Michael Ledwidge - Alert

As it turned out, two of the exit routes — the ones to the west and to the north — actually had surveillance cameras pointed at the street. The camera aimed at the western route was highly visible on the corner. The camera to the north was much less visible, so that’s where Robertson had concentrated his search.

The last pickup on the box had been at 5:00 p.m., so Robertson had recorded the plate of every car that had stopped at the intersection since then. More than two hundred plates. From the DMV database, he got a list of names, then cross-referenced them with everything we had on all three outstanding cases, every lead and tip. Finally, at six fifteen this morning, something popped. A name.

A Russian name.

Dmitri Yevdokimov was a Russian immigrant with no priors. His name had been on the list of the more than nine hundred anonymous tips that had come in after the publication of the subway bomber stills.

The anonymous caller had said that Yevdokimov resembled the younger of the two subway bombers from the paper and that he was a chess genius with such a negative, unpleasant, antisocial personality that the Russian-accented caller said he “wouldn’t put it past the bastard to blow up the city.”

The note on the follow-up report by the FBI agent who’d worked the lead stated that Yevdokimov had been interviewed and had provided a solid alibi for the morning of the subway bombing.

But now that his car had been found a block from the drop site, it was time for a follow-up interview, I thought as I ate a light on Bailey Avenue and roared east.

Arturo and Robertson were already on scene with an ESU breach team at Yevdokimov’s last known address, in the East Bronx. The entire block and most of the neighborhood were slowly and meticulously being surrounded by half the department. Since the bloody fiasco in Queens, we were expecting the unexpected, and no one was taking any chances.

I’d gotten as far as East Tremont Avenue when my cell rang with Arturo’s number.

“What?!” I yelled.

“We bagged him, Mike! We were just setting up when a car turned the corner, and Doyle verified the plates. We swooped in as he was getting out of his car. Not a shot fired. ESU has him on the ground, and Mike, listen. There was another guy with him. It could be Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We may have just ended this!”

“Great job, Arturo. I hope you’re right. I’m about five minutes out. Where are you taking him? The Four-Five?”

“Yep. The Four-Five. We’ll meet you there,” said Arturo.

Could it be that we actually caught this guy? I wondered as I tossed my phone into the passenger seat. I screeched around a double-parked fish truck and turned on the jets, the siren screaming.

“Let it be. Let it be. This must be the answer. Let it be,” I sang hopefully as I pinned it up East Tremont.

The forty-fifth Precinct station house, near City Island, was on Barkley and Revere Avenues. I parked and flew up the stairs to the DT department on two and found Arturo and Robertson outside the detective CO’s crowded office. I happily greeted them as well as Brooklyn and Doyle, who were just inside with an ESU sergeant and the precinct captain.

“It looks like them, Mike,” was the first thing out of Arturo’s mouth. “No facial hair, but they look like the suspects from the subway bombing.”

“Anything on the other guy yet?” I said. “Tell me there’s a Facebook selfie of him holding a bunch of plastic explosives.”

“His name is Anatoly Gavrilov,” said Brooklyn. “Like Dmitri, he’s claiming he doesn’t know what the hell is going on — that they’re just cousins who work together as computer programmers and were coming back from a night on the town. They claim they’ve worked for plenty of Wall Street firms, which, from our preliminary look into it, might actually be true. Odd, though, since I wouldn’t exactly peg these two on first glance as Goldman Sachs consultants.”

“You had to see the guy’s house, Mike,” said Arturo. “Hoarders, except organized. Stacks upon stacks of labeled plastic containers of comic books, chess magazines, newspapers — mostly Daily News dating back to the fifties.”

“Exactly,” said Doyle. “Real strange shit.”

I remembered what Kaczynski had said about the bomber being a hoarder. And that he might play chess. Had we actually caught these guys?

I looked at the two men on the interview-room monitor on the lieutenant’s desk. The resemblance was there. They easily could have shaved their goatees because of the manhunt.

“It’s them. Has to be, right?” said Arturo.

“Nothing has to be, Lopez,” I said. “But so far, not bad.”

I spoke to Yevdokimov first.

“What the fuck is this? Russia?” were the first words out of the Russian’s mouth as I opened the door.

He was not a handsome man, but his casual clothes were expensive — a fastidious sandwashed silk T-shirt; tailored jeans.

“Why’d you do it?” I said.

“Blow up the subway?” he said, staring at me with bulging eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. I was bored. No, wait. I thought I’d start the Fourth of July off early this year, that’s it. Plus of course my mother didn’t really love me.”

His chair creaked as he attempted to shift his weight with his hands cuffed behind him.

“How many times do I have to say it?!” he cried as he began rocking back and forth. “It wasn’t me. I have a lot of enemies, okay? That happens when you’re a genius. Most people are stupid, and when they come into contact with a towering intellect, they become fearful and jealous. I was at work when that bomb went off. I have twenty witnesses who will testify to it.”

“Where were you last night around six fifteen?”

He stared at me as he rocked.

“I was at Orchard Beach in the Bronx. I walk my dog there. Why?”

“Bullshit. You were at the corner of Thirty-First and Dyer Avenue in Manhattan, Dmitri. Your genius must be slipping a bit, because you didn’t think about that second camera on the corner past the box.”

He laughed as he rocked, shaking his head.

“The box? What box? The jack-in-the-box? You’re unbelievably wrong,” he said as he started squeaking around again in his cheap hard plastic chair like the world’s largest hyperactive four-year-old.

“That’s the spirit, Dmitri,” I said. “Rock that boat, but remember, just don’t tip the boat over. Get real comfy, because we’re going to be here for a long, long time.”

He whimpered.

“This is unreal,” he said. “Let me guess. You guys are out of ideas, and since you have no clue who’s doing this and never will, the plan now is to find a scapegoat.”

“Your car was there, Dmitri,” I said. “A gray Civic. Your car, your plates. You were there.”

“No, I wasn’t,” he said sadly as he finally stopped squiggling around. He shook his head and looked down at the floor.

“Someone is framing me.”

“Oh, a frame job,” I said. “I haven’t heard of one of those since television came in black-and-white. Tell me more.”

He lifted his head.

“Do you play chess?” he said.

“No. I put murderers on death row.”

“Ah, very funny,” he said with a pained grin. “New York City is one of the most competitive chess arenas in the world, especially for big-money underground games. I haven’t lost a game in six years — six years — and I play every day. They set them up, and I knock them down. Some people are gracious winners. I’m not one of those people.

“I crow. Sometimes I laugh. It’s emasculating to get owned. At least I suppose so, because I wouldn’t know. And now I guess one of those very bright people I beat has had enough. This is their moment to make their mark or whatever. Why not get me back, right? School the master. Revenge! Now, please take off these cuffs. I want my lawyer. Let me out of here. I have to feed my dog.”