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 facade 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.”
“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
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.”