Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,10
they’re not hopeful. They’ve never seen anything like this before.’
He looked down at his team.
‘But we need to find out where the hell this shit came from and who has it. And we need to do it before any more is released. The next time we may not be so lucky. Lieutenant General Franklin has ordered that we are the investigating team. This is our responsibility.’
He paused.
‘Pull up the victim’s profile, Rach.’
She tapped several keys and a driving licence appeared on the screen. Archer saw a middle-aged Mexican man in the photograph. With jet black hair and skin the colour of coffee, he looked like a nice guy, totally harmless. And totally unrecognisable from the bloody frozen husk of a human being who’d died out there in the Meadow.
‘His name was Luis Cesar,’ Shepherd said. ‘Fifty two years old, immigrant from Mexico, worked as a groundsman in Central Park for eleven years. Leaves behind a widow and five kids. He and his wife live in an apartment up in Spanish Harlem.’
The room was silent as they looked at the dead man’s photo.
Shepherd turned to Jorgensen and Marquez.
‘I want you two to head up there. His wife called 911 early this morning saying that her husband didn’t come home last night. She hasn’t been told what happened. I want you to deliver the news.’
‘Shit,’ Jorgensen said.
‘Are we telling her the truth?’ Marquez asked.
‘Save the specifics. He died from unknown causes. Tell her he didn’t suffer. Leave it at that.’
‘OK,’ Marquez said, scribbling down the address from the driving licence.
‘If you can, find out if anything out of the ordinary has been going on lately,’ Shepherd added. ‘Anything strange in her husband’s behaviour or unusual phone calls, that sort of thing. I’m almost positive this was just wrong place, wrong time, but we need to make one hundred per cent sure he wasn’t a deliberate target.’
Shepherd shifted his attention to Archer and Josh.
‘There’s a research laboratory located on West 66and Amsterdam. It’s called Flood Microbiology. I want you two to head over there. A Dr Peter Flood is expecting you. Find out if he or his team recognise these symptoms or have any idea where this could have come from.’
The two men nodded.
‘This room will be the base of operations. Rach and I will work out of here, staying close to the line with Health Services. All precincts across the city have been notified of the threat. ESU and Chemical Response Teams are on standby but we’re the ranking team on the case.’
He pointed at Cesar’s licence.
His already tense face hardened.
‘Make no mistake. We’re going to find out who killed this man. No one does something like that in this city and gets away with it.’
‘What about Central Park security cameras?’ Marquez asked. ‘They might tell us who planted the device?’
‘Two techs next door are already checking them,’ Rach said. ‘But there isn’t any CCTV in the immediate Meadow area, and over ten thousand people went in and out of the Park yesterday. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.’
Shepherd nodded, checking his watch.
‘We need to get going. Questions?’
There were none.
‘Remember, its seven days until Christmas. There're eight million people living in the city right now with a shitload more tourists on top.’
He tapped the screen.
‘Someone out there did this for a reason. We’re going to find out who they are and take them down.’
He looked at his team and nodded.
‘Let’s go to work.’
Across Queens, three men were sitting in a booth in the middle of a diner just off the 30 Avenue subway stop in Astoria. All three were dressed in an assortment of jeans, coats and thick sweatshirts, a half-filled cup of coffee in front of each of them. Their bodies were full of nervous energy. Between them, they'd only managed a few hours sleep last night. There were two reasons for that. One of them was anticipation of the task ahead of them this morning. And the other was that there were meant to be four of them there in the diner. One of their team was missing. He’d gone out late last night to get some pizza and had never come back.
His disappearance had seriously unsettled each member of the trio. One of them, the leader of the group, was doing his best to eat something from a plate in front of him. It was a slice of apple pie doused with cream, more dessert than breakfast. He’d ordered it out of habit but it wasn’t going