Bullets didn’t scare Ian Altman. He’d done two tours in Afghanistan as a combat photographer with the air force. He dropped to one knee and pointed his camera toward the action.
Through the lens, he could see it coming. A white stretch Cadillac careened out of control down West 54th Street, sideswiped a cop car, ricocheted off an NYPD traffic van, and plowed head-on into the pair of eight-hundred-million candlepower searchlights that had been lighting up the night.
Xenon bulbs exploded, and a hail of sparks and glass showered down on the cameraman as he zoomed in on the driver’s side window, where a body was slumped over the steering wheel.
The first wave of cops advanced on the limo, barking at the occupants to come out with their hands up.
Altman wheeled his camera around in time to catch a young man, his shirt covered in blood, stumble from the back door. Cops came at him from all sides screaming, “Down on the ground! Now, now, now!”
The man fell to his knees, threw his hands in the air, and screamed back, “She’s been shot! Get an ambulance!”
A sergeant yelled a command, and two cops approached the limo, peered inside, and then holstered their guns. The female cop crawled into the backseat while her male partner ran around the vehicle and entered it from the opposite side.
They slowly eased Elena Travers out of the car and set her down under the marquee — a rag doll, the front of her white gown as red as the carpet beneath her. The female officer knelt down and gently cradled Elena’s head.
The actress tried to speak, but all that came out was a pained whimper. The cop leaned in close, and Altman moved in tight enough to read her lips. “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”
It wouldn’t.
Ian Altman’s pulse was racing, but his hands were steady as he framed the tableau in his viewfinder. The actress and the cop, their eyes locked in an unfathomable bond. And then Elena took one last breath, and the light in her eyes went out.
Altman had captured death on video before, but it had always been surrounded by the horrors of war. This was almost peaceful, but at the same time so much more gut-wrenching.
Out of respect, he began to widen his lens, pulling back until he could compose his final shot, one that was going out on the air live, and would eventually go viral and be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world: Elena Travers, flawlessly beautiful, even in death, except for the deep gouges on her skin where Maxwell Bassett’s one-of-a-kind, eight-million-dollar masterpiece had been ripped from her chest.
Part One
Long Days. Short Nights.
Chapter 1
Nothing attracts a crowd like a dead celebrity.
By the time Kylie and I arrived at the crime scene, a wave of humanity had descended on the Ziegfeld Theater, bearing candles, flowers, stuffed animals, and, of course, pictures of the late Elena Travers.
The Daily News would sum it up with one word in their morning edition.
“Zach! Zach Jordan!”
I looked up and saw Stavros Kellepouris walking toward us. Sergeant Kellepouris was old-school, tough on his officers and even tougher on himself, which is why cops who work for him either respect him, hate his guts, or both.
“Zach, I knew they’d kick this one up to Red,” he said, shaking my hand. He turned to Kylie. “And you must be Detective MacDonald.”
“Kylie. Good to finally 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 strained against his bloody shirt.
It’s possible that he’d hit the genetic jackpot, but I’m enough of a gym rat to know a steroid user when I see one. The disproportionately developed upper body, the bulging veins on his hands, and the prominent acne told the story. Craig Jeffers was a juicer.