Raley popped the trunk. Heat moved around to join him, Ochoa and Rook at the rear bumper. While the three detectives vested up, she said, “Rook, you wait here.”
“Come on, I promise I won’t get shot. I can wear one of those vests.”
Ochoa indicated the bold white lettering across his chest and back. “Check it out, bro. It says ‘POLICE.’”
Rook peered into the trunk. “Do you have one in there that says ‘WRITER,’ preferably in a large tall? You’re gonna like the way I look. I guarantee it.”
“Give it up,” said Nikki.
“Then why did you even bring me?”
Nikki almost let slip the truth and said, For the moral support. But she replied, “Because if I left you behind, I’d never hear the end of the whining.”
“That’s why?” said Ochoa, as the three detectives fell in with the SWAT unit. “I thought it was ‘cause Rook’s like the human Air Wick. Won’t need that cardboard pine tree in the Roach Coach with him around.”
ESU swarmed the house with a tactical precision that belied the laid-back demeanor of the commander and his team. Heat and Roach double-timed with the SWAT unit on foot, using the armored Bearcat vehicle for cover as it roared up the driveway. When the black truck came to a stop, the Bell helicopter thundered up the street and the pilot hit his Nightsun, beaming a dose of hot light to blind anyone looking out windows as the team deployed. They approached in efficient, textbook sequence, taking cover behind the porch rail, trash cans, and shrubs as they moved in. When Heat and the crew carrying the battering ram gained the front door, she knuckled it and called over the din of the chopper, “NYPD, open up.” After a pause too short to measure, Heat gave the go sign for the ram.
The thud of the door into the wall matched the pounding under Nikki’s vest as she entered the unlit house, leading the SWAT team in a surreal ballet of flashlight beams and rapid incursion. She called out, “NYPD, identify yourself!” but only heard the slap echo of her own voice in the near-vacant house. The assault force fanned out, a third rolling to the right side of the downstairs with Heat, a third going left, circling toward the dining room and kitchen, with Roach and the remainder heading upstairs to the second story and attic. The spotlight from the circling copter pierced the windows and crept along the walls, making the house feel like it was spinning. Each terse update whispered in Heat’s earpiece confused and disheartened her. “Dining room: clear.” “Kitchen: clear.” “Master bed: clear.” “Hall closet: clear.” “Attic: clear.” “Basement: clear.” The downstairs pincer groups met up in the kitchen, which smelled from enough stacked garbage to qualify for a cable TV hoarders show.
But no suspect.
“Garage status?” she said into her mic.
“Clear.”
The ESS commander came downstairs with Roach and met her in the living room. “Doesn’t make sense,” he said. “And there’s no place to hide. Closets are empty. Only a ratty mattress on the floor of the master.”
“On the vacant side down here, too,” said Detective Ochoa. He traced his Stinger LED across the nail hooks, illuminating the spots where pictures once hung above an unbleached rectangle in the hardwood the size and shape of a sofa. Now only a pair of mismatched patio chairs sat off to the side of a grimy, secondhand rug.
“Any false walls?” asked Rook, coming in the front door. “I know for a fact some of these old houses have fake doors behind bookcases.”
Heat sounded a familiar refrain. “Rook, I told you to wait outside.”
“But I saw the pretty light from the helicopter and it pulled me in against my will. It’s like Close Encounters for me. Or the rose ceremony on Bachelorette.”
“Outside. Now.”
“Fine.” He backed up to leave and stumbled to the floor, landing on his butt.
Ochoa shook his head. Raley helped him up and said, “See? This is why we can’t take you anywhere.”
“It’s not my fault. I tripped on something under that rug.”
“Well, lift your feet,” said Nikki. “On your way out.”
“Detective?” said Ochoa. He was down on one knee, running his palm across a lump in the stained green shag. He rose and whispered to her, “Hatch handle.”
They peeled back the rug and exposed a three-by-three square of plywood with a pull ring handle and hinges embedded into the floor. “I’m going in,” said Heat.
The commander cautioned her. “Let’s drop some gas down there first.”
“He’ll get away. What if there’s a tunnel?”
“Then we’ll send a dog.”
But adrenaline called her shots. Nikki slid her forefinger into the pull ring and threw the hatch back. She shined her light into the emptiness and shouted, “NYPD, show yourself.” A startled moan came from below.
“See anything?” asked Raley.
Heat shook no and swung a leg into the opening. “There’s a ladder.”
“Detective…” said the ESS commander. But too late. Overwhelmed by the drive to capture her suspect, Heat broke from procedure and descended. Ignoring the rungs, she slid down the outer rails, using the ladder like a firehouse pole. Nikki landed in a crouch, Sig Sauer ready in her right hand. She plucked the flashlight from her teeth and shined it across the cellar.
He stood completely naked in the center of the partitioned-off section of basement, staring at her with detached eyes that appeared to see and not to see. “NYPD, freeze.” Her suspect didn’t respond. Besides, he had already frozen, standing there motionless yet unthreatening as SWAT backup rained down to join her, training assault weapons with tactical-mount lights on him. “Hold fire,” said Heat.
She wanted him so dead, but she needed him alive.
All the flashlights revealed a sea of shoes surrounding him. Hundreds and hundreds of shoes: men’s and women’s, old and new, pairs and orphans-all in neat rows of concentric circles around the center, toes pointing at him. “So,” he said. “You came for my shoes.”
“What do you answer to, William or Bill?” Nikki waited again for him to speak and would wait as long as she had to. The suspect had remained silent since they sat down to face each other in Interrogation One ten minutes before. Mostly, he just studied himself in the observation mirror. Occasionally, he looked away, then back, as if to surprise himself. He rolled his muscular shoulders so that they flexed against the orange fabric of his jumpsuit.
At last he asked, “Is this mine to keep?” and seemed to mean it.
“William,” she said. “I’m going to call you what it says here on your rap sheet.” He broke eye contact and looked back in the mirror. Detective Heat studied the file again, although by then she had committed the salient facts to memory. William Wade Scott, male cauc, age forty-four. Basically a low-end drifter whose arrest record traced his movements through the Northeast following his dishonorable discharge on drug charges after Desert Storm in 1991. His beefs ran on the petty side, a ton of shoplifts and disorderly conducts, plus a few arrests that raised the bar, most notably a 1998 electronics store smash-and-grab in Providence that earned him three years as a state guest. Nikki tasked Ochoa to run a double-check with Rhode Island Corrections for the release date because that incarceration alibied him for her mother’s murder.
Behind the mirror in Observation Room 1, Detective Ochoa texted her, confirming William Wade Scott’s prison release in 2001-a year and a half after her mom’s killing. She read it passively, but Rook watched her fists ball under the table after she slipped her cell phone back into her pocket.
In the wake of so many setbacks on her mom’s case over the years, Nikki had hardened herself against despair, but this one stung. However, as ever, Heat’s response to disappointment was greater resolve. And a reality check. Did she honestly believe the killer would fall into her lap on the same day as the new lead? Hell, no. That’s what tomorrow was all about.
Rook turned to Raley and Ochoa in the Ob Room. “That still leaves him as a possible for the Jane Doe killing, doesn’t it?”
“Possible?” said Raley. “Yeah, possible…” The “not likely” was silent. After the raid in Bayside, neighbor interviews said the naked man in the basement was not the owner of the residence on Oceania Street but a homeless squatter, one of a number who had moved into nice, suburban neighborhoods throughout Long Island after residents simply walked away from upside-down mortgages. The block had filed several complaints about the man, but they grumbled that nothing had come of them. But Raley’s follow-up check on the absent homeowner suggested this vacancy hadn’t come from a mortgage walk-off. He pulled up an old 1995 New Jersey arrest against the owner for operating a hydroponic pot farm in the basement, which not only accounted for the floor hatch in his
