Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

“What do you want to do first?”

“Brainstorm,” I said, leading her toward the stairs. “But we’re going to need to use your brain. I fried mine about three days ago.”

Chapter 50

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Emily and I were standing in the center of Major Case Squad’s open bull pen on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza. Phones kept ringing across the stuffy, beat-up empty office space, with nobody to answer them. Every single one of the task force’s forty-plus detectives was out chasing down leads on the now three- pronged case. There was no rest for the weary in this summer of insanity. Nor any in sight, for that matter.

Beyond the cluster of cluttered desks, we parked ourselves in front of a decidedly low-tech rolling bulletin board. Pushpinned onto it was a huge map of the city, along with the printouts of each crime and crime scene. In the very center of the board, the new Xeroxed sketch of the kidnapper stared back at us like a spider from the center of its web.

With her arms crossed, Emily stared at the board silently, absorbed, an art critic before a new installation.

“Give me the vitals on the abduction, Mike.”

I slowly went through what had happened to Angela Cavuto.

“According to the father,” I said, “our guy is white, right-handed, walks with a limp and a cane and is thin and about five eleven.” Cavuto also said he was cultured and polished. Not only was he wearing a tailored suit, but he spoke quite convincingly about hedge fund investing.”

“I can’t believe it, Mike,” Emily told me as she took a rubber-banded folder out of her bag. “I spent yesterday pulling reams of stuff about famous New York crimes, hoping this wasn’t true, but I think it must be.”

“What have you got, Emily?”

“I think this guy’s done it again. This abduction is another copycat. A carbon copy, in fact.”

“Of what? The Lindbergh case?” I said, confused.

“No. There was another heinous kidnapping way back in the twenties—in Brooklyn, no less. At the time, they called it the crime of the century. A sociopathic murderous pedophile named Albert Fish was dubbed the ‘Brooklyn Vampire’ when he abducted and killed a girl.

“And Mike, his MO wasn’t just similar. From what you just told me, it was exactly the same. Posing as an employer, Fish answered the ad of an eighteen-year-old boy seeking work and ended up leaving with his ten-year-old sister under the pretense of taking her to a birthday party.”

“F——off! No!” I yelled as I collapsed into a chair.

Emily nodded.

“Tell me, did he give the father something?” she said.

“Strawberries and some goop,” I said.

“Pot cheese. Right. Shit! It’s the same thing! The Mad Bomber, then the Son of Sam, now the Brooklyn Vampire. This guy’s just pulled off a third famous crime. Mike, this isn’t good. This Fish guy was evil personified. He made the Son of Sam seem like a volunteer at a soup kitchen. He was one of the worst pedophiles and child murderers of all time. He didn’t just kill his victims. He would cannibalize them as well.”

I punched the desk beside me, then my thigh. Then Emily and I sat there silently listening to the whoosh of the air duct. On the board, a picture of Angela from last year’s Cavuto family Christmas card smiled at us from beneath a glittery halo.

Chapter 51

I WAS WITH EMILY, putting on some coffee about an hour later, when I heard a strange, gut-wrenching call come over the break room’s radio.

There was some kind of disturbance uptown. An unconscious, unresponsive child had been found in a store on Fifth Avenue. When I heard the name of the store repeated, my blood went cold.

“What, Mike? What is it?” Emily said, straining to listen.

“They found a little girl uptown at FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store across from the Plaza Hotel. Not good, Em. It’s on the same block as the CBS Early Show, the locale of the bombing on Tuesday.”

There was a more massive crowd than usual out in front of the landmark toy store when Emily and I arrived after a long, twenty-minute ride uptown. Two radio cars and two ambulances spun their lights in front of the freaked-out-looking tourists and moms and little kids.

A veteran Nineteenth Precinct sergeant whose eye I caught shook his dismal face before I was three steps out of my car.

I showed the cop the picture of Angela.

“Tell me this isn’t her,” I said.