Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

“Cut you where?” Dodd said.

“My face.” The voice was a whimper.

“And then where else will I cut you?” Dodd said.

The words came tumbling out in heaving sobs. “My … my body. I swear … I won’t say anything stupid. I just … I just want to talk to Jamie.”

“Make it quick.”

“Jamie?” she moaned. “Jamie, is that you?”

“Erin, baby, are you okay? What has he done to you?”

“I love you. I want to come home. Please, please, please get me out of here. I’m scared, and I’m—”

“That’s enough,” Dodd said. “Did you hear that, Gibbs? She’s alive. Are you satisfied now?”

Kylie shook her head violently.

“No! I’m not satisfied,” Jamie said. “That wasn’t a conversation. That was her voice. It could have been a recording or an impersonator. I need”—he looked up at the three new words I’d added to the board—“proof of life. I want a video. I want to see that she’s really alive and unharmed.”

“Fair enough,” Dodd said. “I’ll get you your video. You figure out how to get me my twenty-five million.”

“I can’t get that kind of money overnight. It’s going to take a lot of time. Promise me that you’ll—”

“He hung up,” the tech announced. “The call dropped right after he said, ‘You figure out how to get me my twenty-five million.’ ”

Jamie slumped down onto the sofa and handed me the cell phone.

“You did great, Jamie,” Kylie said. “You did really, really well.”

“I didn’t do shit. My job was to calm Erin down, make her feel like there’s hope, and all I did was explode when he asked for twenty-five million. Did you hear her? She’s petrified. He’s threatening to disfigure her. He’s—”

“He’s terrorizing her,” Kylie said. “And you. You did what we asked you to do. You bought time.”

“ Time? Time for what? I thought he was going to ask for a couple of million. Or maybe five. I don’t have nearly that much, but with a little time I could reach out to friends … but twenty-five million? I’ll never be able to come up with that kind of money.”

“Jamie, it’s a negotiation,” Kylie said. “He doesn’t want to ask for so much that he winds up with nothing. He may only want five million, but he set the bar at twenty-five so that when he finally lowers his price to five, you’ll think you’re getting a bargain, and he’ll get what he wants.”

It was complete horseshit. This was not a negotiation. Dodd had all the cards and could demand whatever he wanted. But our job was to keep the hysterical husband from going off the deep end and blowing up the investigation.

It worked. “I might be able to get five,” he said.

We didn’t care if he could get five million or five dollars. We didn’t want him to pay Dodd a cent.

The tech stood up. “Guys, I’ve got Benny Diaz on the line.”

“Put him through,” I said.

Benny’s voice came over the speaker. “I pinpointed the call,” he said. “It came from the Four Seasons Hotel.”

“What’s the address?” I asked, ready to roll.

“Nile Plaza. Cairo, Egypt.”

CHAPTER 27

YOU HAVE NO idea where he’s really calling from, do you?” Jamie said. “All this big-deal, high-tech NYPD Red shit, and he can trick you into thinking he’s calling from some hotel in Egypt.”

“He didn’t trick us into anything,” I said. “We know he’s not there. He could be right next door, but he’s got enough techno-savvy to route the call so that it looks like it’s coming from anywhere in the world. He’s smart. Everything he says and does is part of the subterfuge. Don’t take anything at face value.”

“ Don’t take anything at face value? Really, Detective?” He bolted up from the sofa. “What about the black straight-edge Ka-Bar knife? Should I not take that at face value?” His fists were clenched, his breathing shallow, his face red.

“Calm down,” I said.

“How the hell am I supposed to calm down? Did you hear the fear in my wife’s voice? Or am I not supposed to take that at face value either?”

“Jamie, the knife was real,” I said. “Erin’s fear was very real, but the threat wasn’t.”

He began pacing the living-room floor. “And how do you know that?”

I knew it based on Bobby Dodd’s profile. He had served in the Marines, but nothing led us to believe that he was a violent criminal. He was also in love with Erin and had deluded himself into thinking they would be together for the rest of their lives. I was more concerned that Dodd would take the ransom money and disappear with Erin than I was about him killing her.

But I couldn’t share any of that with Jamie.

“All his threats are part of his strategy,” I said. “The more he can convince you that Erin’s life is in danger, the more likely you are to pay the ransom. He’s bluffing. His whole game plan is based on lies and deception.”

“Then he and I have something in common,” Jamie said.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Lies and deception. I’m not only lying to him, I’m lying to you.”

“What are you saying, Jamie?” Kylie asked.

“I told you I couldn’t pay twenty-five million but that I might be able to drum up five. That was pure bullshit. I couldn’t get that either. Hell, I’d be lucky to come up with a lousy million, and we can’t buy him off with that.” He stopped pacing. “That’s why you heard all that fear in Erin’s voice. She knows I have no money. Neither of us have any.

“Erin makes millions, but she spends it faster than it comes in. She loves … ” He groped for a word, then spit it out. “ Things . And the more ridiculously overpriced the things are, the more she loves them. She buys these houses a million miles from where she should be living, pours a shitload of money into overhauling them, and then hardly ever lives in them. She owns a twelve-million-dollar boat that she never uses, and even though the designers give her jewelry and clothes to wear on the red carpet, that’s like, what—five nights a year? She still has to look like a million bucks the other three hundred and sixty nights, and all that comes out of her pocket.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Me?” He laughed. “If you go online to one of those celebrity-net-worth websites, they’ll tell you I’ve got anything from sixty-six million to a hundred and fifty million dollars. I don’t know where they come up with numbers like that or how they can get away with saying it, because it’s totally bogus. But the kidnapper asked me for twenty-five million, so he must believe everything he reads on the internet.”

“I don’t think so,” Kylie said.

“What do you mean?”

“As soon as he said twenty-five million, you said you didn’t have that kind of money, and he didn’t even take time to blink. He came right back at you and said, ‘Mommy does.’ ”

Jamie dropped down to the sofa again. “She does—twenty times over. But as she reminds me every chance she gets, it’s her money, not mine. And trust me, if I tell her she has the power to save Erin’s life, my mother won’t part with a nickel.”

CHAPTER 28

LET ME DRIVE,” I said as soon as we left Gibbs’s apartment.

“You need to vent?” Kylie said, tossing me the keys.

I didn’t answer. We got in the car, which was parked behind the forty-eight-foot mobile incident command center.

“Millions of dollars’ worth of police technology sitting right outside his doorstep,” I said, pulling out onto Riverside Drive, “and all he can do is trash our ‘big-deal, high-tech NYPD Red shit’ because we haven’t found his missing wife less than twenty-four hours into the investigation.”