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“Bike messengers? Where’d they go?” I said.
“They got on their bikes and, like, jetted, you know. I wasn’t really watching them. I just check people coming in, man. I figured they must have come in from Roberto’s side. Did they have anything to do with those alarms?”
“Where were the bikes?” Arturo said.
“They had them, like, chained to the shed pole there.”
“What did they look like?” I said.
“They was, like, three white boys, like ESPN host types.”
Three minutes later, Arturo and I were in the dingy, sweltering back security room of a Dressbarn beside the construction site on Forty-Sixth Street, playing back footage from its sidewalk-facing security camera.
The first guy came out from under the construction site’s shed with the bike at the 12:13 mark.
He was a medium-size man in black-and-white sport-racing gear on a modern sky-blue multisport bike that had weird, almost cartoonishly thick black tires. The other two were on beat-up silver bikes and were wearing camo shorts and gray hoodies. It was hard to get their facial features under their sunglasses and helmets, but the sizes and general descriptions were a match for our suspects, three thirty-something white guys, two large and one smaller.
I was calling in the descriptions when I screamed at Arturo.
“Wait! Hit the Pause button!”
In the security footage, the biggest and smallest suspects had immediately crossed to the south side of the street without incident, but the third one, the medium-size guy on the blue bike, had to stop at the rear of a UPS truck to wait for a Poland Spring water truck to pass.
I bent closer to the desktop security monitor until my nose was almost touching the screen. Then I turned and fled the cramped room.
“Lopez, come on!” I yelled, scrambling at top speed out the back-room corridor into the bright store, past the bulging racks of clothes.
“What the hell, Mike?”
Instead of answering him, I pushed out through the front doors and back out onto the street.
“Freeze! Police! Don’t move!” I yelled at the UPS guy twenty feet to the east, who was rolling an empty hand truck toward the rear of the brown truck in front of the store.
“Mike, what the hell?” Lopez repeated behind me.
“The medium-size guy on the blue bike touched the truck here to balance himself when he was crossing the street,” I said, pointing at the UPS truck’s gate. “He wasn’t wearing gloves. Arturo, we need to get CSI down here yesterday. I think we just got lucky. I think we just got ourselves a print.”
CHAPTER 97
I WAS RIGHT. We did get lucky. Half an hour later, all the planets finally aligned.
The prints that veteran CSU tech officer Gabriela Tremane took were beautiful. From the rear rolling gate of the UPS truck, she had peeled picture-perfect thumb, index, and middle fingerprints and a partial palm of the suspect’s right hand. Then, right there on the spot in front of the Dressbarn, she put them into her portable scanner, and before I even had a chance to cross my fingers, she smiled knowingly.
“We have a winner,” she said. “He’s in the system. Jeremy Rylan. Two Beekman Street, apartment four H, New York, New York.”
“If I weren’t in such a hurry, I’d go in there and buy you a dress, Gabriela. Make that two,” I said as I hopped into an undercover Chevy that we borrowed from the responding Midtown South detective squad.
“And I’d, uh, help you raise a barn to put it in,” Arturo said merrily as he hopped in beside me.
The address was downtown near City Hall on the northern end of the Financial District, at the intersection of Nassau and Beekman. It was a really nice, architecturally interesting building, a nineteenth-century palace of terra-cotta and brick that made me think of a red velvet wedding cake.
About an hour and twenty minutes had passed from the time of the robbery when we pulled up to the address. That was our advantage. There was no way Rylan would suspect that we could be onto him so fast. Especially after all the success he’d had.
As we were just about to get out of the car, we saw a guy on the sidewalk turn off the corner of Nassau from the north.
It was a guy on a bike.
A fancy sky-blue bike with funky black tires!
