City is just about as invisible as a vehicle can get.’
Gerrard nodded, looking back over his shoulder towards the Bridge. Just a few blocks away on Vernon Boulevard was the central taxi depot for the entire area. Thousands of the yellow vehicles, all in a tight radius, hundreds of them moving around, coming to and from the depot. The thieves who pulled this job were intelligent. Even if they were being pursued, once they got over the Bridge and turned down the side streets, they’d soon have become invisible, especially if they moved anywhere near the depot itself. He turned back to Katic.
‘How about tracers in the bank? Or should I even bother to ask?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘No luck. They left the registers. They knew where the dye packs and bait money were. They went straight for the vault. The bank manager is over at Lenox Hill getting his nose fixed. They busted him up pretty bad. He took a shotgun barrel to the bridge of his nose twice. Looks like he’s going to need surgery to realign his septum.’
‘What was the take?’
‘Just over five hundred thousand. Half a million.’
Gerrard shook his head and swore, long and hard.
‘Shit.’
‘Like I said, it was delivery day. The vault was fully stocked up. They cleaned house.’ She looked back down at the report in the folder. ‘A silent alarm they didn’t know about was tripped, but it didn’t matter. Every cop in the area was uptown. Judging from the timings, it looks like they called in a fake emergency on the police frequency, and it emptied the entire 19 precinct as they headed the opposite direction, responding to the call.’
Gerrard closed his eyes, processing everything she’d just told him, picturing the entire heist in his head from start-to-finish. There were a few moments of silence as he mentally ran through the job, seeing it unfold in his mind.
Then he opened his eyes and looked back at the torched getaway car.
‘These people have done their homework,’ he said. Katic nodded in agreement as he started walking towards the burnt-out wreck. ‘And they’ve got some serious nerve. It takes a lot of balls to hold up a bank four blocks from a police station.’
He paused, ten yards from the taxi.
‘But this doesn’t make sense,’ he said, pointing at the cab. ‘All that proficiency yet this? Five armoured trucks, four banks, and this is the first getaway car they’ve ever burned. In fact, this is the first one they’ve even left for us to find. Why?’
Katic didn’t reply.
She just pointed to the rear of the car.
The trunk was popped open, one of the forensics detectives peering inside. Gerrard walked forward, and that sickeningly sweet smell of burnt flesh grew stronger. He grabbed the end of his tie and covered his nose and mouth, and took a look inside himself.
A body was in there. It was a horrific sight, the kind that gave grown men nightmares.
The corpse used to be a man. His skin and hair had been burned away, and he was red raw where his skin had scorched, stained with black, his flesh and remaining skin smouldering. An awful and agonising death, cooking like meat in an oven. No escape, just frenzy and desperation as the flames ate up the car as he tried to thrash, kick and claw his way out. Gerrard saw the stringy remains of binds around his hands and ankles and a gag tied around his head and in his mouth.
‘Jesus,’ Gerrard muttered, his tie still to his nose.
‘The driver of the cab,’ Katic said. ‘He was gagged and bound after they lifted the taxi. When they lit the interior, he couldn’t get out.’
Gerrard glanced at what was left of the man’s hands. The fingernails were mostly still intact, and he saw black fabric and blood there from where he had scrabbled at the interior, trying to claw his way out. He’d ripped off a few of them off in his desperation. Having seen enough, Gerrard stepped back, turning and taking a deep fresh breath to clear his airways of the awful smell, releasing his tie and letting it drop back down to his shirt.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. They screwed up,’ he told Katic, who joined him. ‘The ball’s in our court. This is a homicide charge.’
‘Double,’ Katic corrected. Gerrard looked at her and she nodded with her head towards the front seat of the taxi.
He stepped forward and walked around the car. A female detective from forensics