Bree wished she could respond to the fashion designer over the wire. She sent him a text: Hearing you loud and clear. Try to get an invite.
She and Salazar listened as Luster weaved through the crowd. “There’s more beauty here than on South Beach. It’s like a delicatessen for well-scrubbed skin.” He paused. “What? No, I’m not going to try to get an invite to the after-party. You heard Paula’s subtext. I’m expected to have two drinks, nibble some gourmet tasties, and be gone before the real fun begins.”
Salazar said, “Tell Luster to take selfies around anyone he finds interesting so we can identify them later.”
Bree texted him the orders.
“That I can do,” Luster said.
For the next forty minutes, Bree and Salazar listened as the fashion designer mingled with people in the crowd, trying to engage in small talk with some of the older men and largely being rebuffed when he quizzed them about their backgrounds.
Luster said, “You’re not picking this up, I suppose, but there’s definitely a sense of lechery in the air in here.”
Bree texted, What about Victor? Or Katherine?
After a few moments, he said, “I haven’t met either of them yet, though Brad is engaged in a deep conversation with a thick-browed Russian sort at the moment. I’ll wander over.”
Salazar groaned, stood up, pushed her chair over by Bree, and sat by the rear window. “After-party or no after-party, ten minutes and I gotta go home, put my feet up.”
“Understood,” Bree said. “I’ll get you a recording of whatever you miss.”
Out the rear window, Bree saw two black Cadillac Escalades pull up in front of Watkins’s house. A big muscular man climbed out from the front passenger side of each car, both with their hands in their black leather jackets.
“More guests. These are wearing body armor, I think,” Bree said.
“Let me take a look,” the detective said. Bree handed her the binoculars. Salazar peered through them as each bodyguard opened the rear passenger door of a vehicle. A man climbed out of each one.
“Holy Mother,” Salazar said after a moment. “Will you look at that!”
“What? Who are they?”
The police detective did not reply, just kept studying the scene until the two men had gone inside and the bodyguards had been driven away. Then she lowered the binoculars in wonder.
“The guy from the first car? That’s Petro Ivanovic, reputed head of a violent Russian crew based in New York. I learned about him when I was involved in an investigation of Russian organized crime in Queens. The brush-cut tough from the second car is Rory Flynn, runs the Irish mob out of Brooklyn.”
Bree threw back her head and laughed. “Are you kidding me? Mobsters at Paula Watkins’s house?”
“And maybe at an after-party at Paula’s house,” Salazar said. “God, I wish we’d known those two were going to be here. The DA would have been all over—”
The receiver squawked behind them. Luster said, “It’s him—Victor. I’m sure of it. He and Brad are talking very, very intently.”
Bree texted, About what?
Salazar, who was still watching the street, said, “Who’s this now?”
Bree looked up in time to see a figure in a dark hoodie leave the sidewalk and jog up the stairs to Watkins’s front door. The figure stood there a moment, pivoted, then jogged down the stairs, back up the sidewalk, and around the corner.
Salazar said, “What was that about?”
Before Bree could reply, Luster said, “How would I know what Brad and Victor are talking about? It’s not like I can just worm my way in.”
Why not? Bree texted.
As she was about to hit Send, Luster said, “What the hell? Oh my God, no!”
The lights in Paula Watkins’s home died.
Nervous laughter poured from the radio receiver. Luster’s voice shook as he said, “I think that guy had a—”
They heard a woman scream, four loud thuds, and more shouting and screaming.
“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.”