“Let’s see what you got, Lenny,” Kylie said.
Ringel scrolled through several more pictures—one with the two of them smiling at the camera, one where Erin stuck her tongue out, and finally one where she was planting a kiss on his cheek.
“Pretty kick-ass, right?” Ringel said. “She did it as a favor for my girlfriend, Darcy. Real nice of her. I hope you find the bastard who took her.”
“Lenny, I’m going to have to take your phone,” Kylie said.
“My phone? Why?”
“Those are the last known photos of Erin Easton before she was kidnapped. They’ll be very helpful in our investigation.”
“Oh, jeez … you really need my phone?”
“Yes,” Kylie said, holding her hand out. “I’m afraid your girlfriend is going to have to wait before she gets to see them.”
“She won’t have to wait,” Ringel said, reluctantly putting the phone in Kylie’s hand. “I … I texted them to her as soon as Erin left.”
McMaster couldn’t hold back. “Damn it, Ringel, you were hired to safeguard these people, not socialize with them. This is why I put you back here, away from a roomful of celebrities. Detective MacDonald, please give this idiot his phone back so he can call his girlfriend and tell her to delete those pictures immediately.”
“Boss,” Ringel said, not reaching for his phone, “it’s too late. By now those pictures are out there.”
“Out where? ” McMaster demanded.
Ringel couldn’t bring himself to say the word. Instead he twirled two fingers in the air as if to downplay the size and scope of the worldwide network that would connect billions of people to the pictures of a New York City cop clowning around with the woman he was hired to protect.
I could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Post: “Erin Easton Kidnapped While Starstruck NYPD Cop Mugs for Camera.”
Somewhere toward the bottom of the story they might get around to saying he was a retired cop. But the takeaway would simply be “fuckup cop.” The damage-control department at 1PP would be working overtime.
“Out there,” Ringel finally said. “You know …”
We knew. And there was nothing we could do about it.
CHAPTER 5
MCMASTER FIRED RINGEL on the spot.
It came as no surprise to Kylie or me. Lenny, on the other hand, was predictably blindsided.
“For what? A couple of harmless pictures?” he said as one of the other security guards escorted him out the door.
I knew men like McMaster. He’d take full responsibility for Ringel’s failings, but this was not the time to explain or apologize. He went right to the task at hand. He looked at his watch. “She went in there at seven oh eight. If the kidnappers took her early on, they have close to an hour-and-a-half lead on us.”
McMaster might have claimed he was just a civilian tagging along with us, but at his core he was a cop who was used to running the show. The time reference was to let us know that he was looking for some quick answers from the crime scene guys. His words and his body language said it all. He did everything but yell, Let’s get this party started.
Kylie fielded the not-so-subtle hint. “Chuck Dryden is the best criminalist I’ve ever worked with,” she said. “He’s not as fast as some of the others, but he’s got eyes like a hawk.”
“I know Dryden,” McMaster said. “I just wish I could light a fire under him.”
“You can’t, and I can’t,” I said. “But the Chuckster is rather fond of my partner here, and I’ll bet he’s never seen her with this much cleavage. That might generate some heat.”
It did. Dryden lit up as soon as he saw his favorite detective standing at his crime scene door.
“Chuck,” she said, “I know you haven’t dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s yet, but can you at least give me an idea of what we’re looking at here?”
He nodded and walked us to the threshold of the dressing room.
I hadn’t been able to see much from the other side, but from this angle I could see an overturned chair, an empty wineglass, and a bloodstained wedding gown on the carpet.
“So the chair toppled, and the glass fell when they grabbed her,” I said. “I can’t figure out why the dress is on the floor.”
“Knowing Erin, she threw it there when she changed,” McMaster said. “She never hangs anything up. She has people for that.”
“We found this under her dressing table,” Dryden said. He held up a piece of orange plastic that I recognized immediately. It was the safety cap from a hypodermic needle.
“There’s no trace of the syringe,” Dryden said. “They probably took it with them, but they must have dropped this when they uncapped the needle, and they didn’t have time to look for it.”
He put the cap under my nose. “Smell it,” he said.
I took a whiff. Then another. “It smells like liquid dish detergent,” I said.
“I have to test it, but I’m pretty sure it’s ketamine,” he said.
“Special K,” Kylie said. “It’s a party drug.”
“Erin’s not a druggie,” McMaster said. “She’s too smart. That shit ravages your body. She says using drugs would be like buying a store, filling it with all the things you want to sell, then setting fire to it just for kicks. If that’s ketamine, then whoever took her used it to knock her out.”
“If they drugged her, where did all the blood come from?” Kylie asked, pointing at the red stains on the front of the wedding gown.
Dryden held up a pair of angle-tip forceps. Between the pincers was clamped a tiny sliver of green and gold tinged with blood.
“It’s a computer chip,” Dryden said. “We’ll be able to run a battery of tests on it when we get it back to the lab, but even here in the field, I can tell you that in addition to the blood, we found traces of skin cells snagged on some of the copper ridges, and we can make out the word Kinjo engraved on the—”
“Son of a bitch,” McMaster said. “The bastards cut her open.”
“You know what that chip is?” I said.
“Yeah. It’s called a LyfeTracker,” he said. “Erin makes only a small percentage of her income from shooting these reality shows. The bulk of it comes from endorsements. It doesn’t matter what kind of company; if they offer her enough money, she’ll hawk their product. Kinjo is a Korean tech company, and LyfeTracker is like Fitbit in that it tracks your activity, your sleep, your heart rate—all that shit. Only LyfeTracker also has a GPS function like a smartphone. They implant the chip under your skin. It’s pretty quick and easy, like getting a piercing. Once it’s in your body, the theory is if you’re out there hiking in the wilderness, and you get lost, someone who has access to your account can track you down.
“Kinjo signed her to a multiyear, multimillion-dollar deal, and she shot a commercial in a bunch of different locations—the beach, the mountains, a penthouse—and in each scene she’s saying, ‘You can find me here,’ ‘You can find me here,’ ‘You can find me here.’ In the last scene she’s in the shower looking real sexy, and she says, ‘With LyfeTracker, you can find me anywhere.’