NYPD Red 4 Read Online Free Page B

mood,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to be Charlie.”
    “Hell,” Kylie said, “if this is the real Muriel Sykes, then I wouldn’t want to be Howard.”
    That got a laugh out of me. Howard Sykes was the mayor’s husband. We went back up the porch steps to find out what nasty can of worms he was about to entrust us with.

CHAPTER 7
    Muriel Sykes was a scrappy kid from the streets of Brooklyn who worked her way through law school, was appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, then crushed a sitting mayor in her first run for office. If she had one defining quality that propelled her along the way, it was grit.
    Her husband was neither gritty nor scrappy. A privileged child raised on New York’s affluent Sutton Place, Howard Sykes had navigated his way from the city’s private school system to the Ivy League and ultimately to Madison Avenue, where his white-bread good looks and well-bred patrician manner made him a natural fit in a world where image was often more valued than substance.
    But there was a lot more to the man than a proper golf swing and a gift for captivating his dinner guests with advertising war stories. Howard was a virtuoso at orchestrating marketing campaigns that won the hearts of consumers and sweetened the bottom lines of his clients. He retired at the age of sixty to manage his wife’s political campaign and was credited with being the force behind making her the first female mayor of New York City.
    And to top it all off, he was a hell of a nice guy. Kylie and I had met him at several charity functions, and he had a way of always making us feel as important as any billionaire in the room.
    He was waiting for us in the living room of the First Family’s private residence. “Zach, Kylie, thanks for coming,” he said, ignoring the fact that it was a command performance.
    “How can we help?” I asked.
    “I’m on the board of trustees of two hospitals here in the city,” he said. “A month ago some medical equipment disappeared from Saint Cecilia’s.”
    “What kind of equipment?”
    Ever the consummate adman, Howard had prepared visual aids. He opened up a folder and pulled out a photo of a contraption that looked like an iPad on steroids.
    “That’s a portable ultrasound machine used for cardiac imaging. It weighs ten pounds, which means the tech can walk it to any bedside in the hospital.”
    “But this one walked out of the hospital,” I said.
    “This and two more just like it. They cost twenty thousand a pop. My first thought was that that’s the downside to making these machines so compact: they’re easy to steal. However”—he pulled out the next picture—“this one disappeared about the same time.”
    It looked like R2-D2’s taller brother.
    “It’s an anesthesia machine. Fifty thousand dollars, and at four hundred pounds, you can’t exactly slip it into a backpack. And yes, it has wheels, but it also has an electromagnetic security device embedded in it, and the hospital has guards at all access points. But it still went out the door.”
    “Did Saint Cecilia report the thefts?” Kylie asked.
    “No. We had no proof that anything was stolen, and we didn’t report them missing. The hospital decided to write it off and chalk it up to bad security.”
    Kylie and I said nothing. Because so far nothing made sense. A low-level crime that the victim didn’t report, and yet the mayor, knowing we were caught up in the Elena Travers murder, asked us to drop everything and get involved.
    Howard finally dropped the other shoe.
    “I’m also on the board at Mercy Hospital, and two days ago it was hit. This time they got away with a hundred and seventy thousand dollars’ worth of equipment. I don’t believe in coincidences, so I did some digging, and I found out that nine hospitals had been robbed in two months. Total haul, close to two million dollars.” He handed me a printout. “The specifics are all here.”
    “And you’d like us to find out