Feeling a wave of exhilaration starting to lift her, she thanked Summers and hung up just as Rook returned to join her from his back office. He came into the great room brandishing the jumbo magnifying glass from his desk that had been decommissioned to the role of paperweight. “I knew this impulse buy would come in handy someday.” He held it over one of the photos of Nicole Bernardin.
“I already saw this,” said Heat. “Taken somewhere here in New York, right?”
“Have a closer look and see where.”
Nikki leaned over and peered through the lens. Rook moved it off the image of Nicole and aligned it on the background. When Heat saw the enlarged sign come into focus behind Nicole, she shot her eyes up at him and said, “Let’s go.”
When Heat and Rook got to the Upper West Side, they both felt thrust into a replay of their photo moment at the Notre Dame Cathedral when Nikki had put one foot on the brass marker at Point Zero and he’d framed the shot. Only this was not a sentimental reenactment of her mother’s pose. They were restaging one by Nicole to learn its message and, hopefully, find a killer.
“We want to be somewhere around here,” Nikki said, circling on the sidewalk near the street corner. Using the old picture for reference, Heat moved closer to the phone booth. “This it?” Rook stood a few feet away, looking at her image on his iPhone screen. He fanned the fingers of his left hand, directing her to shift a few inches to the side, and she did.
“Set,” he said. Then Nikki rotated and, behind her, saw the small green sign Rook had magnified in the background of Nicole’s photo: “W 91st ST.”
“All right, so we had the charms on the bracelet reversed,” said Rook. “It’s nine and one, not one and nine. But what do you suppose Mademoiselle Bernardin was pointing to?”
Nikki studied the photo again and struck Nicole Bernardin’s spokes-model pose. “This here, this is what she’s going for.” Nikki’s styling indicated a subway grate, about the surface area of a coffee table, recessed in the concrete.
“Why would she be pointing here?” asked Rook. “It’s just a ventilation grate.” The ground rumbled, and a rush of air came up to warm their faces through the screening as a subway passed below and continued onward. Rook said, “Son of a-I know!” He bent over and tried to look through the mesh. “It’s not the grate, Nikki, it’s what’s down there. Oh, this is cool.” His face lit up. “This is cray-cray cool.”
“Rook. Shut up and talk to me.”
“There’s an abandoned subway station down there. Holy crap, I did an article on it for the Gotham Eye when I was freelancing after J-school. Fifty years ago the city closed the station when the extension of the new platform at Ninety-sixth Street stretched all the way down to Ninety-third and made this stop obsolete. They just sealed off this station and left it to rust. If you look out the window of the One train, you can still see the old ticket booth and gates when you roll by. It looks spooky, all frozen in time. In fact, the MTA old-timers still call it the Ghost Station.” Rook paused while another train sped under them, quaking the ground. “Ghost Station. Not a bad hiding place for something like a drop box, if you ask me.”
Rather than mock him for spinning another wild theory, Nikki recalled Nicole Bernardin’s forensic results that reported grime consistent with a railroad environment on the soles of her shoes and on the knee of her pants. So instead of tweaking Rook, she asked one question. “How do we get down there?”
“Beats me. I remember my PR guide from the transit authority said when they dismantled the sidewalk entrance, they sealed off the stairs with concrete slabs. Guess they also put in these vents.”
Nikki got on one knee and tried to pull the grate open. “Won’t give.” Then she got up, looked around, and pointed to the center divider in the middle of Broadway. “There’s another grate out there behind that fence, see?” Heat took a step out into the street without checking traffic. A horn blasted. Rook grabbed her arm and jerked her back just in time; she had almost gotten clipped by a passing gypsy cab.
“You OK?” he asked.
“Fine. Close one, thanks.”
“No, I mean are you OK-OK?” He studied her and she knew what he meant. It wasn’t like her to be reckless. It wasn’t her nature to let impatience drive her.
Heat dismissed him. “All right, fine, we’ve got the walk now, let’s use it.” She didn’t wait for him but hurried to the median that divided the uptown and downtown flows on Broadway. When Rook caught up, she led him between the evergreen shrubs and tulips to the wrought iron fence surrounding the grate, which was much larger than the one on the sidewalk.
Rook reached both arms through the bars and tried to lift that grate. It wouldn’t budge, either. Another train passed underneath, even louder than the one before, and it blew more wind up at them. “This one must be right above active tracks.” He turned up to her and said, “The one back on the sidewalk would be over the station itself.” But Nikki was already on her way back to it, dodging traffic.
When Rook rejoined her, Heat had both knees on the sidewalk and had her head down, peering through a hole in the grate. “Come see. There’s just enough light from the street lamp to make out the stairs.” She rocked back to give him room.
He shut one eye to focus and spied the deteriorated concrete steps littered by cigarette butts, plastic straws, and all colors of gum that had fallen through the grate over the years. “That’s it, all right.” Then he scanned the grate. “It wouldn’t have these hinges if it wasn’t designed to open. Look. Here’s how it’s locked.” He pointed to a hole in the grid, about the size of a quarter, with a hex head bolt screwed into it.
“Got it.” She squeezed her fingers into the hole and tried to turn it. “That puppy’s on tight. If we could just unscrew that bolt, we could get in.”
“You’re kidding,” he said. “You’re seriously thinking of busting this thing open and climbing down there tonight?”
“Damn straight.”
“I like the way you think. But can’t we call the MTA or Parks and Rec and see if we can have them open it?”
“After office hours?” She shook her head. “Besides, by my estimation, after we got all the red tape cleared and signed all the insurance waivers, we’d be doing our climbing using walkers.” And then she added, “And since when did you become the cautious thinker?”
“Maybe because you’re scaring me. You look like you could use a choke chain tonight.”
“I’m tired of waiting. Ten years, Rook. And now I feel like I’m this close.” She tried the bolt head again with her bare fingertips, knowing it was useless. “I don’t want it to slip away.”
Rook felt the fire in her and said, “We’re going to need a tool to get that off.”
“That’s the Rook I know.”
He surveyed the area as if he’d miraculously find one to improvise, which would have been just that, miraculous. Nikki pointed across Broadway and said, “Oh, man, talk about a cruel irony.” Maybe a hundred feet away sat a locksmith shop with its lights off. “All locked up for the night.”
“We could call them.” When Rook read her impatience, he said, “No, we are not going to break in there. I may not always know where to draw the line, but burglary feels like a good place to start.”
She kicked at the grate with her toe. “If Nicole did get down there, she either had a key or she knew another way in.”
“What we need is a hex wrench to turn that bolt. Or, if it won’t turn, one of those handheld rotary cutters to saw off the head,” said Rook. “Those guys on Storage Wars use them all the time. They go through padlocks like buttah.”
“Is there an open hardware store at this hour?”
“No, but I know the next best thing. Remember JJ?” he said, referring to the building super of a gossip columnist whose murder they had solved.
“JJ, as in Cassidy Towne’s JJ?”
“He’s just down on Seventy-eighth. The man owns every tool imaginable.”
Even though it meant waiting a half hour, Heat agreed their best plan was for Rook to hop down to JJ’s. She would stay there and canvass the area for alternate points of entry. When he got in his taxi, he said to her, “Feels like we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it?” She just shrugged and watched his cab drive off. Nikki had gotten somewhere too many times before only to have it be nowhere.
But this did feel different. Not just the recent surge in leads, but something else. Detective Heat-cautious,
