“Tell me,” I said. “Is he Asian?”
“Profiling is bad for you, Coop. His name is Henry Dibaba,” Mike said. “His parents emigrated from Kenya thirty years ago. He’s twenty-two. No worries, he’s a citizen.”
“What does he do at the zoo?” I asked.
“Night shift. Henry works eight P.M. to eight A.M. He called in that he’d be late last night—which fits our time frame—and he was gone, as expected, by the time I got the heads-up a while ago about his premiere on the CCTV street scenes.”
“You like him as our bomber?”
“Too early to tell,” Mike said. “I couldn’t ID either of them. You think you can?”
“No way. But there should be more video from other avenues in that grid, don’t you think?”
“I do. These tech analysts are working as fast as they can.”
“Last night,” I asked, “how many people were on staff at the Central Park Zoo?”
“Just a handful. There are two guys who work security—one of them let Henry in at that gate when he arrived. The rest are animal keepers and feeders.”
“Only two security at night?”
“Don’t forget,” Mike said. “This little zoo is inside Central Park. So you’ve got an entire police precinct—not a miniature substation like in the Bronx—surrounding it, protecting it. It’s not hundreds of acres of wilderness in the Bronx, like the big one is. That’s so much harder to patrol.”
“Understood,” I said. “But both are run by the Wildlife Conservation Society?”
“They are,” Mike said. “And the connection proved helpful to me.”
“How?”
“So Henry is a feeder. He’s in charge of midnight snacks for the snow leopards.”
“Love those cats.”
“But he’s not your kind of guy,” Mike said. “His passion is snakes, the bigger the better.”
“Spare me,” I said.
“Henry likes feeding rats to the blood pythons and tree boas. Keeps him busy at night. He’s a herpetologist at heart.”
“Oh, Henry! How I hate snakes.”
“So he used to live with his parents in Brooklyn,” Mike said. “Moved out last year to a girlfriend’s house, but she said he split from her a couple of months back. She said Henry took his favorite gopher snake with him when he left, so she’s pretty sure he’s done with her.”
“The zoo doesn’t have a more current address?”
“Nothing. Henry shows up for work on time—usually—and does the deed. Some people don’t mind handling live rats, and others can deal with slimy serpents. But very few folk like to do both. In fact, Henry used to work at the Bronx Zoo but requested a transfer to Central Park.”
“Recently?” I asked.
“Two months ago.”
“Did you run a rap sheet?”
“Yeah, the snake’s got a couple of assaults, Coop. One attempt at strangulation and—”
“No games. Henry Dibaba, not the serpent,” I said. “I’ll pull a better escape from this place than Houdini unless you keep me in the loop.”
“Henry’s got two collars,” Mike said. “Both in the Bronx. Low-level felony for a controlled substance, pleaded down to a misdemeanor and fine because it was his first arrest.”
“What drug?”
“Patience, kid. One PP is pulling up the records now.”
“What’s his other arrest?”
“Henry took one of his snakes for a ride on the C train,” Mike said. “Just a harassment of some kind. The lady sitting next to him fainted when the snake poked his head out of a Barnes and Noble book bag. But it’s opened a new vista for the US attorney.”
“How?”
“Prescott has subpoenaed a list of all the employees at Wildlife Conservation—both zoos and the society’s staff—and Animals Without Borders,” Mike said. “We’ll be running record checks on everyone. Amazing what the feds can do that we can’t. They’re also going to put all the names into passport control. See who’s been traveling where. Even if we can only find some of the low-level runners this way, they can eventually lead us to the head of the enterprise.”
“That’s a needle in quite a big haystack,” I said. “People like Deirdre Wright and Stuart Liebman—a lot of the other employees, too—have to go abroad.”
“No harm in knowing who’s dancing with the animals, and who shouldn’t be.”
I had walked back and forth so many times I was leaving footprints in the carpet.
“Why can’t you come up here for dinner, Mike?” I asked, feeling restless and removed from my routine.
“I’m short one department car, Coop, until the lieutenant replaces it. Remember that?”
“Mine’s in the garage.”
“Against the rules. You just hunker down and listen to Kate and Jimmy,” Mike said. “I’ll call you later.”
At five o’clock, Sister Louise came over with a man she introduced as a staff physician. He took my blood pressure, asked me five innocuous questions about my mental health, offered to listen to me if I wanted to vent, and doled out a single sleeping pill to get me through the night.
As in most institutions, the dinner plan included an early meal. Three of the nuns walked over with trays—some unidentifiable fish covered in a thick white sauce, an underdone baked potato, and a soft roll with margarine on the side. I probably wasn’t the only patient on a bland diet—I think that’s all the kitchen had in its repertoire.
Jimmy and Kate were both hanging out with me for the evening, doing all they could to pretend it was not an assignment. One of them occasionally went outside to check the perimeter of the building and walk down the main driveway, following the six-o’clock curfew, to make sure there were no unwelcome visitors making their way onto the property.
The cottage was way too small for three of us to have a comfortable evening with no TV to divert us. I made as much small talk as I could and was grateful that Vickee had packed a volume of Conan Doyle stories that she found next to my bed. There was nothing like Holmes to get me out of a funk.
Mike called at ten. He was in Queens, having dinner with Vickee and Mercer. I envied him the normalcy of life in the home of our dearest friends. I didn’t know the Final Jeopardy! question he answered for me—no surprise—since the category was physics. I said good night to him, then to the detectives, before washing up and getting in bed to read.
I took my pill—my sleeping draught, as Conan Doyle would have it—and before Watson could engage me in the tale of the creeping man, I fell asleep.
“Alex?”
I heard my name and sat up in bed, glad that I had left a light on in the bathroom. The small clock next to my bed showed that it was 2:53 A.M.
“Sorry,” Kate Tinsley said. “I knocked but you didn’t hear me.”
“What is it?” The drug had worked. My sense of alarm had been dulled but I was unnerved enough by Kate’s voice to try to shake off the sleep.
“It’s James Prescott, Alex,” Tinsley said. “Put on your robe and come into the living room.”
“He’s called?”
“No, Alex. He’s here.”
I reached for the phone next to my bed. I was frightened by this unexpected nocturnal visit from the US attorney, and I wanted to talk to Mike.