CHAPTER 1
I ENJOYED WATCHING my partner fidget as we stood next to a complex in lower Manhattan that housed several annex offices for the city. I left my hands in my overcoat and would never admit that the wind made my face feel like it was about to crack. I’m a New Yorker, dammit. I can stand the weather.
I turned to my young partner, Rob Trilling, and said, “This cold snap isn’t bothering you, is it? I mean, aren’t you from Montana? I thought you were tough guys. Or at least acclimated to temperatures in the teens.”
My partner cut his eyes to me. He generally didn’t bother to respond to minor jests. For a cop on the street, that saved a lot of time. But in his case it was part of his personality, not an efficiency hack.
“I’m not sure why we’re standing out here in the freezing wind,” he eventually said. “Isn’t the crime scene inside?”
“Yes, and that’s why we’re letting the crime scene technicians and the Bomb Squad guys do their jobs,” I said.
I wanted to give the local detective on scene a chance to collect as much information as possible.
We’d been sent down here because it looked like it might be connected to another bombing almost five months ago.
An NYPD patrol sergeant in Queens named Rose Vega had been blown up in her squad car, in front of her family.
The brass was worried about a serial bomber.
I was too. Mainly the fact that bombs had now been used on two different city employees.
This wasn’t a theory they could simply ignore.
My other purpose in waiting outside was to try to get a sense of why an obscure city building like this had been targeted. Why put a bomb in the Office of Technology and Innovation? It was not even their main office. That was in Brooklyn. This was just some kind of annex closer to City Hall.
There was no obvious rationale here. The building housed a few different city offices: In addition to the small Office of Technology, there was the Housing Authority, a department that handled parking fines, and a place to talk about garbage collection issues.
That was it. I kept running the services through my head, trying to see how the offices might fit together.
It was a little like playing the New York Times game Connections.
Just then I saw Jolynn Nelson, one of the top detectives in the recently established Violent Crimes Task Force, appear in the doorway to make a phone call. I stepped toward her, and Trilling followed. We both made sure to slip out of the biting wind and into the hallway.
Nelson gave me the universal one-finger motion to hold on a moment. It was a quick conversation with a few yeses and noes. Then she slipped her phone into her pocket and looked up at me.
“Hey, Mike. I heard they were sending you down from Manhattan North. I’m sorry the only time we get to see each other is when things are so screwed up.”
I said, “What’ve you got so far?”
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to set off a bomb inside an office that doesn’t do much. You already know there’s one dead. The clerk, a young woman named Abby Boyd. Only worked for the city about nine months.”
“Any security footage?”
Nelson shook her head. “Someone hacked the system. Then they went from high-tech hacking to basic breaking and entering. They used some kind of a pry bar to pop the rear door off its hinges. Crime scene thinks they can lift the smudge. But it looks like whoever did it was wearing surgical gloves.”
“So we didn’t get any prints or other useful information?”
“That’s not entirely accurate. We know that whoever left the smudge was missing the middle and index fingers on their left hand.”