cut back on raises by postponing the scheduled rank advancement tests.
Detective Feller cleared his throat. “What if I told you I hear you aced it?” She gave him a side glance and then concentrated on the driver of the bread delivery truck who had stopped to double-park in her lane without flashers. While she hit her blinker and waited for the passing lane to clear, he went on. “I know this to be a fact.”
“How?”
“From some inside sources. Downtown.” He reached for the dashboard. “Mind if I back off the temp? Starting to bake in here.”
“Help yourself.”
“I try to keep myself connected.” He turned down the knob one click, then decided on one more before he settled back in his seat again. “Not planning on riding in back of that cab forever, ya hear what I’m saying?”
“Sure, sure.” Nikki made her swing around the bread truck. “I, um, appreciate the info.”
“So when you get by your orals and all the other hoops they make you jump through-like teach you the secret handshake, or whatever-do me a fave? Don’t forget your friends on your way up.”
Whoomph, there it is, thought Nikki. She felt a little embarrassed. All this time thinking Feller wanted to date her when maybe what he really wanted was to network her. She replayed her mental picture of him at the cop bar clowning in his ass gasket lobster bib and wondered if the jester in him was all in fun, or if he was really just a skilled glad-hander. The more he talked, the more that picture emerged.
“When you get your gold bar, it’s going to be a piece of good news in your precinct for a change. And you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do,” she said. They hit another red at 79th, and unfortunately this was a long one.
“Not sure, that’s a laugh,” he said. “I mean Captain Montrose.”
Nikki knew full well what he meant. Her skipper, her mentor, Captain Montrose, was under increasing pressure from One Police Plaza over his performance as commander of the Twentieth Precinct. Whether it was the bad economy, increased unemployment, or a reset to the dark days of the pre-Giuliani disorder, crime statistics were edging up throughout all five boroughs. And worse, they were spiking in election season. Gravity rules, so in response, the shit roll was all downhill to the precinct commanders. But Heat could see her captain was taking an extra pounding. Montrose had been singled out, called down separately for extra meetings and ass chewings, spending as much time at HQ as he did in his office. His personality darkened under the pressure, and he had grown atypically remote-no, more than remote, secretive. It made Nikki wonder whether something else was going on with him beyond precinct perf stats. Now what bothered Heat was that her boss’s private humiliation was Out There as department gossip. If Feller knew about it, others did, too. Loyalty made her deflect it, back up her boss.
“Listen, Randy, who isn’t getting squeezed these days? I hear those weekly CompStat meetings at 1PP are brutal for all the skips, not just mine.”
“Seriously,” he said with a nod. “They should put a drain in the floor to let the blood run out. Green.”
“Jeez, it just turned.” Nikki pressed the accelerator.
“Sorry. Drives Dutch crazy, too. I tell ya, I’ve got to get my ass out of that cab.” He powered down his window and spat. When he closed it again, he said, “This isn’t just about the performance figs. I have a bud in Internal Affairs. Your man is on their radar.”
“Bull.”
“No bull.”
“For what?”
He made an exaggerated shrug. “It’s IA, what do you think?”
“No. I don’t buy it,” she said.
“Then don’t. Maybe he is clean, but I’m telling you he’s got his neck on the stump and they’re sharpening the ax.”
“Not maybe. Montrose is clean.” She made a left onto 85th. A block and a half ahead, she could see a cross on the church roof. In the distance, across the Hudson, the apartments and cliffs were pinking from the rising sun. Nikki switched off her headlights as she crossed West End Avenue.
“Who knows?” said Feller. “You get rank, maybe you’ll be in position to take over the precinct if he goes down.”
“He is not going down. Montrose is under pressure, but he’s straight as they come.”
“If you say.”
“I say. He’s unassailable.”
As Nikki got out in front of the rectory, she wished she had made the drive alone. No, what she wished was that Feller had just asked her for drinks, or bowling, or for sex. Any one of those, she would rather have dealt with.
She reached for the bell, but before she could press it, she saw a small head through the stained glass window in the door and it opened, revealing a minute woman in her late sixties.
Nikki referred to her notes from the RTCC message. “Good morning, are you Lydia Borelli?”
“Yes, and you’re with the police, I can tell.”
After they showed ID and introduced themselves, Nikki said, “And it was you who called about Father Graf?”
“Oh, I’ve been worried sick. Come in, please.” The housekeeper’s lips were quaking and her hands fluttered nervously. She missed the doorknob on her first attempt to pull the door closed. “Did you find him? Is he all right?”
“Mrs. Borelli, do you have a recent photo I could look at?”
“Of Father? Well, I’m sure somewhere… I know.”
She led them over thick rugs that muted their footfalls through the living room and into the pastor’s adjoining study. On the shelves of the built-in above the desk several photos in glass frames were perched between books and knickknacks. The housekeeper took one down, swiping her finger along the top of the frame to dust it before she handed it over. “This is from last summer.”
Heat and Detective Feller stood beside each other to examine it. The shot was taken at some sort of protest rally and showed a priest and three Hispanic protesters, with arms linked, leading a march behind a banner. Father Graf’s face, frozen in mid-recitation of a chant, was definitely the same as the one on the corpse at Pleasure Bound.
The housekeeper took the news stoically, blessing herself with the sign of the cross and then lowering her head in silent prayer. When she was done, blood vessels showed through her temples and tears streamed down her cheeks. There were tissues on the end table near the couch. Nikki offered her the box and she took some.
“How did it happen?” she asked, staring down at the tissues in her hands.
Fragile as the woman appeared, Heat thought better of giving her the details at that moment about the priest’s death in a BDSM torture and humiliation dungeon. “We’re still investigating that.”
Then she looked up. “Did he suffer?”
Detective Feller squinted at Nikki and turned away to hide his face, suddenly making himself busy replacing the photo on the shelf.
“We’ll have more details after the coroner’s report,” answered Nikki, hoping her dodge was artful enough to be bought. “We know this is a loss for you, but in a while, not just now, we’re going to need to ask you a few questions to help us.”
“Certainly, anything you need.”
“What would be helpful now, Mrs. Borelli, is if we could look through the rectory. You know, search through his papers, his bedroom.”
“His closet,” said Feller.
Nikki moved forward. “We want to look for anything that would help us find out who did this.”
The housekeeper gave her a puzzled look. “Again?”
“I said, we’d like to search the-”
“I heard what you said. I mean, you need to search again?”
Heat leaned closer to the woman. “Are you saying someone searched here already?”
“Yes. Last night, another policeman. He said he was following up on my missing person report.”
