NYPD Red 4 Read Free

meet you, Sergeant. And for the record, it didn’t get kicked up. It came down from on high. What have you got so far?”
    “A dead movie star, a limo driver in the OR with a bullet in his back, two perps in the wind, and a video which won’t give you much to go on.”
    “You’re right,” she said. “We’ve seen it.”
    “The whole damn city has seen it,” Kellepouris said. “There were maybe fifty, sixty people here when they thought she was showing up alive. But stretch her out in a pool of blood on the sidewalk, and an army of vultures shows up with their camera phones hoping to capture a piece of Hollywood history.”
    “Give us a rundown of what went down before the shots were fired,” I said.
    “Quiet night, just the usual paparazzi you have to wrangle and keep behind the ropes, but it was no problem. I had more cops than I needed.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “It’s all part of the Hollywood bullshit game. Travers was wearing this zillion-dollar necklace, and somebody in PR thought it would look better with twelve cops to guard her instead of four. The studio pays the city for the security, so they can hire as many as they want. We were all just props in blue uniforms, until the shit hit the fan.”
    “Tell us about the man who was in the car with her.”
    “Craig Jeffers. He’s her personal trainer, but from what he told me, they had another kind of personal relationship going on that they kept under wraps.”
    “What can you tell us that we didn’t see on the video?”
    “It looks like it started out as a simple snatch-and-grab. Two mooks with guns stopped the limo. I don’t think they had any intention of hurting anyone. They just wanted to heist some bling.”
    “What went wrong?”
    “It was Jeffers. He’s a bodybuilder—macho to the core. He decided to go all Jason Statham and wrestle the gun away from one of the perps. It didn’t work out the way he planned.”
    Kylie shook her head. “Men are such assholes,” she said.
    Kellepouris grinned at me. “You got lucky, Zach. I like this one. She sounds a lot like my wife.”
    “Anything else?” I said.
    “I got stripes, Zach, no shield, so I didn’t dig very deep. Also, Jeffers seemed too devastated to handle a lot of questions. What he did was beyond dumb, but you’ve got to feel sorry for him. That poor bastard will have Elena Travers’s blood on his hands for the rest of his life.”
    “That’s what I like about you, Stavros,” I said. “You never hold back on your opinions.”
    “I hate to disappoint you, Detective, but that’s not my opinion. Those are Craig Jeffers’s words, not mine.”

CHAPTER 2
     
    WE WALKED PAST the sandwiched remains of the limo and the searchlight truck and made our way to the red carpet, where Chuck Dryden was kneeling next to the body of Elena Travers.
    Dryden, who has all the charisma of a medium security prison, looked up. His normally stoic facial expression softened when he saw Kylie, but he was still all business, no foreplay. “She took a 9mm slug to the abdomen,” he said. “She bled out.”
    “Thanks,” Kylie said, giving him her practiced you’re-my-favorite-crime-scene-investigator smile.
    “It’s my job,” he said, and returned to the work at hand, signaling that his report was over.
    We entered the Ziegfeld, which was empty except for a few cops and a man sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his head in his hands.
    “Mr. Jeffers,” Kylie said softly.
    He raised his head. His eyes were red, his face contorted with pain. “I told her I was sorry,” he said. “Before she died, I held her in my arms and told her I was sorry. She didn’t say anything, but I know she heard me.”
    Kylie knelt beside him. “We’re going to find the men who did this.”
    “
I
did it,” he said. “It was my fault as much as anybody else’s.”
    “Can we talk?” Kylie said, standing up.
    Jeffers stood. He was blond, six two, with wide shoulders, a thick neck, and bulging pecs that