Raley cleared his throat. “Maybe we could just follow the scent of tea tree oil.”
“Hilarious,” said Rook. “What happened to the whole brotherhood of Roach Blood thing?”
“We talked it over. We want our blood back.”
Nikki just let them riff and walked the rest of the apartment. Losing Salena didn’t cancel out the day of progress, but it absolutely left a bad taste. Before the gloom could seep in, she decided to get busy. “You guys get the bedroom yet?”
“Not yet,” said Roach.
The duffel was still open at the foot of the bed, so Heat started there, figuring what Salena Kaye would pack to take with her meant the most to her. The outer pockets contained makeup and toiletries bagged in TSA portions. The end zipper section held a blow dryer and brushes. The main compartment was half-filled with a pair of sandals, a bikini, some Victoria’s Secret underwear, on the daring side-no surprise-and a pair of jeans. She carefully lifted that stack out to set on the bedspread and let out a “Yesss!” to the empty room.
Underneath the clothing, Nikki had found her stolen keepsake box of photos.
EIGHTEEN
In a rare and blatant move of tactical Irons avoidance, Nikki Heat skipped going back to the station house after completing the search of Salena Kaye’s apartment that evening. The last time she had called in, Detective Feller told her that the captain was in his glass box highlighting CompStats but had regularly scoped the bull pen to check her desk. Whatever he wanted, it would have to wait. Nikki had a date with the keepsake box.
After confirming that the APB had gone out on Salena Kaye and satisfying herself that Malcolm and Reynolds had the forensic examination of Carter Damon’s van covered, she took her reclaimed photos and cabbed down to Tribeca to meet up with Rook at his loft.
He had gone there an hour before to keep an appointment with a locksmith, and when Heat arrived, Rook handed her a shiny brass key to fit his new deadbolt. “I’d like to think a new lock makes a diff,” he said, “but the way things have been going, I might as well just leave the front door wide open and slap Post-its where to find the good stuff.”
“One good thing,” she said. “Now that we know it was Salena, we don’t need to worry that Forensics didn’t find any prints.”
“Maybe they didn’t score any fingerprints, but they did find my little Scotty dog under the couch.”
“Yay, Forensics.”
“It must have gotten knocked off the table and rolled under there when Salena planted this.” He held up a small black box with a wire dangling from it.
“A bug? So she not only had access to our Murder Board and stole these pictures, she planted a bug?”
“Now I’m all paranoid about things I might have said.” And then he added with a sly grin, “During the massage, I mean.”
“I’ve heard you in your ecstasy, Rook. I’d be paranoid, too.” Then Heat set up shop at the dining room table, opening the lid of the keepsake box and poring over the photos.
The first pass through was to eyeball for jewelry. If that bracelet with the one and the nine charms held any meaning, the first clue would be to see if her mother, Nicole, or anyone else in the pictures wore it or something similar. But after scrutinizing every picture, they had seen no similar bracelets or jewels of unusual note.
Next she set about arranging the pictures in separate piles. When Rook couldn’t detect a pattern to her stacks, he said, “Pardon me if I’m in violation of using your registered trademark, but what are you doing, looking for an odd sock?”
“No, actually I’m looking for the opposite of that. I’m playing around with various sequences and configurations to see what matches instead of what doesn’t. Just letting instincts dictate piles. For instance, these are turning out to be a bunch of poses with tutor patron families. I’ll make that one stack.”
“Got it,” he said. “And these here… What, solo shots of your mother and a piano at various homes?”
“Right, there you go.” Nikki continued sorting and resorting, creating categories of pictures including poses with Tyler Wynn and her mom, Oncle Tyler with Nicole, Tyler with other groups, and then the last stack of remainders-constituting all the solo shots of members of the Nanny Network in those comical, goofy poses, gesturing like spokesmodels.
Rook went over to the counter to pour some hot water through two Melitta filters of French roast, leaving her to spread that last stack out across the table. She found herself drawn to these more by feeling than reason. What were these pictures telling her? She tried rearranging them by date stamp on the backs. The sequence didn’t teach her anything. She made another order by geography. She stared at that grouping for a while and felt nothing coming back. Then Heat tried something uncomfortable for her: She let go of Cop-Think and went back to something more primal.
She let Nikki, the seasoned investigator, think like Nikki, the little girl. And when she did, she thought of how her mom used to love to make her laugh by striking those very same Price Is Right model poses at home. Or to Nikki’s greater mortification, in the aisle of a supermarket or at Macy’s. She called it “styling,” and little Nikki would giggle or groan with embarrassment depending on where her mom styled. The funniest places were at home, safely away from the eyes of schoolmates-or anyone, for that matter. Cynthia would sweep her graceful arms and delicate wrists in front of the oven. Then she’d open the door to style the interior. And then do the same for the fridge, opening the crisper and styling a head of lettuce. “Styling,” her mom had said, “is what you do when it’s not polite to point.”
A new idea triggered by that old memory dawned on Heat. She looked at one photo, then another. Sure, this could have been some running gag or inside joke within the network; the early version of how people nowadays text cell shots of food in the shape of presidents, or forced perspectives of themselves pretending to hold up the Gateway Arch or cradling the Hollywood sign in the palm of a hand.
But what if it wasn’t a joke?
What if her mother and Nicole Bernardin and Eugene Summers and her other friends weren’t just goofing but were doing something else? What if they were using what appeared to be a sophomoric joke as cover for something more serious?
If styling was what one did when it was impolite to point, what if they were pointing at something?
She called Rook over to the array on the table and shared her idea. “Go with me on this,” she said then tapped the first shot. “Check it out. Here’s our butler, Eugene, in front of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel in Vienna back in 1977. He’s holding the camera in one hand to take his own picture, and with the other, he’s styling toward that booth of tourist brochures.” She went to the next. “Here’s young Nicole in 1980 in Nice. She’s at the outdoor flower market, but look, she’s gesturing to a service locker near the entrance. And even in this one…” She picked up the picture of Cynthia in Paris-the same one Nikki had used for her reenactment to stand in her mother’s footsteps. “In this one, Mom’s styling toward that wooden book vendor’s stall. See it, the one that’s over on the side of the square near the Seine?” She set the photo down with care. “I think these are signals.”
“Hey,” said Rook, “I definitely think you’re on to something, but I’m the foil hat guy, remember? How do we find out for sure?”
“I know how.” Heat opened her notebook and flipped pages until she found the cell number she wanted.
Eugene Summers gave her a chilly reception, obviously still harboring bruised feelings following the slight he’d felt from Rook at lunch. But the butler was, in the end, a man of manners. He took a break from shooting Gentlemen Prefer Bongs out in Bel Air to find a private place to answer her question. He didn’t even play the what-if game. “You cracked the code, so I might as well tell you. Especially since it’s a dead protocol anyway. You’re absolutely correct. We’d adopted those modeling poses as our own little Nanny Network secret language. In fact, it was your mother who came up with the idea of styling. She’d say, ‘Styling is what you do-’”
”’-when it’s not polite to point,’” said Nikki, doubling him. And then she asked, “Tell me one more thing. What were you pointing to?” Heat believed she had cracked that one, too, but needed to hear it from him, and without prompting.
“Remember I told you about drop boxes? We’d use these pictures as a means to secretly show each other the locations of our various hiding places.”
