“But muscle works,” said Ochoa.
“Gets it said,” agreed Raley.
Rook had out his Moleskine notebook and a pen. “I gotta get some of these down before I forget.”
“You do that,” said Heat. “I’ll be in with the…miscreant.”
“Vitya Pochenko, you’ve been a busy boy since you came to this country.” Nikki turned pages in his file, silent-reading as if she didn’t already know what was on them, and then closed it. His jacket was full of arrests for threats and violent acts, but no convictions. People either shied away from testifying against Iron Man or they left town. “You’ve gotten away clean. A lot. People either really like you, or they’re really afraid of you.”
Pochenko sat looking straight ahead with his eyes fixed on the two-way mirror. Not nervously checking himself, not like Barry Gable. No, he was fixed and focused on a point of his choosing. Not looking at her, not like he was even there with her. He seemed deep in his own mind and nowhere else. Detective Heat would have to change that.
“Your pal Miric mustn’t be afraid of you.” The Russian didn’t blink. “Not from what he just told me.” Still nothing. “He had some interesting things to say about what you did to Matthew Starr at the Guilford day before yesterday.”
Slowly, he unhooked his eyes from the ozone and rotated his head to face her. As he did, his neck twisted, revealing veins and tendons strung deep into bulky shoulders. He stared at her from underneath a thick ginger brow. At this angle in the downcast lighting he had a prizefighter’s face with a telltale nose that curved in an unnatural flatness where it had been broken. She decided he had been handsome once before the hardness. With the brush cut, she could picture the boy of him on a soccer field or lofting a stick in a hockey rink. But the hardness was what Pochenko was all about now, and whether it came from doing time in Russia or learning how not to do time, the boy was gone and all she saw in that room was what happens when you get very, very good at surviving very, very bad things.
Something like a smile formed in the deep creases at the corners of his mouth, but it never came. Then he spoke at last. “In the subway station when you were on top of me, I could smell you. Do you know what I’m talking about? Smelling you?”
Nikki Heat had been in all sorts of interrogations and interviews with every stripe of lowlife in God’s creation and those too damaged to make the list. The wiseguys and the crazies thought because she was a woman they could rattle her with some leering porn-movie trash talk. A serial killer once asked her to ride in the van so he could pleasure himself on the way to the penitentiary. Her armor was strong. Nikki had the investigator’s greatest gift, distance. Or maybe it was disconnection. But Pochenko’s casually spoken words, along with the entitled look he was giving her, the intrusion of his casualness and the threat carried in those amber resin eyes, made her shudder. She held his gaze and tried not to engage.
“I see you do know.” And then, most chilling of all, he winked. “I’m going to have that.” Then he made wet air kisses at her and laughed.
Then Nikki heard something she had never heard in the Interrogation Room before. Muffled shouting from the observation booth. It was Rook, his voice smothered by soundproofing and double-pane glass, hollering at Pochenko. It sounded like he was shouting through a pillow, but she heard “…animal…scumbag…filthy mouth…,” followed by pounding on the glass. She turned over her shoulder to look. Hard to be nonchalant when the mirror is flexing and rattling. Then came the dampened shouts of Roach and it stopped.
Pochenko glanced from the mirror to her with an unsettled look. Whatever had gotten into Rook’s pea brain and made him slip his leash in there, he had succeeded in undercutting the Russian’s moment of intimidation. Detective Heat latched onto the opportunity and flipped the subject without comment.
“Let me see your hands,” she said.
“What? You want my hands, come closer.”
She stood, trying to gain height and distance and, most of all, dominance. “Put your hands flat on the table, Pochenko. Now.”
He decided he would choose when it was time, but he didn’t wait long. The shackles on one wrist clacked against the table edge, and then the shackles on the other, as he spread his palms on the cold metal. His hands were scuffed and swollen. A few knuckles were plumming into bruises, others were missing skin and wept where they had not yet scabbed over. On the middle finger of his right hand, there was a thick stripe of blanched skin and a cut. The kind a ring would leave.
“What happened here?” she said, relieved to feel in charge again.
“What, this? Is nothing.”
“Looks like a cut.”
“Yeah, I forgot to take my ring off before.”
“Before what?”
“Before my workout.”
“What workout at what gym? Tell me.”
“Who said anything about a gym?” And then his upper lip curled, and she instinctively took a step back, until she realized he was smiling.
Captain Montrose’s office was empty, so Nikki Heat ushered Rook inside and pulled the glass door shut. “Just what the hell was that all about?”
“I know, I know, I lost it.”
“In the middle of my interrogation, Rook.”
“Did you hear what he was saying to you?”
“No. I couldn’t hear him over the pounding on the observation mirror.”
He looked away. “Pretty lame, huh?”
“I’d call it a first. If this were Chechnya, right now you’d be riding down the mountain feet-first on a goat.”
“Will you knock it off about Chechnya? I get one movie option and you pick, pick, pick at it.”
“Tell me you don’t have it coming.”
“This time, maybe. Can I say something?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I don’t know how you can stand doing this.”
“You kidding? It’s my job.”
“But it’s so…ugly.”
“War zones aren’t so much fun, either. Or so I’ve read.”
“War, not so good. But that’s just one part. In my job I get to move from place to place. It may be a war zone one time or riding in a Jeep with a black hood over my head to visit a drug cartel, but then I get a month in Portofino and Nice with rock stars and their toys, or I shadow a celebrity chef for a week in Sedona or Palm Beach. But you. This is…this is a sewer.”
“Is this the equivalent of ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ Because if it is, I’ll kick you in the balls to show you how not nice I can be. I like my job. I do what I do, and deal with the people I deal with, and here’s a headline for your article, writer boy: Criminals are scum.”
“Especially that G.”
She laughed. “Excellent research notes, Rook. You sound so street.”
“Oh, and by the way? No goats. Popular misconception. Up in the Caucasus with General Yamadayev, it was all horses. That’s how we rolled.”
When she watched him leave the room, she was surprised not to feel pissed anymore. How angry could you be at somebody who acted like he cared a little?
A half hour later, she sat with Raley, screening the surveillance video from the Guilford. Detective Heat did not look pleased. “Run it again,” she said. “And let’s watch every corner of the screen. Maybe we missed a piece of them coming back later.”
“What’s wrong?” Rook arrived behind them, his breath smelling of contraband espresso.
“It’s the damn time code.” She tapped her pen on the pale gray digital clock embedded on the bottom of the surveillance video. “It shows Miric and Pochenko arriving at 10:31 A.M. They go up the elevator, right? And come back down to the lobby roughly twenty minutes later.”
