NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,84
me (ha-ha). The design on the outside has these cool silver-and-black Japanese fans. The note I wrote said, With love from your biggest fan. She said she simply adored it. And I said I simply adored her.
“‘She asked me when my birthday is and I told her that it was on March thirteenth, and she said she was sorry she missed it but next year she was going to buy me something special. I told her not to worry, that I’d get my real present on June ninth.’
“What do you think?” Cheryl asked.
“He kidnapped her on June ninth,” Kylie said. “No surprise that he was obsessed with it on June third.”
“I mean what do you think about the gardenias and the stars in her eyes and the moons on her ears?”
Kylie shrugged. “I think some love letters should come with barf bags.”
“Zach, help me out here.”
“Cheryl, I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” I said. “Clearly you didn’t flag it because you hoped I could be half as romantic. What do you see that we’re missing?”
“Details, Detective. Details. There are some very specific facts in this diary entry that we can check.”
“‘Erin and I met in our secret place’?” Kylie said. “How is that specific?”
“It’s not, but we may be able to find out if Erin smelled like gardenias, wore gold crescent-moon earrings, and brought home a Japanese-fan-motif credit card holder on June third.”
“So what if Dodd managed to get a few details right?” Kylie said. “No surprise. He’s been stalking her for years. Somewhere along the way he smelled her perfume. He saw her with those earrings.”
“What about the gift, the credit card holder he says he gave her?” Cheryl said.
“She may have one. That doesn’t mean she got it from him.”
Cheryl stood up and went to the whiteboard. “If that’s the case, we’ll put the diary entry here,” she said, pointing to the rants side of the board. “But if some of the little nuances hold up under scrutiny … ” She tapped the reality side of the board.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘hold up under scrutiny,’ ” Kylie said.
“Erin’s security chief used to be NYPD. He’d know what’s real.”
“Careful, Doc. If you show McMaster a diary entry about Bobby and Erin meeting in a secret place and planning to run away together, he’s never going to say it happened. He doesn’t work for the cops anymore. His allegiance is to her.”
“Good advice,” she said. “Luckily, I’m not a cop. I’m a psychologist, and one of my main concerns is Erin’s well-being.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Cheryl smiled. “You know that. I know that. But McMaster doesn’t. Ask him to stop by. I want to pick his brain.”
CHAPTER 74
MCMASTER SHOT CHERYL’S theories full of holes.
“Gucci’s ‘Gorgeous Gardenia’ is one of the perfumes she pimps on her show,” he said. “All her fans know that. As for the earrings, she wore them on the cover of People magazine about a year ago. Not everyone will remember that, but a man like Dodd would. It’s chapter one in the basic stalker handbook.”
“What about the gift?” Cheryl asked. “If she has it, we could dust it for prints and—”
“Dr. Robinson,” McMaster said, “do you know how many gifts Erin gets every week? From men, from women, from kids. She has a separate closet to store them all. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them come through the U.S. mail. So if I dig through the closet and find the case with the Japanese fans, and you find Dodd’s prints on it, what does that prove? He bought it, put it in an envelope, and dropped it in a mailbox.”
Cheryl frowned. “Thanks. I guess that’s why I’m a shrink and not a cop.”
“No problem,” McMaster said. “I appreciate that it’s your job to analyze all these wacko fairy tales in Dodd’s diaries.” He turned to me and Kylie. “But you guys are cops. Why are you wasting your time on this crap?”
“You were a cop too, Declan,” Kylie said. “You of all people should know that it can take longer to wrap up a case than it does to solve it. And the chief of Ds doesn’t think we’re wasting our time. He wants to know if the man who kidnapped Erin Easton worked alone. Zach and I think he did, but Chief Doyle doesn’t want us to think. He wants us to find out.”
“And those fairy tales that the three of us have been reading,” Cheryl said, “allow us to rummage through the