Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

“Actually, my father taught it to me when I was a little girl, only he used more kid-friendly words.”

“Lay them on me.”

She sat down next to me on the sofa, put her hand on my cheek, and whispered softly in my ear, “Suck it up, buttercup.”

I pulled her close. “You’re a good psychologist,” I said, “but I really miss my girlfriend.”

“In that case,” she said, lying back and pulling me on top of her, “this session is over.”

CHAPTER 57

BY SUNDAY MORNING, hordes of fans and paparazzi had flocked to Ninety-Fifth Street and Riverside Drive in hopes of getting a firsthand look at the most Googled, most talked-about, most sought-after celebrity on the planet.

NYPD had cordoned off the area in front of Jamie’s building and corralled the crowd behind makeshift barriers on Riverside.

Kylie and I arrived just before eleven. In addition to the doorman, two of Declan McMaster’s security team were stationed in the lobby. They recognized us but still checked our IDs.

We took the elevator upstairs. McMaster let us in. “Did you see the crowd out there?” he said. “They loved her before this, but now it’s out of control.”

“She shanked her kidnapper,” Kylie said. “That’s cult-hero status.”

“Meanwhile the poor woman is freaked. She can’t shake the fact that she snuffed out a man’s life. I have to warn you, she’s not herself, so when you question her—”

“Declan,” Kylie said, “we question victims all the time. We don’t expect someone who’s been kidnapped, raped, and living in fear for her life to be herself . All she’s got to do is give us some straightforward, honest answers.”

“Relax. I’m just offering you some insight here. It’s not like I’m telling you how to do your job,” he said, having just tried to tell us how to do our job. He led us to the living room, where Erin and Jamie were sitting on the sofa.

She was wearing gray sweatpants and a black i love ny T-shirt. There was a bandage wrapped around her left forearm. “Hello again,” she said. “Can Jamie stay while we do this?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“What do you want to know?” she asked as soon as Jamie and McMaster had left the room.

“Whatever you remember. Start with the abduction.”

She shook her head. “I slept through the abduction. One minute I was making a video for my fans, and the next thing I knew I was in this house I’d never seen before, and he was there.”

“You knew him,” Kylie said. It was a statement, not a question.

“He’s been stalking me forever. My bodyguards carry his picture. Three different judges have signed orders of protection against him. So, yeah … I knew Bobby Dodd.”

“What happened once you woke up in the house?”

“The first thing I remember is that my arm hurt like hell, and it was a bloody mess. I had this health-tracker chip implant that he cut out while I was drugged.” She peeled back the bandage on her left forearm and showed us the wound. “He apologized, but he said he had to do it so no one would find us. I didn’t tell him that the damn thing stopped working, and it was a piece of crap. One thing I learned from my friend Ari—never volunteer any information.”

“Once you were in the house, were you locked up in your bedroom the entire time?”

“No. Sometimes we’d eat together in the kitchen. Ari trained me to look for signs of another person—a second coffee cup in the sink, a cigarette butt in the garbage—but I never saw a trace of anyone but Bobby. It made sense. Why would he need a partner? He was convinced that I wanted to be with him and that I only married Jamie so I’d have enough money to run away with him. He told me that as soon as he got the money, he was going to take me to Belize.”

“Belize?” I said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, reading the look on my face. “How was he going to get me through airport security? He wasn’t stupid. His plan was to go by car. He showed me the route on Google Maps. We’d cross the border at Brownsville, Texas, and then head back east across Mexico for a couple of days until we got to Belize. It’s insane, but he had it all planned. He said we could be happy together. Just me, him, and the baby.”

We kept asking questions, and she didn’t hesitate or hold back on anything—including the details of the constant sexual abuse she had to endure. She turned out to be an ideal witness, much smarter and a lot stronger than her public image.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said two hours into the session. “Am I going to be charged with murder?”

“Erin, our job is to get the facts,” I said. “You confessed to killing a man, so his death is classified as a homicide. But if the DA finds that your actions were justifiable, it’s a pretty good bet that there won’t be any charges.”

“I didn’t plan on killing him.”

“You put together a pretty deadly weapon.”

“It was only for self-defense.”

“Were you defending yourself when you killed him?” Kylie asked.

She shook her head.

“We need a verbal answer. Were you defending yourself when you killed him?”

“I was trained by an Israeli commando. I know how to read the signs,” she said, her voice louder, more defensive. “He was going off the deep end. I had to kill him before he killed me.”

“What do you mean, he was going off the deep end?” Kylie said.

“After Bobby made the deal with the network, he became unhinged. I think that’s why he killed Veronica.”

After Bobby made the deal with the network? It was one of those rare cop moments when you’ve tapped into a mother lode of new information and you want to jump up and scream, Eureka!

But we didn’t jump. Or scream. In fact, I don’t think either of us blinked.

CHAPTER 58

ELABORATE,” KYLIE SAID, as if we were already privy to Bobby’s deal with the network and just needed to flesh out a few details.

“Take your time, Erin,” I added. “Try to remember as much as you can.”

“I don’t think Bobby ever really wanted twenty-five million dollars,” Erin said. “He would have been happy with a lot less. But he didn’t want me to think that I was worth less. So somewhere along the way, twenty-five million became the magic number.

“The first time he talked to Jamie, it went the way Bobby expected it to. He knew Jamie would ask for proof of life. But after the second call, Bobby was furious. He couldn’t believe that Jamie had reached out to his mother, and she hadn’t even returned his phone call.

“Bobby was pissed at Veronica. He started to get nervous that he’d never get any money. That’s when he came up with the idea to get the network to pay the ransom. He asked me who he should talk to, and I said Harris Brockway but that the best way to get to him was to call his wife, Anna, who is my manager.”

“And did he call Anna?”

“He had me make the call. God, she was so happy to hear from me, and then she put Brock on the phone, and he negotiated with Bobby.”

“Did you hear the conversation?”

“Every word. Bobby had it on speaker. He wanted five million for another video, but Brock said he could only authorize a million on his own. Anything more than that, and he’d have to ask his bosses, but he didn’t think they’d go for it. So Bobby took the deal.”

“Did Brockway pay the million?”

“Oh yeah. Otherwise Bobby wouldn’t have made the second video. He had one of those offshore banking accounts in Belize, and Brock wired him the money. Then ZTV did that horrible Erin in Exile show with that asshole psychologist who said I stole Jamie from Veronica and now that she had him back, why did she need me and the baby?