Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“Great job, Brooklyn,” I said.

“One more thing, Mike, that just came up. May or may not be related,” she said. “Two young men were just found shot dead at a construction site on Roosevelt Island. I called the desk sergeant at the public safety department on the island, and he told me they don’t have ID on them, but the general description seems about the same as these two guys on the video. You want me to head out there or stay here coordinating?”

A lead was a lead, I knew from experience. Even if the suspects were no longer in a position to talk to us, they could still provide us with valuable information.

“No, you stay there,” I said. “I’ll grab Agent Parker and check it out.”

Twenty-six minutes after I hung up the phone, I sat in my unmarked on Seventh Avenue and 50th Street, staring at the garish neon lights as they geysered and flashed silently on the beautiful people-filled billboards above the worn and empty concrete canyons of Times Square.

As the song says, New York City never sleeps, but between 4:15 and 4:30 a.m., it sometimes takes a quick catnap. Even so, it was weird seeing Times Square devoid of people. Not to mention quite off-putting under the horrible circumstances.

I saw that Emily’s hair was still wet from her shower when she finally appeared at a run from her glass-fronted hotel. I smiled to myself as she pulled the car door open. The sight of her was anything but lonely.

“Let me bring you up to speed on some economic forensics I did on the mayor’s shooter, Alex Mirzoyan,” Emily said, thumbing her smartphone as we headed east for Roosevelt Island.

“First, the good news. That robotic gun-aiming device used in the mayor’s assassination is highly specialized, and we were able to track down the manufacturer. The company is giving us some pushback after we asked for their customer list, but we have the US attorney drawing up a warrant, and I think we’ll be making progress there.”

“What about the ownership of the apartment the shooter was in?” I said.

Emily scrolled through screens on her phone.

“No dice there, unfortunately. Apparently, the owner is a Columbia University international law professor who’s in Brussels for a semester’s sabbatical. It doesn’t seem like he’s involved. He rented it out anonymously for a thousand dollars a week through one of those Internet house-swapping services to a fake e-mail address that Mirzoyan must have set up called woopwoop-two-two-six at AOL dot com.”

“Well, it eliminates me as a suspect, at least,” I said, shaking my head. “My fake e-mail address is woopwoop-two-two-six at Yahoo dot com.”

“Very funny,” Emily said, tapping her smartphone screen again. “But what’s more promising is some weird stuff we found with Mirzoyan’s finances. Last week he opened a PayPal account that had three thousand dollars wired into it, which he immediately withdrew from a bank in South Miami.”

I glanced over at her.

“Expense money?” I said. “So he could come up to New York?”

“Could be. Like we’re doing with the rifle company, we’re in the process of having the attorney’s office try to persuade PayPal to tell us who the mysterious someone who wired the money is.”

We were in Queens twenty minutes later. I got turned around after I got off the first exit of the Midtown Tunnel and wandered around the industrial maze of Long Island City for a bit.

“How are we lost, Mike?” said Emily, yawning. “I thought you were Mr. Native New Yorker.”

“I am, Emily, but this isn’t New York, it’s Queens,” I said, making a U-turn. “I mean, we just passed Forty-First Avenue and Twenty-First Street — or was it Twenty-First Avenue and Forty-First Street? Cops from other boroughs usually have to leave a trail of doughnut crumbs behind them in order to find their way back out.”

“What is this crazy place, Mike? Roosevelt Island, I mean,” Emily said as we rolled south under several varieties of train and car underpasses and finally swung onto the small, two-lane Roosevelt Island Bridge.

“Oh, just another one of the bizarre real estate situations you find in this crazy city,” I said. “I think it used to be the site of a mental asylum in the early 1900s, and then they put up some kind of rent-subsidized housing complex. I guess its claim to fame is that it has its very own ski chalet — like cable car you can take to get into Manhattan.”

“A Euro ski tram in New York City?” said Emily, her midwestern face scrunching. “Is it a heavily Swiss immigrant neighborhood or something?”

“Like I said, this is Queens, Emily.” I nodded out at the water. “What happens in Queens stays in Queens.”

The crime scene was at the base of the 59th Street Bridge, toward the south end of the small, narrow island.

I could see that the contingent of cops already waiting for us was definitely much larger than what you’d see at a regular homicide scene. In addition to at least four blue-and-whites from the island’s public safety people, there was a wagon circle of various unmarked detective cars, FDNY ambulances, the medical examiner’s mobile command center, and even an NYPD Emergency Services Unit truck.

Walking through the flashing blue and red lights toward the tape, I spotted Lieutenant Bryce Miller standing with his ESU intelligence commando cowboys. Even before the crack of dawn, the tall and polished pretty boy, looking like a soap opera actor, was in his power suit, ready for his close-up.

“Hey, Bennett. Glad you could make it,” Bryce said sarcastically as we went past him.

He must be a pretty good intel guy after all, I thought, nodding at him. It seemed that he, too, had heard the rumors about my upcoming demise as case lead.

I was coming around the back of the buslike medical examiner’s mobile command center when I saw the ME himself, Tom Durham, helping one of his assistants slide the first of the two stretchers with the already body-bagged suspects on them up a ramp to the vehicle’s back door.

“Hold it there, Tom,” I said to the NBA-tall medical examiner, whom I’d worked with a few times about a decade earlier, when I was in Homicide.

“Mike Bennett,” Durham said, peeling off his rubber glove to shake my hand over the corpse. “Well, well, out of the mists of time. You’ve put on weight.”

“Ah, c’mon, Tom,” I said. “You know how these blue and red lights always put on ten pounds. This is my partner, Emily. Any chance you find any ID on these two?”

“Nope. Not a thing. We already printed them, too, for that guy in the suit over there. No help there, either, apparently.”

“You mind if we take a quick peek at them?” I said.

“Nope,” Tom said, grabbing the body-bag zipper. “And neither will they, I imagine.”

I placed the video still of the darker kid next to the kid on the gurney. The kid’s head was grotesquely deformed from several gunshot wounds, but I thought the picture looked like him.

“What do you think?” I said to Emily.

“I think it’s him,” she said.

Tom looked over her shoulder.

“Me, too,” the ME said with a nod.

We quickly ID’d the other suspect as the second guy who dropped off the EMP device. We needed names, though. Somehow. There was no way I was going to allow this to be yet another dead end.

I thanked Tom, but instead of heading back to the car, I pocketed my phone and walked with Emily away from the police lights to the rocky edge of the island’s dark shore.

“Wait a second,” I said after a minute of looking out over the water. “Look.”

Across the quick current of choppy water, not too far away at the Manhattan base of the bridge, were the lights of our crisis post for the Yorkville disaster.