Heat turned to Rook and shook her head. He said, “What gave it away?”
“Eyes-only? Clever… Max.”
“Sorry about that, Chief.”
Heat held up her hands to the squad, the palms separated by inches. “I was this close to telling you anyway. So now I’m this close.” She brought them together. “But with all the leaks around here lately, I need your pledge that this stays in this group and doesn’t go beyond you.” Every single one, without prompting, raised his right hand.
So Nikki made a leap of faith.
Sometimes risks pay off. If Heat had not opened up to her squad, she never would have found herself in Midtown with Rook an hour later waiting for an elevator in the lobby of the prestigious Sole Building and feeling her first excitement at a potential lead since spotting Nicole Bernardin on her mother’s old recital video.
Nikki had given her detectives the cut-down version, editing out the Russian kidnapping, the Homeland Security encounter, and the most private parts. Nikki was not prepared to give up family secrets-especially not the nasty rumor that her mother had turned traitor at the end. Roach might piece that together if anything came of the hidden bank account, but she’d deal with that then. Meantime, filling the squad in on the Nanny Network, Tyler Wynn, and the CIA had given them plenty to digest. She’d finished by admonishing them again not to share and also to make sure to tell her immediately if anyone contacted them about the case.
Feller asked, “You mean CIA? FBI? One PP?”
“I mean anyone.” Nikki didn’t explain further, and as surely as she had in her Paris photo reenactment at Point Zero, she once again found herself in her mother’s footsteps, becoming cagey and strategic rather than open.
One practical advantage of her briefing was that she could now make assignments, like having Rhymer check out the alibi for the reality TV butler, Eugene Summers. But beyond mechanics, it also allowed her to mine the thoughts of her team, even if only for validation of her own ideas. Reynolds said, “First place I’d go is to those folks your mother spied on.” Which Heat, of course, had already considered.
“The problem is, where to start?” she said.
Rook opened his Moleskine to a dog-eared page. “I did some research on the North Vietnamese family from that box of photos-the family whose son your mom tutored before the Paris Peace Talks. The dad was prominent, so he was on Wikipedia. Both parents died in the eighties, and the son has been in a monastery since.”
“Not that Wikipedia isn’t the investigative journalist’s best friend, Rook,” said Randall Feller, putting a bit of stank on it, “but my gut says we’re smarter to focus in person on her mom’s most recent activity before the murder.”
“Agreed.” Detective Malcolm swung one of his work boots up on a chair back. “I’d say fuck it to the old gigs and start with her U.S. spy work. The old European stuff is going to be hard to trace and you’re going to end up doing a lot of wheel-spinning, sifting through forty years.”
His partner Reynolds said, “True that. Old scores are harder to trace and not likely to carry motives unless they are some mighty epic grudges. I’d start with those last targets she was snooping.”
Heat, already feeling better for their input, said, “Yeah, but how do you do that if you don’t know who her clients were?”
Rook got the lightbulb look and jumped up. “I know how.”
And he did.
The elevator let them out into the forty-sixth-floor offices of Quantum Retrieval. The receptionist was ready for them and ushered Heat and Rook to the corner office so immediately that they were still clearing their ears from the elevator ride when she gestured them in to meet the CEO.
“Joe Flynn,” he said with a broad smile to go with his self-assured handshake. After Heat and Rook declined bottled waters, Flynn motioned them to the mission decor conversation area away from his desk.
Before Rook sat, he took in the view of Rockefeller Center below. The skating rink had long been defrosted and switched over to cafe tables that he watched being set for dinner. “Nice digs. Business must be good.”
“Smartest move I ever made was to quit staking out adulterers at seedy motels and make the jump to insurance recovery. That was my quantum leap.” He paused to let them make the connection to his company name. Flynn looked tan, fit, and rich, like a doctor from a primetime medical drama. Rook didn’t like the way the sexy insurance investigator was appraising Nikki, and he sat close to her on the couch. “First piece of stolen art I recovered took me one week and paid me as much as I’d made in three years of gumshoeing errant spouses… Plus the ones who weren’t having affairs,” he said pointedly to Heat. He flashed her some teeth Rook bet came courtesy of the Brite Smile off Fifth Avenue.
She said, “So you recall that my father hired you once for a case.”
“It was ten years ago, but Heat’s not that common a name. Plus you look just like your mother. And that’s a major compliment, in this humble man’s view.”
Rook, who hadn’t bargained for this when he came up with the brainstorm of contacting Joe Flynn for leads, tried to quell the ex-PI’s bald flirtation by jerking the leash into business. “Cynthia Heat’s murder is still under investigation.”
“Saw that in the Ledger,” he said. “And all over TV last night. I thought you had your killer.”
“We’re keeping things open for now,” said Heat. “We need to go deeper.”
“I like going deeper,” said Flynn, prompting Rook to slide even closer to her. It didn’t seem to faze the other man. “Can I do that for you, Nikki?”
“I hope so. Do you still have records of your surveillance and any other checks you made on the people she was spending time with back then?”
“Well, let’s just see.” Flynn picked up an iPad from the table beside him and started flicking the screen. He caught Rook watching and said, “You should get yourself one, man, they’re amazing. They gave me one of the betas after I recovered a stolen prototype. Some goof left it in a bar, if you can believe that.” He tapped the glass and said, “Here we go. Summer-fall 1999. Piano tutor, right?”
“That’s right,” she said.
“Got it.” He looked up at her. “I’d normally ask for a warrant, but since this hits close to home, let’s not stand on ceremony this time. All right with you, Detective?”
“Quite.”
He tapped the screen again. “Copy’s being printed for you now. Leave me your e-mail and I’ll also attach the file for you.”
She handed him a card. “My phone number’s on there, too.”
“But the e-mail,” said Rook, “that’s all you need, right? For the attachment.”
“Right,” said Flynn. “So you think one of these people may have killed her?”
“Hard to know. Let me ask one more question. You were hired to check for infidelity. Did you observe anything else? Arguments? Anybody threatening my mother? Did she do anything or go anywhere out of the ordinary that you didn’t log because it wasn’t strictly part of your assignment?”
He tugged his ear as he thought. “Not that I recall. Been a number of years, but I’ll keep thinking. If I come up with anything, I’ll sure phone you.”
“Great.”
“Anything else?” he asked. “And I mean anything.”
“Yes,” said Rook stepping between them. “Do you validate?”
Rook’s hide was still chapped over Joe Flynn’s come-ons to Nikki when they got back to the precinct. “That guy obviously clocked too much time chasing lotharios and degenerates. You hang out at enough hot sheet motels, sooner or later the bedbugs are going to bite.” Heat ignored his grousing and made a list of the handful of names in Flynn’s file of her mother’s tutoring jobs during his surveillance and apportioned background checks on them around the squad. She didn’t post the list on the Murder Boards; this wasn’t for everybody.
Meanwhile, other results started coming in. Eugene Summers alibied out. Customs confirmed from passport records that he had indeed been in Europe in November of 1999. And the night of Nicole Bernardin’s death, TV’s most famous butler had been in LA on a location shoot at the Playboy Mansion. Also, Malcolm and Reynolds had buttoned down Hank Spooner’s whereabouts in the kill zone. At the time he had confessed to stabbing Nicole in Larchmont, New York, his credit card placed him in Providence, Rhode Island, running an arcade tab at Dave amp; Buster’s until midnight. The detectives e-mailed Spooner’s mug shot to the manager, who confirmed he’d been
