Джеймс Паттерсон - NYPD Red 6

“Thank you.” She rested her hand on the shoulder of a woman, about sixty, who was sitting on the sofa. “This is Paloma Hernandez. She’s been with the family for three years.”

Paloma barely looked up. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let them in.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kylie said. “They fooled the doorman, and they fooled you. You let them in because you thought they were there to help.”

“I beg them not to put the tape on her mouth. I say she has breathing problems from the COPD. But the one, he just said, ‘She can breathe through her nose.’ Ten minutes after they left Mrs. Edith started to choke. I think maybe she aspirated on her own vomit. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor, but if I wasn’t tied up, I could have helped.”

“Can you describe the two men who entered the apartment?”

“One was a white guy—he was maybe six feet tall. The other was black, a little shorter. They both have brown eyes, but the rest of their face was covered with a surgical mask.”

I didn’t bother asking her if the second perp may have been Hispanic rather than white. Ms. Hernandez knew the difference.

I turned to the daughter. “Ms. Geller, the drawers in your mother’s room were pulled out and emptied. It would help if we knew what they took.”

“Things. Nothing worth killing someone for.”

“I understand, but they are going to try to sell those things. The more details you can give us, the better the chance we have of finding your mother’s killers and bringing them to justice.”

“It was the jade,” Paloma volunteered.

Geller nodded. “Of course. Ever since she was a girl, my mother loved jade jewelry—green, black, red, all colors.”

“Do you think you can describe what they took and give us an approximate value?” I asked.

“I pay the insurance premium, so I can get you a list. Her favorite was a lavender jade oval set in a cluster of diamonds. That was appraised at forty thousand dollars. The entire collection was worth maybe five or six hundred thousand dollars.”

“They take the envelope with the money too,” Paloma said.

“What money?” I said.

“I leave an envelope with cash for Paloma,” Geller said. “It’s for household expenses or for when they go out on their excursions.”

“What excursions?” I asked the nurse.

“Mrs. Edith, she didn’t like to be cooped up in the apartment, and she loved riding the subway, so in the nice weather we would take the train to places like the Bronx Zoo or the Brooklyn Museum or, her favorite, Coney Island. We were just there last Sunday. She loved to sit on the boardwalk and eat an ice cream cone.”

“And how much was in the envelope?”

“Six hundred and forty-two dollars,” Paloma said. “I keep a good count. Also Mrs. Edith’s MetroCard, but that had only like twenty dollars left on it.”

“Detectives.”

I looked up. It was Benny Diaz from TARU. Kylie and I thanked Geller and Hernandez, told them we’d be in touch, and walked over to where Benny was waiting.

“The good news is that the surveillance system in this building was state-of-the-art when they installed it,” he said. “The bad news is they installed it fifteen years ago.”

“Do you have anything we can use?” I asked.

“If you’re looking for blurs and blobs, you’re in luck. But if you’re hoping for facial features, you’re going to have to ask your perps to start robbing buildings with better security cams.”

He opened his laptop and showed us half a dozen screengrabs. The photos wouldn’t help us identify the suspects, but they definitely settled one issue. Our eyewitnesses had been right: One of the phony EMTs was white; the other was black.

“So there are at least three of them,” Kylie said. “And if the white guy from today isn’t the same one from the previous robberies, we’re up to four.”

Our dynamic duo was turning into a gang.

CHAPTER 60

THEY CAN HIDE their faces, but they can’t hide their wheels,” Kylie said. “If you were driving a fake ambulance to a fake emergency call, what would you do to look authentic?”

“Run the lights.”

We called the NYC Department of Transportation and had them check the traffic cameras from lower Manhattan to Harlem. Sure enough, a red-light camera had caught the ambulance blowing through the intersection at Sixty-Third Street and First Avenue.

“Can you give me the plate number?” I asked the tech. Even if it had been stolen we might be able to pick it up on license-plate readers and see where the ambulance had come from.

“Sorry,” the tech said, “but it’s unreadable. They put a reflector cover on the plate. They’re not legal, but people do it all the time.”

“Right,” I said. “If we catch them, we’ll slap them with a summons.”

“Give me your e-mail, and I’ll send you the photos,” he said. “You can’t make out the driver’s face, but the logo on the vehicle is clear as a bell. Prestige Medical Transport.”

“The name is phony,” I said, “but the pictures of the ambulance will help us pinpoint the model and year.” I thanked him and hung up.

“These guys scope out each victim in advance,” Kylie said. “They know whose apartment they’re going to hit before they get there, and so far they’ve only targeted buildings where they can avoid getting picked up by security cameras. They’re getting their insider information from somewhere.”

The question was, from where? We ran Paloma Hernandez’s name through the system, and she came up clean, just like the first two home attendants had. And each of the three had been placed by a different agency. There had to be a common denominator. We just couldn’t figure out what it was.

We stuck around while CSU combed through the apartment, but they couldn’t come up with any prints or DNA that could help us identify the two intruders. We were about to leave when Kylie stopped dead in her tracks.

“The MetroCard,” she said. “The one they stole from Mrs. Shotwell.”

“What about it?”

“Moss and Devereaux have been checking pawnshops and dozens of sites online where the perps might sell the jewelry. But these crooks are too smart for that. They must have a fence taking the pricey stuff off their hands, so good luck tracing any of Mrs. Shotwell’s jade. But there’s one thing that a fence wouldn’t be interested in, and it’s traceable: her MetroCard.”

“It’s a long shot,” I said, “but it’s a great idea.”

We called Bethany Geller and asked if she knew how her mother had paid for her MetroCard. She gave us the answer we were hoping for.

“I bought it for her. I put it on my credit card a year ago, and it refills automatically.”

“Did you cancel the auto payments yet?” I asked.

“I didn’t think of it, but I better do it now, otherwise those bastards will keep riding the subway on my credit card.”

“Don’t. Please,” I said. “Do not cancel your mother’s MetroCard.” “Why not?”

I told her. Two minutes later Kylie and I called the NYPD Transit Bureau’s special investigations unit. We gave the detective who took the call Geller’s Visa card number and asked him to pull the usage file. Within seconds, he linked the credit card to one of the city’s millions of MetroCards.

“Can you tell us when it was last used?” I asked.

“I can tell you when and where, and if you give me a minute to scan the video, I can give you a description of the person who used it.”

A few minutes later he had an answer. “It was used a week ago Sunday at eleven fifty-three a.m. at the Fifty-First Street station by an elderly white woman. She was with a younger woman, Hispanic, probably her caretaker. They had one of those rolling portable oxygen tanks. The card was used again at two fifty-nine p.m. at the Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn.”