Free NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson Page A

hand, had a lot more latitude than cops. They could show up at a parolee’s house anytime. No warrant. No warning.
    “Call RTC and find Davis’s PO,” Kylie said as she barreled up Third toward the One Nine.
    The Real Time Crime unit worked out of One Police Plaza, and they could tell you in a heartbeat just about anything you needed to know about anyone in their databases. I called them, and in under a minute, I had Davis’s address and the cell number of Brian Sandusky, his parole officer.
    My next call was to Sandusky. “Brian,” I said, “this is Detective Zach Jordan. One of your boys, Raymond Davis, was fingered as the shooter in the robbery-homicide at the Ziegfeld Theater last night, and I need you on scene to get me inside so I can bypass a warrant.”
    “Davis? Elena Travers?” Sandusky said. “Holy shit, count me in.”
    Some POs hate being dragged out at night to make a house call, but Sandusky was young and eager to help out on a high-profile case. I told him to meet us at the precinct.
    Then I called Cates, gave her a top line, and asked her to call in an ESU team to help us bring in Davis and Ryder.
    Seventy minutes after we left the Kimberly Hotel, Kylie and I were in our car, followed by two Lenco armored trucks from Emergency Service Squad 1, in lower Manhattan. PO Sandusky was in the backseat.
    “Fourteen heavily armed cops in full body armor ready to take down two bungling low-level criminals,” he said as Kylie led the convoy across town, toward the FDR Drive. “Your average taxpayer might think that’s excessive.”
    She looked over her shoulder at him. “That’s because your average taxpayer’s never been shot at,” she said.
    Davis and Ryder lived downtown, on Rivington Street. We parked our vehicles around the corner on Suffolk and met up with one of the cops from the three units we’d dispatched as soon as we had the address.
    “That’s the building, over there,” he said, pointing to a five-story gray-brick building. The facade from the second floor to the roof was covered with a cluster of metal fire escapes that probably dated back to the first half of the twentieth century. There was a storefront at street level, but it was boarded up, and the window had become a canvas for a graffiti artist who had done a remarkably good likeness of the Notorious B.I.G.
    “Nobody in or out since we got here,” the cop said.
    I gave a hand signal, and a dozen cops poured out into the street, weapons at the ready. The team leader opened the front door and stopped.
    “Blood,” he whispered. He threw a light on the floor, and I could see it. A trail of blood leading to the inside door. He turned the knob. It didn’t give.
    One of his men took a Hooligan Tool and cracked the lock like it was an egg.
    There were more bloodstains on the stairs. We followed the trail to Davis’s apartment door, on the third floor.
    “We’ve got probable cause to enter,” I whispered to Sandusky, pointing at the bloody floor. “Leave the building. Now.”
    He looked both relieved and disappointed, but he didn’t argue. He left.
    “Open it,” I said to the team leader.
    One of his men had a universal skeleton key: a thirty-five-pound steel battering ram. One swing and the wooden door splintered.
    There was a man sprawled facedown on the floor, and I held a gun on him as the team stormed the apartment. They checked the bedroom and the closets, and within seconds I heard a volley of “Clear, clear, clear.”
    I holstered my gun. The man on the floor was unmistakably dead.
    “Roll him,” I said.
    Two of the cops flipped the body over.
    It was Raymond Davis, his face ashy gray, his eyes bugged open in wide surprise, a single bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

PART TWO
BEST. MOM. EVER.

CHAPTER 21
     
    IT WAS THE kind of crime scene that nerds like Chuck Dryden live for. A dead murder suspect with a bullet in his brain, a second bullet embedded in the pockmarked plaster on the opposite side of the