NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,60
ceiling and waved. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“You can thank Ari too,” I said. “He taught you well.”
“One night, years ago, he brought me into a room and said, ‘You’ve been kidnapped. The bad guys will be back in an hour, and they’re going to kill you. You better have a weapon when they get here. Find one.’ Then he locked the door. I think I spent most of the time crying because there were no weapons in that room. He came back an hour later and showed me how to make five.”
“Amazing,” Kylie said. “Where did you find the blade?”
“It took me a while to figure it out. Nothing in the room looked lethal. Nothing. And then that first night he came in, he wanted sex. I never tried to fight him off. I knew better. I just lay there on the bed, breathing hard, and pretending I was enjoying it. My eyes were always closed. I couldn’t look at him but I could hear him moaning and groaning and telling me he loved me. I tried to tune him out until all I could hear was the sound of the bedsprings creaking, creaking, creaking. And all of a sudden, I knew the answer.
“I waited for him to leave and lock me up for the night. I pulled the mattress off the bed. It was one of those old-fashioned kinds where the springs are held together by metal straps. It took me hours to pry one of the springs off. Then every time I knew he was out of the house, I honed it against a metal pipe that was under the sink in the bathroom until it was razor-sharp. I never wanted to … to do what I did, but when he told me he killed Veronica, I knew he wouldn’t stop. If he didn’t get what he wanted, I was next.”
The door opened, and Dr. Paris came in. “Time’s up, Detectives,” she said. “Excuse us.”
She drew the privacy curtain around the bed and asked us to step out of the room. We stood in the doorway. A few minutes later she pulled the curtain back, and we stepped back in.
“She needs to rest,” the doc said. “She should be released by Friday. Why don’t you pick it up with her then?”
“Just one more question,” I said. “Please.”
“One more? Sure. Go ahead.”
“Erin, did he have any accomplices?” I asked.
“He’s the only one I ever saw. The only one I ever heard. The room was soundproofed. If he had a partner, I never saw him or heard him. But I don’t think so. I mean, why would he?”
“What do you mean?” I said, asking another question.
“He thought we’d have this life together. He was never going to let me go.” She laid her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes. “He thought he’d get the money.” Her speech was fuzzy, slurred. “We’d leave the country and … ” She let out a long sigh.
“And what?”
“We’d live … hap … ” She fought to stay awake. “Hap’ly …”
And then she was out like a light.
“Happily ever after,” Dr. Paris said. “I think that’s what she was going for.”
“You gave her something to knock her out, didn’t you?” I said.
“I’d have given her an Ambien if I could have,” Dr. Paris said. “But she’s pregnant. The only thing I did when I went behind that curtain was hold her hand and tell her that she was safe and that the man who had turned her life into a living hell was dead and gone forever. I told her that she was brave, that now it was time to let us take care of her, and that her baby needed her to sleep more than the police needed her to stay awake. Sorry, Detectives, but this woman is mentally and physically exhausted, and she needs to recover before she can be subjected to a police interrogation.”
The doc was right. We had a lot of unanswered questions, but the answers would have to wait.
CHAPTER 53
LIKE MANY COMBAT-TRAINED Marines, Bobby Dodd had known how to hide in plain sight. The white clapboard two-story farmhouse with the wraparound porch sat at the end of a seven-hundred-foot driveway and was practically invisible to anyone driving or walking along Ball Road. It was just far enough off the beaten path to be ignored, yet it was only a short drive from the heart of Warwick. He could have holed up there for months.
By the time Kylie and I