“What the hell is he doing?” asked Feller.
“Wally being Wally,” said Rook. “I wonder if he’ll wear the body armor to his press conference.”
“Get ready to move,” said Heat into her walkie. “He’s at the door.”
Captain Irons’s voice echoed across the empty street. “NYPD, open up!” An instant later, the ESU battering ram popped the door and Wally led the charge inside. Heat and her detectives trotted to cover and made the parked car. That’s as far as they got.
A bright flash filled all the windows of the house and was instantly followed by a deafening boom.
FOURTEEN
hile Nikki Heat sat on the curb the next morning waiting for the bomb squad to give the all-clear to go inside the house, she watched the sun rise grimly through wood smolder and thickening clouds. Rook found a spot beside her and handed over a coffee from the bodega that had just opened outside the restricted zone. Although he had remained on scene all night, they had not spoken since the blast. She had immediately kicked into emergency leadership mode — fire-walling her personal feelings about the close call so she could manage the crisis and its aftermath. In this interval before the next phase, they sat in silence, sipping their drinks, awaiting the magic of caffeine.
At last, Rook said, “So I can assume when you said you’d handle Wally Irons for me, this isn’t what you meant.”
She paused. “Dark.” Then, turning to him, said, “You may be more cop than I knew.”
“Hey, you said I could only ride along again if I could be me. Here I am.”
Captain Irons had been the only fatality. The ESU team that entered with him heard the telltale metallic click when he rushed over to read the message written on the strip of duct tape on the wall, and took cover. Two made it out the door, the other dove into the empty fireplace. The SWAT officer said he yelled to the captain to stay put, not to move, but in his inexperience and panic, Irons tried to get out, too. Human-flight instinct sealed his fate. The instant he took his foot off the pressure plate that was rigged to an explosive device under the floor, he was cooked.
Heedless of their own safety, the pair of officers who’d bailed out the front door heroically reentered through the flames and hauled their wounded comrade out. Kevlar and his leap into the hearth saved his life. Surgeons spent an hour extracting nasty shards of glass and pieces of wood from his calves, but he’d probably be released from Bronx-Lebanon by lunchtime.
NYPD Counterterror had joined in the sweep of the small box of a house. Commander McMains made the trip there from the OEM hurricane HQ in Brooklyn along with the mayor and the chief. A bomb and a dead precinct captain became top priority, and the Counterterrorism boss needed to assess the degree and scope of the threat. There would be no conversation about the task force that morning. When the site had been declared safe, Cooper McMains came out of it and rested a hand on Heat’s shoulder. “You sure you want to go in there?”
When Nikki got inside, stepping on glass and plaster and nails, holding a handkerchief over her face in a useless attempt to filter the fumes, she understood what he meant. The duct tape that had been on the wall above the gaping hole in the floor had been recovered way across the room. A CSU tech had sealed the charred and disfigured specimen in a plastic evidence bag. She held it in her hands and concentrated on not letting them tremble as the other detectives and Rook watched. There were two words written in black Sharpie on the tape: BYE HEAT.
For Nikki, this was just chilling confirmation of what she already knew and had tried to avoid thinking about until later. But for the hubris of Wallace Irons, that could have been the last thing she saw before she died. Heat passed the specimen around, and nobody said a word. Until Rook broke the charged silence. “He left out the comma.”
The duct tape went off to Forensics for prints. Nobody disputed whose they would find. “Thing I want to know,” said Ochoa, “is if this Zarek Braun knew you were coming, or if he just thought maybe you might come.”
“A lot of bang for a maybe,” said Detective Feller. “I’m thinking setup.”
Of course Heat had already made the triangulation between getting the address and the detonation. When Hays gave her that paper, was he priming the fuse? Or did Zarek Braun know it was only a matter of time before she tracked him and set the booby trap for that inevitability?
Commander McMains came to her when she stepped outside. “Nobody will think less if you decide to stand down. It’s been a hell of a night for you, Heat.” She didn’t answer, just squared her gaze to his. “I didn’t think so,” he said. “Obviously, this is still your case, but let me assure you that we’re heightening the APB for this Zarek Braun and all available resources will be on this.”
“Thank you, Commander.” But she knew by how quickly he got called by the chief back to the motorcade headed for the OEM Situation Room that Braun would be looked for with half an eye. His key word was “available” resources. With a Category One hurricane bearing down on the city in less than twenty-four hours, Heat knew this would be her battle to wage.
That didn’t mean she would be alone. With all recent differences forgotten, Raley and Ochoa came to her first, offering split shift, ’round-the-clock Roach protection. Soon after, Rhymer and Feller did the same. The solidarity meant everything to her, she told them. “But I want us to focus on taking this to him, not hunkering down for protection.”
Heat tasked Roach and Rhymer to canvass the neighborhood with pictures of Zarek Braun, Fabian Beauvais, and just to be thorough, Lawrence Hays, which she had downloaded from an antiwar Web site and texted to them. “Talk to residents, talk to shop owners. Get a sense of when Zarek Braun was last here, if anybody was with him, did he have girlfriends or boyfriends, what he was driving, the works.”
She put Detective Feller on checking him through the RTCC. “See if there are any hits on disturbance calls or neighbor complaints on this street. A guy like Braun might be the type to get in a beef with someone over nothing, or just creep somebody out. Don’t overlook the smallest thing, even a hassle with a meter maid over an opposite-side parking ticket.” Eager to be useful, Rook went off with them, barnacling onto Raley and Ochoa.
Lauren Parry stepped out of the house and told her friend she should go home and take a nap because her enhanced team of MEs would be a long time painstakingly collecting the remains of Captain Irons.
Heat said, “Thanks, Mother,” and said she’d hang there nonetheless. Nikki felt a quarter-inch from meltdown and worried what would happen if she stopped working.
The bomb squad sergeant gave her the prelim on the device. As expected, a pressure-sensitive plate had been cut into the floor with a bath rug placed over it as camouflage. The explosive material was C-4, military grade, with the primer set to trigger when the pressure came off the plate. She tried not to imagine herself on that rug, reading that message, but it was hard. Would she have run for cover like the captain, or would she have held it together? Thankfully, she didn’t need to know.
Zach Hamner phoned and Heat was surprised that the caller ID was his office at One PP, not his cell. “You working on a Sunday?” she asked.
“It’s storm watch, Heat, there is no weekend here.” As if he took a day off, anyway. Heat imagined that Zach Hamner probably went to the beach in his suit and tie. He nearly — but not quite — sounded compassionate as he checked on her after the ordeal.
“I’m fine. But I’m not the one OCME is working on in there.”
He asked her how Irons managed to get in that position, and when she told him, he muttered, “Fuck.…” And then he sniffed and added, “A boob to the end.”