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Now she was en route to the local precinct, where she’d leave them in protective custody and then she herself would race back to the bungalow to walk the grid there.
And confront the fumes again; she’d been right about the MO; Unsub 89 had left an IED in the house. An acid bomb.
And with that thought, her lungs ironically began another bout of coughing.
She hit fifty again, balancing urgency with the conditions of one of her passengers: both the pregnancy and the nausea.
ln the lot of the precinct, she stopped near the front door, turned to them.
“It’s poison?” the wife asked. “Acid?”
“That’s right.”
She began to cry.
“And you’re sure he put it inside?” From the husband.
“Yep, it’s detonated. It’s all through your house. Officers’ve seen the fumes.”
“Christ,” he muttered. “If we’d been inside …” He then asked, “This is all because I saw his SUV? That’s what I told him I saw.”
“Could you have gotten a look at him planting the device he used to sabotage the counterweights?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember anything like that.”
“How close were you to the crane?”
There was hesitation as the husband and wife glanced each other’s way. Apparently, her question surprised them, as if she were missing some detail that they both knew.
The man said, “Well, pretty close. I was the operator.”
24.
SACHS SAID,“I thought the operator died.”
“What?” Garry Helprin’s face was confused briefly. Then it went still. “That was Leon Roubideaux who died. Beam man. Nobody better.” A grimace, laced with anger. “He was in the building, the twenty-first floor. Tried to run a plank to the tower, to rig an arresting cable. It was crazy. Wouldn’t’ve worked. But … He was a friend.”
“I’m sorry.” The image returned: the rebar, dark with blood, flecked with bits of flesh and brain. “You climbed down before it fell?”
His wife, Peggy, said, “He rappelled.”
Sachs lifted an eyebrow.
“Rock and mountain climbing’re my hobbies. I keep three hundred feet of line in the cab. Just in case. I mean, the just-in-case I was thinking of was that the stairwell got damaged or there was a fire. Never thought I’d have to bail out of a crash.”
“Can you tell me anything about the man who called, claiming he was a detective?”
“Not much. No foreign accent, or accent from here, like Southern or Boston. Said his name was Adams, I think. Didn’t really say anything about himself.”
“Caller ID?”
“It said ‘NYPD.’ No number. That’s why I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Easy to set up a phone to do that. Happens all the time. And what did you tell him? That vehicle you mentioned?”
Her pad was out and a pen.
“A beige SUV, I don’t know what kind, with Connecticut plates parked at the side of the site. Why I noticed it, it was parked in a funny place, not the lot reserved for workers. But I knew it was one of the crew ’cause there was a hard hat on the dash. We sometimes leave ’em there so the traffic cops know we’re working and give us a break.”
