Tick Tock (Michael Bennett 4)

“Yes,” Mrs. Morales said, nodding vehemently. “That was it. Lawrence Berger.”

“Excuse me one second,” I said, popping out the door and poking my head back into Miriam’s office.

“The lid just ripped off this thing. We got our Lawrence! Tell Brown to look for Berger. Lawrence Berger. He was a professor at John Jay.”

I rushed back into the interview room. “I can’t tell you how important the info you just gave to us is,” I said. “Do you have any idea why Berger would do something like this? Hurt your families?”

“It’s because we got the twisted son of a bitch fired. He got canned ’cause we objected that he was getting his rocks off,” Mrs. Morales yelled, standing up.

“Come again?” Emily said.

“He set up a secret video camera in the ladies’ room next to the class,” Mrs. Cavuto said. She took a tissue out of the box on the table and began shredding it.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Morales said. “There were strange noises from time to time in the ladies’ room, and finally one day in the cafeteria between classes, Alicia and I and a woman named Stephanie put our heads together and realized we had all heard it. We took it to the administration. A week later, Berger was investigated, found out, and ultimately fired.”

“Wait. What about Stephanie? Stephanie Brill, I think it was. Where is she?” Mrs. Cavuto said. “Did he go after Stephanie’s family? She signed the complaint as well.”

“Stephanie Brill died in the recent bombing at Grand Central,” Emily said.

“He comes up to my neighborhood and stabs my daughter?” Mrs. Morales said, staring at us in disgust. “He didn’t even have the cojones to come after me?”

“What was the name of this class?” I said.

“Abnormal Psychology,” Mrs. Cavuto said, meticulously tearing her tissue.

There was a knock, and my boss threw open the door and gestured for me to come with her.

“This is it, Mike,” Miriam said, handing me a printout. “We’ve got an address on Lawrence Berger. You’re heading uptown, the Upper East Side. The son of a bitch lives on Fifth Avenue.”

Chapter 67

“LADIES, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING,” said a linebacker-size Emergency Service Unit sergeant as he folded open the rear of a shiny black Ford Econoline SWAT van in Central Park an hour later.

Two more vans just like it were parked in a wagon circle in our staging area behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More than two dozen Emergency Service cops and members of the FBI New York Hostage Rescue Team and NYPD Bomb Squad were now ready to close this case with extreme prejudice. With one cop already dead and a perp with sophisticated bomb-making skills, all stops had been pulled out to take Lawrence

Berger down.

Emily and I climbed into heavy Kevlar vests as a short, grizzled, wiry black man with huge forearms and a Bic-shaved jarhead shook our hands painfully.

“Agent Hobart!” the Hostage Rescue Team leader introduced himself in a drill sergeant’s near-scream. He tilted the Toughbook computer on his lap in our direction.

On it were photographs of Berger’s elaborate prewar building a couple of hundred feet to the east. Close-up shots showed its even more impressive stone penthouse. It was amazing, like a monumental baroque palace in the sky, complete with columns and setbacks and gardens.

“Feast your eyes on Berger’s quote unquote apartment,” Hobart called out. “It’s a three-level, seven thousand-square-foot penthouse.”

I couldn’t believe it. Seven thousand square feet? In the Silk Stocking District? How was that even possible? I thought.

“That’s right,” Hobart said, eyeing me. “I said seven thousand square feet.”

“Shit, boss. I gotta get me a gig at John Jay,” called back an Odd Job–looking, stocky Asian cop sitting in the van’s passenger seat.

“Shut up, Wong,” Hobart said savagely. “These shots were just taken from our scout snipers on the roof of the building across Seventy-seventh Street. As you can see, all the drapes are drawn, so no help for us there. The building super told us there’s at least seven bedrooms, three hundred and sixty degrees of outside terraces, two separate staircases, and even an interior elevator. It’s basically a maze. A nightmare for a breach and search.”

“But great for cocktail parties, I bet,” Wong said.

Hobart gave him a dirty look before continuing.

“The super also said Berger’s a recluse, and he hasn’t seen him in years. Said he hires his own contractors and staff who must have signed confidentiality agreements because they don’t even talk to the doormen about what goes on up there. Berger basically does whatever he wants because he’s, by far, the largest shareholder in the co-op. We’ve also been up on his phone for the last hour. No incoming or outgoing calls. Quiet as a mausoleum.”