Red Alert_An NYPD Red Mystery Page 4

  He nodded. It wasn’t exactly an ironclad guarantee, but he knew it was the best he was going to get.

  “It happened five years ago,” he said, easing into his story. “Claudia had just given birth to our first kid. It was a C-section, so she was in the hospital for a couple of days. It was the second night, and visiting hours were over, so Aubrey and I left together. It started out innocent enough. We were just going to have a couple of drinks and get something to eat.”

  He paused, hoping we could figure out the rest on our own. I decided to help him out.

  “And one thing led to another?” I said.

  “Claudia had complications during the pregnancy. She cut me off in her sixth month. I was horny as a stallion and plenty drunk. Aubrey was even drunker and plenty willing. We went back to her place.”

  “And?”

  “And the girl was a total freak show. Hey, I’m all in favor of getting a little kinky—leather, role-playing, the kind of shit you read about in those “Spice Up Your Sex Life” articles in magazines—but when a chick begs me to put a cigarette butt out on her nipple, I draw the line.”

  “Did you ever consummate the relationship with her?”

  “No. I guess I sobered up in a hurry. When I realized what a hot mess she was, I got out of there.”

  He leaned forward in his chair. “You must think I’m a real hypocrite. I would’ve fucked my wife’s sister, but I wouldn’t paddle her, whip her, or piss on her. But trust me, there’s a city full of guys who would, and she knew where to find every one of them.”

  “How many other names can you give us besides Janek Hoffmann?”

  “None. Zero. I swear. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. The only reason I knew Janek was that he was her cameraman, and they had this serious on-again, off-again relationship for over a year. I saw a lot of him. And I saw the bruises on her. I didn’t have to ask him if he did it. He’s the kind of guy who has to beat the shit out of someone, and Aubrey was the kind of woman who needed the beating. It was a match made in sadomasochist heaven.”

  “Do you know where Janek Hoffmann lives?” I asked.

  His body sagged, and he slumped down in his chair. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Somewhere in Brooklyn.”

  Somewhere in Brooklyn turned out to be a block from where Aubrey’s car was parked.

  CHAPTER 9

  If New York City is a melting pot, then Brooklyn is the cultural hodgepodge that gives the stew its special kick. Throw a dart at a map of the world, and no matter where it sticks, the odds are there’s a mini-version of that country in Brooklyn.

  Janek Hoffmann lived in Little Poland, a microneighborhood in Greenpoint, the northernmost section of the borough.

  Kylie and I drove across the Pulaski Bridge, past alphabetically organized streets—Ash, Box, Clay, Dupont, Eagle—until we hit a working-class enclave where the mom-and-pop pharmacies are called apetkas, the butcher shops stock dozens of varieties of kielbasa, and the restaurants have hard-to-pronounce and impossible-to-spell names like Karczma and Lomzynianka.

  Hoffmann lived in a five-story walk-up, across the street from a Catholic church and a short walk from where Aubrey Davenport had parked her car.

  Rule number one when you’re making a house call: Don’t let the suspect know you’re coming. We entered the building, and I rang the super’s bell.

  He buzzed us in and met us in the vestibule. It was only 5:15, but he was already dressed and working on a mug of coffee.

  Rule number two: The super doesn’t have to unlock an apartment door just because a cop wants to question a tenant. You’d better give him a good reason to let you in.

  “NYPD,” Kylie said. “We’ve been sent to check on Janek Hoffmann. His girlfriend was found murdered, and we’re concerned that it could be a double homicide. We need to make sure he’s all right.”

  Rule number three: The super almost always knows you’re full of shit, but if you give him what he needs to cover his ass, he’ll usually cooperate.

  This one did. “Four B,” he said, flipping through the oversize key ring attached to his belt. “Follow me.”

  He led us to the fourth floor, unlocked Hoffmann’s door, and left in a hurry.

  The first thing that hit me when we entered was the smell. Correction: smells. Sweat-stained gym clothes piled up in a corner, rancid food containers on the kitchen table, and the nasty, burnt-plastic stench of crack cocaine.

  The second thing I noticed was the body lying facedown on the living room floor. He didn’t smell that sweet, either.

  Kylie looked at me, pointed at the human heap, then reversed her finger and tapped her chest. Translation: This prick beats up women. He’s mine.

  I nodded, and she drew back her foot and gave him a not-so-gentle nudge under his rib cage.

  He groaned, rolled over, and looked up at us. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “We’re from Better Homes and Gardens. We’re here for the photo shoot.” She flashed her badge. “Who did you think we were, asshole?”

  She kicked him again, and he instinctively clenched his fists.

  “Come on. Get up and hit me,” she taunted.

  He stood up as far as he could go, which was only about five foot six inches high. But what he lacked in height he made up for in bulk. His biceps looked like they came off the label on a tub of whey protein powder, and his skintight muscle shirt showed off every pec, delt, and ab on his upper torso.

  “Janek Hoffmann?” she said.

  “Yeah, I live here. How did you get in?” he asked, staggering over to a tattered lime-green sofa that even the Salvation Army wouldn’t try to salvage.

  “Your cleaning lady left the door open. Do you know Aubrey Davenport?”

  That got his attention. He struggled to fight his way through a substance-induced fog.

  “I work for her,” he said. “Well, technically, she fired me. But she’ll take me back. She always does.”

  “When did you last see her?”

  He closed his eyes and squeezed out an answer. “Friday.”

  “You sure you didn’t see her last night?”

  The eyes popped open, angry, challenging. “I told you: she fired me. The bitch makes me repent for a week before she calls and gives me another chance. It’s all part of her twisted dance.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  He gave a nod at his ravaged apartment. “Party for one.”

  “I don’t think so,” Kylie said. “Aubrey’s car is parked around the corner. We know she was here last night.”

  That stumped him. He scrunched his eyes tight again, rummaged through his muddled memory bank, and came up with insufficient funds. “She was?”

  “You tell us, Janek.”

  He sat forward on the edge of the sofa and massaged his temples. “I don’t know. Maybe she was. My brain is a little fuzzy since Friday. Why the hell don’t you ask her if she was here?”

  Kylie squatted, leaned in so close that she was practically eyeball to eyeball with him, and whispered, “I can’t ask her. She’s dead.”

  “Dead?” The wheels inside his steroid-addled head were turning now, and I could see that he was finally on the verge of being able to put two and two together. “And is that why you’re here? Do you think I killed her?”

  “We don’t think you killed her,” I said, tired of letting my partner have all the fun. “We know you killed her. She parked her car nearby, then the two of you took your car to Roosevelt Island, where you tied her up, whipped her, choked her to death, came home, and fired up your amnesia pipe, hoping it would all go away. It won’t. The only thing going away will be you.”

  He stared at me with his high beams on. “Roosevelt Island? Near the big old haunted house?”

  If we had taken him into custody, we would have had to warn him that anything he said could be used against him. But we hadn’t arrested him, and cops are not required to stop a chatterbox from incriminating himself.

  “Now it’s coming back
to you, isn’t it?” I said. “That’s where we found her body. You’re in deep shit, Janek, but we can help. Tell us everything now, and we’ll see to it that you get brownie points with the DA’s office.”

  Silence.

  Kylie sat down on the sofa next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke softly. “Get it off your chest, Janek. Tell us the truth. Did you kill her?”

  He shook his head, and began to sob. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  CHAPTER 10

  There are two ways to search a suspect’s apartment: get a warrant, which would take hours, or con the tenant into giving us permission, which in Janek Hoffmann’s case would take seconds. Kylie took the lead.

  “Let’s go easy on him, Zach,” she said, her hand still on our prime suspect’s shoulder. “So he can’t remember anything. That doesn’t make him guilty. Maybe he didn’t do it.”

  That’s the genius of Kylie MacDonald. A few minutes before, she was kicking the guy when he was down, trash-talking him, using every trick in the Bad Cop’s Handbook to goad a confession out of him.

  Now she was Detective Mother Teresa, and it was my turn to put on the Bad Cop pants.

  “‘Maybe he didn’t do it’?” I bellowed. “And maybe when he wakes up tomorrow morning he’ll be six foot two.” I kicked my voice up an octave. “He’s a juicer, a crackhead, and now he’s a murderer. All the DA has to do is get up in front of a jury and say two words—’roid rage—and this sackless wonder will spend the next forty years doing drop sets in the prison yard at Green Haven.”

  “At least give him a chance to prove he’s innocent.” She turned to Hoffmann. “Can you do that, Janek? Can you prove you were here last night?”

  He gave it his best shot. “I might have had some friends over. I could call around and see if any of them—”

  “Friends lie,” Kylie said. “You have to do better than that.”

  He shook his head, his reservoir of ideas dried up.

  “What about take-out food?” Kylie said. “Did you get a delivery last night?”

  “Probably. I mean, I order in all the time.” He pointed with pride at the array of pizza boxes, Chinese food containers, and other roach bait rotting on the kitchen table. “We can call and see if any of the delivery guys remember.”

  “It won’t fly,” Kylie said. “The DA thinks delivery guys lie even more than friends. Let’s look around and see if we can find a receipt with the date on it.”

  Janek thought that was a stellar idea and was grateful when we offered to help search the apartment for his meal ticket to freedom. We neglected to tell him that if we happened to stumble on a tripod, it would be admissible evidence.

  Since it took us less than a minute to find a couple of crack pipes and a bag of weed in his dresser drawer, we realized that hiding shit from the cops wasn’t his strong suit. After ten minutes, we knew the tripod wasn’t in the apartment.

  “My ex was in the film business,” Kylie said once we’d come up empty-handed. “I’m surprised this place isn’t cluttered with camera equipment.”

  “It all belongs to Aubrey,” Janek said. “She keeps it in her office. Did you find any receipts yet?”

  “No, which means you still don’t have an alibi,” Kylie said. “Give me your cell. The GPS might tell us if you were here last night.”

  Without missing a beat, he passed her his phone, and I wondered why the hell an intelligent photojournalist like Aubrey Davenport would spend more than ten minutes with this brain-dead Neanderthal.

  If we had any doubts that Janek was a narcissist, they were put to rest when we opened his photo app. There were gigabytes of selfies of him oiled up and stripped down to nothing but the classic ball-cupping posing thong.

  And then we found what we thought was pay dirt: a series of pictures of Aubrey, fully clothed, standing in front of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital.

  “What are these?” Kylie asked him.

  “That’s the place,” he said.

  “What place?”

  “The creepy place on Roosevelt Island where you said you found her.”

  “What were the two of you doing there?”

  “Aubrey thought she might want to do a documentary about it. A lot of people died there, and death really turned her on. She’d rather have sex in a cemetery than a five-star hotel.”

  “Did you have sex there?” I asked.

  “Shit, man, we had sex everywhere.”

  “These are dated last October,” I said. “Have you been back there since?”

  “A couple of times. But not in the winter. And definitely not last night.”

  We delved into his contacts, his phone log, his browser history, his text messages, and dozens of unappetizing sexts between him and Aubrey, but other than finding out that they had a twisted long-term love-hate-work-sex relationship, there was no evidence to link him to her murder.

  My text alert beeped, and I checked my phone. It was Malley.

  I know who made your bomb. Meet me at 26 Fed.

  It took me a beat to put it together, and then it all came flooding back. The Silver Bullet dinner. A smiling Del Fairfax suddenly ripped in half. A tiny pigtail of red, white, and blue wire. I’d become so immersed in the narrow world of Janek Hoffmann that for a few glorious minutes I’d totally forgotten that Kylie and I had another homicide to solve.

  CHAPTER 11

  I showed the text to Kylie.

  “At least the FBI’s got their act together,” she said. “We’re not getting anywhere with this lunk. How are we supposed to figure out if he killed Aubrey if he can’t figure it out himself?”

  Janek was out cold on the sofa, snoring like a bear. “I doubt if he’s a flight risk,” I said.

  “I doubt if there’s a risk of him getting out of the apartment.”

  The sun was up when we left the building, and the air was thick with the heady aroma of something sweet and irresistible. We followed our noses to a tiny bakery on the corner of Java Street.

  The sign on the window said RZESZOWSKA, which I decided meant the best place in New York to get cheese babka, poppy seed rolls, blackberry Danish, and if you want coffee, find a Starbucks.

  We did, and we drove back to Manhattan restoring our souls in the grand tradition of cops everywhere: wolfing down sugary pastries and deconstructing the events of the past twelve hours.

  The Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza on Foley Square is forty-one stories of steel, glass, and red tape. It houses a multitude of government agencies, including Homeland, GSA, Social Security, Immigration, and, on the twenty-third floor, the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Howard Malley was waiting for us in his office.

  “Do you accept bribes?” Kylie asked, dropping what was left of the Polish goodies onto his desk.

  “It’s the first thing they teach us at Quantico,” Malley said, digging into the bag and pulling out a piece of apple cake. “I found your bomb maker. He’s a master. One of the best in the business.”

  “Name?” Kylie said, pen and pad in hand.

  “Real name is Flynn Samuels, but Interpol gave him a code name: Sammy Six Digits.”

  “Six Digits? He doesn’t sound that masterful.”

  “That’s that wacky French sense of humor. The guy has all ten fingers, but he always uses a symbolic six-digit date to trigger his bombs. So, like, if he wanted to blow up Independence Hall, he might go with July 4, 1776, and use 741776.”

  “What numbers did he use to set off this one?”

  “Impossible to tell,” Malley said, putting away half a square of cake in a single bite, “but last night’s blast has his signature all over it. His specialty is shaped charges designed to take out a single target. And remember the red, white, and blue wires? You thought that meant he was American. You were close. He’s Australian, and guess what colors their flag is.”

  “Do you have a mug shot? We’ll put out a citywide BOLO.”

  “Don’
t bother. He’s in a prison in Thailand. Fifteen years ago he built the bomb that killed their minister of justice. It was neat, clean, and did the job without any collateral damage. But the people behind the assassination were stupid and got caught. They were facing the death penalty, so they made a deal. They gave up their bomb maker in exchange for a lighter sentence. The cops arrested Samuels at the Bangkok airport just as he was about to get on a plane for Australia. The next morning, the bozos that hired him were executed by machine gun. Samuels wasn’t so lucky. They decided to let him rot in a Thai prison.”

  “Then he must have a disciple,” Kylie said. “Someone he taught the tricks of his trade.”

  “I doubt it. Samuels commanded top dollar to create one-of-a-kind bombs. Blowing people up was his livelihood. He didn’t have disciples. He was too smart to share his secret sauce recipe.”

  “Do you have any idea when he gets out of prison?” I asked.

  Malley reached into the bag and plucked out a gooey Danish. “Good question, Zach. Let me check my calendar. Oh, wait: it’s Thailand. Never.”

  CHAPTER 12

  We drove back to the precinct, where I showered, shaved, and grabbed a change of clothes from my locker. By the time I got to my desk, Kylie had already cleaned up and was checking her email.

  “We got a gratitude note from Mayor Sykes.” She tapped her computer screen. “Take a look.”

  My mind was too preoccupied with Cheryl for me to care about reading an attaboy from the mayor. “How about you just give me the executive summary?”

  “Sure,” she said, swiveling her chair away from the screen. “‘Blah, blah, blah, Jordan and MacDonald, quick thinking. Blah, blah, blah, Jordan and MacDonald, excellence and valor.’ Plus four more paragraphs of ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ Bottom line: we are the flavor of the month.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse.”