Patterson Array - NYPD Red

I smiled back. “You were wearing a vest?” I said.

“My wife bought it for me. I think Bloomingdale’s was having their annual Kevlar sale.”

“Your wife bought you a bulletproof vest?” I said. “Really?”

“She said I’m high enough on the food chain that if some meshuggener is out there killing people, odds are I’m on his list. I hate it when she’s right, but in this case I’m willing to make an exception.”

I stood up. “You’re a lucky man, Shelley.”

“I know, I know.” He sighed. “And she’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

“Zach. Over here.”

Spence Harrington was sitting on the front step of the funeral home. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a chunk of the building’s brownstone facade that had obviously taken a bullet. “Another half a second, and that would’ve been my head. Kylie shoved me out of the way. Saved my life.”

“I think she saved a lot of lives,” I said.

“You’ve got one hell of a partner,” he said.

“So do you.”

Kylie came over holding the shooter’s purse. “Her name is Alexis Carter, twenty-eight years old.”

“Alexis,” I said. “Lexi. The girlfriend J.J. told us about. What’s her address? He may still be there.”

“She has an Indiana driver’s license. There’s nothing in here that connects her to a New York City address. Damn it, Zach, I never thought about looking for the girlfriend. I was totally focused on looking for a man.”

“We were all looking for a man,” I said. “Gabriel Benoit.”

“And we’re still looking for him,” she said. “Let’s make sure this whole scene is locked down. Have the uniforms get statements from everyone in the crowd. I don’t care if it takes all-Zach…her cell phone. It’s vibrating.”

“Answer it.”

She scrambled to pull the shooter’s cell phone out of the purse. “The ID says ‘Gabe.’ It’s him.”

“Put him on speaker.”

She pushed the answer button. “Hello,” she said.

“Who is this?” the voice on the other end demanded.

“This is Detective Kylie MacDonald, New York City Police Department.”

“Where’s Lexi? Where is she?”

“I have a better question,” Kylie said. “Where are you?”

The line went dead.

The bigger the crime, the more likely it is that someone important will show up to keep the cops from solving it. In our case, it was a close personal friend of Shelley Trager, who just happened to be the mayor of the city of New York.

Trager was on an EMS stretcher, about to be transported to Lenox Hill Hospital, when the mayor and the rest of his entourage arrived at the crime scene. After congratulating his friend on being smart enough to wear a bulletproof vest, His Honor turned on Kylie.

“Detective MacDonald,” he said. “Aren’t you the one who told me you were going to catch this maniac before he left town? The way you keep promises, you have a bright future ahead of you. As a politician.”

“Stan!” Trager yelled from the stretcher. “If it hadn’t been for MacDonald, there’d be more bodies piled up outside this funeral home than there are inside. The same goes for Detective Jordan. You got good cops here. Don’t be a schmuck. Let them do their job.”

“Fine,” the mayor huffed. “And I’ll do mine. I’m going to pull the plug on Hollywood on the Hudson week.”

Trager winced in pain as he propped himself up on one elbow. “Hop in the ambulance, Stan, and I’ll drop you off at Bellevue, because you’re out of your fucking mind. What message do you want to send to Hollywood? If the shit hits the fan, New Yorkers run from a fight? Or that we’ve got the fastest, smartest, bravest police force in the world, and nobody-anywhere-backs up the film industry like NYPD Red?”

“So what are you saying, Shelley? If we quit now, the terrorists win?”

“I don’t know who would win,” Trager said, “but I can damn well tell you who would lose. You bail out now, and next November you’ll be lucky to get half a dozen votes on Staten Island. Grow a pair, Stanley.”

“All right. I’ll give it one more day.” He turned to Kylie. Anyone who thought he might apologize for jumping down her throat, or at least congratulate her for bringing down an active shooter, didn’t know him very well. “Who’s the dead girl?” he said.

She told him.

“Now what?” he asked.

“We’re going through her text messages and her voice mails,” Kylie said. “She’s only one degree of separation from Gabriel Benoit, the guy we’re looking for. We’re closing in on him.”

“I’ll ask you one more time,” the mayor said to Kylie. “You still think you’re going to catch this guy?”

“Yes, sir,” she said without missing a beat. “Absolutely.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but Kylie actually sounded more confident than she did when she answered the same question two nights and four dead bodies ago.

Delia Cates is not the kind of cop who shows up at a crime scene just because the mayor is there. She’s smart enough to give her team enough time to pull together some information. When she got there, twenty minutes after the mayor left, we had plenty. Some of it downright scary.

“Give me what you’ve got,” she said.

“The shooter was Benoit’s girlfriend, Alexis Carter, a.k.a. Lexi. Her cell phone is a treasure trove. Nothing is password-protected,” I said. “From what we can put together from the texts between her and Benoit, she knew what he was up to, but she didn’t go with him when he killed Roth, Stewart, or Schuck.”

“She definitely made up for it this time around.”

“All of it behind her boyfriend’s back. Benoit had no idea she was going to pull this. In his last few messages he was looking for her frantically. And you were right. They’re plotting out a movie. We found the script for this scene in her purse. It had two endings.”

“One where she gets away, and one where she dies tragically?” Cates said.

“No. One where she gets away, and one where she gets caught by NYPD Red, and she stands up to us, protecting her man.”

“With Tammy Wynette on the sound track?” Cates said.

“She even uses my name and Zach’s in the script,” Kylie said, unfolding one of the pages we found in Lexi’s purse. “Her character is called Pandemonia Passionata. I’ll give you some of the dialogue.”

DETECTIVE JORDAN

Where is your partner? What does he have planned?

PANDEMONIA

Save your breath, pretty boy. You’ll get nothing out of me.

DETECTIVE MACDONALD

You have no idea how much trouble you’re in.

PANDEMONIA

And you have no idea how much trouble you’re in.

“That’s the way she saw this going down?” Cates said. “We either catch her, or she gets away? Did she ever write the ending the way it happened?”

Kylie shook her head. “No. She was blissfully delusional to the very end.”

“We need the rest of the script,” Cates said. “Do you have any idea where it is?”

“It may be in her computer, but she has an out-of-state license and all her last known addresses in New York are dead ends,” I said. “But we do have something. Remember Cheryl Robinson predicted that Benoit is about to do something big-much bigger than the previous murders? Listen to this.”

I pushed the message retrieval button on Lexi’s cell phone.

“Lexi, it’s me. Things are turning to shit. I’m outside Mickey’s building, and the cops showed up. I’m pretty sure they’re going to pick up Mickey. I got forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of C4 in my bag, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop them. That’s all. Oh yeah, one more thing. Where the fuck are you?”