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  "Talk about not knowing what we're going to find," Emily said, shaking her head.

  We passed into an even larger wood-paneled living room. There was an incredible amount of art on the massive mahogany walls. A mix of museum-quality sketches, photography, what looked like a Renoir. Modern stuff.

  "There's more paintings than wall space," I said.

  We were stepping toward the stairs at the opposite end of the room when we heard shouting from above. There was an enormous chandelier-rattling thump followed by a blood-curdling scream.

  "What is this? Why are you in my house? What the hell are you doing?" I heard as I arrived on the next floor at the commando-filled doorway.

  Then I looked inside.

  "No," I said, staring in wide-eyed wonder.

  Emily bumped into me to look in as well.

  "What the hell?" she said, shaking her head.

  "You're hurting my back. I have a bad back," said the man on the floor-the tremendously fat, naked man lying facedown on the floor.

  Chapter 69

  I gagged as a waft of the stifling room's horrendous body odor slapped into me. I started coughing. I was surprised I didn't throw up.

  Whoever the morbidly obese man was, he certainly wasn't the suspect from the witness statements or sketch or the surveillance video.

  We'd screwed up, I thought as I lowered my gun.

  "God, somebody get a sheet, huh?" Emily said, holstering her service weapon as she averted her eyes.

  "And a case of Lysol," Wong said, covering his nose and mouth as he finished cuffing him.

  Reluctantly, I went into the room and tore a filthy sheet off the bed and covered the guy's backside with it. It barely fit. He was easily six hundred pounds. Maybe even seven. The ESU guy actually had to use two pairs of handcuffs to secure the fat bastard's wrists.

  I knelt down beside him.

  "Lawrence Berger?" I said.

  "Yes," he said, lolling his large head in my direction. "Oh! Wow! Michael Bennett. I didn't know you were here. My God. This is so surreal."

  Emily and I exchanged baffled looks.

  "I know you?" I said.

  "You gave a lecture on homicide investigation to the general assembly at John Jay back in 'ninety-three, was it?" Berger said, looking into my eyes. "Your wife was there with you. A tall, pretty Irish lady. Tell me, how is your wild Irish rose these days? Oh dear, what am I saying? The article about you in New York Magazine said she died. Well, she's in a better place. My deepest condolences."

  Before I could punch the man in his mouth, Hobart hauled back hard on his handcuffs.

  "Ahhh! My wrists!" Berger screamed, tears in his eyes. "Ow! Stop it! That hurts! What are you trying to do? Break my arm? Didn't I tell you I had a bad back?"

  "I look like your chiropractor, fatty?" Hobart said in the man's ear. "Watch your mouth before I fill it with my combat boot."

  Berger nodded as he turned slowly toward Emily.

  "Don't tell me you're Agent Parker. You guys have teamed up again? I feel honored. Nice core. Pilates?"

  "That's it," Hobart said, tugging back hard on the cuffs again.

  But instead of screaming again, Berger did something as surprising as it was horrifying.

  He broke into giggles.

  "You call this pain?" Berger said, smiling back at Hobart after a beat. "I've paid more than you make in a week for far, far worse, Brown Sugar. What were you going to do with your combat boot again?"

  This was taking a bad turn. Getting weirder and weirder. Hobart let the cuff chain go as if it were on fire and wiped his hands on his pants.

  "Where were we again?" Berger said, turning back around to face me. There was an oddly chipper tone in his voice now.

  "Who the hell is this, Berger?" I said, showing him the sketch and FAO Schwarz surveillance photo.

  Berger squinted at it.

  "That would be a crappy rough semblance of Carl, I think," Berger said.

  "Carl?" Emily said. "Who the fuck is Carl?"

  "Carl Apt is my friend," Berger said. "My very close friend and companion. I know what you're thinking. Longtime companion, aka gay lover, but no. Not that I didn't make some overtures. Strictly business, Carl is. Pure as the driven snow and twice as cold."

  "Carl what? Works for you?" I said, trying to piece things together.

  "Kind of," Berger said. "It's complicated."

  "I say we gag this turd," Hobart said.

  "Where is he? Where's Carl right now?" I said.

  "Where Carl usually is, silly," the fat man said, rolling his eyes. "He's upstairs taking a bath."

  Chapter 70

  Outside Berger's bedroom, Emily and I raced behind Hobart and a few SWAT and bomb guys to a circular staircase at the end of the hallway.

  "If this sick-ass individual really is up there, he knows IEDs, so keep your eyes peeled for trip wires," Hobart called back to us as we quickly began to ascend in single file.

  IEDs? Trip wires?! I thought, wiping sweat out of my eyes. I couldn't believe this insanity. We'd found Berger, taken him down, and yet this thing still wasn't over?

  Of course not, I thought as we corkscrewed upward toward the penthouse's third floor. It wasn't over until the fat lady sang.

  It was noticeably hotter in the upstairs hallway. Dim, with the curtains drawn, it reminded me of an attic. A bizarre, mazelike one with ornate crown moldings and paneled walls and more art. Strange art, too, I thought, scanning the walls filled with photographs of hellish landscapes and oil portraits of melting people. We passed a large room nearly filled with hideous primitive sculptures.

  Sweat dripped from my nose and from the grip of my Glock as we slowly went down the hallway. Emily was pressed close behind me, her Glock 23 pointed toward the ceiling, her palm flat on the back of my Kevlar vest.

  Everyone jumped in unison as we heard a loud, electric clack and a deep humming from behind the wall we were walking beside.

  "Excuse my French, but what the fuck?" Emily said.

  "Must be the building's elevator machinery," Hobart whispered over the com link.

  "Can anyone loan me a fresh pair of boxer shorts?" asked one of the commandos.

  A moment later, Hobart and his men paused by an open doorway on our left. When I arrived beside them, I was surprised by a breeze.

  That wasn't the only surprising thing. Inside was a bathroom. The most enormous white-marble bathroom I'd ever seen. It had a sunken tub, a fireplace, and French doors that opened onto a massive stone balcony. A soft breeze fluttered the bubbles in the tub along with the tiered flames of candles that blazed in the enormous fireplace.

  "Where the hell is this creep, already?" Hobart said, sighting his submachine gun at the tub. "Did Calgon take him away?"

  We followed Hobart out onto the balcony. A tar beach this was not. Talk about a million-dollar view. Over the ornate granite railing in front of us was nothing but Central Park's trees and the distant, iconic towers of the Dakota and San Remo apartment houses on Central Park West.

  "What have we here?" Hobart said, kneeling down at the terrace's south end. A rock-climbing rope was knotted expertly around one of the stone balustrades, its other end pooled onto the roof three stories below.

  Hobart cupped his mike with his fist.

  "I want a team on the roof at the base of the penthouse pronto. Be advised, it looks like our guy has bugged out, either into the building or onto one of the fire escapes."

  I followed Hobart's gaze. He was right. Looking down below on the roof of the building, I spotted the openings for at least two fire escapes. If our man Carl had bolted the moment we'd knocked the door down, he could have gotten down to the ground floor by now or onto the roof of one of the block's adjoining buildings.

  Shit. We would have to go floor by floor now or maybe even building by building. It was possible he could even have gotten away.

  I immediately called Miriam.

  "I got good news and bad news," I told my boss. "We found Berger, b
ut apparently the guy from the security camera is his accomplice. Not only that, but he just went Spider-Man on us. We're going to need Aviation on the block here, eyeballing the rooftops."

  "On it," my boss said.

  "Wait up. What's this?" Hobart said, suddenly climbing over the railing on the north side of the balcony and hopping down.

  Five feet below the terrace around the side of the penthouse was another balcony with a massive garden of potted palms and shrubs and exotic plants. Beside the garden, alongside the building itself, was a suburban-type garden shed. Hobart raised his foot to kick its door in, but then thought better of it.

  Brian Dunning from the NYPD Bomb Squad popped a gum bubble as he climbed down and stepped forward. He took a digital video recorder out of a bag and worked its fiber-optic camera under the door's bottom crack.

  "It's okay. Clear," he said after a minute.

  Still, a tense, collective breath was held as he opened the shed's door.

  Most of the dim room was taken up by a massive worktable. The flashlight taped to Hobart's MP5 played over a soldering iron and bricks of what looked like modeling clay.

  "That's plastic explosive," Dunning said, waving his arms frantically, warning everyone back. "Enough to crater this roof. We need an evac of the penthouse and the roof right now."

  Chapter 71

  An EMT guy with long black headbanger hair stood beside a stretcher in the hallway outside Berger's bedroom when we hurried back downstairs.

  "What do you mean ASAP?" he was saying to a cop as he pointed down at Berger with an incredulous expression. "You don't need me, you need to call a piano mover with a boom crane."

  Due to the evacuation condition, everyone pitched in. Everyone except Emily, who I noticed was suddenly conveniently absent. Very much like a beached whale, Berger was rolled onto a comforter and on the count of three was hoisted by ten groaning first responders out of the room and the apartment into the freight elevator.

  Downstairs, I hustled the doorman, whose name was Alex Rissell, into the coatroom off the lobby. We needed info-and quickly. For all we knew, Berger could have been totally bullshitting us about Carl.

  Alex seemed to have calmed down from our initial storming of the building. I walked over to Emily as she unfolded the surveillance photo of Carl Apt and showed it to him.

  "Does this man live in Mr. Berger's apartment, Alex? It's really important," she said.

  "Holy crap! I saw that picture in the Post," the doorman said, scratching at a zit on his pasty double chin. "I didn't think anything of it, but you're right. It's him. It's Carl Berger."

  "You mean Carl Apt," Emily said.

  Alex gaped at us.

  "His name is Apt? I thought he was Mr. Berger's brother Carl. That's what we were told. We all called him Mr. Berger."

  "Whatever," I said. "Was this Carl guy upstairs when we came in?"

  The doorman nodded rapidly. "The board says he's been in since last night."

  "How long have Berger and Carl been living here?" Emily said.

  "Berger grew up here. Carl came much more recently. I'd say about five years ago," the doorman said, nervously flicking at his zit again.

  "Where did Carl come from?" Emily said.

  "I don't know," the doorman said with a shrug. "But I do know that when he moved in, Mr. Berger stopped going outside. Mr. B was always an odd duck, but after Carl came, he went full-tilt cuckoo. Started having all his meals catered. Mr. B was always rotund, but holy crap! I hear he's a real whale now, am I right? I mean, break-the-boxspring, TLC-show fat. Imagine what a scandal this is going to be for his family, especially his famous brother."

  "What are you talking about?" I said.

  "You don't know?" the doorman said, surprised. "Lawrence Berger's brother is David Berger, the Oscar-winning Hollywood composer. The whole Berger family are, like, rich and famous geniuses from way back.

  "Lawrence's grandfather was Robert Moses's right-hand engineer or something, and his father was some kind of A-list computer-whiz business guy. The old super told us that, before the older Berger died, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs showed up here one night for a birthday dinner."

  I blinked at Emily. Bill Gates? Could this case get any weirder?

  "Does Berger have any vehicles, other residences?" Emily said.

  "Let's see. They have an estate in Connecticut. The address is around here somewhere. Mr. B never went, but Carl went every other weekend in that slick Merc convertible of his. He keeps it at the garage around the corner on Seventy-seventh. Mr. Carl is the cold, silent type, but I'll tell you one thing, he always slips me a crisp, warm twenty just for packing the trunk. He really kill all those people? Planted bombs?"

  "Who knows? Thanks, Alex," I said, going back to the lobby.

  Outside I spotted Hobart.

  "EMT says fatty-fatty-two-by-four is healthy enough for questioning," he told me. "They're taking him over to the One-Nine Precinct."

  "Good," I said. "Any sign of Carl?"

  "We're doing apartments and the house-by-house on the building side of the block, but so far not a whisper," Hobart said with a shrug. "Ain't that the way? Fat fell down and broke his crown, but so far, Skinny is still winning the race."

  Chapter 72

  Still dripping water from his wet hair, Carl Apt hung on in the shaft of the building's front elevator.

  He had been hanging on for the past forty minutes on a vertical beam using a rock-climbing method known as laybacking. With the fingers of both hands and the soles of both bare feet gripping the cold metal, he hung sideways with the side of his butt and lower back pressed against the brick of the elevator's shaft.

  Grabbing only the kit bag the moment after the authorities blew the door down, he was completely nude. Inside the duffel bag was everything he needed-a pistol, his ATM cards, five hundred Percocet, and a change of clothes. The bag dangled in the breeze along with the rest of him, eighteen stories above the hot, pitch-black pit of the elevator shaft.

  Every once in a while, he had to shift his grip and foothold to avoid cramping, but he wasn't worried yet. One thing he knew was pain, and he wasn't even in the ballpark of his threshold yet.

  What he needed now was a hole. A place to get inside of and stay until things cooled down enough for him to move again. Until dark at least. He knew just the place, too. He'd get to it in a few minutes. Despite the sudden turn of events, he was completely calm. He'd been planning everything in his mind, every contingency, for the past year.

  A silver blue electric spark flashed down from above as the elevator motor clacked on, and the cables in front of him began to whir.

  After a minute, the top of the elevator began to approach. It stopped ten feet below him, police radios squawking as the cops inside got off.

  Now was his chance. He shimmied down the girder and onto the top of the elevator as silently as a cat. His toes squished in the cable grease. The now-empty elevator started heading down toward the lobby.

  Now for the tricky part, he thought as the floors fell away.

  When the elevator car got to three, he stood and stepped off the top of the elevator car onto the lip of the second floor's elevator door. He waited for the door of the elevator to open onto the lobby before he popped the release lever at the top of the second floor's door and stepped out onto the landing. As he let the door slide back, he wrapped his bag's handle on the shaft-side door release.

  He waited on the furniture-filled landing of the second floor, staring at the two doors of the A and B apartments. Now was the bugger, he knew.

  He would have to wait until the elevator went back upstairs in order to open the door and actually get underneath the elevator. It was the only way of getting into the basement undetected. That's where his hole was. His life now depended on getting down into the building's basement.

  He glanced at the apartment doors, his hand on the suppressed 9-millimeter Smith amp; Wesson semiauto in his bag. If someone came out, he would kill them. On that note, if the
police came to the second floor, he would also be forced to have it out right here, right now. He'd go for face shots at this close range, grab one of the automatic rifles, go down to the lobby, and go balls to the walls. Shoot his way out or die trying.

  He smiled. It wasn't such a bad plan, definitely not a bad way to go. If he was anything, he was a warrior, and like all warriors, what he ultimately wanted was a good death.

  One way or the other. It was up to the fates now. It was completely out of his hands.

  Chapter 73

  Carl waited. Watching, listening. After a minute, he heard more police radios and then footsteps going into the elevator one floor below. He heard the elevator door whir to a close, and the car began to ascend with a mechanical hum.

  He tightened his grip on the pistol as the car seemed to slow down. But then it was past the second floor and going up.

  Excellent, he thought. So far, so good.

  When he heard the elevator stop somewhere far above a long minute later, he yanked on the strap of his bag and opened the door onto the elevator shaft. He leapt onto the vertical girder he'd been hanging onto and began laybacking down as silently and quickly as he could. Past the lobby door, he jumped the last ten feet into the well of the elevator. There was a small door in its corner that led into the basement. He pushed it open and climbed out and then closed it quickly behind him.

  He pulled out the gun and ran quickly down a corridor alongside dusty storage bins. He made a turn past the boiler room and came to a thick steel door at the end. He banged on the door with his fist once and then again.

  Carl stuck his gun in the face of the ugly girl who opened the door. Her stained bathrobe was loose enough at the collar to reveal a tattoo of a butterfly beneath her dirty collarbone.

  "What is this? Who are you? You have no right to be here," she said in broken Slavic-accented English as she flinched from the gun.