innocence masking the sexy tigress inside. You know, that could be us.”
Nikki looked away. “There is no sizzle in those pictures. He’s too old for her.”
“Know who I bet this is?” he said. “He’s that Oncle Tyler who set up her tutoring clients. Yeah, this is Tyler Wynn. Am I right?”
Ignoring him, she plucked another shot from the stack and held it up. “Hey, here’s one of just Mom taken right here in Paris.” The developer’s time stamp on the reverse read “May 1975.” The photo was of her mother balanced on one foot with a hand shading her eyes, comically peering into the future. It was snapped in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “I want to go there,” said Nikki. “Right now.”
They left the keepsake box with the hotel manager to lock in the safe and took a taxi to Ile de la Cite. Darkness had fallen and the gray stoneworks of the edifice were bathed in white light, which also cast a spooky glow upon the gargoyles observing from above.
Rook knew what this was all about; she didn’t have to say it. They left the taxi and hurried along silently, walking around the back of a tour group that encircled nighttime street performers who juggled flaming batons. They made their way to their destination: the center of the square that faced the front entrance of the massive cathedral. They paused, patiently waiting for a high school field trip to clear away and then approached a small piece of metal embedded in the paving stones, a shiny octagon of brass rubbed smooth by years of wear. This was the exact location in the photo of Nikki’s mom. She took the picture out of her pocket to prepare herself and did what she’d come to do. A month shy of thirty-five years later, Nikki Heat stood in her mother’s footsteps. Then, raising one foot off the ground, she shielded her eyes in the identical hammy pose, which Rook captured with the flash of his iPhone.
This spot of her reenactment was the famous Point Zero, the Paris milestone outward from which all distances are measured in France. This, the saying went, was where all roads began. Nikki hoped so. She just didn’t know where it would lead yet.
They ate at Mon Vieil Ami, a ten-minute stroll to Ile Saint-Louis. Over dinner they talked some more about their visit with Nicole’s parents, which gave Rook a chance to say he didn’t buy Lysette and Emile’s whole theory about Cindy’s taking a break from the rigors of pursuing her passion as the explanation for why she quit her dream. “You have a better theory?” Heat asked. “And does it involve UFOs, cranial needle probes, or memory-erasing light flashes from men in dark suits?”
“You know you hurt me when you mock my outside-the-box approach to case solving. Chide me if you must, but chide me gently. I’m as tender as a fawn.”
“OK, Bambi,” she said, “but don’t look at the chalkboard, venison is the special.”
After they placed their orders, Rook came right back to it. “It’s still the odd sock,” he said. “If someone’s going to prepare her whole life like your mother did for a concert career, she doesn’t just drop it. It’s like an athlete training for the Olympics only to walk away from the starting blocks to become a personal trainer. Great gig, but after all that sacrifice and training?”
“I hear you, but what about what Emile said about changing passions?”
“Uh, with all due respect? Merde. I refer you back to my Olympics versus personal trainer theory. One’s a passion, the other is a J-O-B job.”
Heat said, “All right, maybe it wasn’t necessarily a passion, but you saw her face in those pictures. My mom was having a ball. And probably earning just enough money to make it hard to quit. Maybe the work got to become golden handcuffs.”
“Not that the subject of handcuffs doesn’t titillate me, but that’s also a hard sell. Responsible young woman turns into Paris Hilton in one summer? Doubtful.” His salad and her soup arrived. He took a bite of tender lentils and then continued, “Do you think she had something going with this Tyler Wynn?”
Heat put her fork down and leaned over her plate toward him. “You are talking about my mother.”
“I’m trying to help us-correction, help you-get an understanding of what happened over here to change everything back then.”
“By going to some pretty seedy places.” Her quiet tone was what unnerved him. And the steely gaze.
“Let’s put a pin in it.”
“Good idea.”
“Besides,” he said, “we already hit pay dirt with a suspect. I hope you told Raley and Ochoa to put out an APB on Ryan Seacrest.”
She laughed and said, “Roach had the same response when I called them. Obviously a bogus name, but they’re going to run phone records to see where that call originated last Sunday.”
“It tells us one thing, for sure. Someone definitely wants to get his hands on something. And since the timing of that call came after Nicole’s town house got tossed, we know he didn’t find it.”
“Assuming that it’s the same person looking,” she said.
“Well fine,” he said, teasing her. “If you want to be all ‘objective’ in this investigation instead of leaping to conclusions, go ahead.”
“Objective’s kinda what I do,” she said.
“Kinda,” he said with a tentative edge. Her look told him Nikki knew exactly what he meant by that jab, but she let it go and concentrated on her soup.
A subtle breeze had given the night a soft spring warmth, and when they left the restaurant, Heat and Rook decided to bypass the taxis and walk back to their hotel. They strolled arm in arm over the footbridge to Ile de la Cite, skirting the cathedral and the Palais de Justice until they came to Pont Neuf and stood in one of the bridge’s semicircular bastions to stop the world and enjoy the spectacle of Paris at night reflected in the Seine.
“There it is, Nikki Heat, the City of Light.” She turned to him and they kissed. A dinner bateau passed underneath them, and a happy couple on the top deck called out “ Bon soir ” and raised champagne flutes to them in a toast.
They mimed a toast back to the couple, and Nikki said, “Amazing. No, magical. What is it about this place? The air smells better, the food tastes like nothing I’ve ever had…”
“And the sex. Did I mention the sex?”
She laughed. “Only constantly.”
“Who knows what it is?” he said. “Maybe it’s Paris. Maybe it’s us.”
Nikki didn’t answer that, only nestled against him. Rook stood holding her, feeling her breath against the soft of his neck, but at the same time he felt drawn to silently watch the hypnotic flow of the Seine. Its dark waters streamed underneath them, a powerful force channeled between thick walls of stone revetment engineered to be impenetrable and to keep nature itself within controlled, reliable boundaries. He wondered what would happen if one of the walls ever cracked.
They didn’t set an alarm. Instead Heat and Rook awoke at daybreak to pink light filtered under a thin canopy of gray clouds. Turning to each other, they smiled and said their good mornings. Rook began to slide under the sheet, but Nikki mumbled, “No, stay up here with me this time,” and drew him to face her. The two made love again to the peal of morning church bells and the scent of heaven’s own bakery across the street at Au Grand Richelieu. “All in all, not a bad way to start another day of homicide work,” said Heat on her way to the shower.
As he had calculated, their warm pastries lasted from the bakery door to the espresso bar he had discovered the afternoon before. They found one pair of open stools at the high top counter in the window, and each drank a blood orange juice and a cafe au lait as they watched a businessman standing on the sidewalk turn his back to the wind and expertly roll his own cigarette.
Nikki checked her voice and e-mails. Roach, ever keen about keeping her in the loop, had closed their workday reporting that the request was in process on the phone records search for the Seacrest call to the Bernardins. The wheels of international bureaucracy turned slowly, but Detective Raley said Interpol was helping, so that was something positive anyway. Forensics had promised fingerprint test results on the found glove by morning, and Irons had told Ochoa he would check with the lab personally on his way in. Heat pocketed her phone then took it out again to double-check the time in New York, and determined it was too early to call.
Rook said, “I’ve been doing some further reflection.” He paused, knowing this remained a touchy area. “And I think you got more than a shoe box of memories yesterday. My gut tells me we got a new lead, and it’s Tyler Wynn,”
“Why am I not surprised to hear this?”
“Relax, I’m speculating in a totally new direction, seeing him in a whole other light.”
