“Adorable.”
“You’ll love them even more when you see this.” He opened another window, beside the Berkowitz image. It was an advertisement for Bedbug Doug posed beside Smokey, his bedbug-sniffing beagle. “Apparently beagles are great at finding bedbugs, and exterminators are using them like crazy. Doug even made Smokey his company mascot.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the ads,” said Heat. “So you’re telling me your connection is that both victims liked beagles? Kind of thin, Randall.”
“Stand by, please.” With the eraser end of a pencil he pointed to the litter surrounding Maxine Berkowitz. “Mixed litter, lots of colors. You’ve got one here that’s mottled, these two are lemon and white, and then there’s this boy here.” He zoomed on the image of one puppy. “This, they call open marked. White coat with tan and black spots. Notice the pattern of these three black spots on his shoulder?” He zoomed on the image of Smokey.
“Identical,” she said, more interested now. “Is it the same dog?”
The detective smiled. “You tell me.” He moused open a YouTube video. While it loaded, he said, “This was shot a year and a half ago in Danbury, at a canine scent-training academy. Basically, it’s Smokey’s graduation from bedbug school.” Nikki watched the amateur video of Douglas Sandmann climbing a riser to applause as he accepted a diploma, with his beagle matching stride, on heel. After Sandmann took the certificate, there was a jump edit to a video that chilled Nikki. Clearly taken in the parking lot after the ceremony, the camera captured Douglas Sandmann and Maxine Berkowitz kneeling and praising her little guy, Smokey, who licked her face.
Heat gave Feller a nod of appreciation. “Who’s a good boy?” he said.
Rook came into the bull pen from his lunch meeting and joined Heat and Feller. Nikki recapped Randall’s beagle connection for him then turned to the Murder Boards. “So we already had one connection from Roy Conklin to Maxine Berkowitz. Now we have one from Maxine to Bedbug Doug. We don’t know what they mean yet but it’s something.” She turned to Detective Feller. “What you just did for Maxine? Do it for Douglas Sandmann. And the locksmith, Glen Windsor, too.”
“Got it. Anything that connects to the other victims.”
“Or helps us learn who his next one might be,” she said. As Feller left for his desk, Nikki drew a line in marker from Berkowitz and Sandmann and labeled it “Smokey.”
“Nice name for a beagle,” said Rook as she capped her dry erase. “Barry Manilow had two beagles. Named them Bagel and Biscuit.”
“Fascinating.” Heat made her way back to her desk, and he followed along, still talking.
“Speaking of Barry Manilow, I just saw an ad for that sitcom The Middle. So funny, Patricia Heaton walks in on her mom dancing to Barry Manilow. Oh. The mom?” he said loudly to the room. “Played by… Marsha Mason. Even fewer than six degrees, thank you, thank you very much.”
“Rook, maybe you could save the parlor games until we’re a little less busy,” said Heat. “Like after we finish, I dunno, catching a murderer or two?”
“Well, Detective Heat, as it turns out, I do have something to contribute to the search for one of your suspects, a certain Tyler Wynn.” He sat on her desk, as was his habit, and she again had to yank a file out from under one of his cheeks.
“I’m listening.”
He unwrapped the elastic band from his black Moleskine. “In spite of his misplaced enmity for me that I just don’t get, Eugene Summers gave up some really useful intel on Tyler Wynn at our lunch. He’s a perfect source. Summers not only spied for Wynn all those years, he’s a butler-a combo of observant plus oriented to detail. The man gave me an incredibly complete list of Tyler’s personal buying preferences.” Rook opened to a page he had bookmarked with the notebook’s black ribbon. “For instance, did you know Wynn wears custom shoes? Six-thousand-dollar bespoke loafers from John Lobb boot maker in Paris.”
That got her attention. Not just the self-indulgence; the price served as a red flag for anyone doing a background check on a government employee. Tyler Wynn’s treason clearly supported his expensive tastes. He looked up from his notebook. “Maybe it’s just I, but if a shoe costs six grand, can it really be called a loafer?”
“Agreed. And superb use of that personal pronoun.” She habitually needled Rook for being the writer boy, but seeing him riffling through interview notes, she respected his journalistic chops. All the more, if they led her to capture Wynn. Hell, it might even keep her alive.
“Let’s see what else. Outerwear, only Barbour, only from Harrods. Briefcases from Alfred Dunhill, sweaters from Peter Millar, shirts from Haupt of Germany, and athletic socks from South Africa-Balegas, if you must know. His booze habits are also quite particular. His white Burgundy of choice is Domaine Leflaive Puligny-Montrachet. His red is a Mil-Mar Estates Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa. He goes for WhistlePig rye and Vya sweet vermouth. His Irish whiskey brand is Michael Collins.”
“What,” she said, “Jameson’s not good enough for him?”
“Nikki Heat, it’s like you’re reading my mind.”
Personal habits had a way of becoming a trail, and reality TV’s premier butler had given them a trove of leads. So much to go on that Heat pulled in Detective Rhymer to pair with Rook and start making contact with the retailers and distributors who supplied Tyler Wynn with his unique brands of consumer products. “Your investigative journalist’s gut is doing the job, Rook,” she told him. “Now take it to the next step and find out if Uncle Tyler’s been buying himself any goodies lately, and where they’ve been delivered.”
“You can’t have specific tastes like his and fall completely off the grid.”
“Prove it,” she said. And he and Rhymer got to work.
Raley called in from the Roach Coach. “Miguel and I are just now wheels-up from Sotheby’s on the East Side,” he said.
“Do you think they can ID the painting for us?”
“Already have. It took them five seconds. The hand on that slip of paper was clipped from a work by Paul Cézanne. It’s called Boy in a Red Waistcoat. The appraiser e-mailed me a digital image of the whole painting. I’ll forward it to you or you can pull it up online if you don’t want to wait.”
“Thanks, I will. That was fast, Rales.”
“Yeah, well, turns out the painting is not only well known, it’s on everyone’s radar these days.”
“How come?”
“It’s hot. It got stolen in 2008 from the… hang on, I can’t read my own writing. The painting got jacked along with a couple others from the Bührle Collection. That’s in Zurich, Switzerland.” After a pause he said, “I lose you?”
“No,” said Nikki, “I’m with you, just thinking I’ve got a call to make. Good work.”
She hung up, bit the bullet, and dialed Joe Flynn at his Quantum Recovery office. While the phone rang, she Googled the Cezanne and got multiple hits, most two-year-old news items about its theft. “I’m sorry, Mr. Flynn’s out of the office,” said his assistant. “Would you like to leave a voice mail?”
After the beep, Nikki left word for him to call. Then she checked her notes for his cell number and left a message there, too. When she hung up, she chided herself for not calling him earlier; she could have saved half a day chasing down the painting. It’s what happened, she thought, when she let her personal feelings interfere with an investigation. Heat vowed not to let that happen again.
That reaffirmation met a challenge sooner than she’d thought. “Nikki Heat. It’s your number one fan,” said the caller. At the sound of his voice, her guard went up and she cleared everything else from her mind. Zach “The Hammer” Hamner, senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, never made contact unless he wanted something. And when the man Rook had dubbed the unholy spawn of Rahm Emanuel and Gordon Gekko wanted something, “no” came at your own risk.