“How can I help you, officers?” she asked.
“We’re looking for your son, Teddy,” I said.
“Then you should get in touch with his parole officer. That fella always knows where Teddy is better than his own mother,” she said, capping it off with a roll of her eyes that looked like it had been lifted from a fifties sitcom.
“When did you last see him?” Kylie asked.
Annie tapped her chin and thought about it for a bit. “Oh, I remember,” she said. “He came here for dinner Monday night. I made a meat loaf. Then the two of us watched TV while we had our dessert.”
“What was on that night?” Kylie said, asking the standard cop follow-up question.
“Well, I love to watch the celebrities get all dolled up, so we turned on the show where they were doing live coverage of a Hollywood premiere. It was horrible. Here’s me and Teddy, just sitting there eating our Chunky Monkey ice cream, watching to see who’s the next one to walk down the red carpet, and all of a sudden, this limo crashes and out tumbles that poor actress who got shot.”
We hadn’t asked her for Teddy’s alibi for Monday night, but she’d decided to get it on the record. Her bogus story had just the right amount of detail, and she wrapped it up by gracing us with a warm grandmotherly smile, which I’m sure was the exact same one she’d lay on the jury when she perjured herself on her son’s behalf.
“Can you tell me what’s going on that you want to talk to Teddy?” Annie said. “He’s made some mistakes, but he served his time, and now he’s back on the straight and narrow.”
Normally, it’s not a question we’d answer, but she already knew why we were there. “We’re investigating a homicide,” I said. “A man named Raymond Davis was shot in his apartment.”
Annie covered her mouth with both hands, reeling from the horror of it all. “I hope you don’t suspect Teddy. He and Raymond were best of friends. Besides, my son would never, ever hurt a soul,” she said, her eyes watery. “It’s how he was raised.”
“Did Teddy ever talk to you about Raymond?” I asked. “Like, do you know if anyone had a grudge against him?”
“I wish I could help, but you know how boys are. Teddy never tells me anything. Always confides in his father. They had a long talk Monday night while I was fixing dinner.”
Bingo. We’d finally caught her in a lie. Q had told us that Buddy Ryder was dead, and NCIC had confirmed it.
“Then maybe his father can help us out,” I said. “Can we talk to him?”
She put her hand on my arm and led me over to a sideboard. “You can talk to him all you want,” she said, pointing to a bronze cremation urn with Buddy Ryder’s name engraved on it. “Just don’t expect him to talk back.”
Game, set, match.
“The envelope, please,” Kylie said as soon as we got in the elevator.
“I tried,” I said. “Did I even get nominated?”
“No. She played you like a grand piano. The old girl could have done her victory lap right after the Chunky Monkey ice cream and ‘that poor actress who got shot.’”
“I know. She had all the right answers before we even asked the questions.”
“Mothers lie, Zach. And Annie Ryder does it better than most.”
Chapter 34
We got back to the precinct three hours after we left Cates’s office pretending to be in hot pursuit of Annie Ryder.
“The captain is probably wondering why we’ve been gone so long,” Kylie said, giving me an impish grin.
Our side trip to Shelley’s apartment and Kylie’s throw-down with Spence’s stoner buddies had wasted a serious chunk of time, and the grin was to let me know that she didn’t care.
“I need five minutes before we go to her office,” I said, heading up the stairs.
“What’s more important than debriefing Cates?”
“Salvaging my relationship with Cheryl.”
“Bad idea. Cates put a freeze on personal time,” she said, giving me another grin.
I gave her the finger and double-timed my way up the stairs to Cheryl’s office. She wasn’t in. I bounded up another flight of stairs and got to Cates’s office just a few steps behind Kylie.
Cates was in the middle of a meeting, but she dropped everything as soon as she saw us. I’m sure she said something, but I didn’t process a single word. I just stood in the doorway staring at the three other people sitting in the room. Our backup team, Betancourt and Torres, and, next to them, Cheryl.
She gave me half a smile. On closer inspection, it looked more like half a frown. I eased my way into the room as Kylie gave Cates a top line summary of our visit to Annie Ryder.
“She definitely knows where Teddy is,” Kylie said, “but she’s too smart to lead us to him.”
“I’ll post a team outside her apartment anyway,” Cates said. “Any intel is better than nothing at all.”
“Thanks,” Kylie said.
“Glad you got here,” Cates said. “We’ve been running down where we are on the hospital robberies. Torres, catch them up.”
“Lynn Lyon hasn’t been anywhere near a hospital since we started tailing her,” Torres said. “She’s onto us.”
“She’s not onto us,” Betancourt corrected. “She knows that her cover is blown, and whoever she’s working for knows it. Her scouting days are over.”
“So now what?” Kylie said. “We can’t wait for them to hit another hospital and hope they trip up.”
“We are going to wait for them to hit another hospital,” Cates said. “But we’re going to be inside the hospital waiting for them to show up.”
“There are over a hundred major medical facilities in the five boroughs,” Kylie said. “We can’t cover all of them.”
“We only have to be at one, and Cheryl has an idea on how to zero in on the right one. I’ll let her spell it out for you.”
It was a sting, and a damn good one. It took Cheryl less than a minute to lay it out.
“I love it,” Kylie said, “but we can’t do it without Howard Sykes on board.”
“Then talk to him and get back to me,” Cates said. “This meeting is over.”
The group broke up, and Cheryl walked past me and down the hall.
I followed. “Cheryl, can we talk?”
She let one hand sweep across the wide-open squad room filled with cop eyes and cop ears. “This is not the right place for a conversation, Zach.”
“I just need to say six words.”
“Fine.” She gestured for me to follow her. She opened the door and started down the stairs. I thought we were going to her office, but after half a flight, she stopped, and the two of us stood in the empty stairwell. This was as much privacy as I was going to get.
“Six words,” she said.
I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. “I’m wrong. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
My father had taught me those words when I was seventeen, after I’d had a huge argument with my girlfriend the day before our senior prom. It had worked like gangbusters on my prom date, but it definitely wasn’t flying with Cheryl.
“Is that it?” she said.
“No. An apology is just the beginning. I want to talk about what happened and then prove to you that it won’t happen again.”
“We can’t exactly do that here,” she said, pointing at the grimy gray stairs and the city-mandated fire hose hanging on the wall.
“I was thinking dinner.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to cook,” she said.