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There was still a lot of investigating left to do. We knew the makes of the guns left behind by the kidnappers, and maybe that would turn into something. We’d found shells and spent cartridges. And half a dozen guns that shot rubber bullets. That was an interesting twist for me. They’d thought to bring crowd-control weapons. We still needed to figure out exactly how they had stored oxygen tanks in the river. Not that it really mattered.
I was hip-deep in hostage interview reports when the phone on my desk rang two hours later.
“Sorry, Mike,” Lo
As I laid the phone back into its cradle, looking at the tiny black holes in the earpiece, I thought I caught Jack’s cocky laugh.
Chapter 107
THE PHONE WAS RINGING on my desk when I came in the next morning.
I heard a familiar voice when I picked up, and certainly not one I was expecting.
“This is Cathy Calvin from the Times. May I speak to Detective Be
I debated between telling the hatchet-wielding scribe, No hablo inglés, or just hanging up.
“It concerns the hijacking,” she said.
“This is Be
“Mike,” the reporter said brightly. “Please let me apologize for that piece I did. You know how crazy it was. My editor was breathing fire down my neck and… What am I saying? No excuses. I screwed up, and I’m sorry, and I owe you one. I do. Make that ten, okay? I heard about the loss of your wife. My sincerest condolences to you and your children.”
I paused, wondering if the Times reporter was just playing up to me. She certainly sounded sincere, but I was wary, and I ought to be. She’d made me and the department look like fools. But then again, having a Times reporter owe me a favor could certainly come in handy.
“Accept my apology, Mike,” Calvin tried again. “I feel like a jerk.”
“Well, at least you’re self-aware,” I said.
“I knew we were going to be friends eventually,” Calvin said quickly. “The reason I called was I’m doing interviews with the celebrity victims. Well, I should say, failing miserably because I can’t get past most of their lawyers and agents. But I did speak to the civil rights activist, Reverend Solstice, and do you know what he told me?”
The race-baiting quasipolitician Solstice was famous for basically one thing, I knew. Hating cops.
“I’m holding my breath,” I said.
“He said he thinks the hijackers were cops,” Calvin went on. “I just wanted to call and let you hear. Also to tell you that I refuse to print such bullshit. Okay? See, I’m not all bad.”
“Okay,” I said. “I appreciate the call.”
After I hung up, I leaned back in my chair, thinking about Solstice’s accusations. Though he was known to court controversy, the man was savvy enough to realize he needed something-however outrageous-to back it up and get some attention. So what did Solstice know? Was it anything important? Was he involved somehow?
I called back Calvin and got the reverend’s number.
Solstice answered on the first ring.
“Hello, Reverend. This is Detective Michael Be
“Ha!” Solstice said forcefully. “Insight my butt. I know what you’re doing. What you’re trying to pull. It’s starting already.”
“What is it you think I’m starting exactly, Reverend?”
“What you punks are best at. The coverup. Sweeping the truth under the rug. Listen, man, I know. I been inside. I know cops. Only pros like you could handle us the way you did. Oh, yeah, and then everybody just conveniently gets away. Just missed ’em, I bet. You cops pulled this off, and now you’re covering it up. Same as it’s always been.”
Could that be true? I sure doubted it.
But Solstice had raised two serious questions: How did the hijackers know so much about siege tactics? And how did they always seem to know what we were going to try next?
Chapter 108
THERE ARE ACTUALLY ten prisons on Rikers Island in the Bronx, housing as many as seventeen thousand inmates. Rikers is almost a small town, with its schools, clinics, athletic fields, chapels and mosques, grocers, barbershops, a bus depot, even a car wash.
As I arrived there early the next morning, I was hopeful again. I’d had an idea during the night, and now I had the opportunity to execute it.
At a little past eight, I walked by the Amnesty Box, where prison visitors are allowed to deposit drugs or weapons without fear. I had neither, so I proceeded inside and was escorted to a small meeting room inside Rikers’ Central Punitive Segregation Unit, also known as “the Bing.”
About a quarter of the inmates at Rikers are poor people who can’t afford to post bails of five hundred dollars or less, but I was more interested in the hard cases. For the next four hours, I sat in the room and met dozens of inmates.
I played them a tape of excerpts with Jack’s voice from the negotiations. Maybe somebody would recognize “Jack” from a previous stay at Rikers or one of the other prison facilities around New York.
But not Angelo, a burglar with an exaggerated shoulder curl, like a boxer always ready to fight.
Not Hector, a gang player with two tear tattoos at the corner of his right eye, signifying he’d killed two people so far in his twenty-one years.
Not J.T. either-a white thug from Westchester with a serious drug habit who was a walking Merck Manual on pills and meds.
Or Jesse from 131st Street in Harlem, placid face with one lazy eye, soul patch under his lip, inside Rikers for alleged felonious assault.
In fact, not any of the seventy-nine inmates who came to see me in the cramped meeting room space had anything for me. How depressing was that?
Until my eightieth visitor, Tremaine, a ski
On the way back from Rikers, I called One Police Plaza and told Lo
It was an hour later when the fax rang back at my office. The cover sheet told me it was Lo
It seemed like a month before the second sheet hummed out of the machine.
I lifted it up slowly, careful not to smudge the ink.
It wasn’t the smiling ID picture of the dead hijacker that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from so much as the captioned information underneath it.
Surprise mixed with a sick, guilty feeling that washed through my stomach like battery acid.
Unbelievable, I thought.
I took out my cell and speed-dialed Commander Will Matthews’s office. “This is Be