Run for Your Life by James Patterson Page B

Lavery said, rolling his eyes. “Just tell the Commish I said hi, next time you meet him for lunch at Elaine’s.”
    With the ritual chop–busting out of the way, Lavery flipped opened his notepad.
    “Here’s what we got so far,” he said. “Victim’s name is Kyle Devens. He was forty–six, gay, lived in Brooklyn, been working here eleven years. There was one witness to the actual incident, another clerk. He managed to whisper about a dozen words to us, then he went catatonic, so we don’t have a description of the shooter yet.”
    “Near as we can put it all together, he walked in here before noon, pulled out a semiautomatic pistol, pumped a full clip into our boy, then walked back out.”
    “That’s it?” I said. “No robbery, no struggle, nothing else?”
    “If he was trying to hold the place up, he really botched it, because absolutely nothing’s missing. If there’s another reason, we don’t know it.”
    “Did Devens have a boyfriend?” I said. Despite the antiterror response, we had to treat this as a regular murder until we knew otherwise.
    “The manager said he lived with a guy a couple of years ago, but it didn’t work out, so he moved back in with his mother. We’re still trying to contact her. But there didn’t seem to be anything in the wind like a lovers’ quarrel, and he got along with his coworkers. No priors or indications that he might have hung out with bad guys.”
    My lousy luck was holding. It was already clear that this wasn’t going to be an easy case.
    My gaze moved to the scattered cuff links in a crime scene cop’s camera FlashPack, sparkling like ornaments on the expensive rug — except that mixed in with them were several fat .45–caliber brass shell casings.
    The Crime Scene Unit tech, an old friend named John Cleary, caught me eyeing them. “Don’t get your hopes up, Mike,” he said. “We already dusted them. No prints. And if that’s not good enough news, no exit wounds, from a .45 at point–blank range. I’m not the ME, but my guess is that means hollow points.”
    More good news, all right. Not just a murderous psycho, but one who was locked and loaded with especially lethal ammo.
    Kyle Devens’s body was still lying on the fancy rug, too. He’d fallen in such a way that he was reflected in the ten–foot–high corner try–on mirror — a composition of blood, death, and broken glass, multiplied by three. I stared down at the gaping wounds in his chest.
    “Yeah, when you’re up against unarmed tie salesmen, everyone knows it’s all about stopping power.”
    But almost more unsettling than the degree of violence was the shooter’s meticulousness. Not only had he been quick and efficient, he’d used gloves when he loaded his gun.
    I thought of the 21 Club killing and I started to get the vague, uneasy hunch that we were dealing with the same man.
    There was nothing vague about my feeling that this was going to be one heck of a long day. That settled down on me like a soggy raincoat.
     
    Chapter 16
     
    A minor commotion at the store’s ground–floor entrance signaled the arrival of the medical examiner. I got out of his way and put in a call to Midtown South to find out if any more information had come to light about the other assaults that Commissioner Daly had mentioned.
    The detective who’d caught the case was a newly promoted woman named Beth Peters, whom I’d never met before.
    “The girl in the subway says somebody shoved her. She wasn’t paying attention, so she didn’t see who. But a dozen witnesses saw a man standing right beside her. One elderly lady swears he bumped her deliberately with his hip, and several others think he might have.”
    “Description of the guy?” I said.
    “Not anything like you’d think. A businessman, very well groomed, wearing a quote unquote ‘gorgeous’ tailored gray suit. White male, around thirty. Black hair, six two, two hundred pounds. In other words, a metrosexual sociopath. Very