Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

I hit the bar when I’m done. The bartender has a bourbon waiting for me. He says the coppers like it when I do a few minutes, so this one’s on the house.

That’s me, the funny guy, the comedian. The comedian who’s killed three perps in the line of duty in the last week. Ha-freakin’-ha.

“I forgot you had a sense of humor.” Marsha Flager takes the seat next to me.

“You did? It’s my most endearing quality.”

She raises her hands. “Didn’t mean to offend. Don’t shoot me or anything.”

“You’re safe; we’re not on a roof.”

She takes a long, hard look at me, then slides a manila envelope out of her bag and into my hands.

“Are you sure you’re safe, Billy?” she asks. “Because after reading what I just found, I’m not so sure.”

Chapter 71

FEELS LIKE a lifetime ago, but Marsha Flager and I went for a spin back in the day, when I was still a patrol officer. That was before I met Valerie and before she met her husband and popped out three kids. Somewhere between the first and second bundles of joy, I think it was, she lost her taste for the street.

“What are you havin’?” I ask her.

“Nah, I hit my limit. Got an early day tomorrow.”

“Someone stole a credit card or something?” I wink at her. I understand her move to Financial Crimes. She majored in finance in college, thought she’d do something in that field until she got a yearning for police work and thought, what the hell, put in for the Academy. Turned out she liked the street, had a real talent for it. Misses it, too, even now, but every time she’d roll out on a shift, she told me the other day, when I first called her for help, all she could think about was her children growing up without their mother.

More or less exactly what Carla said to me last night in the ambulance.

“It was good to hear from you,” she says. “Even if it was work. Doesn’t just have to be work, y’know.”

I look at her. She’s looking at me. I remember that come-hither expression. It’s what got me the first time. Four or five times, actually, before I got transferred and it petered out. She liked to do it in the back of patrol cars, hot and sweaty, legs up in the air.

“Divorced,” she says, showing me a finger without a ring.

“Ah, I didn’t know. Sorry to hear.”

“It’s okay. He’s good to the kids. We’re making it work. Just—y’know, you wanna grab a drink sometime, I might answer the phone.” Giving me an out in case I’m not interested. I might be, but not right now.

“Okay, so listen up,” Marsha says to me. “This isn’t a joke, this guy. I didn’t dig all that deep outside of the financial filings, which is what you needed me for. But I saw enough. And what I saw, well…” She nods toward the manila envelope in my hand. “The KB in KB Investors Group is a Ukrainian named Kostyantin Boholyubov.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“Yeah, nobody can pronounce it. They call him Boho for short.”

That’s what Valerie called him, in her attorney notes. Boho .

“This guy ran the Ukraine secret police for a decade after the Soviet Union fell,” she says. “Supported the government, suppressed opposition. Surveillance, interrogations, torture, rape rooms. Had a militia that terrorized the country. Kinda guys who don’t knock before they come in. Kinda guys make people disappear, and nobody asks why, or they’re next. Amnesty International practically opened up a satellite office in Kiev to complain about him and his thugs.”

“And I’ll bet nothing stuck.”

“Not really, no. And now he’s gone legit. On paper, at least. Has his hands in a lotta stuff. Real estate, for one. Also runs a steel export company. Ships it to a lotta places, including America.”

I wonder if there’s more than steel on those ships. “That must be why Nathan Stofer squeezed him out of the Stratton Tower project,” I say.

She turns, gives me a look. “He didn’t squeeze nobody outta nuthin’.”

“No, huh?”

“KB Investors was one of the largest investors in the Stratton Tower,” she says. “Boho made millions.”

“No shit. So the untimely death of Mr. Stofer—”

“Was pretty friggin’ timely for General Boholyubov,” she says.

“Okay, thanks, Marsh.”

She touches my arm. “This guy keeps a personal security detail, Billy. When the secret police was broken up, he hired most of them. This guy doesn’t have a sense of humor. So you’re gonna step into his world? I’d bring body armor and a SWAT team.”

Chapter 72

VALERIE, THE GUN under her chin.

Don’t come any closer, she says.

What are you doing? Don’t—put the gun down, honey. Please, please put it away—

She’s gone, isn’t she? You wouldn’t be here in the middle of the day—you wouldn’t have left the hosp—

Yes, she’s gone. She just passed.

And I wasn’t there.

Give me the gun, Valerie. Give it to me.

I can’t do this anymore.

Yes, you can. You know what you can do? You can help me plan the funeral. So we can honor her, together. That’s what we’re supposed to do.

I…can’t.

Yes, you can. Give me the gun.

Don’t—don’t come any closer.

Give me the gun, Valerie. We’ll work through this together. I promise. Just—

What are you—no, don’t come any—

Give it to me!

“No.” I pop off the bed, fall to the carpet. Pull the comforter off the bed and wrap it around me, trying to contain an uncontrollable shiver, the fog of the dream fading.

No. That’s not what happened. I wasn’t there.

No; they killed you, Valerie. They killed you.

They killed you, and I’m gonna prove it.

Chapter 73

EVENTUALLY, THE chill inside me wanes, my pulse decelerates. I’m nothing but dried sweat. I grab my phone off the nightstand. Eight o’clock. Shit.

I stumble to the shower, blast the hot water, run a dry razor over my face, let the water scald me, wash it all away.

IAB and fucking COPA—the Civilian Office of Police Accountability—are done interviewing me. Don’t see how they can come back negative on me for shooting those two on the rooftop, guys who were about to shoot either me or Carla, all while protecting a major heroin mill, but with civilians and the suits at IAB, who collectively have probably never once had a gun pointed at them, you never know.

I roll in at a quarter past nine.

“Happened to you?” says the intake sergeant, Vitrullo. All these Italians behind their desks while the potato eaters go out and get shot at.

“Shoulda seen the other guy.”

“Package for you,” he says. “Your partner took it.”

She’s not at her desk upstairs. I find her in an interview room, watching a—

Watching a video on the flat-screen.

A courier approaches the SUV at the curb. Shots fired from the back window, the screen panning wide to show a massacre.

I’m watching the K-Town shooting.

Carla hears me, turns. “You freakin’ believe this?”

“What…” I say. “How…”

She shows me a big brown wrapper, words in black marker: Detectives Harney and Griffin.

“Someone dropped it off at the front desk,” she says. “Must have seen our names in the papers, knew it was our case.” She holds up the remote and rewinds. “You gotta see this from the beginning.”

She rewinds it. A 4Runner turning off Van Buren onto Kilbourn, heading north. Pulling up to the curb outside Shiv’s house, the courier in the Bears jersey—Frisk, they called him—approaching the vehicle. Camera zooms in on the license plate, tells us what we already knew. Then the camera moves up and tells us something we didn’t.