F Train Read online

  Flo hesitated, then shook her head.

  “Then I’d say first, Lieutenant, with no other details, he’s not top priority. Not this guy. If he was armed and he knew them, he might go for them. If he was unarmed and knew them, more likely he’d try to get away. In which case, he’s heading in the wrong direction. He was looking toward that bucket when he toppled over. My guess now, without further details? He didn’t know them. He’s only trying to stand up and see what’s going on. Or get off soon and, boom, he keels over.”

  “Raymond, far as it goes, I think we’re in agreement here. But it’s worth everything to hear it from someone like you, the first one there. It’s a confirmation. Can we call you back? And I’m serious about lunch, Raymond, I owe you.”

  “Anytime. I’m retired, I got nothing to do.”

  5:20 P.M.

  Alone in her office—only photographic evidence of the F train corpses for company, ghostly images projected on the wall—Flo could focus, uninterrupted, no distractions at least for a few moments.

  She stood and walked around the room and returned to her desk, watching the dead out of the corner of her eye.

  The dead demanding justice.

  She heard, and only a slight awareness here, a distant jackhammer, four stories below somewhere out in the street, an implacable steel bit pneumatically pounding through concrete, incessant, persistent, unrelenting, as if to get down to some buried truth and expose it to daylight.

  Then, interruption.

  Reality resumed. An occurrence at the door: mayor’s promise fulfilled in the flesh. Time for the unavoidable appointment with Dr. Howard Gerald, criminal psychologist.

  “Just call me Howie,” the short, plump man said, bouncing into her office like a beach ball in a suit and tie. “You don’t have to call me doctor. And please, don’t get up, Lieutenant.”

  Adjusting his bifocals, the mayor’s man, psychologist Howard Gerald, PhD, moved with a display of great deliberation from projected photograph to photograph, his nose inches from the wall, his shadow obliterating crime scene images as he progressed.

  “I’m beside myself,” he said, “absolutely beside myself with horror. How can I ever ride the subway again, and not, not picture this, this obscenity, this grotesquerie, this— Words simply fail me.”

  Howard Gerald carried a double mocha decaf latte and a prune pastry, a hunk of Danish about the size of the pigeons roosting on Flo’s office windowsill.

  “Want a piece?” He hefted his pastry.

  “No, thanks, I’ll wait for supper.”

  “Then please excuse me.” Howie Gerald attacked his pastry. “But I have to finish this, before”—he nodded at the wall display of death—“before I look at them again, and then it’s bye-bye, appetite. You don’t really sit with these bodies around you all day up on the wall, do you, Lieutenant?”

  “Until we arrest the killers and close the case, they’re not going anywhere.”

  The mayor’s favorite psychologist rolled his eyes, his attention returning to the prune pastry as he consumed it with the assiduous deliberation he then devoted to examining the death scene projection on the wall, aiming a sharp assessor’s squint at the massacre tableau, picture by picture, while slurping the last of his double mocha decaf latte. When he concluded the full circuit, he shook his head and sighed. “I just don’t know how you can live with this, Lieutenant, I really don’t.”

  Flo regarded her visitor calmly and said nothing. She wasn’t about to provide ammunition for the commissioner or the mayor.

  “Did you know, Lieutenant, that the deadliest day in this city—since September 11, that is—was July 10, 2004? Eight murder victims, Florence—remember that day?—eight separate homicides. But this, this truly takes the cake here. Seven in one blow. Now, I’m a really huge believer in statistics, Florence. You find statistics useful?”

  “Juries prefer evidence.”

  The psychologist smiled. “But they have to, don’t they? No choice. Personally, I find statistics fascinating.” He leaned back in his chair, placed his hands together as if in prayer, and slowly drummed his fingertips. “For example, Florence, the fact that more homicides are committed in Brooklyn than in any other borough, now that’s really interesting. It must say something, I mean besides the fact that Brooklyn has more people. And more people are murdered on Saturdays, did you know that? And roughly a third of all murders in New York stay totally unsolved. True fact, honest to God. Hundreds, even thousands of killers go waltzing off on their merry ways totally scot-free. A peculiar statistic, most unwanted, and that the mayor definitely wants to see improved.”

  “Don’t we all, Howie?”

  “Well, that’s our job, Florence. And did you know…”

  Howard Gerald, PhD, was enjoying his lecture as much as he enjoyed his prune pastry, steadily drumming fingertips on fingertips in a strange kind of prayer, the instructive voice of doctorate authority rolling on and on.

  “When it comes to killing, men overwhelmingly prefer guns. But women murderers, they make homicide a fifty-fifty choice, between knives or guns. And now we have this one, a gas job. So who uses gas, Florence? The gas is where we start. Gas is key here, it’s definitive.”

  “Absolutely, Howie, let’s start with gas.”

  He smiled approvingly, teeth bared, large teeth, bright white and far apart, reminiscent of tombstones designed for a cemetery somewhat larger than his mouth. Flo winced, moving her chair back. A curious smell escaped his mouth, like a grave left open too long, or simply the combination of too much prune and mocha.

  “Well, how’s this…” Howard Gerald’s tone turned philosophical, fingertips beating a rhythm of wisdom into the informative flow of one-way discourse. “…Just for starters, Florence. Suicides often use gas. Head in oven. Legs sprawled across a kitchen floor. Come to think of it, kind of like this diagram here, although of course on a much smaller scale. Quiet, clean, efficient, that’s your gas suicide victim, no matter how unstable. Now as for mass killers, they do tend to be psychopaths. I can see no sane or rational motive behind this monstrous event on the F train. Unless of course it’s somehow political, in which case, all bets are off. I can never really draw conclusions about people from their strengths. Don’t get much from that. Weaknesses are far more revealing. Any claimants call in?”

  “All fake. They just take up everyone’s time. Worthless.”

  “Tips?”

  “Only emails and also useless. Crackpots.”

  “Typical.” The psychologist removed his bifocals and polished the lenses with his tie. “Statistically, the public is pretty useless most of the time, if not a downright pain in the ass. But this witness I’ve been told about, the first one on the scene. I’d like to see him, Florence. Can you set up an interview for me?”

  “When’s good?”

  “What a question. I’m up to my eyeballs in psychotics, no joke. The department’s psychologist-at-large, and I’m the only one around, I’m all over the place. Rockaway yesterday, South Bronx tomorrow. But your F train case is our top priority. So you just be sure, absolutely sure, Florence, you only have to whistle and that’s it, I’m running straight over wherever you set it up.”

  “Thanks, Howie. I’ll whistle.”

  Too often she saw the Howard Geralds of this world use truth the way media like the Post shaped it, truths splintered into suitable shards to propel a patron’s agenda. Flip gestures, incendiary sound bites, slyly trimmed photos, the shams stirred and spiced a brimming hot pot of grievances. Flo realized the dangers of spewing fractions of truth around a city where four million out of eight million people hung on by their fingertips day after day, consumed in simply surviving. She believed in real truth as a vital principle: she was ready to give her life for it, but only if the truth had a real value.

  Exactly as she’d give her life for her husband or her daughter, she’d risk it for the African American woman slumped dead against the subway car window or wager it for the sake of John James Reilly�
�s children. All the energies of motherhood harnessed a laserlike intensity in Flo Ott’s determination.

  The great city around her, and her beloved skin-close borough of Brooklyn, this world existed in an incessant, pounding, self-asserting motion like that pneumatic drill penetrating the concrete pavement down below in the street.

  Utterly relentless.

  The disappearance of spouses. Abused bodies of children. The deaths of strangers on the subway.

  For all these truths, Flo was set to work a lifetime.

  But for Howard Gerald, PhD, five minutes handed over to him felt like an eternity wasted, time lost forever.

  Howie Gerald was a jerk.

  He left her office the same way he entered, bouncing out like a beach ball in a suit and tie.

  6:58 P.M.

  From her office, Flo headed straight for the subway.

  She carried Eddie’s supper and in her pocket a thumb drive with all the photos to load on her home computer.

  She rode the Q train headed out to Sheepshead Bay on the south shore of Brooklyn. She sat in the front car and watched the tunnel ahead, twisty and dark, shadowy, unidentifiable shapes looming up, then fading, intermittently illuminated in the sudden flashing of control lights.

  Fast.

  Slow.

  Stop.

  Go…

  Underground the subway seemed to seal you in stone as tight as a tomb. At an elevated station, Flo left the train and walked down two flights of stairs, heading straight along the Sheepshead Bay harbor-front boulevard to the nursing home.

  A familiar route she’d taken a thousand times. Here the wind whipped in off the bay with a stinging spite, and the sky was black and unyielding.

  She ducked into the nursing home, stamping the slush from her boots. The lobby was warm and cozy. Under the yellow light of a floor lamp, the receptionist at the desk looked up at Flo and smiled. The receptionist was reading the Post, open to a two-page color photo spread of seven bodies. Newspapers thought their reporters explained a story, when all they did was tell stories, articles strewn with unsolved details, a kind of journalism of fantastic intimacies.

  “Hello, Mrs. Ott,” the receptionist said. “Rotten night, but you’re looking good. What’s on the menu?” Always kindly, always friendly, the woman at the desk was a good choice for a hard job, welcoming visitors to a house of permanent pain.

  Flo appreciated her greeting. “Fried chicken this evening, and creamed corn and string beans.”

  “That’s wonderful.” The receptionist winked and smiled. “He’ll love it.”

  Flo had made the supper at a quieter moment almost two days before, but now this seemed more like years. She’d packed Eddie’s meal in Styrofoam and kept it cold in her office refrigerator. Flo would heat it all up for him in the microwave.

  Eddie barely whispered when he greeted her. “Honey, what’s up?”

  She glanced at the muted TV, a college basketball game in progress. “You’ve seen the news.”

  “F train. Yours, right?”

  “Mine.”

  “Congratulations. You’ll be famous. Gas, is what they’re saying.”

  “Forensics confirmed it. Sarin. Knives, poisons, baseball bats, guns, all that stuff I’m used to. The gold standards. But gas, Eddie, gas is new. We’ve never had a gas massacre in Brooklyn. Just lots of lone suicides.”

  Flo and Eddie had developed an accommodation—he said nothing that might shock or offend, and she was just as loving with him, a consequence of a growing quiet, an enforced serenity that simultaneously kept them together and pitilessly pushed them apart, tossing from solicitude to fatigue, until slamming into recoil.

  Work was usually a safe topic, Flo’s job a strange kind of oasis, a neutral zone. Here, and only here in this nursing-home room, mass murder on the New York subway was free of friction.

  Slowly, Flo served his supper, her hand to his mouth with each forkful…fried chicken, corn, string beans.

  “The TV,” Eddie said. “Look at him, that son of a bitch.”

  The mayor of New York was moving his mouth without a sound. Flo left the volume off. She’d heard his spiel in person, and once was enough. The mayor had nothing to say that would help her.

  The families of the dead were different. And tomorrow morning, she’d meet those grieving people.

  Saturday

  7:20 A.M.

  “Too bad,” Flo said. “You missed the all-time fruitcake yesterday. The mayor’s consultant shrink.” She and Frank Murphy and Marty Keane were sitting in her office, finishing their coffees.

  “The mayor and the commissioner retain him,” she said. “So he’s ours to use, free for nothing, whenever we want. Mayor’s treat.”

  Frank rubbed his huge hands. “Can’t wait.”

  Flo smiled. “Comes with mass murder, Frank, especially before an election. Seven bodies, the mayor’s got a trophy here.”

  “And the families?” said Frank, placing those rock hands together almost as if in prayer. “When are the wakes?”

  “Reilly’s starts today,” said Marty. “Out by Our Lady of Angels in Bay Ridge. Sconzo Funeral Home on Fourth Avenue, a block from the church.”

  Flo turned off her computer. “We go now, pay our respects, and set up an appointment with his wife. Alone. Her husband was a professional, she’d expect nothing less from us.”

  “How long before Dangler sniffs him out? About being a Bureau special agent and all.”

  Flo shook her head. “The Post won’t learn it from us, Marty, or from the Bureau. So far it’s up to his family, it’s up to Mrs. Reilly. Unless she wants to stay mum, and I pray she does.”

  8 A.M.

  In the car riding out to the Sconzo Funeral Home in Bay Ridge, Flo said, “Real psychos, Frank, in our experience, they work alone.”

  “In our experience,” said Frank “Usually they do. But the guys who did the Towers, they couldn’t have been sane. And Jonestown? Almost a thousand of them, all religious, all Americans, Flo, lining up to drink cyanide Kool-Aid, even killing their own kids. Revolutionary suicide. They all had to be totally wacko?”

  “But in both cases nobody got away, and no perpetrator ever planned to get away. Dr. Gerald, in his great wisdom, didn’t note how on the F train nobody but victims seems to have stuck around.”

  “Our gasman,” said Frank, “or gasmen, they could’ve come from anywhere and be back in anywhere right now. Sunning themselves on a beach halfway round the world. No intention of setting foot in New York ever again. Crazy, right, Flo? Wacko like foxes, we can bet on it.”

  “Forensics say more about the weapon, Marty? How about the bucket?”

  “Forensics, they’re crying in their beer, Flo. No prints. We got the manufacturer’s name and that’s about it, a start. A camping goods outfit in Oregon.”

  “We’re after it, Flo, don’t worry.”

  Frank said: “Reconstruction, Flo. The gasman wore an overcoat with inside pockets, specially sewn, for the chemical bottles and for the collapsible bucket. Planning, excellent planning for the hit and for the escape. Snowstorm, outdoor stations. Definitely not your average psycho’s route. Nothing impulsive, no showing off, no bragging, no taunting. Not a peep out of them so far. They’re pros, not nutballs.”

  “It’s a fair to good shot,” Flo said. “We’ve got an intelligent, motivated killer or killers. Possibly hired? And maybe Marty’s right, maybe they’re all somewhere on the other side of the world now. Life’s a beach. And we have an FBI special agent who may or may not have known them. Then what about the woman?”

  “This morning her employer called in.” From his briefcase, Frank Murphy took out the photo of the pretty, young African American woman slumped against a subway car window, a man’s head in her lap, his right hand on a gun.

  “Marie Priester was a paralegal at a big Wall Street law firm, Deutsch and Templer. Intelligent, discreet, a model employee and still single. She lived somewhere near—you guessed it—Coney Island. So she’s on
her way home here, obviously after a pretty long night out and with this guy maybe she’s been on the town with. He’s escorting her home. And now his wife is going to be crushed, Flo, she hears this, she’s devastated all over again.”

  “I’ll do the talking with Mrs. Reilly.” Questioning the widow, a woman left alone with two small children, wasn’t Flo’s idea of fun, but the widow was family lead number one, her interrogation imperative.

  “Flo,” said Frank, “one more point. You really can’t see his off-hand in the first picture, Reilly’s hand on her thigh, it’s out of focus, but one thing is clear, he doesn’t have his wedding ring on. The ring was in his right-hand jacket pocket, in that little pocket inside the regular pocket, the extra one for tickets and loose change.”

  Flo nodded. “Playing hooky. Nothing about this or the widow is going to be easy. God’s honest truth, Frank, I dread it.”

  Other truths, the more permanent truths, were harder for Flo to pin down. The dead in the F train massacre photos gave off an aura of lost people, their tableau of terror a tale told in still undeciphered ideograms waiting for an interpreter with a key to unravel their stories like some ancient disaster, a Pompeii gassed and buried and now exposed.

  A widow’s tale to tell.

  8:30 A.M.

  In the lobby of the Sconzo Funeral Home, a navy-blue velvet board set behind glass listed three wakes and the chapel rooms assigned each of the deceased.

  John James Reilly’s coffin waited for his mourners in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.

  Frank Murphy held open the chapel’s heavy door and the three detectives stepped aside as two small children—a girl, a boy, ages about six and seven—left the chapel with an older man holding the children’s hands.

  For the first time in this case, Flo felt herself personally tipping into fear—not of the killer or killers, but of the immeasurable woe she now had to add to the widow’s burdens.

  The detectives entered the wake quietly, and with a long, soft sigh the door closed behind them. The Chapel of the Holy Spirit lay in semidarkness.

  Heads bowed, Frank and Marty, a pair of good Irish Catholics accustomed to wakes, walked directly up to the open coffin, where they knelt next to an elderly woman saying her Rosary.