NYPD Red (9 page)

THE CHAMELEON CLOSED his eyes and tried to home in on the voice on the other end of the phone.

“Who is this?” he said.

A raspy laugh. “An old war buddy.”

“This is a new number. None of my old crowd has it.”

“We got friends in common, Gabriel. Some of them still work at Silvercup. Your name was on the call sheet for the Ian Stewart movie today. I guess you saw that terrible tragedy unfold before your very eyes.” Another laugh, even raspier.

The neurons in The Chameleon’s brain were going off like a string of cheap Chinese firecrackers, and one of them zeroed in on the grating laugh. “Mickey?” The Chameleon said. “Is that you?”

“I’m happy to say it is, but you, on the other hand, don’t sound too overjoyed to hear from me.”

“Mick,” The Chameleon said. “It’s after midnight. My girlfriend and I were just—”

“Just what? Watching TV? Catching up on the news of the day?”

“We were asleep. What do you want?”

“Nothing we can talk about over the phone,” Mickey said.

“Last I heard you were on an extended vacation up in the Adirondacks. It’s six hours away, but if you tell me when visiting hours are, maybe I can take a run up there.”

“They gave me time off for being a model vacationer. I got back into town last week. Remember where my old loft was?”

“Yeah. Long Island City. Skillman Avenue. The scenic part.”

Another annoying laugh. “Scenic. I like that. Why don’t you come over and we can sit on the veranda, have coffee, and watch the sun rise over the freight yard.”

“Screw the sunrise, Mickey,” The Chameleon said. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

He hung up and started getting dressed.

Lexi didn’t move from the bed. “What was that all about?” she asked.

“Production snag. It goes with the territory.”

“Bullshit,” she barked. “Listen—if you don’t want me to show up on location at Radio City and watch the pyrotechnics, fine. I can live with that. But if you’d rather go to Long Island City in the middle of the night than fuck, you damn well better tell me why. I’m not the girl at the popcorn counter anymore, Gabe. We’re either in this together, or you’re in it by yourself.”

He sat down on the bed. “Sorry, Lex. You’re a worrier, and I was trying to spare you.”

“Don’t. Don’t ever. Now tell me what’s going on?”

“Did I ever tell you about Mickey Peltz?”

“No.”

“He was one of the best special effects guys in the business—especially with explosives. He was good at blowing things up, but he cut corners so he could siphon off some of the production budget and put it in his pocket. One day he’s working on a bank heist movie and they needed to blow up an armored car. Mickey was in charge of the blast, and he decided to buy some bargain-basement crap that was cheap and volatile instead of expensive and stable. A bomb went off prematurely, a stuntman lost an arm, and Mickey pulled four years at the Adirondack Correctional Facility up in Ray Brook.”

“And?”

“And it looks like he got out early, saw the Molotov on TV, and knew it was me.”

“How is that possible?”

“The one I tossed was wickless,” The Chameleon said. “Only a handful of guys in the business do it that way. It was one of Mickey’s signature effects. He taught me how to make it, and I guess he put two and two together.”

“So what does he want from you?” Lexi said. “A screen credit?”

“My guess? He wants a few bucks, and he’ll promise to keep his theories to himself.”

“Blackmail.”

“He didn’t use that word, but that’s where my brain went.”

“And it won’t just be a few bucks, will it?” she said.

“Blackmailers have delusions, so I guess his starting price will be somewhere between ridiculous and out of his fucking mind.”

“I have one more question,” Lexi said.

“And I already have the answer. No, you can’t go. But you knew that before you even asked.”

She hopped off the bed and wrapped her arms around him. She was still naked. The fading scent of their lovemaking still hung in the air. He draped his arms over her shoulders and pressed her close.

“You’re a glass-half-empty person,” she said. “I’m a glass-half-full.”

“Understatement,” he said, planting a kiss on the back of her neck. “You’re a glass-overflowing person. What’s your point?”

“This is the best thing that could have happened to us,” she said. “Your little trip to Mickey’s loft could be an incredible scene. It’s another twist. Even we didn’t expect it, and we wrote the script.”

As soon as she said it, he knew she was right.

“This is why I love you,” he said. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it right away, but you nailed it. Let’s go write the scene.”

“You and me?” she said.

“Who else would I write it with?” he said, pressing her to his chest and kissing her hair, her nose, her lips. “We’re a team, aren’t we?”

WE FINALLY HAD something solid to go on. Photos of our killer. We sent Ellen Dobrin and Jason Garza, two bilingual detectives, out to the Bronx to wake up Rafe, the waiter from the Regency Hotel.

They showed him the picture of the fake E! channel cameraman and asked if it reminded him at all of the busboy from that morning.

“This is an old white guy,” Rafe said. “I told them other cops that the busboy was a young Latino.”

“Yes, sir,” Dobrin said. “But imagine that this is a disguise. Let’s say the white hair is a wig. Now imagine that the busboy was also wearing a disguise. Do you see any similarities between the two of them—you know, like height, build, bone structure?”

Rafe took another look at the photo. “They’s both dudes,” he said, hoping to be helpful.

Dobrin sent me a text.
We got nada. Nuance no es Rafe’s strong suit.

Then Matt Smith, our techie, put the bomber’s picture through facial recognition software. Even with a disguise, it’s not easy for a person to change the distance between his eyes, the depth of his sockets, the shape of his cheekbones, or eighty other distinct facial landmarks.

We collected headshots of every extra and every crew member on the set of Ian Stewart’s movie. We also had a second batch of pictures of random people lifted off the Internet that we used as a control group. The software then uses some magic algorithm and compares each face to our perp.

“If this were the third act of
CSI: Miami,
the computer would spit out the one guy who’s a match,” Kylie said.

But real police work is nothing like TV. The computer picked out twenty-three possibles. Eleven extras, including two women, three crew members, and nine from the control group, including Leonardo DiCaprio.

“This whole facial recognition thing isn’t nearly as foolproof as people might think,” Smith said.

“Even so,” Kylie said, “let’s go pay Leo a visit and see if he has an alibi.”

I finally got to sleep at 2:00.

At 4:15, my cell phone rang. I hit the light and looked at the caller ID. It was Kylie.

“This better be good, K-Mac,” I said.

“This isn’t K-Mac,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Spence. I guess with a name like Spence Harrington, I can’t have a cool street name like K-Mac. Maybe Spennington.”

“Is Kylie okay?” I said.

“Yeah, she’s exhausted and I hated to wake her. Me, I’m a night owl. This is when I do my best thinking. I found your number in her cell, so I figured I’d give you a ring while it’s still fresh in my mind. Maybe kick it around. Just you and me, guy to guy.”

I was half-awake now, but I still had no idea what he was talking about. “Okay, what is it?” I said.

“You know I’m not a cop, right?”

I grunted in the affirmative.

“But I make a damn good living producing cop shows on TV,” he said, “and I have an idea I want to bounce off you.”

“An idea for a TV show?”

“God, no, Zach. About these murders. You should have invited me into that powwow with the mayor. I might have come up with it earlier, but I was outside with the rest of the civilians.”

“Spence, I’m sorry you had to stay outside, but—”

“Don’t worry about it. Kylie explained. Anyway, you want to hear my theory?”

Did I have a choice?

“Sure,” I said.

“Now, I’m just pitching,” he said, “but listen to this. New York is trying to attract LA production money. They invite all these Hollywood wheeler-dealers to fly in, and suddenly they’re being bumped off. Who benefits from these murders?”

I was working on two hours sleep. Even if there were an intelligent answer, I wouldn’t have come up with it.

“I give up, Spence. Who benefits?”

“The City of Angels. Los freakin’ Angeles, California.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“Making movies and TV shows is LA’s bread and butter,” he said. “They don’t want to lose a crumb of it to New York, so they’re trying to prove that New York is not a safe town for moviemakers. And listen to this—it’s working already. Shelley Trager is having a blowout party on his yacht Wednesday. It’s the premiere screening of my new TV show, and let me tell you it’s the must-have invite of the whole week. As of tonight, six people canceled. They said they had to fly back to LA. They’re full of shit. They’re afraid of New York, and they’re running back home to Mama. I know it sounds far-fetched, but all great plots have these kinds of quirky hooks to them. Look at
Lost
—it was off-the-wall crazy, but it ran six seasons. Like I said, I’m just tossing out an idea here. What do you think?”

“Spence, I don’t think a city—even one with a good motive—could be behind these killings,” I said. “Some person has to be behind it all. Have you narrowed it down to a human suspect?”

“No. That’s your job. You and K-Mac,” he said. “The obvious places to start are the California Film Commission, the LA Chamber of Commerce—hell, it might go all the way up to city hall.”

“That’s an intriguing thought, Spence,” I said.
For a TV show, maybe. But hard to believe in real life that the mayor of Los Angeles would put a contract out on three people in New York.

I thanked him, promised I’d talk to Kylie about it in the morning, and hung up. Thirty minutes later, I was still wide awake. Maybe because I was running all the events of the past twenty-four hours through my shit sorter. Maybe because I was trying to make sense of Spennington’s phone call.

Or maybe because I knew Cheryl Robinson was probably already at the diner on her second cup of coffee.

“ARE YOU SURE he’ll have something you can use to blow the place up?” Lexi had asked when they finished.

Gabe shrugged. “He just got out of prison. He may not even have a quart of milk in the fridge.”

“Maybe you should just shoot him the second he opens the door.”

“No,” Gabe said. “I have to make sure he didn’t tell anyone. Mickey’s a nonstop talker. That’s how I met him. We were shooting some piece-of-crap terrorist-on-an-airplane movie. I was a passenger and Mickey had to blow off the cockpit doors. I asked if I could watch him set up, and before you know it, Mick is giving me a short course in special effects. I figured this guy is a gold mine of tech stuff I can use one day, and I struck up a friendship. By the time he went off to prison, I kind of liked the old guy. It’ll be nice to catch up with him.”

“Catch up. Find out what he knows. Then kill him,” Lexi said.

“Looks like you’ve been reading the script.”

Gabe took the number 7 train to Flushing, got off at 33rd Street, and walked to Skillman Avenue. He was glad he had a gun. A guy could get rolled in a neighborhood like this.

Nothing had changed since he had last been here. He wondered how Mickey managed to keep the place the whole time he was in jail. He’d have to ask him during the nice-to-see-you-again part of the conversation.

He rang the bell and identified himself over the intercom. Mickey buzzed him in.

The ground floor reeked of garbage and piss. He waited for Mickey to send the elevator down, then rode it up to the fifth floor, patting the compact Walther PPK tucked into the pocket of his windbreaker.

The door to the elevator opened directly into the loft, and Gabe walked in.

“Hey, I’m over here at my workbench,” Mickey called out from the opposite end of the space, forty feet away.

Gabe crossed the length of the room. Peltz was sitting on a wooden stool. He had aged at least ten years in the past four. His shoulders were stooped, and his hair and skin were both ashy gray.

“One thing’s for sure. You didn’t get too much sun,” Gabe said.

“Grab a seat,” Mickey said. “This is cool. You really got to see this.”

There was only one place to sit—a threadbare old armchair—and Gabe lowered himself into it and sat back. “What’s so cool that I got to see?”

“This,” Mickey said, holding up a chrome cylinder about the size of a penlight. “It’s a pressure-release trigger. Watch what happens when I click it.” He pressed the silver button at the top of the cylinder and held it in place with his thumb.

“Nothing,” Gabe said. “Nothing happened.”

“Exactly. But guess what happens when I lift my thumb off the button?”

Gabe didn’t have to guess. He knew. He started to stand.

“Don’t move,” Mickey said. “The seat cushion is lined with C4. The instant I release this button, your ass will be blown to kingdom come.”