leading his partner into the brush. On The Hammer’s walk to the rear of the ambulance he stared over at the body under the tarp. “Nice to see you made it, Detective,” he said, standing on the bricks and looking up to her.
“Feeling good about it myself.” Nikki folded her arms tightly inside the blanket, not much up for a handshake with the lawyer.
“The boys say it’s going to go down as a righteous kill. Your story checks out with the bird-watcher, too.”
Heat tried to like him but wasn’t having much success. She said, “So you can relax. No liability for the department?”
“None so far,” he replied, not reading any of her subtext. Nikki wondered where all the men with a sense of irony had gone in this city. “Sounds like you were quite the hero. That’s not going to hurt things for your promotion.”
“Given the choice, I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way,” said Heat.
He said, “I hear ya,” but he was looking away as he did, more interested in the form under the tarp.
“Who was he?”
“Male Hispanic, twenty-eight to thirty. No ID. We’ll run prints.”
“You see any of them?” Nikki shook her head. “Any idea who they were?”
“Not yet.”
He studied Nikki and could not miss seeing her resolve. “They say the SUV down in the Transverse is gone. No sign of the other guy, the driver you say you shot.” Then he said, “These guys were pros.”
It always annoyed her to have office functionaries roll up after the action and play cop. All she said was “Tell me.”
He looked at his watch and then around the crime scene. “By the way. Where the hell’s your boss? Where the fuck is Montrose?”
The Hammer irritated her, but he wasn’t wrong. Precinct commanders always showed at every major incident involving their people. Captain Montrose didn’t make Belvedere Castle. He wasn’t in his office when she got back to the Two-oh, either.
Everyone knew of her ordeal, and all eyes fell on her as she entered the bull pen. In any other profession Nikki would have been forced to spend the rest of the day being pestered by sympathetic coworkers milking every detail of her story out of her and pushing her to share her feelings. Not in Copland. Ochoa set the tone when she reached her desk and he sidled over, checking the wall clock. “About time you rolled in,” he said. “Some of us have been working this case.”
Raley pivoted on his office chair to face them. “I hope you have a good reason for keeping us waiting.”
Heat thought a moment and said, “I made the mistake of taking the park. The Transverse was a killer.”
Detective Ochoa had a ball of kite string in his hand. He set it on her blotter. “What’s this?” she asked.
“Old trick. Tie one end of it to your gun.” He winked and clucked his tongue.
Then the three paused five seconds, letting the silence express the friendship. Marking the end of the interval, Raley stood. “Ready to hear what we’ve got?”
“Am I ever,” said Heat. She wasn’t just seeking solace in work, Nikki now had highly personal stakes in jamming this case even harder.
Lancer Standard, the CIA contractor, had finally called Raley back to set an appointment with Lawrence Hays, who was due back tomorrow from his desert training facility in Nevada. “Weird,” he said. “His secretary said that he would only meet with you. By name, he specifically mentioned Detective Heat. I never brought you up.”
“Pushy, but it just means he’s done his homework,” said Nikki. “He’s a military type and probably wants to deal with the leader of the squad.”
Ochoa said to his partner, “Man’s busy. Can’t waste time on a loser like you.”
“Loser?” said Raley. “Partner, you are talking about the King of All Surveillance Media, now including hard drives.”
“Whatcha got, sire?” asked Nikki.
“I took another look through Father Graf’s computer and found a link to a second e-mail account that didn’t forward to his Outlook. I accessed it and found only one folder. It’s labeled ‘EMMA.’ There were no saved e-mails in it, nothing in the inbox. Either it was inactive,” Raley speculated, “or it’s been purged.”
“Call Mrs. Borelli at the rectory,” said Heat. “See if that name means anything to her.” She cast another glance at the dark office across the pen. “Any Montrose sightings?”
“ Nada,” said Hinesburg, joining in as she crossed over. “And his cell is dumping to voice mail. What do you think it means?”
“Cap’s been off the charts lately, but I have to say this has me shaking my head.” Nikki recalled his warning an hour before her ambush to watch her back, and wondered if it was more than sage advice. The salacious hunger in Hinesburg’s eyes alerted Nikki that this was not the forum for thinking out loud about her boss, and she moved on. “Anything on the money in the cookie tins yet?”
“Oh, yes, and get this,” she said. “The serial numbers trace to cash used in a DEA sting years ago.”
Ochoa asked, “How does a stash from a fed drug deal end up in a priest’s attic?”
“Do we know who the DEA deal was with?” said Heat.
“Yeah, an Alejandro Martinez.” Hinesburg consulted her notes. “He cut a plea bargain for a deuce in Ossining and he’s out. Clean jacket since his release in ’07.”
Nikki crossed over to the board and started to write his name next to the notation for the found money. “Let’s see how clean this Alejandro Martinez is. Bring him in for a chat.”
They had just scattered to work their assignments when a familiar voice called from the door to the bull pen. “Delivery for Nikki Heat?”
Jameson Rook stepped in toting dry cleaning on hangers looped over his hand. “You know, I can’t just drop everything and keep coming here every time you get all bloody.”
Heat looked at the clothes from her closet, then at Rook, and then to Roach, arching a brow at them. Ochoa said, “We figured, you know, that he’d want to know how your day was going.”
Rook asked, “Did you really stab him with an icicle?” When she nodded, he said, “Please, tell me you said ‘Freeze,’ because that would be only perfect.” Rook was grinning, but there was worry behind it. He put his free arm around her waist. “Detective, you doing OK?”
“Fine, I’m just fine. I can’t believe you did this.” She took the clothes from him.
“Think they match… You seem to have this sort of practical monochromatic thing going in your closet, not that I judge. All right, I judge. We need to take you shopping.”
She laughed and pulled a couple of items from the selection he’d brought. “These will do just fine.” She kissed his cheek, forgetting herself in a rare office display. “Thanks.”
“I thought you had protection. What happened to your Discourager?”
“Poor Harvey, you should have seen him. Mortified. In all his years he never got blocked like that.”
“How… discouraging. Whatever’s going on, you need better. When I went by your apartment, there was a car sitting up the block watching, I know the look.”
Nikki got a fresh chill and draped the clothes across the back of her chair. “How do you know it was watching?”
“Because when I walked up to it, he sped off. I yelled stop, but he kept going.”
“The yelling stop, that never works,” said Raley.
“Did you see him, get a description?” Ochoa had his pad open. Then he said, “You didn’t get a description, did you?”
“No,” said Rook. And then he took out his Moleskine notebook. “But would a license plate help?”
“Got it,” said Raley, hanging up the phone. “Vehicle you saw was regis tered to Firewall Security, Inc., a domestic protection division of… are you ready?… Lancer Standard.”
“We should get on them. Get over there right now,” said Rook. “These have got to be the guys who ambushed you. It adds up, the surveillance, the military tactics, let’s go.”
Nikki finished putting on her clean blazer and said, “First of all, there is no ‘we’ or ‘let’s,’ Rook. Your ride- along days are through. And second, there’s nothing to go on. Third, if they are up to something, I don’t want to let on that I know…”
Rook sat down. “When you get to the fifteenth reason, let me know. I believe this is like Little League; isn’t
