window when he saw Nikki. “Bloody hell,” he said in his Mayfair accent. “You look just like your mum.”
Maggs had good reason to do a double-take at the sight of her. In London back in 1976, when Carey was eight years old, Nikki’s mother had been employed by his beer magnate father as his piano tutor. After he’d emigrated to America in 1999, Carey Maggs had passed the torch by hiring his childhood piano teacher to tutor his own son. “That’s the circle. The circle of life,” said Rook.
“Don’t need to tell me about history repeating. Here I am making suds just like my father did back in the UK,” Maggs said as he led them on a tour of his brewery. The humid air in the massive facility was tinged with enough yeast and malt to taste them; equal parts inviting and off-putting at that early hour. As they passed giant vats and containers with their sprouts of coiled tubing and pipes, Carey Maggs described the process in brief, and how they performed all processes on-site, from malting, to mashing, to lautering, fermenting, conditioning, and filtering.
Rook said, “I don’t know why, but I thought these would all be copper.”
“Stainless steel. Doesn’t impart taste to the brew and it’s easy to clean and sterilize, which is critical. Those vats over there are copper-plated on the outside, but that’s just for aesthetics because they face the showcase window of the pub.”
“Impressive. Your father must be proud of you for continuing the legacy,” said Nikki.
“Not so much. We part company on the business model. Dad named his signature beer after the town drunk in a Dickens novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”
“Durdles,” said Heat, recalling her own dad’s longing for it.
“Right. Well, my dear father seemed to forget that Charles Dickens was all about exposing social injustice and corporate greed. So now that I run the company, I’ve not only expanded our Dickens brand to pubs and beer gardens, I donate half our profits to Mercator Watch. That’s a foundation that monitors international child labor abuse. I call them GreedPeace. You heard of it?”
“No,” said Rook, loving the nickname, “but now that you gave me a title, I have an article to pitch Rolling Stone.”
“The way I see it, how many million is enough when half the world is starving or doesn’t have water to drink? Of course, that’s all too radical and socialistic for the old man, but he’s just a big Scrooge. Now, how’s that for irony?” Carey laughed and finger combed the unruly curtain of brown hair that had fallen over one side of his forehead. “Sorry about prattling on. You didn’t make the trip here this morning to listen to this.”
The three of them took seats on red leather bar stools in the empty pub, and Nikki said, “Actually, I do have some serious business to discuss. I’m investigating my mother’s murder, and since you knew her so long, maybe you can help provide some information.”
“Of course. Now I feel even worse for blathering on. Whatever I can do.” Then his eyes widened. “I’m not a suspect, am I? Because that would pretty much suck, especially considering how I felt about her. I mean, Cynthia was wonderful.”
She didn’t tell him whether he was a suspect or not because she hadn’t decided. Instead, Nikki moved forward with her questions. She’d prepped carefully, knowing an interview like this would be tricky because she faced the challenge of not revealing that her mother had been a spy. So Heat decided to proceed as she would with any other interrogation of an eyewitness or person of interest and see what shook out: nervous behavior, inconsistencies, lies, or even new clues. “Think back, if you can, to the month leading up to her killing,” she began. “November of ‘99. Did you see any changes in my mom’s behavior?”
He thought it over and said, “No, not that I recall.”
“Did she confide any worries? Seem agitated? Mention anybody who was bothering her, threatening her?”
“No.”
“Or say that she felt like she was being followed?”
He thought and wagged his head. “Mm, nothing of that sort, either.”
And then Heat tried to ascertain if her mother had been snooping his home. “During that last month she worked for you, did you or your wife ever get a feeling that things in your house were disturbed?”
His brow was puzzled. “Disturbed in what way?”
“Any way. Items in disarray. Items out of place. Items missing.”
He shifted on his bar stool. “I’m trying to makes sense of this, Detective.”
“You don’t have to, just think back. Did you ever come into a room and find something was moved? Or gone?”
“Why would that be? You asked me if she was agitated. Are saying your mother had developed some mental problem and gone klepto?”
“I’m not saying that. I’m just asking if things were disturbed. Do you need to think about it?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”
“Let me ask about other people who may have been in your home back then.”
“You do realize that was ten years ago plus.”
“I do. So I’m not talking about plumbers or deliverymen. Houseguests. Did you have anyone staying with you?”
“Hello. You think somebody we knew might have killed her?”
“Mr. Maggs, it would be helpful for you not to keep guessing what I’m trying to learn and just focus on the question.”
“Brilliant. Carry on.”
“I just want to know if you had any houseguests. Overnight, weekends?” Heat had circled a notation in Joe Flynn’s surveillance log that a man, about thirty, had been at the Maggs residence that week just before the PI got pulled from his stakeout by her dad. “Anyone stay in your apartment with you while my mom was there giving lessons?”
He shook his head slowly as he thought. “No, I don’t think so.”
Rook said, “That was right around Thanksgiving. No friends or relatives came to stay with you the week before Thanksgiving?”
“Of course, that is not one of our traditional UK holidays, so let me give it a fair bit.” He made a steeple of his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Well, now that I think it over, it comes to me that a college mate of mine did arrive and stayed with us that week. Your mentioning Thanksgiving jogs my memory because the kids were going to be off school. We were planning to leave that weekend for London and he was going to mind our flat while we were chocks away.” Maggs recognized the implications and grew unsettled. “But if you’re thinking he had anything to do with it, no. I couldn’t believe that, not him.”
She turned her spiral to a fresh page. “May I have the name of this friend?” Carey closed his eyes slowly and his face went slack. “Mr. Maggs, I am going to ask you again to give me the name.”
In a voice that had gone strangely toneless, he said, “Ari. Ari Weiss.” Then he opened his eyes. He looked as if the admission had hollowed something out of him.
Nikki spoke quietly, but persistently. “Can you tell me how I could get in touch with Ari Weiss?”
“You can’t,” he said.
“I have to.”
“But you can’t. Ari Weiss is dead.”
“Confirmed,” said Rook, hunched toward the screen at his desk back in the precinct. Heat crossed over to him as he referred to it. “Obituary for Ari Weiss, MD, says the graduate of Yale School of Medicine and Rhodes Scholar-which is probably how he met up with Carey Maggs, up at Oxford-died of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. It says here, that is a malaria-like parasitic disorder which, like Lyme disease, is usually tick-borne, although it can come from transfusion, blah, blah.”
“Rook, a man’s dead, and all you can say is, ‘blah blah’?”
“Nothing against him. It’s just I’m one of those people who hears about rare diseases delivered by ticks and I start scratching and checking my temperature every five minutes.”
“You’re a prize package, Rook. Lucky me.” She hitched a thumb at the obit on his screen. “Meanwhile, a potential lead hits another dead end. When did he pass?”
“2000.” Rook closed the webpage. “That eliminates him as a suspect for Nicole Bernardin’s murder, anyway.”
Nikki tried to stay upbeat in the face of yet another lead coming to an apparent dead end. She was making a
