Step on a Crack (Michael Bennett 1)

I was crossing the wide sidewalk when a human form suddenly flew out

the black space of the open door. I couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman.

The body skidded across the flagstone paving and landed facedown on top of a wilted flower arrangement. Male, I registered. Dark suit. Which hostage had been killed?

Breath scorching in my chest, I fell to my knees in front of the victim. I didn’t even bother looking for a pulse when I saw the torso. The lower back had been ripped apart and was horribly torn and bloody.

I was too late.

The victim was a middle-aged man. His shirt had been removed, and dozens of large, ragged stab wounds covered his back. What looked like cigarette burns went up and down his forearms. I’d seen my share of bodies, and I recognized that someone with a sharp knife, maybe even a box cutter, had taken out a lot of anger on this one.

The first thing I saw when ESU lieutenant Steve Reno helped me flip the victim was that the poor man’s throat had been slit.

My heart seized hard in my chest as I looked at the victim’s beaten and bloody face.

I turned to Reno beside me. “This is so wrong,” the big man said, staring at the corpse. Reno’s voice was small and wounded, as if he was speaking to himself. “As wrong as it gets.”

I nodded my head as I continued to stare down, unable to take my eyes away.

Andrew Thurman, the mayor of New York City, peered up lifelessly into the leaden sky. A pulse of cold shuddered through me as I glanced up into the dark, towering arches where he seemed to be looking for some answer as to why this could have happened.

Steve Reno pulled off his Windbreaker and wrapped it around Mayor Thurman like a blanket. He crossed himself silently before he closed the mayor’s eyes with his thumbs.

“Grab his legs, Mike,” Reno said. “Let’s get him out of here. Don’t let the press get any shots.”

Chapter 71

THE NOON ANGELUS bells started tolling from the cathedral as we carried the mayor of New York down the front steps. Everything that had happened up until now paled in comparison to this brutal, horrifying, and unnecessary murder.

There was an instant hush in the crowd of law enforcement. The bell continued its ominous pealing as the police and emergency personnel we passed in the cordoned-off street either gaped, goggle-eyed, or stiffened in ramrod postures of respect.

Cold violently kneaded my stomach as I remembered how police and firemen stopped and stood in the same reverential way in the WTC rubble whenever a service member was brought out of the pile. I looked up at Rock Center’s glorious seventy-foot Christmas tree right after we laid the slain mayor on an EMS stretcher.

The hits just kept on coming, didn’t they?

Enough, I thought. What the hijackers had done was precedent-setting in the savage department, but I had to get myself beyond shock. It was time to put up the wall and focus. Get out ahead of this thing. Figure Jack out somehow.

Why the mayor? I thought, staring again at his badly tortured body.

Was Jack so overwrought by the death of one of his fellow hijackers that he’d chosen the mayor as the one victim who would make us the angriest? Or was the whole thing another ploy to push our buttons, to get us to react in a certain way? Was this murder actually a clue for us? Our first? Why did they pick Andrew Thurman as the one to die?

As I was trying to figure it out, a captain from Midtown North came down between the white wicker angels and rows of poinsettias and grabbed me. Borough Commander Will Matthews had moved the command center to an office in 630 Fifth, the Rockefeller Center building to the west, directly across from the cathedral. He wanted me to report there immediately.

I ran all the way, and I don’t know what I expected when I stepped into the boardroom of the second-floor office—but it wasn’t that Commander Will Matthews would be the lowest-ranking cop in the room.

Normally, I would have been a little rattled to receive NYPD Police Commissioner Daly’s curt nod of hello a second before Bill Gant’s, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New York office. But my shock reserve was bone-dry that afternoon. I just nodded back at both of them.

“Afternoon, Detective,” the commissioner said.

He was tall, aristocratically handsome, and seemed more like a banker than a cop in his broad pinstripe navy suit. Some said, with his tailored clothes and his Columbia MBA, he was just another glory hound, far removed from the rank and file. This was the first time I’d gotten close enough to make any kind of judgment.

“We just heard about the … my God, I can’t believe I’m saying this … Andy’s … I mean, the mayor’s murder,” Daly stammered. He seemed genuinely upset, and that touched me. “You’ve been speaking to the individuals responsible. What do you think this is all about?”

“Frankly, sir,” I said, “I can’t get a bead on them. It looked like a straight-up money deal, at first. A group of professional criminals trying to pull off an audacious mass kidnapping.

“But then, for some unknown reason, they shot a priest. I guess you could chalk up shooting the tactical team officers to defense, but what they did to the mayor shows a great degree of rage. Maybe at first it was for money, but now, since they see how surrounded they are, they’re losing it.”

“Do you think all or a part of this might have had something to do with a personal grudge against the mayor?” Gant asked. With his basset-hound eye bags, the short FBI chief looked like the antonym of Daly. Pudgy and pale in a dark Sears single-breasted suit, Gant could have been a bartender at a funeral.