mental note to do some of her own research later on Ari Weiss, when Roach startled her.
“Detective Heat?” Nikki turned to see the partners standing before her, looking grim.
“Tell me,” she said.
“We’d better show you,” said Ochoa.
As she and Rook followed Roach across the bull pen, Raley said, “I scored this a few minutes ago, but I waited for Sharon Hinesburg to clear out for her two-hour lunch.” He sat at his desk and keyed some strokes on his computer keyboard.
Ochoa said, “It’s the statement for November 1999 on your mother’s separate account at New Amsterdam Bank and Trust.” The monitor filled with a financial PDF. Raley rolled his chair back so Nikki could lean in to read it.
Rook bent over beside her to look and let out a low moan. Heat turned away, her face drained of color.
As if to confirm the reality she feared, Detective Raley said in a hushed voice, “According to this, your mom received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit the day before she was killed.”
“Detective, do you have some idea what this means?” asked Ochoa.
Nikki didn’t reply. Because she would have had to say that it meant it looked like her mother had sold out her country.
Her head became light. Heat turned back to see the document again, hoping she had been mistaken, but the image clouded before her eyes. Small trembles made her hands start to shake, and when she crossed her arms on her chest to hide them her whole body began quaking from the inside, radiating out to her joints. As her legs grew weak, she heard Rook’s voice, sounding like it came from the end of a tunnel, asking if she was all right. Nikki turned away to cross to her desk but changed her mind when she got halfway across the room and wove unsteadily out of the bull pen, smacking her thigh into a chair or maybe a desk on the way out.
When she got to the street, fresh air didn’t help. Nikki’s head still cycloned in a whirl of panic. Even in the bright morning light her vision remained fogged by a deep blue haze, the way condensation forms on a shower door. She rubbed her eyes, but when she opened them again the mist had crystallized, making her view a solid sheet of blue ice. Behind it, shadowy figures moved, seeming familiar to her, but unrecognizable. A face looked back at her through the frost. It looked like her own, through a clouded mirror. But it might have been her mother’s.
She didn’t know which.
Somewhere behind her, Heat heard her name being called. She ran.
She didn’t know where.
Rubber squealed and a truck horn blasted. Defensively, Nikki put out her palms and touched the hot grill of a semi as it skidded to a stop. She stayed on her feet, but the jolt fractured the veneer of ice she was looking through enough for her to see how close she had come to getting hit by a truck.
Nikki turned and bolted through traffic on Columbus Avenue, running somewhere, anywhere.
Away.
FIFTEEN
A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback fronts the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History across from Central Park. Surrounding the famous bronze, a dozen titles listing the achievements of the great president are carved into the stone wall of the parapet: Ranchman, Scholar, Explorer, Scientist, Conservationist, Naturalist, Statesman, Author, Historian, Humanitarian, Soldier, and Patriot. Before these words sits a line of granite benches arranged for contemplation.
When Rook caught up with Heat, she was on the Statesman bench, doubled over, hyperventilating.
Nikki saw his shoes and pant legs before he spoke, and without raising her head, she just whispered, “Go.” He ignored that idea and sat on the bench beside her. Neither said anything for a time. She kept her face to the ground; he rested his palm on her back. It rose and fell with her breathing.
He reflected how, just a few short nights before, the two of them had held each other on the Pont Neuf in Paris while he’d contemplated the thick stone walls channeling the Seine. And Rook recalled wondering what would happen if one of them ever cracked.
Now he knew.
And he set about shoring up the damage.
“It’s not conclusive, you know,” he said as soon as her breathing leveled off. “It’s just a bank deposit. You can project the bad thing if you want, but sounds to me like you’d be breaking one of your own rules if you jumped to a conclusion without hard evidence. That’s my job.”
Not a chuckle from her, not even a scoff. Instead, she folded her arms across her knees and rested her forehead on them. Finally, she spoke. “I wonder if it’s worth it. Seriously, Rook, maybe I should just shut it down. The whole investigation. Leave the past in the past, keep all the bad stuff, I dunno… frozen in time.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“It’s not unthinkable, and that’s a first.” Nikki sighed and her breath hitched. Then in a small, plaintive voice, she said, “But then I keep telling myself I’m doing this for her.”
“Are you?”
“Why else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself because you need to find out the part of her then that’s part of you now. That’s the best reason I can think of to keep going.” He paused and added, “Or you could just throw in the towel because it got difficult, like Carter Damon did.” Heat sat up and glowered at him. “Hey,” he said, “I’m pulling out all the stops here.”
“No kidding. Comparing me to that washout? Not too manipulative.”
“I have my moments.” He looked past her to the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue that loomed over Central Park West. “He was a force of nature, wasn’t he? Did you know he was once NYPD commissioner? They told him the department was hopelessly corrupt and lazy. TR turned it around in two years. You remind me of him. Although you’d have to work on the mustache.”
Nikki laughed. Then she grew pensive and stared deeply into him, seeing something there precious and infinite. Finally she stood. “Time to get back to work?”
“If you insist. And if you’re crazy enough to keep going, I’m crazy enough to follow.”
Algernon Barrett was the next name on the list of wealthy tutoring clients Nikki had gotten from the PI who’d tracked her mother, and when Heat pulled up to the gate of his business, she asked Rook if they had the wrong address. Located on a dead-end street of cement factories and auto scrap yards in the Bronx, Barrett’s Jamaican catering company, Do The Jerk, appeared anything but prosperous. “Know how they say not to judge a book by its cover?” asked Rook, stepping around weeds on their walk up the fractured walkway to the front entrance. “Do judge a caterer by his cockroaches.”
However, as they waited in the small lobby that seemed suited more to a car wash, Rook drifted to the windowed double doors giving onto the food preparation plant and said, “I take it back. You could eat off the floor in there and not be a rodent.”
They paced twenty long minutes before the receptionist answered a phone buzz and led them down a dingy, Masonite-paneled hall to the owner’s office. Algernon Barrett, a whip-skinny Jamaican with an impressive set of Manny Ramirez dreds cascading from under his knit cap, didn’t get up. He remained seated behind his massive desk, peering around an accumulation of spice bottles, unopened UPS cartons, and horse racing magazines scattered there, making no effort even to acknowledge them. In fact, with his designer sunglasses on, it was hard to tell if he was even awake. But his attorney certainly was. Helen Miksit, a former star prosecutor who had quit for private practice and carved an equally strong reputation on the opposite side of the aisle, sat in a folding chair beside her client. The Bulldog, as she was known, didn’t extend any courtesies, either.
“I wouldn’t bother sitting,” she said.
“Nice to see you again, too, Helen.” Nikki extended her hand, which the lawyer shook but without rising.
“Your first lie of the morning. Trying to remember the last time we crossed paths, Heat. Oh, right, the interrogation room. You were putting the pins to my client Soleil Gray. Right before you badgered her so much she killed herself.” That was untrue; they both knew the famous singer had jumped under that train in spite of Nikki’s
