The driver pulled away and headed east out of the park. McNaughton twisted around and flashed Kylie his best game show host smile. “It’s a tight squeeze back there, Detective. Just wondering if you had enough room for those legs?”
“I am more uncomfortable than you can possibly imagine,” she said.
He laughed as if he actually got the joke. “How’s your husband doing?” he asked.
“My husband? What the hell are you talking about?” Kylie snapped.
“Hey, no offense. I read the whole story in the Daily News. Big-shot TV guy who makes cop shows becomes crime victim.”
Kylie’s husband is one of the more visible TV producers on the East Coast, which made him a prime target for the nut job who almost crippled the film business in New York. Kylie and I took the maniac down, but not before he put Spence in the hospital.
“So, how’s your old man doing?” McNaughton said.
“My old man?” Kylie repeated. “My old man is doing turn around and shut the fuck up, McNaughton—that’s how he’s doing.”
Timmy McNumbnuts slunk around in his seat, and nobody said a word till we got to 88th Street and East End Avenue.
Kylie bolted from the car and marched up the walk toward the mayor’s residence without looking back. I hung back and thanked the driver for the lift.
McNaughton put his hand on my arm. “What’s her deal?” he said. “Is she like this with everybody?”
“No,” I said, removing the hand. “Just child molesters and assholes. Have a nice day.”
Chapter 5
Gracie Mansion was two centuries old, but it wasn’t until World War II that it became home to anyone crazy enough to want to be mayor of New York. The current occupant, Stan Spellman, desperately wanted to renew his lease for another four years, but if you believed the pollsters, he was eight days away from being replaced by Muriel Sykes.
As mansions go, it’s pretty low-key. No commanding porticos or marble columns—just a simple two-story, yellow-and-white Federal house with five bedrooms and a better than average view of the East River.
Kylie was at the top of the steps, fuming. “What is this—No Personal Boundaries Day?” she said. “Why is everybody invading my private space?”
“Everybody?” I said, trying not to shout on the mayor’s front porch. “That sleazebag would love to invade your private space. That’s why he’s asking ‘how’s your husband.’ All I want to know is why you fell off the grid this morning. How the hell can you lump me and him in the same category?”
“Because you’re asking different questions, but they have the same goddamn answer. Spence fell in the shower this morning. Hit his head. I took him to the ER. He’s okay now, but he’s upset that he’s still wobbly on his feet three months after the Chameleon incident. That’s why I was late. You happy now?”
I felt like a jerk. “I’m sorry,” I said—my second apology in less than twenty minutes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I thought our main priority was to find a killer. Now, can we get on with it?”
She pushed open the front door, and we entered the foyer. I get my furniture from IKEA. The mayor gets his from the nineteenth century. But I’d been here before and picked up a few factoids. I pointed at the floor, a vast expanse of black and white diamond shapes that led to a winding staircase thirty feet away.
“Faux marble,” I said, trying to soften the edge. “It’s painted wood.”
“I know, Zach. I’ve been here.”
Draped on Spence’s arm was left unsaid.
“Detectives!”
It was our boss, and all I needed was that one-word clue to know her mood. She stormed down the stairs.
Captain Delia Cates is one of the rising stars in the department, black on the outside, true blue on the inside—a third-generation cop. While she can barely tolerate the politics that comes with her job, she plays them well. And when a woman finally crashes through the Y-chromosome ceiling at NYPD, the smart money is on her. Her reputation is “Always tough, sometimes fair,” and I braced myself for a serious dose of verbal bitch slapping.
“You’re late,” she said, “and the mayor is six degrees beyond batshit.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We were working under the theory that homicides take precedence over political hissy fits.”
“You think I like pulling my lead investigators off a major crime scene? This is not your run-of-the-mill hissy fit. It’s as big a political clusterfuck as I’ve ever been in the middle of. What’s the story on our VIV?”
VIV is Red jargon for “very important victim.” I filled Cates in on the little I knew so far, ending with, “And Chuck Dryden is convinced that she’s the latest victim of the Hazmat Killer.”
“He’s probably right,” Cates said. “Someone just uploaded an online video of Parker-Steele confessing to the murder of Cynthia Pritchard. That’s the Hazmat’s MO—kidnap, kill, then go viral to let everyone know that the innocent victim isn’t so innocent.”
“Who’s Cynthia Pritchard?” I said.
“An event coordinator who worked with Parker-Steele two years ago on the campaign to reelect Congressman Winchell. A month before the election, Pritchard fell fourteen stories from the terrace of Evelyn’s apartment.”
“Fell?” I said.
“That’s what she told the DA. She changes her tune on the video.”
“I never even heard about this case,” I said.
“You didn’t hear about it because Leonard Parker has enough lawyers to squelch the sinking of the Queen Mary,” Cates said. “The autopsy showed that Pritchard was drunk. Parker-Steele was wasted herself, passed out on the floor when the cops arrived. The coroner’s conclusion was that Pritchard leaned too far over the terrace railing and fell. He ruled it an accident.”
“Medical examiners make mistakes all the time,” I said. “Didn’t the department ask for a follow-up investigation?”
“Yes, but the lawyers cut it off at the knees. They said the two women were co-workers, got along well, and there was no motive. They also stated loud and clear that if an unwarranted departmental witch hunt—their words—was leaked to the press and in any way damaged the reputation of Evelyn or any member of one of the city’s most prominent families, there’d be repercussions.”
“Financial repercussions,” I said.
“Right. They’d sue the city’s ass, and they’d probably win. So—no investigation, no press, case closed,” Cates said. “Money buys anonymity, Zach, and a lot of money buys total silence.”
“Only now some vigilante comes out of the woodwork and gets Parker-Steele to confess to murder,” Kylie said.
“Yes, and Muriel Sykes is already firing off tweets that say it’s a crock of crap. If you torture somebody long enough, they’ll tell you Jimmy Hoffa is buried in their basement. She’s screaming that Parker-Steele is not a killer, she’s a victim. And this city needs a mayor who can lock criminals up, not have them run loose so they can pin murders on innocent citizens.”
She turned and headed toward the carpeted staircase, talking as she went. We followed. “The mayor has been plunging in the polls, and with a serial killer on the loose and an opponent who’s bashing him for being soft on crime, unless we catch this Hazmat Killer, his reelection campaign is going to plunge right into the toilet.”
We were at the top of the stairs, and Kylie stopped. “Captain,” she said, “can I be brutally honest with you?”
Cates turned around. “With me, yes, but not with the mayor. Speak.”
“If you told us the Loch Ness monster was seen in the subway system, Zach and I would walk the tracks from the Bronx to Far Rockaway till we found it. I don’t know how long it would take, but we’d get it done. Now we’re chasing down a painstakingly smart serial killer who has eluded the cops for four months, and the mayor wants us to solve it in a week?”
“You got it, MacDonald,” Cates said.
“We’re cops. Our job is to nail this bastard before he
kills someone else, not to save the mayor’s sorry political ass.”
Cates laughed. “You sound like me back in the day when I didn’t have to worry about being politically correct. But the mayor asked for you two by name. You want the job?”
“Totally. And we’re flattered that he sent for us,” Kylie said. “But he might want to hedge his bet and send for a moving van.”
Chapter 6
Stanley Spellman started his law career with the Legal Aid Society in New York City forty years ago. His insightful logic, compassion for others, and personal charisma propelled him from his small office on Water Street to Congress and eventually to Gracie Mansion.
None of those sterling qualities were in evidence this morning. He was in a full-blown panic.
“It’s about bleeping time!” he bellowed as we walked through the door. He wanted us to know he was mad, but he was old school and preferred bleeping over F-bombs when he was in mixed company.
The man sitting next to him stood up and crossed the room to greet us.
It was Irwin Diamond—Spellman’s oldest friend and most trusted adviser. The mayor could go off the tracks—especially in times of crisis. Diamond kept him grounded. His unofficial title at City Hall was deputy mayor in charge of damage control.
“Detective Jordan, Detective MacDonald,” Diamond said, shaking our hands. “Under the circumstances I can’t say I’m happy to see you again, but I’m reassured that we’re putting our trust in the best law enforcement officers this city has at its disposal. Thank you for coming.”
“Get on with it, Irwin,” the mayor said, waving a hand at him.
“The mayor has been running the city and campaigning hard,” Diamond said. “He’s spread a little thin, so he’s not his usual charming self.”
“If it’s any consolation, neither are we,” Kylie said. “Crime scenes tend to bring you down.”
“Understood. First order of business: Everything you hear within the confines of this room is confidential,” Diamond said, speaking slowly and enunciating each word like a teacher laying down the ground rules on the first day of school. “It is not to be repeated to anyone or referred to in any written reports. Do you both accept and agree to that?”
Accept and agree? Were we kicking off a homicide investigation or downloading software? At least he didn’t ask us to solemnly swear. Kylie and I quickly accepted and agreed.
“We made some mistakes,” Diamond said. “The Hazmat Killer’s first three victims were hardly a loss to the city. They were all criminals themselves. And while we abhor vigilantism, we may not have been aggressive enough in tracking him down.”
“May not have been aggressive enough?” Spellman echoed. “It wound up being dumped on two gang cops from Chinatown.”
Diamond ignored the comment. “The murder of Parker-Steele changes everything,” he went on. “Hazmat is now our number one priority, and the case is assigned to NYPD Red. You two will head up the task force.”
“What about the two detectives who are handling it now?” I said.
“They’re under you. And we’re streamlining the chain of command. You report directly to Captain Cates, and she’ll have a straight line to Commissioner Harries’s office.”
“Irwin, the video,” the mayor said, his agitation level up a notch. “They should watch the damn video.”
“Excellent idea,” Diamond responded as if his boss had made a major contribution. He turned to Cates. “Please put it up on the big monitor, Captain.”
Cates queued up the video on a laptop, and we all took seats facing the flat-screen on the wall.
The mayor turned to me and Kylie. His shirt was stained with flop sweat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you when you came in.”
“No apologies necessary, sir,” Kylie said. “We’re here now, and we’ll do everything we—”
“This Parker-Steele,” Spellman interrupted, raising his voice. “She admits to murdering an innocent young woman. You would think that would reflect negatively on Muriel Sykes, who picked her as a campaign manager. Am I right?”
“Stan,” Diamond said, “they’re cops, not politicians.”
The mayor ignored him. “But no,” he went on, his finger shaking as he pointed it at us. “Sykes says the confession was forced. She says that NYPD didn’t take the first three murders seriously, so it’s all my fault. She’s saying if I were tougher on crime, Parker-Steele would still be alive. And then she does a one-eighty and goes after me for the Pritchard murder—claiming that I allowed Parker-Steele’s family to strong-arm me into dropping the investigation.”
“Stan, you’ve gone through this before,” Diamond said, pouring a glass of water from a chrome pitcher on the desk. “It’s politics. Get a grip. What did you think she would say? ‘I’m an idiot for hiring a murderer to run my campaign’?” He crossed the room and handed the water to the mayor.
“This is different,” Spellman said. “She’s got Leonard Parker and Jason Steele behind her. They want me out of office, and they have the money to do it. Plus she’s got Evelyn’s blowhard brother, Damon Parker, and you can pretty much guess what he’s going to say on TV.”
“He’ll probably say that his sister is an innocent victim,” Diamond said, “and lay the blame squarely on you.”
He offered the mayor two small pink oval pills. Xanax—the anxiety killer of choice for panic-riddled city fathers and stressed-out soccer moms.
“Parker-Steele isn’t a victim,” the mayor shouted, grabbing the pills from Diamond’s hand. “She’s a murderer. I’m the bleeping victim!”
He popped the pink footballs as if they were M&M’s and washed them down.
Diamond looked at Kylie and me and shook his head, an unspoken apology for his candidate’s unmayorlike behavior.
I now understood why he’d insisted we take that vow of silence.
What happens in Gracie stays in Gracie.
Chapter 7
The video was queued up on LiveLeak.com, ready to be played. The bar at the bottom let me know it was four minutes and seventeen seconds long. I wondered how many times I would watch it before the case was closed.
Cates clicked Play, and the picture came up on the big screen.
Evelyn Parker-Steele was seated in a metal folding chair. Her white Tyvek suit was a stark contrast to the black background.
Her hair was bedraggled, she had on no makeup, and the harsh lighting made her look more like a member of the Manson family than a woman at the top of New York society’s pecking order. “My name is Evelyn Parker-Steele, and two years ago I killed Cynthia Pritchard,” she said, lisping the name through broken teeth. “Cynthia was my co-worker, my friend, and my lover. She was open about her sexuality. I was not.”
Her eyes were empty, her voice a monotone. It reminded me of al-Qaeda hostage videos I’d seen, and I wondered if she was reading from a script.
“I grew up in a household that considered homosexuality as Satanic. They would never have accepted me as I am, so I pretended to be something else. When I married my husband, it was a marriage of convenience that suited both our needs.”
“Translation: Jason Steele is gay,” the mayor said. “As if you couldn’t tell.”
“Stanley!” Diamond yelled, pointing at me, Kylie, and Cates to remind the mayor that he was being very un-PC. Then he ran two fingers across his mouth—the universal sign for zip your lips.
“Sorry,” the mayor grumbled, clearly not sorry.
“Most of my sexual encounters were discreet, even anonymous,” Evelyn went on, “but when Cynthia joined the campaign team for Elliott Winchell, I fell in love with her, and we were together day and night. I was happy to continue on in secret, but Cynthia refused to live a lie.
“The night she died, we were on my terrace. She was drinking heavily and begged me to leave my husband. Same-sex marriage had been legalized in New York. Everyone was talking about it, and she wanted me to tell the world that we were in love. I told her I could
n’t even tell my father, how could I tell the world? She said, ‘If you won’t, I will.’ And then she walked to the edge of the terrace, stood up on a planter, and started screaming.
“We were fourteen stories over Park Avenue. It was dark. Probably nobody would hear her. Even if they did, I thought she’d just yell something like ‘Evelyn Parker-Steele is gay’ and that would be it, and we’d laugh about it in the morning. But that’s not what she did.
“She screamed, ‘Leonard Parker cordially invites you to the wedding of his gay daughter, Evelyn, to Cynthia Pritchard, a beautiful and talented young lesbian. Mr. Parker deeply regrets his narrow-minded, homophobic behavior that fucked up his daughter’s life and—’”
There were several seconds of silence as Evelyn just stared into the camera. “And that’s when I pushed her. It all happened in an instant. I didn’t want to kill her. I just wanted to stop her.
“I panicked. I picked up the phone to dial 911, but I knew if I called just a few seconds after she hit the ground, they’d know I was right there with her. I had to be not with her if they were ever going to believe that she fell. I couldn’t leave the apartment. People knew I was home. And then I had an idea. I went to the bar and grabbed a bottle of vodka. I took a big gulp, then another, and another. I was gagging with every swallow, but I just kept drinking.
“The cops found me passed out on the floor in a pool of vomit, drunk, incoherent. It wasn’t an act. My blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit. They took me to the hospital. When I finally could focus, they told me Cynthia was dead, and I cried. I was so sick they couldn’t interview me till the next day. By that time, my father had a wall of lawyers around me. I told the police that I had passed out early in the night, and the last thing I remember was Cynthia sitting on the terrace, drinking. The DA bought my story. It didn’t hurt that my father plays golf with him and supports his reelection campaigns.
“I want to apologize to Cynthia’s parents and her two brothers. I killed her because I didn’t want the world to know how I felt about her. But now I do. She was the free-spirited young woman I always wished I could be, and I loved her more than I ever loved anyone in my life. I didn’t mean to kill her, but I did. I’m sorry. I know what’s going to happen to me next. No trial, no judge, no jury. By the time you see this—”