The Man Who Lost His Shadow, page 2
Captain Wilson requested that all flights at the city airport be temporarily grounded, but the Mayor talked him down to advanced screenings. The Captain grumbled and barked for the airport to be thoroughly searched.
Sterner tossed the car keys to a rookie officer who was standing near the entrance of the Precinct, as his partner quickly pulled Jimmy T from the back seat. The small-time crook cooperated, too caught up with the flurry of activity that was unfolding around him. He’d been to the 102nd Precinct so many times he knew where all the good bathrooms were.
The 102nd Precinct had been built almost half a century ago, and it showed. The massive concrete block was painted a dull shade of grey, and no amount of petitioning by city groups could get the Mayor to sanction renovation. There was no money in the budget for it, or so he claimed.
“Connor! Fill us in!” Merson yelled out as they headed over to the bullpen. Officer Ryan Connor looked up from his computer and shook his head slowly. “Things are crazy, where’ve you guys been?”
Edwin shoved Jimmy T into a chair, and Connor understood. He exchanged a quick nod with the criminal.
“Okay, so this is what we know so far,” Connor continued. The Precinct was getting louder by the minute, as police officers rushed in and out and the telephones began ringing incessantly. A few civilians were streaming in as well, all clamoring toward the front desk, claiming to have useful information. It was an inevitable part of any large-scale manhunt. The officers at the front desk tried their best to handle the situation.
“There was an annual NRA Convention at the Bremmer Plaza Hotel. It started at 10 in the morning, and the first shots were fired at around 2.30 or so. The first responders reached the scene around 2.45, and by then the shooter had fled.”
Detective Greg Merson nodded grimly. “And who’s the nutcase who did this?”
“That’s the crazy part!” Connor exclaimed. “You’d think it’d be a psycho, right? But witnesses say the man got into a car and drove off as though nothing happened. Merged into traffic and just disappeared without a fuss! And guess who the plates were traced to?”
The two detectives and the criminal in handcuff listened in rapt attention.
“An elementary school teacher!” Connor cried, shaking his head in disbelief. “Mohammed Iqbal. The guy’s a saint! Hell, you know Bryan? His kids are in the guy’s class!”
“Jesus Christ,” Merson muttered, considering the possibility. “Just about anyone can snap these days, looks like.”
“Err, his name is Mohammed?” Jimmy T chimed in, expecting a response from the law enforcement officers around him. They didn’t take the bait.
Sterner was skeptical. “They just got an ID of the car?” he asked. “Did anyone actually identify the person as Mohammed Iqbal?”
Connor looked a little deflated, but he quickly brushed away the doubt. “It’s too early to get a visual ID. Most of the witnesses are being hospitalized for trauma. But there’s no sign of Iqbal. He’s not at his home.”
The Precinct was filling up with people. One of the officers at the front desk snapped at a civilian. “We’re a little caught up at the moment, sir. Would you please take a seat!”
“But I need to talk to someone about the shooting. I was –”
“Have a seat and we’ll get back to you!” the officer yelled, and the civilian meekly returned to the waiting area, where countless others were seated for the same reason.
“I don’t know, though,” Sterner muttered, turning Connor’s computer screen around to take a look at Mohammed Iqbal’s file. “He’s never had a criminal record. Not even a parking ticket. The guy’s completely clean. What if his car was stolen, and we’re just going on a wild goose chase?”
Merson considered it for a moment and added before Ryan could protest. “Yeah, and the whole thing happened in less than fifteen minutes? 140 people in 15 minutes at an NRA Convention? It’d require some serious skill to carry that out without getting hit…”
“The count’s 185,” a nearby uniformed officer corrected him. “And rising…”
They turned towards the back of the bullpen, as the sound of someone swearing traveled through the corridor from the Command Centre.
“Captain?” Merson asked.
“He’s been going crazy in there,” Connor whispered. “It’s 3.25 now. Almost 45 minutes since the suspect fled. If we don’t get him within the next thirty minutes, the guy could vanish. Remember the last time we had to mount a 24-hour manhunt in this damn city?”
They fell silent as the phones continued ringing and police officers manned their desks, frantically taking down notes. Suddenly the city had come alive, and people were spotting the suspect at every street corner.
“And how the hell did this leak to the media?” Merson lamented as he scanned the bullpen.
“It doesn’t have to leak, does it,” Sterner countered. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure out we’ve unleashed a manhunt. Cops are heading down to every shady spot in the city, knocking on doors, checking in alleyways…”
His voice trailed off, and the others nodded in agreement. The noise level in the Precinct was creeping upward.
“They’d sent squad cars to the guy’s house, you know,” Connor noted. “In case he was planning to pull a murder-suicide. His folks can’t believe he’d do such a thing…”
Sterner straightened up, eyes staring off into the distance. The angry rants of Captain Wilson echoed behind him, but the veteran cop moved forward, as though possessed. His partner noticed the expression on his face and got up to join, sensing something was wrong.
They pushed their way through the bullpen, past cops who were pacing around desks until they were near the front desk. For a moment Sterner was still, and his partner stood right behind him, unable to explain the tightness in his chest.
The next moment Sterner pulled his gun and pointed it at the man sitting in the middle of the waiting area, yelling so loudly his voice cut through the noise.
“Put your hands in the air! Now!”
Every other cop took a second to understand what was happening, and then almost at once pulled their guns as well, pointing towards the meek little man who’d been sitting there for over twenty minutes, unsuccessfully waiting to talk to someone in charge.
They’d found Mohammed Iqbal.
Chapter Four
Bremmer Plaza Hotel was filled with people who were either trying to contain a crime scene or exploit it. The local police had somehow managed to set up blockades at the front desk, and miles of yellow tape snaked around the ballroom, lounge area, and the restrooms, reminding everyone of just how extensive the carnage was.
Scores of media outlets had descended onto the hotel, crowding up against the steel fences placed at the entrance. News crews set up their equipment swiftly, scouring for the right angle. Within an hour of the last gunshot being fired, over two dozen reporters were chattering away mere meters from the first dead bodies, reporting on every bit of news they could get their hands on.
Anyone flipping through the main news channels on a loop would have found the difference in content amusing, if not a little disconcerting. Every anchor stood in front of the same backdrop, jostling to make sure they were the only ones caught in the frame. But the talking points began to diverge right after stating that a mass shooting had taken place.
One of the only ones on the scene who seemed disgusted by such disparity in news coverage was the one who’d spent a career trying to break stories the hard way. A Pulitzer Prize winner who’d burnt every bridge he’d ever crossed, Arthur Walsh now stood in the garden on the west side of the hotel, shaking his head at the media circus that was just getting started.
“Long live cable news,” he muttered, so softly and bitterly that his fresh-faced assistant had to turn around and raise an inquisitive eyebrow.
“What’s the matter old man, hate all of visual media?”
“If that’s what all of this is, sure,” Arthur said sourly.
“And why is that?”
Arthur knew the kid, who was younger than his own son, was just trying to bait him. Probably had his mobile camera on so he could post a funny video on the internet about an old man railing against the world.
“No seriously, Arthur, I want to know your take on news channels. Is there a concrete reason you hate them?”
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure this thing out junior. Flip through them yourselves and try to tell me what exactly happened here.”
“Well, for starters, we’ve just endured the worst mass shooting in the history of the nation, and by extension perhaps the whole world.”
“Alright, and who do you think did it?”
“I don’t know, some gun nut who had a point to prove?”
Arthur raised his eyebrow and shook his head, one after the other. “Right, and why of all the places, would he attack an NRA convention?”
“I honestly don’t know, but god, the irony is crazy, right?”
The assistant, whose official job title was Technical Producer, was spending half his energy scouring the news and his twitter feed simultaneously. That’s what annoyed Arthur the most. Talking to the top of someone’s head instead of their face.
“Do you have a timeline yet?” Arthur asked, tapping his notepad. They’d been at the scene for almost twenty minutes, and he still didn’t know where to start. This wasn’t how he’d pictured his 59th year in existence. Standing next to a kid who’d barely graduated from college, working for an online website that was inexplicably popular and claimed to want him for his experience and writing skill, neither of which they personally had on their staff of fifteen. And now, standing next to perhaps the most talked-about crime scene of the decade, and without a clue as to how to cover it, Arthur knew his journalism professors would probably be writing disparaging commentary about him from the grave.
“Check this out,” the kid said, and Arthur immediately knew he was about to be subject to yet another instance of technical wizardry. Sure enough, he leaned forward as a laptop was flipped around. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s the timeline,” the assistant said, sounding hurt. “Check it out, we have the approximate time of when the shooting started, the time of when it ended, where the 911 calls originated from…. basically, the timeline you asked for.”
Part of Arthur’s brain was admittedly impressed by the work that’d been put into the timeline. There were timestamps, little inverted balloon pins scattered around the schematics of a map, presumably that of the hotel, as well as small crosses trailing from one end to the other. And then a smaller, yet more important part of the brain, the one that tied facts together and snarled whenever there were holes in them, took over.
“This is utter crap!”
For a second the 22-year-old looked genuinely hurt, but the expression morphed into one of defiance. “Yeah? Well, let’s see you put together something half as good within an hour!”
Arthur dialed back his anger and tried again. “Look, kid, the work you’ve done…. it’s…. fancy, alright?”
Thankfully the assistant understood it was code for pretty impressive. He nodded solemnly, signaling for his colleague to continue.
“But here’s the thing. This – this just doesn’t make sense. For one thing, the duration is too short. You’re telling me this massacre was over in fifteen minutes?”
“Approximately, yeah, why not?”
Arthur Walsh took one of his signature pauses, accompanied by a deep sigh that his ex-wife so despised she’d chucked glass plates at him the last time he used them with her.
“Do you know how many mass shootings I’ve covered?”
A quick shake of the head.
“48 of them…”
“Jesus! Just how old are you, man?” The assistant guffawed, flashing a reconciliatory smile.
“…In the last twenty years, mind you.”
“Oh.”
“And out of all of them, this is the one that smells the fishiest.” Arthur Walsh looked around, wishing he was inside the hotel rather than in the outside garden. “All of this…. this has happened too fast.”
His assistant was about to respond but his phone chirped loudly. Head down, wavy, unkempt hair addressing Arthur, he spoke in short bursts.
“Damn. It looks like they caught him. The guy. The shooter. Huh. Damn, check this out. Looks like he just walked into the police station! How crazy is that!”
Arthur’s eyes narrowed as he stepped forward. “Walked into the police station? Just one guy? Unarmed?”
“Err…. I don’t know. There are just two bloggers on Twitter who’re reporting it. Give it a few minutes, the big guns will pick it up…”
“Ah, Twitter. The frontline of journalism…” Arthur Walsh muttered, losing interest in the phone and its slave. He felt old, and out of place. What he wouldn’t have given to be back in his office, twenty, thirty years ago, tapping on a typewriter. The future sucked.
There was a tap on his shoulder, and the assistant shoved a giant tablet in front of him. “Man, you really look like you need something to cheer you up. Watch this.”
Arthur was about to protest, more out of habit than anything, but the image in front of him, almost static, arrested his tongue. A few seconds later words trailed out of his mouth.
“Wait….is this….”
The young man puffed his chest, looking marginally less like a bored pothead. “Yup. When we got here, I just thought I’d let the drone fly. And turns out it was a pretty smart decision, eh?”
There were countless conflicting thoughts, commands, and rebukes clashing in the old man’s head, but Arthur finally verbalized the most pressing one. “You have a drone inside the hotel right now?”
“Yeah, this is live. All from top of one of the chandeliers. Have to admit, it’s a pretty cozy spot, eh? Not too high, and the lighting is perfect. See?”
The seasoned journalist knew he should admonish the reckless young man, for the possible felony he was committing by spying on an active crime scene. But as the image flicked to life, relaying everything that was happening in the hotel’s main ballroom, at the heart of the action, Arthur Walsh only had one thought.
Maybe the future wasn’t so bad.
*
To them, Mohamed Iqbal looked like a terrified mouse.
The elementary school teacher had a near oval face, with round spectacles covering round, wide eyes that were presently looking about in absolute fear. His hair was neatly parted to one side, and in any other situation, he could’ve passed for a nerdy accountant or a nervous professor.
“He looks so…” Captain Wilson muttered under his breath as he stared at the giant television screen in front of him, “harmless.”
A moment later the veteran police officer snapped his fingers as he regained focus.
“Do we have the camera feed yet?” He asked, turning around to face the room.
Ten of his top officers were gathered in the briefing room, occupying the first two of the twenty or so rows of chairs. The air was thick with nervous energy; most had rushed in just seconds earlier, and they were coming to terms with the fact that the suspect had just walked into the Precinct.
One of the men tapped away on a laptop and held up a hand. “We’ll have them in a second, boss.”
“Alright, listen up, we need to get this rolling right away. Pierce, Johnson, coordinate with CSU. I want three units at the suspect's house. Three, you understand? We need to sweep the whole place in half hour's time."
Pierce nodded sharply. "What are we looking for?"
"Anything," the Captain growled, glancing at the timid man on the screen. "Don’t let the look fool you. This guy could be a real psycho. Get the Bomb Squad ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if he'd wired the whole place to blow."
A few of the men exchanged glances. Some were grim, others less worried.
"Murphy, Lewis, head over to the Hotel. We need to get forensics started. Coordinate with the Coroner's office. The faster we bag the evidence, the faster we nail this guy."
Detectives Merson and Sterner exchanged looks. Something was bothering them, and the Captain was in no mood to know what.
"Merson, Sterner, you two get the privilege of cracking this guy. I want you to get in there, and get me a signed confession," Captain Wilson said, slapping his hands together in relish. "Listen up everyone, we've got one chance to bag this one. Let's make sure we do it for this great city, alright?"
It was clear the rest of the men shared the detectives’ confusion. They looked around; no one seemed to have the courage to ask the question.
Finally, it was the youngest, perhaps most foolish of them who raised a hand sheepishly. "Hey Boss, just a quick question," he said, as though about to crack a joke. "What about the Feds? Aren’t they gonna be handling this?"
It was what everyone wanted to know, but the rest had enough experience with the Captain to know better than to ask. They looked down, and the young officer was caught in the Captain's furious gaze.
"Hey Berner," he rasped, moving forward. "Where did the shooting take place?"
Officer Berner's smile disappeared. "At - at the Bremmer Plaza Hotel, sir."
"And how far is that Hotel from this Precinct?"
"It's - about five miles, sir."
"Then why the FUCK," the Captain roared, inches away from the young officer's face now, "would the FBI be investigating it, huh?"
Officer Berner shriveled into his seat, and the rest of them remained silent. Captain Roger Wilson took a deep breath, stepped back, and scanned the faces of his men.
"Let me make this clear to all of you," he said with strained patience. "This shooting happened in our city. We are the ones who are gonna handle it, is that clear? We're not going to just hand it over to the Feds or whoever else comes asking. So, let's all just -"
