Step On A Crack

Chapter 104

I’D OFFERED TO stay home from work with the kids, who were off on Christmas break, but Seamus and Mary Catherine wouldn’t hear of it.

“Sorry, fella,” Seamus told me. “These kids need to be spoiled like no one has ever been spoiled before, and with the mood you’re in, you’re going to have to leave that job to me and Mary C. Besides, you need to get outside of yourself there, Mick. Throw yourself into something positive. Stop sitting around and go and collar those pathetic mopes who jacked the cathedral.”

“ ‘Collar the mopes’?” I said with a faint grin. “ ‘Jacked’?”

“So I watch NYPD Blue now and then,” Seamus said with a fantastic roll of his eyes. “Is it a sin?”

So the Monday morning after the funeral, I arrived back at my desk inside Manhattan North Homicide in East Harlem. Harry Grissom, my boss, and the rest of my squadies were irritatingly supportive and polite. Who would have ever thought that you’d miss being the butt of practical jokes? Soon enough, I thought, knocking the dust off my mouse.

I put in calls to Paul Martelli and Ned Mason. And I learned that nothing really new or promising had been discovered. Every square inch of the church’s granite, marble, and stained glass had been searched and dusted for latent prints, but there had been nothing. These criminals had been extremely tidy.

There had been some excitement when a hijacker’s body was found in the archbishops’ crypt under the altar, Martelli told me, but it ended when it was discovered that the man’s hands and head, along with any chance at identifying him, had been removed by his cold-blooded partners.

No traces of explosives had been discovered in the church either, so it seemed that Jack’s threat about blowing everyone to smithereens had been just a bluff. Another hand he had won.

I found a Post-it on my computer to call Lonnie Jacob, the NYPD CSU investigator working the car dealership where the sedan had crashed. Around noon, I lifted the phone and dialed the fingerprint lab at One Police Plaza.

“Mike,” Lonnie said after he answered. “I was just about to call you. I just did it.”

“Did what?” I said.

“It wasn’t easy, but by sodium hydroxiding our John Doe’s hands, I was able to dry them out and peel off the top layer of his charred skin. The second dermal layer is harder to ID because there’s this kind of doubling of the ridges, but at least we have something. I already spoke to my contact down in Latent Prints at the FBI. Should I fire it down to DC to cross-reference?”

I told him yes, and he told me he’d call me back with the results. These criminals had gone nutso about covering their tracks-which could only mean they were definitely trying to hide something.