“So will you guys think I only put in half a day if I call it a night now?” I asked. “I feel more useless than a subatomic particle.”
“I’ll walk you down,” Mercer said.
“Imagine, guys. I used to complain because Mike wouldn’t talk about anything except murder. In hindsight that was pretty stimulating compared to physics.”
“It’s all connected to this pattern, Coop. There’s a relationship here we just haven’t made yet.”
“Strings?”
“Make fun of me, kid. None of what’s been going with these homicides is coincidence.”
“I get that, Detective Chapman. Where’s the string that ties all this together?”
We’d been talking so loudly that we didn’t hear footsteps approaching the room. There was a knock on the door before Rocco let himself in.
“We got a game changer, guys,” he said, dropping a stack of papers onto the table with each hand. “We got a name.”
It was as though an electrical charge raced through the room, slicing the tension and exhaustion, filling the space with energy.
“Yes!” Mike shouted at top volume. “What’d you get?”
“A hit on the DNA from NDIS.”
“He’s in the national data bank?” I asked.
Rocco Correlli pressed the fingers of his right hand onto one of the piles of paper. “Yeah, they just faxed the results up to me via the stationmaster. Maybe you can walk us through this.”
“Happy to,” I said, my heart pounding as the adrenal started to pump. “What’s his name?”
“Nicholas,” Rocco said. “Nicholas Blunt. Twenty-nine years old.”
“We’re out of here,” Mike said, holding out his hand. “You got addresses? Let’s get this motherfucker off the street.”
“No address.”
“Can’t be.”
“It is, Chapman. At the moment, that’s what it is. No current address.”
“Do we just go back to figuring how he chose his victims,” I asked, “or is there any reason to connect him to Grand Central? To think he’s targeting it?”
“Every reason to connect him,” Rocco said.
Mercer didn’t move a muscle. His left shoulder was against the window over the operations room, his eyes fixed on the men inside. “Why’s that?”
“Blunt grew up here, according to the stationmaster. I mean right here, in this terminal. His father was a hostler.”
“Hustler?” Mike said. “What difference does that make?”
“I didn’t say hustler. It’s hostler-with an o.”
The four of us looked at Rocco with blank stares.
“His old man drove the locomotives from their platforms out to the roundhouse. Turned them around, tuned them up, and brought them back for the next part of the trip. That’s all he did, every day of his working life.”
“You mean he was an engineer?” Mike asked.
“Hostlers never leave the station. They’re engineers, but all they work on are trains in the rail yard. Grand Central was his life.”
“And his son?” I asked.
“Nicholas Blunt grew up in this place. Every minute he wasn’t in school, he was hanging out with his old man. He knows more about this terminal and each piece of track that runs in and out of here than anyone on the planet.”
“Sometimes I hate it when I’m right,” Mike said.
“Scully’s on his way up with the city head of the FBI,” Rocco said. “They won’t wait till two A.M. to close Grand Central. We’ve got two hours to get everyone out of here, best we can.”
“It’s not possible,” I said.
“It better be, Alex. By ten tonight, we’re in lockdown.”
THIRTY-FIVE
“Let’s get Coop on her way,” Mike said.
“I’d like her to tell me what this DNA stuff means first, okay? There’s pages of it,” Rocco said. “Then the guys can take her out of here.”
“I’m not going. I know these cases as well as anyone.”
“No time to get stubborn,” Mercer said.
“Let’s see how this develops. I’ve still got my uses, don’t I?” I smiled, trying to diffuse the tension.
“Then get an officer up here, Loo,” Mike said, turning to me. “And you do have your uses. Loop in the Thatcher family, then we’ll get you a laptop and you can be our researcher on whatever comes up.”
“Oh, great. You’re looking for the killer, and I’m in charge of Google Alerts?”
“You stay close to anyone who’s got a badge and a gun, okay?”
Rocco seemed surprised. “No heat?”
“I’ve never had a gun, Loo. Fortunately, Battaglia doesn’t believe in letting his legal staff carry. I’d probably have taken Mike’s head off by now.”
Each of the men had tried dialing out on his cell-Mercer to update his boss at the Special Victims Unit, Mike to check in with his lieutenant at Manhattan North, and Pug to notify his team who were still hunkered down at the Waldorf.
“There’s no reception here,” Rocco said, pushing the spider-phone toward Mercer. “It’s built like a bunker on purpose. You’ve got a couple of different landlines to use.”
Mercer had one hand on the receiver. “Do we have a plan, Loo? Are you going with Blunt as a person of interest?”
“What’s his criminal history?” Mike asked, pointing to the sheaf of papers that Rocco Correlli had passed to me. “How can he be in the data bank and not known to the department?”
“Too many questions at once,” I said, pulling my chair closer and starting to plow through the information about Nicholas Blunt. “He’s not KTD because he’s never been arrested.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The match isn’t arrest-based. That much is clear.”
“Case-to-case?” Mike asked. “DNA from semen in an unsolved rape?”
Rocco was talking over my head. “Person of interest is an understatement. We’ve got his blood on the curtain at the Waldorf and in the sink on Big Timber. Alex, can we call him a suspect? It’s okay legally?”
“Go for it, Loo. I don’t care if you tag him as the perp. As long as the public puts a name and face to the guy who’s running around out there, and they understand that he’s horribly dangerous,” I said, scrutinizing the FBI lab records. “It’s not seminal fluid. The DNA came from a swab. From saliva.”
“An investigation?” Mike asked. “What state?”
“Not an investigation. Voluntary. It’s connected to some kind of job he was working about three years ago.”
“Keep reading.”
“NorthStar. That’s the name of the company that submitted the sample,” I said. “The DNA report itself is not very complicated, Loo. The paperwork is thick because it’s all the lab notes confirming the matches. All they need is the headline you got. The blood found at two of the crime scenes belongs to Nicholas Blunt.”
“That’s helpful. I thought I’d be swimming in double helixes all night.”
“So I guess finding out more about Blunt is my first Google assignment. Where’s the laptop I’m supposed to use?”
“Coming up any minute,” Rocco said.
“You don’t need a search engine for that,” Mike said. “NorthStar. One word, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a security contractor, mostly for overseas work in the most hostile territories in the world.”
“Like Blackwater?” I asked. I remembered stories about the private firm that was created to support government troops abroad after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
“A lot like it, but much smaller.”
“Tough guys, no?”
“Blackwater had a lot of former military experts,” Mike said. “Smart founders who recruited some very experienced men-and yeah, some hard-hitters. At one point they were up to eighty thousand employees worldwide. They got into some hot water and had to rebrand.”
“But legit?” I asked.
“Mostly. They had a slew of government contracts,” Mike said, as the door opened and a Metro-North cop entered the room with three laptops. “Blackwater actually trained Navy SEALs and military SWAT teams. I don’t know if they’re completely out of that business, after allegations of shooting civilians in Iraq, or if they just regrouped under a new name.”