Shock Warning

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Alonzo Schmidt would be damned if he was going to let this stump him.

The radiation levels were well within the standard tolerances, but something was amiss. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there definitely was something wrong.

Think.

He’d been on duty the day of the attacks, and he’d seen firsthand some of the carnage as they brought the dead and wounded over from the Ninety-second Street Y. It was always the Jews who caught the brunt of things like this, always the Jews who got blamed for everything. Being black in America was hard enough, but being a Jew, he decided, was really tough.

Not that he minded being black in America. He was always being lectured by some baggy-pants, straight-haired Negro or other that the black man had suffered four hundred years of iniquity at the hands of the white man, but then he looked around the hospital and what did he see? A sea of color: white doctors, black doctors, Indian doctors, Arab doctors, Christian doctors, Jewish doctors, even some Muslim doctors. All getting along perfectly fine, all conforming to the discipline of the hospital, all dedicated to precisely one cause, which was saving lives.

He had a good job, a good life, a good wife, great kids. They had their own place in Queens, bought if not yet paid for. He had a nice car, which he left garaged most of the year until spring came and he could take the family out to Sag Harbor to visit relatives. And the hospital made it all possible — the hospital and his skill at his job.

Think. No, better—

Think back.

Chaos that day. Hard to believe that one lone gunman could have done all that damage. Why—

The phone rang. “Schmidt,” he said.

“It’s Detective Saleh, Mr. Schmidt,” came the phone. “Remember me?”

“Sure I do. In fact, I was just thinking about you. You know, there’s something at the back of my—”

“Listen, we don’t have much time. I’m in the car right now, on my way uptown. Can you clear your schedule?”

“Of course, Detective.”

“The M.E. got us an ID on the shooter at the Y. His name was Crankheit, C-R-A-N-K-H-E-I-T, like Walter only different, first name Raymond. Does that ring a bell?’

Alonzo thought for a moment. “Can’t say that it does.”

“He might have been using another name. Or maybe he never told anybody his name.”

“What are you getting at?”

“We think he might have been in the hospital prior to the incident. His head was blown off by whoever took him out, but our guys in the M.E.’s office are whizzes with computers and we think we’ve got a pretty good idea of what he might have looked like. I’m sending you the picture now. Hold on.”

Alonzo Schmidt took the smartphone away from his ear and watched. Sure enough, in a few seconds the machine let him know he had a photo. He punched it up.

“Nasty-looking little geek, ain’t he?” he said to Lannie.

“Mustn’t go by looks now,” said Lannie. “But he was even nastier than he looked — a real piece of shit.”

“I saw what he done to those ladies at the Y,” said Alonzo. “He messed them up pretty good. A whole lotta hate in that boy. Whole lotta hate in a lot of people.”

“Yeah, love seems in pretty short supply around the world these days. Hang on — we’re pulling up now. Meet me out front.”

Lannie was coming through the main doors when Alonzo got there. He held out his hand in greeting. Lannie shook it and kept moving. “Someplace private,” he said, “where we can talk.”

They ducked into a nearby office, empty. “Do you recognize him?”

“Yes,” said Alonzo simply.

Lannie turned on the recorder application in his smartphone. “Go.”

“I only saw him a couple of times, but I have a pretty good memory for faces, and this one kinda creeped me out. I mean, he seemed nice enough in a weird sort of way, but he wasn’t what you’d call friendly, which I thought was odd for a delivery guy.”

“Delivery guy?”

“Yeah, from the deli around the corner. People always getting hungry around here, sending out for stuff, and he brought me a corned-beef sandwich a couple of times.”

“When was this?”

“Right before the attack. Couple of days.”

“What makes you think you’d remember somebody as anonymous as a delivery guy?”

“Celina Selena pointed it out to me. That’s what we call her, Celina Selena, on account of her momma loved that singer who got killed. Don’t tell her I told you. She likes to keep her middle name private.”

“You mean, the technician in nuclear medicine?”

“That’s Celina.”

Five minutes later they were in one of the unused examining rooms in Nuclear Medicine. “Of course I remember, Detective,” Celina was saying. “People tell me I have the best ear for accents of anyone they’ve ever met.”

“Where am I from?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Atlantic Avenue, west of the Van Wyck. If I hear you talk some more, I might be able to get within a couple of blocks.”

Lannie was impressed but didn’t have time for parlor tricks right now. “I’ll take you up on that some other time,” he said. “Tell me about this guy. What was it about his accent?”

Celina looked at Alonzo. “Well, we were shooting the breeze and he said he was from Wahoo, Nebraska, but I know people from Wahoo, Nebraska — Dr. Lovenberg is from Wahoo, Nebraska.”

“Why do you keep saying that. ‘Wahoo, Nebraska’?”

“Because that’s how they say it. Wahoo, Nebraska, accent on the ‘hoo.’ And he didn’t. He just said Wahoo. So I said, you mean, Wahoo, Nebraska, and he just looked at me. That was when I knew he wasn’t from Wahoo.”

“Nebraska,” finished Lannie.

“Exactly. Plus he accented ‘Wa.’ ”

“Okay, now where did he go? Was he ever carrying anything? Did he walk over here or take a bike?”

“Neither,” said Alonzo. “He rode one of those threewheelers with a compartment up front to put stuff in. You’ve seen ’em.”

Lannie felt his heart racing. “Where’s the service entrance?”

They were there eight minutes later. Lannie was punching in text on his phone the whole way.

The room was downstairs, just as he feared.

“Are there any storage rooms around here? Places the service personnel use to store things?”

“It’s okay, Ralph,” said Schmidt to a big man in a security guard’s rig. “Everything cool. Right over here, Detective.”

Lannie tried the door. “It’s locked.”

“Not locked. The door’s busted, stuck or something, and we haven’t gotten around to getting it fixed. Not a lot of use for it anyway.”

“We have to break it down,” said Lannie, deadly serious. “Come on, help me.”

He and Alonzo threw themselves at it. Nothing. Celina tried as well. They felt it move a little, but that was all. “Come on, Ralph, get your ass over here,” said Alonzo.

The fat man added his weight to the mix. The door groaned and buckled but did not give.

“Stand back,” said Lannie, drawing his weapon, the Sig P226, the model that was among the standard-issue nine-millimeters in the department. Even his chief, Frankie Byrne, had switched, although more out of necessity than choice. He fired a single round. “Okay, again,” he said, and the four of them put their combined weight behind it….

Open. There was the trike. “Fuck a duck,” said Lannie.

He raced to the trike and opened the compartment. Empty. It would have been a miracle were it not, and it seemed that for New York City miracles were just about in as short supply as love.

Lannie punched another message, then looked up. “How far could he have gotten with whatever he was carrying before somebody noticed him?”

“Depends on the time of day,” said Celina. “Late at night…”

Late at night, hospitals were just about the least secure places in the city. Just the comatose patients and a few overworked interns heading into the twentieth consecutive hour of work while most of the doctors slept soundly at home in the Oranges or Westchester or Ridgefield in Connecticut, and the help went home to the Bronx and Staten Island. If that kid had gotten entry to the hospital at night, he could have left his package anywhere.

“Thanks, Ralph, you’ve been very helpful,” said Lannie to the fat man, and began to walk away. He dropped his voice as he spoke to Celina and Alonzo. “You’re not to speak of this to anybody, you understand. This is police business. Alonzo, get me a radiation check on that trike ASAP. Celina, I need you to start asking around… quietly… among the staff if anybody remembers seeing your boyfriend Raymond one night before the attacks. And I need to see the head administrator, right now.”

“I’ll take to you Dr. Leopold’s office,” offered Celina.

“I knew something was wrong,” muttered Alonzo. “I felt it. I felt like something was hiding from me”

Celina and Lannie were heading for the elevator that would take them to the administration floor. “Do you think you can feel it one more time?” asked Lannie. “And find it? Our lives are going to depend on it.”

“You can count on me, Detective,” said Schmidt. “If there’s something hot in this place, I’ll get it.”

“Make it snappy,” said Lannie. Then, to Celina, “Let’s—”

She was taking an in-house page on her cell phone. The look on her face told Lannie something was terribly wrong. “Can you please repeat that?” she said, signaling frantically to Lannie to come close and listen. “I’m having a hard time hearing you. This is a hospital, you know. It’s noisy around here. Wait, let me put you on speakerphone.”

She hit the button. Together, they listened to the voice.

“Did you give him my message?”

Lannie signaled for her to play along, string out the conversation, keep him on the line as much as possible as he frantically sent a message back to Sid Sheinberg at CTU headquarters. In hospitals, cell phone service was tied in with Internet service; the relay stations worked off the wireless service. If he could just keep the guy talking long enough, they could get a read on his position.

“Give who the message?”

“Detective Aslan Saleh—” and then the words devolved into some kind of Middle Eastern gibberish again, words that Celina had no chance of ever understanding, no matter how many times she went to Brooklyn.

Lannie was still texting when his ear caught the change of language. A look of disbelief came over his face as he listened, and a sneer of derision appeared on his lips.

“He’s right there with you, isn’t he?” said the man, speaking in English again. “So this is my message to you, Detective Saleh, you dog son of a thousand whores. There is fatwa against you and your family for the crime of apostasy. There is fatwa against you and your family for the crime of insulting Islam. There is fatwa against you for the crime of collaborating with the infidel. May you make your peace with Allah and beg his most compassionate forgiveness. Taubeh kon! For the day of reckoning is at—”

Lannie grabbed the phone. “Listen to me, fella. You can take your goddamn fucking threats and shove them up your ass. This is my town, my country, my home and if you don’t like then go blow a camel. You ever show up here, you’re dead meat. You wanna see repentance? By the time I’m finished with you, you’re gonna confess to murdering Judge Crater. Capisce?”

But the bastard had rung off. No matter — he’d kept him on the phone long enough. Sid Sheinberg would track his ass down. The long arm of the NYPD would reach out and take his fucking head right off.

“Everything okay, Detective?” asked Celina.

“Let’s get to work,” he said.