Page 98 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

“Yeah,” she said, getting out of the booth. “She’s a lousy tipper.”

“It’s not hard to figure out why Andy Buchanan didn’t tell her anything,” Kylie said once Gerri was out of earshot. “He’s got nothing to give. He’s not in the loop. And I know Mickey Delmonico. He’s too good a cop to leak anything to the press, but he let her take him to lunch hoping he’d get laid anyway.”

We ate, thanked Gerri again, and went back to the office. Steve Edlund called just as we settled in.

“I spoke to Vincent Ackerman’s boss at the MTA. He didn’t come in to work today.”

“You think he’s on the run?” Kylie asked.

“According to the boss, he just took a couple of vacation days. It’s been on his schedule for over a month. It’s his girlfriend’s birthday, and they’re going off on some romantic getaway, whereabouts unknown. But just to be on the safe side, we called Homeland and put his passport in the system. He’s not getting out of the country. He’ll be back the day after tomorrow, but we can pick his sister up now.”

“Too risky,” I said. “If he calls her and she doesn’t answer the phone, he’ll know we’re onto him, and he really will be in the wind. But if you can ping his phone, we can grab him first. We know she’s not going anywhere. Call the DA and get a warrant so we can track him. If we can’t find him, we’ll just have to stick with the plan. We know he’s not going to leave Priscilla alone for too long. We can wait anotherthirty-sixhours.”

“We’re on it,” Edlund said.

“Shit,” Kylie said. “I was looking forward to having the Ackermans in custody before Shane woke up in the morning.”

“And celebrating with some kind of... what should I call it—victory dance?”

“The thought crossed my mind,” she said.

“Life is full of little disappointments. Your happiness will have to wait another day.”

My phone rang. It was the lab.

“Detective Jordan, this is Ananda Singh. I have the results of the analysis you asked for.”

“It’s been a long day, Ananda, and it’s not even close to being over,” I said. “I hope you’re calling with good news.”

“It’s not good news, Zach,” she said. “It’s great news. The items you brought in this morning were very probative. I can’t be a hundred percent certain, but I think you’ve zeroed in on the person who killed Warren Hellman.”

CHAPTER 65

There’s an old maxim:“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Nowhere do those words ring truer than in the New York City Police Department.

As soon as Kylie and I got the details of the forensic analysis, we reported the news to Captain Cates. She immediately called Chief of Detectives Harlan Doyle, and within minutes the smell of success wafted through the rarefied air of One Police Plaza. Red was closing in on the department’s most wanted criminal, and everybody with brass on their lapels or politics on their agenda wanted to be part of the action.

Ninety minutes after Ananda Singh called, Kylie and I were downtown in the chief of Ds’ private sanctuary. The room had anold-timeyNew York feel. The walls were lined with pictures of all those venerable commanders who ruled the roost before Doyle, and every chair around the massive oak table was filled with the aristocracy of the department, all dreaming of the victory party, where the mayor praised the police commissioner and they could cautiously raise a glass because his job—and, in turn, theirs—was secure until the next crisis.

Kylie and I were assigned to boil down Singh’stech-heavythirty-minutemonograph on gun powder residue to aneasy-peasyexecutive summary for twenty men and women who are laser focused on results and not particularly interested in details.

Case in point: Singh reminded us that professionals like the person who shot Warren Hellman wouldn’t be caught dead buying a box of ammo at Walmart. “They pride themselves in making their own ammunition,” she told us. “They craft their bullets to perform to their exact specifications, and this guy has his own personal recipe. He creates a primer with an extremely low flash point, adds his own special blend ofhigh-flashpistol powder—much finer granules than the BBs you’d find in a standard cartridge—then addsmilitary-graderifle powder.”

Singh went on, but if we repeated her report verbatim, either our audience would fall asleep or the chief of Ds would say get to the fucking point.

So we skipped the science and got to the fucking point. “The killer who took out Warren Hellman made his own bullets,” Kylie said.

“How do you know that?” the chief of Ds asked.

“We found gunshot residue on the roof where the shot came from. The criminalist who analyzed it had never seen anything like it before. It’s our killer’s own signature formula.”

Head nods.

“The second item we had the lab analyze was a business card that the reporter Megan Rollins gave to our witness Theo Wilkins approximately two hours after the Winstanley shooting at the funeral home. There was GSR and a patent thumbprint on the card. The GSR was an exact match to the residue we obtained from the roof.”

Kylie paused, then dropped the bombshell. “And the print belonged to Megan Rollins.”

Even a roomful of veteran cops can be blindsided, and their reaction was a mix of shock, disbelief, andnot-appropriate-for-the-

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