NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,73

of course, no makeover artist in the world could change Lucille’s unique brand of charm.

“What the fuck are you two doing back here?” she said. “I thought this case was closed.”

“That’s fake news,” Kylie said. “Don’t repeat it next time you’re on TV.”

She turned away from Kylie and squared off with me. “How the hell do you put up with her?” she said.

“She’s an acquired taste,” I said. “We need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

“No. I have nothing more to say. I told you everything I know.”

“You may have left out a few things. Like why the man you said you barely knew is sending a thousand dollars a month to Samantha, Nina, and Ryan’s college fund.”

That blindsided her.

“Your silence speaks volumes,” Kylie said. “Now, can we come in, or would you rather the TV cameras filmed us escorting you to our place?”

Speranza opened the door, and we followed her to the living room.

“I don’t know why you damn cops keep hounding me about this Bobby Dodd shit,” she said.

“Let’s get back to the question about the money he’d been sending you every month,” Kylie said.

“He was a tenant. It was rent money.”

“You told us he was paid up through the end of August,” I said. “Why was he sending more money in June?”

“It must be a mistake. I’ll send it back.”

“Do you care about your grandchildren, Mrs. Speranza?” Kylie said.

“My grandchildren? Why the hell would you drag them into this?”

“Why the hell would you have a psycho killer funding their college education? We didn’t drag them into this. You did. And if you’ll start spitting out answers instead of venom, maybe they won’t get to see their names in the morning paper.”

Any other seventy-seven-year-old granny probably would have started cooperating to avoid bringing shame to innocent family members, but Lucille Speranza was determined to go down swinging.

“You cops are all alike. You’re all on the take, and you’re all bigots. What do you think, just because I’m Italian, I’m a criminal?”

“It doesn’t matter what we think. But you might want to worry about what your friends who watch the six o’clock news think,” Kylie said, pulling out her cuffs. “Hands behind your back.”

Speranza threw her hands up in the air and backed away. “All right, all right. It wasn’t the rent. That was paid. We had a separate deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“He paid me extra for storage.”

“What do you mean, storage?”

“What do you think storage means? I kept shit for him.”

“In the basement?”

“No. I keep it here. He paid extra because he knew it would be safe in my house.”

“And what did you keep for him?”

Speranza took a deep breath and looked at us with eyes that were brimming with contempt. The woman who had called us bigots hated cops. She probably always had and definitely always would.

She spit out the answer to the question. “He had a box.”

CHAPTER 64

THE BOX WAS an olive-drab metal footlocker with Bobby Dodd’s name and serial number stenciled on it.

“He didn’t leave me no key,” Speranza said.

Kylie bent down and examined the padlock. “Core-hardened steel,” she said. “It looks brand-new except for the scratches on the shank.” She looked up at Speranza. “I hope you didn’t break a nail trying to get it open.”

Speranza responded with her middle finger.

It was unlikely that Dodd had left it booby-trapped, but protocol and good sense dictated that we evacuate Speranza’s house as well as the two homes that flanked hers, cordon off the entire block, and bring in the bomb squad.

That’s not easy to do without attracting attention, and by the time the men in the moon suits lumbered down Zulette Avenue toward the house, the streets on the other side of the barricades had become a sea of news vans.

The entire operation took less than forty-five minutes from discovery to all-clear, but the media circus was just getting started. And in the center ring stood Mrs. Speranza. Her fifteen minutes of fame was going into overtime.

Kylie and I went back to the house. ESU broke the padlock while CSU documented it all on film.

“Now comes the fun part,” Kylie said as a tech lifted the lid.

The inside looked like a survivalist’s wish list, everything a trained Marine would need to bug out and stay gone: guns, knives, ammo, a bulletproof vest, camping gear, fake IDs, even paper maps, because you can’t use a GPS when half a dozen law enforcement agencies are trying to hunt you down.

One by one, the items were