Malloy stifled a yawn as he entered the office. “Me? You kidding? I got home just in time to wake up my little cherubs. Guess who gave them breakfast and looked after them while his wife slept an extra hour?”
Alex frowned. “So you show up at work tired and your wife is fresh as a daisy. Bad decision.”
Malloy’s disposition soured. “I’ll remember that.”
Alex pointed to the photo of Hoover. “You think he came to work tired so he could let his wife sleep?”
“He wasn’t married.”
“Not officially, at least.” Alex cracked a smile to show that the boss was human.
Malloy wandered over to the corner and picked up the battering ram. “This the thirty-five-pounder?”
“Little Bess.” Little Bess weighed thirty-five pounds. Big Bess weighed fifty. As the first woman to make the FBI’s SWAT team, Alex had been rewarded by being allowed to carry Little Bess up five flights of stairs every other Saturday when the team met to train. She didn’t mind one bit.
Malloy dropped the battering ram. “We get the warrant for Windermere yet?”
“Not enough to go on. No way to tell if the picture is real or fake. Plus no imminent threat. We wait another day. If our guy doesn’t show, I’ll call the judge.”
“Fair enough. Still, I wonder what—”
Alex’s phone rang and she raised a hand to interrupt Malloy. “Yeah?”
It was Jason Mara, one of her squad members, calling from Inwood. “Our guy just came home.”
“You’re kidding me, right?” said Alex, but she was already snatching her blazer off her chair, burying an arm in one sleeve and lunging for her vest. “When did he show?”
“A minute ago,” said Mara.
“What took you so long to call?”
“You serious?”
“Shut up and listen. Get that place locked down. He is not to leave the premises under any conditions. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s out there with you?”
“DiRienzo.”
“Good. I’ll be there in forty minutes.”
Alex hung up and looked at Malloy. “Let’s go earn a beer.”
13
The call had come in three days earlier.
A woman in Long Island phoned the hotline claiming to have witnessed her neighbor unloading crates of military hardware from his car at three in the morning. The report was verified and a written copy forwarded to CT-26, where it landed on Alex’s desk.
The mention of military hardware graded the call “urgent.” Alex vetted the source herself. The woman was named Irene Turner and lived in Inwood, a scruffy lower-middle-class neighborhood on the southern tip of Long Island. Inwood had plenty of temporary residents, some organized crime, and a significant foreign-born population, but it was the town’s proximity to John F. Kennedy International Airport, a major international freight hub, that piqued her curiosity and made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up.
“I saw guns,” the woman named Irene Turner explained.
“Really? What kind?”
“Well, actually boxes full of guns.”
“Boxes of guns?”
“They were really crates with markings on them. I’m Russian. The writing was Cyrillic.”
Alex hadn’t caught an accent. “Have you lived here long?”
“Since I was four. My parents were refuseniks. We emigrated in 1982. I have my American passport.”
Alex’s interest ratcheted up a notch. “Please go on.”
“It was past three in the morning. I don’t sleep. I was downstairs in the kitchen making coffee. From my window, I can see into his garage. Of course, he doesn’t know this. Otherwise he would think I’m some kind of crazy for watching him so much.”
“Do you know your neighbor’s name?”
“Oh, no. We don’t speak. He moved in a couple of months back, but I don’t see him much. He’s nice-looking. About thirty. Tall. Fit.” She giggled. “He has a nice behind.”
Alex began to get a picture of Irene Turner. Thirty-five years old. Single. Lonely. A life lived looking through windows. “About the guns…”
“Yesterday night he came home late. He opened the back of his truck and that’s when I saw them. The crates. Green with rope handles…”
“And Cyrillic writing on the side.”
“It said Kalashnikov.”
“Excuse me, Ms. Turner, I don’t mean to be rude, but how can you see that far?”
“The writing on the side was yellow. It was easy to read. I took a picture.”
“A picture?” Alex smiled to herself. The technology these days. Every man a spy.