Alert Read online

“Give me a break, Jane, will you, please? I’m up to my neck here. Do you have another nice dress?”

  “Um, no. Mary Catherine was supposed to take all us girls shopping before she left, remember? Or maybe you forgot. Like the way you forgot to bring Mary Catherine home.”

  I winced. I probably deserved that one. In fact, I knew I did. The fact that Mary Catherine hadn’t come home with me was still stinging to everyone. To me most of all.

  “Figure it out, Jane, okay? Please? You can wear jeans, I guess, if they’re nice. We have to look really good, remember? That’s the point here. That’s the theme. Sweet and presentable and appropriate, okay?”

  “Hey, everyone! Dad said we can wear jeans!” Jane shouted as she took off down the hallway.

  “Dad, can I borrow your razor?” someone else asked a minute later.

  This new query came from a groggy-looking Brian, still in his pj’s. I looked at his smooth, pale, sixteen-year-old cheeks. There was no hair to speak of. I didn’t say this, of course. Not passing on my observation was a no-brainer. Dad 101. Maybe his eyesight was better than mine. Make that definitely.

  “In my medicine cabinet,” I said. “But hurry up. Please. We need to do this for Seamus. We need to pull together, or we’re all going to be late.”

  Ten minutes later, I had everyone ready and gathered in the living room. Jane had actually found another dress and was looking quite spiffy, as was everyone else. Even I was wearing a tie for the special occasion. Everyone was present and accounted for except Seamus and Ricky and Juliana.

  Which reminds me, I thought as I checked my watch. I nodded to Fiona, and at my signal she hit the stereo as the clock struck eleven precisely.

  The door to the back bedroom opened just as the first strains of “Immaculate Mary” filled the room. Out the door came Juliana, holding a bookmarked Bible, followed by Ricky, wearing his altar-boy robe and holding a lit candle, then lastly, Seamus, wearing a surplice and clasping his hands in prayer.

  As they arrived at the front of the room, I elbowed a daydreaming Trent to up the volume or, better yet, actually start singing from the lyric sheet I had printed out.

  Since Seamus needed to take it easy after his stroke, I’d decided to turn the apartment into Saint Bennett’s Cathedral this Sunday and do Mass at home. He seemed to be fine enough since we brought him home, but I was still quite worried about him, of course. Not having Mary Catherine here to help me keep an eye on him, I decided to err on the side of caution.

  The good news was that Gramps really seemed blown away when he saw the furniture rearranged in the living room and all the kids in their Sunday best.

  “Good morning, parishioners,” he said, winking, as he stood smiling at the front of the room.

  “Good morning, Father,” everyone said, smiling back.

  Seamus stood there, then suddenly brought a finger to his open mouth as a vacant look glazed his eyes.

  “Now, what’s next?” he said, looking down at the carpet, confused.

  “Seamus?” I said as I stepped forward.

  “Psych!” he said to me, snapping out of it after another moment as everyone laughed.

  “Don’t worry: I’m not ready for the glue factory yet, Detective. Still a marble or two rolling around in this old gray head.”

  “Very funny, Father,” I said, stepping back. “I’ll be the one with the stroke next if you keep it up.”

  “Nonsense,” Seamus said. “Now, where was I? I know. Let us begin today as we begin every day. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

  Chapter 8

  That evening, I was minding my own business, sheltering in place on the couch with a pint of Smithwick’s, about to watch the Yanks at Boston—ESPN’s game of the week—with Seamus and the rest of the boys, when I made the mistake of checking my phone for messages.

  My boss, Miriam Schwartz, had sent a text about an hour before. In it she let me know that during the week I’d been in Ireland, the department had appointed a guy I’d vaguely heard of named Neil Fabretti to be its newest chief of detectives.

  Chief Fabretti was trying to get up to speed before officially starting on Monday, Miriam explained, and was requesting a quick informal meet and greet with his transition team at his house up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In the next half hour, I thought, groaning, as I checked my watch.

  Get up to speed during a New York–Boston rubber game? I thought as I stared at my phone, dumbfounded. I’d been busting my hump all day with laundry and homework and getting dinner on the table. I’d even been to Mass—or at least Mass had been to us. I’d been looking forward to a little Sawx-crushing, male-bonding downtime all day.

  Are you sure this guy is the new chief of detectives for the New York police department? I almost texted back.

  Instead, I reluctantly put down my Smithwick’s and stood and found my keys.

  “Excellent idea, Michael,” Seamus said as I headed out. “We could use some goodies for the game. And don’t forget another six of Smithy’s.”

  “Sorry, Father. No goodies tonight. It’s all baddies, in fact. A.k.a. work.”

  “Work, Dad? But it’s Yanks-Sox! That’s sacrilegious.”

  “My sentiments exactly, Brian,” I said as I hit the door. “Keep me posted on the score. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Chief Neil Fabretti’s house turned out to be on Delafield Avenue in a ritzy section of Riverdale called Fieldston. It wasn’t a huge house, maybe two thousand square feet, but it had a slate roof and antique stained-glass windows between its Tudor beams. Not too shabby. Especially for a cop. It had to be worth well over a million bucks.

  “Mike, I’m so glad you could make it,” said Chief Fabretti as he gave me a firm handshake.

  Fabretti was a neat and trim fiftyish man in a brown golf shirt and khakis. He looked more like a corporate executive than a cop. I wondered if that was a good thing. A large black curly-haired dog ran around us in the foyer, woofing and sniffing.

  “Down, Faulkner. Down!” Fabretti said. “I know—Faulkner? My wife’s idea, as is the house and pretty much everything in it. She’s the cultured one, an editor at Knopf. I’m just a lovable fool from Brooklyn who married up. Anyway, the other guys just left. I know this is a pain in the ass during the game. I actually have it on in my den. This won’t take long, I promise.”

  He led me into a cozy, dark, wood-paneled room. Beyond a writing table were built-in bookshelves with actual books on them. I spotted a shelf of Hemingway. The Day of the Jackal next to Keith Richards’s Life. A section of military history.

  The one thing I had heard about Fabretti was that he was political. But who knew? A real library was pretty telling in terms of character. Maybe this guy was okay, I thought.

  “Can I get you a beer?” Fabretti said, opening a little fridge beside his desk. “Well, if you can call it that. My wife has me weaned down now to Beck’s light. It’s more like beer-flavored water.”

  “No—that’s okay, Chief. What’s up? How can I help you?”

  “You can help me by just continuing to do what you do, Mike,” Fabretti said as he cracked open a brew and sat behind his desk. “People complain that you’re overrated—a hot dog and a headline hound—but I’ve done my homework, and you’re obviously not. You’re just flat-out one of the department’s best detectives, if not the best. I’ve been following your phenomenal career, Mike. I’m a big fan.”

  A fan? Hmm, I thought. Maybe the rumors were true. Politicians plus flattery equals what? Nothing good was a pretty sure bet.

  “Where am I being reassigned?” I said.

  Fabretti laughed.

  “C’mon, Mike. It’s okay, I swear. I definitely want to keep you at Major Crimes. But I also need you to do what you’ve been doing. I want you to be flexible in terms of floating to local precincts occasionally to help on extra-pain-in-the-ass cases.”

  “How can I be in Major Crimes plus be a precinct detective?” I said. “Who wil
l I answer to? The precinct captains or my boss, Miriam, at Major Crimes?”

  “You’ll answer to me, Mike,” Fabretti said after a moment. “You know I’ll always have your back. You’ll work out of Major Crimes for now. What do you say? This will be a little experiment. One we’ll correct as we go.”

  Or, more precisely, make up as we go.

  I definitely didn’t like it. A man without a home in the department was a good guy to scapegoat when the pressure got turned up. I didn’t want to be that goat, but it wasn’t looking like my opinion mattered.

  The books had to be the wife’s, I finally realized.

  “Whatever you need me to do, Chief,” I finally said as I turned to the flat screen above the fireplace, where Ellsbury was hitting into a double play.

  Chapter 9

  At 3:23 a.m., the two Supervac trucks turned off their headlights and pulled off the northbound FDR Drive into a junk-strewn abandoned lot beside the Harlem River across from the Bronx.

  After he put the first truck into park, Tony took a bottle of orange Gatorade from the cooler they’d brought, cracked its lid, and commenced gulping. His stubbled face was filthy, and he was sweating profusely; he had in fact sweated through the back of his heavy coveralls.

  “Hey, you want some of this, Mr. Joyce?” said Tony, coming up for air.

  “No. All you, Tony. Truly, you broke your butt down in the hole. I’m proud of you,” Mr. Joyce said.

  It was true. Tony had some heft on him and could use a few suggestions about his hygiene, but no one could say he wasn’t a worker. He’d been going at it hard for the previous three hours, shuttling between the two manholes, really hustling. He’d been Johnny-on-the-spot for every task without a word of complaint.

  They were finally done now. At least with the prep work. It had gone off without a hitch. The truck tanks were empty, and the manholes were closed. Everything was set up and ready to go.

  “How’s the link?” Mr. Joyce called into the radio he took from his pocket.

  “Crystal clear,” Mr. Beckett, in the other truck, replied.

  They had hacked into the MTA’s internal subway video feed, and Mr. Beckett was now monitoring the security cameras at every 1 line station from Harlem to Inwood.

  “Okay, I see it,” Mr. Beckett said over the radio a second later. “It’s pulling out of One Fifty-Seventh in the northbound tunnel. There. It’s all the way in. You have the green light, Mr. Joyce.”

  Mr. Joyce took a cheap disposable cell phone from the left breast pocket of his blue coveralls. It was a Barbie-purple slide phone made by a company called Pantech, a simple phone one would buy a suburban girl for her middle-school graduation. He turned it on and scrolled to the phone’s only preprogrammed number.

  Theory becomes reality, he thought. He thumbed the Call button, and the two pressure cookers preplanted in the train tunnel ten stories beneath Broadway twenty blocks away detonated simultaneously.

  Chapter 10

  The initial explosion of the pressure-cooker bombs, though great, was not that impressive in itself. It wasn’t meant to be. It was just the primer, the match to the fuel that the two trucks had been pumping into the air of the tunnel for the previous three hours.

  The tunnel was dome-shaped, seventy-three feet wide at its base, twenty feet high, and a little less than four miles long. Within milliseconds of the blast, a powerful shock wave raced in both directions along its entire length. There were no people on the subway platforms that late at night, but in both stations, the wave ripped apart vendor shacks on the platforms, MTA tool carts, and wooden benches.

  As the wave hit the south end of the 181st Street station, a three-ton section of the vaulted tunnel’s roof tore free and crashed to the tracks—as it would in a mine cave-in—while up on Broadway, the fantastic force of the blast set off countless car alarms as it threw half a dozen manhole covers into the air.

  South of the main blasts, in the tunnel between the 157th Street station and 168th Street, the shock wave smashed head-on into the approaching Bronx-bound 1 train that Mr. Beckett had spotted. The front windshield shattered a millisecond before the train tore from its moorings, killing the female train operator instantly.

  As the train derailed, its only two passengers, a pair of Manhattan College students coming back from a concert, were knocked spinning out of their seats onto the floor of the front car. Bleeding, and still barely alive, they had a split second to look up from the floor of the train through the front window at a rapidly brightening orange glow. It was strangely beautiful, almost like a sunset.

  Then the barreling twenty-foot-high fireball that was behind the shock wave slammed home, and the air was on fire.

  Back at the abandoned lot near the Harlem River, Mr. Joyce had to wait seven minutes before he heard the first call come in on the radio scanner he had tuned to the fire department band. He clicked a pen as he lifted his clipboard.

  “We did it, Tony,” he said, giving the driver a rare grin.

  “Phase one complete.”

  Chapter 11

  More blue and red emergency lights than I could count were swinging across the steel shutters and Spanish-language signs at 181st Street and Saint Nicholas Avenue when I pulled up behind a double-parked FDNY SUV that morning around 4:30 a.m.

  I counted seven fire trucks and an equal number of police vehicles and ambulances. As I hung my shield around my neck, I saw another truck roar up. Rescue 1, the FDNY’s version of the Navy SEALs. Holy shit, was this looking bad.

  I found the pitch-black subway entrance and went down stairs that reeked of smoke. All I could hear were yells and the metallic chirp of first-responder radio chatter as I swung my flashlight over the tiled subway walls.

  The initial report I received from my boss, Miriam, was that some kind of explosion and a subway tunnel fire had occurred. One memory kept popping into my head as I hopped a turnstile and ran toward the sound of radios and yelling.

  Don’t tell me this is 9/11 all over again!

  I went past a station booth and almost knocked over white-haired, blue-eyed fire chief Tommy Cunniffe, thumbing something out of his eye.

  “Chief, Mike Bennett, Major Crimes, NYPD. What the hell happened?”

  “Massive tunnel explosion of some kind, Detective,” Cunniffe called out in a drill-sergeant baritone. “Two stations, One Hundred Sixty-Eighth Street and here at One Hundred Eighty-First Street, are completely destroyed. We have the fire almost under control here, but there’s colossal structural damage, a large cave-in at the south end of this station. It’s like a mine accident down there. We’re looking for bodies.”

  “Is anybody dead?”

  “We don’t know. I heard over the horn there was a train that got fried a little south of One Sixty-Eighth, but everything else is still unknown at this point. I got two engine companies down there working a water line that we had to feed seven stories down through the elevator shaft. It’s an unbelievable disaster.”

  “Chief,” came a voice from his chest-strapped radio. “We got movement. A heartbeat on the monitor.”

  “Coming from where?” Cunniffe yelled back.

  “Up near you, in one of the other elevator shafts.”

  “Downey, O’Keefe: get me a goddamn halogen!” Cunniffe screamed at two firemen behind him.

  I ran over with the firemen and helped them pry open the door to one of several elevator shafts. When we got the doors open, three huge rugby-player-size firemen appeared out of nowhere and tossed a rope.

  “Hey, Danny, what the hell are you doing? It’s my turn,” said one of them as the biggest clicked his harness onto the rope and lowered himself into the darkness.

  “Screw you, Brian,” the big dude said. “You snooze, you lose, bro. I got this. Watch how it’s done.”

  I shook my head. These guys were amazing. Tripping over themselves to help. No wonder people called them heroes.

  “Send down the rig,” said the fireman in the shaft a minute later. “We
got two, a mom and a daughter. They’re okay! They’re okay!”

  Everyone started cheering and whistling as a pudgy Hispanic woman, clutching her beautiful preschool-age daughter, was pulled up out of the shaft into the light.

  “Okay, good job, everyone. Attaboys!” Cunniffe bellowed as EMTs took the mother and child up the stairs. “Now get the f back to work!”

  An hour later, I was deep underground ten blocks south in full-face breathing apparatus and a Tyvek suit as I toured the devastation that had been the 168th Station with FBI bomb tech Dan Dunning, from the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

  “This is unbelievable,” he said, swinging the beam of his powerful flashlight back and forth over the vaulted ceiling.

  “Which part?” I said.

  “This was one of the grandest stations of the whole subway system, Mike. See the chandelier medallions next to the cave-in and the antique sconces in that rubble there? This used to be the station for the New York Highlanders, who went on to become the New York Yankees. A part of history. Now look at it. Gone. Erased.”

  “Could it have been a gas leak?”

  “Not on your life,” Dunning said. “Gas and electric are surface utilities. These are some of the deepest stations in the system. Ten stories down. Whatever blew them up was intentionally put here. I can’t say for sure yet, but you ask me, these goddamn bastards set off a thermobaric explosion.”

  “A what?”

  Dunning pulled off his mask and spat something out.

  “Thermobaric explosions occur when vapor-flammable dusts or droplets ignite. They rely on atmospheric oxygen for fuel and produce longer, more devastating shock waves. As you can see, when they occur in confined spaces, they are catastrophic. They pumped something down here and lit it up. A gasoline mist, maybe, is my guess. Just like a daisy-cutter bomb. I mean, look at this!”

  We hopped down off what was left of a platform and walked over the burned-to-a-crisp tracks toward a blackened train. As crime-scene techs took pictures, I could see that one of the train’s plastic windows had melted and slid down the side of one of the cars like candle wax. Inside, the driver was burned pulp, and the two other bodies in the front car were skeletal and black, like something from a haunted house.