“Positive ID.”
“I’ll see that and raise you one,” said Raley, coming through the door clutching a photo print. “Just pulled this still from my surveillance screening of the OCME cams. Check out who dropped off the bad gas at the loading dock.” He held up the shot for them all to see: Salena Kaye in a delivery uniform and baseball cap.
Rook joined them from his desk and said, “That is one naughty nurse.”
“Yeah,” said Raley. “Too bad this surveillance tape has been sitting around unscreened for a couple of days. If we’d only seen this day before yesterday, we might have gotten her before she rabbitted.”
“Or got Petar,” added Feller.
“Refresh my memory,” said Rook. “Who was it who said he wanted to take point on the gas truck, personally? Then delegated it to his secret weapon?”
Nikki took the still from Raley and walked it into Irons’s office and shut the door. Less than three minutes later, the captain must have decided not to summon the press, after all. He grabbed his coat and left in a hurry.
Exhausted, but unwilling to go home with things in such flux, Heat spent the night at the precinct. Rook came in at daybreak with a latte and fresh change of clothes for her. “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.
“Ish,” she said. “Tried to grab a few winks in one of the interrogation rooms, but, you know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “My dad’s an early riser, so I called him a little while ago to fill him in, so he wouldn’t hear it on the news first.”
“How’d he take it?”
“Closed, as ever. But at least he didn’t screen me out when he saw the caller ID, so that’s a start.”
Rook thought back to the brittle exit from her father’s condo after she had asked him for the bank statements. “You’re either stronger than I thought you were or a glutton for punishment.”
“Aside from all the personal crap? I really thought I had this case locked down.” She led him to the twin Murder Boards. Both were brimming with new notes she had made on them in the predawn hours. “I thought once I nailed the killer, I’d be done. But Petar ended up-well, he ended up just the consolation prize.”
“You know, Nikki, that’s the tragedy of all this. I was feeling that your old boyfriend and I were just starting to bond.” He looked at her innocently. “What, too soon?”
“A little,” she said, but smiled in appreciation of his usual effort to try to make her laugh, in spite of. “This nerve’s still a bit exposed. But don’t give up, OK?”
“Deal.”
She contemplated one of the boards with a bleak sigh. “This one…” Nikki tapped Tyler Wynn’s name, now featured prominently. “He called the orders. Because of him, my mother died, Nicole died, Don died.”
“Carter Damon, also.”
“Right. And why?” She shook her head. “Damn, I really thought I’d be done.”
Most of the squad gathered early. Clearly, sleep was not anybody’s priority. Roach came in a little later, but only because they had paid a visit to the MTA headquarters on the way in to check surveillance video from the 96th Street station. “They’re making dubs for us now,” said Detective Raley, “but we logged Nicole Bernardin going over the platform toward the Ghost Station with the leather pouch and then coming back without it the same night she died.”
“Any idea what was in it?” asked Rhymer.
“None. I never even touched it.”
Detective Feller joined them. “Any guess who Nicole left it for?”
Heat bobbed her head side to side. “I would only be guessing.” Although Nikki did have one idea she would keep to herself.
Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds came into the bull pen with fresh news from Forensics. The blood traces in the cargo hold of Carter Damon’s van matched Nicole Bernardin’s type. “They’re running it at the DNA lab for confirmation,” said Reynolds. “But I’d bet we hear a ding, for sure.”
Malcolm added, “Carpet fibers match positive for Damon’s work boots. And, even though there’s more fingerprints on that vehicle than an airport lap dancer, they also managed to isolate three big hits: Damon, Salena, and Petar.”
Behind them they heard raised voices and a door slam and all turned toward the glass office to see Captain Irons in a muffled shouting match with Detective Hinesburg, whose mascara had raccooned down the sides of her cheeks. “Trouble in the diorama,” said Feller.
“You guys didn’t see this morning’s Ledger?” asked Reynolds. “ Metro column was all about wondering how a prisoner could die in custody.”
Ochoa said, “All the papers are on that.”
“Yeah, but Tam Svejda has a source who says one of the detectives dropped the ball on identifying Salena Kaye from surveillance video.”
“And we know who that source is, don’t we?” said Feller. “The survivor.”
Ochoa agreed. “Hey, if Wally’d knock a kid over to get on camera, why wouldn’t he save his ass by throwing Sharon Hinesburg under the bus?”
“Or, in this case, under the pressurized gas truck,” added Rook.
Heat cleared her throat. “Much as you know I love forming a gossip circle, maybe we could keep our heads in the game and get back to work?” But as they all returned to their desks, her own gaze drifted to the glass office and she secretly hoped if Hinesburg didn’t get transferred, at least she’d get a nice, fat suspension.
Rook joined her. “I’m going to head out. I have some work of my own to do. Outside stuff. No big deal.”
“Liar. You’re going to work this up as your next article, aren’t you?”
“All right,” he said, “as long as you’re forcing my hand, my editor at First Press e-mailed me to say that they’re going to do a major launch for a new online version of the magazine and think an exclusive on this case would be a perfect cover story to premiere on the new website.”
“And you know how much I loved the last article.”
“I promise, nothing about your sexual prowess, strictly facts.”
“Pants on fire.”
“Let me put this another way,” he said. “Would you prefer I do the article of record, or Tam Svejda?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Get crackin’, writer boy.”
“You won’t be sorry.”
“I already am.”
“Can I buy you lunch later?”
She lowered her eyes from his. “You go on. I’ve got something to do around lunchtime.” When he studied her, deciding whether to ask what it might be, she said, “Go on. I’ll see you at my place after work tonight.”
When she got to the door, she put her ear to it and heard nothing inside. Nikki rapped lightly to make sure the place was empty, and when nobody answered, she quietly slipped in and twisted the lock on the knob.
Taking care not to disturb Detective Raley’s screening notes that were stacked in neat piles along the counter in front of the monitor, she sat behind the console in the little closet he had converted to his surveillance media kingdom. Heat smiled when she saw the cardboard Burger King crown she had awarded to him in a squad meeting after he had found the security cam footage of a gigolo’s street abduction last winter. Then she took a memory key out of her pocket, plugged it into the USB port, and put on the earphones.
Nikki didn’t know how many times over ten years she had listened to the audio of her mother’s murder. Perhaps twenty? First, she had made a crude dub of it by holding a dictation recorder beside the answering machine before Detective Damon could take the mini cassette from the apartment. The quality was poor so, when she became a detective, Heat wrote herself a pass into the Property Room and got the phone cassette copied as a digital file. That WAV sounded much cleaner, yet with all the times she had listened to it, straining to analyze the muffled voice of the killer in the background, she had never gotten closer to identifying it.
She always did it in secret because she knew it would seem ghoulish to anyone who didn’t know she was only doing a clinical playback. This was a search for clues, not an obsession with reliving the event. That’s what she told herself, anyway, and felt it to be true. Her focus was on background, not foreground. She especially hated hearing her own voice on it, and always-every single time-stopped the audio just before it picked up her coming into the apartment and screaming.
That was too much to bear.
