Triple Cross

“What the hell’s going on in there?” Salazar said, lurching to her feet and grabbing the handles to the van’s rear doors.

Luster bellowed over the mayhem, “They’re shooting people in here! Help, Bree! Help, Detective Salazar! I’m calling Mayday, for God’s sake!”

CHAPTER 50

BREE AND SALAZAR BURST out the rear of the van and raced to Paula Watkins’s dark townhome. The detective lagged a little behind, holding her stomach with one hand and her police radio with the other.

“Shots fired!” she roared into the radio. “I repeat, shots fired at six East Sixty-Third, the residence of Paula Watkins. Need backup and ambulances at six East Sixty-Third! Now!”

Through the windows of Watkins’s home, Bree saw the slashing of cell phone flashlights and heard more screaming and cries of terror. She bounded up the front stairs, drawing her pistol.

The door and handle were moving but the door wasn’t opening; people were calling hysterically from the other side. She dug out her phone and shone the light into the locks, saw they were filled with some kind of glue or epoxy. “The door’s locked from the outside!” Bree shouted. “We’ve got police on the way. Get to the front windows and open them if you can!”

Salazar reached the bottom of the staircase. She was gasping for air. Frenzied guests were at the windows, but the windows appeared locked as well.

Someone finally threw a table through a window to the right of the door. Detective Salazar shouted, “NYPD! Where are the shooters?”

A terrified Phillip Henry Luster stuck his head out the window and shouted, “We don’t know! We couldn’t see a damn thing!”

Sirens wailed at them from multiple directions and quickly after, patrol cars were skidding to a stop in front of 6 East Sixty-Third Street. Salazar ordered them to seal the perimeter of the town house. “No one leaves unless they need immediate medical help,” the shaken detective said. “No one, not until we figure out who was shooting and who was shot. And get Con Edison on the line. I want the lights on in there before anyone enters.”

Twenty minutes later, media trucks were lined up at the end of the block. The lights went on in Watkins’s house and the screaming inside began all over again. Firemen broke down the front door with a battering ram.

Traumatized guests, many spattered with blood, streamed slowly from the residence. NYPD detectives and patrol officers began sorting and interviewing them.

Salazar looked at Bree. “I’m sorry, Chief, but I can’t let you in there.”

“I understand,” Bree said. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”

“Get the recording of Luster from the van. I want it in hand when I explain to my chief and the DA why I was first on the scene.”

“Of course,” Bree said.

The pregnant detective took a deep breath, climbed the stairs, and disappeared inside.

As Bree walked back toward the van she’d rented, she found herself suddenly trembling with adrenaline and on the verge of hyperventilating. Who was shooting in there? The sheikh’s bodyguards? The two mobsters?

She sat in the back of the van, forcing herself to breathe deep and slow, until she heard Luster talking over the receiver again. She crossed to it as the fashion designer said, “Brad, I so need to get out of here. I’m feeling claustrophobic and nauseous.”

Jenkins, sounding equally shaken, said, “You heard them, Phillip. Stay where we are until we’re told we’re good to leave.”

“I’m good right now!” Luster shot back.

Bree texted him: I’m in the van again. I can hear you. I know this is rough, but tell me what you see.

In a wavering voice a few moments later, Luster said, “There are at least nine people we can see dead in here. Paula’s one of them. So is Ari Bernstein, the hedge-fund hack. They’re on their backs about twenty feet from us. Both were shot between the eyes. And Brad’s contact, Victor, is dead, along with a woman I don’t know next to him. I don’t recognize the others, but one looks like a sheikh of some sort. There are two men dead near him and two others by the bar that someone said were known mobsters.”

Ivanovic and Flynn! Bree thought. She texted: Did you see the shooters?

“One,” Luster said. “He was near Paula and Ari, wearing a Saint Laurent tux from two seasons ago and a shirt with no bow tie. About five eight. Hundred and fifty pounds. Short, bristly, salt-and-pepper hair, unattractive face, unassuming manner. But he looked very fit, like a gymnast, so he held my attention more than several glances. Then I noticed he was playing with this metal cylinder thing in his left hand. It was maybe five inches long, two inches around, with buttons and glass lenses at both ends. Like a mini-telescope?”

“A mini-telescope?”