NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,34

every lead—is yours.”

Kylie, Cates, and I knew that St. Claire didn’t have to come across town to pledge his cooperation. He was on a mission. We waited to hear what it was.

He leaned forward. “Second is that yours are not the only shoulders being looked over. Everyone in the Bureau of Second-Guessing will be asking why we didn’t catch the perps before they started ripping off the governor’s blood relatives.

“I know Devereaux and Moss. They’re smart, they’re thorough, and even though they’ve got a stack of open cases, this one hit home for both of them. A burglary when nobody is in the house is one thing, but when two assholes break in, brandish weapons, and rip the wedding ring right off Mrs. Lowenthal’s finger—that gets all our blood boiling. Bottom line is these guys have been busting their asses on this one. So I’m asking a favor. If you do see anything we missed, I’d appreciate a heads-up.”

“You’ll be the first one we call, Reuben,” Cates said.

And if I knew Cates, it would be the only call. Her mission is to track down bad guys, not help 1PP look for scapegoats.

CHAPTER 30

THE PILE OF leads, tips, background information, and reports of Erin sightings on my desk had grown exponentially since we’d been diverted by the ambulance robbery, and as soon as we said goodbye to Captain St. Claire, we assigned Danny Corcoran to work with Detectives Moss and Devereaux and dived back into the Easton case.

One of the best ways to track someone down is by digging into his financials. No matter how spartan Dodd’s lifestyle, he still needed to pay for it. There had to be a trail of money coming in and going out.

“His only reported income is a monthly pension check from the Marine Corps,” Kylie said, reading from a confidential file we’d received from the Violent Felony Squad, the only ones on our team who knew Dodd by name. “The checks were direct-deposited to his account at the USAA bank in Clarksville, Tennessee, until March 2018, when the account was closed, and the checks were redirected.”

“Is that when he moved to New York?” I asked.

“No. Since then, every check has gone directly to the Wounded Warrior Project.”

“He’s giving his entire pension to charity?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Then what is he doing for money?”

“That’s what we have to figure out.”

It took hours, but we found it buried in the thick file Declan McMaster had given us. Dodd had been stalking Erin for years, but in September of 2017, he fell off the grid. He resurfaced six months later.

McMaster, who is as freakishly thorough as Kylie, figured he’d been doing jail time and decided to track down some of Dodd’s cellmates to see what he was planning next.

But he hadn’t been locked up. Immediately after two devastating hurricanes hit the Caribbean in 2017, Dodd had signed on with a U.S.-based construction company that had been hired for the rebuilding effort.

“Are you kidding me?” Kylie said, reading the file. “According to this, Dodd earned as much as twenty grand a week.”

“Twenty … doing what?”

“Helping the rich and famous restore their ravaged mansions to their former glory. He’s a skilled stonemason, and apparently requests for his services came fast and furious. He could name his own price. And he did.”

“Twenty grand a week for six months is half a million dollars,” I said. “And assuming he socked it away in a bank somewhere on the islands, it’s tax-free. No wonder he gave up his pension to help his fellow veterans.”

“And that explains why he has nothing current in his creditrating profile. Whatever he needs he pays for in cash.”

If Dodd had a bank in the U.S., we could stake it out. If he had a go-to ATM or a regular gas station, restaurant, or supermarket where he used his credit card, we could track him. But he had none of those. We’d gone through an exhaustive search, and the only thing we had to show for it was that we were both totally exhausted.

Working a kidnapping case is a race against time, and for us the mission was to find Dodd while Erin was still alive and unharmed. We had the vast resources of the NYPD at our fingertips. All we had to do was pick up the phone and ask, and we could have almost anything we wanted. There was only one thing we couldn’t get: sleep.

“We need caffeine,” Kylie said. “You want some warm brown beverage from the