“‘She said she was sorry she couldn’t be with me on her birthday tomorrow but she’s got plans with Jamie. I said I understood, and I was happy enough to have her to myself the day before.
“‘She was wearing tiny gold crescent earrings, and I said that the moons on her ears went real good with the stars in her eyes. She laughed and said I was sweet. Then we talked about our plans to be together. I can’t wait.
“‘Before she left I gave her the birthday present I bought her. A little metal case she can keep in her purse to carry her credit cards and maybe a picture of me (ha-ha). The design on the outside has these cool silver-and-black Japanese fans. The note I wrote said, With love from your biggest fan. She said she simply adored it. And I said I simply adored her.
“‘She asked me when my birthday is and I told her that it was on March thirteenth, and she said she was sorry she missed it but next year she was going to buy me something special. I told her not to worry, that I’d get my real present on June ninth.’
“What do you think?” Cheryl asked.
“He kidnapped her on June ninth,” Kylie said. “No surprise that he was obsessed with it on June third.”
“I mean what do you think about the gardenias and the stars in her eyes and the moons on her ears?”
Kylie shrugged. “I think some love letters should come with barf bags.”
“Zach, help me out here.”
“Cheryl, I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” I said. “Clearly you didn’t flag it because you hoped I could be half as romantic. What do you see that we’re missing?”
“Details, Detective. Details. There are some very specific facts in this diary entry that we can check.”
“‘Erin and I met in our secret place’?” Kylie said. “How is that specific?”
“It’s not, but we may be able to find out if Erin smelled like gardenias, wore gold crescent-moon earrings, and brought home a Japanese-fan-motif credit card holder on June third.”
“So what if Dodd managed to get a few details right?” Kylie said. “No surprise. He’s been stalking her for years. Somewhere along the way he smelled her perfume. He saw her with those earrings.”
“What about the gift, the credit card holder he says he gave her?” Cheryl said.
“She may have one. That doesn’t mean she got it from him.”
Cheryl stood up and went to the whiteboard. “If that’s the case, we’ll put the diary entry here,” she said, pointing to the RANTS side of the board. “But if some of the little nuances hold up under scrutiny…” She tapped the REALITY side of the board.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘hold up under scrutiny,’” Kylie said.
“Erin’s security chief used to be NYPD. He’d know what’s real.”
“Careful, Doc. If you show McMaster a diary entry about Bobby and Erin meeting in a secret place and planning to run away together, he’s never going to say it happened. He doesn’t work for the cops anymore. His allegiance is to her.”
“Good advice,” she said. “Luckily, I’m not a cop. I’m a psychologist, and one of my main concerns is Erin’s well-being.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Cheryl smiled. “You know that. I know that. But McMaster doesn’t. Ask him to stop by. I want to pick his brain.”
CHAPTER 74
McMaster shot Cheryl’s theories full of holes.
“Gucci’s ‘Gorgeous Gardenia’ is one of the perfumes she pimps on her show,” he said. “All her fans know that. As for the earrings, she wore them on the cover of People magazine about a year ago. Not everyone will remember that, but a man like Dodd would. It’s chapter one in the basic stalker handbook.”
“What about the gift?” Cheryl asked. “If she has it, we could dust it for prints and—”
“Dr. Robinson,” McMaster said, “do you know how many gifts Erin gets every week? From men, from women, from kids. She has a separate closet to store them all. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them come through the U.S. mail. So if I dig through the closet and find the case with the Japanese fans, and you find Dodd’s prints on it, what does that prove? He bought it, put it in an envelope, and dropped it in a mailbox.”
Cheryl frowned. “Thanks. I guess that’s why I’m a shrink and not a cop.”
“No problem,” McMaster said. “I appreciate that it’s your job to analyze all these wacko fairy tales in Dodd’s diaries.” He turned to me and Kylie. “But you guys are cops. Why are you wasting your time on this crap?”
“You were a cop too, Declan,” Kylie said. “You of all people should know that it can take longer to wrap up a case than it does to solve it. And the chief of Ds doesn’t think we’re wasting our time. He wants to know if the man who kidnapped Erin Easton worked alone. Zach and I think he did, but Chief Doyle doesn’t want us to think. He wants us to find out.”
“And those fairy tales that the three of us have been reading,” Cheryl said, “allow us to rummage through the twisted mind of Bobby Dodd. And if he did have an accomplice, I would think you’d want to know about it as much as we do.”
McMaster exhaled hard. “You’re right,” he said. “My priorities have been a little screwed up. A few days ago I was positive that this kidnapping was a career-ender for me. But Erin wants me to stay on. I’ve been so desperate to get this nightmare behind me that I stopped thinking like a cop and started acting like a man with a business to save and a reputation to protect. I’m really sorry. Tell me what I can do to help.”
“For starters, can you find out where Erin was on June third?” Kylie asked.
“I can tell you where she was every day for the past couple of years. June third is the day before her birthday. What’s the significance?”
“Dodd says he was with Erin that day. Which probably means that wherever she was, he was close enough to watch her. If we know where Erin was, we can figure out where Dodd was, and with any luck we might be able to find out if he was alone or with someone.”
“Give me a sec.” He pulled an iPad out of his briefcase and began tapping on it. His face screwed up in a scowl. “Shit. It was one of her WAN days.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning every now and then, she puts on the standard celebrity disguise—sunglasses, baseball cap, baggy sweats—and she goes out into the real world to WAN, ‘walk around normal.’ I’m not allowed to follow.”
“But knowing you,” Kylie said, “you have.”
He grinned. “Not me, and don’t ever repeat this, but a couple of years ago I hired someone she’d never met to tail her on those days. The first time, she took a cab to the Cloisters museum up at Fort Tryon Park. The next time, it was the Bronx botanical gardens. She really was walking around normal. I don’t like it, but I get it. The poor woman has spent most of her life in a goldfish bowl. Sometimes she just needs to totally escape and be by herself. Bottom line: I have no idea where she was on June third.”
“We could ask her. Will she remember?”
He shook his head. “After what she’s been through? I seriously doubt it.”
“What about the GPS chip?” I said. “The one that Bobby cut out of her arm. The one that was supposed to keep tabs on her whereabouts.”
“The Korean company’s LyfeTracker,” McMaster said. “Good call, Zach—if it was working. But like I told you, it crapped out about a month ago. Middle of May or so. They’re still trying to figure out how to fix the problem.”
“I’m not an engineer,” I said, “but a better battery might do the trick.”
“It doesn’t take a battery,” McMaster said. “The chip runs on kinetic energy, like a self-winding watch. The more you move, the more juice it produces. When it stopped working I spoke to one of the engineers in Korea. He said maybe Erin wasn’t active enough to get it charged. I said bullshit. The woman is a human dynamo. A week later he calls me back and tells me I’m right. It’s a product flaw. Erin generates plenty of energy. The damn chip was just not storing enough to transmit th
e data. It’s like having a GPS in your car, but it won’t tell you where you are.”
“But…” Kylie said, working the thought out in her head as she was talking. “But just because your car doesn’t tell you where you are doesn’t mean it doesn’t know where you’ve been.”
“You lost me,” McMaster said.
“Something was sapping the energy from the LyfeTracker, which kept it from transmitting Erin’s whereabouts,” Kylie said. “But did it at least have enough juice in it to record and store the data?”
“I have no idea,” McMaster said. “It was just another one of Erin’s crazy product endorsements. I didn’t really ask the engineer too many questions.”
“Well, I’ve got a few questions for you,” Kylie said.
“Go for it,” McMaster said.
“What’s the engineer’s phone number, and what time is it in Korea?”
CHAPTER 75
McMaster looked at his watch. “It’s one in the morning in Seoul. Nobody at Kinjo Technology is going to pick up the phone for at least six more hours.”
“Do you have a home number for the engineer?” I said.
“No, but I’ll bet Peter Woon has it. He’s the head of their New York office. At least, he was when he came to see me last week.”
“He came to see you? Why?”
“To apologize on behalf of Kinjo. They signed one of the most recognizable people on the planet to be the spokeswoman for their new product. She did a commercial saying, ‘With LyfeTracker, you can find me anywhere.’ Then she goes missing, and nobody can find her. Zach, the man was embarrassed beyond belief, but to his credit, he took full responsibility for the product failure.”
“And you think he’s going to be the fall guy?”
“Let me put it this way. Kinjo had big plans to roll LyfeTracker out around the world. Now it’s in the scrap heap, and the only thing that’s going to roll are heads. The smart money is on Peter’s. Corporate culture is a bitch.”
Thirty minutes later we were in a conference room in Kinjo’s Fifth Avenue office sitting around a massive rosewood table with six men in suits. On an eight-foot screen that dominated the far wall was Kang Woo Ki, sitting in front of a laptop in his home seven thousand miles and thirteen time zones away. His eyes were bleary, his hair looked like he’d combed it with an eggbeater, and he was definitely not wearing a suit. He was in close-up, so for all I knew, he was sitting in his boxer shorts. Clearly, he was trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
Woon opened the session by exchanging a few remarks with Mr. Kang. It was in Korean, so I could only guess what was said. Woon might have simply been explaining why the man had been dragged out of bed. Or, since Kang was the company’s senior engineer, the two of them might have been making plans to get stinking drunk after their first trip to the unemployment line.
Introductions were made, and finally, Kang, speaking in perfect English, said, “How can I help you, Detectives?”
“The chip that Ms. Easton was wearing stopped transmitting data over a month ago,” I said.
He winced and gave a slight head bow.
“The question is, was it still recording her movements?”
He pondered that briefly. “In theory. The satellite connection was flawless. The problem was that the elements we used for the transmitter—”
I had no time for a science lesson or a mea culpa. “Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “You are saying that in theory, the chip was gathering data. If that’s true, then her whereabouts—even after the transmitter failed—would be embedded in the LyfeTracker.”
“Forget in theory,” he said, his voice stronger as he cleared the cobwebs from his head. “Most definitely.”
Magic words. Kylie and McMaster sat forward in their chairs.
“How do we retrieve it?” I said.
“I’m afraid you can’t do that.”
Kylie dropped the flat of her fist onto the table and blew the exasperation from her lungs.
And then…
“Correction,” Kang said. “You could retrieve the information, but not without Ms. Easton’s permission.”
“Why do we need her permission?” Kylie called out to the giant screen.
“The chip is in her body,” Kang said. “You can’t just rip it out of the woman. It’s a violation of her—”
“It’s already been ripped,” Kylie said, standing up. “I have it right here.”
She held up the evidence bag that we’d picked up before we left the precinct. A loud, long “Ohhhh” came from the men around the table. We hadn’t told anybody, them included, that Dodd had cut the chip out of Erin’s arm.
This seemed like a good time to fill them in.
“So if the chip was removed, it wasn’t a failure on the part of LyfeTracker that the police couldn’t find her,” Peter Woon said, his Wharton-educated brain rewriting history to save his corporate ass. “Detective, can you make a public statement to that effect?”
We’re all whores in one way or another. We get into bed with strangers because we have something they want, and they have something we need.
“Once this case has been resolved,” I said, “the department would be happy to tell the press that the kidnapper removed your tracker from Erin’s arm because he was concerned that we would use it to find her.” And I will leave out the fact that the damn thing was broken anyway, so it was a wasted effort on Dodd’s part.
Wide smiles and animated Korean chatter around the room as the suits realized that their company’s reputation could be salvaged.
“Mr. Kang,” Kylie said, cutting through the din. “Now that we have the chip, can you help us figure out where it’s been since it stopped transmitting? And no more theories, please.”
“Yes, I can. All we need is a power source.” He barked some orders in his native language, and the youngest two suits bolted from the room.
Twenty minutes later the chip was hooked up to a contraption that was linked to Mr. Kang’s laptop in Seoul.
“Give me a date and time,” he said.
“Sunday, June ninth, at five p.m.,” Kylie said.
“The chip was at three-eleven West Thirty-Fourth Street in New York City,” Kang said, the address of the Hammerstein Ballroom.
“The damn thing was recording the whole time,” McMaster said.
“Last night at eight p.m.,” Kylie said.
“It was at one fifty-three East Sixty-Seventh Street, also in New York.”
And we knew for sure that was exactly where it had been—tucked away for safekeeping in the evidence room at the Nineteenth Precinct.
More than a month after it had stopped transmitting, and a week and a half after Dodd had dug it out of Erin’s arm, the damn thing was still recording.
There were ten of us in the meeting—nine in New York, one in Korea—all with one thing in common.
Big, wide, shit-eating grins.
CHAPTER 76
Erin Easton had a brand-new stalker, and she had no idea that he was tracking her every move.
It was my old friend Benny Diaz from our Technical Assistance Response Unit.
We gave Benny the LyfeTracker, the power source that Peter Woon graciously donated to help us gather evidence that might help wipe some of the egg off his corporate face, and Declan McMaster’s detailed log of Erin’s comings and goings over the past year.
“One question,” Benny said. “Erin’s security people know exactly where she was ninety, ninety-five percent of the time. Shouldn’t I just focus on the times when she went off on her own?”
“No,” I said. “I know it’s a lot more work, but if Declan has her shopping at Fifty-Ninth and Third, and the LyfeTracker says she was at Fifty-Eighth and Park, then none of the data will hold up, and the DA will kick us out of his office.”
“Benny,” Kylie said, “if we’re going to use this technology to prove where Erin was when McMaster wasn’t watching, then it better be spot-on for all the times when he was.”
“
You got it,” Diaz said. “But it’s going to take me a few days. I’m crushed with other work.”
“Take all the time you need,” Kylie said. “We’ll tell the chief of Ds you’re busy with stuff that he doesn’t give a shit about.”
“Come back tomorrow morning at eight,” he said. “I like my coffee black and my bagels buttered.”
The next morning we were back with coffee, bagels, and high hopes.
“I’ll start with the good news,” Benny said. “I know they had transmission problems, but the GPS in that little sucker is as good as anything on the market. Maybe better. It was pinpoint accurate across the board. There was one time when McMaster’s log said Erin was on a photo shoot in front of the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, and LyfeTracker practically had her sitting in Alice’s lap. I’d testify in court that the damn thing knew where Erin was every step of the way.”
“Good news is usually followed by bad,” I said. “Drop the other shoe.”
“Ye of little faith,” Diaz said. “This time the good news is followed by even better news. Listen to this—over the past year there were eleven separate days when Erin went off on her own. I cross-checked them with Bobby’s diary. On five of those days, he didn’t post anything. That leaves six days when she’s off the grid, and he writes that he was with her.
“I eliminated three of them right away because his description of where they were is completely different from where the GPS says she was. For instance, one entry said they took a romantic sunset cruise to the Statue of Liberty, but I know for a fact that she was in an apartment building near Tompkins Square from four in the afternoon till ten at night. There might have been romance in the air, but I doubt if she saw the sun set.”
“So we’re down to three days when they might have been together,” I said.
“May nineteenth, May twenty-seventh, and June third,” he said. “According to McMaster the tracker stopped transmitting on May twelfth, so as far as Erin was concerned, she was untraceable on those three days. But once I powered up the chip I knew exactly where she was—Pelham Bay Park all three times.”
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