Description
Where?”
“Still searching, Amelia,” Buddy Everett, the patrolman from the 84, told her. “Six teams. Exits’re all covered, us or private security. He’s got to be here somewhere.”
Wiping away the blood on her boot with a Starbucks napkin. Or trying to, futilely. Her jacket, in a trash bag she’d gotten from the coffee shop too, might not be irreparably ruined but she wasn’t inclined to wear a garment that had been saturated with blood. The young patrolman noted the stains on her hands, his eyes troubled. Didn’t say anything. Cops are, of course, human too. Immunity comes eventually but later to some than others, and Buddy Everett was young still.
Through red-framed glasses, he looked at the open access panel. “And he . . . ?”
“He didn’t make it.”
A nod. Eyes now on the floor, Sachs’s bloody boot prints leading away from the escalator.
“No idea which direction he went?” he asked.
“None.” She sighed. Only a few minutes had elapsed between the time that Unsub 40 might have seen her and fled, and the deployment of the backup officers. But that seemed to be enough to turn him invisible. “All right. I’ll be searching with you.”
“They’ll need help in the basement. It’s a warren down there.”
“Sure. But get bodies canvassing in the street too. If he saw me he had a window to get the hell out of Dodge ASAP.”
“Sure, Amelia.”
The youthful officer with the glasses the shade of cooling blood nodded and headed off.
“Detective?” A man’s voice from behind her.
She turned to a compact Latino of about fifty, in a striped navy-blue suit and yellow shirt. His tie was spotless white. Don’t see that combo often.
She nodded.
“Captain Madino.”
She shook his hand. He was surveying her with dark eyes, lids low. Seductive but not sexual; captivating in the way powerful men—some women too—were.
Madino would be from the 84th Precinct and would have nothing to do with the Unsub 40 case, which was on the Major Cases roster. He was here because of the accident, though the police would probably step out pretty soon, unless there was a finding that there had been criminal negligence in the maintenance of the escalator, which rarely happened. But it still would be Madino’s boys and girls who ran the scene.
“What happened?” he asked her.
“Fire department could tell you better than I could. I was moving on a homicide suspect. All I know is the escalator malfunctioned somehow and a male, middle-aged, fell into the gears. I got to him, tried to stop the bleeding but there wasn’t much to do. He hung in there for a while. But ended up DCDS.”
Deceased, confirmed dead at scene.
“Emergency switch?”
“Somebody hit it but that only shuts the stairs off, not the main motor. The gears keep going. Got him around the groin and belly.”
“Man.” The captain’s lips tightened. He stepped forward to look down into the pit. Madino gave no reaction. He gripped his white tie to make sure it didn’t swing forward and get soiled on the railing. Blood had made its way up there too. Unemotional, he turned back to Sachs. “You were down there?”
“I was.”
“Must have been tough.”
She decided that her initial impression of him was wrong. The sympathy in his eyes seemed genuine.
“Tell me about the weapons discharge.”
“The motor,” Sachs explained. “There was no cutoff switch that I could find. No wires to cut. I couldn’t leave him to find it or climb to the top to tell somebody to kill the juice; I was putting pressure on the wounds. So I parked a round in the coil of the motor itself. Stopped it from cutting him in half. But he was pretty much gone by then. Lost eighty percent of his blood, the EMT said.”
Madino was nodding. “That was a good try, Detective.”
“Didn’t work.”
“Not much else you could do.” He looked back to the open access panel. “We’ll have to convene a Shooting Team but, on this scenario, it’ll be a formality. Nothing to worry about.”
“Appreciate that, Captain.”
Despite what one sees on screens large and small, a police officer’s firing a weapon is a rare and consequential occurrence. A gun can be discharged only in the event the officer believes his or her life or that of a bystander is endangered or when an armed felon flees. And force can be used only to kill, not wound. A Glock may not be used like a wrench to shut off renegade machinery (or to open doors—tactical officers use special shotguns to take out hinges, not doorknobs or locks).
In the event of a shooting by a cop, on or off duty, a supervisor from the precinct where it happened comes to the scene to secure and inspect the officer’s weapon. He then convenes the Patrol Borough Shooting Team—which has to be run by a captain. Since there was no death or injury resulting from the shot, Sachs didn’t need to submit to an Intoxilizer test or go on administrative leave for the mandatory three days. And, in the absence of malfeasance, she wasn’t required to surrender her weapon. Just offer it to the supervisor to inspect and note the serial number.
She did this now: deftly dropped the magazine and ejected the chambered round, then collected it from the floor. She offered the weapon to him. He wrote down the serial. Handed the pistol back.
She added, “I’ll do the Firearms Discharge/Assault Report.”
“No hurry, Detective. It takes a while to convene the board, and it looks like you’ve got some other tasks on your plate.” Madino was looking down into the pit once more. “God bless you, Detective. Not a lot of people would’ve gone down there.”
Sachs rechambered the ejected round. Officers from the 84 had cordoned off both of these escalators, so she turned and hurried toward the elevators on her way to the basement, where she’d help search for Unsub 40. But she paused when Buddy Everett approached.
“He’s gone, Amelia. Out of the building.” His dark-red frames both enhanced and jarred.
“How?”
“Loading dock.”
“We had people there, I thought. Rent-a-cops if not ours.”
“He called, the unsub, he shouted from around the corner near the dock, said the perp was in a storage area. Bring their cuffs, Mace or whatever. You know rentals? They love a chance to play real cop. Everybody went running to the storeroom. He strolled right out. Video shows him—new jacket, dark sport coat, fedora—climbing down the dock ladder and running through the truck parking zone.”
“Going where?”
“Narrow-focus camera. No idea.”
She shrugged. “Subways? Buses?”
“Nothing on CCTV. Probably walked or took a cab.”
To one of the eighty-five million places he might go.
“Dark jacket, you said? Sport coat?”
“We canvassed the shops. But nobody saw anybody with his build buy anything. Don’t have his face.”
“Think we can get prints from the ladder? At the dock?”
“Oh, the vid shows he put gloves on before he climbed down.”
Smart. This boy is smart.
“One thing. He was carrying his cup and what seemed like some food wrappers. We looked but he didn’t drop ’em that we could find.”
Starbucks maybe. “I’ll get an ECT on it.”
“Hey, how’d it go with Captain White Tie? Oh, did I say that?”
She smiled. “If you said it I didn’t hear it.”
“He’s already planning how to redecorate his office in the governor’s mansion.”
Explained the posh outfit. Brass with aspirations. Good to have on your side.
God bless you . . .
“Fine. Looks like he’s backing me up on the weapons issue.”
“He’s a decent guy. Just promise you’ll vote for him.”
“Keep up the canvass,” Sachs told him.
“Will do.”
Sachs was approached by an inspector with the fire department and gave a statement on the escalator accident. Twenty minutes later the Evidence Collection Team assigned to the Unsub 40 case arrived from the NYPD’s massive Crime Scene complex in Queens. She greeted them, two thirty-ish African American techs, man and woman, she worked with from time to time. They wheeled heavy suitcases toward the escalator.
“Uh-uh,” Sachs told them. “That was an accident. The Department of Investigations’ll be coordinating that with the Eight-Four. I need you to walk the grid at Starbucks.”
“What happened there?” the woman officer asked, looking over the coffee shop.
“A serious crime,” her partner offered. “Price of a frappuccino.”
“Our unsub sat down for a late lunch. Some table in the back, you’ll have to ask where. Tall, thin. Green checkered jacket and Atlanta baseball cap. But there won’t be much. He took his cup and wrappers with him.”
“Hate it when they don’t leave their DNA lying around.”
“True, that.”
Sachs said, “But I think he ditched the litter somewhere close.”
“You have any idea where?” the woman asked.
Looking over the staff in Starbucks, Sachs had, in fact, had an inspiration. “Maybe. But it’s not in the mall. I’ll check that out myself. You handle Starbucks.”
“Always loved you, Amelia. You give us the nice and fuzzy and you take the dark ’n’ cold.”
She crouched and pulled a blue Tyvek jumpsuit out of the case one of the ECTs had just opened.
“Standard operating procedure, right, Amelia? Bundle up everything and get it to Lincoln’s town house?”
Sachs’s face was stony as she said, “No, ship everything back to Queens. I’m running the case from downtown.”
The two ECTs regarded each other briefly and then looked back to Sachs. The woman asked, “He’s okay? Rhyme?”
“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Sachs said tersely. “Lincoln’s not working for the NYPD anymore.”