“You can tell that?” Kylie said. She looked at me. “He’s amazing.”
Chuck stood there soaking it up, most likely trying his darnedest not to get an erection.
“What about defensive wounds?” Kylie asked. “Bruised knuckles, skin under the nails—something they might not be able to get rid of with ammonia?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It would appear that none of the victims ever got a chance to put up a fight.”
Kylie leaned over the table to get a closer look at Evelyn’s face. “Why is her mouth all busted up like that?” she asked. “Do you think the killer used a ball gag?”
“No, that would keep the victims quiet, but whatever this was did a lot more damage. Broken teeth, lacerations inside the mouth, and torn jaw muscles. A ball gag wouldn’t rip them up like that.”
“What would?”
“I don’t like to hypothesize,” Dryden said with a wry smile.
“But you have an educated guess, don’t you,” Kylie said.
“Not in the official report. Nothing goes into my reports unless it’s completely verified. I deal in facts, not whimsy.”
“Then give me thirty seconds of whimsy,” she said. “Please.”
Dryden smiled as I’d never seen him smile before. “Off the record,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Cross my heart,” she said, drawing an imaginary X on her left breast.
With a twinkle in his eye, Chuck said, “How familiar are you with medieval sadomasochism?”
“A little,” Kylie said, looking at him with newfound respect. “But apparently, not nearly as much as you.”
Chapter 21
“I think we just saw a side of old Cut And Dryden that very few people get to see,” Kylie said as soon as we were back in the car. “That boy knows more about medieval torture devices than Kellogg knows about cornflakes.”
“I always figured Dr. Straight Arrow had a kinky side,” I said.
“He probably has a rack in his bedroom and a guillotine in his basement,” she said, laughing out loud.
And just like that, the glow was back. Whatever shroud of gloom had been hanging over Kylie’s head was gone, and she was bubbling with energy.
“I don’t care who wins the election,” she said. “We are going to nail this Hazmat bastard before next Tuesday and level the playing field.”
She stopped at a red light and turned to me, a bloodhound straining at the leash. “First thing we’re going to do,” she said, “is pull Matt Smith in on this.”
It was like a punch to the gut. Before I could spit out What the hell do we need Matt Smith for? Kylie explained.
“You heard Dryden,” she said. “Most of these contraptions are in museums. If you want to get your hands on one, you can’t exactly waltz over to the Torture Department at your local Wal-Mart. It’s a very esoteric marketplace, and I thought if Matt could track down whoever sells them, that might lead us to the person who bought it. You agree?”
I couldn’t disagree. “It’s worth a shot,” I said.
“I have to tell you,” Kylie went on, “I’ve worked with a lot of computer guys, but Matt Smith is the world’s smartest geek. And not only does he get the tech side, he knows how to work well with people. We’re lucky to have him right there in the building.”
Yeah. Right there next door to Cheryl.
It was late afternoon when we got back to the precinct, but Matt, as affable and good-looking as ever, was there, and he was thrilled that we could use his help.
“A choke pear?” he said when we told him what Dryden came up with. “I never heard of it.”
“That makes three of us,” Kylie said. “And Dryden won’t go on record saying that’s what he suspects. He says it’s just an educated guess.”
“Where was he educated—Hogwarts?” Smith said. “I don’t know much about the torture business, but give me a few hours, and I’ll see if I can figure out where the killer did his shopping. Now, what about Parker-Steele’s computer?”
“Missing,” I said. “Gone like a freight train in the night.”
“Oh, bollocks,” he muttered. It’s a word he trots out all the time that is apparently so flexible, he can use it whether he’s pissed or happy.
“Did you find anything on her credit card charges or cell phone records that would connect her to any of the other three victims?” I asked.
“Nothing. She didn’t text them, call them, or check out one of their video confessions on her iPhone. And there’s nothing in her voice or data charges that gives me a clue to the killer. It’s possible she never even knew her kidnapper.”
“Then how was he able to grab her without her putting up a fight or raising some kind of ruckus?” I said.
“How do you know she didn’t put up a fight?” he asked.
“I don’t, and that’s been bothering me,” I said. “Kang, Tinsdale, Catt, Parker-Steele—none of them are the easiest people in the world to kidnap. If they don’t have a common thread, then let’s assume that a total stranger grabbed them. If that was the case, surely they would have put up some kind of a struggle.”
“Especially Kang and Tinsdale,” Kylie said, jumping in.
“And if they did, there might be witnesses who saw them fighting off an attacker,” I said. “Let’s focus on Evelyn. We know from her credit card charges that she was at Hackie’s Pub on Second Avenue Friday night. She never made it back to her apartment, which is only nine blocks away. Matt, maybe if you pinged her phone, you could locate the general area she was abducted from. Then we could—”
“I’m an idiot,” said the man who Kylie had just informed me was the world’s smartest geek. “I’ve been so busy looking for something that would connect all four victims that I completely glossed over the obvious. Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll have something for you.”
He sat down at his computer. “You’re bloody brilliant, Zach,” he said. “I don’t know why I bloody didn’t think of it myself.”
Bollocks, mate. Maybe you were too busy romancing my girlfriend with your soccer star looks, your annoying Britspeak, and your spontaneous bloody soy lattes.
Chapter 22
Twenty minutes later, Kylie and I were back in Matt Smith’s office. I noticed that Cheryl’s door was closed and her lights were out, which meant she wouldn’t be going home with either of us.
“What have you got?” Kylie asked.
“Evelyn’s last known whereabouts were right here,” Smith said, pointing to a Google map of the Upper East Side on his monitor. “Hackie’s Pub. Second Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street. She paid her tab with an American Express card at eleven oh-nine p.m. Her apartment is on Ninety-Fourth and Park, which is maybe a ten-minute walk. It was a balmy night, so she might have chosen to walk. But even if she caught a taxi right away, which isn’t likely on a busy weekend, what with traffic and red lights, it would take about the same ten minutes. And since we know she never made it home, she went off the grid not too far away from the bar.
“Working under the assumption that she was on foot, I pulled up traffic and surveillance camera pictures along Second. It must have taken her a few minutes to get out of Hackie’s after she paid the bill, but at eleven seventeen a traffic cam catches her at Eighty-Ninth Street walking uptown on Second. We pick her up again at Ninetieth, then Ninety-First, and that’s it. Nothing shows up on any cameras above Ninety-First Street and Second Avenue.
“Then I went back to her cell phone records. Her iPhone continually pings her location. I checked with Verizon, and they have her at the bar all night, then the signal keeps refreshing, and they can track her as she walks up Second. At eleven nineteen, she’s in the vicinity of Ninety-First and Second. Five minutes later, she’s twelve blocks south at Seventy-Ninth Street. Eight minutes after that, she’s on the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge heading for Queens, and then the signal goes dead. Verizon never picked her up again. Either she turned off her phone, or it’s at the bottom of the East River.”
> “So a car or a taxi picked her up near Ninety-First Street,” I said.
“That strip of Second Avenue is loaded with bars,” Smith said. “There are three of them between Ninety-First and Ninety-Second, which is where we lost her. But none of them have cameras outside on the street.”
“Even so,” Kylie said, “it’s Friday night on the Upper East Side. There would still be plenty of potential eyewitnesses.”
“But most of them would be inside one of those bars,” Smith said.
“I’m not talking about the people inside the bars,” Kylie said. “I’m talking about the ones outside.”
She turned to me. “Remember what Leonard Parker did to keep Muriel Sykes from lowering his property value?” she asked.
“He sent her outside to smoke,” I said. “Good call, Detective. So now all we have to do is hang outside this strip of bars, find some nicotine addict who was there at eleven p.m. on Friday night and was still sober enough to notice Evelyn get into a car and head downtown on Second.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kylie said, more upbeat than she’d been all day. “Let’s go barhopping, partner.”
Chapter 23
The Post-it note on Emma Frye’s desk said “Call Gideon.” The big block letters at the bottom of her grocery list said “CALL GIDEON!!!” But Emma had let the whole day slip away without calling her son. Like a lot of New Yorkers, she’d been glued to the TV set, riveted by the Rachael O’Keefe murder trial.
“Emma,” Sherman yelled as he came through the front door, “did you call Gideon yet?”
Emma muted the TV and hurried down the stairs, stopping briefly to check her hair in the hall mirror. “Look at you,” she said to her reflection. “Giddy as a teenager.”
Sherman was at the kitchen sink, putting flowers in a vase.
After her husband died a few years ago, Emma didn’t think she’d ever have another happy day in her life. The flower shop she and Roy had owned together was successful, but without him, Emma couldn’t handle it alone. “I’m going to sell it,” she told Gideon.
Gideon found the perfect buyer. Sherman Frye had been a history teacher and a track coach at John Adams High and had just retired after thirty-five years. He offered to buy the shop, but only if Emma agreed to help him run it for the first year.
She said yes, and after two months they started going out for the occasional business dinner. Then came weekends. Golf, antiquing, road trips to Civil War battlefields, and marina hopping on Tecumseh, Sherman’s beautifully restored thirty-three-foot Chris-Craft cabin cruiser.
The night Emma’s year of service was up, the two of them went to their favorite restaurant, La Nora on Cross Bay Boulevard. He waited till they were having coffee and cognac before sliding the envelope across the table.
“Here,” he said. “It’s a going-away present for my favorite employee.”
Emma opened the envelope and read the card. It said, “Don’t go away. Ever.”
And then he held up the blue velvet box with the antique diamond engagement ring nestled inside. “I’m sorry I can’t get down on one knee,” he said. “You should have known me before my golf game screwed up my ACL, but I love you, and you’ve been working for me long enough. I’d like to spend the rest of my life working for you. Emma, will you marry me?”
Once again, she said yes to his offer. Since then, she’d never been happier.
“Irises,” she said as Sherman filled the vase with water. “My favorite.”
“No, they’re not,” he said. “Your favorite are lilacs, but all the lilacs I had in the shop were fresh and extremely sellable. These babies have about twenty-four hours left in them before they crap out. So I figured I’d bring them home to my wife, because by now she’s surely called her son like I’ve been asking her to for the past five days.”
He put his big bear arms around her. “So,” he whispered in her ear, “did you call him?”
She pulled back so she could look into his magical blue eyes and gave him her sexiest mea culpa pout. “Not yet. I meant to call him yesterday, but it was Sunday, and he’s been so busy at work that I didn’t want to bother him on his day off.”
“And today is Monday, but you’ve been watching that Rachael O’Keefe trial on TV all day,” he said.
“Guilty,” she said.
“Ha! I knew she was guilty.”
“No, no, no,” Emma corrected. “I’m guilty for watching. The verdict came in this afternoon. The jury found her not guilty.”
“That’s crazy,” Sherman said. “The woman killed her daughter. How can they not see that?”
“Now you know why I couldn’t turn off the TV. I’ll call Gideon now,” she said, tapping his speed dial on her cell.
He picked up on the first ring. “Hey, Mom, is this important? I’m in a hurry.”
“Well, hello to you too,” she said. “You’re in a hurry for what?”
“I’m meeting Dave and a bunch of people. We’re going to a bar downtown to grab a few beers and catch the Monday night football game. Can this wait till tomorrow?”
“I have one question. It’ll only take me a half a second. You think your friends and your beer can wait a half a second?”
“Sure, Mom. One question. Go ahead.”
“Sherman wants to turn your old bedroom into a little den for himself.”
“That’s not a question,” Gideon said, “but I have one. You remarried less than a year ago, and Sherman is already moving out of the bedroom?”
“Don’t be cute,” Emma said. “He just wants a nice private place to work on his computer. He’s going to write a novel.”
“Really?”
“Really. It takes place during the Civil War.”
“You mean like Gone With the Wind?”
She laughed. “Better.”
“I’m in a hurry, Mom. What’s your question?”
“I spent the whole day packing up your old stuff,” she said. “Clothes, toys, a bunch of papers from high school, all your trophies from Little League. Can you come over and pick up all your things so we can clear out the room?”
“No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? You’re a grown man. You can’t leave all your stuff here forever. We need the space.”
“Then leave it all on the curb for the garbageman. I took everything I wanted to keep when I moved out. The rest of that crap I haven’t needed for fifteen years, and I don’t need it now.”
“Are you sure? You could probably sell some of those old toys and games on eBay.”
“Mom, you’re a pack rat. I’m not. Sherman’s not. Chuck all that crap. Burn it.”
“Okay,” she said. “I think you’re crazy to throw away all that good stuff, but I know Sherman will be happy. And for the record, mister, my new husband and I are very happy in our bedroom.”
“Oh God,” Gideon said. “I’m hanging up now before you give me any of the details. Love you, Mom.”
“Love you too,” Emma said, and hung up. She wrapped her arms around Sherman. “Okay, flower man, the room is all yours. Now go upstairs to your new office and start writing that book.”
Sherman put his hands on her soft, round butt and pulled her in tight. “How about you walk me upstairs to the bedroom just in case I need a little inspiration before I start writing.”
“Oh, crap,” Emma said.
“Is that any way to talk to a guy who brought you irises?”
“No, I meant, Oh, crap, I forgot to tell Gideon one thing.”
“So call him back.”
“Not tonight. He’s going out to unwind with his friends. I can tell him another time.”
“Tell him what?” Sherman said, maneuvering her toward the stairs.
“When I was cleaning out his desk, I found this red leather notebook wedged in behind the bottom drawer,” she said. “It’s not Gideon’s. I wondered if he knew anything about it.”
“Whose notebook is it?” Sherman asked as they headed upstairs.
“Enzo
Salvi’s.”
Sherman stopped in the middle of the stairwell. “I knew that kid from back when I was teaching,” he said. “He was a total shit. You know who his father is, don’t you?”
“Of course I know,” Emma said. “Everyone in Howard Beach knows. We all went to Enzo’s funeral out of respect for the family.”
“Then do me a favor,” Sherman said. “Out of respect for me, don’t get involved. The kid is dead. He doesn’t need the notebook.”
“Well, maybe his mother might want it,” Emma said. “She lost a son. This is a connection.”
“It’s a connection all right. It’s a connection to us. I don’t want to be connected to the Salvi family. Emma, they’re Mafia. Regular people like you and me do not get involved with people like them.”
“So what should I do with the notebook?” she asked.
“Throw it in the trash with the rest of Gideon’s shit.”
“Okay,” she said, and scurried up the stairs toward the bedroom.
Sherman was right behind her.
Chapter 24
Gideon squinted at the mirror and slowly ran a brush through his dark, curly hair, looking for one of those rogue gray strands that had been popping up lately. Not a trace.
His brain wandered back to the woman with the sports bra and the FDNY baseball cap. “Timing is everything Andie,” he said, playing to his image in the mirror, “and yours just happened to suck.”
He left his apartment on West 84th and walked to the subway station at 86th and Broadway. He felt good about making his mother laugh. It’s the least he could do after killing her husband.
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