He laughed. “The guy who sold it to me said it has a crisp palate of strawberry and crunchy apple gorgeously rounded out by light toasty undertones. But I like your description better. It kind of captures our philosophy of locally sourced fresh food, a range of fine but affordable wines, and minimal pretensions.”
“Minimal pretensions?”
“Yes. That means I will now attempt to give you the grand tour of the seven different appetizers on this platter without once saying, ‘La-di-da.’”
His descriptions were funny, and the food was every bit as good as Cheryl and Zach had promised it would be.
“This is about the point where I would normally say, ‘Tell me about yourself,’” Shane said as they dug into the appetizers. “But Dr. Cheryl gave me a complete dossier on you, so I already know the answers to most of the traditional first-date questions—where you’re from, where you went to school, what you do for a living. So how about you tell me something Cheryl might have left out?”
“Let’s see,” Kylie said. “Did she tell you my favorite action movie?”
“No.”
“How about my favorite Christmas movie?”
“No.”
“They’re the same movie,” Kylie said.
“Really? Which one is it?”
“Back off, pal,” Kylie said. “That’s a second-date question.”
Shane laughed. “Okay, what did Cheryl tell you about me?”
“She gave me a list of culinary schools you went to, all of which I’d heard of, and she told me you were an apprentice to some famous chef in Switzerland, and I was duly impressed even though I’d never heard of the guy.”
“That’s terrible profiling,” he said. “It makes me sound like I’ve spent my entire life in the kitchen.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Heck no. When I was twenty-three I didn’t see the inside of a kitchen for eight solid months,” Shane said.
“Sounds like jail time.”
“You think like a cop. No, I hiked the Appalachian Trail—all two thousand one hundred and ninety miles of it—with my friend Pat.”
“Pat-rick? Or Pat-ricia?”
“Back off, pal,” he said. “That’s definitely a second-date question.”
Three courses followed the appetizers, each paired with a different wine, and by the time they were finished, Kylie had decided that Shane Talbot was too much fun and too damn sexy to be one-and-done.
The restaurant was bustling, but he never once turned to look at the crowd. She’d been married to Spence for eleven years, and she couldn’t remember a single dinner when he’d spent an entire evening completely focused on her.
“I hope you saved room for dessert,” Shane said.
“Dessert, singular? I got through seven appetizers because I was starved, but I couldn’t possibly handle a heaping platter of multiple desserts.”
“Just one, I promise.” He twirled his fingers in the air, and a waiter arrived with two bowls and set one in front of each of them.
Kylie looked at it, leaned down and inhaled the sweet aroma, then finally picked up a spoon and tasted it.
“Butterscotch budino with salted caramel sauce,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this, but this is hands-down my favorite dessert.”
“No kidding,” Shane said, straight-faced.
“You knew that, didn’t you?” she said. “But how? It doesn’t sound like something Cheryl would put in her dossier.”
“You’re right. I had to call her up and ask. You like it?”
“Darn tasty,” Kylie said, taking another spoonful.
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You tell me your favorite action movie slash Christmas movie now, and I will tell you a deep dark secret that nobody knows—not Cheryl, not my mother, no one.”
“Deal,” Kylie said. “Die Hard. It’s also my favorite Bruce Willis movie, so it’s actually a cinematic trifecta. What’s your deep dark secret?”
“I had two desserts waiting in the wings,” he said. “I signaled for the budino because I’m hoping for a second date.”
“Your meddling mother and your complicit cousin will take all the credit,” she said. “But absolutely.”
She took another spoonful of the creamy dessert, and the sugar shot straight to her wine-mellowed brain.
Damn, she thought. A girl could get used to this.
CHAPTER 43
It’s been said that if Gerri Gomperts ever closes her diner, she should go work for Internal Affairs. That woman knows more about the private lives of cops than anybody at IAB.
“Would you like to know how your partner’s date went last night?” she said as soon as I walked through the door.
“Do I look like I want to know?” I asked.
“You look like a guy who’s trying to act like he doesn’t care,” she said. “But who are we kidding, Zach? You can’t wait for me to tell you.”
“Why do I get the feeling that I’m not going to get breakfast until I let you tell me something? How about you just give me the top line. No details.”
Gerri turned on a grandmotherly smile. “It went well.”
“Great. I’m happy for her.”
The smile broadened. “Very, very, verrrrrry well.”
“I said no details.”
“That’s not a detail. It barely qualifies as color commentary. I’ve got more. Are you sure you’re not even just a little bit curious?”
“The only thing I’m curious about is how the hell you managed to dig up so much dirt on Kylie’s date this early in the morning.”
“Cheryl is in a booth in the back. Women talk, Zach. She told me everything she knows.”
“She told you or you pumped it out of her?”
“Is there a difference?”
I ordered breakfast and walked to the rear of the diner. I gave Cheryl a morning kiss and plopped down in the booth across from her.
“Kylie and Shane really hit it off.”
“So I heard.”
“She called early this morning to thank me for fixing them up. I told her she should be thanking you. It was your idea.”
I shrugged. It hadn’t been my idea, but we’d come too far for me to undo that misconception.
“He asked her out on a second date,” Cheryl said.
“I’m sure that’s going to make Aunt Janet very happy,” I said.
“Speak of the devil,” Cheryl said, looking over my shoulder.
I turned around, half expecting to see Shane’s mother. But of course it was Kylie.
“Good morning,” she said. She sat down next to Cheryl and stared across the table at me. “You’ve got a future as a matchmaker, partner. Last night was a home run.”
I responded with a lame smile, but the baseball reference made me think of my high-school days when first base, second base, third base, and home run were metaphors for levels of sexual activity. I shook the thought out of my head.
“Tell him the best part—the dessert story,” Cheryl said.
I didn’t know if I wanted to hear about any of the parts, much less the highlight of the evening. I was thinking about how to exit gracefully when Gerri came to my rescue.
“Your breakfast is ready,” she said. “You said to go, right? It’s at the register.”
“Where are you going?” Kylie said. “Why don’t you stay and eat with us?”
Left unsaid: And hear all about my fabulous night with Shane Talbot.
I thought about it. The past nine months had been hell for Kylie. Her husband started popping Percocets like gummy bears, then graduated to a full-blown heroin addiction, and finally dropped off the grid completely.
Kylie had put in a lot of hours since Sunday, and she’d looked beat when she left work last night. But this morning she was totally pumped.
“Zach,” Gerri said, rolling her eyes at me as if I were missing the fact that she was there to bail me out. “To go or not to go? That is the question.”
“Thanks, but on se
cond thought, can you please unwrap it and bring it to the table? I’m going to stick around for a while.” Gerri gave me a nod of approval and left without another word.
“So,” I said, “tell me the dessert story.”
Kylie smiled. She looked happier than I’d seen her in a long time. Glowing, actually.
I sat back and basked in the glow.
CHAPTER 44
We were just finishing breakfast when I got a call from Jamie Gibbs.
“I’m tired of sneaking around like some teenage kid breaking curfew,” he said. “I’ve got a crazy schedule today—a morning meeting at the network, lunch with my biggest cosmetics client, then I’m joining my mother at a fashion show in Brooklyn, after which we will be hosting a dinner in a private room at a restaurant on the East Side.”
“Thank you for keeping me informed,” I said. “It makes it easier on us.”
“You don’t get it, Detective. I’m not trying to make it easy for you. I’m giving you fair warning to back the hell off. I don’t want to be tripping over a bunch of nanny cops, especially when I’m with my mother. Understood?”
Before I could answer, he hung up. I filled Kylie in on what had just transpired, then I called Rich Koprowski and told him to keep the phone tap on Gibbs but to give him a wide berth—even wider if Veronica was around.
“So Jamie is calling the shots now?” Rich said. “He’s laying down the ground rules on how we should be doing our job?”
“Kylie and I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said, “but he’s our main conduit to the kidnapper. If he feels like we’ve got him under a microscope, we risk alienating him entirely. Give him some space. Some cooperation is better than none at all.”
Our day didn’t get any better once we were upstairs. Benny Diaz and his crew at TARU had combed the proof-of-life video looking for a clue and listening for a sound that might help us identify where it was recorded, but they’d come up empty. Dodd had been smart enough not to shoot the video with a cell phone, which would have given us GPS tracking coordinates. Instead, he’d shot it with a GoPro camera.
Then we checked in with Bill Harrison at the DA’s office. He didn’t have any good news either.
“The network lawyers know we’re trying to prevent them from airing any more hostage videos,” he said, “so they’re screaming ‘freedom of the press’ to anyone who will listen. I might just as well be trying to shut down an NRA convention by telling the court, ‘Those guys have got guns, Your Honor.’ No judge wants to fly in the face of the Second Amendment. Or, in this case, the First.”
And just when we thought our morning couldn’t get any worse, it did. It started with a tweet. ZTV had a fresh-from-the-oven-new Erin Easton video, and they turned to social media to drum up an audience.
By ten that morning about thirty cops were gathered around the TV set in our break room and millions of people were tuned in across the country and around the world.
This episode started just like the previous one—the spinning graphic that turned into a newspaper with ZTV NEWS BULLETIN on the masthead. It spun again and morphed into a picture of Erin, but this time the producers outdid themselves on the headline.
ERIN IN EXILE, it said.
There were a few groans from the cops in the room. But they weren’t the jeers of ridicule for an opponent who’d played dirty. They were more like those involuntary sounds of frustration you make when you realize that you’ve underestimated your adversary, and he’s at the top of his game.
The camera cut to the newsroom set, but the anchor desk had been replaced by a sweeping arc of a Lucite table and five chairs. Brockway was on the far left, and he introduced himself and then the other four members of his panel: a psychologist, a forensic accountant, a special agent with the FBI, and, of course, at center stage, looking drawn and tired, Jamie Gibbs.
“You think we gave him too much space?” Kylie asked.
“Short of cuffing him to a radiator pipe, do you think we could have stopped him?” I said.
The digital clock at the bottom of the screen was still keeping track of the time since Erin was abducted. It was now at 2 DAYS / 14 HOURS / 26 MINUTES.
Another five minutes passed while Brockway lied to the world about how ZTV had come to be in possession of the video he was about to show.
“The outcry from Erin’s fans was so overwhelming that the kidnapper wanted to assure her supporters that she was safe and unharmed,” Brockway said. “He made the latest tape and sent it to ZTV trusting that we would air it, knowing that public opinion and the Constitution of the United States of America were on our side.” Brockway left out God, but he took a long pause after “public opinion” and cast his eyes heavenward. Any idiot could fill in the blank.
The video was a little shy of three minutes long. Erin looked as drawn and tired as Jamie. There were no bombshells like the one announcing the pregnancy. She just thanked her fans for their devotion, praised the network for its support, and begged her husband to do everything he could to bring her home.
The raw meat of this episode was the panel. Brockway started out by asking the psychologist what Erin was going through emotionally. The man clearly had no idea, and his answer rang as hollow as a Miss America contestant promising to do all she could to bring about world peace during her reign.
Next, Brockway turned to Sam Dobin, the federal agent, and asked him what hidden clues he saw in Erin’s body language or speech patterns. Dobin rehashed a case he’d worked on ten years ago, but he never really came up with a straight answer.
“Agent Dobin,” Brockway said, “our viewers are submitting questions on social media, and here’s one that has come up often. Why isn’t the FBI handling this case?”
It felt as if everyone in the break room collectively leaned forward. “Yeah, asshole,” one cop yelled. “Why aren’t you bailing us out?”
“Excellent question, Mr. Brockway,” the agent said. “And one I’m sure the powers that be in Washington have posed to the director of the Bureau. The simple reason is that, from the outset, the kidnapper has been communicating with the NYPD. We were willing to watch that play out. But when that communication breaks down—and believe me, it will—we’ll be stepping in.”
“Hopefully,” Brockway said, his tone somber, “it won’t be too late.”
He then turned his attention to Jamie. “I’m assuming there have been ransom demands. Can you tell us how much they’re asking for?”
“I can’t comment on that,” Jamie said.
“Can’t comment? Or can’t afford?” Brockway said.
Jamie sat back in his chair, looking like he’d been blindsided.
Brockway raised a hand. “Please don’t take offense. I’m here to help. There’s a lot of public pressure on you to pay whatever the kidnapper asks. Roger Levenson here is a forensic accountant, and we’ve asked him to do an analysis of the Gibbs family fortune. Roger?”
“There’s a lot of false information online,” Levenson said. “Websites that know nothing about Mr. Gibbs will claim to reveal his net worth just to generate viewer interest. But I know where to look, and from what I can tell, most of the wealth is held by Jamie’s mother, Veronica Gibbs.”
“Interesting,” Brockway said. “Jamie, have you talked to your mother about paying for Erin’s release?”
Jamie looked lost. Whatever he’d been promised would happen, this wasn’t it. Each panelist had a glass of water in front of him, and Jamie, stalling for time, took a sip from his. “I don’t know…I…if I feel I need help from my mother, I’ll ask her.”
“Save your breath.” It was the psychologist.
“Dr. Goodman,” Brockway said. “Strong words. Are you suggesting that just because there’s bad blood between Jamie’s mother and his new wife, Veronica won’t come to the aid of her son’s unborn child?”
“No. I’m saying that the only child Veronica Gibbs cares about is her boy Jamie. Erin Easton stole him away from her, and now that Mama’s got him back
again, why does she need Erin and the baby?”
“Fuck you!” Jamie screamed, and he tossed the entire glass of water in the TV doc’s face. Then he lunged at the man, and the two of them went down to the floor. The FBI agent jumped in to try to break it up, the accountant backed away from the table, and the director cut to a close-up of Brockway.
“Heated moments. Trying times,” he said. “We’ll be right back after these important messages.”
They cut to a commercial, but Kylie and I didn’t wait for Brockway to come back. We left the room, ran downstairs to the car, and made a beeline for the arrogant bastard’s office.
CHAPTER 45
Don’t say a word,” Kylie said. She flipped on the lights, hit the siren, and barreled through the red on Lexington.
“Why would I say a word?” I responded, buckling my seat belt. “Oh, do you mean because running hot to a nonemergency is a flagrant violation of traffic safety, departmental policy, and common sense?”
“Who’s to say this isn’t a life-threatening emergency?” she yelled over the high/low wail of the siren. “Clearly that TV asshole is playing fast and loose with Erin’s.”
“I love your logic. Save it for the inquest after you bowl over a couple of pedestrians.”
She slowed down, turned off the siren, hesitated, then killed the flashing lights. “You feel better now, Zach?”
“Much better. And much, much safer.”
“That whole bit with the psychologist was a setup,” she said. “Brockway baited Jamie, and then the shrink moved in for the kill.”
“I’m in violent agreement,” I said.
My phone rang. It was Koprowski with an update on Jamie. “Elvis has left the building,” he said.
“Just stay with him,” I said. “We’re on the way to the studio to get our hands on the new video.”
“Why bother?” Koprowski said. “I heard on TV that the feds are taking over the case.”
“That would be funny if you and I were the only ones who heard it, but I bet everyone at One PP was watching, and none of them are laughing.”
It took us fifteen minutes to get to the network headquarters, storm the reception area, and demand to see Harris Brockway.
NYPD Red 6 Page 13
