Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

“Bunny. Bunny Ogden,” the doorman said. “I have her son’s cell number. I can call him right now.”

“Hang tight, bro,” Gary said to the doorman as Julio opened the ambulance’s back doors and dropped a gurney to the pavement. “Wait till we get back down. Let’s see what’s going on before you hit the panic button.”

They grabbed their gear, an oxygen tank, and the gurney and headed for the building. The doorman ran ahead, opened the door, and rang for the elevator.

They rode up to the eighth floor in silence and wheeled the gurney down the hall to 8C. Julio rang the doorbell.

It took about twenty seconds before a female voice on the other side responded. “Who is it?”

“Ambulance for Mrs. Ogden. Please let us in.”

A lock clicked, and a uniformed nurse opened the door. She looked at the two EMTs, the stretcher on wheels, and the oxygen and tried to take it all in. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“We got a call that Mrs. Ogden was in respiratory distress,” Gary said.

“She’s fine. She’s watching TV. Who called? Was it her son?”

“Ma’am, please,” Gary said. “If you have questions, call our dispatcher, but legally we can’t leave the apartment until we check on the patient. Please let us in.”

The nurse stepped aside, and the two men entered.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Gary asked.

“Lydia Humphries.” She reached into her pocket and took out a cell phone. “I’m calling Mr. Ogden,” she said. “Something’s not right.”

“One more question before you call,” Gary said as Julio shut the apartment door behind them. “How long have you been working for Mrs. Ogden?”

“I came here in September, so … nine months.”

Gary reached into his equipment bag and pulled out a gun. He held it up to her head and removed the phone from her hand.

“After nine months, I’m sure you know where the old lady keeps the money and the jewelry, Lydia, and if you want to get out of here alive, you’ll tell us.”

CHAPTER 20

WHEN I GOT back to the station Kylie was still asleep. I walked over to the bed and stared down at her, and my thoughts invariably drifted back to a time a thousand years ago when hers was the face I woke up to every morning.

We were both young, just starting out at the academy, working our tails off night and day to impress our instructors—and each other—with how smart we were. Turns out she was smarter. She graduated at the top of our class, five notches ahead of me. I congratulated her with a gift, a T-shirt with a giant 1 on the front.

The next day she returned the gesture by giving me a T-shirt that said a respectable 6.

Our love affair only lasted twenty-eight days, but they were the most unforgettable four weeks of my life. The crushing blow came on the twenty-ninth day, when she told me that her longtime boyfriend, Spence Harrington, had come out of rehab, and she’d decided to give him one last chance.

A year later they were married. Eleven years after that, Spence returned to his coke addiction with a vengeance and wound up in the ICU after a near-fatal overdose. This past January, he completely dropped out of sight. They’re still married, but only on paper.

I took one of the breakfast burritos and held it under her nose. It got an immediate response. “Mmmph,” she said. “That smells like heaven.”

“It’s all yours when you wake up, Sleeping Beauty.”

She opened her eyes. “That’s Detective Sleeping Beauty to you. Did you find Erin yet?”

“No.”

She frowned. “Rats.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but how about a little gratitude for the burrito?”

She swung her legs off the bed and took a healthy bite out of the sandwich. “Thanks,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

I handed her a cup of coffee. “How you doing there, K-Mac?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“No. You haven’t been your regular, annoying pain-in-the-ass self lately, and I’m your partner. I’m genuinely concerned.”

“Well, partner, my professional life is aces. I love my job, I love the unit, and I love the people I work with. It’s my personal life that kind of sucks. In the five months since Spence disappeared, I’ve only had one brief relationship—CJ.”

“The poker player,” I said. “He seems nice enough.”

“ Seemed nice enough. It’s all past tense. He moved back to Hawaii. Which leaves me stumbling around my big, beautiful two-bedroom apartment with no husband, no boyfriend, and no desire to download one of those apps where you have a choice of swiping left or swiping right.”

“So you’re lonely,” I said.

She laughed. “Is that a euphemism or are you missing the point? I’m not lonely. I’m horny.”

“Aha. I wish I could help you.”

“You help me more than you know,” she said. “And I’m not just talking about this incredible sausage, egg, and cheese burrito. You were there for me every step of the way when Spence was spiraling out of control. I know there were times when you had to choose between spending the night with Cheryl or holding my hand when I went careening around Harlem, the Bronx, and Atlantic City in search of my drug-addled husband. You’re not just my partner, Zach. You’re my rock. You’re my best friend.”

She stood up, wrapped her arms around me, and kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m going to shower and get dressed,” she said. “I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”

She left me standing there, my pulse racing, my brain flooded with emotions I had no desire to deal with.

Over the past year I’ve fallen deeply in love with Cheryl. I can look down the road and see a long, happy future with her. But I’ve never fallen out of love with Kylie. I keep it under control most of the time, but when I look down the road in the opposite direction, I see a brief, blissful past that I can’t let go.

There are times, like this very moment, when I wish that Kylie and I could somehow be friends with benefits.

But I know I have to settle for friends with baggage.

CHAPTER 21

KYLIE AND I couldn’t possibly tackle the Easton case on our own, so the borough chief had drafted a small battalion of detectives to back us up. Within hours of the abduction, they descended on the third floor of the precinct and commandeered every inch of workspace that is normally assigned to Community Affairs.

They saved us a lot of legwork, phone work, and grunt work, but they also generated a ton of paperwork. In a criminal investigation, anything and everything connected to the case has to be preserved, cataloged, and available to the court. There was a basket on my desk where they deposited all those reports.

By the time I ate my breakfast and settled in, the basket was buried under a mountain of DD-5s with ripped-out notepad pages stapled to them; computer printouts of background checks of the hundreds of wedding guests, venue employees, and other witnesses; CDs of surveillance videos; and the usual slew of phone messages.

“I hope you brought a broom,” Kylie said. “Your desk looks like a subway track after New Year’s Eve.”

We recruited Danny Corcoran to help us organize it all while we focused on Bobby Dodd.

He didn’t own a car, which meant whatever vehicle he’d used to transport Erin after he ditched the box truck could have been stolen. We assigned a team to wade through the stolen-vehicle database, check out any that had been recovered, and see if there were any prints or DNA left behind that could connect it to Erin or Dodd.

Our crime scene team found the wireless cameras Dodd had planted that allowed him to know exactly what was going on during the wedding. It meant that McMaster had been wrong– Dodd hadn’t tracked Erin through her tweets.