Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

Dunning smelled the piece of cardboard.

“Dynamite, I’d say off the top of my head. About a stick or so, I’d guess. Mobile phone trigger with a fuse-head electric blasting cap packed in a coffee cup all as neat as you please. This cop-killing freak’s got skills. I’ll give him that.”

Great, I thought. Our guy was using new materials. Or maybe not, I thought, letting out a breath. It could have been someone else catching the heat of the moment and getting in on the act.

More questions without any answers, I thought. What else was new?

I caught up to my boss, who was talking with a group of shaken-up Early Show staffers.

“No one seems to have seen a thing, Mike,” Miriam said as we walked toward the corner. “They have security out here on the Plaza, of course, but they don’t detour pedestrian traffic. Sanitation said they collected this morning at five. Our guy must have dropped the coffee cup sometime after that, probably as he was waiting for the light. This guy’s a ghost.”

I quickly went over the double copycat theory that Emily and I were working on.

“He’s not just copying Sam the Man,” I said. “In the forties, a disgruntled Con Ed employee named George Metesky planted bombs in movie theaters and public places. For sixteen years, he set off gunpowder-filled pipe bombs in the same places this guy has hit. The library, Rockefeller Center, Grand Central. It fits, boss.”

She stepped off the sidewalk into the street. We looked down Fifth Avenue at the Empire State Building for a few beats.

“So you’re saying this guy isn’t just some regular run-of-the-mill violent psycho?” she said.

I nodded.

“I think we have some kind of supercompetent and super-loony NYC crime buff out there giving nods to those he admires,” I said.

Chapter 34

FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE DAY, I visited the other crime scenes at Rock Center and Times Square, where I learned absolutely nothing new. No one in Times Square had seen a man dropping a coffee cup, not even the Naked Cowboy.

The entire Major Case Squad was going blind reviewing security video footage from surrounding stores and buildings, but so far nothing had made itself evident. It was the same story for the red-balled forensics test on the letter from the Flushing double murder. There was a brief moment of hope when I learned that the VIN for the truck involved in the Grand Central bombing had been traced. But that hope had been dashed with authority when it turned out that it was a stolen rental truck.

Who steals a rental truck? A psycho, was the answer to that one. A very neat and tidy anal psycho. The worst kind of all. And to top it all off, I still couldn’t shake how I’d almost died on the BQE through my own sheer stupidity.

It was around ten that night when I got off the exit for Breezy Point. There was no music when I pulled up in front of the Bennett beach house. Definitely no margaritas waiting for me. In fact, all the lights in the house were off. I remembered Mary Catherine was at her night class at Columbia. Not good.

Somebody was on the porch. It was my son Brian, pacing back and forth, holding a baseball bat. It didn’t look like he was working on his swing.

“Don’t tell me something else happened,” I groaned. “Wasn’t today any better?”

“No one told you, Dad? Eddie and Ricky went out to get ice cream, and a bunch of a-holes threw some eggs at them from a passing car. Not only that, but when Jane rode the bike to the store, she came out and found this.”

He rolled the bike over and showed me the front tire sliced to ribbons.

“I’m going to kill this kid, Dad. I swear, I’m going to kill him.”

“And I’m going to absolve him when he does,” Seamus said, stepping onto the porch with a golf club.

I let out a breath. Home Insane Home.

“The worst thing,” Seamus said, “is that all the fookin’ Flahertys go to Sunday mass. Like it’s going to keep them out of Hell, which it isn’t, the little heathens. The host should burn holes in their tongues.”

“Enough about going on the warpath, you fighting Irishmen,” I said. “Brian, listen. I know you’re mad, but we need to be smart about this. You let this punk bait you, you’ll be the one who gets arrested.”

“Maybe we should do what Bridget said, then, Dad,” Brian said, dropping the mangled bike. “Maybe we should just clear out, because this vacay is starting to suck.”

I lifted up the bike and carried it off the porch and into the garage. I popped off the tire with a screwdriver and looked through the shelves for a patch kit.

“He’s right, you know,” Seamus said, coming in as I put rubber cement over the first gash.

“About what?” I said.