NYPD Red(55)
“So what are you saying, Shelley? If we quit now, the terrorists win?”
“I don’t know who would win,” Trager said, “but I can damn well tell you who would lose. You bail out now, and next November you’ll be lucky to get half a dozen votes on Staten Island. Grow a pair, Stanley.”
“All right. I’ll give it one more day.” He turned to Kylie. Anyone who thought he might apologize for jumping down her throat, or at least congratulate her for bringing down an active shooter, didn’t know him very well. “Who’s the dead girl?” he said.
She told him.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We’re going through her text messages and her voice mails,” Kylie said. “She’s only one degree of separation from Gabriel Benoit, the guy we’re looking for. We’re closing in on him.”
“I’ll ask you one more time,” the mayor said to Kylie. “You still think you’re going to catch this guy?”
“Yes, sir,” she said without missing a beat. “Absolutely.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Kylie actually sounded more confident than she did when she answered the same question two nights and four dead bodies ago.
Chapter 63
DELIA CATES IS not the kind of cop who shows up at a crime scene just because the mayor is there. She’s smart enough to give her team enough time to pull together some information. When she got there, twenty minutes after the mayor left, we had plenty. Some of it downright scary.
“Give me what you’ve got,” she said.
“The shooter was Benoit’s girlfriend, Alexis Carter, a.k.a. Lexi. Her cell phone is a treasure trove. Nothing is password-protected,” I said. “From what we can put together from the texts between her and Benoit, she knew what he was up to, but she didn’t go with him when he killed Roth, Stewart, or Schuck.”
“She definitely made up for it this time around.”
“All of it behind her boyfriend’s back. Benoit had no idea she was going to pull this. In his last few messages he was looking for her frantically. And you were right. They’re plotting out a movie. We found the script for this scene in her purse. It had two endings.”
“One where she gets away, and one where she dies tragically?” Cates said.
“No. One where she gets away, and one where she gets caught by NYPD Red, and she stands up to us, protecting her man.”
“With Tammy Wynette on the sound track?” Cates said.
“She even uses my name and Zach’s in the script,” Kylie said, unfolding one of the pages we found in Lexi’s purse. “Her character is called Pandemonia Passionata. I’ll give you some of the dialogue.”
DETECTIVE JORDAN
Where is your partner? What does he have planned?
PANDEMONIA
Save your breath, pretty boy. You’ll get nothing out of me.
DETECTIVE MACDONALD
You have no idea how much trouble you’re in.
PANDEMONIA
And you have no idea how much trouble you’re in.
“That’s the way she saw this going down?” Cates said. “We either catch her, or she gets away? Did she ever write the ending the way it happened?”
Kylie shook her head. “No. She was blissfully delusional to the very end.”
“We need the rest of the script,” Cates said. “Do you have any idea where it is?”
“It may be in her computer, but she has an out-of-state license and all her last known addresses in New York are dead ends,” I said. “But we do have something. Remember Cheryl Robinson predicted that Benoit is about to do something big—much bigger than the previous murders? Listen to this.”
I pushed the message retrieval button on Lexi’s cell phone.
“Lexi, it’s me. Things are turning to shit. I’m outside Mickey’s building, and the cops showed up. I’m pretty sure they’re going to pick up Mickey. I got forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of C4 in my bag, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop them. That’s all. Oh yeah, one more thing. Where the fuck are you?”
“Forty-five thousand?” Cates said. “That’s a lot of C4.”
“It’s enough to call in Homeland and anybody else we need to help us track him down,” I said.
“I don’t want to track him. I want to be three steps ahead of him.”
“Zach and I have a list of all the events happening connected to Hollywood on the Hudson. But they’re spread all over town—hotels, theaters, restaurants, private parties. I don’t think we can find enough bomb-sniffing dogs to handle it all.”