F Train by Richard Hilary Weber Read Free Book Online Page A

wore an overcoat with inside pockets, specially sewn, for the chemical bottles and for the collapsible bucket. Planning, excellent planning for the hit and for the escape. Snowstorm, outdoor stations. Definitely not your average psycho’s route. Nothing impulsive, no showing off, no bragging, no taunting. Not a peep out of them so far. They’re pros, not nutballs.”
    “It’s a fair to good shot,” Flo said. “We’ve got an intelligent, motivated killer or killers. Possibly hired? And maybe Marty’s right, maybe they’re all somewhere on the other side of the world now. Life’s a beach. And we have an FBI special agent who may or may not have known them. Then what about the woman?”
    “This morning her employer called in.” From his briefcase, Frank Murphy took out the photo of the pretty, young African American woman slumped against a subway car window, a man’s head in her lap, his right hand on a gun.
    “Marie Priester was a paralegal at a big Wall Street law firm, Deutsch and Templer. Intelligent, discreet, a model employee and still single. She lived somewhere near—you guessed it—Coney Island. So she’s on her way home here, obviously after a pretty long night out and with this guy maybe she’s been on the town with. He’s escorting her home. And now his wife is going to be crushed, Flo, she hears this, she’s devastated all over again.”
    “I’ll do the talking with Mrs. Reilly.” Questioning the widow, a woman left alone with two small children, wasn’t Flo’s idea of fun, but the widow was family lead number one, her interrogation imperative.
    “Flo,” said Frank, “one more point. You really can’t see his off-hand in the first picture, Reilly’s hand on her thigh, it’s out of focus, but one thing is clear, he doesn’t have his wedding ring on. The ring was in his right-hand jacket pocket, in that little pocket inside the regular pocket, the extra one for tickets and loose change.”
    Flo nodded. “Playing hooky. Nothing about this or the widow is going to be easy. God’s honest truth, Frank, I dread it.”
    Other truths, the more permanent truths, were harder for Flo to pin down. The dead in the F train massacre photos gave off an aura of lost people, their tableau of terror a tale told in still undeciphered ideograms waiting for an interpreter with a key to unravel their stories like some ancient disaster, a Pompeii gassed and buried and now exposed.
    A widow’s tale to tell.
    8:30 A.M.
    In the lobby of the Sconzo Funeral Home, a navy-blue velvet board set behind glass listed three wakes and the chapel rooms assigned each of the deceased.
    John James Reilly’s coffin waited for his mourners in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit.
    Frank Murphy held open the chapel’s heavy door and the three detectives stepped aside as two small children—a girl, a boy, ages about six and seven—left the chapel with an older man holding the children’s hands.
    For the first time in this case, Flo felt herself personally tipping into fear—not of the killer or killers, but of the immeasurable woe she now had to add to the widow’s burdens.
    The detectives entered the wake quietly, and with a long, soft sigh the door closed behind them. The Chapel of the Holy Spirit lay in semidarkness.
    Heads bowed, Frank and Marty, a pair of good Irish Catholics accustomed to wakes, walked directly up to the open coffin, where they knelt next to an elderly woman saying her Rosary.
    Flo approached the end of the third and last row of metal folding chairs, fifteen chairs in all, where the only mourner was a woman in black. In her thirties, blond hair cut short, an angular and pretty face, a slight build, slim shoulders, waist, and hips. The woman, her face immobile, looked up at her.
    “Mrs. Reilly?” Flo said.
    The woman nodded.
    “I’m Detective Florence Ott.”
    The widow slid over a seat and motioned for Flo to sit down.
    A younger woman wandered in looking very upset. She sank to her knees in front of