And that would be that. Mickey would open up like a three-dollar hooker at a lumberjack convention.
Gabriel’s cell rang.
Lexi. Please let it be Lexi.
He checked the caller ID. Mickey.
He didn’t answer. Talking to Mickey was a waste of time. What he had to do now was shut the bastard up.
He had till 1:00.
Chapter 59
BY THE TIME he got back to the apartment, Gabriel’s clothes were sweat-soaked all the way through. He wheeled the explosives into the bedroom, stripped down, took a quick shower, and tried to figure out what to wear for the next scene.
Lexi would know, but she wasn’t here. He rummaged through their wardrobe supply and did the best he could.
It was 10:30. He had time before Mickey’s parole officer showed up, but first he needed a drink. He grabbed one of Lexi’s champagne glasses from the dish rack and poured a shot of vodka. Not enough to get him buzzed. Just a little something to take the edge off.
He sat down at Lexi’s computer, booted up, opened Firefox, and checked her recent browser history to see what sites she’d been visiting. It was the usual crap—Perez Hilton, TMZ, Astrology Connection.
He checked her email. Maybe she sent him something and he didn’t get it on his cell. But there was nothing.
He opened her recent document folder. And there it was at the top of the list—AltScene.doc with yesterday’s date.
Alt. Scene? Lexi, what are you thinking?
He double-clicked and the document filled the screen.
ALT. SCENE:
EXT. FRANK E. CAMPBELL FUNERAL CHAPEL, MADISON AVENUE AND 81ST STREET—DAY
PANDEMONIA PASSIONATA looks so pretty in her little black mourning dress as she waits patiently behind the police barricade at Ian Stewart’s memorial service. The mourners file slowly out of the chapel, but she ignores the little fish. She’s here for the Big One. This is Pandemonia’s moment. Redemption time.
Who the hell is Pandemonia Passionata?
He kept reading. Halfway through the scene, he stood up, and stormed off to his closet.
The Walther wasn’t there.
He flung the champagne glass against the wall.
“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” he screamed, pounding his fist against the closet door.
It wasn’t anger. It was agony.
Chapter 60
THERE WERE AT least thirty cops on the scene and none of us saw the gun. But as soon as I heard the first shot, I had no doubt what we had on our hands. Active shooter—an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.
Our Counterterrorism Bureau issued a book on the subject. I’ve read it three times, and what stands out for me is this: Active-shooter attacks are dynamic events. Police response depends on the unique circumstances of the incident.
In other words, when the bullets start flying, we can’t tell you what’s going to happen. You’re on your own.
The first shot hit Shelley Trager. He stopped abruptly, his hands to his chest. A potted plant, one of two that stood in solemn repose on either side of the front door, broke his fall, and he slid to the ground, his face contorted in pain.
The crowd hemorrhaged in every direction, and that’s when I got my first look at the shooter. A woman in black. She was standing directly behind the metal barricade, right arm outstretched, gun pointed at the people caught in the front doorway of the funeral home.
Her? Ninety-six out of every hundred active shooters are men. Our heads had been wrapped around looking for a man.
My gun was out, and I bolted across Madison as she pulled the trigger a second time. She was not a pro. Her one-armed shooting stance was all wrong, and her hand kicked back when she took the shot. I have no idea who she was aiming at, but I watched as the bullet drilled through Henry Muhlenberg’s skull, exiting in a trail of blood, bones, and brains.
The crowd was in chaos. With the barricade trapping them on one side, and the funeral home on another, a handful of people ran north toward 82nd Street, but the bulk of them came running straight at me, heading for the opposite side of Madison. The shooter, who was less than ten feet from Spence and Kylie, turned her gun toward them.
I stopped, trying to line up a clean shot.
And then I went down hard.
A large man in a purple sweatshirt had broadsided me, kicked the gun out of my hand when I hit the ground, fell on top of me, and screamed, “I got him, I got him!”
I heard another shot, then another, then a third, as more wannabe-hero civilians piled on top of me.
I had counted five shots in all. And then nothing. Five seconds passed. Seven. Ten. The gunfire had stopped.
The Counterterrorism Bureau was right. Every active-shooter event is different. I had no idea what was going to happen, and now with my face pressed to the oil-streaked pavement, I had no idea how this one had ended.
Chapter 61
I COULD HEAR NYPD coming to my rescue. “Let him up, let him up. He’s a cop.”
“He has a gun,” the fat guy directly on top of me yelled back in a thick southern drawl.
“He’s a cop, you idiot. We all have guns. Now get off him.”
And then, from ten feet away, another voice—loud, official, conclusive. “She’s dead.”
Who’s dead?
I was at the bottom of a dogpile that must have been four or five guys high. I could feel the load getting lighter as the uniforms dragged them off one by one.
Finally, the 250-pound guy who brought me down, who turned out to be a high school football coach from Batesville, Mississippi, got up and reached out to help me.
“I’m sorry, Officer. It’s just that I saw you running toward a bunch of people with a gun…”
Who’s dead? WHO’S DEAD???
I stood up, got my bearings, and pushed my way to the front of the funeral home.
“You laying down on the job again?”
It was my partner, service pistol still in her hand, the hint of an inappropriate smile on her face, and, most important, not dead.
“You all right?” I said.
“No. But I’m better off than she is.”
The woman in black was lying on the sidewalk, face up, two bullet holes in her chest, one in her forehead.
“You do that?” I said.
Kylie nodded.
Perfect shot group.
“I saw Trager and Muhlenberg go down,” I said.
“Muhlenberg was dead before he hit the ground,” Kylie said. “Shelley has a few broken ribs, but he’ll be fine.”
“A few broken…how is that possible? I saw him take a direct hit to the chest.”
“The son of a bitch was wearing a vest.”
Trager was lying on Madison, a jacket propping his head up. I knelt down beside him.
He smiled up at me. He still had the crooked teeth of a kid who had grown up in poverty. At this point, he had enough money to straighten them a thousand times over, but he kept them as they were—a daily reminder of his roots.
I smiled back. “You were wearing a vest?” I said.
“My wife bought it for me. I think Bloomingdale’s was having their annual Kevlar sale.”
“Your wife bought you a bulletproof vest?” I said. “Really?”
“She said I’m high enough on the food chain that if some meshuggener is out there killing people, odds are I’m on his list. I hate it when she’s right, but in this case I’m willing to make an exception.”
I stood up. “You’re a lucky man, Shelley.”
“I know, I know.” He sighed. “And she’ll never let me hear the end of it.”
“Zach. Over here.”
Spence Harrington was sitting on the front step of the funeral home. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a chunk of the building’s brownstone façade that had obviously taken a bullet. “Another half a second, and that would’ve been my head. Kylie shoved me out of the way. Saved my life.”
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“I think she saved a lot of lives,” I said.
“You’ve got one hell of a partner,” he said.
“So do you.”
Kylie came over holding the shooter’s purse. “Her name is Alexis Carter, twenty-eight years old.”
“Alexis,” I said. “Lexi. The girlfriend J.J. told us about. What’s her address? He may still be there.”
“She has an Indiana driver’s license. There’s nothing in here that connects her to a New York City address. Damn it, Zach, I never thought about looking for the girlfriend. I was totally focused on looking for a man.”
“We were all looking for a man,” I said. “Gabriel Benoit.”
“And we’re still looking for him,” she said. “Let’s make sure this whole scene is locked down. Have the uniforms get statements from everyone in the crowd. I don’t care if it takes all—Zach…her cell phone. It’s vibrating.”
“Answer it.”
She scrambled to pull the shooter’s cell phone out of the purse. “The ID says ‘Gabe.’ It’s him.”
“Put him on speaker.”
She pushed the answer button. “Hello,” she said.
“Who is this?” the voice on the other end demanded.
“This is Detective Kylie MacDonald, New York City Police Department.”
“Where’s Lexi? Where is she?”
“I have a better question,” Kylie said. “Where are you?”
The line went dead.
BOOK THREE
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Chapter 62
THE BIGGER THE crime, the more likely it is that someone important will show up to keep the cops from solving it. In our case, it was a close personal friend of Shelley Trager, who just happened to be the mayor of the city of New York.
Trager was on an EMS stretcher, about to be transported to Lenox Hill Hospital, when the mayor and the rest of his entourage arrived at the crime scene. After congratulating his friend on being smart enough to wear a bulletproof vest, His Honor turned on Kylie.
“Detective MacDonald,” he said. “Aren’t you the one who told me you were going to catch this maniac before he left town? The way you keep promises, you have a bright future ahead of you. As a politician.”
“Stan!” Trager yelled from the stretcher. “If it hadn’t been for MacDonald, there’d be more bodies piled up outside this funeral home than there are inside. The same goes for Detective Jordan. You got good cops here. Don’t be a schmuck. Let them do their job.”
“Fine,” the mayor huffed. “And I’ll do mine. I’m going to pull the plug on Hollywood on the Hudson week.”
Trager winced in pain as he propped himself up on one elbow. “Hop in the ambulance, Stan, and I’ll drop you off at Bellevue, because you’re out of your fucking mind. What message do you want to send to Hollywood? If the shit hits the fan, New Yorkers run from a fight? Or that we’ve got the fastest, smartest, bravest police force in the world, and nobody—anywhere—backs up the film industry like NYPD Red?”
“So what are you saying, Shelley? If we quit now, the terrorists win?”
“I don’t know who would win,” Trager said, “but I can damn well tell you who would lose. You bail out now, and next November you’ll be lucky to get half a dozen votes on Staten Island. Grow a pair, Stanley.”
“All right. I’ll give it one more day.” He turned to Kylie. Anyone who thought he might apologize for jumping down her throat, or at least congratulate her for bringing down an active shooter, didn’t know him very well. “Who’s the dead girl?” he said.
She told him.
“Now what?” he asked.
“We’re going through her text messages and her voice mails,” Kylie said. “She’s only one degree of separation from Gabriel Benoit, the guy we’re looking for. We’re closing in on him.”
“I’ll ask you one more time,” the mayor said to Kylie. “You still think you’re going to catch this guy?”
“Yes, sir,” she said without missing a beat. “Absolutely.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Kylie actually sounded more confident than she did when she answered the same question two nights and four dead bodies ago.
Chapter 63
DELIA CATES IS not the kind of cop who shows up at a crime scene just because the mayor is there. She’s smart enough to give her team enough time to pull together some information. When she got there, twenty minutes after the mayor left, we had plenty. Some of it downright scary.
“Give me what you’ve got,” she said.
“The shooter was Benoit’s girlfriend, Alexis Carter, a.k.a. Lexi. Her cell phone is a treasure trove. Nothing is password-protected,” I said. “From what we can put together from the texts between her and Benoit, she knew what he was up to, but she didn’t go with him when he killed Roth, Stewart, or Schuck.”
“She definitely made up for it this time around.”
“All of it behind her boyfriend’s back. Benoit had no idea she was going to pull this. In his last few messages he was looking for her frantically. And you were right. They’re plotting out a movie. We found the script for this scene in her purse. It had two endings.”
“One where she gets away, and one where she dies tragically?” Cates said.
“No. One where she gets away, and one where she gets caught by NYPD Red, and she stands up to us, protecting her man.”
“With Tammy Wynette on the sound track?” Cates said.
“She even uses my name and Zach’s in the script,” Kylie said, unfolding one of the pages we found in Lexi’s purse. “Her character is called Pandemonia Passionata. I’ll give you some of the dialogue.”
DETECTIVE JORDAN
Where is your partner? What does he have planned?
PANDEMONIA
Save your breath, pretty boy. You’ll get nothing out of me.
DETECTIVE MACDONALD
You have no idea how much trouble you’re in.
PANDEMONIA
And you have no idea how much trouble you’re in.
“That’s the way she saw this going down?” Cates said. “We either catch her, or she gets away? Did she ever write the ending the way it happened?”
Kylie shook her head. “No. She was blissfully delusional to the very end.”
“We need the rest of the script,” Cates said. “Do you have any idea where it is?”
“It may be in her computer, but she has an out-of-state license and all her last known addresses in New York are dead ends,” I said. “But we do have something. Remember Cheryl Robinson predicted that Benoit is about to do something big—much bigger than the previous murders? Listen to this.”
I pushed the message retrieval button on Lexi’s cell phone.
“Lexi, it’s me. Things are turning to shit. I’m outside Mickey’s building, and the cops showed up. I’m pretty sure they’re going to pick up Mickey. I got forty-five thousand dollars’ worth of C4 in my bag, and there’s not a damn thing I can do to stop them. That’s all. Oh yeah, one more thing. Where the fuck are you?”
“Forty-five thousand?” Cates said. “That’s a lot of C4.”
“It’s enough to call in Homeland and anybody else we need to help us track him down,” I said.
“I don’t want to track him. I want to be three steps ahead of him.”
“Zach and I have a list of all the events happening connected to Hollywood on the Hudson. But they’re spread all over town—hotels, theaters, restaurants, private parties. I don’t think we can find enough bomb-sniffing dogs to handle it all.”
“Can Benoit do this on his own?” Cates said. “It’s one thing to rig a Molotov cocktail, but that’s a lot of plastic for him to be handling without his resident bomb guy. We’ve got Peltz in custody. We can hold him for seventy-two hours.”
“That might slow him down, but I don’t know if it will stop him,” I said. “Benoit is smart. He had to figure we’d be paying a visit to a bomb expert who just got out of prison. That’s why he didn’t leave the
explosives at Peltz’s place. More likely he used Peltz to score the fireworks and give him a short course in how to use them. C4 is not all that complicated.”
“Well, if Peltz taught Benoit how to use that plastic, then Peltz would have to know what the targets are,” Cates said. “Get back to the station as soon as you can wrap it up here and put the fear of God into Mr. Peltz.”
“Are we still waiting for his PO to show up?” Kylie asked.
“That’s the rule, isn’t it?” Cates said. “Don’t question the parolee without his parole officer present.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kylie said. “That’s the rule.”
“And you of all people ought to know, Detective MacDonald…some rules are meant to be broken.”
Chapter 64
IT WAS A half hour before shift change when we finally got back to the station house, and a steady stream of people were either coming, going, or waiting to speak to the desk sergeant.
The One Nine is one of the busiest precincts in the city, and it takes an old pro like Bob McGrath to man the front desk.
When we got there, he was dealing with two women in their early twenties—one of them an amazingly beautiful Latina. Four more civilians were stacked up in a holding pattern.
Kylie and I went to the front of the line.
“Sorry to interrupt, Sarge,” I said, “but Captain Cates sent a patrol car to pick up this guy Mickey Peltz in Queens. Did they?”
“Yeah, Detective, hold on, I got his intake sheet here somewhere,” McGrath said. “Either of you two guys habla español?”