“That’s it. Oh, and two feds. I got their names here. And an NYPD cop named Thomas Stagger.”

Chapter 12

Stagger wasn’t in his office.

Still standing in front of his office door, Kat typed up a text saying that she needed to talk to him right away. Her fingers shook, but she managed to hit the SEND button. She stood there and stared at the screen for two full minutes.

No reply.

This made no sense. Monte Leburne had been picked up by the FBI, more specifically the feds working RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. NYPD wasn’t involved in the arrest at all. The feds suspected him of murdering two members of a rival crime family. A few days later, they’d also uncovered information that Leburne had been the triggerman in the death of her father.

So why had Stagger visited Leburne before that, the day after his arrest?

Kat needed some air. A small twinge sent a reminder that she had also skipped lunch. Kat wasn’t good when skipping meals. She tended to lose focus and get grumpy. She hurried down the stairs and asked Keith Inchierca at the front desk to contact her as soon as Stagger came back. Inchierca frowned.

“I look like your secretary?” he said.

“Good one.”

“What?”

“Please? It’s important, okay?”

He waved at her to go away.

She found a falafel stand on Third Avenue and then, remembering Brandon Phelps’s home address, she figured, well, why not? She started walking north. Seven blocks later, she arrived at a fairly unassuming high-rise. On the street level, there was a Duane Reade pharmacy and a store called Scoop, which Kat had wrongly assumed was an ice-cream parlor when, in fact, it was a trendy boutique. The apartment building entrance was on 74th Street. Kat flashed her badge at the doorman.

“I’m here about Dana Phelps,” she said. “Apartment 8J.”

The doorman stared at her badge. Then he said, “Wrong building.”

“You don’t have a Dana Phelps here?”

“We don’t have a Dana Phelps. We also don’t have an apartment 8J. We don’t do letters. The apartments on the eighth floor run from 801 to 816.”

Kat put her badge away. “Is this 1279 Third Avenue?”

“No, this is 200 East 74th Street.”

“But you’re on the corner of Third Avenue.”

The doorman just stared at her. “Uh, yeah, so?”

“But it says 1279 Third Avenue on this building.”

He made a face. “You think, what, I’m lying about the address?”

“No.”

“Please, Detective, by all means. Go up to apartment 8J. With my blessing.”

New Yorkers. “Look, I’m trying to find apartment 8J at 1279 Third Avenue.”

“I can’t help you.”

Kat headed back outside and turned the corner. The awning did indeed say 200 East 74th Street. Kat moved back to Third Avenue. The 1279 was actually above the entrance to Duane Reade. What the hell? She entered, found the manager, and asked, “Do you have any apartments above you?”

“Uh, we’re a pharmacy.”

New Yorkers. “I know that, but I mean, how do I get to the apartments above you?”

“You know a lot of people who walk through pharmacies to get to their apartment? The entrance is around the corner on 74th.”

She didn’t bother with follow-up questions. The answer was now pretty damn apparent. Brandon Phelps, if that was his name, had given her the wrong—or, more likely, a false—address.

• • •

Back at the precinct, Google gave Kat some of the answers, but they didn’t clarify much.

There was a Dana Phelps with a son named Brandon, but they didn’t live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Phelpses resided in a rather tony section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Brandon’s father had been a big-time hedge fund manager. Beaucoup bucks. He died when he was forty-one. The obituary gave no cause of death. Kat looked for a charity—people often requested donations made to a heart disease or cancer or whatever cause—but there was nothing listed.

So why had Brandon sought out a specific NYPD cop?

Kat checked out other residences the Phelps might have owned. There was, of course, a chance that a wealthy family from Greenwich might own a place on the Upper East Side, but nothing in Manhattan came up. She ran Brandon’s cell phone number through the system. Whoa. It was a prepaid phone. Most rich kids from Greenwich don’t use those. Most people who use them either have poor credit ratings or, well, don’t want to be traced. Of course, what most people didn’t know was that it was rather easy to trace disposable phones. In fact, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit had ruled that you could even “ping” a location without getting a warrant. She didn’t need to go that far. At least not yet.

For now, she played a hunch. All prepaid phone sales are registered in a data bank. She typed in the number and found out exactly where Brandon had purchased his phone. The answer didn’t surprise her. He bought it at a Duane Reade, located at, yep, 1279 Third Avenue.

Maybe that explained why he chose that address.

Okay, maybe. But it explained nothing else.

There were other links to explore, but they’d take more time. Brandon Phelps had a Facebook account, but it was set on private. It would probably take only a phone call or two to find out how Brandon’s father had died, but really, what was the relevance of that? The kid had come to her because his mother had run off with some guy.

And there was the rub: So what?

This could all be nothing but a stupid hoax. Why was she wasting her time with this nonsense anyway? Didn’t she have anything better to do? Maybe, maybe not. Truth was, work was slow today. This was a welcome distraction until Stagger got back.

Okay, she thought. Play it out.

Let’s say this was a hoax. Well, for one thing, if this was a joke on Brandon’s part, it was almost pathetically lame. The hoax wasn’t funny or clever in the slightest. There didn’t seem to be much of a punch line or big payoff.

It didn’t add up.

Cops loved to buy into their self-created myth that they have some innate ability to “read” people, that they were all human lie detectors, that they could suss out truth from deception from body language or the timbre in a voice. Kat knew that that sort of hubris was complete nonsense. Worse, it too often led to life-altering disaster.

That said, unless Brandon was either a pure sociopath or a recent graduate of the Lee Strasberg school of method acting, the kid truly was distraught about something.