James Patterson: Step On A Crack

I shook my head. I had no idea.

“Because of how insulting it would have been. Not to Eileen’s memory, I realized, but to Eileen herself. That’s when I realized she hadn’t really left for good. She’d just gone on ahead a little.

“One thing Eileen had taught me by her example was that you get up and put your clothes on and do what you can do until the day you don’t get up. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Maeve isn’t really gone. She’s just ahead, waiting for you, Mike. That’s why you can’t shut down. We Irish don’t always succeed, but we’re pretty decent at grinding it out.”

“Grind it out until you’re dead,” I said blankly after a moment. “Gentle words of inspiration from Seamus Bennett. You’re the new Deepak Chopra.”

“Ah, sweet, undiluted sarcasm,” Seamus said, punching my knee softly as he rose. “That’s the lad. Maeve’d be proud of ya. Music to her Irish ears.”

So after I took a shower, we made arrangements. Or, I should say, Seamus and Mary Catherine did. They called the church and then the funeral home, and I just nodded or shook my drooping head. Grind it out until you’re dead .

IT WAS STONE WALL to stone wall with friends and relatives inside Holy Name Church two days later for Maeve’s funeral. At the wake the night before, and now here at the church, my wife had managed to draw a crowd that rivaled the one at St. Patrick’s for the First Lady, despite the fact that there wasn’t a news van or celebrity in sight.

In the sea of sad faces, I made out her former coworkers, past patients, even most of our snooty neighbors. Not only did most of my Homicide squad show, but most of the NYPD, it seemed, was there, giving their support for a brother in blue.

At the wake, so many people had shared touching vignettes I’d never heard before about Maeve. Story after story about how she had comforted their kid or wife or parent as they were wheeled into surgery or giving birth or dying. The compassion she showed at the hardest of moments. The strength she’d provided when people were most alone.

There are times when New York can be the loneliest place on earth, but as I watched Seamus in his robes come down from the altar and encircle Maeve’s casket with incense and heard the sincere weeping of the people behind me, I could feel a sense of community that I would put up against the smallest of small towns.

After the Gospel, Seamus did the eulogy.

“One of my favorite memories of Maeve comes from, of all places, Ground Zero,” he said from the pulpit.

“We were both volunteering on the Spirit of New York , moored off Battery Park City, helping to give out hot meals to the rescue people. It was during the fourth game of the 2001 World Series, and I was on the open top deck of the boat, comforting a distraught battalion chief who had lost one of his men, when we heard this earsplitting howl from below deck. We thought someone had been shot or fallen overboard, but when we arrived below in the dining room, all we could see was Maeve, wearing headphones, jumping up and down so hard she was nearly rocking the boat.

“ ‘Tino Martinez tied it up,’ she was screaming. ‘He tied it up!’

“Someone got a TV and set it up on the buffet table. Now, I’ve listened to people say that they’ve never heard Yankee Stadium louder than when Derek Jeter hit that walk-off home run in the tenth to win it, but they weren’t any louder than the group of us crowded around that beat-up set. When I think of Maeve, I will always see her in the middle of those tired men with her fist pumped in the air. Her energy and hope and life transforming that black place and time into something unique, something I think on the verge of holy.”

Seamus’s cheeks clenched then. He, along with the rest of the church, was losing it.

“I won’t lie to you. I can’t say why God would take her now. But if the fact that she was sent here among us doesn’t point toward a loving God, then I can’t help you. If we bring away anything from today, it should be the lesson that Maeve herself showed with every full, spent day of her life. Hold back nothing. Leave nothing in the tank.”

All through the church everyone, including myself, was crying shamelessly. Chrissy, beside me, brushed my overcoat out of the way and wiped her tears on my knee.

The sun came out for the burial at Gates of Heaven Cemetery up in Westchester. The kids filed past Maeve’s casket with roses. I almost lost it again behind my sunglasses when Shawna kissed her flower before she put it down with the rest. And again when the high, bittersweet skirls of an NYPD piper’s “Danny Boy” blew off the headstones and frozen ground.

But I didn’t.

I asked myself what Maeve would do, and I swallowed my tears and hugged my kids and promised myself and my wife that I would somehow get us through.

I’D OFFERED TO stay home from work with the kids, who were off on Christmas break, but Seamus and Mary Catherine wouldn’t hear of it.

“Sorry, fella,” Seamus told me. “These kids need to be spoiled like no one has ever been spoiled before, and with the mood you’re in, you’re going to have to leave that job to me and Mary C. Besides, you need to get outside of yourself there, Mick. Throw yourself into something positive. Stop sitting around and go and collar those pathetic mopes who jacked the cathedral.”

“ ‘Collar the mopes’?” I said with a faint grin. “ ‘Jacked’?”

“So I watch NYPD Blue now and then,” Seamus said with a fantastic roll of his eyes. “Is it a sin?”

So the Monday morning after the funeral, I arrived back at my desk inside Manhattan North Homicide in East Harlem. Harry Grissom, my boss, and the rest of my squadies were irritatingly supportive and polite. Who would have ever thought that you’d miss being the butt of practical jokes? Soon enough, I thought, knocking the dust off my mouse.

I put in calls to Paul Martelli and Ned Mason. And I learned that nothing really new or promising had been discovered. Every square inch of the church’s granite, marble, and stained glass had been searched and dusted for latent prints, but there had been nothing. These criminals had been extremely tidy.

There had been some excitement when a hijacker’s body was found in the archbishops’ crypt under the altar, Martelli told me, but it ended when it was discovered that the man’s hands and head, along with any chance at identifying him, had been removed by his cold-blooded partners.

No traces of explosives had been discovered in the church either, so it seemed that Jack’s threat about blowing everyone to smithereens had been just a bluff. Another hand he had won.

I found a Post-it on my computer to call Lonnie Jacob, the NYPD CSU investigator working the car dealership where the sedan had crashed. Around noon, I lifted the phone and dialed the fingerprint lab at One Police Plaza.

“Mike,” Lonnie said after he answered. “I was just about to call you. I just did it.”

“Did what?” I said.

“It wasn’t easy, but by sodium hydroxiding our John Doe’s hands, I was able to dry them out and peel off the top layer of his charred skin. The second dermal layer is harder to ID because there’s this kind of doubling of the ridges, but at least we have something. I already spoke to my contact down in Latent Prints at the FBI. Should I fire it down to DC to cross-reference?”

I told him yes, and he told me he’d call me back with the results. These criminals had gone nutso about covering their tracks-which could only mean they were definitely trying to hide something.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, word got back to us that when the police commissioner heard the meager results of our investigation at St. Patrick’s he had a simple response: Do it again. Do it better .