NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,9

nothing more for about fifteen minutes, and then you can hear the guard outside the door talking to someone. It’s followed by loud knocking, and someone yelling … wait, I have an exact quote.” He checked his notepad. “‘Come on, Erin. Your public is waiting. Time for you to knock ’em dead.’ ”

“That was Brockway, the network exec,” McMaster said. “He came and got me, I unlocked the door, and Kylie was right behind me. How’d you even get on the scene so fast?”

“Your security team was stoic all evening,” she said. “All of a sudden, three out of the four of them started running in the same direction. I followed.”

“Chuck, do you have a time stamp on the video?” I asked.

His eyes went back to the notepad. “She turned the camera on at seven twenty-eight. The rear door shut at seven thirty-four. End of story.”

“Maybe not,” Kylie said. “With any luck, the story continues at seven thirty-five on camera six.”

CHAPTER 7

I WAS HAPPY that Benny Diaz had caught our case. Of all the computer cops in TARU, Benny is the user-friendliest.

We found him in a room about the size of a Turkish prison cell. There was no sweeping console, no bank of servers, no wall of CCTV screens, just a large wooden table, two racks of DVRs, and a couple of Acer monitors.

“Welcome to the nerve center of your entire case,” Benny said. “This security system is everything you could hope for—if you still lived in the second half of the twentieth century.” He smiled. “And yet I think I can still tell you the exact minute that Elvis left the building.”

“Seven thirty-five,” Kylie said.

He looked up at me. “She’s not only beautiful, she’s clairvoyant.”

He plugged a thumb drive into the back of his laptop. “You were spot-on about camera six. I downloaded this. The quality is on par with your average convenience-store videocam.”

A picture popped on the screen, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was the loading dock captured from two stories up by a low-tech camera under the worst possible lighting conditions.

“This is when it all starts,” Benny said. He hit Play, and a white box truck came into view and backed up to the dock. The image was so fuzzy, I knew we didn’t have a prayer of making out the license plate or the driver’s face.

“Hold on,” Kylie said. “The time stamp says six twenty-six p.m. Zach and I just saw a video where he grabbed her at seven twenty-eight. Are you telling me he hung around for an hour before he went in?”

“He pulled in at seven twenty-six,” Diaz said. “The system clock never got pushed ahead to daylight saving time.”

The driver got out. I could tell he was white, male, and about six feet tall; he was wearing tinted glasses and had a baseball cap pulled down low over his face. He opened the rear door of the truck, went inside, and came back out pushing a large box.

“It’s a musician’s road case,” Diaz said. “It’s big enough to hold a six-foot-high amp.”

“Or Erin,” McMaster said. “It’s on wheels. It’s got those big clasps on the sides. That’s what we heard on the tape. That’s our guy.”

The driver walked out of the frame.

“Do we have any other cameras in the hallway on the other side of the loading dock?” I asked.

“Nada,” Diaz said. He fast-forwarded the video until the man reappeared, which was at 6:35 on the video, 7:35 in real time. We watched as he loaded the case into the rear of the truck, closed the door, hopped off the platform, got behind the wheel, and pulled away from the dock.

“So we’re looking for a white box truck,” Kylie said. “How many of those are there in New York City?”

“Hundreds. Maybe thousands. But this might help narrow it down.” Diaz froze the picture. “You see the lettering on the driver’s-side door?”

“Barely,” she said. “It’s a blur, but it looks like Chinese.”

“Or Korean. Or Japanese,” Diaz said. “Whatever it is, it’s not English, and it’s enough to help set this one apart from a lot of other white one-ton boxes.”

“Call Real Time Crime Center,” Kylie said. “Have them pull the photos captured in the past four hours from every single license-plate reader in a twenty-block radius of the Hammerstein, then check to see if any of those plates are registered to a white commercial box truck. If they get a hit, check the truck for Asian lettering on the