Page 15 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

“It’s that easy to steal a truck?” Kylie said.

“Anemptytruck,” White said. “We lose about a million dollars’ worth of packages every day to porch pirates,grab-and-rundrug addicts who wait for the driver to go into a store with a delivery, and sometimes by crazies who put a gun to the driver’s head. We focus on the security of our customers’ property and the safety of our people. An empty truck that was scheduled for routine maintenance wasn’t on our radar this morning, but as soon as I get back, I will personally interview everyone who was in it, near it, or might have caught it out of the corner of their eye.”

“What about GPS?” I asked. “Can you track it from the time it left the garage? LMSI tried to trace its route from the crime scene, but the driver drove to the garment center, got lost in a sea of identical trucks, and it’ll take them a while to figure out how he got from there to here.”

“Sorry,” White said. The GPS units in these trucks aren’t built in. They’re portable, like police radios. The driver unplugged it as soon as he hit the road at eighttwenty-seventhis morning. He plugged it back in ateleven-oh-four, and the truck hasn’t moved from this spot since.”

“I’m sure you know you won’t be getting it back for a while,” Cates said. “CSU will be here to print, swab, and photograph the exterior; then they’ll take it to their garage to do the interior. After that—”

“I know the drill, Captain,” White said. “With a crime of this magnitude, NYPD will hold on to this truck for years. I’ve already drafted a memo in my head letting corporate know that oldone-zero-one-two-seven-zero has delivered her last package.”

“Our shooter may not be as smart as he thinks,” Kylie said, pointing up at a lamppost thirty yards away. “That’s an NYPD globe camera up there. Hopefully, it’s angled right, and we can get a clean shot of him leaving the truck. And if that doesn’t work, I can see two more cameras from here.”

“There are six cameras on this street from Eleventh to Twelfth Avenue,” White said. “I canvassed the block as soon as I got here. Old habits... anyway, more bad news. Every one of them has been disabled. Shot out.”

“Shot?” Cates said. “The man had a Barrett .50-cal. We know he didn’t use that, or he’d have vaporized half the lamppost.”

White nodded. “The PC told me your killer was packing heavy artillery,” he said. “But clearly, he had a game plan, and his backup weapon was a lot smaller.”

“And a lot quieter,” Cates added.

“Let’s call LMSI and see if they’ve got a read on any of the cameras,” Kylie said.

She called. Ted had been right. Every camera on the block had been shot out.

“And there’s no way that I can make out the shooter,” the LMSI detective said. “All I got is the flash from his muzzle. This guy is a total pro.”

Kylie looked over at me and held up two fingers in the sign of aV. I know my partner. She wasn’t talking about victory. She was silently correcting the LSMI detective and confirming something we pretty much knew.

If whoever shot Warren Hellman left his getaway vehicle on WestTwenty-SeventhStreet at 11:04, and the murder of Curtis Hellman five miles uptown was called in at 11:09, we weren’t up against just one total pro.

We had to find two.

CHAPTER 11

If this were anyother case, Kylie and I would have spent the next six to eight hours watching the crime scene techs painstakingly retrieving hair, fibers, and other virtually imperceptible evidence that might lead us to the killer. They love laboring over every speck of minutiae that goes with their job, but for us, it’s the homicide detective equivalent of watching paint dry.

But this time we were off the hook. Cates would assign another team of detectives to stare at the UPS truck. We were on a priority mission for the PC—tell a good cop who lost his sister and his father, then got kicked in the balls by the justice system, that he was a person of interest in one, maybe two, homicides.

Evan Belmont lived in Staten Island. The drive from Lower Manhattan through the tunnel into Brooklyn, then over the Verrazzano Bridge to his quiet neighborhood in Dongan Hills took close to an hour. Kylie and I didn’t talk much. I just sat there with the same feeling of dread that I get in the pit of my stomach when I’m on the way to notify a family that someone they love was murdered. However they deal with it, I know that their life—and how they feel about me—will never be the same.

“Shit,” Kylie said as we pulled up to Evan’s house. His driveway was lined with cars and pickups that spilled out onto the street for almost a block. The house would be packed with Evan’s support group, who would be cursing out the jury and drinking to the health of the sniper who shot Warren Hellman.

“I thought we were just going to lose one friend today,” I said. “Looks like we’re going to piss off a lot more cops than we planned on.”

The white clapboard house was a notch or two above the typicalworking-classStaten Island home. Three stories, a wide covered porch, and atwo-cargarage. It was above Evan’s pay grade, but he’d inherited it when Jonas died, and I could just hear Sonia Blakely saying, “If he can afford to live in a magnificent house like this, he could easily afford to pay a hit man.”

Four women were sitting on the front porch. I’d never seen any of them before, but based on their ages and the fact that they were drinking either Diet Cokes or water, I figured they were all cop wives—designated drivers who had no other interest in being there except to get their drunken husbands home safely.

“How you doing?” one of them said. “Evan is in the backyard.”

“They’re all back there,” a second one said. “Commiserating.”

The group laughed their approval.

Kylie and I walked around the side of the house. The backyard was spacious, more than enough to accommodate thetwenty-fiveor thirty cops who were smoking, drinking, and talking loud enough for Kylie and me to know that the drinking had started hours before we arrived.

I scanned the group and recognized some cops from Evan’s squad, plus the five retired detectives from Jonas’s crew who had been sitting in the gallery with us that morning. Then I saw Evan, weaving his way toward us.

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