NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,69

in a neighbor’s apartment, seven A. CSU just arrived. They’re up there with the DOA.”

Kylie and I took the elevator up to the seventh floor. CSU was just getting started, but we didn’t need an expert to tell us the cause of death. There were petechial hemorrhages in Mrs. Shotwell’s eyes where the blood vessels had burst, and there were traces of glue from the duct tape on her mouth. She’d suffocated.

We went across the hall to the neighbor’s apartment. The daughter introduced herself. “I’m Bethany Geller,” she said. “Those animals murdered my mother.”

“We’re sorry for your loss,” I said. “I promise we will do everything we can to find them.”

“Thank you.” She rested her hand on the shoulder of a woman, about sixty, who was sitting on the sofa. “This is Paloma Hernandez. She’s been with the family for three years.”

Paloma barely looked up. “It’s my fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have let them in.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kylie said. “They fooled the doorman, and they fooled you. You let them in because you thought they were there to help.”

“I beg them not to put the tape on her mouth. I say she has breathing problems from the COPD. But the one, he just said, ‘She can breathe through her nose.’ Ten minutes after they left Mrs. Edith started to choke. I think maybe she aspirated on her own vomit. I don’t know. I’m not a doctor, but if I wasn’t tied up, I could have helped.”

“Can you describe the two men who entered the apartment?”

“One was a white guy—he was maybe six feet tall. The other was black, a little shorter. They both have brown eyes, but the rest of their face was covered with a surgical mask.”

I didn’t bother asking her if the second perp may have been Hispanic rather than white. Ms. Hernandez knew the difference.

I turned to the daughter. “Ms. Geller, the drawers in your mother’s room were pulled out and emptied. It would help if we knew what they took.”

“Things. Nothing worth killing someone for.”

“I understand, but they are going to try to sell those things. The more details you can give us, the better the chance we have of finding your mother’s killers and bringing them to justice.”

“It was the jade,” Paloma volunteered.

Geller nodded. “Of course. Ever since she was a girl, my mother loved jade jewelry—green, black, red, all colors.”

“Do you think you can describe what they took and give us an approximate value?” I asked.

“I pay the insurance premium, so I can get you a list. Her favorite was a lavender jade oval set in a cluster of diamonds. That was appraised at forty thousand dollars. The entire collection was worth maybe five or six hundred thousand dollars.”

“They take the envelope with the money too,” Paloma said.

“What money?” I said.

“I leave an envelope with cash for Paloma,” Geller said. “It’s for household expenses or for when they go out on their excursions.”

“What excursions?” I asked the nurse.

“Mrs. Edith, she didn’t like to be cooped up in the apartment, and she loved riding the subway, so in the nice weather we would take the train to places like the Bronx Zoo or the Brooklyn Museum or, her favorite, Coney Island. We were just there last Sunday. She loved to sit on the boardwalk and eat an ice cream cone.”

“And how much was in the envelope?”

“Six hundred and forty-two dollars,” Paloma said. “I keep a good count. Also Mrs. Edith’s MetroCard, but that had only like twenty dollars left on it.”

“Detectives.”

I looked up. It was Benny Diaz from TARU. Kylie and I thanked Geller and Hernandez, told them we’d be in touch, and walked over to where Benny was waiting.

“The good news is that the surveillance system in this building was state-of-the-art when they installed it,” he said. “The bad news is they installed it fifteen years ago.”

“Do you have anything we can use?” I asked.

“If you’re looking for blurs and blobs, you’re in luck. But if you’re hoping for facial features, you’re going to have to ask your perps to start robbing buildings with better security cams.”

He opened his laptop and showed us half a dozen screengrabs. The photos wouldn’t help us identify the suspects, but they definitely settled one issue. Our eyewitnesses had been right: One of the phony EMTs was white; the other was black.

“So there are at least three of them,” Kylie said. “And if the white guy from today isn’t the same one from the previous robberies, we’re up