Chapter 7
I WAS ENCOURAGED by the prospect of working with a bright ATF special agent. I had to trust that Maggie Chin would stand by her pledge to be open with any results she found. That was the reputation of the ATF. They worked a lot more closely with local agencies than some of the other feds.
I didn’t like leaving a crime scene, but I couldn’t linger at Picatinny Arsenal. I had too much work to do on my own case, especially with my partner out of commission, on his way to Bozeman, Montana.
It was late in the afternoon by the time I made it to Brooklyn. This was not an assignment I was particularly looking forward to. I needed to talk with the mother of Abby Boyd, the victim from the bombing at the Office of Technology.
When Joyce Boyd opened the door to her brownstone, I could tell it was during a brief pause in a day full of weeping. Her eyes were red, and her hair hung to the side like she had been lying down.
She made a brave effort to get it together and invited me into the house after I introduced myself.
I sat on a floral couch while Mrs. Boyd took a chair facing me from across a coffee table.
I’d been through enough of these sensitive interviews to know not to rush things.
There were a few key pieces of information I required, but she needed to talk.
The most heartbreaking thing she told me was that she’d also lost her son five years earlier.
After a while, we tracked back to today’s tragedy.
Mrs. Boyd said, “How could someone do something like this?”
“I wish I had a good answer.”
The question had plagued me since my first days with the NYPD, when I’d discovered a homeless man beaten and left to die in an alleyway. I’d turned to my partner and asked, “How could someone do something like this?” My partner had replied, “Imagine what it would be like without us around.”
That was one of my motivations in the job. What would happen if I wasn’t here?
I glanced over at a photo of Abby at about age sixteen, holding a soccer ball. Her long brown hair was tied in a ponytail and her smile looked like it could be used for an advertisement. Swap the soccer ball for a basketball, and it could have been a photo of one of my own teenage daughters.
Her mother said, “She was so bright. And friendly. Everyone loved her. Who would want to hurt her?”
“That’s what I intend to find out, Mrs. Boyd.”
I was here for information and had to eliminate some of my theories about who had planted the bomb. I asked the standard question about her daughter’s love life and circle of friends.
Mrs. Boyd thought about it and said, “Abby was dating a nice young man named Jimmy Pinter for most of this past year. But they broke up last month. She said she just didn’t have serious feelings for him.
It seemed to really shake him to his core.
I spent one evening trying to comfort him when he dropped some roses off and found out Abby was out on the town. ”
“Can you tell me more about Jimmy?”
“He is about the same age as Abby, maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. Nice enough. Average height. Nothing really unusual about him.”
“Do you know what he does for a living?”
“He’s some kind of construction manager.”
I asked about some of the construction sites, and Mrs. Boyd told me they were bigger ones mostly in Manhattan. That gave me pause. Who had control of explosives used on the big sites? Usually, it was a construction manager.
I had my first lead.