NYPD Red 4 (20 page)

While Kylie and
I were escorting Rick Hawk back to Hudson Hospital, his partners in crime were being escorted out: the three men who had been on the biohazard truck with him and the woman who had disabled the security cameras.

“It was a fine night for New York's Finest,” Frank Cavallaro said when we regrouped in his office. “No casualties, and best of all, when I wake up in the morning, I'll still be head of security at Hudson Hospital.”

With one perp in need of a blood transfusion and the others being transported to Central Booking, Kylie and I decided to call it a night and interrogate them one at a time in the morning.

I got home shortly before midnight.

“Half a day?” Angel said as I walked through the door.

I grinned and resisted the temptation to ask him if my girlfriend was upstairs in the apartment.

She wasn't. And there was no note.

My clothes looked and felt like they'd been worn by a tunnel rat. I peeled them off, took a shower, put on a clean pair of boxers and a T-shirt, opened a cup of peach yogurt, plopped down on the sofa, and flipped on the TV.

It was twelve fifteen on Sunday morning—day thirty of my ill-fated experiment to cohabitate with the woman I loved. Tryouts were over, and I'd pretty much blown it. I was about to be cut from the team.

This is your life now, Zachary,
I thought.
Sitting around the apartment in your underwear, clicking the remote, and spooning down fermented milk laced with bacteria and the fruit of your choice. Pathetic.

I was just settling comfortably onto my pity pot when the front door opened.

“Hi.”

It was Cheryl.

I sat upright. “Where the hell have you been?” I demanded. “I've been sitting around waiting for you all night.”

I tried to keep a straight face, but it was impossible. The two of us cracked up. It wasn't going to change the facts, but at least it broke the ice.

“My mom had an extra ticket to see
Pagliacci,
and, having nothing better to do, I went,” she said.

“Pagliacci is the new guy who plays for the Knicks, right?”

She laughed and sat down on the sofa next to me. “You're home early from an all-night stakeout. Did you catch the bad guys?”

“Five of them.”

“Congratulations. So I guess you've been too busy to think about where the two of us go from here.”

“Just the opposite. It's all I've been thinking about.”

“And?”

“You want to give me your decision first?” I said.

“No. It's on you, Zach. Man up.”

“I love you,” I said. “And I don't want to lose you.”

“I love you too,” she said, resting her hand on my knee. “And I definitely don't want to get lost.”

“I heard what you said Friday morning at the diner. I thought living together would bring us closer, but it turns out all it does is underscore how much time we spend not living together. You always seem so damn happy to see me when I walk through the door; I never thought about how you must feel when
you
walk through the door, and I'm not there.”

“It feels lonely,” she said. “I know I'm home, but it still feels like the apartment is empty.”

“Okay. Here goes. Manning up,” I said. “I realize that not living together works a lot better than living together. I'm willing to go back to the way it was.”

Her eyes closed for a second, then she opened them and smiled. “Good call. I think we'll both be happier.”

I did my best to smile back. “Plus, now I get my dresser drawers back,” I said.

She wrapped her arms around me. “Not all of them. Just because I like waking up in my own bed doesn't mean I want to do it every morning.”

Some cops can
crack a major case and ride high on their success for the rest of their careers. Having cracked a politically sensitive crime spree, I'd have been happy to have the euphoria last for a few days, but five hours after I hit the pillow, my trip on the glory train went completely off the rails.

My cell rang. It was Kylie.

“What?” I grumped into the phone.

“Cates just called. She wants us in her office in twenty minutes.”

“Why?”

“She didn't elaborate. All she said was, ‘Don't be late. Howard Sykes doesn't like to be kept waiting.'”

I jumped out of bed and started throwing on clothes.

“What's going on?” Cheryl asked, still half asleep.

“I'm not sure. All I know is that Howard Sykes is meeting me and Kylie in Cates's office.”

“He probably wants to give you the key to the city after what you did last night.”

I looked at my watch. I was pretty sure the city didn't start handing out keys at 6:26 in the morning.

I grabbed a cab to the One Nine. Kylie was waiting for me outside. We bolted up the stairs and were in Cates's office by 6:44. Sykes was already there.

Cates skipped the usual foreplay. “Did you interview Rick Hawk last night?” she asked.

“The man was in no condition to talk,” I said. “He was a couple of pints low on blood.”

“Did you run his name through the system?”

“Our priority was getting him on life support,” Kylie said. “The task force collared four other perps, so we turned the whole lot of them over to Central Booking to sort out. Why? Did Hawk have any priors?”

Cates nodded toward Howard Sykes. It was his show now.

“He had one big prior,” Sykes said. “Three years ago, Staff Sergeant Richard Hawk saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers, coalition partners, and civilians by holding off a half dozen Afghan suicide bombers who breached a NATO base. He was awarded the Silver Star.”

Sykes handed us a photo of a four-star general pinning the award on Hawk's chest. “Hawk left the military two years ago,” he said. “Since then he's been a champion for veterans' rights. Bottom line: the man you arrested last night is a national hero.”

My stomach dropped. Kylie, however, tackled the news head-on.

“With all due respect, sir,” she said, “national heroes don't steal millions of dollars' worth of medical equipment.”

“Understood. But you're thinking like a cop.”

“I thought that was my job, sir.”

“It is, but it's my job to think about the public backlash that's going to erupt when word gets out that my wife's elite task force locked up America's poster boy.”

“Sir, I am patriotic to the core,” Kylie snapped, “but a Silver Star isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. What are we supposed to do, unarrest him?”

“Rein it in, Detective,” Cates ordered. “Last night we had a police problem. You solved it. Now it's about to become a political shit storm, and if you think that's not your problem too, then you're in the wrong unit. This team was founded to serve at the mayor's pleasure. When she has a problem, we all have one.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Kylie said. And then, in a rare moment for her, she apologized. “Howard, I'm sorry. What can we do to help?”

He shook his head. “I don't know. I'm an ad guy. Muriel has only been mayor for three months. Before that, she was a U.S. attorney. We both swam with sharks, but they were toothless compared to the ones we're up against now. Especially Woloch.”

I winced when I heard the name. “Dennis Woloch?” I said.

Sykes nodded.

Woloch is every ADA's nightmare. He's the most formidable defense attorney in the city—a cross between Clarence Darrow and Lord Voldemort. His remarkable ability to mesmerize twelve people in a jury box is so legendary that the press dubbed him the Warlock—a name that only enhances his mystique.

“He's been retained by the Hudson Hospital Five,” Cates said. “He called the DA this morning. He wants the city to drop the case.”

Kylie exploded. “
Drop the case?
Captain, we caught them stealing the equipment. They
shot
at us.”

“It turns out they used nonlethal weapons and rubber bullets,” Cates said.

“Nothing is 100 percent
non
lethal.”

“The Warlock will claim that these were trained marksmen. They only used the guns to deter the police.”

“What about the ten hospitals they robbed?”

“He informed the DA that he plans to use the Robin Hood defense.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong,” Kylie said, her tone barely on the right side of snarky, “but didn't Robin Hood steal from the rich and give to the poor?”

“Yes, MacDonald. I read the book, saw the movie,” Cates said. “But according to Woloch, Congress has turned a deaf ear on the sergeant's campaign for better health-care benefits for veterans, so Hawk and his band of Merry Men have decided to fund it on their own. They're not selling the stolen equipment on the black market. It's all going into an underground health clinic they're building for veterans. A jury will eat it up.”

“A jury?” Sykes said. “The whole purpose of bringing Red into this was to keep everything out of the press. If this goes public, it will be a front-page nightmare of global proportions and a political disaster for Muriel.”

“I have a possible solution,” I said.

Sykes exhaled. “Tell me. Please.”

“You're not going to like it,” I said.

“It doesn't matter if I like it,” Sykes said, “as long as my wife likes it.”

“She'll probably hate it,” I said. “It's got no political artistry to it. It's pretty much straightforward, get-the-job-done cop logic.”

“I don't give a rat's ass about political artistry,” Sykes said. “All I want to do is keep Woloch the Warlock from positioning Sergeant Hawk as a modern-day Robin Hood. Because if he does, my wife will come off looking like the goddamn Sheriff of Nottingham.”

“The man is
in over his head,” Cates said as soon as Howard Sykes left her office. “I don't care what he did in advertising. He's got a lot to learn about damage control.”

“At least he was smart enough to give us the green light on Zach's idea,” Kylie said.

“Good luck making it work,” Cates said. “Ivy League smarts are no match for a street fighter like Woloch. He's got the mayor up against the hot pipes, and he's going to ask her for the moon. The son of a bitch is cunning.”

“Speaking of cunning,” I said, “Max Bassett has been lying to us big-time.”

“About what? He copped to shooting Jeremy Nevins.”

“Why wouldn't he?” I said. “A grand jury won't indict him for shooting a home invader who killed his brother.”

“Then what is he lying about?”

“He ID'd the necklace that Chuck Dryden found in Jeremy Nevins's backpack as the one that was taken the night of the robbery.”

“And the insurance company confirmed it,” Cates said.

“Not exactly. All they did was confirm it's the one they insured. Once they got it back, they were off the hook for eight mil, so why bother doing forensics to see if it was the same one that was stolen?”

“The
same
one? You're telling me there was more than one necklace?”

“We think so.”

“Based on what?”

“Based on the fact that when your brother is lying in a pool of blood, and you just shot the man who killed him, your story on how it all went down can't be so perfect that it sounds like you've rehearsed it for hours. We knew Max was hiding something, but we didn't know what, so we had Chuck run a DNA test on the necklace. The crime scene photos showed that Elena's neck and chest had been lacerated during the robbery, but the necklace that came out of Nevins's backpack didn't have a single trace of her hair, her skin, or her blood.”

Cates shrugged. “So Nevins had it steam cleaned, or whatever jewelers do to get the gunk off and the shine back.”

“It wasn't clean. Dryden said the necklace was ripe with a buildup of grease and skin oils, but none of the DNA belonged to Elena.”

“Because she never had it around her neck,” Cates said, connecting the dots.

“We think the Bassetts gave Elena a fake, then had it stolen so they could collect the insurance on the real one,” Kylie said. “So we contacted the insurance investigator. Turns out the Bassetts filed three claims for theft in the past twenty-two years, each with a different insurance company. Each claim was paid in full, a total of nineteen million. This robbery was probably supposed to go down just like the others, but it all went to shit when Elena got killed.”

I picked up the story. “After that, they all turned against each other. Nevins shot Davis. Teddy Ryder took off with the bogus necklace, which he probably thought was real. Then Nevins kills Leo. And finally Max conveniently overhears them fighting, kills Nevins, and plants the real necklace on him. He won't collect the insurance, but he doesn't care, because it looks like the case is all neatly tied up, so the heat's off.”

“And with his brother dead,” Kylie said, “Max would now be the sole owner of the company, which is probably an even bigger payout than eight million.”

“Can you prove any of this?” Cates said.

“The only way we can prove anything would be to find the fake that Elena Travers was wearing.”

“Then find it, because the DA will laugh you out of his office if you ask him to hang a case on a
lack
of DNA. Do you even know where to look?”

“We'll start with Annie Ryder,” Kylie said. “If her son, Teddy, has it, she may be willing to turn it over if we cut him a deal.”

“Talk to her and see what she wants,” Cates said.

“If we can find her,” I said. “The way the bodies have been piling up, we're hoping she's still alive.”