“Next best thing. Yardley hung out with me while I recuperated in Athens, and eventually, I moved some of my stuff into a flat she kept in London. You can do the math; it was great fun but it was complicated. She had a job that she couldn’t talk about, and I had one that I wouldn’t. We shared a place but both traveled.” They stopped at a light in Columbus Circle, just a few blocks from the precinct. “I won’t lie to you, it was good while it lasted. But it didn’t last.”
“Conflict of interest?”
“The biggest. I met you.” Nikki turned to him, and they stared at each other until a horn honked behind her on the green light. She drove on, and he continued, “That’s when I stopped seeing her.”
Nikki thought about the intimacy of Yardley’s greeting, and her undisguised physicality with Rook, and thought maybe she had a new understanding of Agent Yardley Bell’s interest in her case. But the DHS meeting had told her something else more important. If Homeland was pinging Salena Kaye’s cell phone calls deep in a Situation Room bunker, something big was definitely going on with Tyler Wynn and his band of conspirators.
Heat double-parked her Crown Vic along with the other police vehicles in front of the precinct on West 82nd. “Wouldn’t lock it up,” called Ochoa. He and Raley stepped out of the walled parking lot on their way to the Roach Coach. “Got a fresh homicide.”
Nikki knew these guys and could read the signs: their impatient eyes, the pace of their strides. Heat’s gut told her things were about to get jerked into a new dimension. “What?” was all she said.
“There’s string,” said Raley.
His partner added, “Looks like we have ourselves a serial killer.”
THREE
Against the dimming of the day, the crime scene floods could have been lights from one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous movie shoots. But as Heat and Rook rolled south on Riverside Drive, approaching 72nd, there were no box trucks, no RV dressing rooms, no port-a-potties with doors marked “Lucy” and “Desi.” When they pulled up, she parked behind the van from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. None of this would be make-believe.
Nikki got out and paused in the street before she closed her door. Rook asked her if everything was OK. Detective Heat nodded. This time she took her private interval for the deceased and felt ready. Raley and Ochoa joined up from the Roach Coach, and the four moved on to work.
The first thing Heat did when she recognized the victim was to call for the ranking scene supervisor. Nikki never broke stride, just told the sergeant to order up crowd control immediately. “Press, paparazzi, gawkers-nobody gets near.”
“Whoa,” said Rook. “It’s Maxine Berkowitz.”
“None other,” said Raley. “Your Channel 3 Doorbuster.”
“Gentlemen” was all Heat needed to say. They quieted, stopping in place. She moved forward, using her palm to shield her face from the powerful CSU lights while she made her Beginner’s Eyes tour around the victim. The body of the Channel 3 consumer advocate sat upright on a city bench facing the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in the pedestrian entrance to Riverside Park. Maxine Berkowitz wore a nicer-quality, tan, off-the-rack business suit. Her hair, although heavily sprayed, spiked out at the back where it had been disturbed. Her makeup bore smudges around her lower face and mouth. Both hands rested gently in her lap. To the casual passerby, she could have been any thirtysomething Manhattan professional taking a break to contemplate the memorial to the First Lady of the World. Except this woman had been murdered.
“Asphyxia through strangulation,” said Lauren Parry over her clipboard. “That’s my prelim, with the usual caveats about letting me run my tests, and yadda, yadda.”
Nikki bent forward to examine the pronounced bruise line around the victim’s neck. “Not manual.”
“I’m betting electrical cord. That contusion is sharply defined. And I see no abrasion or strand pattern like with rope.” Heat drew closer and got a sick-sweet whiff. “Chloroform?” The ME nodded. Nikki studied the smear of makeup around the victim’s nose and mouth and felt a pang of sadness for the reporter, recalling her own abduction a few months before. She rose up and said, “Show me the string.”
The CSU technician’s camera flashed one last shot. He picked up the six-inch aluminum ruler he had placed beside the string to illustrate scale and said, “All yours.”
It sat atop the victim’s purse at the other end of the park bench. Red string, similar to the one left with Conklin’s body, had been tied to an equal length of yellow string, then coiled as one and placed on the purse in a figure-eight loop. The gesture, the care, the quietness of the message-whatever it meant-brought a chill to Nikki. Then Rook moved close by and she felt his warmth against her.
“What do you know,” he said. “A lemniscate.”
“A what?” asked Ochoa.
“Lemniscate. The word for infinity sign.”
Raley weighed in. “I thought infinity sign was the word for infinity sign.”
“Ah, except that’s two words.”
Nikki looked at Roach and shook her head. “Writer.” Then, she said to Rook, “Where’d you learn that, interviewing Stephen Hawking?”
Rook shrugged. “The truth? Snapple cap.”
They worked the scene for over an hour, interviewing the teenage boy who had discovered the corpse while he was walking his neighbor’s pug and had asked the deceased for an autograph. He’d seen nobody else around; in fact, the only reason he paid Maxine Berkowitz any attention was that she was the only one there. The canvass of the nearby dog park yielded nothing to go on but did give Dr. Parry time to set up the OCME privacy screens and run a preliminary temperature and lividity field test. She fixed the time of death as noon to 4 P.M. that day.
Forensics called Heat over to the bench. “Found something when we picked up the victim’s purse to bag it.” With gloved hands, the technician lifted the purse and revealed, underneath it, a small disc. Nikki crouched down beside it for closer examination, to makes sure it was what she thought it was. She frowned and looked up at the tech. “Weird, huh?” he said. “Rollerblade wheel.”
Heat tasked her squad to run the usual checks of facing apartment buildings for eyewitnesses-especially anyone who might have registered a Rollerblader-and to scan for security cams. Then she and Rook set out for Channel 3.
WHNY News occupied the bottom two floors of a media complex wedged between Lincoln Center and the West Side Highway. As she waited for security to clear them, Nikki stared across the courtyard at the neighboring studios where her ex-boyfriend, her mother’s killer, had worked as a talent booker for a late night talk show. The wave of betrayal washed over her anew and refreshed her anxiety about Tyler Wynn’s whereabouts. Heat sealed it off and focused. One murderer at a time, she thought.
The newsroom felt to Heat like her own bull pen, but with higher technology, brighter colors, and better wardrobe. The buzz of preparing for News 3 @ 10 clicked along with the same measured adrenaline rush of working a murder case on deadline. The pressure and excitement ran in the blood, not in the air. Call it controlled chaos.
The news director, George Putnam, a stocky redhead, was still reeling from the shock of his consumer reporter’s murder. Heat walked through a vapor trail of Scotch as she and Rook followed him through a maze of desks. Nikki wondered if the whiskey was Putnam’s reaction to the death, or how he managed to mount a nightly newscast in Gotham. They settled into his office, like Captain Irons’s at the Twentieth, a glass box that gave him a view of his world. “This is a big blow to our family,” he said. He gestured to the newsroom. “We’re all working, but it’s hard. We’re doing it for Max. She was special, that girl.”
The little fans in Heat’s bullshit filter started to whir, but she said, “That’s admirable.” Rook caught her eye and, in the way only lovers can, vibed that his antennae had also risen.