Worst Case

I dropped a five into the offering box and lit candles. Kneeling down before their ruby glow, I closed my eyes and said prayers for the dead and most especially for their families. I knew all too well how completely devastating death could be in a tight-knit family. I could only guess at a parent’s depth of despair that the loss of an only child would bring.

As I was crossing myself, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Seamus.

“Good man. Just the lad I was looking for,” he whispered. “I need a volunteer. Will you do the first reading or bring up the gifts? Your choice.”

“Bring up the gifts,” I said.

“Actually, you’ll have to do both. I lied about that choice thing. Let’s get this show on the road.”

The mass seemed more solemn and sadder than usual. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the killer out of my thoughts even when Seamus whispered the High Latin phrase used on this solemn holy day.

“Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,” he said as he administered the ashes.

From dust we are born and to dust we shall return, I thought. It was the same thing written on the blackboard next to the first poor young man’s corpse.

Please, God, help me to stop the sick individual who is responsible for all this death, I prayed as I walked back to my pew with the cross on my forehead.

As I knelt down, I realized I was marked the same way the kids had been. My forehead seemed to burn. I could almost sense Jacob Du

Dear Lord, I prayed, I can’t let them down.

Chapter 67

FRANCIS X. MOONEY was passing the Flat Iron Building when he shook some Dexadrine tablets into his hand. As he made it across the street into Madison Square Park, he reconsidered, dropping them into a corner trash barrel. He didn’t need any speed today.

His blood felt like it was singing. In fact, everything that presented itself to his heightened senses seemed significant. The ornate architecture on the facades of the Beaux Arts buildings of lower Broadway, the scent of grease and sugar from the curbside doughnut carts, the filth-covered sidewalk beneath the soles of his shoes. None of it had ever been so vivid.

The case he carried was becoming heavier. He had to move it to his other hand every other block. Sweat from his exertion was actually making his shirt stick to his back. Still, no way would he call a taxi. His last walk, his last pilgrimage, had to be on foot.

He’d always loved the city. Walking its endlessly fascinating streets had been one of his life’s greatest and simplest pleasures. The French actually coined a word for urban strollers, flâneurs, people who derive pleasure from observing the urban scene completely objectively and aesthetically.

But that was the problem, he thought as he walked on. He had been objective for way too long.

At the corner of 25th and Fifth, he suddenly stopped. A woman was approaching the side alley of a run-down building, carrying a white garbage bag.

“Excuse me,” Francis called as he jogged over. “Miss! Miss! You there!”

She stopped.

“How dare you!” Francis said, pointing to a Diet Coke bottle clearly visible beneath the thin plastic garbage bag she was holding. “That’s recycling. You’re throwing out recycling!”

“What are you, the garbage police?” she said. She gave him the finger. “Get a life, you pathetic freak.”

Francis thought about shooting her. His Beretta, locked and loaded, waited at the top of the valise. Blow the smugness and the woman’s ugly face clean away, kick her into the stinking alley, where she belonged. Suddenly aware of the passing pedestrians, he got a grip instead. He wouldn’t let his emotions get the better of him. He had much bigger fish to fry.

But he just couldn’t help himself when he stopped for the second time, on 33rd, one block south of the Empire State Building. Putting down his case, he halted before the telephone company’s idling box truck on the corner.

“Excuse me!” he said to the oaf eating his breakfast behind the driver’s side window. He rapped sharply with his Columbia ring on the glass right beside the jerk’s face. “I said, excuse me!”

The phone guy threw open the door and leapt out onto the sidewalk. He had a shaved head and the shoulders of a defensive lineman.

“Fuck you knocking on my window for, dog?” he bellowed, spitting doughnut crumbs.

“Fuck you idling your truck for, dog?” Francis shot back. “You’re violating Section twenty-four-dash-one-sixty-three of the New York City Administrative Code: ‘No person shall cause or permit the engine of a motor vehicle, other than a legally authorized emergency motor vehicle, to idle for longer than three minutes while parking.’ You see that poison coming out of your tailpipe there? It includes chemicals like benzene, formaldehyde, and acetaldehyde, not to mention particulate matter that can lodge deep in your lungs. It kills people, heats up the environment, too. Now shut it-”

The gaping, wide-eyed phone company man let out a kind of snort as his huge hand suddenly reached out. He snatched Francis’s tie and swung him around in a full three-sixty before letting him go. Francis actually went off his feet as he slammed into a newspaper box on the corner. He ski

Turning, Francis got a good mouthful of particulate matter-laced exhaust as the fleeing phone truck left rubber. He coughed as he pulled himself back into a sitting position on the curb.

There were pebbles embedded in his bleeding palms, a streak of something black and wet across the forearm of his tailored suit jacket. He looked down at the torn knee of his Savile Row pants. For a moment, he was back in the schoolyard again, picked on and knocked down by assholes who were bigger and older. Like it did then, the misery of feeling powerless began to bubble up.

But then, the startled fury on the phone man’s face came back to him, and he was suddenly laughing. He had to stop this nonsense. He’d gotten off easy, Francis realized, considering how large the man was. He was lucky the guy hadn’t killed him.

Besides, he wasn’t powerless anymore, was he? he thought as he found his valise. He patted it lovingly before he lifted it and continued his pilgrimage north.

A snatch of grammar school Robert Frost came to him as he picked up his pace.

He recited to himself, But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Chapter 68

“DADDY, DO MY ashes look okay? I told Grandpa to do a good job,” my five-year-old, Chrissy, said as we sat by the window inside the crowded Starbucks at 93rd and Broadway.

We’d just dropped off her siblings at school after church. Chrissy, who was in kindergarten now, luckily didn’t have to go in until noon. In our big family, one-on-one time was an extremely rare commodity. Not even a nasty killing spree would make me miss our Wednesday-morning Starbucks date.

“I don’t know. Let me see,” I said, reaching across the table, holding her tiny chin in my hand as I peered at her. I couldn’t help but kiss her elflike nose. “They look great, Chrissy. Grandpa did fine. And they go really well with your hot chocolate mustache.”

As she went back to her drink, I looked at the long line by the pastry case. Waiting for their morning fix of Seattle ’s main export were na

I wondered with a cold chill if it was in the killer’s mind to shoot people who had ashes today. That he was going to do something was a given. Every indication was that today was the day. The only questions left were where and how.