Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“What?” Glover said.

“Find your own way back,” he said. “This stunt was all your idea. I never learn.”

“Dad!” he said. “It should have worked. How could I know there was a mouse in her yogurt? You think I put it there?”

“Close the door!”

“Richard,” Valerie said softly. “You can’t—”

“Now!” Headley shouted.

Glover closed the door. Through the window, Valerie gave him a sympathetic tip of the head as the car pulled away. Then she shifted in her seat to look at her boss.

“Don’t start with me,” he said.

“He’s your son,” she said.

“He walked me right into that. God damn it, if he excels at anything, it’s making me look like a fool.”

“Look, if you—”

Valerie’s phone shouted out news of an incoming text. She quickly dug it out of her purse and looked.

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s Chris. Details just coming in.”

“Of what? Christ, not another elevator thing.”

“No, it’s a shooting. In a hotel.” She waited as more words appeared on her phone’s screen. “Two dead. The FBI took down the shooter. He’s... still alive.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Hang on... there’s a link.” She tapped on the screen. “That Flyovers guy. And a woman. It’s not clear. Wait, Chris is writing something else. The man the FBI shot, he could be the one who shot the Flyovers person.”

“This isn’t clear at all,” Headley said.

“Let me make some calls. But from what Chris is saying, this guy the FBI got, they like him for the taxi bombing, and maybe the elevator stuff, too. You’re gonna want to make a statement. That mouse in the parfait just got kicked off the six o’clock news.”

Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado had spent the morning working the phones, tracking where city-owned cars were garaged, and working up a list of vehicles that were not only part of the “green” pool but had plates ending in 13. Once they’d tracked down the car, they wanted to know who’d taken it to Simpson Elevator for a chat with Otto Petrenko.

But then the captain showed up and told them to get their asses over to the Westerly Hotel in Fort Lee, on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, in New Jersey. There was a chance, the captain said, that what was going on there might have something to do with what he and Delgado were working on.

Bourque made the case that just one of them should go. The other should stay back and try to make headway on finding that car.

“Flip for it,” the captain said.

They didn’t have to. Delgado said she was happy staying on the car, so Jerry headed off to New Jersey.

On the way, he found out what made the Westerly a place of interest, beyond its usual charm.

A week ago, a forty-four-year old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the name of Garnet Wooler had rented a room on the second floor. This same Garnet Wooler, had, two hours earlier, been shot in the shoulder by an FBI agent in the lobby of the InterMajestic Hotel in midtown Manhattan as he was drawing a weapon. It was believed this same gun had been used to kill Eugene Clement and his wife, Estelle, just moments earlier in the men’s bathroom just off the hotel lobby.

Wooler had been rushed to the hospital, where he was listed in serious but stable condition. And while he was able to talk, he had so far chosen not to. But police had found, in his pocket, a key card for the Westerly in Fort Lee.

A quick check found that Mr. Wooler was not unknown to police, at least out in Tulsa, who knew him better as Bucky. There were two minor assault charges. One, on an ex-wife, was five years ago, and the second, eight years back, stemmed from a disagreement in a bar with someone who had opened his door into the side of Wooler’s pickup truck.

Four years ago, Wooler had also been treated and released for burns to his upper body after goofing around with explosives on a buddy’s farm. He had, off and on, worked for a company that removed tree stumps by using dynamite. Given his history, it wasn’t a stretch to think he had the wherewithal to blow up a New York cab.

Bourque’s captain had dispatched him to the scene because Clement had been, up until the moment he was fatally shot, the head of the Flyovers activist group, which might or might not have had something to do with taxi explosions and elevator plunges, and maybe even the murder of Otto Petrenko.

While police had arrived on the scene nearly ninety minutes earlier, it was only moments before Bourque’s arrival that they gained access to Wooler’s room. Given that this man might be their bomber, they were proceeding with great caution. First, they didn’t know whether Garnet Wooler had been acting alone, or if he might have associates holed up at the hotel. Second, they needed to determine that the room had in no way been booby-trapped. No one wanted to trigger an explosion when they entered it.

So a crane was used to lift police up to the second floor hotel room’s window so that they could scope the place out. In addition, a high-tech camera on the end of a wire was inserted under the door to give a full view of the room’s interior.

Confident, at last, that the room was safe to enter, police did so.

Similar precautions were taken with the 2004 Dodge minivan registered to Wooler that was sitting in the hotel parking lot. As Bourque arrived, the van was being loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and being taken to a forensics lab for examination.

Judging by the number of official vehicles in the hotel lot and the surrounding streets, one could be forgiven for thinking a Newark-bound jet must have come down here. There were countless New York and New Jersey state police cruisers, cars bearing the NYPD logo, fire emergency vehicles, and enough black Tahoe and Suburban SUVs — most likely Homeland and FBI — to start a GM dealership.

Bourque found a spot for his unmarked car and killed the engine.

Flashing his badge, he got into the hotel and up to the second floor. The hallway outside Wooler’s room had been turned into a law enforcement convention. He made his way to the door, flashing his badge again. A rosy-cheeked FBI agent named Ben Baskin invited him in once Bourque had explained his interest.

“Oh, yeah,” said Baskin. “I saw you at the meeting.”

“What have you found?”

“Shitload of stuff. The guy did not travel light. We’ve found rifles, couple more handguns, in addition to the one found on him. Ammunition. We think we’re going to find more weapons in the van. Also, some ammonium nitrate, Tannerite, some wire and—”

“Bomb-making materials,” Bourque said.

“Yeah.”

“Same materials used in the taxi?”

Baskin shrugged. “To be determined.”

“How about any kind of electronics?”

“Plenty. Couple of laptops. Burner phones. Other stuff.”

“Anything that might be used, say, to hack into an elevator’s control system?”

“Still searching. And like I say, we’ve still got the van to get through. We’re also trying to find out if our friend here was working with anyone else.”

“What happened at the InterMajestic?”

Baskin shook his head. “Our guy shot and killed Clement and his wife but we don’t know why, because it looks like Wooler was on the same team as Clement. Maybe Clement was telling him what to do, or came to New York to be closer to the action when it went down.”

“But if they were somehow working together, why’d he shoot Clement and the wife?” Bourque asked.

“Good question. Wooler’s said next to nothing, but he made one comment, something along the line that Clement’s wife thought they were gay. Wanted us to know that was not the case, at least where he was concerned.”