But I didn’t.
I asked myself what Maeve would do, and I swallowed my tears and hugged my kids and promised myself and my wife that I would somehow get us through.
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.
Chapter 105
THE FOLLOWING DAY, word got back to us that when the police commissioner heard the meager results of our investigation at St. Patrick’s he had a simple response: Do it again. Do it better.
First, the Emergency Service Unit guys returned to the cathedral and repeated exactly what they had done to stabilize the crime scene. They even checked for booby traps and hazmats again.
NYPD detectives, along with the Crime Scene Unit-CSU, not CSI-did another thorough search for evidence like latent prints and fibers. Everything was swabbed down a second time for DNA. A check was made to see if any religious relics had been defiled-anything that might provide a psychological or behavioral clue.
Everything that could be checked was examined a second time.
Bloodstains.
Hair, fibers, and threads.
Loose glass-from windows, bottles, eyeglasses.
Firearms.
Tool marks, evidence of flammable liquids.
Controlled substances found anywhere, but especially in the archbishops’ crypt, where the hijackers hid out before the attack.
Two patrolmen were stationed at St. Patrick’s solely to act as messengers to get any evidence to the labs as quickly as possible.
And after three more exhausting days, the end result-not a clue about Jack and his team.
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.