We hadn’t asked her for Teddy’s alibi for Monday night, but she’d decided to get it on the record. Her bogus story had just the right amount of detail, and she wrapped it up by gracing us with a warm grandmotherly smile, which I’m sure was the exact same one she’d lay on the jury when she perjured herself on her son’s behalf.
“Can you tell me what’s going on that you want to talk to Teddy?” Annie said. “He’s made some mistakes, but he served his time, and now he’s back on the straight and narrow.”
Normally, it’s not a question we’d answer, but she already knew why we were there. “We’re investigating a homicide,” I said. “A man named Raymond Davis was shot in his apartment.”
Annie covered her mouth with both hands, reeling from the horror of it all. “I hope you don’t suspect Teddy. He and Raymond were best of friends. Besides, my son would never, ever hurt a soul,” she said, her eyes watery. “It’s how he was raised.”
“Did Teddy ever talk to you about Raymond?” I asked. “Like, do you know if anyone had a grudge against him?”
“I wish I could help, but you know how boys are. Teddy never tells me anything. Always confides in his father. They had a long talk Monday night while I was fixing dinner.”
Bingo. We’d finally caught her in a lie. Q had told us that Buddy Ryder was dead, and NCIC had confirmed it.
“Then maybe his father can help us out,” I said. “Can we talk to him?”
She put her hand on my arm and led me over to a sideboard. “You can talk to him all you want,” she said, pointing to a bronze cremation urn with Buddy Ryder’s name engraved on it. “Just don’t expect him to talk back.”
Game, set, match.
“The envelope, please,” Kylie said as soon as we got in the elevator.
“I tried,” I said. “Did I even get nominated?”
“No. She played you like a grand piano. The old girl could have done her victory lap right after the Chunky Monkey ice cream and ‘that poor actress who got shot.’”
“I know. She had all the right answers before we even asked the questions.”
“Mothers lie, Zach. And Annie Ryder does it better than most.”
CHAPTER 34
We got back to the precinct three hours after we left Cates’s office pretending to be in hot pursuit of Annie Ryder.
“The captain is probably wondering why we’ve been gone so long,” Kylie said, giving me an impish grin.
Our side trip to Shelley’s apartment and Kylie’s throw-down with Spence’s stoner buddies had wasted a serious chunk of time, and the grin was to let me know that she didn’t care.
“I need five minutes before we go to her office,” I said, heading up the stairs.
“What’s more important than debriefing Cates?”
“Salvaging my relationship with Cheryl.”
“Bad idea. Cates put a freeze on personal time,” she said, giving me another grin.
I gave her the finger and double-timed my way up the stairs to Cheryl’s office. She wasn’t in. I bounded up another flight of stairs and got to Cates’s office just a few steps behind Kylie.
Cates was in the middle of a meeting, but she dropped everything as soon as she saw us. I’m sure she said something, but I didn’t process a single word. I just stood in the doorway staring at the three other people sitting in the room. Our backup team, Betancourt and Torres, and, next to them, Cheryl.
She gave me half a smile. On closer inspection, it looked more like half a frown. I eased my way into the room as Kylie gave Cates a top line summary of our visit to Annie Ryder.
“She definitely knows where Teddy is,” Kylie said, “but she’s too smart to lead us to him.”
“I’ll post a team outside her apartment anyway,” Cates said. “Any intel is better than nothing at all.”
“Thanks,” Kylie said.
“Glad you got here,” Cates said. “We’ve been running down where we are on the hospital robberies. Torres, catch them up.”
“Lynn Lyon hasn’t been anywhere near a hospital since we started tailing her,” Torres said. “She’s onto us.”
“She’s not onto us,” Betancourt corrected. “She knows that her cover is blown, and whoever she’s working for knows it. Her scouting days are over.”
“So now what?” Kylie said. “We can’t wait for them to hit another hospital and hope they trip up.”
“We are going to wait for them to hit another hospital,” Cates said. “But we’re going to be inside the hospital waiting for them to show up.”
“There are over a hundred major medical facilities in the five boroughs,” Kylie said. “We can’t cover all of them.”
“We only have to be at one, and Cheryl has an idea on how to zero in on the right one. I’ll let her spell it out for you.”
It was a sting, and a damn good one. It took Cheryl less than a minute to lay it out.
“I love it,” Kylie said, “but we can’t do it without Howard Sykes on board.”
“Then talk to him and get back to me,” Cates said. “This meeting is over.”
The group broke up, and Cheryl walked past me and down the hall.
I followed. “Cheryl, can we talk?”
She let one hand sweep across the wide-open squad room filled with cop eyes and cop ears. “This is not the right place for a conversation, Zach.”
“I just need to say six words.”
“Fine.” She gestured for me to follow her. She opened the door and started down the stairs. I thought we were going to her office, but after half a flight, she stopped, and the two of us stood in the empty stairwell. This was as much privacy as I was going to get.
“Six words,” she said.
I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. “I’m wrong. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
My father had taught me those words when I was seventeen, after I’d had a huge argument with my girlfriend the day before our senior prom. It had worked like gangbusters on my prom date, but it definitely wasn’t flying with Cheryl.
“Is that it?” she said.
“No. An apology is just the beginning. I want to talk about what happened and then prove to you that it won’t happen again.”
“We can’t exactly do that here,” she said, pointing at the grimy gray stairs and the city-mandated fire hose hanging on the wall.
“I was thinking dinner.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to cook,” she said.
“No, I thought I could nuke us something nice.”
She cracked a smile.
“Or Gerri’s Diner,” I said.
The smile got wider.
“Okay. My last shot: Paola’s,” I said, throwing out the name of her favorite restaurant. “I can call Stefano and ask them to bake me a humble pie for dessert.”
The smile exploded into an eye-rolling, this-guy-is-incorrigible laugh.
“Seven o’clock,” she said. “Pick me up in my office.”
She headed down to the second floor, and I went back up to the third. I wouldn’t be sleeping on the sofa tonight.
CHAPTER 35
Jeremy Nevins had never killed anyone before, but shooting Raymond Davis didn’t faze him a bit. The arrogant bastard had it coming. First he’d botched Jeremy’s biggest score, and then he’d had the balls to demand more money.
Jeremy was at a table in the Recovery Room, a plate of half-eaten Buffalo chicken wings and an untouched mug of Stella Artois in front of him. He wasn’t hungry, but he needed the real estate and the Wi-Fi, and no place was deader than a sports bar at three in the afternoon. Correction, he thought, looking down at his eighty-thousand-dollar Audemars Piguet watch: 3:01.
The watch had been a gift—more like a signing bonus. But with an eight-million-dollar pot of diamonds at the end of the rainbow, Jeremy would have signed on for a Timex.
The plan had been perfect until Leo, his self-obsessed partner in crime, decided not to get in the limo because he didn’t look right.
So now E
lena was dead, the necklace was in the wind, and Jeremy was on his own, trying to formulate plan B.
He didn’t know where the necklace was, but he was pretty sure he knew who had it: Teddy Ryder’s mother. He’d never met Teddy until last night, but he knew all about him. The man had never had an original thought in his life, and now that he was wounded and scared, he’d go running home to Mama.
And Jeremy knew exactly where to find her. When you plan a crime with a scumbag like Raymond Davis, you hedge your bets. Jeremy had attached a GPS tracker to the underside of Raymond’s Honda Civic just in case he decided to take the necklace and drive off with it.
But the GPS had paid off even sooner. In the week leading up to the robbery, the car made two round-trips from Teddy’s apartment to Hoyt Avenue in Astoria. Jeremy’s antennae went up, so on the third day he tailed the Honda to Annie Ryder’s doorstep.
He knew the old con woman’s history, and he knew that pulling a gun on her wouldn’t produce the necklace. The only way to get it was to cut her a deal, and then get Leo to pay her price.
He tapped on his cell phone and searched Google News. There was nothing on the shooting of Raymond Davis. Either the cops made him for just another crime statistic not worth the ink, or they figured out the connection to Elena Travers and put a lid on it.
The phone vibrated in his hand, and he flinched. It was Sonia Chen. He had no desire to talk to her, but she was too connected to the Bassetts: he couldn’t ignore the call.
“Hey, baby,” he whispered into the phone. “How’s the world’s sexiest publicist?”
“Terrible. Come on over to my apartment.”
“Honey, I’m busy.”
“Just for an hour. Please.”
“Sonia, I’m horny too, but—”
“Don’t be an asshole, Jeremy. I didn’t say horny. I’m scared. I’m lonely. I can’t sleep. I’ve never been involved in anything like this. Elena’s dead, and I keep thinking maybe if I made Leo go in the car with her—”
“Sonia, I’m sorry. But don’t blame yourself. What happened is sad, but it wasn’t your fault. It just happened.”
He waited for a response. Nothing.
“Sonia…does that help, baby?”
“It would help a lot more if you came over here and said it in person,” she said, capping the plea with a loud sigh. “Just for a little while. I really don’t want to be alone. Please.”
Without Sonia Chen, Jeremy never would have met Leo Bassett. He didn’t need her anymore, but if there’s one thing he’d learned stalking prey in the valley of the rich and gullible, it was to never, ever burn bridges.
He looked at his watch. How pathetic that your wrist is worth a fortune, it said, but the rest of you still isn’t worth shit.
“Of course I’ll be there, baby,” he said. “I’ll be right over.”
His face-to-face with Annie Ryder would have to wait.
CHAPTER 36
Any woman who tells a man she wants to be cuddled and not fucked is either lying to herself or to the guy, or both, Jeremy thought after he’d brought Sonia to her third frenzied orgasm in an hour and a half.
The first one had left her in tears, and he held her in his arms while she sobbed for the dead actress. The second one was much more joyful, like a good old-fashioned, no-strings-attached romp in the sack. The final one was slower, more tender at first. He took his time, teasing her with his tongue, lulling her with gentle kisses, sliding her down onto his lap, and keeping up with her gentle undulating rhythm.
And just as she began to slow down, he lifted her up, and with her legs wrapped tightly around him, he pressed her against a wall with deep, hard, unremitting thrusts until the moans of “Don’t stop” exploded into cries of surrender.
Another satisfied customer, Jeremy thought as he showered. Everybody was good at something, and he’d been blessed with the equipment and the technique to drive a lover to insane new heights.
In the end, not all of them remembered him fondly. Some despised him. Some wished him dead. But none of them would ever forget him.
Sadly, none of that charm or sexual prowess would serve him well in his next encounter. All anyone needed to go up against Annie Ryder was cunning. And he knew enough about her to know that she had more than most.
And yet when the gray-haired woman opened the door to her apartment, Jeremy couldn’t help himself. “You’re much younger than I expected,” he said, reverting to habit.
“And you’re every bit as full of shit as I expected,” the old lady said, ushering him into the living room. “Have a seat.”
He sat down on a rose-colored sofa, and she sat next to him, practically knee to knee. “You called me,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Your son has my necklace.”
“Your necklace?” Annie said. “You and I must not be on the same page, because the necklace all the TV reporters are talking about belongs to these two Bassett brothers.”
“It did. But I hired your son and his friend to procure it for me, and they reneged on their part of the deal.”
Annie smiled. “And from what I understand, according to the Book of Jeremy, the punishment for reneging is a bullet through the brain.”
“That was an unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“What about shooting my son? Was that another unfortunate misunderstanding?”
“Mrs. Ryder—”
She rested her fingers on the back of his hand. “Please…call me Annie.”
“Can we cut the crap, Annie?” he said, pulling his hand away and standing up. “I’m not one of your marks. I’m the guy who hired Raymond and Teddy to do a simple job, and they turned it into a page-one clusterfuck. Here’s the bottom line: you’ve got the hottest piece of jewelry on the planet, and there’s not a fence within three thousand miles that will handle the necklace Elena Travers died for. So unless you’re wired up to the diamond mob in Antwerp or Amsterdam, you can either sell it to me or you can wear it to your next tea party and watch the rest of the old ladies wet their—”
“Get out,” Annie said.
“What?”
“You heard me,” she said, standing. “Get out, you foulmouthed, disrespectful little snot. Get out before I call the cops.”
“Look, I’m sorry about the language. All I want is the necklace.”
“I don’t have any necklace, and even if I did, I wouldn’t sell it to a bad-mannered, ill-bred punk.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small cylinder. “This is pepper spray. I’ve used it before, and I’ll use it again. Out.”
She opened the door and watched as Jeremy backed out. Then she locked it behind him.
Teddy came out of the bedroom. “Ma, you were awesome, but now we’re never going to sell the necklace.”
“Of course we will.”
“To who?”
“Your good buddy Jeremy. He’ll be back, and next time he shows up, he’ll show me a little more respect.”
“You think he’ll be back?”
“Not back here, but he’ll call me in less than an hour. Guaranteed.”
“You are the coolest mom in the world.”
“Thank you, sweetheart. How are you feeling? Still sore?”
“It hurts, but no big deal.”
“Can I get you anything? You want some tea?”
“Sure.”
Annie filled the teakettle and then set it on the stove. Then she went to a cabinet and took down a tin of cookies.
“Hey, Ma, can I ask you one question?” Teddy said.
“Anything.”
“Isn’t pepper spray like a weapon?”
“It’s for self-defense, but technically pepper spray can be a dangerous weapon.”
“But you have a thing about no weapons, so how come you have pepper spray in your pocket?”
Annie took out the cylinder. “You mean this?” she said, holding it up.
Teddy grinned. “I got you now, Ma. How you gonna talk your way out of this one?”
/> Annie pointed the cylinder directly at her face, pressed the button, and sprayed it into her mouth.
“Breath freshener,” she said. “Wintergreen. Any more questions?”
CHAPTER 37
“Go next door and take a nap,” Annie instructed her son after they’d finished their tea and cookies.
“Aw, Ma,” Teddy whined. “That place stinks like cat. Why can’t I just stay here?”
“Because this place stinks like cop. There were two detectives here this morning. What do I do if they come banging on my door with a warrant? Tell them to come back in five minutes so I can tidy up?”
“Fine,” Teddy said, sulking. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got a date,” she said, her eyes smiling. “Now get out of here while I make myself as beautiful as I possibly can, considering what I’ve got to work with.”
She opened the door, scouted the hallway, gave Teddy the high sign, and he scurried to the adjacent apartment in seconds.
Then she went to the bedroom, opened the closet, and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. She frowned. “Needs work,” she said.
So she got to work. Makeup first, hair next, and then she slipped into a seldom-worn but totally chic Carolina Herrera black cocktail dress. A pair of sensible heels, two dabs of perfume, and finally, her hands a little shaky, she put the emerald and diamond necklace around her neck.
She went back to the closet door for a second look. “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she said. “Who looks like eight million bucks now?”
She walked to the living room and stood in front of her late husband. “What do you think, Buddy?” she said, doing a full twirl. “It normally costs three thousand, but you know what a smart shopper I am. I got it for a steal at Bergdorf’s.”
She laughed out loud, and she could practically hear him laughing with her. She took the urn from the sideboard, set it on the kitchen table, and sat down across from it.
“I’m in over my head, Buddy,” she said. “I could use some advice.”
She placed a hand on either side of the urn and closed her eyes.
“The newspaper says this little bauble is worth eight mil, but I don’t know beans about fencing jewelry. What do you think this Jeremy guy can get for it? Forty cents on the dollar?”