James Patterson - Tick Tock

I had just gotten through all the stuff from the 2000s and was tossing my desk for some aspirin when my boss called from a Bomb Squad meeting in the Bronx.

"Something nuts just came out of Brooklyn," Miriam said. "A little girl was abducted from her dad in broad daylight. We got Brooklyn Major Case running over, but I need you to see what in the hell is going on. From the little I've heard, it's completely bizarre, which makes it par for the course for our guy. But I mean, it can't be our bastard, right? How could a child abduction have something to do with the Mad Bomber or the Son of Sam?"

The address was in a pricey part of Brooklyn not too far from the art museum and Prospect Park. Blue-and-whites blocked both sides of the brownstone-lined street as I double-parked and headed toward an elaborately refurbished town house. A funereal-faced female lieutenant from the Seventy-eighth Precinct met me in the bright front hallway.

"How we doing here, boss?" I said.

"We've activated an AMBER Alert and sent Angela's picture to all the media outlets, but so far nothing," she said, lowering the static on her radio. "The missing girl is four. Four. The father was totally out of it when the first unit showed, just glassy-eyed. They've got him in the back bedroom now with the mother and a doctor and a priest. A Brooklyn DT went in about five minutes ago."

Another ten long minutes passed before Hank Schaller, a veteran Brooklyn North detective who sometimes taught at the Academy, came out from the back of the house.

"Hank, what's up?" I said. The neat middle-aged man's gray eyes looked wrong as he shouldered past me like I wasn't even there. That wasn't good.

I followed him out of the town house and down the steps. He started speed-walking down Sixth so fast I had to jog to catch up with him. He seemed in a place beyond hurt, beyond angry.

Around the corner, he headed into the first place he came to, a swanky-looking restaurant. He walked around the stick-thin blond receptionist straight to the empty bar. He was loudly knocking an empty beer bottle on the black-quartz bar top when I finally arrived behind him.

"I want a vodka! Yo, a fucking vodka here! Now!" he yelled.

"You some kind of asshole?" said a burly bearded guy who came in from the kitchen.

Hank was trying to launch himself over the bar at the guy when I got in front of him. I flashed my badge and dropped a twenty.

"Just get him a drink, huh?"

"This animal," Schaller whispered, crumpling onto a bar stool. He stared at the empty bottle in his hand as if wondering how it got there. "We need to catch this animal."

"What happened, Hank?"

"I can hardly even say it," he said, biting his lip. "This poor son of a bitch, the father, has been out of work for the past year, right? This guy preyed on him, said he was going to hire him. Then he shows up today out of the blue and invites both him and his daughter to his own daughter's birthday party. Cavuto's thinking, new job, new boss, definitely gotta go, right?"

The lead-assed cook finally poured three fingers of Grey Goose, which Schaller immediately knocked back.

"The dad needs a few minutes to get ready," Schaller said, raising a finger, "so the guy says he'll take the girl ahead because he's running late. Cavuto can catch up with them in ten, call to see where they are. He let her go, Mike. He gave him his kid. They walked away hand in hand. Except, when he gets out of his shower and calls the number, nothing happens. He runs to the zoo, there's no party." A tear ran down the bridge of the veteran detective's nose. "Imagine, Mike. No one's there!"

"Take it easy, brother," I said.

"Four years old, Mike. This girl was a butterfly. How is this guy going to live with himself, Mike? Fucking how?"

"You need to calm down, Hank," I tried.

"Calm down?" the cop said, flicking his tear off his cheek with his middle finger. "I know how this story ends, and so do you. I calm down when this monster is worm food. I catch up with him, this guy isn't going to see the inside of a police car, let alone a courthouse."

I watched Hank storm out of the restaurant.

I stayed back in the empty bar for a second, absorbing all I'd just heard. Hank was right. Our culprit really did seem like a monster out of some primordial ooze, the personification of antihuman evil. Hank's knee-jerk reaction about it was spot-on as well. What do you do when you find a nasty bug crawling up your arm? You slap it off and crush it under your foot and keep squashing it until it isn't there anymore. You do your darnedest to erase it out of existence.

"That all, Officer?" the cook said sarcastically.

"No," I said, pulling up a stool and dialing my phone for my boss. "I need a fucking vodka now, too."

I finished my drink and made some more calls before I returned to the house. Since I knew that poor Angela had been walked away, I put people on to contact the major taxi companies and the buses and subways in case anyone had seen anything.

When I arrived back to the town house, I spotted the CSU team and stayed out on the stoop coordinating with them. For some reason, the kidnapper had dropped off a bag with the father that contained strawberries and some kind of weird-looking cream cheese. I was hoping the bizarre package might get us a print. If this creep was bold enough to let the father get a good look at him, I was thinking, he might be getting sloppy and prone to making a mistake.

I'd just sent the department sketch artist in to Detective Schaller when Emily Parker called me.

"Hey, Mike. I got the green light. Just got the word from my boss I'm on the task force."

"That couldn't be better news, Emily," I said. "Because this case has just taken another left turn."

"What now?" she said.

"A four-year-old child from Brooklyn has just been abducted. I'm not sure yet how an abduction fits in with the other two sets of copycat crimes, but my gut says it's the same flavor of weird that our perp likes."

"Maybe it's another crime of the century. The Lindbergh kidnapping, maybe?" Emily said. "I'll research it and bring anything I find with me tomorrow on the train. Can you pick me up from Penn Station in the morning?"

I thought about Mary Catherine then and how I was going to manage things. It was like a fifth-grade word problem. One love interest is waiting for you out at the beach as another one gets on a train from Washington traveling at a hundred miles an hour. How long will it take before you find yourself in the doghouse? I wasn't sure. I knew I definitely wasn't smarter than a fifth-grader.

"Mike, you still there?" Emily said.

"Right here, Emily," I said. "Of course, I'll come get you. What time does your train get in?"

NYc's evening rush hour was just getting started by the time I bumper-to-bumpered it back under the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge toward my squad room.

I evil-eyed my vacation-robbing workplace, One Police Plaza, as I crawled across the span. The slab concrete cube of a building had been butt-ugly even before it was surrounded with guard booths and bomb-barrier planters post 9/11. Because traffic from the financial district had been rerouted due to all the security measures, some Chinatown businesspeople had raised a fuss and suggested that headquarters be moved to another area. I had my fingers crossed for Hawaii, but so far I hadn't heard anything.

Finally pulling off the bridge ramp onto the Avenue of the Finest, I spotted all the double-parked TV news vans. Since all the newsies and camera guys on the sidewalk beside them looked especially restless, I did myself a favor and decided to keep on going.

I drove a few blocks south and pulled over in front of a graffiti-scrawled deli on the corner of Madison and James. I got a coffee and one of those little Table Talk Pies and a Post, with its ever-subtle tabloid headline "WHO WILL BE NEXT?" on the front page.