Nikki didn’t go home following the movie after all. She stood on the sidewalk in the warm, spongy air of the summer night looking up at her apartment, the one where she had lived as a girl and that she had left to go to college in Boston, and then left again on an errand to buy cinnamon sticks because ground wouldn’t do. The only thing up there in that two-bedroom was solitude without peace. She could be nineteen again walking into a kitchen where her mother’s blood was pooling under the refrigerator, or, if she could bat the image balloons away, she could catch some news on the tube and hear about more crimes—heat-related, the Team Coverage would say. Heat-related crime. There was a time when that had made Nikki Heat smile.
She weighed texting Don, to see if her combat trainer was up for a beer and some close-quarter bedroom grapples, against the alternative of letting some late night comic in a suit help her escape without the crowded bathroom in the morning. There was another alternative.
Twenty minutes later, in her empty precinct squad room, the detective swiveled in her chair to contemplate the whiteboard. She already had it burnished in her head, all the elements-to-date pasted and scrawled inside that frame which did not yet reveal a picture: the list of fingerprint matches; the green five-by-seven index card with its bullet points of Kimberly Starr’s alibis and prior lives; photos of Matthew Starr’s body where he hit the sidewalk; photos from the M.E. of the punch bruising on Starr’s torso with the distinctive hexagonal mark left by a ring.
She rose and walked up to the ring mark photo. More than studying its size and shape, the detective listened to it, knowing that at any time any piece of evidence could gain a voice. This photo, above all other puzzle pieces on the board, was whispering to her. It had been in her ear all day, and its whisper was the song that had drawn her to the squad room in the stillness of night so she could hear it clearly. What it whispered was a question: “Why would a killer who tossed a man over a balcony also beat him with nonlethal blows?” These bruises weren’t random contusions from any scuffle. They were precise and patterned, some even overlapping. Don, her combat boxing instructor, called it “painting” your opponent.
One of the first things Nikki Heat had implemented when she took command of her homicide unit was a system to facilitate information sharing. She logged on the server and opened the read-only file OCHOA. Scrolling through pages, she came to his witness interview with the doorman at the Guilford. Love that Ochoa, she thought. His keyboard skills are crap, but he took great notes and asked the right questions.
Q: Had vic lef bdg anytm drng curse of morng?
A: N.
Nikki closed Ochoa’s file and looked at the clock. She could text her boss, but he might not see it. Like if he was sleeping. Drumming her fingers on the phone was only making it later, so she punched his number. On the fourth ring Heat cleared her throat, preparing to leave a voice mail, but Montrose picked up. His hello was not sleepy and she could hear the TV blasting the weather forecast. “Hope it’s not too late to call, Captain.”
“If it is too late, it’s too late to hope. What’s up?”
“I came in to screen that surveillance cam video from the Guilford and it’s not here yet. Do you know where it is?”
Her boss covered the phone and said something muffled to his wife. When he came back to Nikki, the TV sound was off. He said, “I got a call tonight during dinner from the attorney representing their residents board. This is a building with wealthy tenants sensitive about privacy issues.”
“Do they have issues with their fellow tenants hurtling past their windows?”
“You trying to convince
Of course the skipper was right. Waking a judge to cut a warrant was capital you spent on high-priority matters against a ticking clock. To most judges this was just another homicide, and she knew better than to push Captain Montrose to squander a chip like that. So she switched her desk lamp off.
Then she switched it back on. Rook was pals with a judge. Horace Simpson was a poker pal at the weekly game she always ducked when Rook invited her. Simpson was not as sexy a name drop as Jagger, but last she heard, none of the Stones was issuing warrants.
But hang on, she thought. Eager was one thing, owing a favor to Jameson Rook was another. And besides, she had overheard him boasting to Roach he had a dinner date with that groupie in the halter who crashed Nikki’s crime scene. At this hour, Heat might be interrupting the application of his autograph to a new and more exciting body part.
So she picked up the phone and dialed Rook’s cell.
“Heat,” he said with no surprise. It was more a shout-out, like on
“Is this a bad time?”
“The caller ID says you’re at the precinct.” Evasion. Writer Monkey wasn’t answering her question. Maybe if she threatened the Zoo Lockup.
“A cop’s work is never done, and all that. Are you writing?”
“I’m in a town car. Just had an awesome meal at Balthazar.” Then silence. She had called to screw with him, how did her head end up being the one messed with?
“You can give me your Zagat rating some other time, this is a business call,” she told him, even as she wondered if his halter groupie knew not to wear cutoff jeans to a bistro, SoHo hip or otherwise. “I called to tell you don’t come in for the morning meeting. It’s off.”
“Off? That’s a first.”
“The plan was for us to prep for a sit-down with Kimberly Starr tomorrow morning. That meeting’s in question now.”
Rook sounded beautifully alarmed. “How come? We need to get with her.” She loved the urgency in his voice more than she felt guilty for playing him.
“The whole reason to see her is to screen surveillance pictures from the Guilford yesterday, but I can’t get access to the surveillance tape without a warrant, and good luck reaching a judge tonight.” Heat envisioned underwater video of a big mouth bass opening wide for the miracle lure on one of those sport fishing infomercials she saw too many of on her sleepless nights.
“I know a judge.”
“Forget it.”
“Horace Simpson.”
Now Nikki was up, pacing the length of the bull pen, trying to keep the grin out of her voice as she said, “Listen to me, Rook. Stay out of this.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Rook, I am telling you no,” she said in her best command voice.
“I know he’s still up. Probably watching his soft-core porn channel.” And then Nikki heard the woman giggle in the background just as Rook hung up. Heat had gotten just what she wanted, but it somehow didn’t feel like the win-win she’d envisioned. And why did she care? she asked herself yet again.
At ten o’clock the next morning, in the stickiness of what the tabloids were calling “The Summer of Simmer,” Nikki Heat, Roach, and Rook met under the Guilford canopy holding two sets of twelve still frames from the lobby surveillance camera. Heat left Raley and Ochoa to show one array to the doorman while she and Rook entered the building for their appointment with Kimberly Starr.
As soon as the elevator doors closed, he started in. “You don’t have to thank me.”
“Why should I thank you? I specifically told you not to call that judge. As usual, you do what you please, meaning the opposite of what I say.”
He paused to absorb the truth of that and said, “You’re welcome.” Then he broke out that shit-eater of his, “It’s the subtext thing. Oo, the air is thick with it this morning, Detective Heat.” And was he even looking at her? No, he was tilted back enjoying the up-count of LED numbers, yet she still felt all X-rayed and naked and at a loss for words. The soft bell chimed a rescue signal on six. Damn him.
