later, the store bearing the name Cash 4U Quick explodes in a ball of fiery orange, glass shattering forward, the sides bursting outward.
Above the moneylending store, the twelve-story building buckles and then collapses, its brick-and-mortar walls crumbling, floor after floor succumbing to gravity, crashing down one on top of the other, filling the air with black smoke and dust.
Rescue workers—firefighters, paramedics, police—rush to the scene, the fire blazing, searing heat and toxic dark smoke. The building, what can be seen of it, is reduced to a pile of bricks in a hole in the ground.
The first order of business is extinguishing the fire and rescuing victims.
But the question amid the chaos, through the choking smoke and the blazing furnace that was the building, is this: Are there victims? It’s the middle of the night in a predominantly commercial area. Was the building empty? A patrol officer assigned to this precinct arrives and supplies the information.
The bottom floor was a business, surely closed at this hour.
Above it, a single-room-occupancy hotel, the Horizon Hotel for Men. A hotel for vagrants, for the homeless, subsidized housing—a single room to sleep in for eight dollars a night.
It will be hours—hours spent extinguishing the fire, combing through the rubble to find bodies burned to ashes or crushed beyond recognition—before the extent of the disaster is known. The hotel’s twelve floors had a capacity of sixteen people per floor, and it was at full occupancy last night.
The final body count, which includes the hotel’s meager staff, is 197.
40
I RUSH into the office, still foggy, my legs rubbery, my stomach hollow, operating on little sleep and no food, nothing but nervous energy.
The bombing happened at four in the morning eastern daylight time, an hour after I’d gone to bed. I was awakened by the call ninety minutes later, after an agent in our Chicago office arrived at the scene and noted that the commercial establishment on the bottom floor of the building was a payday-loan store, one of the frequent targets of Citizen David’s ire.
Bonita Sexton, who’s beaten me here, pops up from her cubicle.
“Talk to me, Rabbit,” I say, dropping my bag and booting up my computer. “Was this David?”
She looks terrible, but we all will today, having been roused from our beds at dawn. It’s more than that, though. She looks pained. And it’s not hard to see why. This was different. Up to now, Citizen David has taken great care to avoid casualties, to direct his violence at institutions, not people.
“No way this was David.” The answer comes not from Rabbit, who seems stunned into silence, but from Eric Pullman—Pully—who appears above the wall of his cubicle, puffy-eyed, his hair wild. “He wouldn’t kill innocent people.”
“Not intentionally,” says Rabbit. “But this…I don’t see how he could’ve thought the blast wouldn’t bring down the entire—” She pushes her hair back from her face. “Oh God.”
“Do we even know it was intentional?” I ask. “Buildings blow up. Gas lines break. Come on you, you stupid thing!” I bark at my computer, which is still booting up.
“We don’t know anything yet,” says Pully.
“Okay, well, until further notice, we’re treating this as David. Start with the CCTV cameras, both of you. A ten-block radius. This is Chicago, so they’ll have plenty.”
“Got it, boss.”
I look at my watch. “I have to go see Dwight Ross,” I say.
41
SOME OF the team is already there when I arrive at the conference room that serves as our war room for Citizen David; there are people on the phone barking commands, and a few are huddled by the television mounted on the wall. The TV has a live overhead shot of Chicago, where the crime scene looks like a gigantic fireplace, smoke still billowing out, fire trucks and rescue vehicles everywhere, water spewing into the charred remains, although, from what I can gather, the fire itself is extinguished.
Dwight Ross, sleeves rolled up and no tie, looks haggard but as fierce as always. Near him is a woman dressed in a sharp pinstripe suit, her hair pulled back immaculately, looking better than anybody has a right to look after being summoned from bed before sunrise.
Dwight, looking down at some notes, draws a line in the air between the two of us. “Emmy Dockery, Special Assistant Director Elizabeth Ashland.”
She gives me a cool stare and a strong handshake. “Manhattan, huh?” she says to me. “Well, you were off by only eight hundred miles.”
That didn’t take long, and it came from someone I’ve never met. Nice