NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,32

She buys these houses a million miles from where she should be living, pours a shitload of money into overhauling them, and then hardly ever lives in them. She owns a twelve-million-dollar boat that she never uses, and even though the designers give her jewelry and clothes to wear on the red carpet, that’s like, what—five nights a year? She still has to look like a million bucks the other three hundred and sixty nights, and all that comes out of her pocket.”

“And you?” I asked.

“Me?” He laughed. “If you go online to one of those celebrity-net-worth websites, they’ll tell you I’ve got anything from sixty-six million to a hundred and fifty million dollars. I don’t know where they come up with numbers like that or how they can get away with saying it, because it’s totally bogus. But the kidnapper asked me for twenty-five million, so he must believe everything he reads on the internet.”

“I don’t think so,” Kylie said.

“What do you mean?”

“As soon as he said twenty-five million, you said you didn’t have that kind of money, and he didn’t even take time to blink. He came right back at you and said, ‘Mommy does.’ ”

Jamie dropped down to the sofa again. “She does—twenty times over. But as she reminds me every chance she gets, it’s her money, not mine. And trust me, if I tell her she has the power to save Erin’s life, my mother won’t part with a nickel.”

CHAPTER 28

LET ME DRIVE,” I said as soon as we left Gibbs’s apartment.

“You need to vent?” Kylie said, tossing me the keys.

I didn’t answer. We got in the car, which was parked behind the forty-eight-foot mobile incident command center.

“Millions of dollars’ worth of police technology sitting right outside his doorstep,” I said, pulling out onto Riverside Drive, “and all he can do is trash our ‘big-deal, high-tech NYPD Red shit’ because we haven’t found his missing wife less than twenty-four hours into the investigation.”

Kylie grinned. “So then I was right. You need to vent.”

“Damn right I do. Jamie freaking Gibbs knows how to hide behind that pussycat façade—reformed bad boy gone straight. But he can’t hide his true colors. The man takes no responsibility for coming up short on the security detail. That’s the network’s fault. We offer to talk him through a negotiation with the kidnapper, and he says he doesn’t need any help—he knows what he’s doing. Then the phone call goes south because he loses his shit, so he comes down on me. ‘What about the black straight-edge Ka-Bar knife? Should I not take that at face value?’ I wanted to whack him upside the head.”

“Cut him some slack,” Kylie said. “He’s scared shitless because a maniac kidnapped his wife, he doesn’t have the money to rescue her, and his mother, who I’m sure made him as neurotic as he is, won’t lift a finger to bail him out.”

“I get it. Poor Jamie. That’s still no reason to turn on the cops who are busting their humps to help him. And how come you’re suddenly so tolerant and forgiving? You usually get off on letting people know when they’re behaving badly. You weren’t exactly shy about tearing Brockway a new one.”

“There’s a difference. Harris Brockway is an asshole. Jamie Gibbs is damaged goods. And if I had any doubt, our little visit to Cruella de Vil in her fortress in the sky clinched it. Jamie’s mother, who can exist with virtually no sleep, made a conscious decision to nap through his wedding. The last thing that man needed was a female cop yelling at him because he’s not a model victim.”

Kylie’s phone rang. “It’s your girlfriend,” she said, looking at the screen. I figured it was Captain Cates, and Kylie was just trying to be cute, but I was wrong. It was my girlfriend.

Kylie answered. “Hey, Cheryl, what’s going on?” A pause, then: “CJ? No, that ship has sailed—all the way to Hawaii. He’s gone.” Another pause. “Your cousin?” She looked at me and grimaced. “I don’t know, Cheryl, I’ve been fixed up with my share of my friends’ cousins before, and there’s usually a good reason why they’re available. What is this guy like?”

She looked back at me to make sure I was paying attention, and then she hunched over, screwed up her face, and did a damn good imitation of Quasimodo. I smiled and looked away—eyes on the road, ears on Kylie’s end of the phone call.

But she didn’t say a word.