But this time he was no longer a spoiled rich kid pissing away his life and her money on sex, drugs, and defense lawyers. He was a married man. He had a baby on the way. How could she say no to helping her own grandchild?
He stepped into the vestibule and pulled the key card from his wallet. Would it even work? By now she might have deactivated it as punishment for his marrying the woman she called “that gold-digging whore.”
He swiped the card and heard the familiar electronic click. He opened the door and spotted her immediately. She was sitting at the table in the glass-walled conference room, flanked by a casting director, a stylist, and a photographer. They were contemplating the relative merits of three male models who were standing at the far end of the room, chests bare and bronzed, abs tight as fists, eyes as vacant as the dark side of the moon.
Jamie swung the door open. “Out! All of you!” Nobody moved. “Now!” Jamie said.
All eyes were on Veronica. Without even looking at her son, she slowly lifted her right hand and flicked it in the air. The casting director jumped up and shooed the models out of the room, and the others followed.
“This is what you were so busy with that you couldn’t return any of my phone calls?” Jamie said.
“Why bother returning them?” Veronica said. “You wouldn’t have liked what I had to say.”
“Say it now.”
“The kidnapper did you a favor. Good riddance.”
“She’s pregnant with my child!”
“How do you even know it’s your baby? You dodged a bullet, Jamie. And now you want me to pay money to bring back the one person I told you to stay away from?”
“She’s my wife. I love her.”
“And do you think she married you because she loves you?”
“Trust me, Erin knows my financial situation. She didn’t marry me for my money.”
“Of course she didn’t. She married you for my money. I’ve worked my ass off for thirty years, made a fortune, and someday it will all be yours, and you’ll have barely lifted a finger.”
“I don’t want it all. All I’m asking for is twenty-five million dollars. You can take the rest and build a monument to your empire and your ego.”
“Twenty-five million dollars?” Veronica said. “For that trailer trash? Never.”
“All my life, Mom, everything I ever wanted, every goal I ever pursued, every dream I ever followed—none of it was ever good enough for you.”
“Oh, please, Jamie, save the my-mother-is-a-heartless-bitch-who-never-loved-me sob story for your shrink. And while you’re at it, tell him that I didn’t get where I am today by negotiating bad business deals.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about giving some maniac twenty-five million dollars and hoping that he won’t murder the only person who can possibly identify him after the money is in his bank account. Of course he’s going to kill her—and I’m not going to pay him just to prove I was right.”
“You’re heartless.”
“I’m a businesswoman, and in case you’ve forgotten, you still work for me. The Young Designers Fashion Show is at the Brooklyn Army Terminal tomorrow. I will be in the front row, and I expect you to be sitting next to me.” She stood up and left the room.
Jamie lowered himself into a chair. His mouth was dry. His head was pounding. Of course that maniac is going to kill Erin, he thought. His mother was right. She was always right. He rested his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. He sat there for almost a minute before his phone vibrated in his pocket.
He didn’t recognize the number. The kidnapper? So soon? His hands were trembling as he answered. “Hello.”
“Don’t say a word,” the man on the other end said. “I know they’ve tapped your phone.”
Jamie knew the caller’s voice. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They can’t listen in on the conversation. They can just monitor that I got an incoming—”
“Which part of ‘Don’t say a word’ did you not understand? Forget what the cops tell you. Don’t trust them for a minute. They’re not on your side. They’re just like your mother. They don’t want you to pay the ransom. It’s the only way you can possibly save Erin, and nobody wants you to do it.
“Nobody except me,” the voice said. “I can get you the money. I want you to meet me in the same place where we cracked open that seven-hundred-dollar bottle of Jack Daniel’s Monogram. And don’t let the cops follow you.”
The line went dead.
Jamie stood up and took a deep breath. A hint of a smile formed on his lips. There was hope.
CHAPTER 40
Jamie took the elevator to the basement and left through the service entrance on Ninety-Second Street. The plan was to get back in an hour or two, reenter through the side door, and exit through the lobby. With any luck, Koprowski would still be waiting for him in front of the building.
NYPD had been babysitting him since Sunday night, and it felt good to be able to make his own decisions without a bunch of helicopter cops telling him what to do and how to do it. He didn’t care how much experience they had. They were on a mission to catch a criminal. His only goal was to bring Erin and the baby home safely.
He walked to Madison and flagged a cab. Harris and Anna Brockway lived in Connecticut, but they had a pied-à-terre on West Forty-Eighth. That’s where Brock had introduced him to that ridiculously expensive 94-proof bottle of Jack.
The Brockways were not to be trusted. He knew that. Erin knew that. They took good care of her, but only because there was something in it for them.
“I can get you the money,” Harris had said.
Maybe you can, Jamie thought. But what’s in it for you?
The answer became clear as soon as he entered the Brockways’ apartment. “Erin’s ratings were through the roof last night,” Brock said.
“She’s a megahit,” Anna added. “Mega, mega, mega. And the pregnancy bomb was the capper.”
“We want to do more shows,” Brock said. “We want you on camera. This thing can be the biggest hit that ZTV ever had.”
“This thing?” Jamie said. “The pregnancy bomb? A madman is deciding whether my wife lives or dies, I don’t have any idea how to save her, and all you can talk about is how well this insanity is playing with your television audience?”
“Hey, hey, calm down,” Brock said. “We both love Erin.”
“She’s like a daughter to us,” Anna said.
“We called you over here because you’re trying to pull together the ransom money, and we have a solution.”
“A deal,” Anna corrected. “ZTV is willing to pay for more Erin videos.”
“You want more hostage videos?” Jamie yelled. “One wasn’t enough? You think people haven’t gotten their fill of watching her suffer?”
“That’s the point,” Brock said. “The whole goddamn world is emotionally invested in what happens to her next. Do you understand what kind of a magnet that is? Sponsors will pay through the nose to be part of this.”
“Now you’ve gotten to the heart of it!” Jamie said, pounding a fist into the palm of his hand. “It’s all about money, isn’t it?”
“You’re damn straight it’s about money!” Brock yelled. “And instead of shitting all over the idea, you should be thanking us, because you sure as hell aren’t going to come up with twenty-five million dollars by groveling to your mother.”
The words hit Jamie like a gut punch. He put both hands on the back of a chair to steady himself. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. Your mother didn’t show up at the wedding. She’s made no bones about the fact that she hates Erin, and she—”
“No! Not that. How did you come up with twenty-five million dollars? That’s exactly what the kidnapper is demanding, and the only people who know that number besides me are the kidnapper, my mother, and the cops. Where the hell did you get it from?”
Brockway looked at his wife. Anna folded her arms across her chest
and scowled at him.
Jamie pulled the phone from his pocket. “Answer the fucking question or I will have a platoon of cops here in five minutes.”
“Erin called me,” Anna said.
Jamie sat down. “Erin…called you? When?”
“About an hour ago. I didn’t talk to whoever is holding her, but she said he was listening in. She told me how much money he wanted. I couldn’t believe it. And then she told me that you’d reached out to Veronica for help, and the bitch hadn’t even returned your calls. Is that true?”
Jamie looked down at the floor. He didn’t say a word, but Anna Brockway had her answer.
“Erin convinced the kidnapper that there was another way to get the money,” she said, “and that would be for me to negotiate a long-term contract with ZTV and ask for twenty-five million in advance. I said I would try, but I knew there was no way that would happen.
“As soon as I hung up, I talked to Brock. He came up with the idea of a series of specials. The centerpiece of each would be a new video from Erin. We’d intercut that with interviews from celebrities, commentary from police experts, a little bit of fan hysteria, and, of course, the anguished husband desperate to rescue his wife and their unborn child.”
“It would be appointment television,” Brock said. “Plus it’s right in Erin’s wheelhouse. It’s almost like a continuation of every reality show she’s ever done.”
“Right,” Jamie said. “Only instead of shopping for shoes on Rodeo Drive, she’d be chained to a radiator, sobbing her heart out.”
“Oh, Jamie, if you think that’s all she’s going to give us, you don’t know Erin Easton,” Anna said. “That girl can work an audience as if her life depended on it. And in this case, it does.”
“And you’d pay twenty-five million for a few videos like that?” Jamie said, looking at Brock.
“Are you crazy?” Brock said. “That’s the all-in price for the series. Twenty-five episodes. A million a pop.”
“Twenty-five videos? How are you going to handle the cops? That first video came in unannounced. The next time you’d be in collusion with the kidnapper. Aiding and abetting.”
“Oh, so now you’re a lawyer?” Brock said. “Listen to me, Jamie. Your mother’s not going to save Erin. The cops are not going to save Erin. You’re down to your last option. Yes or no?”
Ten minutes later Jamie Gibbs walked out of the building wondering if he’d made the right decision. He looked at his watch. He’d been gone less than an hour. Koprowski would still be parked outside his mother’s place.
He stepped to the curb to see if he could spot a cab.
“You need a ride?” a female voice said.
There was a car parked in front of the Brockways’ building. He looked in the window. Detective Kylie MacDonald was sitting behind the wheel. Her partner, Detective Jordan, came around the back of the car.
“Sir,” he said, opening the rear door. He smiled politely. But he didn’t look happy.
CHAPTER 41
It was my phone, wasn’t it?” Jamie said from the back seat. “That’s how you found me, right?”
Kylie made a left onto Eighth Avenue and headed uptown. Both of us stared straight ahead, neither of us saying a word.
Of course it was his phone. He knew we’d been monitoring it. He just didn’t know how well.
As soon as the call from Brockway came in to Jamie’s phone, TARU traced it. Had Brockway used his own cell phone, his number would have come up as one of Jamie’s regular callers. But Brockway wanted to go under the radar, so he’d used a burner.
Big mistake. That sent up a giant red flag. An incoming call from a throwaway phone practically screamed kidnapper. TARU immediately alerted me, and I called Koprowski, who told me Jamie was visiting his mother.
A minute later TARU called back to say Jamie—or at least his cell phone—was on the move.
Koprowski raced into the building to get eyes on his subject. By then, the elevator operator had taken Jamie to the basement, and he was on the run.
TARU tracked him as easily as air traffic control watches a jumbo jet cross the country. As soon as Jamie stopped moving, Benny Diaz gave us the address on West Forty-Eighth, and by the time Kylie and I got there, we had a printout of every tenant in the building.
The list was alphabetical. We stopped at B. Brockway, Harris and Anna.
Kylie waited in the car while I checked with the doorman.
“Yes, Officer,” he said. “Mr. Gibbs went upstairs to see Mr. Brockway about five minutes ago. Shall I ring up?”
“Don’t ring, and don’t say a word to him when he comes down,” I said. “I’ll take it from here.”
Ten minutes later Jamie came down, and I ushered him into the back seat of our car. He had every right to resist, but he didn’t. He was scared, confused, and so shocked to see us that he followed orders without a whimper.
Kylie drove north on Central Park West, then turned onto the Eighty-Sixth Street transverse. About halfway to the East Side, she did something very few motorists crossing the park ever do.
She turned into the parking lot of the Central Park Police Precinct and pulled into a space. The lot was filled with cop cars, and uniformed officers were walking in and out of the landmark nineteenth-century station house like extras on a movie set.
Jamie had probably figured we’d drive him back to his apartment or maybe take him into the Nineteenth Precinct to interview him. But this strange place threw him into a tailspin—which was exactly why we’d picked it.
He panicked. “Where are we? What the hell is going on?”
Kylie and I both turned around in our seats, and for the first time since we picked him up, I broke the silence.
“That’s precisely what I was going to ask, Jamie. What the hell is going on?”
“Harris Brockway called me. I went to talk to him. Is there anything wrong with that?”
“Everything is wrong with that,” Kylie said. “What is Harris Brockway going to do if it turns out you’re next on the kidnapper’s list?”
He gawked at us. “I don’t understand.”
“You told the kidnapper that you couldn’t afford to pay the ransom and that your mother wasn’t responding to your calls to save Erin and the baby. By now he could be thinking, I kidnapped the wrong person. Veronica hates the daughter-in-law. Maybe I’ll do better if I grab the son.”
“That’s insane.”
“Everything that has gone down in the past forty-eight hours has been insane,” Kylie said. “Have you counted the number of cops who are watching you? Do you think they’re all there to monitor your phone calls? You’re a target, and our job is to protect you.”
“I didn’t ask for protection.”
“Jamie, this is New York City,” I said. “If there’s a bomb scare at the bus terminal, we don’t wait for a phone call from Penn Station or LaGuardia to ramp up security. From the minute Erin Easton was abducted, everyone connected to her was in danger, and you are at the top of that list. Now, what did Brockway want?”
“Nothing.”
“He didn’t call you from a burner phone to talk about nothing.”
“He wants me to go on TV.”
“To what end?”
“I don’t know. He’s a network guy. I guess he figures people will watch.”
“And how will that help Erin?” I said. “In fact, you might say something that pisses the kidnapper off. Don’t you think it might backfire?”
“I don’t know what to think. Am I under arrest?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then we’re done here. Open the door.”
“We’ll drive you home,” Kylie said.
“No! Just let me out.”
I got out of the car and opened the rear door.
“Stop fucking protecting me,” he said, getting out. “Nobody’s going to kidnap me. And if they do, at least I’ll get to be with Erin.”
Without looking back, he crossed the parking lot and, shoulder
s slumped, trudged west along the transverse.
He looked like a beaten man—his world turned upside down, his mother abandoning him, the network sharks exploiting him.
Kylie and I were still in his corner. He just didn’t know it.
CHAPTER 42
Two hours later, after a hot shower and a mani-pedi, Kylie put on a pair of cropped white jeans, a navy off-the-shoulder top, and her favorite Tory Burch wedges. From the back seat of her Uber, she took out her cell phone and flipped the camera into selfie mode. She wasn’t taking a picture—she just wanted one last look at herself before she got to the restaurant.
Kylie tried to think of the last time she’d gone on a blind date.
College. God, I am so out of practice.
She reminded herself of why she was doing this. For one thing, she was doing her friend Cheryl a favor. Plus Zach, of all people, thought it was a good idea. And hell, it was a free dinner.
The Uber pulled up to the restaurant, and she got out. She recognized the tall red-haired man standing at the front desk from her Google image search, only he’d traded his chef’s whites for a blazer, a tattersall shirt, and a tie.
She smiled. “Kylie MacDonald.”
He returned the smile and extended a hand. “Shane Talbot. Your table is ready.”
He escorted her to a booth in the rear. “What kind of wine would you like?” he asked as they sat down.
“Surprise me,” she said.
He held up three fingers. A waiter appeared with a platter of appetizers while another set a loaf of warm fresh-baked bread and a small stone crock of butter on the table. A minute later the sommelier arrived with a chilled bottle of rosé.
The wine was poured, and Shane raised his glass. “To my meddling mother and my complicit cousin, who came up with this brilliant idea.”
Kylie touched her glass to his and sipped the wine. “Oh my God. This is…I’m not good at wine words. How about darn tasty?”
NYPD Red 6 Page 12
