NYPD Red 2

Chapter 1



The two homeless men were sitting on the cobblestones in front of the World War I memorial on Fifth Avenue and 67th Street. As soon as they saw me heading toward them, they stood up.

“Zach Jordan, NYPD Red,” I said.

“We got a dead woman on the merry-go-round,” one said.

“Carousel,” the second one corrected.

His hair was matted, his unshaven face was streaked with dirt, and his ragtag clothes smelled of day-old piss. I got a strong whiff and jerked my head away.

“Am I that bad?” he said, backing off. “I don’t even smell it anymore. I’m Detective Bell. This is my partner, Detective Casey. We’ve been working Anti-Crime out of the park. A gang of kids has been beating the shit out of homeless guys just for sport, and we’re on decoy duty. Sorry about the stink, but we’ve got to smell as bad as we look.”

“Mission accomplished,” I said. “Give me a description of the victim.”

“White, middle-aged, and based on the fact that she’s dressed head to toe in one of those Tyvek jumpsuits, it looks like she’s the next victim of the Hazmat Killer.”

Not what I wanted to hear. “ID?”

“We can’t get at her. The carousel is locked up tight. She’s inside. We would never have found her except we heard the music, and we couldn’t figure out why it was playing at six thirty in the morning.”

“Lead the way,” I said.

The carousel is in the heart of Central Park, only a few tenths of a mile off Fifth, and unless a Parkie showed up in a golf cart, walking was the fastest way to get there.

“Grass is pretty wet,” Bell said, stating the obvious. “I thought NYPD Red only got called in for celebrities and muckety-mucks.”

“One of those muckety-mucks went missing Friday night, and my partner and I have been looking for her. As soon as you called in an apparent homicide, I got tapped. We work out of the One Nine, so I got here in minutes. But if this isn’t our MIA, I’m out of here, and another team will catch it.”

“Casey and I volunteer,” Bell said. “We clean up well, and if you really twist our arms, we’d even transfer to Red. Is it as cool as they say?”

Is it cool? Is playing shortstop for the New York Yankees cool? For a cop, NYPD Red is a dream job.

There are eight million people in New York City. The department’s mission is to protect and serve every one of them. But a few get more protection and better service than others. It may not sound like democracy in action, but running a city is like running a business—you cater to your best customers. In our case, that means the ones who generate revenue and attract tourists. In a nutshell, the rich and famous. If any of them are the victims of a crime, they get our full attention. And trust me, these people are used to getting plenty of attention. They’re rock stars in the worlds of finance, fashion, and publishing, and in some cases, they’re actually rock stars in the world of rock.

I answered Bell’s question. “Except for the part where I ruin a good pair of shoes tromping through the wet grass, I’d have to say it’s pretty damn cool.”

“Where’s your partner?” Bell asked.

I had no idea. “On her way,” I lied.

We were crossing Center Drive when I heard the off-pitch whistle of a calliope.

“It’s even more annoying when you get closer,” Bell said.

The closest we could get was twenty feet away. We were stopped by a twelve-foot-high accordion-fold brass gate. Behind it was a vintage carousel that attracted hundreds of thousands of parents and kids to the park every year.

It was hours before the gate would officially open, but the ride was spinning, the horses were going up and down, and the circus music was blaring.

“You can’t get in,” Casey said. “It’s locked.”

“How’d she get in?” I asked.

“Whoever put her there broke the lock,” he said. “Then they replaced it with this Kryptonite bicycle U-Lock. It’s a bitch to open.”

“They obviously didn’t want anybody to wander in and mess with their little tableau,” I said.

“We kind of figured that,” he said. “Anyway, ESU is sending somebody to cut it.”

“Not until the crime scene guys dust it for prints,” I said. “I doubt if we’ll find anything, but I don’t want it contaminated by some cowboy with an angle grinder.”

“Detective Jordan…” It was Bell. “You can get a good look at the body from here.”

I walked to where he was standing and peered through an opening in the gate.

“Here she comes,” Bell said, as though I might actually miss a dead woman in a white Tyvek jumpsuit strapped to a red, blue, green, and yellow horse.