NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

food?”
    “Fantastico.”
    “Can you be home by seven?”
    “You bet,” I said.
    “Great. Love you.”
    “Love you back.”
    I hung up the phone and let what I’d just heard wash over me. My brain was thinking about the night ahead when Kylie violated my reverie.
    “Zach, did you hear what I said?”
    “Sorry. Run it by me again.”
    “I said we can’t tail Lyon. I know the mayor wants us on these hospital robberies, but they’re sucking up time we need for the Travers homicide. Let’s talk to Cates and see if she can drum us up another team to do the legwork.”
    “Sure.”
    She got up from her desk and headed toward Cates’s office. My body followed, but my head was still wrapped up in the phone call from Cheryl.
    It was the first time I’d ever heard her refer to my apartment as
home.
It felt incredible.

CHAPTER 14
     
    CAPTAIN DELIA CATES is third-generation NYPD. She grew up in Harlem, and if you ask her where she went to college, she’ll smile and say, “Oh, there was a good school a mile from my house.” The school, as those of us in the know can tell you, is Columbia University.
    She graduated at eighteen, got a master’s in criminal justice from John Jay College, and did four years in the marine corps before joining the department. She rose through the ranks like a comet, and when our previous mayor created NYPD Red, his consigliere, Irwin Diamond, tapped Cates to run it.
    “It’s not that I was the best cop for the job,” Cates told me one night when we were having a drink. “But when most of your constituency is overprivileged white men, it’s smart politics to put a black woman in charge.”
    The truth is, she
was
the best cop for the job, and most days I love having her as my boss. This day was not one of them.
    “That’s all you’ve got?” she said when Kylie and I told her where we were on the Travers murder. “You two haven’t done squat since you met with the Bassett brothers last night.”
    “We’ve got cops canvassing the area, looking for eyewitnesses,” Kylie said. “And there are at least twenty-five traffic and private security cameras at 54th and Broadway, where the shooting happened. We have Jan Hogle going through those.”
    “And how about that
extensive
network of CIs you told me about this morning?” Cates said. “How’s that working out?”
    “You’re right, Captain,” I said before Kylie could mount a defense. “We haven’t done squat on the Travers case. No excuse.”
    Cates laughed. “Of course you have an excuse. It’s called politics over police work. The mayor and her husband want you on these hospital robberies. You’re stuck with it. But I can’t take you off this homicide. Which means you have to do both.”
    “We can,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, “but we could use some help. We have a person of interest—a hospital volunteer who may have been the inside person on four of the nine jobs. She may lead us to bigger fish, but we need to tail her. Do you think you can snag us another team to throw against it?”
    “I’d be happy to,” Cates said. “Do you think you can snag me the perps who killed Elena Travers?”
    “We’d be happy to,” Kylie said.
    Cates ignored the wisecrack and looked at me. “You’ve got Betancourt and Torres,” she said, waving us out of her office without another word.
    Five minutes later, we were sitting down to brief our backup.
    Before they came to Red, Detectives Jenny Betancourt and Wanda Torres had more collars than any team in Brooklyn South. Betancourt is a pit bull when it comes to details, and Torres—well, she’s just a pit bull. Kylie and I had worked with them before, and we liked them—partly because they were new and eager to make their bones, and partly because they reminded us of us. They bickered constantly, like an old married couple.
    “I agree with Kylie,” Betancourt said after we briefed them. “Lyon spent her formative years watching a lot of people die