Heat had already known that much. But she now wanted to ask some new questions. “Did you know who her informant was?” When the agent shook no, she said, “I believe it was a man name Ari Weiss. Deceased now, so no help. But he was college friends with a Brit living here named Carey Maggs.” She searched his face for recognition of either name and got none. “Would it be a pain to ask you to run a check on Maggs for me?”
“You think he might be involved?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be. But I like both belt and suspenders, you know?” Callan twisted open his gold Cross ballpoint and wrote the name down. When he’d finished, she asked, “What about the two hundred thou? Did it ever surface? I know you guys had to mark the bills.”
He wagged his head again. “End of our intel, end of story.” Then he added, “Well, it was the end of the trail until you exposed Tyler Wynn. Which is why I am renewing my pitch to you. The memos out of DC call it cooperative interface. Join me, Nikki. I have resources. We’d make a great team.” He started to reach a hand across the table, but she casually slid hers onto her lap.
“Thanks, but I do better independently.”
He waved his hands back and forth between the two of them. “Then what do you call this?”
“Cooperative interface. And your NYPD appreciates it.”
Out on Madison Avenue, she declined his offer of a ride, even though it would have afforded her a measure of security with Salena Kaye on the hunt for her. The agent said fine, but reminded her that if she ever wanted a sparring partner, he’d be game. From her taxi, Nikki glimpsed him getting into a black Suburban with US government plates, and figured Bart Callan could give her quite a workout.
Detective Heat closed her eyes and ran her math. The equation began with Callan’s intel that her mom had been cultivating an informant. He couldn’t name the insider, but with the new connection Nikki had drawn from her mother to Ari Weiss as a member of Tyler Wynn’s circle, she didn’t have to be at a blackboard in Good Will Hunting to surmise that Cynthia Heat had not been spying on Dr. Weiss-she was cultivating him as a snitch.
She pulled up his obituary on her iPhone. The date of his passing from a tick-borne illness was January 2, 2000. Only six weeks after her mother’s death.
As soon as she locked her apartment door behind her, Heat speed-dialed the home of a judge she’d met at one of Rook’s weekly poker games. After Judge Simpson razzed her about giving him a chance to win his money back, Nikki asked him a favor: to write a court order for the exhumation of Ari Weiss.
Röyksopp startled her from the computer screen. After Rook’s call that morning from Nice, his ringtone, a song from a caveman commercial, seemed newly appropriate to Nikki.
“It’s late there. I was afraid you’d be in bed,” said Rook.
“I’m going over squad reports on my serial killer.”
“I’m in London. Heathrow, actually. Workin’ my way back to you, babe.” The joker, trying to laugh it off, she thought during the long silence she fed him. “Should be there by sunup, your time. I’m flying Virgin.”
“I doubt that.” Another dose of awkward pause.
“Nikki, I guess I can see why you got all bent about Yardley, but you’re reading way too much into this.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.” They listened to each other breathe. Then he said, “They’re calling my flight.”
“How long is it?”
“Let’s see, uh… a little over seven hours.”
“Good,” she said. “Use it to work on your empathy.”
Detective Heat brought her crew in for another early roll call the next morning. This time, they were joined by Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds, on loan from the major case squad. They were quick studies, so Nikki only needed to use the first ten minutes to recap the two murders and get them up to speed. As she wrapped it up, Sharon Hinesburg slid into the back of the bull pen, the only detective to be tardy.
Traces on the physical evidence from each homicide scene had brought no results after a day and a half of calling and canvassing. The red and yellow string was so common and widely available that screening recent purchases could take weeks, plus it could have been bought months or years ago. Same, too, with the skate wheel.
Malcolm raised a hand. “Let me tell you something.” He slouched back in his usual pose and planted one of his work boots on the back of a chair. “Coming in cold?… Whenever I come across props like this in a case, it’s one of two things. Either there’s some sort of personal crap the guy’s working out…”
“You mean like fetishes?” asked Heat.
“Yeah, or some fucked-up, brain-fried, thumb-sucking obsession like his mommy wouldn’t let him have pets or ride a skateboard.”
“… While carrying scissors,” added his partner, Reynolds.
“Or second, he’s just seeding chaff to mess with our heads.” Malcolm brought his cup up to sip. “Who knows?”
“Only the killer,” said Heat. “Let’s keep on tracing those items, especially the string, which is common to both, but keep digging on the victims. People in their lives, how they spent their last day, and especially-are they somehow connected to each other beyond their job types?”
Detective Raley reported that only one neighborhood camera was pointed at the Maxine Berkowitz crime scene. “It’s outside a neighborhood Islamic center on Riverside Drive,” he said. “And it’s out of order.”
Heat logged that in marker on the Berkowitz whiteboard, then tapped the identical notation for the pizza joint cam in the other murder. “Coincidence?” she said. “I would say strange enough to be considered…”
“Wait for it,” called Feller.
“… an odd sock,” said Nikki, and the room erupted in a chorus of “Yessss!” at the first invocation of Heat’s pet investigative phrase on this case. But the rowdiness was quelled when one of the administrative aides brought in the morning papers and held one of the tabloids up to the room. The bold headline screamed: DEAD TIE! Underneath, against a white background, blared a giant photo of two coils of string: one red, one yellow.
Heat dismissed the meeting, and the rest of the squad did exactly what she did: They dove into the New York Ledger. “Exclusive,” read the subhead, and the byline was Tam Svejda, Senior Metro Reporter for the Ledger-whom Heat knew, among other things, to be a lazy journalist prone to easy handouts from “insiders.” Detective Hinesburg had whispered confidential material to her before, acting as Captain Irons’s mouthpiece-an apt term, considering her sexual relationship with the skipper. To Nikki the article felt warmed over, derivative of old reports already made public. But then there was the leak of the big hold-back: that the two homicides were literally bound together by string, which pointed to a serial killer operating in Manhattan.
“Now, calm down, Detective,” said Wally Irons. Heat appeared in his office before he could set down his briefcase. “We were going to release that today anyway.”
“But we didn’t. Someone leaked it. And whoever it was put our MO hold-back on page one,” she said, brandishing the picture of the string.
“First things first,” he said, seeming to enjoy this. “Tam Svejda called me for comment, and you can see for yourself, I downplayed the serial killer angle. Here it is.” He ran a finger down the column and quoted, “Precinct Commander Captain Wallace Irons cautioned against leaping to conclusions. ‘We cannot rule out the possibility that these killings could be the work of separate individuals.’ ”
“Nobody’s going to buy that,” said Heat.
“Ah, but it’s on the record. I did my part.”
Nikki slapped her thigh with the tabloid, wondering how she had gotten so lucky to work under the Iron Man. Detective Ochoa stuck his head in the door.