F Train Read online

  Television news was beginning to broadcast some of the pictures with nonstop commentary that sounded more like fluent gasping, talking heads jabbering feverishly, shamelessly making up facts wherever facts were unknown.

  The silent computer projection on the conference room wall—pictures unpixilated, faces clear—mesmerized the young Krishnaswami.

  FBI special agent Maureen Canane—invited by Flo Ott to keep the Bureau informed, wary in these surroundings, although at least nominally an ally—walked up to the photograph of Marie Priester and John James Reilly. She examined the picture closely and did little to hide her disgust.

  “Reilly’s service weapon was fully loaded,” Sergeant Marty Keane said. “He didn’t get a chance to fire, but I think from his position—”

  Special Agent Canane said, “You mean, his position down on his knees?” She did nothing to conceal the sarcasm in her voice. “And his head in that woman’s lap?”

  “No.” Detective Frank Murphy’s tone strained for patience and thoughtfulness, while his hands were rubbing together like stones seeking sparks. “From the way he was positioned, he was probably looking toward the rear of the car before he collapsed. He must have been drawing on someone he thought was back there. Or who he actually saw back there.”

  Flo laser-pointed to the photo of the rear section of the car. “Someone who might’ve been stepping off the train, out this last door here right behind them. At a stop before Fifteenth, but after Borough Hall. That’s five stations, two of them outdoors, where the platform tapes are pretty useless.”

  “How come?” Special Agent Canane tapped a foot, drummed her fingers, looked incredulous.

  “Snow,” Flo said. “Blowing all over the place, thick and heavy. You can’t see anything at those two stops, nothing but snow on the tapes.”

  Marty Keane read from a typed list. “In Special Agent John James Reilly’s pockets, he had a handkerchief, pressed and unused. He had his house keys, a wallet with his Bureau ID, a driver’s license, two credit cards, a picture of his wife and kids, and a snapshot of Marie Priester, the woman sitting next to him. The snapshot was folded in half and tucked in with his cash. Seventy-four dollars. The lab still has all his stuff, including his service weapon. And in her handbag, you got twenty-nine items. Want me to read them all?”

  Special Agent Canane shook her head. “Just copy me on everything, okay?”

  “Anyway, Marie Priester was unarmed, unless you count a metal nail file and a pair of small scissors.”

  “Hardly weapons.”

  “But you can’t take them on a plane.”

  Marty Keane projected a few photos from the file marked Davidov and set them up in a row on the wall.

  “Here’s the guy with the felony record. His autopsy was first. They finished him an hour ago. We got some pictures. We don’t know exactly where he first started sitting on the train. Or if he was always in this seat here where he’s falling over, or if he moved up from somewhere else.”

  Flo had already examined the photos a dozen times and had her own theories. “Couldn’t he have staggered up from the back of the car? Back where the X is?”

  “Not impossible, Flo. He’s facing the other end of the car, so he could be trying to get away, like maybe he wanted to move in the other direction. Hard to tell.”

  “In that case, we can’t completely eliminate him as a possible suicide killer. Or can we?”

  “No, not yet. He had two thousand two hundred and seven dollars in cash on him, mainly hundreds. Plus his driver’s license, two cigars, both Cuban, a cigarette lighter, and eleven condoms. That’s it.”

  “Busy guy,” Flo said. “Krish, get his arrest, trial, and prison records. Contact his case officer, see if he’s still—was still—on parole.”

  Frank Murphy examined a new shot, the most recent picture of Sidney R. Davidov, a chubby guy, a fish-belly-pale naked cadaver right before his autopsy, the shot taken under close glaring lights.

  “Two grand in his pocket,” said Frank Murphy. “If he was only out to kill himself, that’s a shitload of cash he’s schlepping around. And then what was he carrying those gas chemicals in?”

  Flo paused for a moment. Then: “Certainly not an open bucket. They’re still combing the tracks?”

  “Yes, and so far mainly dead rats and garbage, nothing like real evidence, not yet.”

  Flo said, “I’m not so sure there weren’t maybe two killers. Even more. Maybe along with Davidov, maybe not. Maybe nothing to do with him at all. Maybe—”

  “Maybe a whole mob of maniacs?” Special Agent Canane said, her voice oozing skepticism. “Look, I got to go back. Keep me updated. We’ll share everything we’ve got on Reilly. We hope you people do the same for us. Nobody has seen him in over a week, since he went on leave.”

  Flo turned to face her. “You going to his wake?”

  “I didn’t know him,” Canane said, buttoning up her coat. “I guess his colleagues will go.”

  After the FBI liaison left, Flo tilted back in her chair. “Godawful hour, miserable night. Two postal clerks. Couple of Pakistani shopkeepers. One ex-con. Maybe this is just an ordinary cross-section of exactly who you’d expect riding the subway at two or three in the morning. No mass murderers. But an FBI special agent and a beautiful woman not his wife…and not his color. How ordinary is that?”

  No one answered her. An uncomfortable few moments passed before Frank changed the subject.

  “How’s Eddie?”

  Flo paused at the mention of her husband, her facial expression altering, softening, saddening.

  “I’d like to see him tonight, if we can squeeze in the time. I got a fried chicken dinner I want to take out to the nursing home. Eddie’s doing okay.”

  The car bomb that had crippled U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Captain Edward James Ott—summoned back for a year’s duty now lasting a lifetime—exploded at the first entry checkpoint outside the American embassy in Kabul, killing eight persons and sending Eddie through a windshield.

  Eddie used to despair, curse, rage at the U.S. government, at himself and at Flo, and at an ignorant and indifferent world.

  But you lived was too cruel to say to Eddie, in a nursing home for the rest of his life.

  1 P.M.

  District Attorney Cecil King asked Flo the question, quietly, discreetly, before their lunch meeting began in his office.

  “How’s Eddie doing?”

  “Holding up, it’s a struggle.”

  “Give him my best, please.”

  Flo nodded, her thoughts drifting out to the nursing home in Sheepshead Bay. To the room with the harbor view, a TV with the sound off, a hospital bed, and all the mechanical paraphernalia set up for a quadriplegic. Tonight she wanted to feed her husband that fried chicken, and maybe for a blessed half-hour try to talk about their daughter, and about work, about the unavoidable horror of mass murder, and even about the game the Knicks had lost the night before.

  Her thoughts returned to the frightening job at hand.

  The DA said, “This FBI guy?”

  “Our witness?” said Flo.

  The DA shook his head. “No. The dead one. Any explanation, any ideas?”

  “It could’ve been completely personal, two of them together there. The Bureau seems to think so. Said he was off-duty, on leave.”

  “What’s his assignment generally?”

  “Mixed, but certainly not her, not Marie Priester. He tracked domestic threats to UN delegations. Kept tabs on delegates, some of them anyway. We don’t know much more at this point. The Bureau isn’t very talkative.”

  “And Marie Priester?”

  “Almost zip.”

  “His relation to her?”

  “Nothing solid yet.” Flo paused for a moment. “Well, maybe not. He knew her, that’s for sure, with her snapshot in his wallet.”

  “Nail it all down,” the DA said, “the story on both of them. Because when the media get wind of this agent, and his tomcatting around, and his middle-o
f-the-night lady friend there…for as long as we have no killers in custody, we sure as hell will get hammered whenever the media and the mayor go off on some crazy tangent. We’ll start drowning in bad facts, and bad facts make bad cases, stupid expectations. Garbage in, garbage out.”

  Cecil King didn’t mention he also had a senatorial campaign to worry about. He didn’t have to say a word about that in the office.

  “And the mayor,” he said, “he wants you and me, Flo, in his office right after he finally grabs a bite.”

  “God help us.”

  2:30 P.M.

  Flo Ott and Cecil King rode in a black unmarked SUV across the Brooklyn Bridge and up to City Hall.

  Twelve hours since the massacre, and still no boasts or claims from the killers or any new threats or any fresh evidence.

  No one arrested and not a suspect in sight.

  Social media remained about as useless as ever, too many noisy kooks and narcissists chasing attention and the Twitterverse sputtering a million inanities, except for a wag at The New York Review of Books who found momentary fame with her tweet, “Department of Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492. Dormite in pace.” Sleep in peace.

  Television news shows ran continuous coverage of pictures of the seven victims, the silent images starkly accusing, talking-head teleprompter readers demanding justice now, justice forever. Media vultures fanned out across Brooklyn, searching for families of the dead, reporters armed with video cameras and such insightful questions as “And how do you feel now?”

  The first results from forensics, while still incomplete at this early point, were phoned to Flo as they approached City Hall. Indications were that all seven died of sarin gas poisoning. This finding would be Flo’s offering to the mayor, proof they were on the job, large and in charge.

  “This way.” A uniformed cop from the commissioner’s office led them inside, not to the mayor’s office, but into the mayor’s television studio.

  Hang on, Flo thought, this isn’t a meeting. This isn’t what they promised. This is just another show, a time-wasting showboat op for the bosses. And we’re the stage props.

  The mayor smiled at them, a smile that looked to Flo like moonlight on a tombstone. A self-made man, the mayor, and he worshipped his creator.

  Behind the mayor stood the police commissioner, his head shaved, rock-faced, stone still. Flo and the DA had to stand alongside him, like a pair of spear carriers in an opera.

  The mayor opened straightaway to the camera: “While my commissioner and I have full confidence in the police force—especially in Lieutenant Florence Ott here and her team in Brooklyn homicide—we feel the Brooklyn district attorney could certainly use more help in tracking down the monstrous perpetrators of this unspeakable outrage. No expense will be spared; these are high-value killers we’re hunting, they’ll pay for their grotesque crimes. So the commissioner and I are sending over investigatory reinforcements…. ”

  Me? Especially me? Flo thought. The mayor never heard of me before, he doesn’t know me from a crack in the sidewalk.

  The mayor rolled right on. “…As a former prosecutor myself, I know the value of psychological profiling in identifying and capturing, in convicting and sentencing the kind of unconscionable cowards who commit appalling crimes. The families of last night’s victims, and the millions of subway riders in our great city, deserve no less than total justice. The guilty will be identified. The guilty will be arrested. The guilty will be prosecuted in a New York court. And the guilty will be punished. Today I swear my solemn oath to you that these perpetrators of evil will suffer the full extent of the law. I’m assigning to the Brooklyn special homicide unit a professional criminal psychologist…”

  The mayor’s shrink, Flo thought—a spy from the mayor’s Alice in Wonderland world, and for a moment she was transported to that fantasy tale. Alice said: “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change. I don’t like to go among mad people.” Cheshire Cat explained: “Oh, you can’t help that. Most everyone’s mad here.” And the cat disappears, laughing maniacally. “You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself.”

  As the television lights dimmed, the mayor shook Flo’s hand, gave the DA a playful jock’s punch on the shoulder, and walked out without another word.

  Wonderland.

  3:30 P.M.

  In the office, retired FBI special agent Raymond O’Hara handed Flo Ott a sheaf of drawings.

  “I’ve been working at home on these, Lieutenant. Getting it all down while my memory is still fresh. I don’t know how much help this’ll be, but whatever I can do—”

  “You’re terrific, Raymond. We’re lucky it was you there. Not some civilian.”

  Earlier, however, she’d waited before returning Raymond O’Hara’s first call and accepting his suggestion that he come to her office with his version of a reconstruction. She wasn’t entirely convinced the retired special agent wouldn’t probe for more information NYPD preferred not to reveal to anyone, including the FBI, and certainly not at this early stage in the investigation.

  In person, O’Hara struck her as a sincere man. She could empathize with his caffeinated behavior, teetering on the edge of his chair.

  “I’ve always thought, Lieutenant, it’s important to get your first impressions down as soon as possible. You know, just say it out straight, get it right down there fast when you first observe a crime scene or examine a body. Later, you go back and adjust, let others put their views in, and so forth. Then if you’re way off, you correct. Anyway the point is, here’s my reconstruction. I got to admit, I didn’t sleep too well. And my wife, Mary Margaret, I’m being frank with you here, she really doesn’t want me doing this either, says it’s not my place anymore…”

  Flo smiled and stayed silent, deferring judgment until she heard Raymond O’Hara’s hypothesis.

  “Actually, Lieutenant, I got two versions for you here. Two takes on the situation, different sets of drawings.”

  “You covered homicides with the Bureau?”

  “Not really. Indirectly. The Bureau doesn’t get that many, not like you people, and my time with a murder was back when I was young, when I was still your age. Look, if you think I’m wasting your time, Lieutenant, just tell me to beat it. My skin is thick.”

  “You got to be kidding, Raymond. I should take you to lunch.”

  Raymond O’Hara beamed and lay out his sketches on Flo’s desk, side by side, first take, second take.

  “First, here’s what I saw, pretty much like your real pictures. My take, right off the bat, what happened right before the end, before anything we can see now.”

  His first drawing was a reasonable representation of the photographic diagrams in Flo’s computer of the death scene, minus the name labels.

  Raymond O’Hara’s second set of sketches had a more intriguing aspect.

  “The man with the gun, for me, straight off, he’s your story. What is he? What’s that name you got there—”

  Flo zoomed in on the photo of the dead FBI special agent on her computer screen for O’Hara.

  “John James Reilly,” O’Hara said. “Now is this Reilly guy just what he appears to be—armed, fast, alert—special kind of character, nothing in common with the other victims? Only just happened to be there. Or is he representative of all the victims? Or maybe he’s only like some of them. And if so, which ones? Or—and this isn’t entirely impossible either—is he really closer to whoever did it, maybe even one of them?” Raymond O’Hara paused, as if waiting for Flo’s approval, her permission to continue.

  Flo nodded, nothing more, no revelation that John James Reilly was a special agent from the Bureau, albeit off-duty and on leave. This wasn’t public knowledge, so O’Hara had no idea yet.

  “My take on this guy. Our man here, this Reilly, he sees people falling over in front of him. He senses movement behind him, maybe even hears a shout. All this is almost instantaneous. He’s in great shape, he’s got sharp instincts, and probably g
ood training, too—military, maybe—so he has his weapon out, and then he’s facing the source of the movement, the noise. But he succumbs, he collapses from the gas. Gas, I’ve always thought it was gas. At this point, they’re at or approaching a stop. The guy or guys who put the gas there, they hop off. They’re masked, and then they’re gone. My guess? The Fourth Avenue stop, where it’s snowing like all get-out, and your tapes probably show almost nothing. Nothing there, am I right? Just a helluva lot of snow. And you’ve checked out Reilly, he had a permit for the gun?”

  Flo made a noncommittal gesture.

  O’Hara didn’t push. “The guy or guys who did it, they’re just waiting for a night like this, heavy snow and out they go, then boom, they hit. They get on at the stop just before Fourth Avenue, at Smith and Ninth, where the station is also outside, and nothing there, too, but snow all over the place. So why the hell are they doing this? A test run, maybe a probe? A warning shot across the bow? They had no idea who was in that subway car, and it didn’t matter to them. And our man with the gun, he had no idea who they were. He just happened to be there, and that almost happened to be their bad luck. Another two seconds of consciousness, and our man with the gun might have plugged someone.”

  “So far, Raymond, I can’t poke any big holes in this version. What’s your next take?”

  “Trickier, a lot trickier. Reilly knows who they are. And they know who he is. And he’s the target. Why? Okay, we’re only on page one. This second route is much more demanding.”

  “And what about this man, Raymond?” Flo pointed at O’Hara’s representation of the victim with his nose over the end of his seat, the man called Sidney R. Davidov, ex-convict. “Was he trying to stand up, get a good look at someone? Unlikely he fell over a seat and just landed like that. Or was he trying to stand up to get off? Or was he the target and he recognized them and he was going for them?”

  “Tell me something, Lieutenant, just this little bit, I understand you can’t release details, but…was he armed, too? This Davidov guy.”