Webb’s phone buzzed. He held up a hand for the other two to be quiet. “Webb here. Yeah? You sure? Okay, thanks.”
He hung up and looked at them. “That was the search-and-rescue boys. They think they’ve got all the bodies out of the restaurant. They won’t be able to ID them for a while, of course.”
“What’s the damage?” Vic asked.
“In addition to the three out back, we got seven more from inside.”
Vic whistled softly. “Seven?”
“Some of them are going to be civilians,” Erin said.
“I know.” Webb didn’t look happy. “That’s ten fatalities. Ten. That’s a damn massacre.”
After talking with Logan, there wasn’t much left for Erin to do. Detectives spent a depressing amount of time waiting for people to get back to them. Vic went out to Little Italy to pound pavement and ask around, in the hopes that someone might have seen something. Levine was in the morgue, working her way through the ugly task of identifying seven badly burned corpses. Erin wandered down to see how the medical examination was getting on, telling Rolf to stay by her desk. The Shepherd obediently settled on his makeshift bed for a nap.
The smell stopped her in the morgue’s doorway. The room usually smelled of disinfectant and formaldehyde, with underlying decay. Erin wasn’t accustomed to the scent of an overcooked barbecue. There was actually smoke in the air, and knowing it was particles of the victims themselves didn’t make her feel any better. She knew that smell was going to linger in her hair for days. She was glad she’d left Rolf upstairs. She hadn’t forgotten about the bath he still needed.
“Hey, Doc,” she called.
“What?” Levine was bent over one of the victims, taking a picture of the body’s face. She didn’t look up.
“How’re you coming on the IDs?” Erin took a cautious step into the room, one hand clamped protectively over her nose and mouth.
“We’ll need to use dental records,” Levine said. “Fingerprints are unusable, due to the incineration of soft tissue.”
“Did they have wallets, anything in their pockets?”
“Some of them,” Levine said. “But the heat was sufficient to melt plastic, so driver’s licenses and credit cards didn’t survive. I’m sending dental X-rays to dentists in the greater New York area for potential matches.”
Erin sighed. “We think some of these guys might be internationals.”
“I may be able to ascertain that from dental evidence,” Levine said.
“Yeah, I remember you did that with that Russian girl last year,” Erin said. “Could you tell if dental work got done in, say, Colombia?”
“Colombia is known for dental tourism,” Levine said.
“That’s not what I do on vacation,” Erin said.
“It’s much cheaper abroad,” Levine explained. “Especially without insurance. Unfortunately, the procedures themselves are very similar to those done in the United States. I doubt that will be helpful for establishing country of origin.”
“If we get a miss on the dental records, what will you do?” Erin asked with a sinking feeling.
“DNA,” Levine said, confirming Erin’s fears.
“What’s the current backlog?”
“Four months.”
“We don’t have four months. We have to know who these people are now.”
Levine shrugged. “I can’t rush the process. Maybe your commander can get it moved forward in line, but it’ll still be a month or two. What do you know about them?”
“Some of them probably worked at the restaurant. We’ll have locations where the bodies were found. Can you at least tell me whether they’re male or female?”
“Certainly. Six men, one woman.”
“Okay, that’s a start. Find out everything you can about these people, and keep us posted.”
“I can get you blood types within twenty-four hours, and tissue samples now. If you can get me other samples for comparison, I can do a DNA match between them in seventy-two hours.”
“Levine, if we had samples, we’d already know who they were.”
Levine shrugged again. “I can’t change the science.”
Erin went back upstairs, glad to get out of the smoky room. But the smell clung to her and followed her up the elevator.
Erin thought about what Levine had said. Maybe they could get something from the crime scene. She called up the New York Department of Transportation and, after the requisite automated menu and wait on hold, ended up talking to one of the traffic camera supervisors.
“Yeah, Detective, we’re workin’ that thing your people sent us,” he said. “We got a car for your gunmen. It’s a Dodge Caravan, black. No positive IDs on the guys. Looks like they tinted the windows past the legal limit. We sent the plates over a few minutes ago.”
“Good, thanks,” Erin said. “But I’m actually calling about something else. Can you send the traffic cam footage from before the incident? Say, everything from the preceding half hour, the cameras on both sides of the restaurant?”
“Sure, no problem. You know what vehicle you’re trying to ID?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ll get you the footage. Give me ten or fifteen minutes, I’ll send it.”
Erin hung up and walked over to Webb’s desk. “You got the plates on the getaway car?” she asked.
He nodded but didn’t seem excited. “Yeah. They’re registered to a Subaru Outback belonging to a Daisy Langley. She lives in Brooklyn. I just called her, and it turns out she’s out of the country, building houses for Habitat for Humanity in Haiti.”
“Stolen plates?” Erin asked.
“Stolen plates,” he agreed. “Her car’s parked at JFK, according to her husband. Without its plates, I expect.”
“So, that’s a dead end,” she said.
Webb nodded again. “Worth a try. It just confirms this was a professional hit.”
Once she had the traffic video files on her computer, Erin settled down for some boring movie-watching. She wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking for, but trusted her Patrol instincts to nudge her if anything was out of place.
Sure enough, a few minutes before the shooting started, a black SUV drove through the intersection south of the crime scene. The driver and passenger both had black, slicked-back hair and sunglasses. That wasn’t strange. What was strange was
