NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,4

took up most of the front page. There was a two-inch inset of the other half of the happy couple—the one most people didn’t care about—Jamie Gibbs.

“Read all about it,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I’ve got to make a call.”

I hit Kylie’s number on my speed-dial, and she picked up on the first ring.

“I’m up to my eyeballs in crazy people,” she said. “What’s your ETA?”

“I was at a restaurant on Bank Street. We’re just turning onto Eighth Avenue. I’ll be there in less than ten. When did you get the call?”

“I didn’t. I was at the wedding. Shelley Trager and the rest of the big guns at Silvercup Studios were invited. Shelley’s wife got hit with the stomach flu, so he called me around noon and asked if I’d be his plus-one. I don’t have much of a social life these days, so I said what the hell. I was the first one on the scene. I called Captain Cates. She activated a level-one mobilization.”

There was a time when cops would hear a level 1 come over the air, and it would be a holy-shit moment. These days it’s so overused that the sense of urgency is gone. Cops want the details before they drop everything and go. Is it a shooting on a busy street corner? Or did the parents of some Upper East Side high-school kid panic and call 911 because Junior was three hours late coming home from school?

But this was the real deal. When one of the most recognizable people on the planet gets abducted, that’s level 1 on steroids. Knowing Cates, she’d have called for an army of cops to search the venue, canvass the area, and wrangle the crowd and at least two detectives from every precinct to ID and question the A-list guests, most of whom would probably think they were too damn important to be detained.

I figured by the time I got to the Manhattan Center, it would be a sea of flashing lights and wailing sirens with cops pouring in, guests wanting out, and media trucks clogging the road for blocks.

I told Kylie I’d be there as soon as possible and hung up. “You’re not going to be able to get me all the way to Thirty-Fourth,” I told the cabby. “Just keep driving till you hit a wall, and I’ll jog the rest of the way.”

“What’s going on?” he said.

“I can’t give you the details,” I told him, “but let’s just say that the Wedding of the Century is now the Clusterfuck of the Century.”

CHAPTER 3

YOU’RE A COP in a big hurry, right?” my cabby said.

“Detective,” I said. “Affirmative on the big hurry.”

“You won’t have to jog,” he said as he maneuvered around a city bus. “There’s always white hats outside of Penn Station keeping traffic moving. I’ll drive, you flash your tin, they’ll wave us through.”

He did, I did, and they did.

I’d clipped my shield to my jacket, and as soon as I got out of the taxi, a uniformed officer spotted me, moved the barrier, and escorted me to the Manhattan Center.

Built as an opera house by Oscar Hammerstein I over a hundred years ago, it is now a state-of-the-art production facility catering to film companies, TV networks, and record labels, but much of the old-world elegance and grandeur still lives on in the form of two sprawling event spaces: the Grand Ballroom and the Hammerstein, site of the Easton-Gibbs nuptials.

And now the majestic old building would add a new entry to its star-studded history: crime scene.

The officer led me to the nether regions of the huge complex, navigating through cinder-block corridors never seen or even imagined by anyone but service people. Kylie and a man in a charcoal-gray suit were waiting for me.

When Kylie dresses for work, she wears pants, a shirt, a jacket, sensible shoes, and minimal makeup. It’s the unofficial uniform of the hardworking female detective. It does a fairly adequate job of making her look more like a no-nonsense cop than an incredibly desirable woman. But her outfit today—a sleeveless V-neck blue number that hugged her in all the right places—would jump-start any man’s imagination.

“Zach Jordan,” she said, introducing me to the man next to her, “this is the head of Erin Easton’s security, Declan McMaster. We worked together back when I was assigned to the UN General Assembly.”

I knew the name. And the pedigree. McMaster had put in thirty-five years with the department, retiring as a full bird out of Intel.