“He won’t,” Kylie said. “He can’t. He’s dead.”
“That’s good news and bad news at the same time. I’m sure she’ll be relieved, but knowing she killed another human being will undoubtedly add to the PTSD. She’s going to need a lot of therapy.”
“Can we see her now?” I said.
“See her? Yes. Interrogate her? No. I’ll give you five minutes, ten max. I’m admitting her for a day or two. If you’re going to make her relive what she’s been through, at least let her get some rest first.”
She escorted us to a corner room on the top floor. Erin was lying in bed, tubes coming out of her arms, a bank of glowing screens monitoring her vital signs. Her face was pale and blotchy, her eyes vacant, her hair still damp from her life-changing shower with Bobby Dodd.
Kylie took the lead. “I’m Detective Kylie MacDonald. This is my partner, Detective Zach Jordan. We’ve been looking all over for you. Nice to finally meet you.”
Erin managed a half smile. “I know your names. He told me who you were. He talked to you on the phone.” She didn’t have to tell us who he was. “And I recognize you,” she said to Kylie. “You were at my wedding. Blue dress. Am I right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Did you catch him? He’s insane. You have to catch him.”
“We didn’t have to catch him. He was found dead on the shower floor. He can never, ever hurt you again.”
I could see the relief spread across her face. “Is it true? About Veronica? When he came back this afternoon, he told me…” She started sobbing. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m afraid that Veronica Gibbs was shot,” Kylie said. “She died instantly.”
“Oh, poor Jamie. Where is he? I can’t wait to be with him.”
“And he can’t wait to be with you. He’s on his way. Police escort, so he’ll be here soon. But first we’d like to ask you a few questions. We won’t take long. Are you up to it?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
“Do you mind if we sit down?” I asked. It was a simple request, basically unnecessary, but when you’re dealing with people who have been stripped of all their power, you give them back as much control as you possibly can.
“Please,” she said. “Sit.”
We sat.
“Let me just start by saying that we are in awe of your strength,” Kylie said. “You’re a fighter, and you came out a winner.”
“I was trained. Ari was an Israeli commando. My father hired him just in case something like this ever happened. I told my dad it was stupid, but Ari was so cute and sexy I didn’t want him to leave.” She looked up at the ceiling and waved. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“You can thank Ari too,” I said. “He taught you well.”
“One night, years ago, he brought me into a room and said, ‘You’ve been kidnapped. The bad guys will be back in an hour, and they’re going to kill you. You better have a weapon when they get here. Find one.’ Then he locked the door. I think I spent most of the time crying because there were no weapons in that room. He came back an hour later and showed me how to make five.”
“Amazing,” Kylie said. “Where did you find the blade?”
“It took me a while to figure it out. Nothing in the room looked lethal. Nothing. And then that first night he came in, he wanted sex. I never tried to fight him off. I knew better. I just lay there on the bed, breathing hard, and pretending I was enjoying it. My eyes were always closed. I couldn’t look at him but I could hear him moaning and groaning and telling me he loved me. I tried to tune him out until all I could hear was the sound of the bedsprings creaking, creaking, creaking. And all of a sudden, I knew the answer.
“I waited for him to leave and lock me up for the night. I pulled the mattress off the bed. It was one of those old-fashioned kinds where the springs are held together by metal straps. It took me hours to pry one of the springs off. Then every time I knew he was out of the house, I honed it against a metal pipe that was under the sink in the bathroom until it was razor-sharp. I never wanted to…to do what I did, but when he told me he killed Veronica, I knew he wouldn’t stop. If he didn’t get what he wanted, I was next.”
The door opened, and Dr. Paris came in. “Time’s up, Detectives,” she said. “Excuse us.”
She drew the privacy curtain around the bed and asked us to step out of the room. We stood in the doorway. A few minutes later she pulled the curtain back, and we stepped back in.
“She needs to rest,” the doc said. “She should be released by Friday. Why don’t you pick it up with her then?”
“Just one more question,” I said. “Please.”
“One more? Sure. Go ahead.”
“Erin, did he have any accomplices?” I asked.
“He’s the only one I ever saw. The only one I ever heard. The room was soundproofed. If he had a partner, I never saw him or heard him. But I don’t think so. I mean, why would he?”
“What do you mean?” I said, asking another question.
“He thought we’d have this life together. He was never going to let me go.” She laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “He thought he’d get the money.” Her speech was fuzzy, slurred. “We’d leave the country and…” She let out a long sigh.
“And what?”
“We’d live…hap…” She fought to stay awake. “Hap’ly…”
And then she was out like a light.
“Happily ever after,” Dr. Paris said. “I think that’s what she was going for.”
“You gave her something to knock her out, didn’t you?” I said.
“I’d have given her an Ambien if I could have,” Dr. Paris said. “But she’s pregnant. The only thing I did when I went behind that curtain was hold her hand and tell her that she was safe and that the man who had turned her life into a living hell was dead and gone forever. I told her that she was brave, that now it was time to let us take care of her, and that her baby needed her to sleep more than the police needed her to stay awake. Sorry, Detectives, but this woman is mentally and physically exhausted, and she needs to recover before she can be subjected to a police interrogation.”
The doc was right. We had a lot of unanswered questions, but the answers would have to wait.
CHAPTER 53
Like many combat-trained Marines, Bobby Dodd had known how to hide in plain sight. The white clapboard two-story farmhouse with the wraparound porch sat at the end of a seven-hundred-foot driveway and was practically invisible to anyone driving or walking along Ball Road. It was just far enough off the beaten path to be ignored, yet it was only a short drive from the heart of Warwick. He could have holed up there for months.
By the time Kylie and I arrived, the place was crawling with law enforcement—local, state, and the NYPD Crime Scene Unit. Chief Brown parked on the road, and the three of us walked to the garage, where a crime scene tech was collecting evidence from an aging Volvo wagon.
“That’s Mrs. Katz’s car,” Brown said. “In case you were wondering how your perp got around, the engine was warm when the first responders arrived.”
Chuck Dryden, our go-to criminalist, stepped out of the house and greeted us. “Detectives,” he said, more chipper than usual, “I must admit I’ve never truly understood Ms. Easton’s appeal as a so-called entertainer, but she certainly makes one hell of a ninja. Her abductor, Robert Dodd, was six foot three and over two hundred pounds, most of it muscle. She’s half a foot shorter and about sixty pounds lighter, and yet she shanked him in the shower like a hard-core lifer at Attica.”
“We heard,” Kylie said. “She told us she MacGyvered the weapon out of a bedspring.”
“Aha,” Dryden said. “You saved me some time. I haven’t been here long enough to figure that out.”
“Show us what you’ve got so far,” I said.
“From the outside, the house looks normal,” Dryden said. “The curtains are drawn and the shades are down, and if anyone rang the bell and Dodd opened the front door, all they’d see is a cozy little farmhouse liv
ing room. What they wouldn’t see is the prison cell he fashioned for her.”
He led us down the hallway past several polished-pine doors until we got to the bedroom farthest from the front of the house.
“This was reserved for the guest of honor,” he said, opening a metal fire door.
We went inside. The walls, windows, and ceiling were covered with twelve-by-twelve acoustic foam soundproofing panels. “The odds were slim to none that anyone would even get close to this room, but if someone did, Erin wouldn’t have heard anything, and no one would have heard her.
“After the first 911 call, the house was tactically swept by the locals. They found the body. White male, supine in the shower, water still running, naked except for a bullet on a chain that he wore around neck, his jugular severed.”
Kylie and I stepped into the bathroom where Bobby Dodd was still lying where he had taken his final breath. We didn’t stay with him long. Like Erin, all we cared about was that he was dead.
We went back to Erin’s bedroom.
“Look at this crap,” Kylie said, poking through the box of bargain-basement clothes that had been Erin’s wardrobe. “It makes you wonder.”
“About what?” Dryden said.
“It looks like whoever bought these clothes had absolutely no idea how to shop for the woman who would be wearing them,” Kylie said.
“Most men,” Chief Brown said, “that ain’t exactly their strong suit.”
“Dodd wasn’t like most men,” Kylie said. “He idolized Erin. He knew everything about her. And yet he dressed her in clothes she normally wouldn’t be caught dead in. I think he did it to humiliate her. Knowing how much emphasis Erin places on exteriors, I bet he handpicked this junk to make her feel less than.”
I watched Chief Brown’s face as he took it all in. I was pretty sure he’d decided that Kylie was the smartest cop he’d ever encountered.
We followed Dryden into a second bedroom. “Dodd’s prints were all over Erin’s bedroom, but hers aren’t in here,” Dryden said. “This was his man cave. We found an assortment of disguises, half a dozen burner phones, and a laptop. The search history appears to be intact.”
“How about guns?” Kylie said.
Dryden smiled. As usual, he was saving the best for last. He opened a closet door. Inside was a small arsenal—handguns, rifles, and semiautomatics.
“The man had more guns than my aunt Martha has Hummel figurines,” Dryden said. “But I think this is the one you’re looking for.”
He picked up a soft case, about three feet in length, with the brand name Berlebach sewn into the black canvas.
“I’ll bet half the photographers at that fashion show brought in bags that looked like this. But they were bringing in tripods. This, on the other hand…” He unzipped the case. Inside was a rifle. “It’s a Winchester Seventy,” he said, carefully picking up the gun with his gloved right hand. “And there’s a box of jacketed hollow-point cartridges at the bottom of the bag.”
“What caliber is the ammo?” I asked.
“Two-twenty-three.”
“That’s the same caliber bullet that killed Veronica Gibbs.”
“Give me a few hours, and I’ll let you know if this is the same gun.”
My cell phone rang. It was the chief of detectives. “Jordan,” he said.
That was it. Just my name. But the way he said it sounded more like he’d been chewing on it, hated the taste, and was spitting it out.
“Yes, sir.”
“Meet me at the golf course where we put down the chopper. You and MacDonald. Now.” He didn’t wait for a response. He hung up.
I turned to my partner. “The old man wants to see us.”
“About what?”
“He didn’t say.” I headed toward the door. “But the phrase dead man walking comes to mind.”
CHAPTER 54
The cop who had been assigned to drive Chief of Detectives Doyle met us at the golf course.
“They set up a temporary office for your boss inside the clubhouse,” he said. “He told me to have you wait for him there.”
We followed him into the building. “The manager apologized for the lousy accommodations,” he said, “but they’re in the middle of painting the place.”
As we approached Doyle’s loaner office, I could smell the fresh paint. And then the cop opened the door and flipped on the light.
“I can’t believe it,” Kylie said as soon as the cop left.
Neither could I.
There’s a running joke in the department: if your boss calls you into his office, and there’s plastic on the floor, the odds are you’re going to get whacked.
The first thing Kylie and I saw when we entered the room was the plastic tarp on the floor.
“Hey—they’re painting the place,” I said.
“I don’t care what they’re doing, Zach. It’s a bad omen. A really bad omen.”
The only seat in the room was a desk chair. We remained standing.
Five minutes later Doyle walked in.
“So, Detectives,” he said. “How is your day going?”
“Fine, sir,” I said.
“I’m so glad to hear that,” he said. “Funny thing…when I heard that Ms. Easton was safe and in custody, I thought my day would go well too. But, alas, I was sadly mistaken.” He slid into the chair and rested his arms on the desktop. “Would you like to know why my day is going so badly, Detectives?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My day went into the crapper—in public, mind you—because you, Detective Jordan, and you, Detective MacDonald, fucked up royally.”
Some bosses are screamers. When they’re angry, they want every cop in the borough to feel their wrath. Doyle’s voice was calm, devoid of emotion. In fact, he spoke so softly I had to strain to hear every punishing word.
Very passive-aggressive. Very effective.
“You were the leads on this case,” he said. “You made the call to keep Dodd’s identity under wraps. I believe the argument you used was something like ‘We want him to think it’s safe to walk among us.’ Your captain signed off on it. Her boss signed off on it. We all signed off on it. Why? Because we had faith that you knew what you were doing, and you’d catch the bastard.
“Well, he did walk among us. He brought his assassin’s rifle into our city and walked past God knows how many of our smartest cops, none of whom were looking for him, and then he shot and killed one of our most influential citizens. Only then did you release his name and picture. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” Kylie said.
“A few hours later, he was dead, and the press put two and two together and asked how long we’d known Dodd was our primary suspect. I sidestepped with the usual ‘I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,’ but they didn’t let up. They asked how I felt about the fact that this…this celebrity…this woman who is famous for what she wears, where she shops, and who she bangs was able to save herself when the elite NYPD Red Squad couldn’t. I assured them that everyone in the department was relieved to know that Ms. Easton was safe and sound, and that was all that mattered.
“And as I looked across the room, I could see that every one of them was thinking the same thing: Doyle is full of shit.”
He sat back in his chair. “But enough about my day,” he said. “Tell me about yours. Did you determine if Dodd had any accomplices?”
“It doesn’t appear that way, sir,” I said, “but we can’t yet rule it out.”
“So then the answer to my question is: ‘We haven’t solved that one either.’ Maybe you should get some help from Ms. Easton. She seems to be good at bailing you out.”
“We spoke to her briefly, sir, but she was too drained to go on. We’ll be interviewing her as soon as the doctors allow it.”
“You do that. Do you have anything else to say, Detectives?”
We should have said, “No, sir,” and backed out of the room. But Kylie doesn’t walk away from any confrontation without getting
in a few choice words.
“We made a judgment call, sir,” she said. “If it turned out to be wrong—”
“If it turned out to be wrong?” Doyle said, his voice getting edgier, his tone angrier. “Don’t delude yourself, Detective MacDonald. It turned out to be spectacularly wrong. I understand that cops working under pressure can make a bad call. But the rich and powerful people who grease the wheels of this city don’t want to be at the mercy of your average cop. That’s why we created Red. You are supposed to represent the finest of New York’s Finest. But as tomorrow’s newspapers will undoubtedly point out”—he stood up, put his palms on the desk, and leaned into us—“you and your partner did not live up to the hype.”
CHAPTER 55
It’s none of my business,” Rich Koprowski said, “but the chief of Ds has got some pair of balls blaming the two of you for Veronica Gibbs’s murder. You might have made the call to keep Dodd’s identity under wraps, but everyone up the chain of command—including him—signed off on it.”
“You’re right, Rich,” Kylie said. “It’s none of your business. It’s mine and Zach’s, and we don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine,” Koprowski said. “He’s still a dick because of what he did to me.”
The three of us were in Koprowski’s car driving back to the city.
“He didn’t do anything to you except tell you to drive Jamie Gibbs up to Warwick,” Kylie said.
“I did. I drove him to the edge of town, and then what? Doyle tells me to turn him over to the local cops so they can drive him the last mile to the hospital. What the hell is that about? It made me feel like a goddamn delivery boy.”
“Rich, I hate to break the news to you, but as far as Doyle is concerned, you are a delivery boy. You drove Jamie up, and now you’re driving Zach and me back to New York. We didn’t exactly cover ourselves with glory in this case, and the chief of Ds doesn’t want it to look like the only thing NYPD is capable of is chauffeuring the victim’s husband to her bedside. But if it’s any consolation, we really appreciate the lift.”
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