NYPD Red 6

by James Patterson

“He’s terrorizing her,” Kylie said. “And you. You did what we asked you to do. You bought time.”

  “Time? Time for what? I thought he was going to ask for a couple of million. Or maybe five. I don’t have nearly that much, but with a little time I could reach out to friends…but twenty-five million? I’ll never be able to come up with that kind of money.”

  “Jamie, it’s a negotiation,” Kylie said. “He doesn’t want to ask for so much that he winds up with nothing. He may only want five million, but he set the bar at twenty-five so that when he finally lowers his price to five, you’ll think you’re getting a bargain, and he’ll get what he wants.”

  It was complete horseshit. This was not a negotiation. Dodd had all the cards and could demand whatever he wanted. But our job was to keep the hysterical husband from going off the deep end and blowing up the investigation.

  It worked. “I might be able to get five,” he said.

  We didn’t care if he could get five million or five dollars. We didn’t want him to pay Dodd a cent.

  The tech stood up. “Guys, I’ve got Benny Diaz on the line.”

  “Put him through,” I said.

  Benny’s voice came over the speaker. “I pinpointed the call,” he said. “It came from the Four Seasons Hotel.”

  “What’s the address?” I asked, ready to roll.

  “Nile Plaza. Cairo, Egypt.”

  CHAPTER 27

  You have no idea where he’s really calling from, do you?” Jamie said. “All this big-deal, high-tech NYPD Red shit, and he can trick you into thinking he’s calling from some hotel in Egypt.”

  “He didn’t trick us into anything,” I said. “We know he’s not there. He could be right next door, but he’s got enough techno-savvy to route the call so that it looks like it’s coming from anywhere in the world. He’s smart. Everything he says and does is part of the subterfuge. Don’t take anything at face value.”

  “Don’t take anything at face value? Really, Detective?” He bolted up from the sofa. “What about the black straight-edge Ka-Bar knife? Should I not take that at face value?” His fists were clenched, his breathing shallow, his face red.

  “Calm down,” I said.

  “How the hell am I supposed to calm down? Did you hear the fear in my wife’s voice? Or am I not supposed to take that at face value either?”

  “Jamie, the knife was real,” I said. “Erin’s fear was very real, but the threat wasn’t.”

  He began pacing the living-room floor. “And how do you know that?”

  I knew it based on Bobby Dodd’s profile. He had served in the Marines, but nothing led us to believe that he was a violent criminal. He was also in love with Erin and had deluded himself into thinking they would be together for the rest of their lives. I was more concerned that Dodd would take the ransom money and disappear with Erin than I was about him killing her.

  But I couldn’t share any of that with Jamie.

  “All his threats are part of his strategy,” I said. “The more he can convince you that Erin’s life is in danger, the more likely you are to pay the ransom. He’s bluffing. His whole game plan is based on lies and deception.”

  “Then he and I have something in common,” Jamie said.

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Lies and deception. I’m not only lying to him, I’m lying to you.”

  “What are you saying, Jamie?” Kylie asked.

  “I told you I couldn’t pay twenty-five million but that I might be able to drum up five. That was pure bullshit. I couldn’t get that either. Hell, I’d be lucky to come up with a lousy million, and we can’t buy him off with that.” He stopped pacing. “That’s why you heard all that fear in Erin’s voice. She knows I have no money. Neither of us have any.

  “Erin makes millions, but she spends it faster than it comes in. She loves…” He groped for a word, then spit it out. “Things. And the more ridiculously overpriced the things are, the more she loves them. She buys these houses a million miles from where she should be living, pours a shitload of money into overhauling them, and then hardly ever lives in them. She owns a twelve-million-dollar boat that she never uses, and even though the designers give her jewelry and clothes to wear on the red carpet, that’s like, what—five nights a year? She still has to look like a million bucks the other three hundred and sixty nights, and all that comes out of her pocket.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “Me?” He laughed. “If you go online to one of those celebrity-net-worth websites, they’ll tell you I’ve got anything from sixty-six million to a hundred and fifty million dollars. I don’t know where they come up with numbers like that or how they can get away with saying it, because it’s totally bogus. But the kidnapper asked me for twenty-five million, so he must believe everything he reads on the internet.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kylie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “As soon as he said twenty-five million, you said you didn’t have that kind of money, and he didn’t even take time to blink. He came right back at you and said, ‘Mommy does.’”

  Jamie dropped down to the sofa again. “She does—twenty times over. But as she reminds me every chance she gets, it’s her money, not mine. And trust me, if I tell her she has the power to save Erin’s life, my mother won’t part with a nickel.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Let me drive,” I said as soon as we left Gibbs’s apartment.

  “You need to vent?” Kylie said, tossing me the keys.

  I didn’t answer. We got in the car, which was parked behind the forty-eight-foot mobile incident command center.

  “Millions of dollars’ worth of police technology sitting right outside his doorstep,” I said, pulling out onto Riverside Drive, “and all he can do is trash our ‘big-deal, high-tech NYPD Red shit’ because we haven’t found his missing wife less than twenty-four hours into the investigation.”

  Kylie grinned. “So then I was right. You need to vent.”

  “Damn right I do. Jamie freaking Gibbs knows how to hide behind that pussycat façade—reformed bad boy gone straight. But he can’t hide his true colors. The man takes no responsibility for coming up short on the security detail. That’s the network’s fault. We offer to talk him through a negotiation with the kidnapper, and he says he doesn’t need any help—he knows what he’s doing. Then the phone call goes south because he loses his shit, so he comes down on me. ‘What about the black straight-edge Ka-Bar knife? Should I not take that at face value?’ I wanted to whack him upside the head.”

  “Cut him some slack,” Kylie said. “He’s scared shitless because a maniac kidnapped his wife, he doesn’t have the money to rescue her, and his mother, who I’m sure made him as neurotic as he is, won’t lift a finger to bail him out.”

  “I get it. Poor Jamie. That’s still no reason to turn on the cops who are busting their humps to help him. And how come you’re suddenly so tolerant and forgiving? You usually get off on letting people know when they’re behaving badly. You weren’t exactly shy about tearing Brockway a new one.”

  “There’s a difference. Harris Brockway is an asshole. Jamie Gibbs is damaged goods. And if I had any doubt, our little visit to Cruella de Vil in her fortress in the sky clinched it. Jamie’s mother, who can exist with virtually no sleep, made a conscious decision to nap through his wedding. The last thing that man needed was a female cop yelling at him because he’s not a model victim.”

  Kylie’s phone rang. “It’s your girlfriend,” she said, looking at the screen. I figured it was Captain Cates, and Kylie was just trying to be cute, but I was wrong. It was my girlfriend.

  Kylie answered. “Hey, Cheryl, what’s going on?” A pause, then: “CJ? No, that ship has sailed—all the way to Hawaii. He’s gone.” Another pause. “Your cousin?” She looked at me and grimaced. “I don’t know, Cheryl, I’ve been fixed up with my share of my friends’ cousins before, and there’s usually a good reason why they’re available. What is this guy like?�
�

  She looked back at me to make sure I was paying attention, and then she hunched over, screwed up her face, and did a damn good imitation of Quasimodo. I smiled and looked away—eyes on the road, ears on Kylie’s end of the phone call.

  But she didn’t say a word. Cheryl must have talked for three solid minutes before Kylie said, “He sounds too good to be true. What’s the downside? He can’t be perfect, or he wouldn’t be on the market.”

  She listened for a few seconds and then said, “Married to his job? That’s not a deal breaker for me. In fact, it’s a plus. I’m not ready to get serious about—hold on, Cheryl, I’ve got another call coming in.”

  She took the second call. This time it really was Captain Cates. I listened as Kylie rattled off a series of “Yes, ma’am”s and then ended the conversation with “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  She flashed the phone and went back to the first call. “Cheryl, I’ve got to go, but what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  She hung up and turned to me. “Speed it up, Grandma. We may have just caught a break that’s going to make the governor of New York a happy man.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Another home invasion, another rich old lady, another ambulance. Same exact MO.”

  I hit the gas. “Where?”

  “Lincoln Towers on West End.”

  “There are like half a dozen buildings in the complex. Which one are we going to?”

  “None of them. We’re going back to the precinct. It happened three weeks ago.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Most cops work within the boundaries of their precincts. Criminals don’t. So it’s not unusual for detectives from opposite sides of the city to sit down and share information when one of them spots a pattern.

  But when those detectives bring a big boss to show-and-tell, it starts to become something of an event.

  Kylie, Cates, and I sat on one side of the table. On the opposite side were Detectives Al Devereaux and Paula Moss from the Two Oh and Reuben St. Claire, zone captain for three detective squads in upper Manhattan.

  Devereaux kicked it off. “Three weeks ago an ambulance pulls up to a building on West End. The EMTs tell the doorman they got a 911 call, old lady in respiratory distress—Ida Lowenthal. They go upstairs, the private nurse lets them in, the perps zip-tie and gag the two women, then walk off with seventy thou in jewelry plus another fifteen in cash plus six hundred in spending money the family left for the nurse.”

  “But they didn’t touch the nurse’s purse or any of her jewelry,” Moss said.

  “Our guys hit the jackpot—almost two million in jewelry and fifty thousand in cash,” I said. “They also took the day-to-day money from the nurse, but nothing that was hers personally.”

  “They’re either the same pair or they’re working from the same script,” Moss said.

  “We ran our nurse’s name through the system,” Kylie said. “Solid citizen, no history, so far nothing to suggest she was involved. What’s the story on yours?”

  “Same deal. Clean. But now I’d like to know if these two know each other or work for the same agency.”

  “The doorman wrote down the name on the bus—NYCC Senior Care,” Devereaux said. “He thought the CC might mean Catholic Charities, but it’s completely bogus. LPRs got a read on the plates, but they were stolen.”

  “Ours was Morningside Medical. Also phony,” I said. “What about surveillance videos?”

  “They knew where the cameras were. They had baseball caps on, and they kept their faces down, looking at the gurney. None of the images are usable. The old lady has dementia, so she was no help, and the best the nurse could give us was two males, one white, one Hispanic, about forty, very efficient—they knew what they were after.”

  “How about the stolen jewelry?”

  “Moss and I have been checking pawnshops plus eBay and a couple of dozen other websites where they might unload it, but so far nothing.”

  “We’re looking at the same MO,” Cates said. “The only difference is we’re dealing with a high-profile victim, so we have everyone from One PP to the governor’s mansion looking over our shoulder. It’s going to help a lot that you caught the pattern so fast.”

  “You can thank the boss for that,” Moss said.

  Reuben St. Claire was more than a boss. He was a leader. Everyone I knew who had worked under his command said he was the kind of guy who inspired you to be a better cop.

  “I caught it in a hurry because I spend more damn time on the computer than I do on the streets,” St. Claire said. “And now that the ball is in your court, I drove over to say two things. First is that everything we’ve got—every interview, every witness, every lead—is yours.”

  Kylie, Cates, and I knew that St. Claire didn’t have to come across town to pledge his cooperation. He was on a mission. We waited to hear what it was.

  He leaned forward. “Second is that yours are not the only shoulders being looked over. Everyone in the Bureau of Second-Guessing will be asking why we didn’t catch the perps before they started ripping off the governor’s blood relatives.

  “I know Devereaux and Moss. They’re smart, they’re thorough, and even though they’ve got a stack of open cases, this one hit home for both of them. A burglary when nobody is in the house is one thing, but when two assholes break in, brandish weapons, and rip the wedding ring right off Mrs. Lowenthal’s finger—that gets all our blood boiling. Bottom line is these guys have been busting their asses on this one. So I’m asking a favor. If you do see anything we missed, I’d appreciate a heads-up.”

  “You’ll be the first one we call, Reuben,” Cates said.

  And if I knew Cates, it would be the only call. Her mission is to track down bad guys, not help 1PP look for scapegoats.

  CHAPTER 30

  The pile of leads, tips, background information, and reports of Erin sightings on my desk had grown exponentially since we’d been diverted by the ambulance robbery, and as soon as we said goodbye to Captain St. Claire, we assigned Danny Corcoran to work with Detectives Moss and Devereaux and dived back into the Easton case.

  One of the best ways to track someone down is by digging into his financials. No matter how spartan Dodd’s lifestyle, he still needed to pay for it. There had to be a trail of money coming in and going out.

  “His only reported income is a monthly pension check from the Marine Corps,” Kylie said, reading from a confidential file we’d received from the Violent Felony Squad, the only ones on our team who knew Dodd by name. “The checks were direct-deposited to his account at the USAA bank in Clarksville, Tennessee, until March 2018, when the account was closed, and the checks were redirected.”

  “Is that when he moved to New York?” I asked.

  “No. Since then, every check has gone directly to the Wounded Warrior Project.”

  “He’s giving his entire pension to charity?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Then what is he doing for money?”

  “That’s what we have to figure out.”

  It took hours, but we found it buried in the thick file Declan McMaster had given us. Dodd had been stalking Erin for years, but in September of 2017, he fell off the grid. He resurfaced six months later.

  McMaster, who is as freakishly thorough as Kylie, figured he’d been doing jail time and decided to track down some of Dodd’s cellmates to see what he was planning next.

  But he hadn’t been locked up. Immediately after two devastating hurricanes hit the Caribbean in 2017, Dodd had signed on with a U.S.-based construction company that had been hired for the rebuilding effort.

  “Are you kidding me?” Kylie said, reading the file. “According to this, Dodd earned as much as twenty grand a week.”

  “Twenty…doing what?”

  “Helping the rich and famous restore their ravaged mansions to their former glory. He’s a skilled stonemason, and apparently requests for his services came fast a
nd furious. He could name his own price. And he did.”

  “Twenty grand a week for six months is half a million dollars,” I said. “And assuming he socked it away in a bank somewhere on the islands, it’s tax-free. No wonder he gave up his pension to help his fellow veterans.”

  “And that explains why he has nothing current in his credit-rating profile. Whatever he needs he pays for in cash.”

  If Dodd had a bank in the U.S., we could stake it out. If he had a go-to ATM or a regular gas station, restaurant, or supermarket where he used his credit card, we could track him. But he had none of those. We’d gone through an exhaustive search, and the only thing we had to show for it was that we were both totally exhausted.

  Working a kidnapping case is a race against time, and for us the mission was to find Dodd while Erin was still alive and unharmed. We had the vast resources of the NYPD at our fingertips. All we had to do was pick up the phone and ask, and we could have almost anything we wanted. There was only one thing we couldn’t get: sleep.

  “We need caffeine,” Kylie said. “You want some warm brown beverage from the break room or do you want to head over to Starbucks? I’m buying.”

  “I never say no to a free triple espresso macchiato,” I said. My cell rang. “I don’t recognize the number,” I said. “It could be Dodd again.”

  “Put it on speaker.”

  I did. “Hello, this is Detective Jordan.”

  “Detective, this is Brock.” A pause. “Harris Brockway, vice president of programming at Zephyr Television.”

  “Yes, sir, I know who you are. What can I do for you?”

  “Erin’s kidnapper sent us a proof-of-life video.”

  “Where are you?” I said. “My partner and I will be right over to pick it up.”

  “You don’t have to pick it up. You can see it on ZTV in five minutes. We’re broadcasting it.”

  “Sir, you can’t do that!” I said. “It’s a violation of—”

  “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do. We’ve been told if we don’t air it by eight o’clock tonight, they’ll kill her. It’s seven fifty-five now.”