“We’ve got nothing of substance to report yet,” I said.
“Nothing of substance seems to be the theme of my day,” she said. “I’m on my way to Albany to be lied to.”
She walked down the porch steps and headed for the SUV. Charlie opened the rear door as she approached.
Kylie and I followed. “Mayor Sykes,” I said, “you sent for us. Was it just to get an update on the Travers case?”
“Hell, no. I knew you had nothing because nobody from Red called to say you had something.”
She climbed into the backseat of the car, and Charlie closed the door. Sykes rolled down the rear window. “I called for something else. It’s a nasty can of worms, and I can’t trust anyone to deal with it but you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Do you have time to give us the details?”
“Detective, I don’t have time to wind my watch. Howard can give you the details. He’s waiting for you inside.”
She rolled up the window, and the SUV took off for the 145-mile trip to the state capital.
“I’ve never seen her in such a foul mood,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be Charlie.”
“Hell,” Kylie said, “if this is the real Muriel Sykes, then I wouldn’t want to be Howard.”
That got a laugh out of me. Howard Sykes was the mayor’s husband. We went back up the porch steps to find out what nasty can of worms he was about to entrust us with.
CHAPTER 7
Muriel Sykes was a scrappy kid from the streets of Brooklyn who worked her way through law school, was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, then crushed a sitting mayor in her first run for office. If she had one defining quality that propelled her along the way, it was grit.
Her husband was neither gritty nor scrappy. A privileged child raised on New York’s affluent Sutton Place, Howard Sykes had navigated his way from the city’s private school system to the Ivy League and ultimately to Madison Avenue, where his white-bread good looks and well-bred patrician manner made him a natural fit in a world where image was often more valued than substance.
But there was a lot more to the man than a proper golf swing and a gift for captivating his dinner guests with advertising war stories. Howard was a virtuoso at orchestrating marketing campaigns that won the hearts of consumers and sweetened the bottom lines of his clients. He retired at the age of sixty to manage his wife’s political campaign and was credited with being the force behind making her the first female mayor of New York City.
And to top it all off, he was a hell of a nice guy. Kylie and I had met him at several charity functions, and he had a way of always making us feel as important as any billionaire in the room.
He was waiting for us in the living room of the First Family’s private residence. “Zach, Kylie, thanks for coming,” he said, ignoring the fact that it was a command performance.
“How can we help?” I asked.
“I’m on the board of trustees of two hospitals here in the city,” he said. “A month ago some medical equipment disappeared from Saint Cecilia’s.”
“What kind of equipment?”
Ever the consummate adman, Howard had prepared visual aids. He opened up a folder and pulled out a photo of a contraption that looked like an iPad on steroids.
“That’s a portable ultrasound machine used for cardiac imaging. It weighs ten pounds, which means the tech can walk it to any bedside in the hospital.”
“But this one walked out of the hospital,” I said.
“This and two more just like it. They cost twenty thousand a pop. My first thought was that that’s the downside to making these machines so compact: they’re easy to steal. However”—he pulled out the next picture—“this one disappeared about the same time.”
It looked like R2-D2’s taller brother.
“It’s an anesthesia machine. Fifty thousand dollars, and at four hundred pounds, you can’t exactly slip it into a backpack. And yes, it has wheels, but it also has an electromagnetic security device embedded in it, and the hospital has guards at all access points. But it still went out the door.”
“Did Saint Cecilia report the thefts?” Kylie asked.
“No. We had no proof that anything was stolen, and we didn’t report them missing. The hospital decided to write it off and chalk it up to bad security.”
Kylie and I said nothing. Because so far nothing made sense. A low-level crime that the victim didn’t report, and yet the mayor, knowing we were caught up in the Elena Travers murder, asked us to drop everything and get involved.
Howard finally dropped the other shoe.
“I’m also on the board at Mercy Hospital, and two days ago it was hit. This time they got away with a hundred and seventy thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. I don’t believe in coincidences, so I did some digging, and I found out that nine hospitals had been robbed in two months. Total haul, close to two million dollars.” He handed me a printout. “The specifics are all here.”
“And you’d like us to find out who’s behind the thefts,” I said.
“Yes, but not in your usual style.”
“I didn’t know we had a style,” Kylie said, looking at me. “He’s going to have to tell us what it is so we don’t keep doing it.”
Howard smiled and pulled a newspaper clipping from the folder. It was a picture of Kylie and me leaving the Bassett brothers’ house.
“The media loves you,” he said. “It’s one thing to be on the front page when you solve a major crime, but last night you interviewed the people whose necklace was stolen, and you made page five of the Post. You guys get ink wherever you go, and my goal—and Muriel’s—is to keep a tight lid on this investigation. She called the PC this morning, and he’s on board.”
“This is a pervasive crime spree, but it’s the first time we’ve ever heard of it,” Kylie said. “Why is it so hush-hush? And why not tell the public what’s going on? Sometimes they can be our best source of leads.”
“If you ask the head of any one of these hospitals, he’ll tell you that the secrecy is for the well-being of the patients. People want to feel safe when they check in, but if they hear that criminals have stolen a piece of equipment the size of a refrigerator, they’re going to worry. What else can these villains take? My wallet? My laptop? My newborn baby? The prevailing wisdom at the hospitals is that it’s better to keep it quiet. Less stress for the patients.”
“What’s the real reason they don’t want to go public with the thefts?” I asked.
“Because if this shit gets out,” Howard said, a wide grin on his face, “it would put a serious crimp in their fund-raising.”
CHAPTER 8
“Change our style?” Kylie said as soon as she pulled the car out of the mayor’s driveway. “Is he serious? One of the reasons we get press is because we solve crimes. Riddle me this, Batman: how are we supposed to crack this case if we can’t put out any feelers to the public?”
“Because we can solve anything, Girl Wonder. That’s why the mayor of Gotham City picked us,” I said. “Why don’t we start by talking to the people we’re actually allowed to talk to? Get on the Drive, and let’s shoot down to Mercy Hospital and talk to their security people.”
She turned left on 79th, and we headed south on the FDR.
“There’s only one way to get two million dollars’ worth of hospital equipment from New York to whatever third world buyer is willing to pay for it,” Kylie said. “Big fat shipping containers.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Let’s give Howard’s list to Jan Hogle and see if she can run it against the manifests of cargo ships that sailed within a few days of each heist. She can cross-check by weight. If they stole x pounds of equipment, she can flag every shipment that weighs about the same.”
“That wasn’t my idea,” Kylie said. “I was thinking we could go down to the shipyards and talk to the dockworkers. Those guys have eyes and ears everywhere, and a few of them owe us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “A
nd then our pictures would be in the paper as the first two cops fired by the Sykes administration.”
Kylie’s cell phone rang. We were doing fifty on the Drive, so she tapped a button and the call went directly to speaker.
“This is Detective MacDonald,” she said.
“This is Mike Danehy at Better Choices,” the voice on the other end said. “Is Mrs. Harrington there?”
She grabbed the phone and took it off speaker. “This is Mrs. Harrington.”
She dropped her voice after that so that I could barely hear her end of the conversation, but I could tell by the look on her face that it was bad news. Something was going on with Spence.
A lifetime ago, when Kylie and I were new at the academy, we had a throw-all-caution-to-the-wind sexually liberating affair that lasted twenty-eight days. And then, like the lyrics to a bad country song, her boyfriend got out of rehab, all shiny clean and sober, and she dumped me and married him.
For eleven years, Spence Harrington didn’t pick up a drink or a drug. But then he did. Since then he’d been in and out of rehabs trying to get the monkey off his back. Connecticut, Oregon, and now Better Choices, a day program right here in New York.
“Mike, I know the rules, but they suck,” she said, getting louder as she got more frustrated. “Surely I can do something. Anything.”
She obviously didn’t like Mike’s answer because her response was to hit the gas and blow her horn at the yellow cab in front of her.
“I’m sorry, Mike, but that’s not enabling,” she said. “It’s called being his wife.”
The taxi in front of us refused to move over, so she swerved around him on the right, almost running him into the divider.
“Okay, thank you,” she said. “Keep in touch.”
She hung up the phone.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Wrong number,” she said, pulling the car off the Drive at the East 53rd Street exit.
It took less than a minute for us to get to Mercy Hospital on First Avenue. She parked in a no standing zone, killed the engine, turned to me, and said, “Spence is missing.”
It didn’t quite process. “What do you mean, missing?”
“That was his counselor, Mike Danehy. Spence hasn’t shown up at rehab for three days.”
“Did they try calling him?”
“Oh yeah. They called to kick him out of the program, but they couldn’t find him to tell him, so they finally called me.”
“What do they want you to do?”
“Oh, Mike was very explicit. He told me to do nothing. He said Spence has to hit rock bottom before he can find his way back up.”
“That’s good advice,” I said. “But of course you’re not very good at taking good advice.”
She gave me half a smile.
“Do you want help?” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“Kylie, your drug addict husband is missing. Do you want help?”
“Yes, goddamn it, Zach, but I’m too stubborn to ask.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to.”
CHAPTER 9
Walking into his office, you’d never know that Gregg Hutchings was a hero. I’d worked with him and knew he’d racked up a chestful of medals, but here at Mercy Hospital, there was no trace of his service with NYPD.
“Hutch,” I said, “where are all the pictures of PCs hanging ribbons around your neck?”
“This is corporate America, Zach. Nobody cares about my past glories. They’re more interested in my golf scores and how many hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment I let slip through my fingertips over the weekend.”
“We heard you had a little incident,” I said. “How can we help?”
“For starters, let me give you a little insight into theft prevention,” he said. “If this was a supermarket, and people were stealing frozen peas, I’d set up a video cam in the frozen pea section. But at Mercy, if I want to keep a watch on the expensive hardware in my dialysis unit, I can’t put my cameras in there. HIPAA says no surveillance in any room where there are identifiable patients. It’s like running a museum and telling the guards not to watch the people who are looking at the paintings. How long do you think it will be before the Picassos start walking out the door?”
“But you’ve got cameras in the public areas,” Kylie said. “If someone tries to walk off with a piece of equipment, you’ll see it in the hallway.”
“You think?” He turned to a bank of CCTV monitors on the wall. “It looks like a lot of coverage, but I’ve only got eyes on 20 percent of the complex. Even then, the hospital doesn’t want to come off like Big Brother, so instead of putting cameras out in the open to act as deterrents, we have to hide them in air vents, or behind exit signs and smoke detectors.”
He pointed at a monitor. “You see that technician? He’s rolling an X-ray unit from Radiology to Recovery. And here’s a guy with an EKG machine waiting for the elevator. And see this food cart? Who’s to say if someone slipped an ultrasound unit in with the salmon croquettes? Everything is on wheels. I can watch it move through the public space, but I can’t tell if it winds up back in the treatment rooms or it gets smuggled out the door.”
“Tell us about the most recent theft,” I said.
“We bought six state-of-the-art dialysis machines and locked them up till the manufacturer could run our techs through some training. All six disappeared. Whoever took them knew the keypad code to the room and how to get them out of the hospital without being tagged by a single camera.”
“So they had someone on the inside,” Kylie said.
“We have thousands of doctors, nurses, patients, visitors, and delivery people going through here every day,” he said. “But I might have gotten lucky.”
He opened a drawer, took out a file, and spread it out on his desk. “Her name is Lynn Lyon,” he said, pointing at a picture of a woman in her thirties. “She’s a volunteer in our gift shop, but a guard caught her taking pictures in the room with the dialysis machines.”
“How’d she get in?”
“She told him the door was open, but I don’t buy it.”
“Did you change the code on the keypad?” Kylie asked.
“I would have, but the guard didn’t think it was important, so he didn’t mention it until after the horse was out the barn door.”
Kylie’s cell rang.
Our boss liked to micromanage, so I figured she was checking up on us. “Cates?” I asked.
Kylie shook her head and stepped out to take the call in private.
I skimmed Lynn Lyon’s personnel folder. “Have you talked to her since the robbery?” I asked.
“She’s not on the schedule this week,” Hutchings said, “and I can’t just bring her in for questioning. I have no jurisdiction.”
“But we do,” I said.
“Look, I know this is below your pay grade, and you’re only here because Howard Sykes drafted you. But I’m glad he did. I need all the help I can get.”
Kylie stepped back into the office. “I’m sorry, Gregg, but Zach and I have to go,” she said.
“We’ll take a run over and talk to Ms. Lyon,” I said, grabbing the folder.
“Thanks,” Hutchings said. “These dialysis machines will go for top dollar on the black market outside the U.S. See if you can get something out of her before they make their way to Turkmenistan.”
I followed Kylie out the door. “Who was on the phone?” I said.
“Shelley Trager. He’s waiting for us at Silvercup Studios.”
Trager was Kylie’s husband’s boss. “Is this about Spence?” I asked.
“Oh yeah.”
“Did they find him?”
“No,” she said, “but when they do, I’m going to kill him.”
I knew enough not to ask any more questions.
CHAPTER 10
It’s hard to make it to the top in the entertainment business. It’s even harder to do it in Queens, three thousand miles from
the heartbeat of the industry in Hollywood. But Shelley Trager, a street-smart kid who grew up on a tenement-lined block in Hell’s Kitchen, had pulled it off. Now, at the age of sixty, he was the head of Noo Yawk Films and part owner of Silvercup Studios, a sprawling bread factory in Long Island City that had been converted into the largest film and television production facility in the Northeast.
Added to the Trager mystique was the fact that the success and the power never went to his head. According to BuzzFeed, he was one of the best-liked people in show business. He was also the driving force behind Spence Harrington’s stellar career.
Spence was only six months out of rehab when Shelley took him on as a production assistant. A year later he gave him a shot as a staff writer on a failing show, and Spence turned it around. The young golden boy then pitched his own idea, Shelley bankrolled it, and the team had their first hit. A string of winners followed until Spence went out on drugs, and it all blew up.
Shelley responded with tough love and banned Spence from the set till he finished rehab.
Kylie pulled the car into the Silvercup parking lot on Harry Suna Place. Carl, the perennially chatty guard at the front gate, recognized her immediately.
“Good morning, Mrs. Harrington,” he said, stone-faced. “Mr. Trager is waiting for you at Studio Four.”
He waved her into the lot. No banter. No jokes. No eye contact.
“This is worse than I thought,” Kylie said. “Carl won’t even look at me. Maybe I shouldn’t drag you into this.”
“Into what?” I asked.
“Somebody broke into the studio last night and trashed some sets.”
“You’re not dragging me into anything,” I said. “It’s a crime scene. It’s what we do.”
“Only this time I’m married to the person who did the crime.”
“Do they have proof?”
“No, but whoever broke into the lot went straight to Studio Four and destroyed two standing sets at K-Mac.”
I winced. K-Mac had been Kylie MacDonald’s nickname back in the academy. I still used it. Spence had shanghaied it. He had created a show about a female detective named Katie MacDougal who had serious boundary issues. The fictional K-Mac was a lot like the one he was married to.
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