Step On A Crack

Chapter 106

I FELT TOO COOPED UP sitting in the squad room, so I decided to go for a ride one morning. I smiled, looking out at the chaotic hustle and bustle of loud vehicles and even louder pedestrians surging around St. Patrick’s when I pulled up on Fifth Avenue in front of it. Our city had survived riots, blackouts, 9/11, Mayor Dinkins, and now this, I thought as I headed up the cathedral steps.

The church was closed to the public for repairs. The uniformed Midtown North cops stationed at the door stepped aside when I showed them my tin.

I walked up the center aisle and genuflected before sitting in the front pew.

I sat looking out on the solemn, austere, empty church. You’d think I’d be sick of churches by this point, but for some reason, I felt comforted just being there in the candle-scented darkness. I felt oddly consoled.

My high school graduation from Regis had taken place here. I smirked, remembering how wretched at Greek and Latin I’d been. One thing, though, perhaps the only thing I’d picked up from the Jesuit priests who taught us was their stress on the importance of reason. Time and again, they preached the necessity of using our God-given rationality in order to cut through to the essence of things. I guess it was the reason I chose philosophy as my major when I went on to Manhattan College, a small, very fine school in the Bronx. And the ultimate reason I had become a detective. The need to get at the truth.

I stared up at the main altar, thinking about the case.

We knew the when, where, what, why, and how. The only thing left was the who.

Who would have done it? Who was capable of the brilliance, and the brutality? Men with a lot of will, for one thing, I decided; and men not afraid to use extreme violence as a means to a selfish end.

They had killed five people during the siege. An ESU officer and FBI agent had been shot in the tunnel firefight. A priest had been shot in the side of the head “by accident,” according to Jack. John Rooney had been executed at point-blank range. Interviews with the hostages who had witnessed it confirmed that.

Finally, I thought about the mayor. Why had they stabbed Andrew Thurman to death? The cigarette burns over his arms meant that he’d also been tortured. These men were nothing if not efficient. Why change their killing method for the mayor? It would seem that shooting a man, however unpalatable, was better than stabbing him, right? Why get personal with the mayor?

I laid my hands against the polished wood in front of me as I squeezed the rail hard.

There was a reason. I just didn’t know what it was.

Yet.

I stopped by the row of votive candles at the Lady Chapel before I left. I lit one for each of the souls that had perished here, and an extra one for my wife. The dollar bills made a shuffling sound in the silence as they dropped into the offering box. Angel wings, I thought, stifling a tear. I hunched onto the velvet kneeler, closed my eyes against my clenched fists.

Dear Maeve, I prayed. I love you. I miss you terribly.

I was still waiting to hear from Lonnie about the prints, and when I returned to my desk he still hadn’t called. I poured myself a coffee and stared out my window at East Harlem as I waited.

In an empty lot right across from the precinct, kids had set some already discarded Christmas trees on fire, their charred trunks like a pile of black bones.

There was still a lot of investigating left to do. We knew the makes of the guns left behind by the kidnappers, and maybe that would turn into something. We’d found shells and spent cartridges. And half a dozen guns that shot rubber bullets. That was an interesting twist for me. They’d thought to bring crowd-control weapons. We still needed to figure out exactly how they had stored oxygen tanks in the river. Not that it really mattered.

I was hip-deep in hostage interview reports when the phone on my desk rang two hours later.

“Sorry, Mike,” Lonnie told me with disappointment. “Nothing doing. No hits on the prints. The dead guy doesn’t have a criminal record.”

As I laid the phone back into its cradle, looking at the tiny black holes in the earpiece, I thought I caught Jack’s cocky laugh.