Page 105 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

Sarah Herman from our field team located his phone and the wire we had taped to his body. They’d been thrown from the car window onto the roadway of theSeventy-NinthStreet Transverse.

Kylie called his father in Australia. I don’t know what she said or if she was even capable of explaining how she and I had gone from “Don’t worry, Travis, we’ll keep an eye on your son” to “We were trying to take down a pair of international assassins, so we enlisted your teenage kid to take part in a dangerous police action, and... um, well, they abducted him.”

“Travis is on his way back to New York,” Kylie said after she hung up. “It’s the middle of the night in Sydney, so it’ll be another six hours before he can get on a plane, and anothertwenty-fourin the air.”

Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t be able to imagine what those next thirty hours would be like for the man. But these circumstances were far from ordinary. This time, the terror was just as real for me.

Theo was my son.

There was no question about it. The DNA results were in my email when I got back to my desk. Cheryl had the lab send the report directly to me.

“You have to know before anyone else,” she said. “You can tell me if and when you’re ready. But you have to live with it first.”

After what I had done to put my son’s life at risk, I didn’t know if living with it was possible.

My phone rang. It was Rich Koprowski. I picked up.

“Zach, put me on speaker. Kylie needs to hear this.”

I tapped the icon. “Okay, you’ve got us both. Where are you?”

“The ninth circle of hell, also known as the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. It’s where our government stores the data on every single person who served in our armed forces since Washington crossed the Delaware. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating, and when I saystores the records, I’mflat-outlying. It’s easy to find pay stubs for your grandfather who fought on Iwo Jima in 1945, but finding the JAG who swept the post–Nine-Elevenblack ops under the rug takes a little more time.”

Kylie and I didn’t even know that Rich was in St. Louis. Cates must have authorized it. But right now we had only one question.

“The JAG,” Kylie said. “Did you find him?”

“Her,” Koprowski said. “She was a young lawyer who enlisted in the navy right after law school.”

“Do you have her name and where we can find her now?” I said.

“Oh, I think you know where to find her,” he said. “Her name is Sonia Blakely.”

“Sonia Blakely?” Kylie said. “Rich, are you telling us that the same woman who helped Warren Hellman beat a murder charge was running the hit men who killed both brothers as soon as the verdict came down?”

“I know it doesn’t add up. But—and this was buried deep in the bowels of the military archives—when these five hit men were killing for the government, they needed a smart lawyer to cut red tape, build their cover stories, and hide their tracks. Blakely got the assignment.”

“And according to Sheffield, that JAG lawyer became Mother,” I said. “He called her ‘the golden goose that made us millionaires.’ Can you prove that she was still in contact with any of them after they left the military?”

“You bet I can,” he said. “Before I called you, I called Selma Kaplan at the DA’s office and got her to do some digging for us. It turns out Blakely is not only attorney of record to the heavy hitters of Hollywood, she also represented humble funeral director Eldon Winstanley in Bronx Criminal Court when he was collared for a DWI. And remember Leonard Cerutti—Alice—the one who was killed by the military in Ecuador? A few years earlier, Lenny was down in Miami and got himself into a bar fight. He shattered a guy’s jaw with a beer mug and then sent him flying through aplate-glasswindow. The cops charged him with felony assault. The next morning, Blakely flew down to Florida, put up twenty grand bail money out of her own pocket, and the case was dismissed two days later because she made financial restitution to the victim. So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that Sonia Blakely had a deep and meaningful relationship with two known assassins long after their time in the military.”

“This is gold, Rich,” Kylie said. “When did Blakely leave the navy?”

“The letter to Martin Sheffield from the president of the United States was dated June 4, 2004. Sheffield, Cerutti, Drucker, Tate, and Winstanley were given an honorable discharge on that date. Three weeks later, Blakely followed them out the door. She had planned to make the navy her career, but she suddenly changed her mind and didn’tre-up.”

“Can’t blame her,” Kylie said. “She could make a hell of a lot more money running the Sorority.”

“Plus, she still had plenty of time to build up her legal practice. Selma gave me a roster of her clients. Some of them make the Hellmans look like choirboys. She helped a lot of scumbags clean up their dirty laundry, and I’ll bet murder for hire was just one of the services she could provide.”

“And she did it all under the protection ofattorney-clientprivilege,” Kylie said.

“Yeah, but she’ll throw every one of those clients under the bus if you cut her a deal,” Rich said. “Selma can’t wait for you to bring her in. She’s got a lot of questions for Ms. Blakely.”

So did I. The first one was,Where the fuck is my son?

CHAPTER 70

Sonia Blakely’s officewas downtown. But we knew if we showed up and she wasn’t there, her assistant would text her before we were out the door.

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