The one who knows the secrets is the one who holds the power.
The richest of New York’s rich gather at The Pierre’s Cotillion Room to raise money for those less fortunate. The mayor is present, along with Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald of the elite NYPD Red task force providing security.
The night is shattered as a fatal blast rocks the room, stirring up horrifying memories of 9/11. Is the explosion an act of terrorism – or a homicide?
A big-name female filmmaker is the next to die, in a desolate corner of New York City. The crimes keep escalating, and the perpetrators may be among the A-list New Yorkers NYPD Red was formed to protect.
Zach and Kylie track a shadowy killer as he masterfully plays out his vendetta – and threatens to take down NYPD Red in the bargain.
JAMES PATTERSON is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 365 million copies worldwide. He is the author of some of the most popular series of the past two decades – the Alex Cross, Women’s Murder Club, Detective Michael Bennett and Private novels – and he has written many other number one bestsellers including romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.
James is passionate about encouraging children to read. Inspired by his own son who was a reluctant reader, he also writes a range of books for young readers including the Middle School, I Funny, Treasure Hunters, House of Robots, Confessions, and Maximum Ride series. James has donated millions in grants to independent bookshops and has been the most borrowed author of adult fiction in UK libraries for the past eleven years in a row. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.
MARSHALL KARP has written for stage, screen, and TV, and is the author of five books in the Lomax and Biggs series. He is also the coauthor of the NYPD Red series with James Patterson.
Also by James Patterson
NYPD Red Series
NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp)
NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp)
A list of more titles by James Patterson can be found at the back of this book
For Teresa Patterson, who keeps getting better and better and better
THERE WERE ONLY four words beneath the tattoo of the Grim Reaper on Aubrey Davenport’s inner left thigh. But they spoke volumes.
Death is my aphrodisiac
And nowhere in the entire city was her libido more on point than at the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, a crumbling three-story, U-shaped monster on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island.
Once a marvel of neo-Gothic architecture, Renwick was now a rotting stone carcass, the final way station for thirteen thousand men, women, and children who had died a painful death.
For the city fathers, Renwick was a historical landmark. For the urban explorers, it was New York’s most haunted house. But for Aubrey Davenport, it was a sexual Mecca, and on a warm evening in early May, she and a willing partner scaled the eight-foot fence, made their way into the bowels of the moldering labyrinth, and spread a thick quilted blanket on the rocky floor.
She kicked off her shoes, removed her shirt and bra, shucked her jeans, and stood there, naked except for a pair of aquamarine bikini panties.
Her nipples responded to the caress of a cool breeze that drifted over her breasts, and she inhaled the earthy scent of the decay around her, mixed with the dank overtones of river water.
She dropped to her knees on the blanket, closed her eyes, and waited for her partner.
She shuddered as he silently slipped the noose around her neck. His fingers were long and slender. Piano player fingers, her mother used to call them. Like your father has.
As a child, Aubrey wondered why a man blessed with the hands of a concert pianist never played an instrument, never even cared to. But somewhere along the way she came to understand that Cyril Davenport’s long, slender fingers made music of another kind: the crescendo of sound that came from her parents’ bedroom on a nightly basis.
Aubrey felt the rope pull tighter. Rope was a misnomer. It was a long strand of silk—the belt from a robe, perhaps—and it felt soft and smooth as he cinched it against her carotid arteries.
He took her shoulders and guided her body to the ground until her belly was flat against the cotton blanket below her.
“Comfy?” he asked.
She laughed. Comfy was such a dumb word.
“You’re laughing,” he said. “Life is good, yes?”
“Mmmmmm,” she responded.
“It’s about to get better,” he said, tugging at the waistband of her panties and sliding them down to her ankles. His fingers teased as they walked slowly up her leg and came to rest on the patch of ink etched into her thigh. His thumb stroked the shrouded figure and arced along the scythe that was clutched in its bony claw.
“Hello, death,” he said, removing his hand.
Crack! The cat-o’-nine-tails lashed across her bare bottom, burning, stinging, each individual knotted-leather strap leaving its mark. She bit down hard and buried a scream into the blanket.
Pain was the appetizer. Pleasure was the main course. Her body tensed as she waited for his next move.
In a single, practiced motion he bent her legs at the knees, tipped them back toward her head, grabbed the tether that was around her neck, and tied the other end to her ankles.
“Hand,” he ordered.
Aubrey, her right arm beneath her stomach, reached all the way down until her hand was between her legs.
“Life is good,” he repeated. “Make it better.”
Her fingers groped, parting the pleats, entering the canal, tantalizing the nerve endings. The effect was dizzying: the man with the whip, the foul-smelling ruins, and the inescapable presence of thirteen thousand dead souls.
He said something, but she couldn’t hear over the sound of her own labored breathing. And then—the point of no return. She felt the swell of gratification surging through her body, and with near surgical precision she gently lowered her feet toward the ground.
The silk rope around her neck tightened, compressing her carotid arteries. The sudden loss of oxygen along with the buildup of carbon dioxide made her light-headed, giddy, almost hallucinogenic. The orgasm came in waves. It left her gasping for air, but the euphoria was so powerful, so addictive, that she intensified the pressure around her neck, knowing she could go just a few more seconds.
If erotic asphyxiation were an Olympic event, Aubrey Davenport would have been a world-class contender. Her brain was just on the threshold of losing consciousness when she released the death grip, and brought her feet back toward her buttocks.
But the noose refused to relax. If anything, it felt tighter. Panic seized her. She thrashed, pulled her hands up to her throat, and clawed at the silk, fighting for air and finding none.
She never made mistakes. Something must have snagged. She reached behind her neck, desperately trying to find some slack, when her fingers found his hand. He jerked hard on the silk cord, and her arms flailed.
She slumped, too weak to struggle, all hope gone. Everything went black, and as the reaper stepped out of the darkness to claim her, tears streamed down her cheeks, because in the last seconds of her life, Aubrey Davenport finally realized that she didn’t want to die.
THE COTILLION ROOM at The Pierre hotel bubbled over with New York’s wealthiest—including a few who were wealthier than some countries.
They were the richest of the rich, the ones who get invited to fifty-thousand-dollars-a-plate dinners when one of their own wants to tap them for a worthy cause. In this case, the charity with its hand out was the Silver Bullet Foundation.
The thirty-foot-long banner at the front of the hall proclaimed its noble mission: fighting for the less fortunate.
The man in the black tie and white jacket busing tables in the rear had boiled when he first saw the sign. They haven’t done shit for me, and I’m the least fortunate person in the room.
They’re like swans, he thought as he watched them glide serenely from table to table: so elegant, so regal, but fiercely territorial and vicious when they feel threatened. And like swans, he observed, they are oh so white.
He counted half a dozen black swans among them, but for the most part, the people of color were there to serve. He fit right in.
With his shoulders slumped, his jaw slack, and a cheap pair of clear-lens nerd glasses to dial down the intensity of his piercing black eyes, he was practically invisible, and definitely forgettable.
The only human contact he’d had in the three hours since donning the uniform was with a besotted old patrician who’d slurred, “Hey fella, where’s the men’s room?”
Shortly after nine, the lights dimmed, the chatter died down, and the commanding voice of James Earl Jones piped through the sound system.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the cofounder and chairman of the Silver Bullet Foundation, Mr. Princeton Wells.”
The staff had been instructed to stop work during the presentation, and the busboy dutifully stepped into the shadows near a fire exit as Princeton Wells bounded onto the stage.
Wells was his typically charming, still-boyish-at-forty, old-moneyed self. And lest any man in the room suspect that someone that rich and that good-looking wasn’t getting laid, Wells kicked off the festivities by introducing his current girlfriend, Kenda Whithouse, to a captive audience.
Ms. Whithouse stood up, waved to the room, and threw her billionaire boyfriend a kiss. She was only twenty-three, an actress who was not quite yet tabloid fodder, but who clearly had the talent to fill out an evening gown. Those who knew Princeton Wells had no doubt that the gown would be lying crumpled on his bedroom floor by morning.
Having trotted out his latest eye candy, Wells got down to the serious business of reminding all the do-gooders in the room how much good they were doing for the city’s less fortunate.
“And no one,” he decreed, “has been more supportive of Silver Bullet than Her Honor, the mayor of New York, Muriel Sykes.”
The city’s first female mayor, her approval rating still sky-high after only four months in office, was greeted by enthusiastic applause as she stepped up to the podium.
The busboy did not applaud. He slid his smartphone from his jacket pocket and tapped six digits onto the keypad.
One, two, two, nine, nine, seven.
He stared at it, not seeing a sequence of numbers but a moment in time that had changed his life forever: December 29, 1997. His finger hovered over the Send button as the mayor began to speak.
“I’m not a big fan of giving speeches at rubber chicken dinners,” she said, “even when the chicken turns out to be grade A5 Miyazaki Wagyu beef.”
Everyone but the busboy found that funny.
“On the second day of my administration, I had a meeting with the four founders of Silver Bullet. They showed me a picture of an abandoned old warehouse in the Bronx, and I said, ‘Who owns that eyesore?’ And they said, ‘You do, Madam Mayor. But if you sell it to us for a dollar, we will raise enough money to convert it into permanent housing for a hundred and twenty-five chronically homeless adults.’
“I accepted their offer, framed the dollar, and am thrilled to announce that next month we will start construction. I’m here tonight to thank you all for your generous contributions and to introduce one of the four men who spearheaded this project. He is the brilliant architect whose vision will turn that dilapidated monstrosity into a beautiful apartment complex for some of our neediest citizens. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Del Fairfax.”
Fairfax, architect to the one percent, stepped onto the stage to show off what wonders he could create for the indigent. Spot-on handsome and aw-shucks personable, he rested a laptop on the podium, flipped it open, and said, “I know how fond you all are of PowerPoint presentations, so I put one together for you. Only ninety-seven slides.”
The half-sloshed crowd warmly gave him his due.
“Just kidding,” he said. “Princeton told me if I showed more than five, you’d start asking for your money back. The new facility will be called Tremont Gardens. First, let me show you what it looks like now.”
He picked up a wireless remote and pushed a button.
The explosion rocked the Cotillion Room.
Del Fairfax’s upper torso hurtled toward the screen behind him, while the bomb’s jet spray of ball bearings, nails, and glass shards chewed into his lower half, scattering bits and pieces across the stage like a wood chipper gone rogue.
Thick smoke, flying shrapnel, and abject fear filled the air.
The busboy, standing far from the backblast, slipped through the emergency exit, leaving in his wake sheer pandemonium, as four hundred New Yorkers found themselves caught up in the nightmare they had been dreading since September 11, 2001.
KYLIE AND I had never been attached to Mayor Sykes’s security detail before, but once she agreed to speak at the Silver Bullet Foundation fund-raiser, she recruited us for the night.
The word came down from our boss. “The mayor wants to do a little fund-raising of her own,” Captain Cates said. “She comes up for reelection in three and a half years, and as long as she’s going to spend the evening rubbing elbows with her biggest donors, she wants to assure them that she’s not just a champion of the unfortunate poor. She cares deeply about the disgustingly rich. And what better way to demonstrate her concern for their welfare than by trotting out a couple of poster cops from NYPD Red?”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Kylie said. “Doesn’t she realize we already spend sixty hours a week overprotecting the overprivileged? Now she’s inviting us to suck up to them at some—”
Cates cut her off. “Did I use the word invite? Because the last time I read the department manual I didn’t see anything about invitations being passed down the chain of command. The mayor specifically instructed me to assign Detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan to her security detail. Consider yourselves assigned. No RSVP required.”
I figured it would be the most boring night of the week. And I was right—until the podium exploded.
It was one of those shock and awe explosions. The blinding flash, the deafening boom, the thick smoke, the chemical stench, and the flying chunks of wood, glass, metal, and Del Fairfax.
Mayor Sykes had just come off the stage and returned to her seat when the bomb went off. Kylie and I were only an arm’s length away from her. We yanked her from her chair and, shielding her body with ours, bulled our way through the chaos toward our prearranged exit door.
At least fifty other frenzied people had the same idea.
I keyed my radio and yelled over the din, “Explorer, this is Red One. Vanguard is safe. Egress Alpha is blocked. We’re making our way toward Bravo.”
We did a one-eighty and shoved the mayor toward the kitchen. The path was clear, and the vast stainless steel hub of the hotel’s multimillion-dollar banquet business was almost deserted. Except for a few stragglers, the staff had beaten a quick retreat through a rear fire door and down a stairwell to the employee locker rooms.
At that point, many of them decided that they were out of harm’s way, and at least twenty of them were standing in the corridor, almost every one with a cell phone to his or her ear.
“NYPD. Get out of the way! Get out of the fucking way!” Kylie bellowed as we elbowed our way through the logjam.
A hotel security guard saw us coming and pushed open a metal door that led to the outside world. As soon as she felt the cool night air and heard the sounds of her city, the mayor stopped.
“Please,” she said. “I’m too old for this shit. Let me catch my breath.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Kylie said. “Not here. We only have another hundred feet. Keep going, or Zach and I will carry you to the car.”
The mayor gave Kylie an enigmatic stare that could have been anywhere on the spectrum from contempt to gratitude.
“Nobody …” she said, breathing heavily, “carries … Muriel Sykes … anywhere. Lead the way.”
We single-filed down a narrow alleyway, past a row of Dumpsters, and I radioed ahead to her team.
The alley came out on East 61st Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. Just as we got to the far end, the mayor’s black SUV drove up onto the sidewalk. Her driver, Charlie, jumped out and swung open the rear door. I offered to help the mayor into the back seat, but she waved me off.
“This is as far as I’m going,” she said.
“Ma’am, this is not the place for you to be,” Kylie said.
“A maniac just set off a bomb in my city, Detective. This is my responsibility.”
“Yes, ma’am, but maniacs have a bad habit of setting off secondary bombs targeting people who have just run from the first,” Kylie said. “And it’s our responsibility to get you to safe ground.”
“Madam Mayor,” Charlie said, “they’re setting up a command center at the Park Avenue Armory. I can have you there in two minutes.”
Crisis averted. The mayor got in the car, shut the door, and rolled down her window. “Thank you, Detectives,” she said. That was it. Three words, and the window went back up.
Within seconds, the oversize, bulletproof Ford Explorer peeled out and, with lights flashing and sirens wailing, whisked Muriel Sykes away to the longest night of her fledgling administration.
“I hate these boring babysitting jobs,” Kylie said. “Let’s go do some real police work.”
The two of us ran back down the alley and up the stairs toward the smoke-filled ballroom.
KYLIE AND I joined the influx of first responders who raced to help the injured. It was just cops and firefighters at first, but when a bomb explodes in a public place, it sets off a Pavlovian response. Law enforcement agencies everywhere start salivating.
By the ten o’clock news cycle, The Pierre was the most famous crime scene in America, and everyone—Feds, staties, NYPD, FDNY, even the DEA—wanted a piece of the action.
Fortunately, the turf war dust settled long before the acrid gray cloud in the Cotillion Room, and Kylie and I were thrown together with Howard Malley, an FBI bomb tech we’d run into before.
Malley is a hawkeyed post-blast investigator and a pull-no-punches New York ballbuster, but he can also get testy as a cobra when you disagree with him. In short, he was a lot like Kylie. Maybe that’s why I liked him.
The two of us suited up—disposable Tyvek coveralls, sock boots, face mask—and we crossed the threshold to ground zero. The rear of the room was remarkably intact. Flower arrangements and wineglasses were still sitting on several tables, waiting to be cleared.
We walked toward the spot where Del Fairfax, Princeton Wells, and Mayor Sykes had stood less than an hour ago, wooing their wealthy benefactors. Windows were shattered, wood-paneled walls were peppered with shrapnel, and the floor was littered with the detritus of the blast: scorched drapery, sparkling chunks of chandelier crystal, overturned chairs, silverware, shoes, purses—thousands of puzzle pieces that had made a picture-perfect evening and now lay in tatters, covered in thick dust and splattered with blood.
At the center of it all was the man who was supposed to make sense of this seemingly senseless act. He was squatting at one end of the forty-foot charred swath that had been the stage. Agent Malley, a bald-headed, gray-bearded FBI lifer, was squinting at a pair of forceps in his right hand through a pocket magnifying glass. He looked up when he heard us coming his way. “Well, if it isn’t Jordan and MacDonald,” he said. “How’s business at NYPD’s Fat Cat Squad?”
“Booming,” Kylie deadpanned. “You find something down there?”
“Maybe.” He stood up. “If you think of this mess as a four-thousand-square-foot haystack, I may have just found a needle. Take a look.”
Kylie and I took turns studying the prize dangling from Malley’s stainless steel pincers. It was a piece of wire. Three pieces, actually—one red, one white, one blue—twisted together in pigtail fashion. It was as thin as a strand of angel-hair pasta and no more than two inches long.
“And that’s significant?” I asked.
“Again, maybe. These bomb makers—we see them as mass murderers, but they like to think of themselves as artists.” He gave the word a French spin so that it came out arteests.
“And like artists everywhere, they are compelled to sign their masterpieces. This little red, white, and blue twisty thing isn’t something I’ve come across before, so the thought popped into my head that maybe it’s our bomber’s signature.”
“Red, white, and blue,” Kylie said. “So what does that mean—death to America?”
“The bomb says death. I think the wire is about the guy who built it.”
“Red, white, and blue,” Kylie repeated. “You think he’s an American?”
“Or he could be a color-blind Lithuanian. It would be nice to know what it symbolizes, but what would be really helpful is if this is his trademark, and he’s in our global database. I’ll take it back to the office and see if we get a hit.”
“So, what’s your take so far?” I asked.
He bagged the tiny fragment of wire, marked it, and put it in an evidence bin. “It wasn’t a terrorist attack,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Hell, no. I’m just a humble underpaid government employee, not Harry Potter. But you asked what’s my take, which kind of means my educated guess after snooping around for twenty minutes. It’ll never stand up in court, but right now my take is that with only one dead and twenty-two injured, this is not the handiwork of a dyed-in-the-wool, trained-in-Syria jihadi.”
“Not a terrorist?” Kylie said. “Howard, this guy took out twenty-three people with a bomb.”
“You’re not listening, Detective,” Malley said, his defense mechanisms going on point. “I didn’t say he wasn’t a pro. This guy is top-shelf. But he was using a shaped charge aimed at killing one person. Those twenty-two other people were collateral damage, some from the blowback, but mostly from the stampede. I don’t know nearly as much about dealing with zillionaires as you do, but I’m guessing this was an every-man-for-himself crowd. They’d have a lot fewer broken bones if they didn’t panic. This guy was only after Fairfax. It wasn’t terrorism. It was personal.”
“If it were personal,” Kylie said, “wouldn’t it have been easier just to murder him in his bed?”
Malley shrugged. “I’m guessing he wanted to make a public statement. I just have no idea what he was trying to say.” He winked. “But then, that’s not my problem.”
MALLEY WAS RIGHT. Terrorism was Homeland’s problem, but homicide—especially an A-list victim like Del Fairfax—was all ours.
Other than being witness to the final seconds of his life, we knew nothing about him. We needed to talk to someone who did. We tracked down Princeton Wells. He was still at the hotel, only he’d relocated to the thirty-ninth floor.
“Anything I can do to help,” he said, opening the door to a suite with sweeping views of Central Park.
He’d traded his formal wear for a pair of wrinkled khaki cargo shorts, a faded gray T-shirt, no shoes, no socks.
The mayor had introduced us to Wells earlier in the evening. We’d given him our cards, and he’d joked about hoping he’d never need them. Yet here we were, only hours later, following him into the living room.
“Grab a chair,” he said, heading for a well-stocked wet bar. “Drink?”
We declined. He tossed some rocks into a glass and added four inches of Grey Goose. Then he uncorked a bottle of white and poured an equally generous amount into a crystal goblet.
He took a hit of vodka, set the wine on the coffee table in front of us, and said, “What have you got so far?”
“We’re sorry for the loss of your friend,” I said, “but the fact that he was the only one killed points to the possibility that he may have been the primary target.”
“That’s insane,” Wells said. “Who would want to kill Del?”
“That’s what Detective MacDonald and I are here to ask you. How well did you know him?”
“We’ve been best friends since high school. We roomed together in college. Twenty years ago we cofounded Silver Bullet along with Arnie Zimmer and Nathan Hirsch. Del and I were like brothers.”
“Did he have any enemies? Anyone who would want to see him dead?”
“This is fucking surreal,” he said, tipping the glass to his lips and draining it. “I need another drink.” He padded back to the bar.
The last thing Princeton Wells needed was more alcohol, which is something I would have told him if he were an ordinary citizen, and I were an ordinary cop. But he was a billionaire many times over, and I was a detective first grade trained to deal with the privileged class, be they shit-faced or sober. I watched as he ignored the ice and replenished the vodka.
“This is a beautiful place,” Kylie said, backing off the raw subject of his murdered best friend.
He smiled. “Thanks. I’ve had it for three years now. The view is spectacular when it snows. Point the remote at the fireplace, open a bottle of wine …”
“Did someone say wine?”
Kenda Whithouse entered the room, her hair wrapped in a towel, her body somewhat covered by a man’s tuxedo shirt.
“Already poured,” Wells said, pointing to the glass he’d left on the table.
She picked it up, sat on a sofa, and discreetly tucked her legs under her.
“Kenda,” Wells said, “these detectives are from NYPD.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “Did you catch them yet?”
“We’re working on it,” I said.
“It was terrible. Like one of those disaster movies, only it was real. I was lucky I wasn’t killed. Bad enough I got covered with all that crap flying through the air. I looked like one of those homeless women Princeton is building housing for. I had to wash my hair three times to get the smell out.”
Wells sat down next to her, took another belt of the vodka, and shifted his body so he could square off with the two of us.
“You want to know what I think, Detectives? I think that bomb was meant for the mayor. I mean, she left the podium just a few seconds before it blew. That’s the only thing that makes sense. There’s always someone with a hard-on for politicians. But Del Fairfax? Everybody loved him. Hell, they love the four of us. We raise hundreds of millions of dollars. We provide food, shelter, and education for these people, but more important, we give them purpose, hope—”
He stopped, looked at the glass in his hand, and set it down. “Sorry. A couple of drinks and I go all humanitarian commando on you. My point is, nobody wants to kill the golden goose. Silver Bullet doesn’t have enemies.”
“What about Fairfax’s personal life?” Kylie asked.
“Del was a player. Never married. And why would he? He was rich, he was good-looking, and the gals loved him.”
“Did any of these gals have husbands?” Kylie asked.
“God, no. Del would never poach another man’s wife. He was a hound, but he wasn’t into drama.”
My cell rang. It was Cates. I stepped into the foyer to take the call.
“Fill me in,” she said.
“The blast investigator flat out said, ‘It wasn’t a terrorist attack.’ He thinks it was a targeted hit at the victim. But Princeton Wells says the vic was a saint, beloved by all, so the bomb must have been meant for the mayor.”
“I doubt it,” Cates said. “Sykes was a last-minute addition to the program. This attack was planned, prepped—but I’ll alert Gracie security. What else?”
“Nothing else, boss. There were four hundred people in the room, yours truly included, and we can’t find a single witness who witnessed anything.”
“How soon can you and MacDonald tear yourself away from the scene?”
“About twelve seconds. We’re coming up dry here.”
“Then get your asses out to Roosevelt Island. Chuck Dryden has a body he wants you to meet.”
“Another homicide? For Red?”
“What can I tell you, Jordan?” Cates said. “It’s a bad night for the rich and famous.”
“NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE insanity of people with money,” Kylie said.
“Did you just open a fortune cookie, or is this the beginning of a fascinating observation?” I asked.
We were in the car on our way to Roosevelt Island.
“I’m talking about Princeton Wells,” she said. “Why in God’s name would he buy a three-bedroom suite at The Pierre hotel when he owns a six-story town house on Central Park West less than a mile away? It’s crazy.”
“Why does Bruce Wayne dress up in a cape and a cowl and fight crime in Gotham City when he could just as easily sit back and have Alfred, the butler, wait on him hand and foot inside the stately Wayne Manor? Kylie, the rich have their own special brand of craziness.”
“You’d think I’d have figured that out after working Red for almost a year, but when we called Wells, and he said he was on the thirty-ninth floor of the hotel, I automatically assumed he rented a room for the night.”
“Guys like Wells don’t rent rooms for the night,” I said.
She grinned. “Just women. Poor thing had to wash her hair three times.”
“I take it you don’t approve of his choice.”
“Just the opposite. She’s perfect for the man who wants to devote his energy to being of service to the less fortunate.”
I could tell by the glint in her eyes that she was just warming up, and she was ready to slice and dice Kenda Whithouse like a late-night comedian skewering the Kardashians. But her cell phone rang.
She checked the caller ID, smiled, and picked up. “Hey, babe, I didn’t think you were going to call.”
Babe? Personal call, I decided, my keen detective senses kicking in. I checked my watch and the look on Kylie’s face: 11:47 p.m. Delighted. Very personal.
I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end, but it went on for a solid minute. Finally, Kylie responded with, “Hey, you win some, you lose some.”
A pause, and then she said, “I wish I could, but my partner and I just caught our second homicide of the night.” A laugh, followed by, “Don’t blame me. You’re the one who thought it would be fun to date a cop. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
She hung up. “Damn it, Zach, these dead millionaires are killing my social life. I just had to turn down an invitation for drinks at Gansevoort PM.”
She was baiting me, waiting for me to ask who she turned down.
Keep waiting. I’m not asking.
“I was there last week,” she said. “The music is totally badass, but the bottle service prices in the Platinum Room are off the charts.”
I refused to bite. I kept my eyes on the road and my mouth shut.
“Have you ever been to the Ganz?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said, “but if a dead body shows up, I’m there in a heartbeat.”
That shut her up.
Normally, cops are happy to share the intimate details of their lives with their partners, but my relationship with Kylie was far from normal. We met a dozen years ago at the academy. She had just dumped her drug-addict boyfriend, and I turned out to be just what she needed to fill the void.
For twenty-eight days we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Somewhere along the way I fell in love with her. But on Day 29, the ex-boyfriend, Spence Harrington, came back, fresh out of rehab, begging her for one last chance. She gave it to him, and a year later they were married.
For the next ten years they were the perfect boldface couple. Kylie was a smart, beautiful, decorated NYPD detective, and Spence became one of New York’s most prolific and successful TV writer-producers.
And then one day the drugs pulled him back in, and he began to spiral out of control. To her credit, Kylie did everything she could to save him from self-destructing, only to learn the hard way that you can’t save an addict from himself.
Two months ago, Spence walked out on her, and when it was clear he wasn’t coming back, Kylie slowly dipped her toe back into the dating pool.
There was a line of boys in blue hoping to get on her dance card, but she turned them all down.
“I’m not hooking up with any cops,” she told me. “One was enough.”
I didn’t ask if that meant I had set the bar impossibly high or I’d ruined it for every other cop in the department.
For weeks she’d been dropping little hints about the new man in her life, egging me on to probe for details. But I was damned if I was going to ask.
All I knew for sure was that whoever this guy was, he could afford bottle service in the Platinum Room at the fucking Ganz.
I have no idea why he’d want to be surrounded by loud people and even louder music, and then spend thousands of dollars on a bottle of booze he could buy for fifty bucks at a liquor store.
But like Kylie said, “Never underestimate the insanity of people with money.”
ROOSEVELT ISLAND IS a two-mile strip of land in the East River. It’s so narrow—barely eight hundred feet wide—that from the air it looks like a piece of dental floss in between two teeth called Manhattan and Queens.
Eleven thousand people live there. Most of the other eight and a half million New Yorkers have either never been or popped by once when they took the kids for a ride on the aerial tramway that connects the island to Manhattan.
I drove across the Ed Koch Bridge, made a U-turn in Queens, and then doubled back over a second bridge to Main Street on Roosevelt Island. The trip took twenty-seven minutes. The tram takes three.
We followed East Loop Road to the underdeveloped southern tip of the island, where there was a cluster of vehicles from various city agencies. One of them, an NYPD generator truck, lit up a gray stone hulk that looked like an abandoned medieval castle waiting for the wrecking ball.
“Good morning, Detectives,” a familiar voice called out.
It was a few minutes after midnight, so technically it was morning. And nobody is more technical than our favorite anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive crime scene investigator, Chuck Dryden.
“It’s my first homicide in 10044,” he said, walking toward us.
I smiled as I imagined him racing home after work to color in another section of his Zip Code Murder Map.
“What do you know about autoerotic asphyxia?” he asked.
“As much as I know about Russian roulette,” Kylie said. “It’s a game you can win a hundred times, but you can only lose once. Who’s our victim?”
“Caucasian female, thirty-eight years old. Driver’s license in her purse ID’s her as Aubrey Davenport.”
That explained the Red connection. Davenport was a documentarian whose films focused on social justice: the impact of oil spills, wrongful medical deaths, gun violence in America—the kind of polarizing journalism that gets some people to write their congressman and others to send her hate mail.
We made our way over the rocky ground to where she was lying facedown on a blanket. She was naked except for a pair of panties around her ankles. Her back was covered with welts, and she’d been trussed with several lengths of blue fabric, one end knotted around her neck, the other attached to her ankles. I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies, but I was unnerved by the grotesqueness of this one.
“Was she sexually assaulted?” Kylie asked.
“No evidence of penetration,” Dryden said. “No sign of a struggle. She cooperated with whoever tied her up. She was as much a volunteer as a victim.”
“You telling me she signed on for this?” I said. “Whiplashes and all?”
Dryden shook his head. “You have much to learn about sexually deviant behavior, grasshopper.”
“All I know is what I heard from the missionaries. Feel free to enlighten me, sensei.”
He cracked a smile, which for Chuck Dryden is the equivalent of a standing ovation. “AEA is for the most part a male sport—often people you’d never suspect. Family men, respected pillars of the community who get off by cheating death. They tie ropes around their neck and genitals, attach the other end to a pipe or a doorknob, and then masturbate, slowly lowering their bodies to cut off the oxygen to their brain, which I’m told gives them the best orgasm they’ve ever experienced … although sometimes it’s also their last.
“Most of the recorded deaths are people who do it solo, but this woman didn’t want to take chances. She had a spotter, most likely a man. His role was to tie her up and to help her if anything went wrong. Her biggest mistake was trusting him. Look at this knot.”
He pointed to a loop in the middle of the sash. “It’s supposed to be a slipknot, a fail-safe that she can pull at any time to set herself free. But he tied it so that instead of releasing, it tightened.”
“A good lawyer will say it could have been an accident,” Kylie said. “Not everyone has a merit badge in autoerotic knots.”
“And that’s exactly what the killer would like us to think,” Dryden said. “But look at these ligature marks around her neck. If she had control over her oxygen flow, they would be on a downward angle toward her legs. But these are going in the opposite direction, and they’re deep, which to me indicates he was standing over her, and pulling up hard. I’d like to see a lawyer talk his way out of that.”
“What about the scratches on her throat?” I asked.
“Self-inflicted. She realized what the killer was doing, but it was too late. She didn’t have the strength to put up a fight. Bottom line: Aubrey Davenport did not die because of kinky sex gone wrong. She was murdered.”
“Thanks, Chuck,” I said. “I’m looking forward to hearing you say those exact words in front of a jury. Who found the body?”
“A couple of fourteen-year-old boys with a twelve-pack who were planning a memorable evening and got more than they bargained for. They called it in at 9:36. Time of death is anywhere in the eight-hour window prior to that.”
“What else was in her purse besides her ID?”
“Cash, credit cards, cell phone, a parking stub from a garage in Brooklyn time-stamped 4:52 p.m., and a SIG Sauer P238, which she unfortunately didn’t get to fire.”
“Prints?”
“This place is too rocky for me to come up with any usable fingerprints, but I do have three very telling footprints.”
“Can you get a cast? A shoe size?”
“They’re not the kind of feet that wear shoes.” Dryden smiled. He enjoyed leading us up to the mountaintop, especially when he was the one who discovered the mountain.
He shined his flashlight on three equidistant circles in the dust a few yards away from the body.
“There was a tripod there,” he said. “Whoever killed her filmed it.”
IT’S GOTTEN EASIER for people to get away with murder in New York City.
While the brass at One P P are quick to promote the fact that homicides in our city are at historic lows, there’s one statistic they don’t like to talk about. In four out of every ten cases, the killer isn’t caught.
Other cities with the same problem can blame it on the rise of drug and gang homicides. When drug dealers or gangbangers start killing, the neighborhood goes blind. No witnesses usually means no arrests.
But New York has a singular reason for our less-than-stellar batting average.
9/11.
When the towers fell, Ground Zero became the emotional focal point of our national tragedy. But for NYPD, it was the biggest crime scene in the city’s history. That morning, 2,749 men, women, and children were murdered, and every homicide demanded our full attention—one victim at a time.
The task of bringing closure to thousands of families fell squarely on the shoulders of our most seasoned detectives. It was physically and emotionally draining police work, and within two years of the attacks, three thousand of our best investigators pulled their pins. They retired, and an additional eight hundred detectives were reassigned to the new counterterrorism unit.
That left a hole that has never been filled. To this day there are precinct detectives working everything from petty larceny to major felonies who have hundreds of unsolved crimes on their plates. They catch new cases faster than they can clear the old, and there’s no one available to share the load.
That kind of clearance rate won’t cut it at Red. So when we need backup, we get it. At 1:45, while Kylie and I were still combing the grounds of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, I got a call from Danny Corcoran, a detective second grade working out of Manhattan North.
I knew Danny from the One Nine. He’s smart, thorough, and gifted with a wicked sense of humor.
“Zach,” he said, “I heard you need some grunt work on a homicide, and I just got the good news that I’m your designated grunt.”
I gave him a quick overview and told him to secure Aubrey Davenport’s apartment and office, in Manhattan, and her car, which was in a garage in Brooklyn.
“And I need a next of kin,” I said. “Kylie and I will do the notification.”
“I’m on it,” he said. “By the by, I’m breaking in a new partner. Tommy Fischer.”
“And?”
“He’s got his pluses and his minuses.”
“What are the minuses?” I asked.
“Lactose intolerant. On the plus side, he’s a great kisser.”