“Get on with it, Irwin,” the mayor said, waving a hand at him.
“The mayor has been running the city and campaigning hard,” Diamond said. “He’s spread a little thin, so he’s not his usual charming self.”
“If it’s any consolation, neither are we,” Kylie said. “Crime scenes tend to bring you down.”
“Understood. First order of business: Everything you hear within the confines of this room is confidential,” Diamond said, speaking slowly and enunciating each word like a teacher laying down the ground rules on the first day of school. “It is not to be repeated to anyone or referred to in any written reports. Do you both accept and agree to that?”
Accept and agree? Were we kicking off a homicide investigation or downloading software? At least he didn’t ask us to solemnly swear. Kylie and I quickly accepted and agreed.
“We made some mistakes,” Diamond said. “The Hazmat Killer’s first three victims were hardly a loss to the city. They were all criminals themselves. And while we abhor vigilantism, we may not have been aggressive enough in tracking him down.”
“May not have been aggressive enough?” Spellman echoed. “It wound up being dumped on two gang cops from Chinatown.”
Diamond ignored the comment. “The murder of Parker-Steele changes everything,” he went on. “Hazmat is now our number one priority, and the case is assigned to NYPD Red. You two will head up the task force.”
“What about the two detectives who are handling it now?” I said.
“They’re under you. And we’re streamlining the chain of command. You report directly to Captain Cates, and she’ll have a straight line to Commissioner Harries’s office.”
“Irwin, the video,” the mayor said, his agitation level up a notch. “They should watch the damn video.”
“Excellent idea,” Diamond responded as if his boss had made a major contribution. He turned to Cates. “Please put it up on the big monitor, Captain.”
Cates queued up the video on a laptop, and we all took seats facing the flat-screen on the wall.
The mayor turned to me and Kylie. His shirt was stained with flop sweat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you when you came in.”
“No apologies necessary, sir,” Kylie said. “We’re here now, and we’ll do everything we—”
“This Parker-Steele,” Spellman interrupted, raising his voice. “She admits to murdering an innocent young woman. You would think that would reflect negatively on Muriel Sykes, who picked her as a campaign manager. Am I right?”
“Stan,” Diamond said, “they’re cops, not politicians.”
The mayor ignored him. “But no,” he went on, his finger shaking as he pointed it at us. “Sykes says the confession was forced. She says that NYPD didn’t take the first three murders seriously, so it’s all my fault. She’s saying if I were tougher on crime, Parker-Steele would still be alive. And then she does a one-eighty and goes after me for the Pritchard murder—claiming that I allowed Parker-Steele’s family to strong-arm me into dropping the investigation.”
“Stan, you’ve gone through this before,” Diamond said, pouring a glass of water from a chrome pitcher on the desk. “It’s politics. Get a grip. What did you think she would say? ‘I’m an idiot for hiring a murderer to run my campaign’?” He crossed the room and handed the water to the mayor.
“This is different,” Spellman said. “She’s got Leonard Parker and Jason Steele behind her. They want me out of office, and they have the money to do it. Plus she’s got Evelyn’s blowhard brother, Damon Parker, and you can pretty much guess what he’s going to say on TV.”
“He’ll probably say that his sister is an innocent victim,” Diamond said, “and lay the blame squarely on you.”
He offered the mayor two small pink oval pills. Xanax—the anxiety killer of choice for panic-riddled city fathers and stressed-out soccer moms.
“Parker-Steele isn’t a victim,” the mayor shouted, grabbing the pills from Diamond’s hand. “She’s a murderer. I’m the bleeping victim!”
He popped the pink footballs as if they were M&M’s and washed them down.
Diamond looked at Kylie and me and shook his head, an unspoken apology for his candidate’s unmayorlike behavior.
I now understood why he’d insisted we take that vow of silence.
What happens in Gracie stays in Gracie.
Chapter 7
The video was queued up on LiveLeak.com, ready to be played. The bar at the bottom let me know it was four minutes and seventeen seconds long. I wondered how many times I would watch it before the case was closed.