NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,49
table? I’m going to stick around for a while.” Gerri gave me a nod of approval and left without another word.
“So,” I said, “tell me the dessert story.”
Kylie smiled. She looked happier than I’d seen her in a long time. Glowing, actually.
I sat back and basked in the glow.
CHAPTER 44
WE WERE JUST finishing breakfast when I got a call from Jamie Gibbs.
“I’m tired of sneaking around like some teenage kid breaking curfew,” he said. “I’ve got a crazy schedule today—a morning meeting at the network, lunch with my biggest cosmetics client, then I’m joining my mother at a fashion show in Brooklyn, after which we will be hosting a dinner in a private room at a restaurant on the East Side.”
“Thank you for keeping me informed,” I said. “It makes it easier on us.”
“You don’t get it, Detective. I’m not trying to make it easy for you. I’m giving you fair warning to back the hell off. I don’t want to be tripping over a bunch of nanny cops, especially when I’m with my mother. Understood?”
Before I could answer, he hung up. I filled Kylie in on what had just transpired, then I called Rich Koprowski and told him to keep the phone tap on Gibbs but to give him a wide berth—even wider if Veronica was around.
“So Jamie is calling the shots now?” Rich said. “He’s laying down the ground rules on how we should be doing our job?”
“Kylie and I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said, “but he’s our main conduit to the kidnapper. If he feels like we’ve got him under a microscope, we risk alienating him entirely. Give him some space. Some cooperation is better than none at all.”
Our day didn’t get any better once we were upstairs. Benny Diaz and his crew at TARU had combed the proof-of-life video looking for a clue and listening for a sound that might help us identify where it was recorded, but they’d come up empty. Dodd had been smart enough not to shoot the video with a cell phone, which would have given us GPS tracking coordinates. Instead, he’d shot it with a GoPro camera.
Then we checked in with Bill Harrison at the DA’s office. He didn’t have any good news either.
“The network lawyers know we’re trying to prevent them from airing any more hostage videos,” he said, “so they’re screaming ‘freedom of the press’ to anyone who will listen. I might just as well be trying to shut down an NRA convention by telling the court, ‘Those guys have got guns, Your Honor.’ No judge wants to fly in the face of the Second Amendment. Or, in this case, the First.”
And just when we thought our morning couldn’t get any worse, it did. It started with a tweet. ZTV had a fresh-from-the-oven-new Erin Easton video, and they turned to social media to drum up an audience.
By ten that morning about thirty cops were gathered around the TV set in our break room and millions of people were tuned in across the country and around the world.
This episode started just like the previous one—the spinning graphic that turned into a newspaper with ztv news bulletin on the masthead. It spun again and morphed into a picture of Erin, but this time the producers outdid themselves on the headline.
ERIN IN EXILE, it said.
There were a few groans from the cops in the room. But they weren’t the jeers of ridicule for an opponent who’d played dirty. They were more like those involuntary sounds of frustration you make when you realize that you’ve underestimated your adversary, and he’s at the top of his game.
The camera cut to the newsroom set, but the anchor desk had been replaced by a sweeping arc of a Lucite table and five chairs. Brockway was on the far left, and he introduced himself and then the other four members of his panel: a psychologist, a forensic accountant, a special agent with the FBI, and, of course, at center stage, looking drawn and tired, Jamie Gibbs.
“You think we gave him too much space?” Kylie asked.
“Short of cuffing him to a radiator pipe, do you think we could have stopped him?” I said.
The digital clock at the bottom of the screen was still keeping track of the time since Erin was abducted. It was now at 2 days /14 hours /26 minutes.
Another five minutes passed while Brockway lied to the world about how ZTV had come to be in possession of the video