Free NYPD Red 4 by James Patterson Page B

Look up.”
    I tipped my head toward the stairwell ceiling. I saw it immediately. There were two smoke detectors mounted on the cracked plaster. One was centered directly over the stairs just the way the building code required. The other was tucked into a corner.
    “This second smoke detector is too close to the wall to be effective as a smoke detector,” I said. “But it’s a damn good place for a camera.”
    “And I’ll bet it’s not the only one,” Kylie said.
    We walked the building from the lobby to the roof and found three more.
    “All wireless,” Kylie said. “The question is, whose apartment is the signal going to?”
    “There’s probably a sophisticated high-tech way to find out without waking up the whole building,” I said.
    Kylie grinned. “But sophistication has never been our strong suit. Let’s rattle all their cages,” she said, banging on the door of apartment 5A.
    The same tenants who weren’t happy to see us the first time we canvassed the building were even less happy this time around. Especially since Kylie confronted every bleary-eyed one of them with a bad-to-the-bone snarl and a few choice words. “We found your surveillance cameras. Show us the monitor. Now!”
    The standard responses ranged from dumbfounded stares to an angry “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    We pissed off everyone on the fifth floor and two people on the fourth, but the next apartment was the charm.

CHAPTER 23
    Elliott Moritz, the tenant in 4C, was about sixty, mild mannered, and by far the least confrontational of all the tenants we had met. He quickly admitted that the cameras were his.
    “And who authorized you to install them?” Kylie said.
    “They’re not exactly authorized, ” Moritz said, backing up a step. “I sort of have unwritten permission from the landlord.”
    “Unwritten permission won’t hold up in court, Elliott,” Kylie said.
    “Court? Wait a minute, officer, I’m not the criminal here,” Moritz said. “It’s the woman in 5B. She’s a flight attendant. She sublets her apartment whenever she’s out of town, and the people she rents to are noisy and dirty, and you can smell the marijuana through the air vents. So I complained to the building management. They said they can’t evict her without proof. So I said I would get some, and they said okay.”
    “You’re right, Elliott,” Kylie said. “What she’s doing is illegal. But so is spying on your neighbors. If this were any other night, I’d arrest you, but I’ve got a homicide to deal with, and you may be able to help, so I’m going to let you decide how we handle this. Option one: I wake up a judge, get a warrant to impound your equipment, and book you on charges of video voyeurism. Option two: you show me and my partner your video feed, and I’ll give you the name and cell number of an inspector in the city’s Buildings Department who hates illegal subletters even more than you do.”
    Moritz wisely chose option two.
    He had a quad monitor with one camera pointed at the flight attendant’s apartment on the fifth floor. The other three only covered the stairwells. At 9:37 a man had trudged up the stairs to the third floor.
    “That’s our guy,” Kylie said when he didn’t show up on the fourth-floor camera.
    There was no audio track, so we didn’t get to hear the gunshots, but at 9:44, Teddy Ryder stumbled down the stairs, bleeding. A minute later, the man who had lumbered up the stairs raced down. The image was poor quality, but we could tell that our suspect was white, about six feet tall, and no more than thirty-five years old. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
    Kylie downloaded the video onto her cell phone. We took it back to the precinct, found a tech to pull some screenshots, and got them out to every cop in the city.
    It was almost two a.m. when Kylie dropped me off at my apartment. Angel, my favorite doorman, was on duty.
    “You look beat, Detective,” he said.
    “Fighting crime isn’t as