Worst Case - James Patterson [46]
We were comparing notes with the rest of the shell-shocked surveillance guys when the victim’s father, Gordon Hastings, showed up in his town car.
“You cocked it up! You lost my money! You killed my son!” the red-faced Scot screamed as he came for me across the shoulder of the highway.
He’s lucky he didn’t make it through the half dozen cops and agents between us. At that point I was so frustrated, I would gladly have knocked his millionaire teeth out, father or no father.
Chapter 52
FIVE MINUTES LATER, Parker and I spun over to the Thirtieth Precinct, where the two suspects in the money chase had been taken.
After a lost coin flip in the precinct captain’s office, I was given the onerous task of calling in the fiasco to One Police Plaza. Even the ordinarily heartless, map-of-Ireland-faced precinct captain O’Dwyer gave me a sympathetic nod before leaving me to my spanking. Having dropped the full payload of bad tidings, I thought my ears would start hemorrhaging from the chief’s tongue-lashing.
I was still licking my wounds in one of the captain’s Ed Koch–administration plastic chairs when Emily came back in from the suspect interview rooms down the hall.
“Same story,” she said, closing her notebook and collapsing into the traffic cone–orange chair next to me. “The bald black guy and the kid were both paid in cash by the mysterious Mark. They describe him as a very burly white biker type. They said he had a red Abraham Lincoln beard and double sleeves of tats. Another disguise, maybe?”
I shrugged.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “After all that, we’re back to square one. Make that square negative one.”
Dan Hastings was gone. The five million dollars was gone. I’d come very close to killing a reckless nineteen-year-old and knocking out a reckless middle-aged multimillionaire. Even for me, this was stacking up to be a pretty bad day at the office.
“We need to get back on track,” I said. “Let’s grab some coffee and go over what we know so far.”
The closest thing to a Starbucks we could find was a Greek diner across from the Bronx County Courthouse.
“We know from the Jacob Dunning abduction that our kidnapper hired illegals to purchase cell phones for him. Do you think he could have used yet another middleman—this Mark guy—to subcontract the money pickup?”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Parker said. “Though from all indications, our unsub seems to be more of a loner. But then again, the more I think about it, the more it sort of makes sense that maybe this was about money. He kills the first two as a calling card to prove to Hastings’s father that he’s dealing with a stone-cold maniac. Maybe from this point, we should go on the assumption that Hastings was the real target.”
My aching neck actually made a cracking sound as I rolled it. I finally stood.
“Maybe you’re right. Let’s head back to Columbia.”
Chapter 53
FROM THE THIRTIETH Precinct, we headed directly over to Dan Hastings’s residence hall at Columbia. Because of his disability or maybe because of his father’s connections, Dan Hastings had scored a room at the new dorm on 118th, which was otherwise reserved for law students. One of the Public Safety guys keyed us into his suite.
It was neat as a pin. There were some very expensive-looking custom furniture pieces and a closet full of clothes from stratosphere-priced Barneys. Beside the bed, we found copies of the National Review and the latest Sean Hannity book. Even Dan’s sixty-inch plasma was tuned to the Fox News Channel.
“A closet conservative at Columbia? How do you like that?” Emily said.
As we watched, a report about the Mardi Gras celebration down in New Orleans started. I remembered the forehead ashes on the bodies of Jacob Dunning and Chelsea Skinner and the references to Ash Wednesday. Even though this was starting to look like an elaborate kidnapping-for-ransom plot, I couldn’t completely shake the feeling that the three kidnappings were still related to this