even formed their own chamber ensemble. Why do you think she never told you about her?”
She turned the page to another yearbook shot of her mother and Nicole. This time they were at the 1970 French Cultural Festival at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade. The picture captured them eyeing each other peripherally as they played. The caption read, “Trope and Bernardin, Keeping Time,” but to Nikki the look carried more. If it were present day, the caption would simply say, “BFFs.”
Rook asked, “Do you think they had some big falling out?”
“How would I know if I didn’t even know about her?”
“Hey, here’s a theory.”
“I was waiting. Are you sure you don’t want to put on your foil cap?”
“Nicole Bernardin killed your mother.”
She just stared at him. “And?”
“Hang on, I’m formulating thoughts… And that is how Nicole had your mom’s suitcase.”
“And then, ten years later, someone else killed her, same MO, and just happened to stuff her in it?”
“Oh,” he said, wiggling in his seat. “What if… What if Nicole’s husband was your mom’s killer? That’s how she ended up in his suitcase.”
“You know, at least that has possibilities.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So quit while you’re ahead.” She closed the file and stared at the passing marshes and woodlands, seeing none of it, really. Less than a minute passed, and Rook was back, as if he’d hit reset. “There must be some reason your own mother never mentioned such a good friend.”
“Rook?” she said. “Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Shut up?”
“Thank you.”
He concentrated on the view again, glimpsing the last of the solitary islands of rock just before the train entered an underpass and the concrete wall blocked it from sight.
Even though they had to detour around a frozen zone set up on Dyckman due to a gas leak caused by the earthquake, they still made record time getting to Nicole Bernardin’s apartment in the northernmost section of Manhattan. Her building, a slender two-story town house facing Inwood Hill Park across the avenue, would be Realtor-listed as a charming Tudor. The neighborhood felt safe and looked well maintained, the sort of quiet street where people used canvas car covers and the half walls surrounding porches gleamed with fresh coats of paint. Heat and Rook entered the town house to find a different picture entirely.
From the downstairs foyer, in every direction they looked, the disarray was alarming. Cabinets and closets stood ajar. Paintings and pictures ripped from hooks sat askew, with busted frames tipping against wainscoting and doorjambs. An antique china cabinet in the dining room lay split open on its side with shattered crystal glassware surrounding it like ice chips. Strewn decorative objects covered all the floors as if the whole place had been shaken. “Tell me this wasn’t from the earthquake,” said Rook.
Detective Heat put on a pair of blue gloves. Raley handed him a pair and said, “Not unless the earthquake walked around crushing everything under size eleven work boots.”
Touring the ransacked town house shrouded Nikki in yet another suffocating cloud of deja vu. Her own apartment-once the scene of her mother’s murder-had also been tossed back then, although not so thoroughly violated. Detective Damon had called that an interrupted search. This one clearly went on nonstop until the perp either found what he was looking for or was satisfied he never would.
Ochoa met her in the doorway as she entered the upstairs master bedroom. As they stepped around the fingerprint technician who was dusting the cut glass knob, she asked her detective, “Any sign of blood anywhere?”
He shook no and said, “No obvious sign of struggle, either. Although I don’t know how you’d ever be able to sort that out a hundred percent in all this mess.”
“I can give you about ninety-nine-point-nine percent, if that’s helpful,” said the lead for the Evidence Collection Unit, Benigno DeJesus, as he rose up from kneeling on the rug behind a tossed mattress. Nikki’s shoulders immediately relaxed when she saw him. The crime scene was in excellent hands.
“Detective DeJesus,” she said. “To what do we owe this honor on a Sunday?”
He pulled down his surgical mask and smiled. “I don’t know. I had an uneventful day planned when Detective Ochoa called to tell me about this case of…,” he paused and then, in his typically understated fashion, continued, “some interest. So here I am.” She gave Ochoa a quick study, wondering what favor Miguel had traded for pulling in the best evidence man in the department on a day off, but Oach’s stoic face gave nothing away.
DeJesus gave her and Rook an overview tour of the town house, with his preliminary assessment being that the disarray constituted a property search without an assault associated with it. He pointed to the second bedroom, which Nicole Bernardin had set up as a home office. That had received the brunt of the rummaging. He used a penlight to indicate four tiny circular marks where the rubber feet of her laptop had lived before it got taken. The charger cord as well as the USB cable to her missing external hard drive all remained where they had once connected to the computer. Desk drawers and files all sat open and empty, except for stationery odds and ends. “The level of meticulousness here tells me whoever searched the residence focused most of his attention and care in here,” he said.
Back in the bedroom, the ECU detective said the owner of this place wasn’t sharing it with a spouse. All the toiletries, clothing, foods in the kitchen, and other tells suggested a mature woman living alone, although she had kept a supply of condoms in the nightstand and a new toothbrush, shaving cream, and a package of disposable razors in a bathroom cabinet. Hearing that, Nikki and Rook side-glanced each other, each tentatively ticking one unspoken thought off a mental list about Cynthia Trope Heat and Nicole Aimee Bernardin. The prescriptions in the medicine cabinet all matched Nicole’s name, and the few pictures in broken frames on the floor showed the victim in Europe at various ages with people resembling parents and siblings. Nikki crouched over, curious to see if her mother appeared in any of them, but she did not. She stood up and observed Rook doing the same thing in the next room.
Roach had already briefed Detective DeJesus about the traces of lab solvent and the railroad grime found on her body, and he promised to be on the lookout, as well as to coordinate with Lauren Parry at OCME on Nicole Bernardin’s toxicology to match prescription use and any other findings she learned in her postmortem. Heat was content to leave it in the capable hands of ECU, but she indulged herself in a solitary, sense-of-the-house tour before she drove back to the Twentieth Precinct. One thing she wanted to see satisfied a big piece of curiosity for her when she found it. In the downstairs closet she discovered a complete set of luggage, including the exact size of her mother’s stolen piece. All were empty, and there was no space left in the closet for the suitcase the victim’s body had been found in. That was not definitive information, but it did lessen the likelihood that Nicole Bernardin had been in possession of that American Tourister, and therefore it moved her one step down the roster of her mother’s potential killers. A bittersweet thought for Heat since, ten years later, that roster was still empty.
The silence that fell over the bull pen while Detective Heat updated the pair of Murder Boards was so complete the only sound was the squeak of her marker on the white surface as she printed in red block letters: “1. WHY KILL NICOLE BERNARDIN? 2. WHY KILL NICOLE BERNARDIN NOW?” As she wrote, she said, “As the connections between the old murder and this new one deepen, we need to be thinking about not just the why but the timing, the ten-year lag between the two.”
She turned to the room, where Rook and her squad formed a semicircle around her. Even though she had called them in on a Sunday afternoon, the detectives had turned out without complaint. In fact, beyond just showing commitment, they seemed energized by the mission sense of working this one all-out for her. Some had even brought the group snacks that they had stopped for on the way in from their homes or from the town house up in Inwood. The take-out containers of bagels, cookies, and salads sat behind them on the desktop of the lone no- show, Sharon Hinesburg, who had her phone turned off, a violation of policy. Heat tapped the board with the marker cap. “Keep coming back to these, OK? When this falls together for us, it will be because, above all else, we found the answers to these two questions.”
Their attention was on her, but their eyes were riveted on the new photos Nikki had posted, and the profound-literally graphic-story they told. On the left whiteboard, the familiar death pose of Jane Doe, now Nicole Bernardin. Inches away on the right-hand board, Nikki’s mom’s suitcase, bearing Nikki’s girlish initials, and the new addition, the blowup of Nicole and Cynthia in performance forty years ago at the Esplanade. Not only did the
