NYPD Red

Chapter 98



I DECIDED THAT gray pants, blue blazer, tattersall shirt, and a yellow tie were as opera-worthy as anything I had in my closet. I took the number 1 train to Lincoln Center and walked to the restaurant.

Cheryl was waiting. She was wearing a sleeveless black dress that showed off her flawless caramel skin with a V-neckline that provided just enough cleavage to drive a man crazy.

“You look amazing,” I said.

“Thanks. You clean up pretty well yourself,” she said.

“But you lied,” I said. “That is definitely not what you usually wear to work. If you did, you’d have a lot more cops showing up for counseling.”

Shun Lee Café is perfect for pretheater dinner. Pretty young waitresses push rolling carts of bite-size dim sum in steamer baskets from table to table. The customers pick out a few to share, and then the cart moves on, magically reappearing just when you’re ready for your next course.

“The seafood dumplings with chives are to die for,” Cheryl said, holding one in a pair of chopsticks and passing it across the table. She popped it into my mouth, and I had to lean over to keep the juices from dribbling down my chin and onto my tie.

“That older couple over there is staring and smiling at us,” she said. “I think they think we’re adorable.”

“We are,” I said.

When the check came, I reached for it. Cheryl put her hand on mine. “I’ve got it,” she said.

“You got the opera tickets,” I said.

“I didn’t pay for them. They were a gift.”

“Even so, I’m old-fashioned,” I said. “Guys pay for dinner.”

“My father’s a guy. He’s paying.”

“I thought daddies stopped paying for their daughters’ dates right after senior prom.”

“He bet me a hundred bucks you’d never show up for the opera,” she said. “He lost, so he can pay.”

“Your father bet I wouldn’t show? How did that even happen? Do you always discuss your dating plans with your parents?”

“When you called me Tuesday night, I was having dinner with my father,” she said.

“You said you were with a cop.”

“Daddy was a cop. Didn’t you know that?”

I shook my head.

“Anyway, he’s very old school. Doesn’t think a cop could listen to a woman screaming without jumping onstage and arresting someone. I told him you were much more enlightened, and it cost him a hundred bucks.”

I took my hand off the check. “Thank him for dinner and tell him I’m sorry I let him down.”

La Traviata had been nothing short of mesmerizing.

“Did you really like it?” Cheryl said as we left the opera house.

“Are you kidding? It was the classic love story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy finds girl. Girl dies of consumption in the third act. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that.”

She took my arm, and we walked through the plaza and stopped in front of the Revson Fountain, one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks.

“Turn around,” she said.

I turned, and I was facing the opera house. It was like a cathedral with its crystal chandeliers lighting up the Chagall murals on the inside and the five soaring floor-to-ceiling arched windows on the outside. The fountain was putting on its own show with multicolored lighting effects and a perfectly choreographed water ballet.

“I take it back,” I said. “This is even more romantic than a girl dying of consumption.”

“People come from all over the world just to stand where we’re standing right now,” Cheryl said.

I turned to face her and put my arms around her waist. “It just might be the best place in all of New York for a first kiss.”

She leaned in even closer. “You may be right,” she whispered.

Our lips met and lingered while the water danced around us and covered us with a fine mist.

“I live right here on the Upper West Side,” Cheryl said. “Walking distance.”

“Would you like a police escort?”

“Definitely. Some of these operagoers look menacing.”

We walked uptown to Lincoln Towers, a sprawling complex of six high-rise apartment buildings on West End Avenue. It was yet another New York City neighborhood where most cops can’t afford to live.

“I got the condo. Fred got the bimbo,” she said, reading my mind.

We stood in the shadows, away from the bright lights of her lobby. I wrapped my arms around her. She was exotically beautiful, her skin was soft and warm, and the lingering traces of her perfume set every male hormone in my body on point.

We kissed. The second kiss was longer, sweeter, and even more electric than the first.

“Thank you,” she said. “I had a wonderful evening.”

“Me too. Except for the part where I didn’t get to pay for dinner.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll let you buy me breakfast tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” I said. “Are you really sure you want to trek over to the East Side and have breakfast with a bunch of cops at Gerri’s Diner on a Sunday?”

“No,” she said, taking me by the hand and walking me toward the lobby. “I have a better idea.”

She certainly did. Much, much better.

But that’s a whole other story.





Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Undersheriff Frank Faluotico and Jerry Brainard of the Ulster County, New York, Sheriff’s Department, NYPD Detective Sal Catapano, Dr. Lawrence Dresdale, Michael Jackman, Jim Rothlein, Gerry Cuffe, and Jason Wood for their help in making this work of fiction ring true.





DETECTIVE ALEX CROSS

NEEDS A MIRACLE TO MAKE IT

THROUGH THIS HOLIDAY ALIVE.



FOR AN EXCERPT,

TURN THE PAGE





SIX MINUTES BEFORE, as white foam came from the mouth of a convulsing pimply-faced homeboy in his late teens and people began to shout for help, Hala had slipped from the McDonald’s and taken four big, easy steps diagonally with her back to the nearest security camera. She was inside the women’s restroom in fewer than six seconds.

She walked the length of the stalls until she spotted one with a metal grate in the wall above it. Luckily, the stall was open. She entered, still hearing shouts of alarm outside the restroom, turned, and went to work, knowing full well that the poisoning would quickly bring DC police to the area, police who would soon figure out that a suspect matching her description had been at the fountain a few minutes before the homeboy got his Coke. And so the police would join the others, probably FBI, already looking for her.

Six minutes. That’s all she gave herself.

Hala opened the Macy’s bag and retrieved a blue workman’s suit that had a patch sewn to the chest that said AMTRAK and beneath it the name SEAN. She tore off her jacket, removed her boots, and climbed into the jumpsuit. Around her neck, she hung a chain attached to a remarkably good forgery of an Amtrak employee card that identified her as Sean Belmont, a member of an emergency-train-repair crew.

Four minutes left. She scrubbed her face, lashes, and brows free of all makeup. She slid on workman’s boots and then tucked her hair up under a wig that featured short blond hair in a masculine cut. She put in contact lenses that turned her eyes blue and painted her face and hands with pale makeup.

Ninety seconds to go. Hala stood up on the toilet, which put the metal grate at about shoulder height. She could look through it into a length of air duct about eighteen inches wide and thirteen high. She glanced at the stalls on either side of her and was heartened to see them empty. Quick as she dared, she tried the screws holding the grate over the duct and found them loose. She had the grate off and balanced on the toilet in less than thirty seconds.

Hala reached inside and groped until she found the sound-suppressed pistol taped there. She tore it off, duct tape and all, stepped off the toilet, and dropped the gun into the battered canvas tool kit in the Macy’s bag. She retrieved the tool kit and set it aside. Then she reached to the bottom of the bag and took out eight Christmas-paper-wrapped boxes, each about the size of a large coffee cup. She put them in the tool kit. The jacket and high-heeled boots went in the Macy’s bag.

Forty seconds.

Hala got back on the toilet with the Macy’s bag. She shoved the bag into the duct hard, sending it in deep, and then refitted the grate.

Ten seconds. The restroom door opened. A girl squealed, “OMG! Did you see the stuff coming out of his mouth?”

“I’m gonna be sick, you keep talking about it,” another girl replied.

Hala grabbed the tool bag, opened the stall, and went right at them. “Sorry, young ladies,” she said in the deepest voice she could muster. “We had a leak back there. She’s all yours now.”

“You coulda, like, put up a sign or something,” the OMG girl said indignantly.

“Too much snow,” Hala said, as if there were some connection, and exited the restroom.

She made a sharp right, ignoring the commotion unfolding in and outside of the McDonald’s to her immediate left. She walked resolutely west toward the entrance to the Amtrak gates and glanced to her left only once, when she picked up in her peripheral vision a big guy wearing a blue MPD parka and two shorter men wearing vests that said FBI. A sweaty man in an Amtrak police uniform followed the three of them into the McDonald’s.

Hala allowed herself the barest grin. That had flushed them out, hadn’t it?

She had no idea who the FBI agents were and guessed the sweaty guy was the Amtrak officer in charge tonight. But she totally recognized Alex Cross, the guy who found the president’s kidnapped kids. He’d been all over the papers.

In an odd way, Hala felt honored.





I KNELT OVER the body of Phillip LaMonte, who dressed the gangsta but whose identification showed he was a junior at Catholic University. He had a home address on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and carried a ticket to Penn Station on the Acela that was about to board. The extra-large cup lay on the floor next to him. The ice in it hadn’t yet melted.

I lowered my face over the foam around his mouth and sniffed. I smelled an acrid odor I recognized.

“Cyanide poisoning,” I said.

“Hala?” Mahoney said.

“Has to be,” I replied. “That’s how she killed her husband, right?”

“That’s how he died,” Bobby Sparks agreed.

I looked at the closest patrol officer. “Was this guy with anyone?”

The cop gestured with her chin toward a skinny white kid, late teens, who was also dressed to party with 50 Cent and P. Diddy. “Name’s Allen Kent.”

I glanced at the cup. “Phillip drinking from that before he died?” I asked Kent.

The kid nodded, but he was obviously in shock.

“Anyone else get close to that drink, son?” I asked.

Kent shook his head. “Phil got it himself from the fountain.”

I didn’t know how she’d done it, but I was certain Hala Al Dossari had murdered this college kid. And how didn’t seem to matter as much as why.

I looked at Mahoney and Sparks, said, “Close this place down.”

Captain Seymour Johnson, the shift commander of the Amtrak police, a sweaty, unhealthy-looking man, lost more color. “Are you crazy? We’re the only transportation into or out of DC. We don’t even know if this woman is still in here, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe she’s not,” I said. “But if I were you, I’d put men with her picture at every exit. No one gets out of Union Station without proper identification. That goes for passengers who are boarding too. And call in Metro homicide and patrol. There’s deep snow everywhere. If she has made it outside and doesn’t have a car, then she’s on foot and visible.”

Mahoney agreed and started making calls. Bobby Sparks did the same. So did Johnson. I looked around, spotted a guy, early thirties, wearing a chesterfield overcoat, watching. He held an iPad.

I went to him. “You see what happened, Mr.…?”

“Goldberg. Jared Goldberg. And no, I didn’t see anything. I came over when I heard the screaming.”

“You a patriot, Mr. Goldberg?” I asked.

His brows knit. “I like to think so.”

I handed him my card, said, “Alex Cross. I work with Metro DC Police and as a consultant to the FBI. Can you help me?”

Goldberg frowned. “I clerk at the tax court. How can I—”

“Your iPad,” I said. “Work on one of those four G networks?”

He nodded.

“Backed up in—what do they call it—the iCloud or something?”

The law clerk frowned but nodded again.

“Good, can I use it?” I asked. “I promise you I’ll return it. And if I break it, I’ll replace it with one even better.”

Goldberg looked pained, but he handed it over.

“What are you up to, Cross?” asked Bobby Sparks when he saw me return with the iPad in hand.

“Those guys out in the command center,” I said. “Can they transmit the footage from the cameras at this end of the station?”

The HRT commander thought, then said, “They’ll have to feed it through one of our secure websites, but affirmative, I think they can do that.”





AT THE OPPOSITE end of the rail station, inside the men’s room now, Hala had again taken a stall that featured a duct grate above it. She waited until the stalls adjacent to hers emptied, and then, for the second time in the past few minutes, removed already loosened screws. She turned the grate sideways and pushed it deep into the duct.

She had to stand there for several minutes while an old man came in and urinated, but then he left and the place fell silent.

Slight in stature, Hala had been a highly competitive gymnast as a girl and still maintained her agility and limberness. After shoving the tool kit in after the grate, she stood up on the exposed pipe of the toilet, grasped the stall walls on either side of her, tightened her abdomen, and swung her legs up into a pike position, toes pointed almost at the ceiling.

The split second she felt her hips about to fall, she snapped her heels and calves forward into the open duct. Wriggling, she was completely inside the ventilation system within ten seconds. She kept wriggling and scooting, pushing the tool bag and the grate ahead of her, deeper into the duct.

Three feet in was an intersection of four ducts. She turned her upper body into the right-side passage, pulled herself totally in, and then inched back across the one she’d just left. It took some straining with her left hand, but she was able to retrieve the grate.

Looking toward the light shining in through the open hole in the wall to the restroom, she crabbed back to it and then peered out. A boy was peeing with his father. Hala looked at them from the darkness of the ductwork, wondering if this was something Tariq had ever done with their son, Fahd. Had her boy ever been that young?

When they left, Hala shook off whatever regrets she had and pulled the grate back over the open duct, securing it with an eight-inch length of picture-frame wire she’d brought along for that purpose. Two minutes later, she’d gotten herself turned around again, and she pushed on, straight down the main duct, smelling the odor of pizzas cooking at Sbarro pouring into the air-vent system from her left.

She felt her stomach grumble, ignored it, and kept wriggling. Twenty-five feet farther on, Hala reached a second intersection in the ductwork; she arched and pulled her way into the one that broke right, heading north. When she was fully inside that duct, she stopped, chest heaving, got out the disposable cell from the pocket of the workman’s suit, and hit Redial.

“Why?” she whispered.

“Four and zero,” the male voice replied.

Her allies were close to the target now—it would have taken them no more than twelve minutes to get there on an ordinary day, but the snow had changed everything. Still, she trusted his judgment.

“Go with God,” she said, and hung up.

After stowing the cell phone, she slid on another ten feet, to where the duct made a ninety-degree left turn. In the north wall there was another grate. Cold air was blowing through it. Hala shivered; she paused for only a second to look through the grate, finding herself high above dimly lit loading platforms and two commuter trains sitting dark on the suburban rail tracks.

Hala crawled on toward a third grate. She moved stealthily, as if she were sliding into position for a sniper’s shot, which she was. The last ten feet took nearly ten minutes, leaving her twenty-eight minutes before her role turned crucial.

Irritating Christmas music blared from somewhere. Hala peered through the grate. She was fifteen feet up the east wall of a loading dock platform owned by the U.S. Postal Service. Directly below her were large canvas hampers holding canvas bags that were filled with mail. A skeleton crew of three men worked on the dock, transferring the mailbags from the hampers into an open compartment at the rear of a railcar.

Hala flashed on an image of herself much younger, out in the desert with Tariq, before the children came. He was teaching her how to shoot a pistol. How odd it had been, that aiming and firing a gun came so naturally to her. Then again, shooting was something precise, like medicine, where attention to technique and detail came together to create a little miracle. And wasn’t that what a perfectly placed shot was? A little miracle? A gift from God?

Hala thought so. She got the silenced Glock out of the tool bag and aimed down through the slats of the grate at a fat Latino guy with muttonchops. He was farthest from her, closest to the tracks. The one most likely to get away.



About the Authors


JAMES PATTERSON has created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. Mr. Patterson also writes the bestselling Women’s Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett. James Patterson has had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson’s books have sold more than 240 million copies.

James Patterson has also written numerous #1 bestsellers for young readers, including the Maximum Ride, Witch & Wizard, and Middle School series. In total, these books have spent more than 220 weeks on national bestseller lists. In 2010, James Patterson was named Author of the Year at the Children’s Choice Book Awards.

His lifelong passion for books and reading led James Patterson to create the innovative website ReadKiddoRead.com, giving adults an invaluable tool to find the books that get kids reading for life. He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.