Run for Your Life - James Patterson [54]
Right on time, McGinnis came barreling in, holding a copy of the Post above his head. “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?” the headline read, below the surveillance video shot of the Teacher.
“The answer is yes,” he announced, tossing the paper across the conference table. “We had an Air France flight attendant pick out our shooter an hour ago.”
Spontaneous applause ripped through the room. Thank you, God, I thought, punching fists with Beth Peters beside me. I was so juiced, I decided to let slide the way that McGinnis had said we, with no mention of exactly who we were.
Our lead had paid off! Now we actually had a real shot at this animal.
“Suspect’s name is Thomas Gladstone,” McGinnis said, handing out printouts from a large sheaf. “He’s a former British Airways pilot—lives in Locust Valley, out on the island.”
Locust Valley? I thought. Wasn’t that the place where everyone’s name sounded like Thurston J. Howell III? Pilots made decent money, but they weren’t anywhere near that level on the food chain. I wondered if that explained some of the upscale targets. Maybe Gladstone had gotten snubbed at Polo and 21, or something along those lines, and decided that undertipping just wasn’t going to cut it in terms of showing his dissatisfaction.
“We’ve got a triggering incident, too,” McGinnis said. “Turns out Gladstone was scheduled to fly out of Heathrow to New York last week, but they caught him drunk and he got the ax. And we just found his car, littered with parking tickets in the Locust Valley commuter lot.”
I nodded grimly. Now we were getting somewhere. Losing a job was high up there on the list of why people went on rampages.
“We have an arrest warrant yet?” I said.
“We will by the time we bag this skell’s sorry ass,” McGinnis said. “ESU’s waiting downstairs. Who’s up for a little trip to the Gold Coast?”
I shot up out of my chair with the rest of the surrounding cops, grinning. I’d never even touched my coffee, but for some reason I felt completely refreshed.
Chapter 55
LOCUST VALLEY’S TOWN SQUARE seemed to consist solely of slate-roofed antiques shops, boutiques, and salons. Our designated staging area was a parking lot on Forest Avenue behind something called a “coach and motor works.” Call me a philistine, but it looked suspiciously like a gas station to me.
Nassau County Bureau of Special Operations and even some Suffolk County Emergency Service police were already there waiting for us. When a cop killer is involved, interdepartmental cooperation is more than a given.
“Morning, guys,” I said, and gathered everybody over by my car for a briefing.
The Nassau crew already had surveillance set up around Gladstone’s four-acre property. There were no signs of activity there, and no one had gone in or out. Calls to the inside of his house were picked up by the answering machine. Gladstone had a wife named Erica and two co-ed daughters, I learned, but they hadn’t yet been located.
Tom Riley, the Nassau Special Ops lieutenant, tossed digital photos of the front and back of Gladstone’s house onto the hood of my Chevy. The place was a gorgeous sprawling Tudor with a covered patio and a swimming pool in back. The landscaping was immaculate—Japanese maples, chrysanthemums, ornamental grasses. Definitely not the kind of house one usually associated with homicidal maniacs.
Studying the layout, we talked strategy about how to enter. There would be no attempt to negotiate. We’d gotten the arrest warrant, and we were going in. But considering the firepower Gladstone had, plus the fact that he’d already iced one cop and put another into a coma, no precaution was overlooked.
We decided that a breach team would storm the front door while snipers covered the narrow facing windows. If Gladstone showed his face in one, he’d be going down.
Since this was my case, I claimed the honor of following right behind the breach team to search the second floor.
“That door looks pretty solid,” I said. “What are you going to use? A battering ram?”
A young, muscular NYPD ESU sergeant held up a sawed-off shotgun