McMaster might have claimed he was just a civilian tagging along with us, but at his core he was a cop who was used to running the show. The time reference was to let us know that he was looking for some quick answers from the crime scene guys. His words and his body language said it all. He did everything but yell, Let’s get this party started.
Kylie fielded the not-so-subtle hint. “Chuck Dryden is the best criminalist I’ve ever worked with,” she said. “He’s not as fast as some of the others, but he’s got eyes like a hawk.”
“I know Dryden,” McMaster said. “I just wish I could light a fire under him.”
“You can’t, and I can’t,” I said. “But the Chuckster is rather fond of my partner here, and I’ll bet he’s never seen her with this much cleavage. That might generate some heat.”
It did. Dryden lit up as soon as he saw his favorite detective standing at his crime scene door.
“Chuck,” she said, “I know you haven’t dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s yet, but can you at least give me an idea of what we’re looking at here?”
He nodded and walked us to the threshold of the dressing room.
I hadn’t been able to see much from the other side, but from this angle I could see an overturned chair, an empty wineglass, and a bloodstained wedding gown on the carpet.
“So the chair toppled, and the glass fell when they grabbed her,” I said. “I can’t figure out why the dress is on the floor.”
“Knowing Erin, she threw it there when she changed,” McMaster said. “She never hangs anything up. She has people for that.”
“We found this under her dressing table,” Dryden said. He held up a piece of orange plastic that I recognized immediately. It was the safety cap from a hypodermic needle.
“There’s no trace of the syringe,” Dryden said. “They probably took it with them, but they must have dropped this when they uncapped the needle, and they didn’t have time to look for it.”
He put the cap under my nose. “Smell it,” he said.
I took a whiff. Then another. “It smells like liquid dish detergent,” I said.
“I have to test it, but I’m pretty sure it’s ketamine,” he said.
“Special K,” Kylie said. “It’s a party drug.”
“Erin’s not a druggie,” McMaster said. “She’s too smart. That shit ravages your body. She says using drugs would be like buying a store, filling it with all the things you want to sell, then setting fire to it just for kicks. If that’s ketamine, then whoever took her used it to knock her out.”
“If they drugged her, where did all the blood come from?” Kylie asked, pointing at the red stains on the front of the wedding gown.
Dryden held up a pair of angle-tip forceps. Between the pincers was clamped a tiny sliver of green and gold tinged with blood.
“It’s a computer chip,” Dryden said. “We’ll be able to run a battery of tests on it when we get it back to the lab, but even here in the field, I can tell you that in addition to the blood, we found traces of skin cells snagged on some of the copper ridges, and we can make out the word Kinjo engraved on the—”
“Son of a bitch,” McMaster said. “The bastards cut her open.”
“You know what that chip is?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s called a LyfeTracker,” he said. “Erin makes only a small percentage of her income from shooting these reality shows. The bulk of it comes from endorsements. It doesn’t matter what kind of company; if they offer her enough money, she’ll hawk their product. Kinjo is a Korean tech company, and LyfeTracker is like Fitbit in that it tracks your activity, your sleep, your heart rate—all that shit. Only LyfeTracker also has a GPS function like a smartphone. They implant the chip under your skin. It’s pretty quick and easy, like getting a piercing. Once it’s in your body, the theory is if you’re out there hiking in the wilderness, and you get lost, someone who has access to your account can track you down.
“Kinjo signed her to a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal, and she shot a commercial in a bunch of different locations—the beach, the mountains, a penthouse—and in each scene she’s saying, ‘You can find me here,’ ‘You can find me here,’ ‘You can find me here.’ In the last scene she’s in the shower looking real sexy, and she says, ‘With LyfeTracker, you can find me anywhere.’
“The product worked great for a while, and then about a month ago the damn thing crapped out and stopped transmitting data. The company is working around the clock to resolve the problem before the whole world realizes LyfeTracker can’t track shit.”
“But whoever took her didn’t know that,” Kylie said.
McMaster shook his head. “If they did, they’d have known they didn’t have to cut her up. We never could have tracked her.”
Kylie turned to Chuck. “Thanks. Do you have anything else?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I told you I’m not quite ready, but if I’m right, I may have hit the mother lode.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. Forensic foreplay.
“What’s that?” Kylie asked.
“I think we have the entire abduction on video.”
CHAPTER 6
She was shooting a video when she was abducted,” Dryden said. He held up a smartphone. An excellent likeness of Erin’s face was etched into the metallic rose-gold case.
“That’s her phone,” McMaster said. “Now you really know she was taken against her will. She doesn’t even go to the bathroom without it.”
“We found it under her dressing table attached to a selfie stick when we got here,” Dryden said. “The video was still recording. Once we’d dusted and photographed everything, I turned off the camera, removed the phone from the stick, and hooked it up to this laptop so you could view it on a larger screen.”
He hit the Play button, and the picture popped on. It was a shot of Erin wearing a low-cut glittery pink top, and from the background details, it was clear that she was sitting at her dressing table looking into both the camera and the mirror as she spoke.
“The deed is done,” she said with a giggle. “I am now officially Mrs. Jamie Gibbs.” She held up her left hand and flashed a diamond-encrusted wedding band. “I wish I could have invited every single one of you to my wedding, but I couldn’t, so I decided to do the next best thing. You all know that ZTV is shooting everything, and we’re putting together a fantastic show that the whole world can watch in September. But this little private video is exclusively for my Twitter followers. I’m in my dressing room, getting ready to sing for my new husband and some of the coolest people in—”
A latex-gloved hand clamped over her mouth, and the picture scrambled as she dropped the selfie stick, leaving the camera pointed at the ceiling. Dryden paused the video.
“From here on in the picture doesn’t change until my team arrived and retrieved the camera,” he said. “When I get back to the lab I’ll be able to analyze the audio track, but for now, you’ll have to rely on your own ears.”
“Let me drive,” Kylie said, putting her fingers on the laptop’s trackpad. She hit Rewind and backed the video up about fifteen seconds. As soon as Erin said “coolest people,” Kylie froze the picture and then advanced it frame by frame so we could study the hand that came from behind.
It appeared to be male, which came as no surprise. The latex glove was an opaque light blue, which made it impossible to determine his race.
She hit Play, and I closed my eyes so I could focus on the sound. I heard a muffled cry from Erin as the man covered her mouth. It was followed by a yelp. Kylie backed it up and replayed it.
“That was more pain than fear,” Kylie said. “I think that’s when he stuck her with the needle.”
I could make out some faint guttural noises coming from Erin, then the man saying, “Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” half a dozen times.
“He’s trying to keep her calm till the drug knocks her out,” I said.
It didn’t take long. In less than ten seconds, Erin was completely silent.
For the n
ext three minutes, the sounds were indistinct. Her abductor was doing something, but I didn’t know what.
“Declan,” Kylie said, letting the tape keep running, “where was that chip implanted?”
“Right about here,” he said, tapping a spot under his arm. “It’s practically invisible.”
“I think what we’re listening to is him cutting it out,” Kylie said.
Then we heard wheels rolling, followed by the snap of clasps opening. You didn’t need to be a detective to put it together. He was getting her out of the building in a trunk.
There were some grunts as he loaded her into the box, then clasps snapping closed, wheels rolling and fading into the distance, and finally the door shutting.
Dryden stopped the video. “I’ve watched it already,” he said. “There’s nothing more for about fifteen minutes, and then you can hear the guard outside the door talking to someone. It’s followed by loud knocking, and someone yelling…wait, I have an exact quote.” He checked his notepad. “‘Come on, Erin. Your public is waiting. Time for you to knock ’em dead.’”
“That was Brockway, the network exec,” McMaster said. “He came and got me, I unlocked the door, and Kylie was right behind me. How’d you even get on the scene so fast?”
“Your security team was stoic all evening,” she said. “All of a sudden, three out of the four of them started running in the same direction. I followed.”
“Chuck, do you have a time stamp on the video?” I asked.
His eyes went back to the notepad. “She turned the camera on at seven twenty-eight. The rear door shut at seven thirty-four. End of story.”
“Maybe not,” Kylie said. “With any luck, the story continues at seven thirty-five on camera six.”
CHAPTER 7
I was happy that Benny Diaz had caught our case. Of all the computer cops in TARU, Benny is the user-friendliest.
We found him in a room about the size of a Turkish prison cell. There was no sweeping console, no bank of servers, no wall of CCTV screens, just a large wooden table, two racks of DVRs, and a couple of Acer monitors.
“Welcome to the nerve center of your entire case,” Benny said. “This security system is everything you could hope for—if you still lived in the second half of the twentieth century.” He smiled. “And yet I think I can still tell you the exact minute that Elvis left the building.”
“Seven thirty-five,” Kylie said.
He looked up at me. “She’s not only beautiful, she’s clairvoyant.”
He plugged a thumb drive into the back of his laptop. “You were spot-on about camera six. I downloaded this. The quality is on par with your average convenience-store videocam.”
A picture popped on the screen, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was the loading dock captured from two stories up by a low-tech camera under the worst possible lighting conditions.
“This is when it all starts,” Benny said. He hit Play, and a white box truck came into view and backed up to the dock. The image was so fuzzy, I knew we didn’t have a prayer of making out the license plate or the driver’s face.
“Hold on,” Kylie said. “The time stamp says six twenty-six p.m. Zach and I just saw a video where he grabbed her at seven twenty-eight. Are you telling me he hung around for an hour before he went in?”
“He pulled in at seven twenty-six,” Diaz said. “The system clock never got pushed ahead to daylight saving time.”
The driver got out. I could tell he was white, male, and about six feet tall; he was wearing tinted glasses and had a baseball cap pulled down low over his face. He opened the rear door of the truck, went inside, and came back out pushing a large box.
“It’s a musician’s road case,” Diaz said. “It’s big enough to hold a six-foot-high amp.”
“Or Erin,” McMaster said. “It’s on wheels. It’s got those big clasps on the sides. That’s what we heard on the tape. That’s our guy.”
The driver walked out of the frame.
“Do we have any other cameras in the hallway on the other side of the loading dock?” I asked.
“Nada,” Diaz said. He fast-forwarded the video until the man reappeared, which was at 6:35 on the video, 7:35 in real time. We watched as he loaded the case into the rear of the truck, closed the door, hopped off the platform, got behind the wheel, and pulled away from the dock.
“So we’re looking for a white box truck,” Kylie said. “How many of those are there in New York City?”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands. But this might help narrow it down.” Diaz froze the picture. “You see the lettering on the driver’s-side door?”
“Barely,” she said. “It’s a blur, but it looks like Chinese.”
“Or Korean. Or Japanese,” Diaz said. “Whatever it is, it’s not English, and it’s enough to help set this one apart from a lot of other white one-ton boxes.”
“Call Real Time Crime Center,” Kylie said. “Have them pull the photos captured in the past four hours from every single license-plate reader in a twenty-block radius of the Hammerstein, then check to see if any of those plates are registered to a white commercial box truck. If they get a hit, check the truck for Asian lettering on the door.”
“I’m on it,” Diaz said.
“Finding the truck isn’t going to help find Erin,” McMaster said. “This was no random snatch-and-grab. The person who did this carefully planned this whole thing. The clock on the security feed may be an hour off, but this guy showed up at the perfect time—when Erin was alone in her dressing room changing out of her wedding gown.”
“How could he even know when that was going to happen?” I said.
“All he’d have to do is follow her tweets.” McMaster said. “She doesn’t eat, sleep, pee, or shop without posting about it on social media.” He looked at his watch. “She’s been missing almost two hours. By now she’s been transferred out of the truck and onto another vehicle or a boat or a plane. Or, if he’s totally out of his gourd, she’s dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Kylie said. “He’s going to need proof of life when he makes the ransom call.”
“What makes you so sure he’s in it for the money?” McMaster said.
“Because he waited until after she’d married a millionaire to take her.”
CHAPTER 8
He waited until after she’d married a millionaire,” McMaster said, repeating Kylie’s logic. “I’d almost forgotten how smart you were.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Let’s go talk to our millionaire husband before the kidnapper gets to him.”
We stepped into the hall, where a uniformed cop was going at it with a civilian.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass who you know,” the cop said. “This is a crime scene. Turn off the camera or you’re walking out of here in cuffs.”
The man, about sixty, wasn’t taking orders. “Did you ever hear of the First Amendment? You shut me down, and I’ll have your job.”
“Declan, do you know that guy?” Kylie asked.
“Harris Brockway. He’s a suit with the network. He’s a pompous ass, but he’s got a lot of footage you’re going to want to get your hands on. I’d make nice.”
It was a politically savvy suggestion, but Kylie has never been good at making nice, especially with a pompous ass threatening a cop. “Officer,” she called out, jumping into the fray. “Can you do me a favor and give them a hand in the ballroom? I got this one. Thanks.”
The cop checked out the gold shield clipped to her blue dress, shrugged, and walked off.
Brockway checked out the blonde inside the dress, smiled, and turned on the charm.
“Harris Brockway, vice president of programming at Zephyr Television,” he said, waving for his cameraman to move in closer. “My friends call me Brock. And you are?”
“Detective Kylie MacDonald. That’s my partner, Zach Jordan. We’re investigating the disappearance of Ms. Easton, and you’re going to have to turn off that camera.”
“Please, Detective, you stri
ke me as an intelligent woman. Do I really have to explain the First Amendment to you?”
“You mean the one where Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press?” Kylie said. “No, I’ve got that one down. You can broadcast whatever you want. However, there are laws against interfering with a police investigation, which is exactly what you’re doing when you bring your camera into an active crime scene. Now, either tell your cameraman to turn it off or prepare to spend the night with him in a holding cell.”
The cameraman lowered his camera. “Hey, you work it out with her and the union, Mr. Brockway, but I didn’t sign on for no jail time.”
Brockway glared at Kylie. “Do you know how much ZTV has invested in this production?”
“I’m not here to help you put on a show, Mr. Brockway. I’ll tell you what I can do—I can impound your cameras right now and get a court order giving me access to all the footage you shot today. Or, if you’re willing to cooperate and provide me with copies, you can keep on shooting, just as long as you don’t point your lens at this side of the yellow tape.”
“Fine,” Brockway said, spitting out the word. “I’ll get you dupes.”
“And the script,” Kylie said.
“What script?” Brockway demanded.
“Mr. Brockway, I have a boss, and she has a boss, and so it goes, all the way up the chain of command to the police commissioner himself,” Kylie said. “Every one of them thinks like a cop, and eventually every one of them is going to ask the same question: ‘How do we know this isn’t a publicity stunt?’”
“Are you out of your mind?” Brockway said. “This is a reality show. There are no goddamn scripts. How could you even ask such a dumb question?”
“Erin Easton has been around since I was in high school,” Kylie said. “She’s not exactly the flavor of the week. This kidnapping—real or staged—is going to put her back in the spotlight. When you’re a detective investigating her sudden disappearance, the question isn’t dumb at all.”
NYPD Red 6 Page 3
