Kylie turned to me and mouthed a string of silent curses.
“Please don’t leave,” she said. “We’ll be there in—”
A few seconds of silence, and then she exploded. “Then where are you now, Mrs. Sykes?” she demanded. “Where?”
She signaled me to get moving, and I followed her toward the door.
“Please don’t touch anything,” she said into the phone. “And don’t let anyone else in. We’ll be there in five minutes.”
She hung up and flew down the stairs, yelling, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! We are a couple of idiots!”
Chapter 17
The Ford Interceptor was in front of the precinct, and Kylie got behind the wheel. I barely had the door closed when she peeled out and sped west on East 67th. She flipped on the lights and sirens and ran the red on Lexington. Then she hung a hard right on Park and blasted her way uptown.
“Are we on a Code Three?” I shouted over the howl of the siren.
Code 3 is for life-threatening emergencies only. We’re not supposed to totally disregard traffic laws, but we can muscle cars out of our way. Code 2 is for high-priority non-emergencies. Must follow traffic laws.
“Code Two and a Half. I’ll try not to kill anyone,” she said.
“Then slow down.”
She didn’t hit the brakes, but she eased up on the accelerator.
“Now, where are we going, and why are we idiots?” I asked.
“What was Mayor Spellman’s biggest—no, make that his only—concern?”
“Arrest the Hazmat Killer before next Tuesday, or he’ll be former mayor Spellman.”
“Exactly,” she said. “If we do it on Spellman’s watch, he’ll hog the glory and tell the world that the tough-on-crime candidate is already in office. If we haven’t cracked it by the time the voters go to the polls, Sykes will blast the mayor for being weak and impotent. So what do you think she wants us to do?”
“Shit,” I said. “Not catch him.”
“Bingo. It’s in her best interests to slow us down, and she may have figured out how to do it. There was a break-in at campaign headquarters early this morning, and guess what? Evelyn’s computer was stolen.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We are idiots. We were so busy being cops that we never looked at the big picture. Politics.”
Kylie swerved around a cabbie who was either too slow or too arrogant to get out of the way. We barreled across 86th in our race uptown.
“Wait,” I said. “Campaign headquarters are on Fifty-Fifth. Where are we going?”
“Ninety-Fourth and Park. Evelyn Parker-Steele’s apartment. The same place where she murdered Cynthia Pritchard two years ago.”
“What’s there?”
“Muriel Sykes. And I’ll bet a year’s salary on what’s not there,” she said. “Evelyn’s personal computer.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said, pounding the dash with the flat of my fist. “Screw Code Two. Floor it.”
Chapter 18
As Park Avenue buildings go, Evelyn’s was rather modest. It wasn’t one of those grand old dames built at the turn of the last century. It was a 1960s-era redbrick building, and Evelyn probably bought her two-bedroom co-op for a couple of mil, which in this zip code is practically Walmart pricing.
Of course, Evelyn and her husband, Jason Steele, owned an eighty-million-dollar horse farm in Pound Ridge. So for her, 1199 Park was just a simple crash pad, tastefully appointed with a few million bucks’ worth of modern art and antique furniture.
We didn’t have to wave our badges at the doorman. The flashing lights on our double-parked Ford was all he needed.
“You’re here about Mrs. Parker-Steele,” he said, holding the door for us.
“That’s right,” Kylie said. “Mrs. Sykes is upstairs. She’s expecting us.”
“Fourteen A. The elevator’s over there,” he said. “Shame about what happened. She was a good tenant. Never any problems.”
Except for that one time she tossed her girlfriend off the terrace. It’s amazing how much you can block out about someone’s past when you’ve seen them being tortured on the Internet.
The door to the apartment opened before we could ring the bell. Muriel Sykes let us in. She had played NCAA lacrosse at Penn State. Thirty years and four kids later, she still had an imposing athletic physique. Her casually styled chestnut-brown hair and her slate-gray skirt/jacket ensemble were age and image appropriate for a woman who wanted to appeal to voters across a broad economic spectrum.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Sykes said as if we had accepted her gracious invitation and not as though we’d bolted out of the precinct when we realized she was trying to undermine our investigation.