The Steel Kiss

She thought now about how to narrow down an address in the relatively large neighborhood of Chelsea. She spun the detective’s computer around and typed real estate databases. No one with a first name Vernon owned property in Chelsea and those two people with that name on deed records were much older than the perp and both were married, a status that seemed extremely unlikely for this type of perp. So, if the kid was right about the name, their perp would be renting.

An idea occurred to her: She ran stats in Chelsea to see about recent crimes. Something interesting turned up. A homicide, just reported yesterday, on West 22nd Street. A man named Edwin Boyle, a printing company employee, had been killed and his body shoved into a storage cabinet in an abandoned warehouse. His wallet and cash were still in his possession. Only his phone was missing. The cause of death was “blunt force trauma.”

She called the Medical Examiner’s Office and got through right away. She identified herself.

“Hi, Detective,” said the woman technician. “What do you need to know?”

“That homicide, Boyle? Yesterday. Chelsea. You have anything more on the blunt force? Type of weapon?”

“Hold on. I’ll check. I didn’t do the PM.” A few moments later she came back on the line. “I have it here. Funny, it’s similar to another PM we handled not long ago. Something you don’t see very often.”

Sachs said, “Murder weapon was a ball-peen hammer?”

The tech barked a laugh. “Sherlock Holmes. How’d you know that?”

* * *

“Can’t tell, Detective. He’s got shutters on the bedroom window. Metal, have to be. Can’t read through them. K.”

Near an ESU van parked up the street from the target apartment, Amelia Sachs spoke into her stalk mouthpiece in reply: “Any light getting through?”

The S&S officer was on the roof opposite, his sophisticated equipment aimed at the second-floor, two-bedroom apartment on West 22nd Street. “Negative, Detective. No thermal readings but with the shutters he could have a card game going on there, everybody smoking cigars and I couldn’t tell you. K.”

“Roger.”

The unsub was no longer one. He was an Identified Subject.

Vernon Griffith, thirty-five, was a resident of New York. He’d owned a house on Long Island, which he’d inherited and recently sold. He’d been renting here in Chelsea for about a year. Some juvie offenses for schoolyard fights, but no rap sheet as an adult. And—curiously—no history of social activism, until he started using consumer products a few days ago to murder the good citizens of the city of New York as the People’s Guardian.

Edwin Boyle had been his neighbor until, for reasons yet unknown, Griffith had hammered him to death a few blocks away, in the same inelegant manner as he had Todd Williams.

“We’re locked down. The whole block.”

This from Bo Haumann, head of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit—the city’s SWAT team. The lean, grizzled man, with an etched face, and Sachs looked over a layout of the apartment building on his laptop. The schematic had come from the Department of Buildings and was old, about ten years, but New York City apartments rarely underwent major internal renovation. Landlords wouldn’t want to pay for that. Only with the gold mine of converting a building to co-ops or condominiums did the owners get out the checkbooks for structural improvement.

“Don’t have much choice.” Haumann said, meaning there was essentially only one strategy for entry to collar Griffith. There was a single entrance into the building from 22nd Street and one door in the back alley. Griffith’s apartment itself had one door, opening onto the living room. There were two bedrooms opposite the entry door and a small kitchen to the right.

Haumann called a half-dozen officers over. Like Sachs they were in tactical outfits—helmets, gloves, Kevlar vests.

Tapping the computer screen, he said, “Three friendlies in the back. Four-man entry through his front door.”

“I’m one of them,” Sachs said.

“Four-person entry through his front door,” Haumann corrected, to smiles. “One breacher, other three in serially. One right, one left, one center, covering.”

The weapons they’d be armed with were the same as the one that had been used to kill Osama bin Laden: H&K 416s. This model was the D14.5RS carbine, the numbers referring to the length, in inches, of the barrel.

They acknowledged the instructions blandly, as if their boss were giving them details of a new coffee break plan at the office. To them this was all in a day’s work. For Sachs, though, she was alive. Completely attuned to the moment. Good at crime scene work, yes—she enjoyed the mind game of tricking evidence to life. But there was nothing like a dynamic entry. It was a high unlike anything else she’d experienced.

“Let’s move,” she said.

Haumann nodded in confirmation, and the teams formed up.