“Yes, I know that.”
“You know about the envelope with your name on it tucked into his car’s seat cushion,” Safire said. “We read it and don’t want anyone else to ever know about it. Ethan was into some pretty bad behavior. Compulsive. Illegal. Harmful. There is proof of that, but no point in letting the tiger out of the bag. Ethan Ellis was being extorted. Compromised. He had to obey orders, or some things harmful to him would have been given to the media and sensationalized. You were part of what Ethan planned in order to spare his family and reputation.” Safire made a tent of his fingers. Looked at his nails, which were chewed almost to nonexistence.
“To be brief,” Safire said, “someone owned and instructed Ethan Ellis. For several years Ethan studied the architecture and engineering of certain Manhattan buildings. He wanted to make sure that what was planned was possible. He chose buildings that could be brought down by explosives in such a way, and direction, that they would knock down adjacent buildings. So buildings could be destroyed in sequence, in strings of four or five, or more, like dominoes only messier.”
“The Gremlin,” Quinn said. “He was the architect’s master. The Gremlin wanted those buildings destroyed, revealing what was inside. Everything exposed to his curiosity and compulsion. He could have been made to destroy some of the same buildings he’d designed.”
Henry Safire seemed not to have heard. “Someone like Ethan Ellis could be made to determine exactly how the structures would fall, in strings of up to a dozen or more. Since he’d designed many of the buildings, he could also plant the explosives. Small, powerful charges, expertly applied, that could be detonated from a short distance. All that was needed was a driver to take a certain route at a certain speed through the city, sending out intermittent signals via a cell phone.”
“What would keep this driver from being killed as half of Manhattan fell?” Quinn asked. As he spoke, he tried to imagine the island of Manhattan a jumble of wreckage north to south. Then he tried not to imagine it.
“The signals would activate timers on the bombs so they would detonate in precise sequences,” Safire said. “This wouldn’t happen until well after the driver, who activated the timers while keeping a constant speed, was far away.”
Quinn pushed for more answers. “Why not simply use Ethan Ellis for the driver?”
“Let’s face it, Quinn, some folks are squeamish about killing thousands, maybe millions, of people.” Henry Safire shrugged. “Like you, Quinn.”
Quinn said, “Thank God!”
“Besides,” Safire said, “they had to have something profound on the driver. Something they could hold over his head that would scare the hell out of him. Something dearer to him than life itself. Even his own life.”
“Then the car crash was suicide?”
“No doubt about it,” Safire said. “We’ll keep the motive under wraps as long as we can, but you know how it is with secrets.”
“Secrets?” Quinn said. “There are none.”
Postscript
Demolition experts, using information contained in Ethan Ellis’s suicide note to Quinn, located and disarmed most of the planted bombs set to tick away to detonation when a certain code was broadcasted to them at a certain frequency. The chances of eventually finding and combining the code and frequency were practically nil.
Practically.
It shouldn’t matter that a number of the bombs remained unfound, hidden away or concealed in cast concrete. Within a few years the explosive would become inert and a danger to no one.
In what used to be a car dealer’s service center in Astoria, New York, the devoted son of Ethan Ellis worked assiduously, using mail-order parts and plans to rebuild a small, wrecked helicopter a Midwest TV station had given up on for weather and traffic reports. A home project, he called it, if anyone asked. When finished, it wouldn’t lift or carry a lot of weight. Nor would it fly very fast, with a pilot and passenger limit of two people. But it could fly low enough to pass under radar, yet high enough so that its broadcast signals would reach receivers and detonators, even in buildings with higher floors.
That was enough. Even more than enough. For its final flight, the helicopter was only required to carry one passenger at a certain speed, along with a modem sending out a certain signal in a certain code.
Straight down Broadway.
Photo by Jennifer Lutz-Bauer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award winner—including the Shamus Lifetime Achievement Award—John Lutz is the author of over 30 novels. His novel SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female (1992), starring Bridget Fonda, and later remade as The Roommate (2011), starring Minka Kelly and Leighton Meester, and The Ex was a critically acclaimed HBO feature. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida. In describing his serial-killer thrillers, John Lutz says: “I’m trying to provide readers with the kind of roller-coaster ride that will scare them a lot but compel them to buy another ticket.”
His website is johnlutzonline.com.
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Copyright © 2015 John Lutz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-2831-3
First electronic edition: September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3798-8
ISBN-10: 0-7860-3798-9