NYPD Red 4 (4 page)

Walking into his
office, you'd never know that Gregg Hutchings was a hero. I'd worked with him and knew he'd racked up a chestful of medals, but here at Mercy Hospital, there was no trace of his service with NYPD.

“Hutch,” I said, “where are all the pictures of PCs hanging ribbons around your neck?”

“This is corporate America, Zach. Nobody cares about my past glories. They're more interested in my golf scores and how many hundred thousand dollars' worth of equipment I let slip through my fingertips over the weekend.”

“We heard you had a little incident,” I said. “How can we help?”

“For starters, let me give you a little insight into theft prevention,” he said. “If this was a supermarket, and people were stealing frozen peas, I'd set up a video cam in the frozen pea section. But at Mercy, if I want to keep a watch on the expensive hardware in my dialysis unit, I can't put my cameras in there. HIPAA says no surveillance in any room where there are
identifiable patients.
It's like running a museum and telling the guards not to watch the people who are looking at the paintings. How long do you think it will be before the Picassos start walking out the door?”

“But you've got cameras in the public areas,” Kylie said. “If someone tries to walk off with a piece of equipment, you'll see it in the hallway.”

“You think?” He turned to a bank of CCTV monitors on the wall. “It looks like a lot of coverage, but I've only got eyes on 20 percent of the complex. Even then, the hospital doesn't want to come off like Big Brother, so instead of putting cameras out in the open to act as deterrents, we have to hide them in air vents, or behind exit signs and smoke detectors.”

He pointed at a monitor. “You see that technician? He's rolling an X-ray unit from Radiology to Recovery. And here's a guy with an EKG machine waiting for the elevator. And see this food cart? Who's to say if someone slipped an ultrasound unit in with the salmon croquettes? Everything is on wheels. I can watch it move through the public space, but I can't tell if it winds up back in the treatment rooms or it gets smuggled out the door.”

“Tell us about the most recent theft,” I said.

“We bought six state-of-the-art dialysis machines and locked them up till the manufacturer could run our techs through some training. All six disappeared. Whoever took them knew the keypad code to the room and how to get them out of the hospital without being tagged by a single camera.”

“So they had someone on the inside,” Kylie said.

“We have thousands of doctors, nurses, patients, visitors, and delivery people going through here every day,” he said. “But I might have gotten lucky.”

He opened a drawer, took out a file, and spread it out on his desk. “Her name is Lynn Lyon,” he said, pointing at a picture of a woman in her thirties. “She's a volunteer in our gift shop, but a guard caught her taking pictures in the room with the dialysis machines.”

“How'd she get in?”

“She told him the door was open, but I don't buy it.”

“Did you change the code on the keypad?” Kylie asked.

“I would have, but the guard didn't think it was important, so he didn't mention it until after the horse was out the barn door.”

Kylie's cell rang.

Our boss liked to micromanage, so I figured she was checking up on us. “Cates?” I asked.

Kylie shook her head and stepped out to take the call in private.

I skimmed Lynn Lyon's personnel folder. “Have you talked to her since the robbery?” I asked.

“She's not on the schedule this week,” Hutchings said, “and I can't just bring her in for questioning. I have no jurisdiction.”

“But we do,” I said.

“Look, I know this is below your pay grade, and you're only here because Howard Sykes drafted you. But I'm glad he did. I need all the help I can get.”

Kylie stepped back into the office. “I'm sorry, Gregg, but Zach and I have to go,” she said.

“We'll take a run over and talk to Ms. Lyon,” I said, grabbing the folder.

“Thanks,” Hutchings said. “These dialysis machines will go for top dollar on the black market outside the U.S. See if you can get something out of her before they make their way to Turkmenistan.”

I followed Kylie out the door. “Who was on the phone?” I said.

“Shelley Trager. He's waiting for us at Silvercup Studios.”

Trager was Kylie's husband's boss. “Is this about Spence?” I asked.

“Oh yeah.”

“Did they find him?”

“No,” she said, “but when they do, I'm going to kill him.”

I knew enough not to ask any more questions.

It's hard to
make it to the top in the entertainment business. It's even harder to do it in Queens, three thousand miles from the heartbeat of the industry in Hollywood. But Shelley Trager, a street-smart kid who grew up on a tenement-lined block in Hell's Kitchen, had pulled it off. Now, at the age of sixty, he was the head of Noo Yawk Films and part owner of Silvercup Studios, a sprawling bread factory in Long Island City that had been converted into the largest film and television production facility in the Northeast.

Added to the Trager mystique was the fact that the success and the power never went to his head. According to BuzzFeed, he was one of the best-liked people in show business. He was also the driving force behind Spence Harrington's stellar career.

Spence was only six months out of rehab when Shelley took him on as a production assistant. A year later he gave him a shot as a staff writer on a failing show, and Spence turned it around. The young golden boy then pitched his own idea, Shelley bankrolled it, and the team had their first hit. A string of winners followed until Spence went out on drugs, and it all blew up.

Shelley responded with tough love and banned Spence from the set till he finished rehab.

Kylie pulled the car into the Silvercup parking lot on Harry Suna Place. Carl, the perennially chatty guard at the front gate, recognized her immediately.

“Good morning, Mrs. Harrington,” he said, stone-faced. “Mr. Trager is waiting for you at Studio Four.”

He waved her into the lot. No banter. No jokes. No eye contact.

“This is worse than I thought,” Kylie said. “Carl won't even look at me. Maybe I shouldn't drag you into this.”

“Into what?” I asked.

“Somebody broke into the studio last night and trashed some sets.”

“You're not dragging me into anything,” I said. “It's a crime scene. It's what we do.”

“Only this time I'm married to the person who did the crime.”

“Do they have proof?”

“No, but whoever broke into the lot went straight to Studio Four and destroyed two standing sets at
K-Mac.
”

I winced. K-Mac had been Kylie MacDonald's nickname back in the academy. I still used it. Spence had shanghaied it. He had created a show about a female detective named Katie MacDougal who had serious boundary issues. The fictional K-Mac was a lot like the one he was married to.

Audiences liked the show. Kylie hated it.

“I'm going with you,” I said.

We entered the lot and made our way past a man with a bloodied knife in his chest, a burned-out city bus, and two nuns on a smoke break. As unreal as it all was, nothing prepared us for the devastation inside Studio Four. It looked like someone had taken a wrecking ball to it.

Shelley was waiting for us inside the soundstage. “For the record, I'm not going to report what happened,” he said to Kylie. “You're not here as cops. I called you because you're his wife.”

“Thank you,” she said. Then she walked slowly through the shattered glass and splintered wood that had been the squad room. Desks were overturned, computers smashed, and the ultimate insult: the NYPD shield on the wall had been spray-painted red. I'm sure the choice of color was not lost on her.

She crossed the room to the other set—Katie MacDougal's bedroom—stepping over the shards of broken mirror and glass bottles that had been on the vanity, steeling herself as she approached K-Mac's bed, where the sheets, the pillows, and the mattress had all been slashed.

She finally turned away. “Shelley, I'm so sorry,” she said. “I know he's mad at me because I wouldn't take him back into the apartment, but…”

“I kicked him out too. He's mad at both of us, and he's sending us a message.”

Kylie shook her head. “What kind of message is this?”

Shelley didn't answer.

Whatever the message was, there was no nuance to it.

“I'm invoking the
DWI rule,” I said as Kylie and I walked back to the parking lot.

A faint smile crept across her face. When she gets riled up, Kylie drives like a NASCAR champion, so we have an agreement: no Driving While Infuriated.

“Come on, Zach,” she said. “I haven't wrecked a car since way back in…”

“January,” I said. “You're almost ready to get your three-month chip.”

The smile turned into a grin, and she tossed me the keys.

It was only a fifteen-minute drive from the studio to Lynn Lyon's apartment on West End Avenue, and Kylie talked nonstop. The topics ranged from the Elena Travers case to the hospital robberies, and finally to how my new living arrangement with Cheryl was working out. The only thing Kylie didn't talk about was the elephant in the car: her drug addict husband.

But I'm sure that was what she was thinking about. By now she had dismissed the advice she had gotten from the counselor at the rehab. Kylie was an action junkie, and, while Spence may not have hit rock bottom yet, after seeing the destruction he'd left at Silvercup, she was no longer capable of doing nothing.

We pulled into a parking lot at Lincoln Towers—eight high-end buildings spread across twenty landscaped acres in the middle of Manhattan's trendy Upper West Side. Not exactly where I'd expect to find someone selling stolen medical equipment on the black market.

The head shot Hutchings showed us of Lynn Lyon hadn't done her justice. She opened the door wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and a sauce-spattered apron. Even with no makeup and her hair caught up in a blue bandanna, I got that rush men get when they're suddenly face-to-face with a naturally beautiful woman.

We ID'd ourselves and told her we had some questions to ask her.

“I'm right in the middle of something,” she said. “Can you come back later?”

“No, ma'am,” Kylie said. “It can't wait.”

“Neither can my risotto,” she said. “We'll have to talk in the kitchen.”

She didn't wait for an answer. “I'm a food blogger, and I'm working on my next post,” she said, leading us into a cluttered kitchen, where I picked up the earthy smell of mushrooms.

“My take on porcini-asparagus risotto,” she said, picking up a wooden spoon and stirring a shallow pot. “What's this about?”

“There's been a robbery at Mercy Hospital,” I said.

“Well, that's hardly a big surprise,” she said. “I warned them.” With all the poise of a TV chef, she turned to the oven and took out a loaf of fresh-baked bread, set it on the counter, and picked up a camera.

“What do you mean you warned them?” I said.

“Some of these volunteers will leave the gift shop and run off to grab a cup of coffee,” she said, clicking off a few photos of the bread. “Instead of locking the place up, they hang a sign that says ‘Back in five minutes.' They're too trusting. It was bound to happen.”

“It wasn't the gift shop, Ms. Lyon,” Kylie said. “They stole six new dialysis machines.”

“Six…I don't understand,” she said, ladling broth from a stockpot onto the risotto. “I work in the gift shop, but…Oh my God—I was in with the new dialysis machines last week.”

“Taking pictures,” Kylie said, gesturing at the camera.

Most people—guilty or innocent—would respond with indignation:
“Are you calling me a thief?”
Not Lyon. She put the hand that wasn't stirring the risotto to her mouth. Her eyes watered up, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “This is so embarrassing,” she said.

“What were you doing in a restricted area?” Kylie asked, all bad-cop body language and tone of voice.

“It didn't say Restricted, and the door wasn't locked. I have a friend who is a dialysis nurse upstate. I was telling her about this new equipment Mercy bought, and she asked me to send her a picture, so I did. That's all. It was harmless. I can't believe you're accusing me of stealing.”

“Nobody is accusing you of anything,” Kylie said. “I'm just asking a few routine questions.”

“If you knew me, you wouldn't ask things like that. I don't steal. Cooking and volunteer work are my passions. My soul needs redemption, and I get that from both.”

The tears were gone now. “I have a few questions of my own,” she said. “How am I supposed to get six dialysis machines out of the hospital? And what would I do with them if I had them? It's not just embarrassing; it's insane. Unless you're planning to arrest me, please leave.”

We left.

“You bought her act?” Kylie said once we were back in the car.

“How do you know it was an act? You hit her with some circumstantial evidence, and she had a plausible explanation.”

“Oh please: pretty lady, at home in the kitchen, turns on the waterworks. Guys fall for it all the time.”

“So all of a sudden I'm a
guy?
I thought I was a cop.”

“I'm a cop too, and the first thing I thought of was, if I were going to send someone to case a hospital, I'd send someone who could fly under the radar. She fits the bill.”

“Well, right now we have nothing to go on,” I said.

“So why don't you humor me? Let's look at the other hospitals that were hit and see if Lynn Lyon volunteered at any of them.”

Kylie and I have similar instincts, and we're usually in sync when we question someone. I was pretty sure I was right on this one, but this time her anger at Spence spilled over, and she took it out on Lyon.

“Fine with me,” I said. “You want to call the other hospitals?”

“Absolutely. Police work is my passion, Zach, and my soul could use a little redeeming,” she said. “Also, I try to never miss out on an opportunity to prove I'm smarter than you.”