Tick Tock

Chapter 78

SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED, indeed, I thought, twenty siren-blaring minutes later as I burst into Berger's holding cell in the back of the precinct.

Berger had fallen out of the bed. Also, his butt had fallen out of his sheet again, I couldn't help but notice, to my horror.

The EMTs were long gone, replaced by the thin, birdlike female Medical Examiner I'd worked with before named Alejandra Robles.

As Alejandra went through her routine, I stared down at the massive dead man. He'd had everything-education, wealth, the coolest apartment in Manhattan-and decided on this? Setting off plastic explosives? Killing children? Committing suicide? He was the most inadequate person I'd ever come across, and that was saying a lot.

The worst part of it was that it all felt almost scripted. The people who'd been killed seemed like they'd been bought for Berger's fifteen minutes of slimy fame.

I tried not to think about what it meant, about what kind of future the human race was heading toward. But I couldn't help it.

Alejandra knelt in front of Berger, pointing a flashlight into his mouth.

"I take it he's having trouble saying ah," I said.

"You take it correctly," she said, beckoning me over. "I think it was poison. Cyanide, I'd guess by the bright red rash, but we won't know until the toxicology."

She held the light over his upper back teeth.

"Check this out," she said, directing me to peer into Berger's pie hole. "See that molar? That's not a cavity, Mike. It's a fake tooth. That must be where he hid the poison. Can you believe it?"

After Berger was rolled out, I called Emily Parker at her hotel from the hallway outside the precinct detective squad room upstairs.

"If you thought the pantie bomber was crazy, have a seat," I said when she answered.

"You found Carl?" she guessed.

"Nope," I said. "It's Berger. He's gone. Killed himself. He had poison in a hollowed-out tooth, a cyanide pill most likely, like a Nazi spy. How's this for an epitaph? 'Lawrence Berger, weird in life, weird in death, weird in the hearts of his countrymen.' "

"Wait. Did you say cyanide? Hold on. Let me get my notes. Crapola! He's done it again. It's happened before. Maggie O'Malley, a nurse dubbed the 'Dark Angel of Bellevue,' swallowed a cyanide pill after she was accused of some baby murders in the early nineteen twenties."

"I need to watch more of the History Channel," I said squeezing my temples. Book Three