NYPD Red 6

by James Patterson

  “Great job, Danny,” I said. I turned to Kylie. “Let’s pay Mr. Bruno a visit and find out what Bobby loved about him.”

  CHAPTER 62

  Gosh,” Kylie said as we drove past the low-rise red-brick buildings that housed the shops along Crosby Avenue, “the neighborhood hasn’t changed much since we were here last week.”

  I laughed. It had barely changed since Eisenhower was president.

  The office of Dominic F. Bruno, attorney-at-law, was in the heart of the business district, nestled neatly between a pizza parlor and an eyebrow-threading salon. We parked and went inside.

  The woman at the front desk was impeccably dressed, all smiles, and at least a decade past retirement age. “Can I help you?” she chirped.

  “Detectives MacDonald and Jordan, NYPD,” Kylie said, showing her shield. “We’d like to speak to Mr. Bruno.”

  “Can I tell him what this is in reference to?”

  “It’s a police matter.”

  “Oh, you can tell me, honey. I’m not just the receptionist. I’m his sister, Rosemary Polito.” She gave Kylie a big smile.

  “How about we tell him first, and then he can tell you?”

  Rosemary lost the smile and picked up her phone. “Two NYPD detectives to see you.”

  Within seconds a door in the rear opened, and Dominic Bruno stepped out. He had to be one of the most handsome septuagenarians on all of Crosby Avenue—six feet tall, olive complexion, thick salt-and-pepper hair, and a warm, engaging Crest Whitestrips smile.

  “Dom Bruno,” he said as he strode to the reception desk. He gripped my hand and shook it firmly. Then he reached for Kylie and gently cupped her hand in both of his. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Can we talk in private?” Kylie asked.

  “Say no more.” He escorted us to his office. The walls were covered with awards and photos, some dating back decades: Bruno with Mario Cuomo, Bruno with Mayor Koch, Bruno with Cardinal O’Connor.

  “Rosemary can make you a nice cup of espresso,” he said as the three of us sat down at a conference table.

  “No, thank you,” Kylie said. “We just have a few questions about one of your clients, BD Rentals.”

  “I may not have the answers. I never even met them. One brief phone call about six months ago, and since then everything is handled electronically.”

  “They’ve been wiring you money every month,” Kylie said. “Can you tell us what it is they’re paying you for?”

  “Detectives, I love the NYPD,” he said, gesturing to a picture of himself with the CO of the Forty-Fifth Precinct. “But surely you know I’m bound by lawyer-client confidentiality.”

  “Your client is dead. Does that unbind you or do we need to get a subpoena?”

  “Subpoena? There’s no call for that. How do you know my client is dead?”

  “It was in all the papers. BD Rentals was owned by Bobby Dodd.”

  He sat back in his chair. “The kidnapper?”

  “Yes, sir. Can you tell us where the money is going?”

  He nodded. “It’s a very simple transaction. BD would send me the check every month, and I would then deposit it into a 529 college savings fund for three children.”

  “Do you know if they’re Dodd’s children?”

  “They’re not. They’re the grandchildren of a woman I know from my church.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  He put his fingertips to his head and rubbed his temples. “This woman is very much alive, Detective, so I’m afraid we’re back to lawyer-client confidentiality again.”

  “Counselor, your client is doing business with a man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered,” I said. “Do you really want to—”

  “Wait a second. What am I thinking? She asked me to be the go-between as a favor. I didn’t charge a fee. She’s not a client.” He lowered his voice. “Her name is Lucille Speranza.”

  “Dodd’s landlady?”

  “I guess you know her,” Bruno said. “Ever since it got out that he lived in her basement, she’s been all over the television and the newspapers.”

  “We met her before she was famous,” Kylie said. “But she told us Dodd had paid up through the end of August. So what are the thousand-dollar checks for?”

  “I told you. It’s for a college fund for her grandkids—Samantha, Nina, and Ryan.”

  “That’s not my question. If the rent was paid, what else is she doing for Dodd that nets her a thousand dollars a month?”

  “That’s none of my business. You’d have to ask Lucille. Do you need her address?”

  “No, sir, we don’t. Thank you for your time, Mr. Bruno.”

  We stood up and started to leave.

  “Detectives,” he said, “I shared Lucille’s information with you because I don’t think she and I have a lawyer-client relationship. But she may see it differently, and to be honest, she can be sort of a…a difficult person.”

  “That would be putting it mildly, sir,” Kylie said.

  “Maybe you can do me a favor, then. Even though it’s after the fact, maybe you could issue me a subpoena. Then I’d have no choice but to tell you what I told you.”

  “Understood,” Kylie said. “We’d be happy to do it, sir.”

  He flashed us a victory smile. “Thank you.”

  The Mayor of Crosby Avenue may well have been beloved by all, but he was also smart enough to cover his ass.

  CHAPTER 63

  Life for Lucille Speranza had changed dramatically since we’d last seen her. Newspapers printed her picture. TV networks ran her sound bites. Magazine editors wanted her story. Overnight, she had become to Bobby Dodd what Kato Kaelin had been to O.J. Simpson.

  Even now, five days after she’d become known around the world as the Kidnapper’s Landlady, several news vans were parked outside her home.

  “She’s quite the celebrity,” Kylie said as we walked up the stairs. She rang the bell. “You think she’ll still remember her old friends Jordan and MacDonald?”

  I barely recognized the woman who opened the door. Gone was the mop of unruly orange hair. It was now a soft brown and styled. Gone was the baggy red-flowered dress. She now wore one that was navy and tailored. Someone—probably a TV producer—had gone to the trouble of getting her camera-ready. But of course, no makeover artist in the world could change Lucille’s unique brand of charm.

  “What the fuck are you two doing back here?” she said. “I thought this case was closed.”

  “That’s fake news,” Kylie said. “Don’t repeat it next time you’re on TV.”

  She turned away from Kylie and squared off with me. “How the hell do you put up with her?” she said.

  “She’s an acquired taste,” I said. “We need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

  “No. I have nothing more to say. I told you everything I know.”

  “You may have left out a few things. Like why the man you said you barely knew is sending a thousand dollars a month to Samantha, Nina, and Ryan’s college fund.”

  That blindsided her.

  “Your silence speaks volumes,” Kylie said. “Now, can we come in, or would you rather the TV cameras filmed us escorting you to our place?”

  Speranza opened the door, and we followed her to the living room.

  “I don’t know why you damn cops keep hounding me about this Bobby Dodd shit,” she said.

  “Let’s get back to the question about the money he’d been sending you every month,” Kylie said.

  “He was a tenant. It was rent money.”

  “You told us he was paid up through the end of August,” I said. “Why was he sending more money in June?”

  “It must be a mistake. I’ll send it back.”

  “Do you care about your grandchildren, Mrs. Speranza?” Kylie said.

  “My grandchildren? Why the hell would you drag them into this?”

  “Why the hell would you have a psycho killer funding their college education? We didn’t drag them into this. You
did. And if you’ll start spitting out answers instead of venom, maybe they won’t get to see their names in the morning paper.”

  Any other seventy-seven-year-old granny probably would have started cooperating to avoid bringing shame to innocent family members, but Lucille Speranza was determined to go down swinging.

  “You cops are all alike. You’re all on the take, and you’re all bigots. What do you think, just because I’m Italian, I’m a criminal?”

  “It doesn’t matter what we think. But you might want to worry about what your friends who watch the six o’clock news think,” Kylie said, pulling out her cuffs. “Hands behind your back.”

  Speranza threw her hands up in the air and backed away. “All right, all right. It wasn’t the rent. That was paid. We had a separate deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “He paid me extra for storage.”

  “What do you mean, storage?”

  “What do you think storage means? I kept shit for him.”

  “In the basement?”

  “No. I keep it here. He paid extra because he knew it would be safe in my house.”

  “And what did you keep for him?”

  Speranza took a deep breath and looked at us with eyes that were brimming with contempt. The woman who had called us bigots hated cops. She probably always had and definitely always would.

  She spit out the answer to the question. “He had a box.”

  CHAPTER 64

  The box was an olive-drab metal footlocker with Bobby Dodd’s name and serial number stenciled on it.

  “He didn’t leave me no key,” Speranza said.

  Kylie bent down and examined the padlock. “Core-hardened steel,” she said. “It looks brand-new except for the scratches on the shank.” She looked up at Speranza. “I hope you didn’t break a nail trying to get it open.”

  Speranza responded with her middle finger.

  It was unlikely that Dodd had left it booby-trapped, but protocol and good sense dictated that we evacuate Speranza’s house as well as the two homes that flanked hers, cordon off the entire block, and bring in the bomb squad.

  That’s not easy to do without attracting attention, and by the time the men in the moon suits lumbered down Zulette Avenue toward the house, the streets on the other side of the barricades had become a sea of news vans.

  The entire operation took less than forty-five minutes from discovery to all-clear, but the media circus was just getting started. And in the center ring stood Mrs. Speranza. Her fifteen minutes of fame was going into overtime.

  Kylie and I went back to the house. ESU broke the padlock while CSU documented it all on film.

  “Now comes the fun part,” Kylie said as a tech lifted the lid.

  The inside looked like a survivalist’s wish list, everything a trained Marine would need to bug out and stay gone: guns, knives, ammo, a bulletproof vest, camping gear, fake IDs, even paper maps, because you can’t use a GPS when half a dozen law enforcement agencies are trying to hunt you down.

  One by one, the items were photographed, cataloged, and laid out for inspection. Under the weapons was a fat manila folder that was crammed with all things Erin. Magazine covers, feature stories, videotapes, CDs, and hundreds of pictures, some clipped from fan books, but many of them candid shots, most likely taken while he stalked her.

  The biggest surprise was the diaries—handwritten journals dating back fifteen years. I picked one up and opened it to a random page.

  October 12, 2014

  Erin and I drove up to the Berkshires for the weekend partly just to look at the fall foliage but mostly to find a house for us. Not that we’re going to live up in Massachusetts. She’d rather be where it’s warm all year round. It doesn’t matter anyway because none of the places we looked at were right for us. It’s Sunday and she’s got a rerun on tonight. We’ll watch it but I keep telling her that the damn network should be making new shows instead of just repeating the old ones over and over. I sent them fourteen e-mails about it but so far they haven’t written back. What do you expect from a bunch of idiots.

  I flipped to another page, then another. It was all the same. Bobby Dodd was in love with someone who wasn’t there, and he had journaled their life together as if they actually had one.

  Kylie had a second volume, and I watched her face as she flipped through it, waiting for her expression to turn from cold to compassionate as she read a few of the entries. But it never did.

  “Well, this sucks,” she said, finally putting the diary down.

  “Granted, it’s not Shakespeare,” I said.

  “I’m not talking about the writing. I’m talking about the fact that it’s all fiction. Our job is to read everything Bobby wrote and find out how he planned all the crimes he committed. Was he a loner, or did he have accomplices? What if we read for a week, and we finally get to the part where he says he was in cahoots with Mrs. Speranza? Or the Brockways? Or the Rockettes? How do we know what’s real and what’s crazy? How do we know what to believe, what to follow up on?”

  They were smart questions, but I had no answers.

  “Zach, you and I have great bullshit detectors when we’re sitting across the table from a suspect, studying his word choices, watching his body language. But it’s hard to find the truth when you’re wading through a thousand pages written by a delusional man.”

  And then the answer came to me. “You’re right,” I said. “We’re going to need professional help, and I just happen to know someone who’s extremely adept at deciphering the thoughts of a delusional man.”

  Kylie tapped herself on the forehead, that classic gesture you make when someone else comes up with the obvious answer before you do.

  “I know Dr. Robinson too,” she said. “In fact, I know her so well, I think she might actually enjoy reading this crap.”

  CHAPTER 65

  As soon as I got back to the station I went directly to Cheryl’s office. “Please tell me you’re free tonight,” I said.

  “I could be,” she said, giving me one of those seductive smiles that made me wish I had more than police work to offer her. “What did you have in mind?”

  “A foursome—you, me, Kylie, and the insane ramblings of a psycho stalker-rapist-kidnapper-murderer-badass. Bobby Dodd left behind his diaries. Kylie and I have to make sense out of them. We thought it might be more productive if we brought along a trained psychologist. For the record, you were our first choice.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “But wait, there’s more,” I said. “If you act now, we’ll throw in an all-expenses-paid dinner from the Chinese takeout joint of your choice.”

  “It’s hard to say no to an evening of insane ramblings and General Tso’s chicken. Sign me up.”

  Twenty minutes later, Kylie, Cheryl, and I were sitting in a conference room with the diaries.

  “Logic might dictate that each of us start from the beginning,” Cheryl said. “But we’re not going to be able to read it all in one night, and it’s better to get at least one pair of eyes on every page. So let’s break it up into thirds. I’ll take the first third, Kylie the next, and Zach the last.”

  The time flew as I got sucked into the strange world of Robert Allen Dodd. Kylie had been wrong. It wasn’t all fiction. It was filled with fantasies about Erin, but there was also page after page about his father, all of which sounded heartbreakingly genuine. Bobby, at least the way he told the story, was a good son, and when his father was dying of cancer, Bobby was at his bedside around the clock. And then I turned to a page that punched me in the gut.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, “can you take five? I want to read you something.”

  They put their books down, grateful for the break. I read it word for word, just as Bobby had written it.

  September 8, 2014

  Two days ago my father, Jody Elias Dodd, died peacefully in his sleep. When the funeral director brought me the urn from the crematorium, he also gave me this little box that he said was from Da
d.

  There was a note. It said, Dear Bobby, Being your father is the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m sorry I won’t be around to watch your six, but keep this close, and I will always be with you. Love, Dad.

  Inside the box was a .357 Magnum bullet on a gold chain and inside the bullet were some of Dad’s ashes. Then I read the engraving on the back: Succeed, or die trying. Semper Fi.

  I could barely breathe and as soon as the funeral guy left I bawled like a baby. I love you, Dad. Miss you. And don’t you worry. I’m not going to fail.

  “That’s not delusional,” I said. “That’s not a fantasy. The date matches up with the date of his father’s death in McMaster’s file. And the bullet—we saw the bullet. It was around his neck when he died.”

  Kylie and Cheryl had also found pockets of truth throughout Bobby’s prose and had marked each one with a Post-it note. We decided to transcribe the important points onto a large whiteboard. We drew a line down the middle and labeled one side RANTS, the other REALITIES.

  After four hours we’d gone through less than half of the journal entries, some of them real, most of them make-believe, none of them helping us come up with the answers Chief Doyle was looking for.

  Cheryl had an early-morning meeting and left at about ten. Kylie and I plugged away at it, determined to work as long into the night as our brains and bodies would allow.

  I was back in Bobby’s world when the call came in from the NYPD Transit special investigations unit.

  “Detective Jordan, I’ve got a hit on the MetroCard you’re tracking,” the cop on the other end said. “It was swiped at nine forty-seven at the Sixty-First Street Woodside station in Queens. Video shows a white female, blond hair, midthirties, wearing lavender hospital scrubs.”