Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

The door opened, and Dr. Paris came in. “Time’s up, Detectives,” she said. “Excuse us.”

She drew the privacy curtain around the bed and asked us to step out of the room. We stood in the doorway. A few minutes later she pulled the curtain back, and we stepped back in.

“She needs to rest,” the doc said. “She should be released by Friday. Why don’t you pick it up with her then?”

“Just one more question,” I said. “Please.”

“ One more? Sure. Go ahead.”

“Erin, did he have any accomplices?” I asked.

“He’s the only one I ever saw. The only one I ever heard. The room was soundproofed. If he had a partner, I never saw him or heard him. But I don’t think so. I mean, why would he?”

“What do you mean?” I said, asking another question.

“He thought we’d have this life together. He was never going to let me go.” She laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “He thought he’d get the money.” Her speech was fuzzy, slurred. “We’d leave the country and … ” She let out a long sigh.

“And what?”

“We’d live … hap … ” She fought to stay awake. “Hap’ly …”

And then she was out like a light.

“Happily ever after,” Dr. Paris said. “I think that’s what she was going for.”

“You gave her something to knock her out, didn’t you?” I said.

“I’d have given her an Ambien if I could have,” Dr. Paris said. “But she’s pregnant. The only thing I did when I went behind that curtain was hold her hand and tell her that she was safe and that the man who had turned her life into a living hell was dead and gone forever. I told her that she was brave, that now it was time to let us take care of her, and that her baby needed her to sleep more than the police needed her to stay awake. Sorry, Detectives, but this woman is mentally and physically exhausted, and she needs to recover before she can be subjected to a police interrogation.”

The doc was right. We had a lot of unanswered questions, but the answers would have to wait.

CHAPTER 53

LIKE MANY COMBAT-TRAINED Marines, Bobby Dodd had known how to hide in plain sight. The white clapboard two-story farmhouse with the wraparound porch sat at the end of a seven-hundred-foot driveway and was practically invisible to anyone driving or walking along Ball Road. It was just far enough off the beaten path to be ignored, yet it was only a short drive from the heart of Warwick. He could have holed up there for months.

By the time Kylie and I arrived, the place was crawling with law enforcement—local, state, and the NYPD Crime Scene Unit. Chief Brown parked on the road, and the three of us walked to the garage, where a crime scene tech was collecting evidence from an aging Volvo wagon.

“That’s Mrs. Katz’s car,” Brown said. “In case you were wondering how your perp got around, the engine was warm when the first responders arrived.”

Chuck Dryden, our go-to criminalist, stepped out of the house and greeted us. “Detectives,” he said, more chipper than usual, “I must admit I’ve never truly understood Ms. Easton’s appeal as a so-called entertainer, but she certainly makes one hell of a ninja. Her abductor, Robert Dodd, was six foot three and over two hundred pounds, most of it muscle. She’s half a foot shorter and about sixty pounds lighter, and yet she shanked him in the shower like a hard-core lifer at Attica.”

“We heard,” Kylie said. “She told us she MacGyvered the weapon out of a bedspring.”

“Aha,” Dryden said. “You saved me some time. I haven’t been here long enough to figure that out.”

“Show us what you’ve got so far,” I said.

“From the outside, the house looks normal,” Dryden said. “The curtains are drawn and the shades are down, and if anyone rang the bell and Dodd opened the front door, all they’d see is a cozy little farmhouse living room. What they wouldn’t see is the prison cell he fashioned for her.”

He led us down the hallway past several polished-pine doors until we got to the bedroom farthest from the front of the house.

“This was reserved for the guest of honor,” he said, opening a metal fire door.

We went inside. The walls, windows, and ceiling were covered with twelve-by-twelve acoustic foam soundproofing panels. “The odds were slim to none that anyone would even get close to this room, but if someone did, Erin wouldn’t have heard anything, and no one would have heard her.

“After the first 911 call, the house was tactically swept by the locals. They found the body. White male, supine in the shower, water still running, naked except for a bullet on a chain that he wore around neck, his jugular severed.”

Kylie and I stepped into the bathroom where Bobby Dodd was still lying where he had taken his final breath. We didn’t stay with him long. Like Erin, all we cared about was that he was dead.

We went back to Erin’s bedroom.

“Look at this crap,” Kylie said, poking through the box of bargain-basement clothes that had been Erin’s wardrobe. “It makes you wonder.”

“About what?” Dryden said.

“It looks like whoever bought these clothes had absolutely no idea how to shop for the woman who would be wearing them,” Kylie said.

“Most men,” Chief Brown said, “that ain’t exactly their strong suit.”

“Dodd wasn’t like most men,” Kylie said. “He idolized Erin. He knew everything about her. And yet he dressed her in clothes she normally wouldn’t be caught dead in. I think he did it to humiliate her. Knowing how much emphasis Erin places on exteriors, I bet he handpicked this junk to make her feel less than.”

I watched Chief Brown’s face as he took it all in. I was pretty sure he’d decided that Kylie was the smartest cop he’d ever encountered.

We followed Dryden into a second bedroom. “Dodd’s prints were all over Erin’s bedroom, but hers aren’t in here,” Dryden said. “This was his man cave. We found an assortment of disguises, half a dozen burner phones, and a laptop. The search history appears to be intact.”

“How about guns?” Kylie said.

Dryden smiled. As usual, he was saving the best for last. He opened a closet door. Inside was a small arsenal—handguns, rifles, and semiautomatics.

“The man had more guns than my aunt Martha has Hummel figurines,” Dryden said. “But I think this is the one you’re looking for.”

He picked up a soft case, about three feet in length, with the brand name Berlebach sewn into the black canvas.

“I’ll bet half the photographers at that fashion show brought in bags that looked like this. But they were bringing in tripods. This, on the other hand … ” He unzipped the case. Inside was a rifle. “It’s a Winchester Seventy,” he said, carefully picking up the gun with his gloved right hand. “And there’s a box of jacketed hollow-point cartridges at the bottom of the bag.”

“What caliber is the ammo?” I asked.

“Two-twenty-three.”

“That’s the same caliber bullet that killed Veronica Gibbs.”

“Give me a few hours, and I’ll let you know if this is the same gun.”

My cell phone rang. It was the chief of detectives. “Jordan,” he said.

That was it. Just my name. But the way he said it sounded more like he’d been chewing on it, hated the taste, and was spitting it out.

“Yes, sir.”

“Meet me at the golf course where we put down the chopper. You and MacDonald. Now.” He didn’t wait for a response. He hung up.

I turned to my partner. “The old man wants to see us.”

“About what?”

“He didn’t say.” I headed toward the door. “But the phrase dead man walking comes to mind.”

CHAPTER 54