Next to this chart was juxtaposed “Wolf’s Seven Ways,” the simpler list made previously by Vinnie. Simon had scrawled, “7 Ways in 7 Days?” sideways across the new chart.
But Cody was frowning. Something was wrong with this picture, and at first he couldn’t put his finger on it. Hamilton was a perfectionist, and Cody’s instinct told him he wasn’t through with him yet.?
Wolfsheim came in from the morgue, grabbed the cup of coffee DeMarco handed him, then sat down to quietly contemplate the charts and the list, mentally checking off the orchestrated murders one by one.
Then he frowned too. “You’d think someone might have considered checking this list with the coroner on call,” he gruffly remarked.
Cody suddenly recognized what was wrong. Simon listed “suffocation” and “drowning.” But, Wolfie pointed out, they were one and the same “way,” known generically as “asphyxiation.” And Hamilton was playing word games with “Number Six” back in the cave, something about a “backup.”
Wolfsheim took another sip of coffee, then reached into his grip and held it up: “the Murder Book,” as he called it, the dog-eared and ragged handbook used by every coroner worth his salt. He lost no time beginning his lecture.
The missing “seventh way” was one that all the pathology books, including this one, argued over. It was generally called “catastrophic” or “mass disaster”-an event involving multiple victims whose wounds were so massive and varied that it was difficult to separate them; an event like an airplane or train crash, or an explosion, in which death occurred by fire, blunt trauma, and/or piercing from flying debris.
The category had been overlooked by Vinnie and Simon because TAZ normally focused on singular acts of violence, not on disastrous events of that scale.
Cody flashed to the doorman’s gesture as Hamilton exited his co-op building last night at 11:45.
He exchanged glances with Wolfsheim. Then he thought of something else. “Where was I last night?” Cody asked.
“You were out dancing, Captain,” Vinnie answered immediately, keeping a straight face.
Cody rummaged through his wallet, and pulled out Patricia Roberts’ business card and handed it to Vinnie. “Find out where this woman is right now.”
Only a few minutes passed before Vinnie returned from his desk to report that Roberts hadn’t shown up for work at her P.R. firm yesterday morning. Her employees said it wasn’t “like her” not to even let them know she wasn’t coming in. They’d been unable to reach her by phone all day.?
Calling in advance to warn the Seventh Precinct, within minutes TAZ had descended in full force on Hamilton’s E. 59 ^ th Street residence. The Precinct had already staked out the perimeter; it was, fortunately, headquartered on the very next block. This time Cody saw the yellow ribbons with approval, and was also pleased to see that the Special Demolition Unit had just arrived on the scene, its Mark V, an 800-pound robot the size of a riding lawn mower, being rolled down its ramp from the armored truck.
“Who’s in the apartment?” Cody asked the Precinct officer in charge.
“We don’t know,” the officer replied. “When we picked up the clicking sound from the hall, we waited for you as you requested.”
“Yeah,” Cody said. “That was a trick question.”
The officer stared at him without comment.
Another officer escorted the super to Cody, and Cody reassured the nervous Russian that they needed his immediate action and cooperation. “This is an emergency. You have three minutes to get all the residents out of the building and onto the street.”
The man’s shocked look quickly gave way to the New York sangfroid and suspicion. “What is-“
“You’ll need to open up the penthouse for us,” Cody interrupted.
“Do you have a warrant?” the super ventured.
“No, but we do have a battering ram,” Cody said. “Your choice.”
“Just had to ask,” the super shrugged. “Give me a minute to find a key.”
“We don’t have a minute to spare,” Cody retorted.
As the man walked away, the Transit Bureau K-9 detail showed up with a sniffer.
Seeing the jet black German shepherd straining at his leash, Cody had to look away.
“His name is Nero,” the K-9 officer said.
Vinnie took out Patricia’s card, and handed it to the officer.
“Here, boy,” the dog officer said, offering the business card to the eager canine’s nose. “Here’s your target.”?
A heartbeat after the elevator doors opened, Nero barked twice.
“That was fast,” Cody said.
“It’s not that,” the officer said. “That double-bark means explosives.”
The building’s alarm siren sounded, squawking the warning to residents to evacuate. There were no other doors on the penthouse floor. Cody could only hope the co-op owners weren’t so jaded by false alarms after 9/11 that they would ignore the alarm.
Nero, unfazed by the raucous squawking, led them directly to the front door of the penthouse, passing by the janitorial closet and the service entrance without a glance.
He pawed at the front door, and growled, looking at the five men escorting him as if to say, “Your move! My work here is done.”
Cody called for the Mark V to be sent up. Then he signaled for the K-9 officer to take Nero and the super to safety, took the pass key and moved his hand toward the double lock.
“Aren’t you going to wait?” Bergman said, eyeing the door warily.
Cody shook his head. “It won’t be the door,” he said. “These two were exhibitionists. That’s one thing I understand about them. They’d want us to see the stage they’ve set first.”
All the lights in the luxury penthouse were on. But the two detectives could discern at a glance that the main room was empty of anything unusual. The ticking sound emanated from the door to the right of the large room.
“You do the honors,” Cody said, gesturing for Bergman to record their entrance as he himself had done Saturday morning at La Venezia.
Bergman nodded, and took out the digital recorder while Cody moved to the picture window and glanced down at the street where he could see the residents filing out beneath the canopy in various states of disarray. He signaled to Bergman to get started.
“It’s Thursday, November 1 ^ st,” he began, “and we’ve entered the penthouse of the late Ward Hamilton…”?
They found Patricia in the barber’s chair, nude, bound, and gagged with a lacy brassiere. Her eyes shouted her relief as she saw the detectives, without a thought for her nakedness. Cody removed his windbreaker and positioned it across the woman’s body as he squatted to examine the device beneath the chair.
“We’ll get you out of here in a sec,” he said to the grateful publicist, whose chest was still heaving with fear.
The bomb squad officer gestured for Cody to step back, but not before the Captain could see the device’s timer counting down from 00:03:00. The demolitions guy saw it too. “We don’t have time to fuck around here,” he said.
Cody was busy freeing Patricia legs.
The bomb-exploding robot rolled through the door.
Its keeper, an East Indian officer in full Hazmat gear whose badge read Krishna Daipur, read the situation at a glance and opened his olive-green notebook. “Disarm or contain?”
“Contain! No time to disarm!”
“Very well, sir,” the Officer Daipur said. “But there can be no certainty of successful containment…”
“Just do what you have to do,” Bergman ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Daipur said, dropping his helmet mask into place.
Once Cody untied the bra from her mouth, Patricia Robert, the only survivor of the diabolical Ward Hamilton and Victoria Mansfield, would not stop screaming.
“Get her out of here,” Cody told Bergman. “Now!”
Bergman already had the terrified woman by the arm and was rushing her to the door.
