Callan arranged for an agent to shuttle Heat and Rook back to the Twentieth, which only further postponed the conversation looming over them about Rook’s loose lips. He filled the trip mostly by complaining about his Callan-forced SUV time-out. “I hated that. I felt like I was sitting in the penalty box, having to watch a power play. Anyway, I made use of the hour and a half getting my mother out of the city.”
“Rook.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell her why. I’m much sneakier than that.”
“I know.”
He sidestepped that and explained, “I called in an IOU from a colleague of mine at the State University of New York and arranged for Margaret Rook, Broadway’s diva’s diva, to receive the first annual Stage Door Prize at the SUNY Oswego Drama Festival. It’s short notice, but Mom’s thrilled.”
“What is the Stage Door Prize?”
“Haven’t figured that out yet. All I know is it’s going to cost me ten grand plus luxury accommodations. But it gets Mom out of harm’s way. Just in case… you know.”
She turned away and stared out the window as they turned off Lenox Avenue, remembering for a moment when she caught a glimpse of foliage at the north end of Central Park that it was spring. Her brief interlude with nature got interrupted by a text. “Weird,” she said after reading it. “From Callan. Test results of the bioagent traces on my blazer came back. It wasn’t ricin.” She held out her phone to Rook.
“Smallpox?” His face turned ashen. “Didn’t Dr. Doom from CDC call that one of the bad boys?” She nodded. “And all you can say is, ‘weird’? Oh, excuse me, just a spot of bother. I seem to have picked up a bit of smallpox on my coat sleeve. No biggie.”
“It is a biggie, I know it’s a biggie. Apparently it’s a marker, not enough to cause worry, but a medic is coming to give me a shot.” She finished reading and said, “What’s weird to me is that it’s not ricin, so that means I didn’t pick it up from Ari Weiss’s corpse.”
“So where?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a silence. Then the driver lowered his window. “Don’t blame you, buddy,” said Rook. “Stick your head out and breathe, if you like.”
As soon as the DHS car dropped them on 82nd, Rook smiled and said, “So. We good?”
“That’s it? That’s what you call dealing with this? Shrug it off and say ‘We good’?” She mocked him by brushing her palms as if dusting them clean. “God, you are such a boy.”
“I am not…” He mimicked her palm brushing. “I just think we should be good because you know very well that I would never compromise you by sharing secrets.”
“Then what do you call it?”
Sharon Hinesburg passed by with a take-out bag, and they held their conversation. When she went inside the precinct, Rook said, “First of all, before I can keep a secret, I have to know it’s a secret. I thought we were all kind of working on the same team here, trying to stop the bad guys from unleashing a plague.”
“Being on the same team is one thing, Rook, but that doesn’t mean you can go reporting to other people. Especially Yardley Bell.”
“You don’t like her.”
“It’s not about liking her.”
“You’re still jealous because we have a history.”
“It’s not that, either. I just don’t trust her.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing I can pinpoint. It’s an instinct.”
“Hey, I’m the one with hunches and instincts, and you hate that.”
“Well now it’s my turn. And as irrational as it may seem, I want you to respect that.” They regarded each other a moment, and in spite of the argument, all the good feelings held fast. Maybe that’s what a relationship was, she thought. She reached out and he took her hand. “Look, you know what I’m juggling. All I’m saying is, with everything else I have to look over my shoulder about, I don’t want you to be another one.”
He reached out his other hand and she took that, and they faced each other. He smiled. “So. We good?”
Heat regarded him and knew that, above all else, Jameson Rook was a good man she could trust. Nothing else mattered. “We are good.” She squeezed both his hands and they walked in together.
While Nikki received her shot of an antiviral, she thought through her day for any clue where she might have picked up that smallpox marker. A disturbing notion came to her. After quick calls to Benigno DeJesus and Bart Callan, the orange string Rainbow left on the pillow got priority-messengered to the DHS lab for testing. A certain conspiracy-hungry boyfriend would be quite proud of her.
One thing Heat did know for certain: There was no way in hell she would spend another minute in sweats at the cop shop. She opened her bottom file drawer where she kept what she called her emergency wear: backup apparel for those days she spilled coffee or got blood on her clothes.
After a quick change and a review of the Murder Boards, she decided it was time to hit the phones again. That was how an investigation worked. You got a new scrap of information and followed it up by talking to someone about it. Sometimes you got another scrap that moved you forward, sometimes not. But you kept making rounds, occasionally feeling like a tethered pony walking a circle at a kids’ zoo, but you just continued plodding until something shook loose.
First call went to Carey Maggs at Brewery Boz. He came on the line sounding extra-Brit, which was to say deliciously cranky and jovial about it. “Catching you at a busy time?”
He chuckled, “Is there any other kind? You know, just running a business and saving the world in a failing economy. I’m like your Clark Kent, only not slim enough for the tights, I suppose.”
She thought of the peace march he was sponsoring that weekend, and her heart ached wanting to warn him about the looming terror possibility, but where did something like that stop? There were hundreds of public events, conventions, bike-a-thons, and street fairs on the weekend calendar. Maybe if Rook optioned her article to Hollywood, he’d have enough money to give everyone in New York City an award at SUNY and get them all out of town. Putting that aside, she broke the news to Maggs about Ari Weiss: that his old friend had not died of a blood disease at all, but had been murdered.
“Christ in heaven,” he sighed.
Weiss’s murder was not only new information, the stabbing matched her mother’s so closely that Nikki texted Maggs a picture of her killer, Petar Matic. She heard the chime on his cell phone as it arrived, then a deep exhale and some tongue clicking from Maggs’s end as he studied it. “Know what? I have seen this guy.”
“You’re sure?”
“No doubt. It’s the greasy long hair and the slacker eyes. Who is he?”
“He was my boyfriend.”
“Uh-oh, low bridge, sorry.”
“… Who killed my mother.” She heard a whispered curse and continued, “It’s likely he stabbed Ari as well. Do you recall when you saw him, and where?”
“I do very well because I called the police about him. He was hanging about in the front of my apartment building a number of times and I wanted him dealt with.”
“When was this?”
“Good lord, Detective, it was near Thanksgiving. Same week as Ari was staying with us. And same week as…”
“It’s all right, Carey, I know what else happened that week.”
Heat could hear the strain in Maggs as he absorbed the startling news she’d dropped on him about his old friend. But she pressed forward. He could recover later. Right now, she needed a new lead. “Carey, I want your help with something, if you’re up for it.” He sounded emotional but croaked out a yes, so she asked, “You mentioned Ari wasn’t real social or political. Do you recall if he had any colleagues in the science world with whom he was close? Was there anyone in particular he talked about, or teamed with on any special projects?”
After some thought, Maggs said, “None that stuck in my brain. Sure, I’d cross paths with his crowd for a beer or to watch football at Slattery’s, but to me they were, basically, this blur of boffins.”
She didn’t want to lead him with a name, so she asked, “Do you recall any foreigners?”