NYPD Red 2(83)

“Did he ever come back?”

“Hell, no—and I kept my ears open. I also kept checking the news, hoping they nailed him with something big. Nothing. Three days later, he’s on the front page of the Post all decked out in his Hazmat suit. I’m thinking these two cops did what I would have done if I could. They didn’t just kill him. I thought about that a lot. They got him to confess to Hattie’s murder. Those two guys were my heroes. There was no way I’d turn them in.”

“That was then. This is now,” Kylie said. “Your heroes are about to murder an innocent woman. How heroic is that?”

LaFleur didn’t answer. He just reached down and opened the bottom desk drawer. It was lined with row after row of audiotapes.





Chapter 76



The boxes of old phones, wires, and installer tools Horton LaFleur had squirreled away may have been helter-skelter, but the surveillance tapes of his wife’s killer were organized, dated, and coded.

We took them all back to the office but had to listen to only one to prove that Dave Casey and Gideon Bell were the last people to see Sebastian Catt on the night he vanished. They had identified themselves as NYPD, but there was no official record that they had arrested him, brought him in for questioning, or even been in his neighborhood.

“Now comes the hard part,” I said.

“Arresting them?” Kylie said.

“Telling Cates.”

Kylie scrunched up her face. “We’ve been doing pretty well with nobody looking over our shoulder,” she said. “Do we have to tell her now?”

“No. We had to tell her two days ago, before we invited Casey and Bell under the tent. Let’s not compound a bad decision.”

It was only 5:45, but Cates had come straight to her office from Gracie Mansion. We told her everything and played the tape for her.

“And that’s all of it?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

“Ugly would be the two of you running the show on your own,” she said, “but I’ll deal with that another time. For now, let’s focus on the good—you found the Hazmat Killer—and the bad—you don’t have a case. You’ve got a surveillance tape made illegally by a man who admitted to you that he hated Catt so much, he thought about killing him. A first-year law student could get your evidence thrown out of court. And if you arrest Casey and Bell, they’ll never tell us where Rachael O’Keefe is, and she’ll wind up dying a slow, miserable death.”

“She’s innocent,” Kylie said. “I thought these two guys were the champions of justice.”

“She’s the only victim who could possibly ID them. If it means saving their asses, they’ll throw justice right under the bus,” Cates said. “I don’t know how much time we have left before Calvin Vidmar’s confession leaks and the whole world finds out O’Keefe is innocent. We have to get Casey and Bell to lead us to her before it does.”

“We’ll follow them,” Kylie said. “They must be feeding her. They fed all the other victims.”

“You know where they are right this second?”

“No.”

“You can’t follow them until you know where they are,” Cates said, “and if the news gets out before you find them, Rachael will be dead and buried, and those two will hang up their Hazmat suits, sit back, and watch the case go cold.”

There was a reason Cates was a commanding officer at such a young age. I was glad to have her brain back.

“I have a thought,” she said.

Really glad.





At 6:30 Friday morning—exactly four days after I thought I had met two perfect candidates for NYPD Red, I called Gideon Bell. By 7:15, he and Casey showed up at the precinct.

Kylie and I were all smiles when they walked through the door. We didn’t have to fake looking happy to see them. We were. Sort of like the Wolf when Red Riding Hood shows up with a basket of goodies.

“Man, Zach, you sounded excited over the phone,” Bell said. “What’s going down?”

“My boss wants to be in on it,” I said. “She’ll tell you.”

We walked down the hall to Cates’s office. She stood up when they entered the room. Introductions all around, and then I shut the door.

“First, I want to thank you gentlemen for helping out,” Cates said. “We have good news: 911 got a call from a woman who said she was Rachael O’Keefe. She said she was being held by two men. She was pretty incoherent, rambling on about being tortured. The dispatcher tried to get her location, and then the call dropped. She didn’t call back, and we thought it was a hoax, but her sister, Liz, listened to the 911 tape and confirmed that it was Rachael.”