NYPD Red 4 (9 page)

She looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s because your average taxpayer’s never been shot at,” she said.

Davis and Ryder lived downtown, on Rivington Street. We parked our vehicles around the corner on Suffolk and met up with one of the cops from the three units we’d dispatched as soon as we had the address.

“That’s the building, over there,” he said, pointing to a five-story gray-brick building. The facade from the second floor to the roof was covered with a cluster of metal fire escapes that probably dated back to the first half of the twentieth century. There was a storefront at street level, but it was boarded up, and the window had become a canvas for a graffiti artist who had done a remarkably good likeness of the Notorious B.I.G.

“Nobody in or out since we got here,” the cop said.

I gave a hand signal, and a dozen cops poured out into the street, weapons at the ready. The team leader opened the front door and stopped.

“Blood,” he whispered. He threw a light on the floor, and I could see it. A trail of blood leading to the inside door. He turned the knob. It didn’t give.

One of his men took a Hooligan Tool and cracked the lock like it was an egg.

There were more bloodstains on the stairs. We followed the trail to Davis’s apartment door, on the third floor.

“We’ve got probable cause to enter,” I whispered to Sandusky, pointing at the bloody floor. “Leave the building. Now.”

He looked both relieved and disappointed, but he didn’t argue. He left.

“Open it,” I said to the team leader.

One of his men had a universal skeleton key: a thirty-five-pound steel battering ram. One swing and the wooden door splintered.

There was a man sprawled facedown on the floor, and I held a gun on him as the team stormed the apartment. They checked the bedroom and the closets, and within seconds I heard a volley of “Clear, clear, clear.”

I holstered my gun. The man on the floor was unmistakably dead.

“Roll him,” I said.

Two of the cops flipped the body over.

It was Raymond Davis, his face ashy gray, his eyes bugged open in wide surprise, a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

IT WAS THE
kind of crime scene that nerds like Chuck Dryden live for. A dead murder suspect with a bullet in his brain, a second bullet embedded in the pockmarked plaster on the opposite side of the room, and a wall covered with bright red high-velocity blood spatters that were the clues to the dirty little details of Raymond Davis’s last moments on earth. For Chuck it was the equivalent of forensic porn.

Kylie and I left him to his fun and went out to canvass the area.

We went back to the bloody trail that had led us to the apartment and followed it down the stairs, out the front door, and onto the street. A half block from the building it ended abruptly.

“He must have figured out he was leaving bread crumbs,” Kylie said. “You think Teddy Ryder is our bleeder?”

“I doubt if he’s our shooter,” I said. “These guys were BFFs.”

“It wouldn’t be the first relationship that was dissolved by a bullet.”

“But Teddy is gun-shy. His parents were con artists. In their line of work the only reason to carry a piece is if you’re hoping for a stiffer sentence when you get busted. Besides, we know that Raymond was trolling the bars, looking for a buyer.”

“I guess he found one,” Kylie said. “So, two shots fired in apartment 3A. How many of the tenants do you think heard anything?”

I laughed. New Yorkers in general are reluctant to come forward and get involved—especially in a crime of violence. And I was willing to bet that Raymond Davis’s neighbors would be even less inclined to talk to the cops. With twelve apartments in the building, at least somebody would have to have heard the two gunshots. And yet no one had called 911. We went through the motions anyway and knocked on every door in the building. As expected, nobody heard a thing.

We went back to the apartment, where Chuck was waiting to give us his top line impressions.

“Be careful where you sit,” he said as soon as we got through the door.

“Gosh, thanks, Dr. Dryden,” Kylie said, “but they taught us crime scene etiquette back at the academy.”

“I’m sorry, Detective MacDonald,” Dryden said. “Let me rephrase that. This place is riddled with bedbugs. Be careful where you sit.”

We stood.

Dryden went through his usual series of disclaimers reminding us that some of his conclusions were not yet scientifically chiseled in stone. Then he launched into the scenario the way he saw it.

“If you two are correct, and Davis and his partner killed Elena Travers and stole an eight-million-dollar necklace, then this is where they tried to unload it. But, as you well know, there is no honor among thieves. Davis was dropped where he stood, but his partner managed to get out with what is most likely a flesh wound. The slug that caught him was in the wall. It’s a .38.”

“And where’s the necklace?” Kylie asked.

Dryden smiled. “Where indeed?”

“But you searched the place.”

“Top to bottom.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Yes, I did,” he said, his expression totally deadpan. “Bedbugs.”

Kylie rewarded him with a smile. “Let me rephrase that,” she said. “Did you find anything that might help us in our investigation?”

“Possibly,” he said. “Mr. Davis had a gun. He didn’t get to use it tonight, but it’s a 9mm—the same caliber as the murder weapon that killed Elena Travers. I’ll run it through ballistics and get back to you tomorrow.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s already tomorrow,” I said.

“Oh, good. In that case, I’ll have it for you today.”

“Last question,” Kylie said. “Do you have anything on the shooter? A partial print? Hairs? Fibers? Anything?”

“Sorry. He was either very good or very lucky, but I’ve got nothing except for the two .38 slugs he left behind.”

“Then there’s only one way we’re going to catch him,” Kylie said, looking at me.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Find Teddy Ryder.”

I CALLED THE
office and asked the desk sergeant to get out a BOLO on Teddy Ryder. “And I need a hospital check,” I said. “He took a bullet.”

Within minutes, Ryder’s picture would be distributed city-wide, and every precinct would send out a team to check the local hospitals for a gunshot victim.

Then I called Q. I thanked him for leading us to Davis and asked if he knew where we could find Ryder’s mother.

“Sorry, Zach,” he said. “You know how grifters are. Annie Ryder is like a gypsy. She could be in any one of fifty states, although I’d probably eliminate Alaska and Hawaii.”

It wasn’t what I was hoping to hear, but at the same time, I was relieved. If Q had an address, Kylie and I would have had to follow up on it immediately. When the case is this hot, sleep is not an option.

“Here’s a thought for you, Zach,” Q said. “Try running her name through NCIC.”

The National Crime Information Center is an electronic clearinghouse of crime data that can be tapped into by any criminal justice agency in the U.S. Q’s advice was the cop equivalent of telling a civilian to Google it.

“Thanks a heap,” I said. “I just thought I’d try you first. I figured you had a better database.”

I hung up and walked over to Kylie, who was still talking to Dryden.

“Good news,” I said. “Q has no idea where to find the mom. We can punch out now.”

I didn’t have to tell her twice. We said good night to Dryden and left the apartment.

We were halfway down the stairs when Kylie stopped and tapped her forehead.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Remember what Gregg Hutchings told us about those hidden security cameras at the hospital? Look up.”

I tipped my head toward the stairwell ceiling. I saw it immediately. There were two smoke detectors mounted on the cracked plaster. One was centered directly over the stairs just the way the building code required. The other was tucked into a corner.

“This second smoke detector is too close to the wall to be effective as a smoke detector,” I said. “But it’s a damn good place for a camera.”

“And I’ll bet it’s not the only one,” Kylie said.

We walked the building from the lobby to the roof and found three more.

“All wireless,” Kylie said. “The question is, whose apartment is the signal going to?”

“There’s probably a sophisticated high-tech way to find out without waking up the whole building,” I said.

Kylie grinned. “But sophistication has never been our strong suit. Let’s rattle all their cages,” she said, banging on the door of apartment 5A.

The same tenants who weren’t happy to see us the first time we canvassed the building were even less happy this time around. Especially since Kylie confronted every bleary-eyed one of them with a bad-to-the-bone snarl and a few choice words.
“We found your surveillance cameras. Show us the monitor. Now!”

The standard responses ranged from dumbfounded stares to an angry “What the fuck are you talking about?”

We pissed off everyone on the fifth floor and two people on the fourth, but the next apartment was the charm.

ELLIOTT MORITZ, THE
tenant in 4C, was about sixty, mild mannered, and by far the least confrontational of all the tenants we had met. He quickly admitted that the cameras were his.

“And who authorized you to install them?” Kylie said.

“They’re not exactly
authorized
,” Moritz said, backing up a step. “I sort of have unwritten permission from the landlord.”

“Unwritten permission won’t hold up in court, Elliott,” Kylie said.

“Court? Wait a minute, officer, I’m not the criminal here,” Moritz said. “It’s the woman in 5B. She’s a flight attendant. She sublets her apartment whenever she’s out of town, and the people she rents to are noisy and dirty, and you can smell the marijuana through the air vents. So I complained to the building management. They said they can’t evict her without proof. So I said I would get some, and they said okay.”

“You’re right, Elliott,” Kylie said. “What she’s doing is illegal. But so is spying on your neighbors. If this were any other night, I’d arrest you, but I’ve got a homicide to deal with, and you may be able to help, so I’m going to let you decide how we handle this. Option one: I wake up a judge, get a warrant to impound your equipment, and book you on charges of video voyeurism. Option two: you show me and my partner your video feed, and I’ll give you the name and cell number of an inspector in the city’s Buildings Department who hates illegal subletters even more than you do.”

Moritz wisely chose option two.

He had a quad monitor with one camera pointed at the flight attendant’s apartment on the fifth floor. The other three only covered the stairwells. At 9:37 a man had trudged up the stairs to the third floor.

“That’s our guy,” Kylie said when he didn’t show up on the fourth-floor camera.

There was no audio track, so we didn’t get to hear the gunshots, but at 9:44, Teddy Ryder stumbled down the stairs, bleeding. A minute later, the man who had lumbered up the stairs raced down. The image was poor quality, but we could tell that our suspect was white, about six feet tall, and no more than thirty-five years old. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Kylie downloaded the video onto her cell phone. We took it back to the precinct, found a tech to pull some screenshots, and got them out to every cop in the city.

It was almost two a.m. when Kylie dropped me off at my apartment. Angel, my favorite doorman, was on duty.

“You look beat, Detective,” he said.

“Fighting crime isn’t as glamorous as it looks,” I said.

He laughed and said good night. I got in the elevator. It had been hours since I’d walked out on Cheryl without saying a word, and I wondered if she’d still be there when I got upstairs.

Angel probably knew. But I was too embarrassed to ask him if my new live-in girlfriend had moved out with all her stuff while I was away.

ANNIE RYDER WAS
a night owl. As her husband, Buddy, loved to say, “Annie never goes to sleep on the same day she wakes up.” So when her cell rang at ten minutes after midnight, she didn’t panic. She just figured it was one of her insomniac neighbors who wanted to stop by for a cup of tea and an earful of gossip.

The screen on her iPhone said Private Caller, but that didn’t bother Annie either. Caller ID was a two-way street, and since she always blocked her name and number from popping up, she couldn’t fault anyone else. She muted the TV and answered the phone with a crisp “Hello. Who’s this?”

“Ma,” a weak voice on the other end said.

She stood up and pressed the phone to her ear. “Teddy, are you all right? What’s wrong?”

“I got shot.”

“Oh Jesus. Where?”

“In my apartment, but I’m not there now. I ran like hell.”

“Teddy, no—not where were you when you got shot. Where did the bullet hit you?”

“Oh. He shot me in the stomach.”

Annie was good in emergencies, but this was a crisis. She instinctively moved over to the sideboard and rested her hand on Buddy’s urn for strength.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Get yourself to a hospital. Now.”

“Ma, are you crazy? I go to the hospital with a gunshot wound, and they call the cops.”

“Teddy, I’d rather visit you in jail than identify your body at the morgue. A bullet to the abdomen can be lethal. God knows how many of your organs got torn up. Get your ass to an ER before you bleed to death internally.”

“My organs are fine,” Teddy said. “You’re thinking like I got shot in the belly button. That’s not what happened. It’s more like the bullet went through the fat parts that hang off the side.”