“This isn’t going to go away,” he said.
Nikki considered that a moment. She opened the fridge and got him a Widmer’s to go with hers, then they headed back to the couch.
“Answer me this,” she said when they sat down. Each tucked a leg under so they could face each other.
“What have I started here?” He chuckled. “Am I going to get interrogated by The Great Interrogator?”
“Your meeting, Rook. What were you hoping for?”
“To clear the air. So I can allay this irrational-totally irrational-jealous vibe I’m getting from you about Yardley Bell. Jesus, I went to France to help you. Why do I feel like I did something wrong?”
“My question-if I may ask it now-is how did Yardley Bell know you were there? And don’t tell me it was coincidence. Did using your passport light up her Homeland Security grid, and she followed you across the Atlantic?”
“She suggested we go.”
Nikki rocked backward in astonishment. “Oh. Right. Air cleared. Jealousy allayed. Boy, how irrational could I be?”
“See? That’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d go to the bad place.”
“And this doesn’t do it?”
“In hindsight, I’ll admit I may not have exercised my best judgment.”
“What did you exercise?”
“Come on, you know me better than that.”
“You, I know. She’s another story.”
“I told you, Yardley and I are past history.”
“To you. But I know her type.”
“And what type is that?”
“Obsessive old girlfriends who can’t let go. You know what I’m talking about. The ones who drive across the country wearing NASA diapers and have tasers and duct tape in the trunk. Or who write thirty thousand e-mails with veiled threats to rival lovers.”
“Yardley sent you an e-mail?”
“No! She doesn’t have to. She can hop on a federal Gulfstream to France and rendezvous with you in fucking Nice.”
“Where she provided invaluable support setting me up with Fariq Kuzbari. You should be delighted by that.”
“Yeah, look at me. Couldn’t be happier.”
“You were happy when I told you. Until you found out she was there.”
“That’s the other thing. Rook, I have been on a mission to keep the feds away from me and out of my case. I’ve dealt with them a hundred times on a hundred other cases. Their so-called resources come with a price tag. I refuse to let them screw it up with their departmental politics or sell me out in the name of diplomatic expediency. I’ve kept DHS at arm’s length,” she said, deciding not to bring up Bart Callan. “Now Agent Heartthrob is sticking her nose in it-and using you to do it. Or vice versa, what’s the diff?”
Rook tried to slow things. “Hey? Nikki?” He brought his pitch down and rested a hand on her knee. “This is so not you.”
All of it, not just the past few days, but eleven years of it boiled over. She despised it whenever her emotions spilled out, but it was too late to stem this tide. In spite of herself, taciturn, compartmentalized, stoic Nikki Heat blurted her raw vulnerability to him. “I feel alone on this. Everything’s coming at me at once. I can’t do it by myself.”
“Then why don’t you want help?”
“I do. Just not from everyone. I can’t trust everyone.”
“What about me? The idiot who jumped in front of a bullet for you. Do you still trust me?”
There it was. The kind of moment an entire life pivots on as surely as the needle of a compass.
Nikki didn’t answer yes or no. She did something else. Something bigger than she could ever speak. She showed it. Without a word, she rose from the couch and walked to her mother’s piano bench to get the codes.
Rook listened intently as Heat told him everything. About the night three weeks ago when she had finally been able to bring herself to play her mother’s piano for the first time since the murder. How she opened the music bench after eleven years and took out the music book, the one she had been taught from as a girl. And how, while playing it, she saw something unusual. Small pencil notations between the notes of the songs. He leaned over the book to examine them, squinting, turning his head, trying to make sense of the marks, and she told him what she believed, and, in doing that, answered his question about trust.
Nikki told Rook she believed that these markings were a secret code left by her mother. And that whatever information the symbols hid was the reason she had been killed. “And because all the signs say whatever conspiracy Tyler Wynn is involved in is heating up, I also believe if the wrong person found out we had this code, we’d both be killed, too.”
“Swell,” he said with a deadpan. “Thanks a lot for dragging me into this.” And then they fell into each other’s arms and held tight.
A few seconds passed. With her face still buried into him, Nikki said, “You’re dying to get at that, aren’t you?”
“It’s killing me.”
She pulled away and smiled. “All yours.”
Rook didn’t hesitate. He swung around to face the coffee table and opened the music book, bending closer, turning his head side to side, squinting some more at the pencil marks. While she let the man she trusted with her life study in peace, her gaze went to the silent TV, where a bartender at the Crown Salon in Belfast pulled Tony Bourdain a perfectly murky pint of Guinness. Nikki had made her leap of faith. At least for the moment, she, too, had no reservations.
They sat up most of the night, working together, banging their heads, trying to figure out the code. They switched from hefeweizen to French Roast, but the coffee only made them more alert, not any more enlightened. Heat answered all of Rook’s questions but tried to avoid sharing too much of her path; his fertile imagination would do its best work unconstrained.
Even when he signed on the Internet, covering the same ground she had again and again, Nikki didn’t warn him off or try to stop him. With his Beginner’s Eyes Rook might find something she hadn’t, and she didn’t want to pollute his fresh thinking.
His quest went beyond her searches of the Egyptians, Mayans, and urban taggers, to the Phoenicians and Druids. Rook even investigated a site devoted to the mutt languages of some TV series called Firefly. That was when they knew it had come time to call it a night and start fresh at sunup. “You mean in about forty-five minutes?” she asked.
Immune to the caffeine, Heat fell into the deepest sleep she had enjoyed in ages. Call it the power of sharing her burden. When she awoke, the sheets on Rook’s empty side of the bed felt cold to her touch. She pulled on her robe and found him sitting on the bench seat of the bay window, staring down at Gramercy Park, although Nikki couldn’t be certain he was actually seeing anything at all except pencil marks on sheet music.
“Now you know where my head’s been all these weeks,” she said, resting her palms on his shoulders.
“My brain itches.” He tilted backward and she kissed the top of his forehead. “You’re going to hate me.”
“You’re giving up?”
“No.”
“You don’t believe it is a code?”
“I do.”
“Then what?”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Always a source of concern.”
“We’re not going to crack this on our own. At least not soon enough to do any good. We need an assist.” Nikki tensed and withdrew her hands. He turned from the window to face her. “Relax, I’m not talking about going to Yardley Bell. Or Agent Callan.”
Old doubts about sharing with Rook began their noxious trickle. “Who then?”