CHAPTER 44

Sometimes when I’m driving, my mind will drift off, and when I finally snap out of it, I have no idea how I managed to travel so far without running off the road.

It’s called highway hypnosis. I guess there must be a conference room version of it, because by the time I shook Theo’s DNA test out of my head, Kylie was in the middle of explaining something about shock absorbers, and I had no idea what she was talking about.

“Kylie, sorry,” I called out. “Could you start again? Take it from the top.”

“No problem,” she said. “Anything wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I think my brain just got all twisted up with this news about Alice, and I guess I tuned out for a sec.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, tossing me a look that said she knew me too long and too well to buy my bullshit about Alice. “The lab called. They got a partial plate on Barbara’s RAV4. It’s just one number—seven—but it’s a big help.”

She paused and looked at me. “I was just explaining how they came up with it. You all caught up now?”

“Totally,” I said. “Keep going.”

“When Theo’s motorcycle hit the rear bumper of the SUV, the front shock absorbers on the bike compressed, and the ass end went straight up in the air.” She punched her right fist into the palm of her left hand, then tipped her right elbow toward the ceiling. “It’s like doing a handstand on his front tire. The impact literally embossed the number from Barbara’s license plate onto Theo’s metal fender.

“Now, the world is full of black RAV4s,” she said. “And hundreds of them have a seven in the plate. But how many do you think were parked in the vicinity of West Hundred-and-Second Street and Riverside Drive on the morning Curtis Hellman was stabbed?”

“And you think Barbara drove there?” Cates asked.

“We don’t know. He could have taken a cab or a subway. But it makes more sense to drive. It’s a lot less exposure than using public transportation.”

“And if he did drive,” Koprowski said, “he’s too smart to expect he would find a parking space on the Upper West Side at that hour of the morning.”

“Tell me about it,” Cates said. “He’d wind up doing what I always do: find a parking garage and pay through the nose to leave it there for a couple of hours.”

“That’s the hope,” Kylie said. “If he did, we figured he’d park within easy walking distance of the crime scene—maybe five or six blocks. But he’s a professional. He’s not going to take the easy way out. So Rich and I thought we should expand the area to ten blocks on either side.”

“It’s a one-mile stretch from Ninety-Second to a Hundred-and-
Twelfth, and from the river to Central Park West,” Koprowski said.

“That’s a big chunk of real estate,” Cates said. “How many garages and parking lots are we talking about?”

“Fifty-six,” Kylie said. “But we’ve been coordinating with Cardona and Henry from the Two-Four. Their CO flew in eight more detectives from the surrounding precincts. It should go fast.”

It went faster than we expected. Within two hours, we had six black RAV4s that were in and out of those garages in the time frame we’d decided on. Two of them had a seven in their license plate. Both cars were owned by men. We ran their driver’s licenses.

The first man’s picture popped on Koprowski’s computer screen. Name: Raymond Villeneuve. Home address: West Ninety-Eighth Street, Manhattan. Age: thirty-seven.

I could almost feel the energy getting sucked out of the room.

Koprowski brought up the next picture. Name: Wesley Varga. Home address: Fitchett Avenue, Rego Park, Queens. Age: seventy-one.

And his face—his face was the spitting image of the sketch our homeless artist, Izaak Weathers, had drawn for us three nights ago at the Twenty-Fourth Precinct.

Kylie let out a booming whoop. We had found Barbara.