NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,70

to four.”

Our dynamic duo was turning into a gang.

CHAPTER 60

THEY CAN HIDE their faces, but they can’t hide their wheels,” Kylie said. “If you were driving a fake ambulance to a fake emergency call, what would you do to look authentic?”

“Run the lights.”

We called the NYC Department of Transportation and had them check the traffic cameras from lower Manhattan to Harlem. Sure enough, a red-light camera had caught the ambulance blowing through the intersection at Sixty-Third Street and First Avenue.

“Can you give me the plate number?” I asked the tech. Even if it had been stolen we might be able to pick it up on license-plate readers and see where the ambulance had come from.

“Sorry,” the tech said, “but it’s unreadable. They put a reflector cover on the plate. They’re not legal, but people do it all the time.”

“Right,” I said. “If we catch them, we’ll slap them with a summons.”

“Give me your e-mail, and I’ll send you the photos,” he said. “You can’t make out the driver’s face, but the logo on the vehicle is clear as a bell. Prestige Medical Transport.”

“The name is phony,” I said, “but the pictures of the ambulance will help us pinpoint the model and year.” I thanked him and hung up.

“These guys scope out each victim in advance,” Kylie said. “They know whose apartment they’re going to hit before they get there, and so far they’ve only targeted buildings where they can avoid getting picked up by security cameras. They’re getting their insider information from somewhere.”

The question was, from where? We ran Paloma Hernandez’s name through the system, and she came up clean, just like the first two home attendants had. And each of the three had been placed by a different agency. There had to be a common denominator. We just couldn’t figure out what it was.

We stuck around while CSU combed through the apartment, but they couldn’t come up with any prints or DNA that could help us identify the two intruders. We were about to leave when Kylie stopped dead in her tracks.

“The MetroCard,” she said. “The one they stole from Mrs. Shotwell.”

“What about it?”

“Moss and Devereaux have been checking pawnshops and dozens of sites online where the perps might sell the jewelry. But these crooks are too smart for that. They must have a fence taking the pricey stuff off their hands, so good luck tracing any of Mrs. Shotwell’s jade. But there’s one thing that a fence wouldn’t be interested in, and it’s traceable: her MetroCard.”

“It’s a long shot,” I said, “but it’s a great idea.”

We called Bethany Geller and asked if she knew how her mother had paid for her MetroCard. She gave us the answer we were hoping for.

“I bought it for her. I put it on my credit card a year ago, and it refills automatically.”

“Did you cancel the auto payments yet?” I asked.

“I didn’t think of it, but I better do it now, otherwise those bastards will keep riding the subway on my credit card.”

“Don’t. Please,” I said. “Do not cancel your mother’s MetroCard.” “Why not?”

I told her. Two minutes later Kylie and I called the NYPD Transit Bureau’s special investigations unit. We gave the detective who took the call Geller’s Visa card number and asked him to pull the usage file. Within seconds, he linked the credit card to one of the city’s millions of MetroCards.

“Can you tell us when it was last used?” I asked.

“I can tell you when and where, and if you give me a minute to scan the video, I can give you a description of the person who used it.”

A few minutes later he had an answer. “It was used a week ago Sunday at eleven fifty-three a.m. at the Fifty-First Street station by an elderly white woman. She was with a younger woman, Hispanic, probably her caretaker. They had one of those rolling portable oxygen tanks. The card was used again at two fifty-nine p.m. at the Stillwell Avenue station in Brooklyn.”

“Coney Island,” Kylie said. “That jibes with Paloma’s description of their last excursion.”

“Do us a favor,” I said to the Transit cop. “Can you put an alert on that MetroCard and call me or my partner as soon as you get a hit?”

“Whatever you need.”

“It’s still a long shot,” I said to Kylie after I hung up. “These guys have done everything right every step of the way. Do you think they’ll be stupid enough to use a stolen MetroCard?”

“Hey, they were stupid enough to turn