the back of the head.

“We found her purse. Name’s Wendy Stub. Twenty-six. Her business card says she’s a publicist at Stoa Holdings, a hotshot Park Avenue South PR firm.”

A publicist? What was her connection to this?

As I listened to firemen ripping open the walls in the other rooms, I wondered if FDNY was still hiring. A midlife career change seemed like just the ticket. Or maybe the stable next door could use a horse whisperer, to help the poor creatures get over their trauma.

Beth was watching me inquiringly. “What now?”

“You’re asking me?” I said.

Chapter 72

Rush hour was still in full swing when the Teacher’s cab stopped behind a police car that was parked in front of the Pierre Hotel. It made him a little nervous, but Vinny, the doorman, came bustling over to open the taxi’s door like nothing was out of the ordinary. Cops didn’t come to places like this to pick up people – they came to protect people. Still, the Teacher kept his face averted and his hand on the butt of his.45 as he got out.

“Welcome home, Mr. Meyer!” Vinny said. “How was your trip? Paris, wasn’t it?”

That’s where he’d told everyone at the Pierre he was going. In fact, he’d gone infinitely farther. To other dimensions. But now he was home, the place where he’d actually lived for the past three years.

“It was great, Vinny. Especially the food,” the Teacher said, smiling despite himself. He’d liked Vinny since the moment he decided to move into the world-famous hotel. That was right after his mother had passed away, and he’d become the sole beneficiary of the twenty-four-million-dollar Ronald Meyer fortune. He’d decided that he owed it to his asshole stepdaddy to blow every last red penny of the old man’s dough. And he’d kept his Hell’s Kitchen apartment as a command center.

“What’s up with the cop car?” the Teacher asked casually.

“Oh, Jeez. You probably didn’t hear. There’s this fucking – pardon me – freaking maniac going around shooting people the last couple of days. Killed a stewardess at a hotel on Sixth and a maître d’ at Twenty-one. It’s in all the papers. They think it’s some rich guy who flipped his lid. So they got cops everywhere they got rich people. Which is everywhere around here, I guess. My cousin, Mario, he’s a sergeant down in the Village, he says the rank and file are psyched they’re making a fortune in OT. Isn’t this world nuts?”

“I’m with you there, Vin,” the Teacher said, letting go of his gun.

“Hey, any more word on that Food Network thing? I’m sick of that Emeril already, with that ‘bam’ shtick.”

“Patience, Vinny. Good things come to those who wait.”

“If you say so, Mr. Meyer. What’s up? No bags?”

“Some kind of mix-up out at Kennedy. What else is new? Be along later, they said. Right now, I just need a drink.”

“You and me both, Mr. M. Have a good one.”

Inside the Pierre, the concierge, Michael, echoed Vinny’s greeting. “Mr. Meyer. Welcome back, sir.” The Teacher liked the concierge almost as much as he liked Vinny. Michael was a small, blond, circumspect man with a soft, discreet voice, who managed to be incredibly helpful without kissing your ass – a true quality person.

Without any fuss, Michael went into the mailroom behind the check-in desk and retrieved the Teacher’s mail.

“Oh, before I forget, sir. Barneys called an hour ago and said that your final fitting is ready whenever you are.”

The Teacher literally felt a sudden cold shiver race like an icy snake down his spine. His suit was ready.

The one he would die in.

That was what he would call a true final fitting.

“Excellent. Thank you, Michael,” he said, flipping through his mail.

He stopped when he got to the oversized envelope with the embossed invitation. “Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette,” the return address read. He nodded with satisfaction. Someone he knew from his former life had gotten him on the guest list. The Blanchettes had no idea who Mr. Meyer was.

“Michael?” he said, tapping the envelope against his chin as he walked toward the elevator.

“Yes, sir?”

“I need an emergency appointment at the in-house salon.”

“Done, Mr. Meyer,” Michael said.

“And would you please send up a bottle of champagne? I think a rosé should do it.”

“Dom Pérignon? Veuve Clicquot?” Michael said, immediately remembering his favorites.

“How about both?” the Teacher said with his winningest smile, what he called his Tom Cruise special. “You only live once, Michael. You only live just once.”

Chapter 73

An hour and forty-five minutes later, the Teacher stood in front of a floor-length triple mirror in Barneys.

“Does the gentleman like what he sees?” the salesman asked.

The navy cashmere suit the Teacher now wore was a Gianluca Isaia, the bootlicker had told him in the loving, reverent tones of a saint uttering the name of God. The silk shirt was a Battistoni, the cap-toed lace-ups from Bettanin and Venturi.

He had to admit, he looked pretty darn good. James Bond-suave. Like the latest actor, including new blond hair, thanks to the cut and dye job.

“The gentlemen loves what he sees,” the Teacher finally said with a grin. “What’s the bill again?”

The fitter toted up numbers on a cash register. “-Eighty-eight twenty-six,” he said after a minute. “That includes the socks.”

Oh, including the three-hundred-dollar socks. What a bargain.

“If the accessories are too pricey, I could show you something else,” the salesman said, with a clear trace of condescension in his voice.

Out of his peripheral vision, the Teacher could see that the immaculately dressed little suckass actually had the nerve to roll his eyes.

These luxury store salespeople just didn’t learn, did they? Exactly when was the last time you dropped four figures on a suit? he wanted to ask the jaded piece of crap. Like so many other people, this guy was practically begging for a bullet in the empty space between his ears.

The Teacher took a steadying breath. Gear it down, he told himself. That’s it. Good boy. This was no time for a silly temper blowup. This close to the goal line, this close to making things right.

“I’ll take it,” the Teacher said, reaching into his Vuitton beside the mirror. His fingers played across the checkered steel grip of one of the two 50-round Intratec Tec-9 machine pistols waiting there under the butter-soft napa leather like loyal friends.

He reluctantly passed them by, instead retrieving his billfold and his American Express Black card.

“Even the socks,” he said.

Chapter 74

“Your cute doggy is what his name?” the turbaned taxi driver asked in a heavy accent, as he pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Finishing Touch,” the Teacher said. He paid the man and tugged the platinum blond Maltese out of the cab.

He’d bought the dog at a boutique pet store on his way over here. It was going to be his prop for doing recon around the Blanchettes’ building. An extremely well-dressed metrosexual walking a lapdog in that part of the Upper East Side would seem like wallpaper.

The Teacher headed up the park side of Fifth, with the nervous little dog straining at its leash. A full block south of the Blanchettes, he stopped and scanned the busy activity out in front of their apartment building. There was a double-parked line of Bentleys and limos, with doormen hustling back and forth as well-heeled ladies and gentlemen exited town cars and stepped under the awning.

One thing struck him as odd. He’d expected extra security, but he didn’t see any besides the doormen. Well, so much the better. His lips curved in a smile. His destiny was holding strong. He was at the finishing line, about to enter the winner’s circle.

The plan was to gain access with the invitation he’d finagled. If he was stopped or searched, he would simply draw the Tec-9s, now hanging in their custom holsters under his arms, and start firing. Kill his way into the elevator. Go upstairs and blast everyone dumb enough to get between him and the Blanchettes.

In a way, he actually hoped there would be some resistance. The Blanchettes would hear, and it would give them something to think about as he made his way closer.

He was gearing himself up for action when he walked past a van on the park side of the street and heard the sound – a strange kind of squelch. A radio, he realized. Inside the catering van! The cops had the place staked out after all.

That cold, snaky shiver ran down his spine again, and his breathing became labored. By sheer willpower, he kept walking casually along, pulling the dog as if he did this every day.

What was the right move if they challenged him? Shoot? Run? Maybe this was his final chance, and he should go for the Blanchettes right now. Rush across the street into the lobby, guns blazing.

He palmed the cold grip of the Tec under his left arm and thumbed off its safety. Whatever happened next, he wasn’t going to die alone. Goddamn cops. Why couldn’t they have stayed useless for just another five minutes!

He chanced a quick look over his shoulder. Nobody! They weren’t coming. He started breathing more easily. Christ, he’d been lucky.

Two blocks north, the Teacher made a hard left and bolted into Central Park. The mutt started yapping, grating on his fried nerves as he dragged it along the darkened path.

Calm down, he told himself. He was safe. He put the Tec’s safety back on. Now he had to think. This wasn’t like the Pierre, with a cop car sitting out front in plain sight. The obvious lack of security, with a major event going on, should have tipped him off. Those sons of bitches had set some kind of trap! That asshole, Mike Bennett, no doubt. He’d somehow guessed what the Teacher had planned.

But the Teacher had read a lot of strategy and war books in his day. The Art of War, The Book of Five Rings, The Prince. They all essentially advised the same simple, yet not so simple thing. Figure out what your opponent thinks you’re going to do next, then do something else. Deception is the art of war.

He was halfway around the reservoir jogging track when the answer came to him. An inspired plan to get around Bennett’s trap – a little end run. Yes, that was it. Yes, yes, yes. He pressed a shaking hand to his grinning mouth. Bingo. It was perfect, better than his original plan. He’d pulled out a game winner right at the buzzer.

His grin widened as the dumbass face of Detective Bennett appeared in his mind.

“You had your shot, Bennett,” he whispered to himself.

He let go of the leash and drop-kicked the squealing Maltese into the darkness.

“Now, it’s my turn.”