that?'
Nikki held her gaze but sensed Rook shifting his weight on the cushions beside her. 'And why is it that you wanted to kill her?'
Again, the woman's answer came without pause. 'She was screwing my husband, Detective.' But the demure politeness had also quickly fallen away, and Elizabeth Essex spoke from a primal place. 'Cassidy and I were on the board of the Knickerbocker Garden Club. I used to have to drag my husband to our events, but suddenly, that spring, he seemed more enthused than I to attend. Everybody knew Cassidy spent her life with her legs in the air, but how would I ever suspect it would be with my husband?' She paused and swallowed dryly and, as if anticipating Heat's question, said, 'I'm fine, let me get this out.'
'Go on,' said Nikki.
'My attorney found an investigator to follow them, and sure enough, they met for several trysts. Nicer hotels, usually. And once… once, on our guided visit to the botanical garden, they disappeared from the tour and rutted like animals behind the herbaceous and mixed borders.
'Neither of them knew that I knew, and I didn't blame my husband. It was her. It was the slut. So when our summer banquet came, I did it.'
'What did you do, Mrs. Essex?'
'I poisoned the bitch.' She now had every bit of her color back, seeming exhilarated with her story. 'I did some research. There's a new drug kids are into. Methadrone.' Heat knew it very well. It went under the name M- Cat and Meow-Meow. 'You know why it's so popular? Access. It's found in plant food.' She grinned. 'Plant food!'
'That stuff can be fatal,' said Rook.
'Not to Cassidy Towne. I got in the kitchen at the banquet and put it in her dinner. It seemed poetic. To die of plant food poisoning at our garden club event. Either I got the proportions wrong, or she just had an incredible constitution, but it didn't kill her. She just thought she had picked up some gut-wrenching stomach bug. You know something, I'm actually glad I didn't kill her. It was more fun to watch the bitch suffer.' And then she laughed.
After she settled, Heat said, 'Mrs. Essex, can you verify your whereabouts between midnight and four this morning?'
'Yes, I can. I was on a red-eye from Los Angeles.' And to bring home the point, she added, 'With my husband.'
'Then I assume,' said Nikki, 'that you and your husband have a good relationship?'
'My husband and I have a great relationship. I got divorced and married again.'
Minutes later, Heat broke the silence of the elevator ride down and said to Rook, 'I'm eager to meet more of your sources. Circus cousins, colorful uncles, perhaps?'
'Don't you worry, I'm just warming up.'
'You got nuthin',' she said, and stepped into the lobby. At five-thirty the next morning, Nikki Heat's combat trainer tried to put a choke hold on her and ended up on his back on the mat. She danced a circle around him as he got up. If Don felt it, he didn't let on. He deked a move left but she read it and side-slipped his attack from the right. He barely grazed her as he went by. But the ex-Navy SEAL didn't go flat on the ground this time, instead taking his fall in a shoulder roll, whirling back around on her and taking her by surprise with a back-scissors to her knee on the blind side. They both hit the mat, and he grappled and pinned her until she tapped out.
They sparred again and again. He tried the blindside attack once more, but Nikki Heat didn't have to be shown twice. She raised her leg in an air kick as he swung around at the back of her knee, and with no leg there to stop him, his momentum carried him off balance. She topped him when he went down, and it was Don's turn to tap out.
Heat wanted to finish the session with a series of disarms. She had made it a regular part of her regime since the night the Russian held her own gun on her in her living room. That disarm worked like a page from the manual, but Nikki believed in rehearsal, the goal to avoid a closing night. Don drilled her on handguns and rifles, then finished off with knives, in their own way trickier than guns, which, once you slipped inside the muzzle line, offered cover with proximity, just the opposite of what happened with a shank. Fifteen minutes and twice that many drills later, they bowed and left each other to hit the showers. Don called to her as she was about to enter her locker room. They walked to meet each other again mid-mat and he asked if she felt like company that night. For reasons she couldn't figure, or at least didn't sanction, she thought about Rook and almost declined. Instead she blew it off and said, 'Sure, why not?' Jameson Rook came out of the locker room at the Equinox in Tribeca and saw that he had two messages from Nikki Heat. The morning was brisk. Autumn was coming in earnest, and when he stepped out onto Murray Street and put his cell phone to his ear to return her call, he saw steam rising off his damp hair in the glass of the front door.
'There you are,' she said. 'For a minute I was starting to think you'd changed your mind about our ride-along arrangement.'
'Not a bit. I'm just one of the few who actually observes the sign about no cell phones in the locker room at my gym. What's going on? Heat, if you found the body and didn't take me, I'm going to be so pissed.'
'I'm a step closer.'
'Get out.'
'Yep. Fat Tommy called. He gave up the crew that jacked the coroner van yesterday. Be in front of your place in twenty minutes and I'll pick you up. If you behave, you can come to the party.' 'Two of them are inside,' said Nikki Heat into her walkie-talkie. 'All we need is for Bachelor Number Three to show up and we can make our move.'
'Standing by,' said Detective Hinesburg in reply.
Heat, Rook, Raley, and Ochoa were Trojan horsed inside the cargo bay of a uniform supply truck parked on East 19th, across from a cell phone store. Fat Tommy had told Nikki the store was a front for the trio's real business, which was fast-jacking parked delivery trucks while the driver was dollying in his first load. They turned over the merchandise to fences and ditched the vehicles, which were of no interest to them.
'So I guess my Fat Tommy thing paid off,' Rook said.
'Neediness is so unflattering, Rook,' she said. Behind him, he could hear Roach sniffing in laughter.
'But it is what got us here, right?' Rook was trying, without success, to make that sound not needy.
'Why did he give this up to you, Detective Heat?' asked Raley, all too happy to twist Rook's jock like this. Ochoa was enjoying it, too.
'I don't want to say it,' answered Heat.
'Say it,' from Ochoa in a low growl.
She paused. 'Fat Tommy said it was because I had the balls to get up in his face yesterday morning. He also said not to make it a habit.'
'Was that a threat?' asked Raley.
She smiled and shrugged. 'More like the start of a relationship.'
'On your side rear,' came the walkie report from Hinesburg, who was in the vestibule of a coin-op laundry two doors down the block. As soon as she finished the call, a motorcycle thundered by.
'Check him out, Ochoa,' said Nikki. She moved aside, and through the ob port he saw a big man in a leather vest hanging from the ape bars.
'Could be my AR-15. He was covered up, but that's definitely the build.' He sat back on one of the canvas laundry bags to let Heat have a look as the biker parked on the sidewalk in front of the store and went in.
'All right,' said Detective Heat into the mic. 'Let's hit them before they decide to take a ride. We'll go on mine in sixty seconds.' She looked at her watch and said, 'Woof,' to sync with the others. 'Ochoa, you go last,' she said. 'I don't want them making you in the middle of the street.'
'Got it,' he said.
'And Rook?'
'I know, I know, please remain comfortably seated until the captain turns off the seat belt sign.' He shifted to let them by and sat on Ochoa's canvas bag. 'Ooh, still nice and warm.'
'In three, two, go,' said Nikki, who was first out the back door, followed by Raley. Ochoa hung in the open doorway, as directed. Rook could see Detective Hinesburg approaching the store on the opposite side of the street.
There was a brief lull, and Ochoa turned to Rook and said, 'I wonder if I should-'
