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the victim’s left parietal, at the top of his skull, and drilled almost straight through the left hemisphere of the brain, starting with the parietal lobe, then the occipital lobe—”
    Impatiently, Weir cut in, “The point is, it was a sniper that got him. The question is: Why this guy, Harun Ahmed, a doorman at a fancy white-glove building on Central Park South, with nothing in the way of a record or anything close? One possible answer is that his wife Durriyah’s first cousin is Mahmoud Amr, who, as of two weeks ago, is a resident of the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix.”
    Fisk remembered reading about the Mahmoud Amr case. Amr bought a fifteen-year-old Chevy Trailblazer SUV listed on craigslist in New Jersey. At $2,000, he probably overpaid, given that the Trailblazer had more than 300,000 miles on it. He hollowed out the SUV’s running boards, stuffed them with $800,000 in hundreds, then resold it for $525 to a car exporter who shipped it, along with fifty-odd vehicles in similar condition, to Lebanon. There, each vehicle sold at auction for around two million Lebanese pounds, or $1,500. Amr’s thinking had been that, even if an extreme bidding war were to ensue over the Trailblazer, if it sold for a record $5,000, his al-Shabaab confederate in Tripoli would still come out $795,000 ahead.
    “Other than Muslim heritage, is there reason to believe that the victim had ties to al-Shabaab?” Fisk asked Weir.
    Chay grinned. “Doesn’t Muslim heritage automatically place someone under NYPD Intel suspicion?”
    “Actually, Muslim heritage can get you hired by NYPD Intel—my mother was Lebanese, so I learned Arabic. Wish I could’ve told you that before your story about our racial-profiling practices.”
    Weir broke it up. “Our theory is that the victim objected to al-Shabaab, but because of something he’d learned, posed a threat to an al-Shabaab operation.”
    “So is that what I’m doing here?” Fisk asked. “You want our Shabaab dossier?”
    “It would sure help if we could get a read on his sympathies,” Evans said.
    “Then I guess the question is what I’m doing here.” Fisk indicated the newsroom with a sweeping gesture. “At the New York Times .”
    Weir nodded to Ed Norman, the Times ’s director of security. Even with close-cropped black hair, a gray business suit and silk tie, the stocky Norman had the windblown look of an old-time sea captain. Fisk recalled that Norman had retired from the FBI after twenty-six years, which was unusual. Most agents who’d been at the Bureau for more than twenty years hung on until thirty, for the obvious pension benefits. After that, they commonly left to cash in, as director-of-security positions like Norman’s paid two or three times the GS-15 pay grade of $99,000, starting salary, not including the annual bonus. Rumor was that Norman’s wife’s affinity for the country-club lifestyle had won out. Norman wore a suit now that looked decent enough; Fisk had the sartorial equivalent of a tin ear, but he recognized Norman’s shoes. The distinctive boat-shaped Bettanin & Venturi loafers, handmade in Italy and fetching in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars a pair for a reason Fisk couldn’t even guess at. He’d seen them before on investment bankers, at their trials. So either Norman had materialistic inclinations of his own, or the shoes had been a gift from his wife.
    “This is the reason you’re here, Detective Fisk,” said Norman, aiming his cell phone at the whiteboard on the front wall. The whiteboard filled with an all-type version of NYTimes.com—devoid of photographs or graphics. Norman scrolled to a brief Metro section story entitled “Jogger Shot and Killed in Central Park.”
    “You guys are seeing our internal version of the paper, what we call the backstage. Reporters file here, editorial goes over copy here, and, after the piece goes live, moderators come here to choose which reader comments to post.” He lowered the