14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14)

by James Patterson

  “I give up,” Brand said. “Don’t shoot.”

  Two shots rang out, but I didn’t see where they landed. My whole mind was on Conklin. He was on the ground, motionless. I stooped down next to my partner and shook his shoulder.

  “Richie. Speak to me.”

  CHAPTER 104

  THE SMALL WAITING room outside the ER was dull beige, and the light from the overhead fixture was flat white and glaring.

  Richie was in surgery. Cindy and I sat together and she was so afraid for him, trying to hold it together, but the tears just streamed down her face. I held her hand, told her the things you say in a situation when you don’t know what the fuck is going to happen. “He’s going to be OK. I promise.”

  Yuki was pacing, and Claire was in the hallway waiting for word of the outcome. Claire had checked out the surgeon and assured all of us that Dr. Starr was the best.

  Joe was off getting coffee, and Brady had waited with us for hours but had gone back to the Hall to tell the story again, this time to Internal Affairs.

  The last hours were running through my mind on a closed loop.

  I kept hearing the sharp sounds of rapid gunfire and the shrill screams of the hostages. I saw the bodies of Brand and Whitney and thought their plan had been a Hail Mary pass. That they hadn’t truly expected to survive.

  I recalled handing my gun to Brady, then climbing into the ambulance that was taking Rich to the hospital. I was supposed to stay at the scene, but there was no way that could happen. No way. Neck injuries were serious, mostly fatal. Richie. My dear friend, my partner, my brother. He could die.

  I remembered calling Cindy from the ambulance and hearing her panicked screams. And I remembered calling Joe, saying “I’m OK.” Now, in the hospital waiting room, he put a tray of coffee containers down on a table, sat down next to me, and held my hand.

  A moment after that, we were all on our feet as the doctor entered the room. He was a small man with a goatee and long fingers.

  He said, “Inspector Conklin is out of surgery. And I have good news. The bullet hit his left forearm, breaking it and deflecting the bullet, slowing it down. That was a lucky thing for Inspector Conklin.

  “Because the bullet was deflected, instead of severing his arteries or spine, it grazed his neck. He had a ragged wound that caused him to collapse and bleed like crazy, but he’s all stitched up and his arm has been set. He’s going to be fine.

  “Who is Cindy?” Dr. Starr asked.

  Cindy stood up, her face pink and gleaming with tears. “That’s me.”

  Dr. Starr said, “He’s really going to be OK, my dear. He said to tell you he loves you.”

  Cindy said, “Thank God,” and she sat back down from the weight of relief and emotion. We were all emoting, thanking both God and Dr. Starr, and tears were springing from all eyes.

  When my phone rang, I said to Joe, “It’s probably Brady.”

  But when I looked at the caller ID, I was shocked to see who was calling me.

  It was Vasquez.

  Where was he?

  Did he know that his partner, Ted Swanson, was in the ICU? That Kyle Robertson was dead? That Brand’s and Whitney’s bodies were at the morgue? I fumbled the phone, then stabbed the Talk button.

  “Boxer,” I said.

  The voice that came over Vasquez’s phone did not belong to Vasquez. It was male, unaccented, unfamiliar.

  “There’s been a terrible accident, Sergeant Boxer, and Vasquez himself couldn’t place the call.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Just listen. Vasquez can’t contact anyone, you understand what I’m saying? He’s lying in the Wicker House parking lot. But Vasquez is not important. Here’s what is. I want what was taken from me. Three million in cash. Two hundred pounds of synthetic marijuana and a hundred kilos of high-grade heroin.”

  I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s your case. You’re in charge. I hope you know who you’re dealing with.”

  “Who is this?” I asked again.

  “I’m called Kingfisher. Ask around. You’ll be hearing from me again soon, Lindsay Boxer. You can count on it.”

  The phone went dead in my hand.

  Joe said, “Linds? Who was that?”

  I stuttered, “S-some dirtbag who has been harassing me.”

  If only Kingfisher were your ordinary dirtbag. But he was anything but ordinary. He topped the list of the most ruthless drug lords in the country: wanted for drug trafficking, torture, murder, and organized crime up and down the length of California and many points east.

  And now the King was here.

  His investment at Wicker House had been stolen by cops—and he wasn’t writing it off as “the cost of doing business.” He’d been unable to recover his property from Calhoun or Vasquez. Robertson, Brand, and Whitney were also dead.

  The only living person who might know the whereabouts of the Wicker House haul was a dirty cop known as One, real name Edward “Ted” Swanson, who’d been hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds and wasn’t expected to live.

  So Kingfisher was targeting me.

  Turn the page for a sneak preview of

  TRUTH OR DIE

  Coming June 2015

  “WHERE EXACTLY DID it happen?” I asked.

  “West End Avenue at Seventy-Third. The taxi was stopped at a red light,” said Lamont. “The assailant smashed the driver’s side window, pistol-whipped the driver until he was knocked out cold, and grabbed his money bag. He then robbed Ms. Parker at gunpoint.”

  “Claire,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Please call her Claire.”

  I knew it was a weird thing for me to say, but weirder still was hearing Lamont refer to Claire as Ms. Parker, not that I blamed him. Victims are always Mr., Mrs., or Ms. for a detective. He was supposed to call her that. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

  “I apologize,” I said. “It’s just that—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said with a raised palm. He understood. He got it.

  “So what happened next?” I asked. “What went wrong?”

  “We’re not sure, exactly. Best we can tell, she fully cooperated, didn’t put up a fight.”

  That made sense. Claire might have been your prototypical “tough” New Yorker, but she was also no fool. She didn’t own anything she’d risk her life to keep. Does anyone?

  No, she definitely knew the drill. Never be a statistic. If your taxi gets jacked, you do exactly as told.

  “And you said the driver was knocked out, right? He didn’t hear anything?” I asked.

  “Not even the gunshots,” said Lamont. “In fact, he didn’t actually regain consciousness until after the first two officers arrived at the scene.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “An older couple walking nearby.”

  “What did they see?”

  “The shooter running back to his car, which was behind the taxi. They were thirty or forty yards away; they didn’t get a good look.”

  “Any other witnesses?”

  “You’d think, but no. Then again, residential block … after midnight,” he said. “We’ll obviously follow up in the area tomorrow. Talk to the driver, too. He was taken to St. Luke’s before we arrived.”

  I leaned back in my chair, a metal hinge somewhere below the seat creaking its age. I must have had a dozen more questions for Lamont, each one trying to get me that much closer to being in the taxi with Claire, to knowing what had really happened.

  To knowing whether or not it truly was … fuckin’ random.

  But I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not Lamont, and especially not myself. All I was doing was procrastinating, trying hopelessly to avoid asking the one question whose answer I was truly dreading.

  I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  “FOR THE RECORD, you were never in here,” said Lamont, pausing at a closed door toward the back corner of the precinct house.
/>   I stared at him blankly as if I were some chronic sufferer of short-term memory loss. “In where?” I asked.

  He smirked. Then he opened the door.

  The windowless room I followed him into was only slightly bigger than claustrophobic. After closing the door behind us, Lamont introduced me to his partner, Detective Mike McGeary, who was at the helm of what looked like one of those video arcade games where you sit in a captain’s chair shooting at alien spaceships on a large screen. He was even holding what looked like a joystick.

  McGeary, square-jawed and bald, gave Lamont a sideways glance that all but screamed, What the hell is he doing in here?

  “Mr. Mann was a close acquaintance of the victim,” said Lamont. He added a slight emphasis on my last name, as if to jog his partner’s memory.

  McGeary studied me in the dim light of the room until he put my face and name together. Perhaps he was remembering the cover of the New York Post a couple of years back. An Honest Mann, read the headline.

  “Yeah, fine,” McGeary said finally.

  It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was enough to consider the issue of my being there resolved. I could stay. I could see the recording.

  I could watch, frame by frame, the murder of the woman I loved.

  Lamont hadn’t had to tell me there was a surveillance camera in the taxi. I’d known right away, given how he’d described the shooting over the phone, some of the details he had. There were little things no eyewitnesses could ever provide. Had there been any eyewitnesses, that is.

  Lamont removed his glasses, wearily pinching the bridge of his nose. No one ever truly gets used to the graveyard shift. “Any matches so far?” he asked his partner.

  McGeary shook his head.

  I glanced at the large monitor, which had shifted into screen saver mode, an NYPD logo floating about. Lamont, I could tell, was waiting for me to ask him about the space-age console, the reason I wasn’t supposed to be in the room. The machine obviously did a little more than just digital playback.

  But I didn’t ask. I already knew.

  I’m sure the thing had an official name, something ultrahigh-tech sounding, but back when I was in the DA’s office I’d only ever heard it referred to by its nickname, CrackerJack. What it did was combine every known recognition software program into one giant cross-referencing “decoder” that was linked to practically every criminal database in the country, as well as those from twenty-three other countries, or basically all of our official allies in the “war on terror.”

  In short, given any image at any angle of any suspected terrorist, CrackerJack could source a litany of identifying characteristics, be it an exposed mole or tattoo; the exact measurements between the suspect’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth; or even a piece of jewelry. Clothing, too. Apparently, for all the precautions terrorists take in their planning, it rarely occurs to them that wearing the same polyester shirt in London, Cairo, and Islamabad might be a bad idea.

  Of course, it didn’t take long for law enforcement in major cities—where CrackerJacks were heavily deployed by the Department of Homeland Security—to realize that these machines didn’t have to identify just terrorists. Anyone with a criminal record was fair game.

  So here was McGeary going through the recording sent over by the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission to see if any image of the shooter triggered a match. And here was me, having asked if I could watch it, too.

  “Mike, cue it up from the beginning, will you?” said Lamont.

  McGeary punched a button and then another until the screen lit up with the first frame, the taxi having pulled over to pick Claire up. The image was grainy, black-and-white, like on an old tube television with a set of rabbit ears. But what little I could see was still way too much.

  It was exactly as Lamont had described it. The shooter smashes the driver’s side window, beating the driver senseless with the butt of his gun. He’s wearing a dark turtleneck and a ski mask with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. His gloves are tight, like those Isotoners that O. J. Simpson pretended didn’t fit.

  So far, Claire is barely visible. Not once can I see her face. Then I do.

  It’s right after the shooter snatches the driver’s money bag. He swings his gun, aiming it at Claire in the backseat. She jolts. There’s no Plexiglas divider. There’s nothing but air.

  Presumably, he says something to her, but the back of his head is toward the camera. Claire offers up her purse. He takes it and she says something. I was never any good at reading lips.

  He should be leaving. Running away. Instead, he swings out and around, opening the rear door. He’s out of frame for no more than three seconds. Then all I see is his outstretched arm. And the fear in her eyes.

  He fires two shots at point-blank range. Did he panic? Not enough to flee right away. Quickly, he rifles through her pockets, and then tears off her earrings, followed by her watch, the Rolex Milgauss I gave her for her thirtieth birthday. He dumps everything in her purse and takes off.

  “Wait a minute,” I said suddenly. “Go back a little bit.”

  LAMONT AND MCGEARY both turned to me, their eyes asking if I was crazy. You want to watch her being murdered a second time?

  No, I didn’t. Not a chance.

  Watching it the first time made me so nauseous I thought I’d throw up right there on the floor. I wanted that recording erased, deleted, destroyed for all eternity not two seconds after it was used to catch the goddamn son of a bitch who’d done this.

  Then I wanted a long, dark alley in the dead of night where he and I could have a little time alone together. Yeah. That’s what I wanted.

  But I thought I saw something.

  Up until that moment, I hadn’t known what I was looking for in the recording, if anything. If Claire had been standing next to me, she, with her love of landmark Supreme Court cases, would’ve described it as the definition of pornography according to Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio.

  I know it when I see it.

  She’d always admired the simplicity of that. Not everything that’s true has to be proven, she used to say.

  “Where to?” asked McGeary, his hand hovering over a knob that could rewind frame by frame, if need be.

  “Just after he beats the driver,” I said.

  He nodded. “Say when.”

  I watched the sped-up images, everything happening in reverse. If only I could reverse it all for real. I was waiting for the part when the gun was turned on Claire. A few moments before that, actually.

  “Stop,” I said. “Right there.”

  McGeary hit Play again and I leaned in, my eyes glued to the screen. Meanwhile, I could feel Lamont’s eyes glued to my profile, as if he could somehow better see what I was looking for by watching me.

  “What is it?” he eventually asked.

  I stepped back, shaking my head as if disappointed. “Nothing,” I said. “It wasn’t anything.”

  Because that’s exactly what Claire would’ve wanted me to say. A little white lie for the greater good, she would’ve called it.

  She was always a quick thinker, right up until the end.

  NO WAY IN hell did I feel like taking a taxi home.

  In fact, I didn’t feel like going home at all. In my mind, I’d already put my apartment on the market, packed up all my belongings, and moved to another neighborhood, maybe even out of Manhattan altogether. Claire was the city to me. Bright. Vibrant.

  Alive.

  And now she wasn’t.

  I passed a bar, looking through the window at the smattering of “patrons,” to put it politely, who were still drinking at three in the morning. I could see an empty stool and it was calling my name. More like shouting it, really.

  Don’t, I told myself. When you sober up, she’ll still be gone.

  I kept walking in the direction of my apartment, but with every step it became clear where I truly wanted to go. It was wherever Claire had been going.

  Who was she meeting?r />
  Suddenly, I was channeling Oliver Stone, somehow trying to link her murder to the story she’d been chasing. But that was crazy. I saw her murder in black and white. It was a robbery. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and as much as that was a cliché, so, too, was her death. She’d be the first to admit it.

  “Imagine that,” I could hear her saying. “A victim of violent crime in New York City. How original.”

  Still, I’d become fixated on wanting to know where she’d been heading when she left my apartment. A two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink would probably call that sublimated grief, while the four-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink would probably counter with sublimated anger. I was sticking with overwhelming curiosity.

  I put myself in her shoes, mentally tracing her steps through the lobby of my building and out to the sidewalk. As soon as I pictured her raising her arm for a taxi, it occurred to me. The driver. He at least knew the address. For sure, Claire gave it to him when he picked her up.

  Almost on cue, a taxi slowed down next to me at the curb, the driver wondering if I needed a ride. That was a common occurrence late at night when supply far outweighed demand.

  As I shook him off, I began thinking of what else Claire’s driver might remember when Lamont interviewed him. Tough to say after the beating he took. Maybe the shooter had said something that would key his identity, or at least thin out the suspects. Did he speak with any kind of accent?

  Or maybe the driver had seen something that wasn’t visible to that surveillance camera. Eye color? An odd-shaped mole? A chipped tooth?

  Unfortunately, the list of possibilities didn’t go on and on. The ski mask, turtleneck, and gloves made sure of that. Clearly, the bastard knew that practically every taxi in the city was its own little recording studio. So much for cameras being a deterrent.

  As the old expression goes, show me a ten-foot wall and I’ll show you an eleven-foot ladder.

  The twenty blocks separating me from my apartment were a daze. I was on autopilot, one foot in front of the other. Only at the sound of the keys as I dropped them on my kitchen counter did I snap out of it, realizing I was actually home.