“Just so you know, I thoroughly agree that Steljess is our prime suspect.” Her face clouded. “It’s too bad he had to be taken out. I was hoping to sweat him. In my heart, I believe he killed Montrose.”
Now it was Rook’s turn to look doubtful. “It’s not that I’m saying you’re wrong… but why?”
Heat smiled. “Now you’re thinking like a cop.”
Heat woke up to an empty bed. Detective that she was, she felt Rook’s side and the sheets were cold. She found him on the computer in his office. “You’re shaming me, Rook. This is the third morning this week you’ve gotten up before I did.”
“As I lay there watching the digits change on the clock on my nightstand, stumped and more than just a bit frustrated by this case, I got up and took a page from your book, Nikki Heat. I went out to stare at the Murder Board.”
“And what did you learn?”
“That Manhattan is very noisy, even at four A. M. I’m serious. What’s with all the sirens and horns?” She sat in the easy chair across from him, waiting, knowing he was ramping up to something. He had the look of the guy holding cards. That’s why she always beat him at poker. “So I waited for one of the items on the board to jump out at me or connect to another. Didn’t happen. So I went the other way. I asked myself, ‘What don’t we have?’ I mean besides closure.
“And then it came to me. It was probably why I couldn’t sleep in the first place-because it was a touchy area last night.”
“Captain Montrose,” she said.
“Exactly. You said he was always telling you to look for the odd sock. Nikki, he was the odd sock. Think about it. Nothing he did was like the man you knew… Like the man anybody knew.” She shifted in her seat, but it wasn’t from upset at the subject, it was because energy was moving through her. She didn’t know where Rook was going, but her experienced sense told her he was asking the right questions. “So with that in mind, I tried to figure out what he was up to. Hard to know. And why?”
“Because he had gotten so closed, so secretive.”
“Precisely. Odd sock behavior. He’d lost his wife, so he wasn’t talking with her, either. But guys, no matter how stoic we appear-unless we’re moody loners, or those Queen’s Guards at Buckingham Palace-have to talk with someone.”
“Father Graf?” she asked.
“Mm-maybe. Hadn’t thought of him. I was thinking more like some existing personal bond. A lifetime confidant. The mortgage buddy.”
“Explain?”
“The one pal you can call, no matter what time of night it is and no matter what you’ve gotten yourself into, who would mortgage his house to save your rear, no questions asked.” He saw her glint of understanding. “Tell me, who is a cop closest to?”
She didn’t hesitate. “His partner.” Nikki was just about to say the name, but he beat her to it.
“Eddie Hawthorne.”
“How could you know about Eddie?”
“Writer’s friend. A little thing called an Internet search engine. Got multiple hits on citations of valor for those two, both as uniforms and detectives. I figured if they found a way to stick together when they got their gold shields, they’d be tight.”
“Eddie retired and moved away, though.” A distant memory brought a smile to her. “I was at his retirement party.”
“July 16, 2008.” He indicated his laptop. “I loves me my Google.” Then Rook pressed a few keys and his printer came alive.
“What’s that, Eddie Hawthorne’s cholesterol level?”
He took two pages from the tray and walked over to Nikki, handing her one of them. “It’s our boarding passes. The car service picks us up for LaGuardia in a half hour. We’re having lunch with Eddie in Florida.”
Eddie Hawthorne pulled up in his Mercury Marquis as soon as they stepped from the terminal in Fort Myers. He got out and gave Nikki a big hug, and as they parted and looked at each other, Nikki’s eyes gleamed as they hadn’t in a long, long time.
He took them to a fish taco place two exits west of Interstate 75 off the Daniels Parkway. “It’s local, it’s good, and it’s close enough to the airport so you don’t have to sweat making your return flight this afternoon,” he said.
They ate at a patio table shaded from the sun blare by a Dos Equis umbrella. The first part of the lunch conversation was reminiscence about their lost friend. “Charles and I were partners so long people didn’t see us as two people after a while. I walked by our sarge once-all by myself, you see-and he looks right at me and says, ‘Hi, fellas.’ ” The old cop laughed. “That’s the way it was. Hawthorne and Montrose, the thorn and the rose, that was us, man. Damn, that was us.” Eddie Hawthorne seemed more interested in talking than the food, which was excellent, and so Heat and Rook just listened, enjoying fresh grilled fish and shirtsleeve weather while he reminisced. When the subject turned to Montrose’s wife, the laughter over glory days faded. “So sad. Never saw two people so close as he and Pauletta. It’s a stunner for anyone, but man… It hollowed Charles out, I know it did.”
“I kind of wanted to ask you a little about that, I mean the past year,” said Nikki.
The ex-detective nodded. “Didn’t think you flew all the way down here for the horchata.”
“No,” she said, “I’m trying to make sense of what went on with the Cap.”
“You won’t be able to. Doesn’t make any sense.” Eddie’s lip quaked briefly, but then he sat up, willing some steel into his body, as if that would help.
Rook asked, “Did you have much contact with him since his wife was killed?”
“Well, you could say I made a lot of attempts. I flew up for her funeral, of course, and we sat up talking most of the night after the service. In truth, maybe more sitting than talking; like I say, I made attempts, but he went to stone in there.” Eddie poked his heart with two fingers. “Who couldn’t understand that?”
Nikki said, “It’s not uncommon to sort of slide a rock over you for a time after you suffer a trauma like that. But after a period of intense grieving most people come out of the funk. And when they do, it’s sort of startling, the new energy.”
Eddie nodded to himself. “Yeah, how’d you know that?” Nikki felt Rook’s hand touch hers under the table briefly. Hawthorne continued, “It was out of the blue, like three months ago. He calls and talks awhile. Old times small talk, that kind of stuff. More conversation than I’d heard from him in ages. Then he says to me that he’s been sleeping poorly, tossing thoughts all night. I told him to join a bowling league, and he just says, ‘Yeah right,’ and keeps on about his insomnia.
“He asks me, ‘Edward, you ever get bothered by any of the old cases?’ And I said, ‘Shit, man, why do you think I retired?’ and we had a good laugh about that, but he came right back to it, like he was scratching at poison ivy. And he gets to the point, saying that he’s been thinking more and more about The Job and how he’s having doubts about his purpose. Even said-get this-wondering about how good a cop he was. Can you believe that?
“So he says he’s been sitting up nights chewing on this one case we worked together, saying he was never satisfied we got it right, and the deeper the hole gets dug around him with all the administrative bullshit he has to deal with, the more he feels the itch to do something. Something to prove that he’s still the cop he believed he was. I told him to open the Scotch and watch some Weather Channel, anything to get his mind clear, and he gets pissy with me, saying he thought that I of all people would understand the importance-the duty, he says-of getting it right. I didn’t know what else to say to that except, let’s hear about it then. Charles says he never believed it was a bad drug deal. It didn’t figure for the victim and his priors to be in with that low end of a dealer, or in that part of town. And I said what I said back then, drugs is dangerous business; if they don’t get you, the dealers will. And then I reminded him I always thought if it wasn’t a busted deal it was a Latin gang initiation.” There it was again, thought Nikki. The catch-all explanation for unsolved crimes. “But Charles, he said he was picking up pieces that smelled like a planned killing and a cover-up. He said he was looking for a revenge motive. Either way,” he shrugged, “what are you going to do? You give it your best shot and don’t look back. That’s what I did, anyway. But he wasn’t one to let anything go unfinished.” The steel left him and his lip quivered again. “I dunno, maybe that’s what finished him.”
“The case,” said Nikki. “What was the case that bothered him so much?” But she knew the answer before
