He gave a nod at his ravaged apartment. “Party for one.”
“I don’t think so,” Kylie said. “Aubrey’s car is parked around the corner. We know she was here last night.”
That stumped him. He scrunched his eyes tight again, rummaged through his muddled memory bank, and came up with insufficient funds. “She was?”
“You tell us, Janek.”
He sat forward on the edge of the sofa and massaged his temples. “I don’t know. Maybe she was. My brain is a little fuzzy since Friday. Why the hell don’t you ask her if she was here?”
Kylie squatted, leaned in so close that she was practically eyeball to eyeball with him, and whispered, “I can’t ask her. She’s dead.”
“Dead?” The wheels inside his steroid-addled head were turning now, and I could see that he was finally on the verge of being able to put two and two together. “And is that why you’re here? Do you think I killed her?”
“We don’t think you killed her,” I said, tired of letting my partner have all the fun. “We know you killed her. She parked her car nearby, then the two of you took your car to Roosevelt Island, where you tied her up, whipped her, choked her to death, came home, and fired up your amnesia pipe, hoping it would all go away. It won’t. The only thing going away will be you.”
He stared at me with his high beams on. “Roosevelt Island? Near the big old haunted house?”
If we had taken him into custody, we would have had to warn him that anything he said could be used against him. But we hadn’t arrested him, and cops are not required to stop a chatterbox from incriminating himself.
“Now it’s coming back to you, isn’t it?” I said. “That’s where we found her body. You’re in deep shit, Janek, but we can help. Tell us everything now, and we’ll see to it that you get brownie points with the DA’s office.”
Silence.
Kylie sat down on the sofa next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and spoke softly. “Get it off your chest, Janek. Tell us the truth. Did you kill her?”
He shook his head, and began to sob. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
CHAPTER 10
There are two ways to search a suspect’s apartment: get a warrant, which would take hours, or con the tenant into giving us permission, which in Janek Hoffmann’s case would take seconds. Kylie took the lead.
“Let’s go easy on him, Zach,” she said, her hand still on our prime suspect’s shoulder. “So he can’t remember anything. That doesn’t make him guilty. Maybe he didn’t do it.”
That’s the genius of Kylie MacDonald. A few minutes before, she was kicking the guy when he was down, trash-talking him, using every trick in the Bad Cop’s Handbook to goad a confession out of him.
Now she was Detective Mother Teresa, and it was my turn to put on the Bad Cop pants.
“‘Maybe he didn’t do it’?” I bellowed. “And maybe when he wakes up tomorrow morning he’ll be six foot two.” I kicked my voice up an octave. “He’s a juicer, a crackhead, and now he’s a murderer. All the DA has to do is get up in front of a jury and say two words—’roid rage—and this sackless wonder will spend the next forty years doing drop sets in the prison yard at Green Haven.”
“At least give him a chance to prove he’s innocent.” She turned to Hoffmann. “Can you do that, Janek? Can you prove you were here last night?”
He gave it his best shot. “I might have had some friends over. I could call around and see if any of them—”
“Friends lie,” Kylie said. “You have to do better than that.”
He shook his head, his reservoir of ideas dried up.
“What about take-out food?” Kylie said. “Did you get a delivery last night?”
“Probably. I mean, I order in all the time.” He pointed with pride at the array of pizza boxes, Chinese food containers, and other roach bait rotting on the kitchen table. “We can call and see if any of the delivery guys remember.”
“It won’t fly,” Kylie said. “The DA thinks delivery guys lie even more than friends. Let’s look around and see if we can find a receipt with the date on it.”
Janek thought that was a stellar idea and was grateful when we offered to help search the apartment for his meal ticket to freedom. We neglected to tell him that if we happened to stumble on a tripod, it would be admissible evidence.
Since it took us less than a minute to find a couple of crack pipes and a bag of weed in his dresser drawer, we realized that hiding shit from the cops wasn’t his strong suit. After ten minutes, we knew the tripod wasn’t in the apartment.
“My ex was in the film business,” Kylie said once we’d come up empty-handed. “I’m surprised this place isn’t cluttered with camera equipment.”
“It all belongs to Aubrey,” Janek said. “She keeps it in her office. Did you find any receipts yet?”
“No, which means you still don’t have an alibi,” Kylie said. “Give me your cell. The GPS might tell us if you were here last night.”
Without missing a beat, he passed her his phone, and I wondered why the hell an intelligent photojournalist like Aubrey Davenport would spend more than ten minutes with this brain-dead Neanderthal.
If we had any doubts that Janek was a narcissist, they were put to rest when we opened his photo app. There were gigabytes of selfies of him oiled up and stripped down to nothing but the classic ball-cupping posing thong.
And then we found what we thought was pay dirt: a series of pictures of Aubrey, fully clothed, standing in front of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital.
“What are these?” Kylie asked him.
“That’s the place,” he said.
“What place?”
“The creepy place on Roosevelt Island where you said you found her.”
“What were the two of you doing there?”
“Aubrey thought she might want to do a documentary about it. A lot of people died there, and death really turned her on. She’d rather have sex in a cemetery than a five-star hotel.”
“Did you have sex there?” I asked.
“Shit, man, we had sex everywhere.”
“These are dated last October,” I said. “Have you been back there since?”
“A couple of times. But not in the winter. And definitely not last night.”
We delved into his contacts, his phone log, his browser history, his text messages, and dozens of unappetizing sexts between him and Aubrey, but other than finding out that they had a twisted long-term love-hate-work-sex relationship, there was no evidence to link him to her murder.
My text alert beeped, and I checked my phone. It was Malley.
I know who made your bomb. Meet me at 26 Fed.
It took me a beat to put it together, and then it all came flooding back. The Silver Bullet dinner. A smiling Del Fairfax suddenly ripped in half. A tiny pigtail of red, white, and blue wire. I’d become so immersed in the narrow world of Janek Hoffmann that for a few glorious minutes I’d totally forgotten that Kylie and I had another homicide to solve.
CHAPTER 11
I showed the text to Kylie.
“At least the FBI’s got their act together,” she said. “We’re not getting anywhere with this lunk. How are we supposed to figure out if he killed Aubrey if he can’t figure it out himself?”
Janek was out cold on the sofa, snoring like a bear. “I doubt if he’s a flight risk,” I said.
“I doubt if there’s a risk of him getting out of the apartment.”
The sun was up when we left the building, and the air was thick with the heady aroma of something sweet and irresistible. We followed our noses to a tiny bakery on the corner of Java Street.
The sign on the window said RZESZOWSKA, which I decided meant the best place in New York to get cheese babka, poppy seed rolls, blackberry Danish, and if you want coffee, find a Starbucks.