We were on our way back to the precinct when Cates called. I put her on speaker. “I just got off the phone with Barbara O’Brien,” she said.
“What does she want?” I said. “My badge or my balls?”
“She told me she tore into you, but she’s changed her tune now that the bomb is disabled and you somehow magically came up with a warrant. Now she wants me to put you both up for a commendation.”
“We’ll settle for a day off,” Kylie said.
“It’s not in the cards. I need your asses back here. Your two drone bandits lawyered up. ADA Kaplan is trying to cut a deal with them now.”
“A deal?” I said. “Those smug bastards blackmailed a judge.”
“Kaplan doesn’t care. They’ve got something she wants, and she’s willing to give away the store to get it.”
“Tell her to hold off. We’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. Kylie hit the accelerator, and the car lurched forward. “Or less.”
Seven minutes later, we walked into an interrogation room where ADA Selma Kaplan was sitting with the two blackmailers and a woman in her late thirties with curly red hair and a pleasant smile.
“This is Grace Marschand,” Kaplan said, introducing us.
“I’m Troy’s big sister,” she said. “I’m a personal injury lawyer, but my brother can’t afford an expensive criminal attorney, and he doesn’t trust public defenders, so here I am. Good thing for him I watch a lot of Law & Order.”
It was an act, and I didn’t buy the fish-out-of-water routine for a second. If Grace Marschand were really out of her element, she’d be a wreck. This woman knew what she was doing, and I could see by the smirk on Dylan Freemont’s face that she was doing it well.
Selma Kaplan stood up. “I need a moment outside with my detectives.”
“Oh, take all the time you need,” Marschand said. “But I just want to tell you both that Troy and Dylan are really, really sorry about what they did, and they’re giving back all of the money.”
“Is there any left?” Kylie said. “Because they went on a really, really big spending spree last weekend.”
“I know. Shameful,” Marschand said, looking at her brother like he was a naughty puppy who’d soiled the carpet. “But they still have eighty-four thousand left, and I’m going to make up the difference.”
“I must have missed the episode of Law & Order where the penalty for committing a class D felony is giving back the money if you get caught,” Kylie said. “Your clients are looking at seven years, counselor.”
Marschand smiled sweetly. “And yet Ms. Kaplan has just offered to drop all charges.”
Before we could say a word, Kaplan herded us out of the room.
“Drop all charges?” Kylie said as soon as we closed the door. “Selma, what the hell have they got?”
“Thirty-two hidden-camera sex tapes, every one of them starring Aubrey Davenport.”
“And who are her costars?”
“According to Ms. I Don’t Know Anything About Criminal Law, they are the pillars of the community: the CEO of an international bank, a congressman, a newscaster, a university chancellor—a laundry list of New York City’s boldest boldface names.”
“So Troy Marschand had Aubrey’s laptop all along.”
“No. That’s still missing. Troy says he was cleaning the office one day, and he stumbled on an external hard drive. He didn’t know what it was, so he and Dylan screened the contents. Turns out that Aubrey spent over a year shooting this secret documentary. She wanted to expose these upstanding princes of industry as liars, cheaters, and sexual deviants.”
“You mean she wanted to blackmail them.”
“No. She was a dedicated filmmaker. She wasn’t thinking about money. She wanted an Oscar. It was only after she was murdered that those two clowns realized they were sitting on a gold mine and went into the extortion business.”
“That calls for some jail time in my book,” Kylie said. “Offer them three years. They’ll get out in eighteen months, but at least they’ll have—”
Kaplan cut her off. “You think like a cop, MacDonald. The DA thinks like a politician. If those tapes ever saw the light of day, it would rock this city’s establishment to the core. Forget about going to trial. I can’t even charge them with anything, or it’ll be on the public record.”
“So the DA is willing to cut them loose just to suppress those tapes,” I said.
“Zach, these are the people that Red is supposed to take care of.”
“Protect and defend, Selma. Not cover up.”
“It’s not your call, and it’s not mine,” Kaplan said. “It’s the DA’s.”
“No doubt with some input from our politician in chief, Mayor Sykes,” Kylie said. “I bet every horndog on those tapes donated generously to her campaign.”
“Sweetheart, you’ve been at this long enough not to sound shocked. The mayor and the DA are simply protecting the hands that feed them.”
“Where is this external hard drive with all these damning videos now?” I said.
“Troy hid it in his mother’s basement. We should have it in a few hours.”
“Then maybe there’s an upside to all this,” I said.
“Please,” Kaplan said. “I could use an upside.”
“Most likely the external hard drive is a backup, and the original videos are still on Aubrey’s laptop. Do you think Troy and Dylan have it?”
“Troy swears that they don’t, and I believe him. He’d be too scared to hang on to it.”
“And Janek Hoffmann didn’t have it, either,” I said. “But somebody does.”
“The question is who.”
“We know that Aubrey always had it with her, so my best guess is that somebody found out about this secret documentary, killed her, took the laptop, and has no idea there’s a second copy. And I’m betting it’s one of the thirty-two men on those videos.”
“I guarantee you it’s not the Honorable Michael J. Rafferty,” Kylie said, a wide grin on her face.
“There you go,” I said. “We’ve just narrowed down the suspect list to thirty-one of our fair city’s most respected citizens.”