'Who calls you that?' pressed his partner.
Raley fidgeted. 'Lots of people. Desk sergeant, a uniform in booking. It doesn't matter how many, I don't like it.'
'Can I say something as your friend and your partner? In the scheme of getting over yourself?… Get over yourself.' And one second after they resumed their work, Ochoa punctuated it with '… Sweat Tea.'
They studied the records in silence. A few minutes later, on his second printout, Rook asked Ochoa for the highlighter.
'Got one?'
'Yeah.' As he took the marker from Ochoa, it registered exactly what he had. 'Holy shit.'
'What?' said Roach.
Rook highlighted the phone number and held it up. 'This number? It's Cassidy Towne's.' A half hour later, Detective Heat stood over the array of highlighted phone records Roach had laid out side by side, in chronological order, on her desktop out in the bull pen. 'So what do we have?'
'We have a couple things, actually,' began Raley. 'First, we have the connection we've been looking for between Esteban Padilla and Cassidy Towne. Not just a phone call, but a regular pattern of calls to her.'
Ochoa picked up the tour, pointing to a series of highlights on the first pages, the ones on the left side of her desk. 'The first calls come here, once or twice a week last winter and into spring. These correspond to the dates he was working the limo. A sure sign Padilla was one of her informants.'
'Know what I think?' said Rook. 'I'll bet you can look at the dates of those calls to her, check who Padilla had booked that night, and match them to items in her column the next day. Assuming any of the tips were newsworthy.'
'Newsworthy?' said Heat.
'OK, gossipworthy.'
She nodded. 'But I take your point. What else?'
'Here it gets even more interesting,' continued Raley. 'The calls stop abruptly right here.' He tapped the printout for May. 'Guess when this was?'
'The month Padilla got fired from the limo company,' she said.
'Right. A whole cluster of calls just after that-we'll have to guess what that was about for now-and then nothing for almost a month.'
'And then they pick up again here.' Ochoa appeared on Nikki's right and used the yellow highlighter cap to show resumption of contacts. 'Calls. Lots of calls all of a sudden in mid-June. Four months ago.'
Heat asked, 'Do we know if he was working another limo company then?'
'We checked that,' said Raley. 'He started driving the produce deliveries end of May, shortly after he got canned from driving the black cars. So I doubt if he was still giving gossip tips.'
'At least not new ones.' Rook leaned in past Nikki and spread his fingers to span the gap in calls. 'My guess is this hiatus in calls was when Mr. Padilla was not providing daily tips to Ms. Towne. And the resumption of calls in June was all about research for whatever the hell book she was writing. Depending on where she was with her manuscript, as a writer, I'd say that would be about the right timing.'
Nikki scanned the highlighted pattern, a time line in its own right, and then turned to face her detectives and Rook. 'Great work. This is big. We not only have our connection between Padilla and Towne, but if Rook's right about what the pattern means, it suggests why he was killed. If she was murdered for what she was writing, he could have been murdered for being her snitch.'
'Same as Derek Snow?' asked Rook.
'For once, not such a whacko theory, Mr. Rook. But still, only a theory until we can make a similar link. Roach, get on our concierge's phone records first thing in the morning.'
As Roach left the bull pen, she heard Raley say in a low voice, 'I'm looking forward to some sleep, but whenever I close my eyes, all I see are printouts of phone records.'
And Ochoa replied, 'Me, too, Sweet Tea.'
Nikki was putting on her brown leather jacket when Rook stepped up to the coatrack, closing his messenger bag. 'You boys kiss and make up?' she asked.
'How did you know that? Did we have that post-make-up-sex glow?'
'I may be sick,' she said. 'Actually, I happened to catch you through the glass in Observation.'
'That was a private conversation.'
'Funny, that's what the bad guys think when they're in that room, too. Everybody forgets it's a two-way mirror.' She flicked her eyebrows at him, a full Groucho. 'But that was a good thing you did, reaching out to them like that.'
'Thanks. Listen, I was thinking… I'd love to cash in that rain check for last night.'
'Oo… sorry. Can't tonight, I've made plans. Petar called.'
His gut took the express elevator to the basement, but he maintained an unfazed smile and kept it casual. 'Really? A drink after, then?'
'Problem is, I don't know when after will be. We're going to get together on his dinner break. Who knows, I may end up back at the show. I've never seen them shoot one of those things.' She checked her watch. 'I've got to run or I'll be late. Catch you in the A.M.' She made sure the squad room was empty, then kissed his cheek. He started to reach for her but thought better of it in the police station and all.
But as he watched her go out the door, he wished he had put his arms around her. Irresistible as he was, she might have canceled her dinner. Roach came in early the next morning to find Jameson Rook camped out at his commandeered desk. 'I was wondering who turned on the lights in here,' said Raley. 'Rook, did you even go home last night?'
'Yeah, I did. Just thought I'd get here early for a jump on the day.'
Ochoa said, 'You don't mind me saying so, you look kinda messed up. Like you've been skydiving without goggles.'
'Thanks.' Rook didn't have a mirror to look at, but he could imagine. 'Well, I'm burning that candle, you know? When I leave here, it's off to my night job at the keyboard.'
'Uh-huh, I'll bet it's tough.' Ochoa gave him a pleasant nod, and the pair moved across the bull pen to log on to their computers.
Ochoa's comment was sympathetic, but it only made Rook feel guilty. Guilty, first, that he'd had the audacity to tell an NYPD homicide detective how difficult life could be in his comfortable Tribeca loft, writing. And guilty, second, because he had not been writing at all. He tried, all right. He had two full days of notes to write up to stay current with his Cassidy Towne article. But he didn't write them up.
It was Nikki. He couldn't let go of Nikki having dinner with her old college lover. He knew it was nuts for him to be so… freaked. What he admired in her was her self-sufficiency, her independence. He just didn't like it when she was so independent of him. And with an old boyfriend. Around 11 P.M., unable to concentrate on his work or even watch the news, he had started to wonder if this was how it started with stalkers. And then he started to think maybe he'd do his next article as an investigation of stalkers. But then, he wondered… if you do a ride-along with a stalker, are you stalking the stalker?
It all got very weird.
That's when he made a phone call. There was a comedy writer he knew on a late-night talk show in LA who had been in the business forever, and sure enough, this guy had the story on Petar Matic. 'Don't you love the name, Rook? Sounds like a product a mohel would sell on an infomercial.' Call a comedy writer, get a one-liner. But it was the only laugh Rook got from the conversation.
Comedy writing, especially in late night, was a small circle of frenemies, and Rook's LA guy knew one of the Later On comedy writers who had done community service a few years back. 'Hold on,' said Rook, 'why would a comedy writer have to do community service?'
'Beats me. Pitching a Monica Lewinsky joke after 2005? Who knows?'
So while the Later On comedy writer was doing his community service at the Bronx Zoo-for DUI, Rook's friend eventually recalled-on the crew with him doing cage cleaning and litter detail was this bright guy from Croatia, a nature documentary shooter. Rook asked if Petar was there for DUI, too.
'No, here's the poetry. Nature filmmaker. Busted for what?' Rook's friend paused for a drumroll. 'Smuggling endangered species into the country from Thailand. He did six months of eighteen in jail, got early release for good
