James Patterson - Tick Tock

With her arms crossed, Emily stared at the board silently, absorbed, an art critic before a new installation.

"Give me the vitals on the abduction, Mike."

I slowly went through what had happened to Angela Cavuto.

"According to the father," I said, "our guy is white, right-handed, walks with a limp and a cane and is thin and about five eleven." Cavuto also said he was cultured and polished. Not only was he wearing a tailored suit, but he spoke quite convincingly about hedge fund investing."

"I can't believe it, Mike," Emily told me as she took a rubber-banded folder out of her bag. "I spent yesterday pulling reams of stuff about famous New York crimes, hoping this wasn't true, but I think it must be."

"What have you got, Emily?"

"I think this guy's done it again. This abduction is another copycat. A carbon copy, in fact."

"Of what? The Lindbergh case?" I said, confused.

"No. There was another heinous kidnapping way back in the twenties-in Brooklyn, no less. At the time, they called it the crime of the century. A sociopathic murderous pedophile named Albert Fish was dubbed the 'Brooklyn Vampire' when he abducted and killed a girl.

"And Mike, his MO wasn't just similar. From what you just told me, it was exactly the same. Posing as an employer, Fish answered the ad of an eighteen-year-old boy seeking work and ended up leaving with his ten-year-old sister under the pretense of taking her to a birthday party."

"F-off! No!" I yelled as I collapsed into a chair.

Emily nodded.

"Tell me, did he give the father something?" she said.

"Strawberries and some goop," I said.

"Pot cheese. Right. Shit! It's the same thing! The Mad Bomber, then the Son of Sam, now the Brooklyn Vampire. This guy's just pulled off a third famous crime. Mike, this isn't good. This Fish guy was evil personified. He made the Son of Sam seem like a volunteer at a soup kitchen. He was one of the worst pedophiles and child murderers of all time. He didn't just kill his victims. He would cannibalize them as well."

I punched the desk beside me, then my thigh. Then Emily and I sat there silently listening to the whoosh of the air duct. On the board, a picture of Angela from last year's Cavuto family Christmas card smiled at us from beneath a glittery halo.

I was with Emily, putting on some coffee about an hour later, when I heard a strange, gut-wrenching call come over the break room's radio.

There was some kind of disturbance uptown. An unconscious, unresponsive child had been found in a store on Fifth Avenue. When I heard the name of the store repeated, my blood went cold.

"What, Mike? What is it?" Emily said, straining to listen.

"They found a little girl uptown at FAO Schwarz, the famous toy store across from the Plaza Hotel. Not good, Em. It's on the same block as the CBS Early Show, the locale of the bombing on Tuesday."

There was a more massive crowd than usual out in front of the landmark toy store when Emily and I arrived after a long, twenty-minute ride uptown. Two radio cars and two ambulances spun their lights in front of the freaked-out-looking tourists and moms and little kids.

A veteran Nineteenth Precinct sergeant whose eye I caught shook his dismal face before I was three steps out of my car.

I showed the cop the picture of Angela.

"Tell me this isn't her," I said.

"Marone a mi," the cop said, the smoke from his cupped cigarette rising like incense as he crossed himself. "It's her. They found her in the back. The clerk thought she was just sleeping."

Emily and I both turned as a car squealed up behind my cruiser. It was a black Lexus with tinted windows. I had my hand on my Glock when its door was flung wide open and a man got out. A man with red hair and even redder eyes.

It was Kenneth Cavuto, Angela's father.

"No!" I yelled as Cavuto bolted toward the store's entrance.

I managed to get there a second before him. No way could I let Angela's dad see his little girl. Not here. Not like this.

Apparently the distraught father had other plans. I'm not a small guy, but Cavuto shoved me off my feet like I was an empty cardboard box. I grunted as I fell forward and my chin hit the concrete.

I got back up and ran after Cavuto into the empty store. I bolted down some steps past museum-quality displays of giant stuffed animals: ostriches and horses and giraffes. I was scrambling past the Puppet Park when I heard a sound that stopped me.

It was a scream in a pitch I'd never heard before. I looked at Emily. She shook her head. We both knew what it was. It was the sound of Cavuto's heart breaking.

It took me, Emily, and three uniforms to get Cavuto off his daughter. I actually had to cuff him. He started crying soundlessly as he banged his head against the polka-dot-carpeted floor.

"Go out to your truck and get something to knock this poor son of a bitch out, would you?" I yelled at a gawking EMT.

I noticed only then that my chin was bleeding. I put my thumb on it to stop the drip as I turned and looked at the girl. She was sitting in a stroller with her eyes closed, her white-blond hair the same shade as the oversize polar bear on the shelf beside her.

I turned away and got down on my knees next to the father and placed my hand on his sobbing back.

I opened my mouth to say something. Then I closed it. What was there to say?

The evening light was just starting to change as Berger steered the Mercedes convertible into the line for the car wash at East 109th Street. He stared up at the fading blue of the sky above the construction site across the street. What he wouldn't give to be in his tub right now, humming on Vitamin P as the sun descended toward the Dakota.

He turned as an unshaven bubble-butted old white guy knocked on his window. Berger thought it was a homeless person until he realized it was one of the car wash employees.

"What?" the guy asked in a Russian accent as the window buzzed down.

"The works," Berger said, handing him a crisp twenty.

"Interior vacuum, too?" Gorbachev wanted to know.

"Not today," Berger said with a grin before zipping the window back up.

Berger sighed as the machinery bumped under the car and began towing him through the spinning brushes and water spray. What a bust of a day.

The girl wasn't supposed to die. The plan had been to torture the parents over a two-day period with the ruse of a ransom and then kill her. But that was all blown to shit now, wasn't it?

It had been the Valium. The girl had had some kind of allergic reaction as he was taking her from the taxi to the Mercedes that he had parked in Brooklyn Heights. By the time they were back in Manhattan, she was gone. He'd screwed up, made his first mistake. He could kick himself.

Oh, well, he thought, as the lemony scent of soap filled the car. He had to stop beating himself up about it. No mission went perfectly. He smoothed out the fiber-optic camera cord sewn into the lining of his jacket. At the very least he'd gotten a little more footage.

Anyway, he didn't have time to dwell on his failures. So much to do, so little time to do it. He'd just have to go on to the next thing. He needed to keep heading in his two favorite directions, onward and upward, and hope it would all come out in the wash.

As the car wash spat him back out into the driveway, he rolled down the window and tossed something into the trash can by the fence.

The Elmo juice box spun as it arced lazily into the can's exact center. Boots the Monkey followed.

"Swish! Nothing but net, and the crowd goes wild," Berger said as he popped the clutch and squealed the Merc out into the street.

After his preliminary, the ME took me aside by a stack of Buzz Lightyears and said it looked like an overdose of some kind. I turned away as a crying female ME assistant knelt by Angela, getting ready to move her. Her father, mercifully sedated, was out in an ambulance on East 58th. I wished I were as well.