daughter, Holly. Holly Flanders had said she found out where Rook lived by looking on the waybills for the messenger service her mother used to send him material. He couldn't remember the name of the service, and there was no way to find that needle in the haystack of Cassidy Towne's office.
After he locked up, Rook walked to Columbus to hail a cab down to Tribeca, to see if he still had any of the shipping envelopes he had received from Cassidy. As the cab passed West 55th, he had a brain tug that the place was located somewhere in Hell's Kitchen. He did a Google search of messenger services on his phone, and five minutes later the taxi dropped him outside Efficient Mail and Messenger on Tenth Avenue, a storefront squeezed between an Ethiopian restaurant and a small grocer with hot tables and pizza by the slice. The garbage pileup had gobbled the sidewalk outside, and under Efficient's dingy awning some of the letters were sputtering in the neon window sign, which read, 'Checks Cashed — Copies — Fax.' A little run down, he thought as he went inside, but if the key fits, paradise.
The place smelled of old library and pine disinfectant. A small man in a turban sat on a high stool behind a counter. 'You wish to make copy?' Before Rook could say no, the man spoke rapidly in a foreign language to a woman using the sole copy machine. She answered back in a short, angry tone and the man said to Rook, 'Be five minute.'
'Thanks,' said Rook, not wanting to engage or explain. He was already at the wall where the bank of brass mail cubbies ran its length from knee to eyebrow. He scanned them and found number 417.
'You rent mailbox? Monthly special.'
'All set.' Rook held up the key and inserted it. It went in cleanly, but the lock didn't budge. He waggled it with some force, remembering that the teeth of the key had a freshly cut edge and might need some coaxing. Still nothing. He looked and realized that when the counterman had distracted him he had put the key in 416.
The teeth of the key snagged in 417, then it opened. He got down on one knee to look inside and his heart kicked.
Two minutes later, in another cab to Tribeca, he tried Nikki again. She was still in interrogation. This time Rook didn't leave a message. He slouched back between the seat and back door of the taxi and took the stack of double-spaced, typewritten pages from the envelope. They were curled from having been half-rolled to fit inside the mail cubby, so he flattened them on his thigh and held the paper-clipped packet to the window light to read the chapter title again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
FADE OUT
Chapter Eighteen
Nikki Heat was big on hands. Sitting in an interrogation room, what she could observe physically about the person across the table was as important as what that person was saying-or not saying. Facial expressions, of course, were key. So were posture, demeanor (restless, fidgety, calm, checked out, and so forth), state of hygiene, and attire. But hands told her a lot. Soleil Gray's hands had been lean and strong from the rigors of her athletic stage dancing. Strong enough, as it turned out, to overpower Mitchell Perkins with such force that people assumed his assailant had been a man. One of the tells Nikki had misjudged when the singer had been sitting at the table with her lawyer just the day before was the cut on her knuckle which the detective had taken to be from the rehearsal hall, not the street mugging.
Now, self-reproach was trying to creep in on Heat, pestering her with the virulent notion that if she had only looked at that hand with a more open view to causes she might have averted a tragedy. She told that idea to have a seat, she'd deal with it later.
Morris Granville's hands were soft and pallid, as if he soaked them daily in bleachy water. He was also a nail biter, although he wasn't doing it in front of her. Swollen domes of irritated skin enveloped the nail stubs at the tip of every finger, and the cuticles that weren't scabbing were raw. She considered those hands and his loner lifestyle and decided to let her projection end right there.
His mind was on Soleil Gray as well, and it wasn't lost on Nikki that her despised moment of fame was the very thing that had brought Morris Granville to her. He had sought out Detective Heat because of her public connection to the now-dead singer, so he could share his moment of special bonding: the night he saw Soleil argue on the sidewalk outside a club with her ex-fiance, Reed Wakefield.
'And you are certain this was the night Reed Wakefield died?' asked Heat. She had been through this with him and asked that same question in different ways over the last half hour, looking for the slipup. Morris Granville was a bona fide celebrity stalker. For this reason the detective was exercising a high degree of caution. His experience could provide an important missing piece of the puzzle, but Heat didn't want to jump for that candy in a weak moment of wishful thinking.
Nikki had run all her back-channel checks. Asking him what date it was. 'May 14.' What night of the week that was. 'A Friday.' What the weather was like. 'It was drizzling off and on. I had an umbrella with me.' Whether there was security. 'I already said there wasn't any. Nobody else was out there.' She told him these, as well as the other details he had given her, were all things she could check. He said that was good because then she would believe him. She noted that he seemed to relish the fact that she was writing down his answers. But she was skeptical there, too. Heat knew his need to be at the center of things could be driving that the same way it drove everything else in his life.
There was another question she wanted to ask Morris Granville. An obvious one to her, but she held it, wanting to get to the things she didn't assume first, in case he decided to stop talking. 'What happened with the fight?'
'It went on a long time.'
'In the rain?'
'They didn't seem to care.'
'Did it ever get violent?'
'No. Just arguing.'
'What did they say?'
'I couldn't hear it all. Remember, I said I didn't want to get too close?'
Heat mentally ticked off one of her consistency cross-checks. 'Did you hear anything?'
'It was about their breakup. She said he was only into himself and getting high. He said she was a selfish bitch, stuff like that.'
'Did she threaten him?'
'Soleil? No way.'
Heat made another mental note that Granville sounded like he had taken on some role as Soleil's defender. She began to wonder if this stalker's outreach was rooted in squaring himself in her legacy somehow. She filed it as a possibility but left herself open. 'Did Wakefield threaten her?'
'Not that I heard. And he was out of it, too. He kept holding on to the light post for balance until they were done.'
'How did it end?'
'They both cried and then hugged each other.'
'And then what?'
'They kissed.'
'As in kissed good-bye?'
'As in romantic.'
'And after they kissed?'
'They left together.'
Nikki double-tapped her pen on her spiral notebook. He was getting to the part she wanted to hear, and she had to make sure to ask in a way that didn't set him up to please her. She kept her question general. 'How did they leave?'
'Holding hands.'
So she got more specific. 'I mean did they walk? Take a taxi? How did they leave?'
