The group leaned in for a look followed by a mix of moans, wolf whistles, and cat calls. Heat said, “I do. That is our own celebrity writer posing for selfies with the hot messes he insists on calling his fan base.”
“Don’t hate me because I’m popular, all right?” said Rook, pretending to be hurt.
Nikki smirked at the woman with her heaving leopard print vest strategically thrust against Rook’s upper arm. “I was there for that shot. That was taken outside the pizza place where we worked Roy Conklin’s crime scene.”
“AKA Rainbow victim number one,” Malcolm observed. Then, with some friendly push-back on his partner, he added, “In the interest of staying curious, if Rainbow had this iPad, why would he search that picture?”
Detective Ochoa saw something and pulled the tablet away from Raley for a closer look. “Whoa, whoa, check this out.” Ochoa zoomed in, resized the photo, then held the screen up to Heat. He had blown up the shot and centered it on a face in the crowd. The one any analyst would say belonged to a moody loner. The only person not cheering or waving for the picture. Instead, Glen Windsor stared right at the lens, boring into it with a look of amused contempt. Heat felt like the locksmith was looking right at her.
Because he was.
The busy squad room kicked up to a new level of activity. Heat sent Malcolm and Reynolds to round up some patrol officers and stake out Windsor’s Locks, a surveillance task that did double duty since Glen Windsor also lived in an apartment above his shop. Their orders were to keep him under a lid until Heat got a warrant.
She wondered how this had slipped through the cracks. It was standard procedure in a homicide investigation for the police to take crowd photos and then study them for suspicious persons or known faces. Before Nikki berated herself too much for not spotting Windsor-whom she certainly would have recognized as Rainbow’s sole survivor-she told Rhymer and Feller to pull up the CSU crowd pics from the four Rainbow victims: Roy Conklin, Maxine Berkowitz, Douglas Sandmann, and Joe Flynn. Heat and Rook joined in with the squad, divvying up the CSU shots and poring over them again on their monitors.
After careful scrutiny of all four crime scene crowds, face by face, the squad reached the same conclusion: Glen Windsor was nowhere to be seen in any of those photos.
“I don’t get it,” said Rook. “Why is he in my picture and none of the others?”
“Because the dude’s savvy,” said Feller. “He knew when to duck the official police photographer.”
“You’re right,” said Heat. “We didn’t spot him when we looked before because he didn’t want us to.” She held up the iPad with the picture taken by Rook, with Glen Windsor’s photo bomb. “He didn’t want us to find this until he wanted us to find this.”
Detective Rhymer studied the Rainbow shot again and declared it freaky. “It’s like arsonists who stand in the crowd because they get off sexually watching the blaze.”
“Except he doesn’t look turned on,” said Ochoa. “He looks…”
“Defiant,” said Heat.
“Windsor is definitely taunting you with this,” agreed Raley.
Rook said, “Just like he taunted you at Joe Flynn’s boat.”
“With the orange string leading to my picture? Yuh, I kinda got that.”
“No, I mean the odd sock.” Rook paced off his nervous energy. “Remember we all said Rainbow was mocking you for your quote in my article by putting odd socks on Joe Flynn? This guy wasn’t just mocking you, Nikki, he was handing you a clue.”
“Holy crap, of course,” said Raley. “Of all Rainbow’s victims, what’s the odd sock?”
Heat kicked herself for not seeing it herself, and sooner. “The odd sock-is the only one who didn’t die.”
“Dude set us up,” said Ochoa. “He turned on just enough gas in that building to make it look like Rainbow attacked him. Probably left the back door open so he wouldn’t suffocate. And to make it look like Rainbow got away.”
Rhymer asked, “How do you account for the string and the clue on the rooftop. Pre-plant?”
“Count on it,” said Heat, rising and adjusting her holster. “We probably can’t get a warrant based on the fact that we saw him standing in a crowd, but let’s bring Glen Windsor in. Maybe he’ll let us take a picture with him.”
Malcolm and Reynolds had the neighborhood around 77th and Amsterdam buttoned down by the time Detective Heat and the others arrived. Surveillance teams and extra manpower for pursuit covered all front and back access, including both ends of the alley. They had alerted School Police, who put nearby PS 87 on precautionary lockdown and cleared Tecumseh Park on the corner of nannies and their charges, as well as a few day sleepers and one pair of trysters. Uniformed officers patrolled the rooftop of Windsor’s building; others waited in the stairwell near his second-floor apartment and on the fire escape outside his bedroom window. For good measure, an NYPD sharpshooter had taken position atop the Equinox gym building across the avenue.
An ESU truck pulled up at 78th, behind Heat and her group, dispersing a black-suited SWAT unit. Nikki reflected that she had been seeing a lot of those brave folks lately.
A surveillance team with high-powered scopes, hidden across Amsterdam, reported no movement or activity in the locksmith shop. The plywood sheeting over one of the storefront windows Heat and Ochoa had busted out in their faux rescue of Windsor limited the field of view, but after thirty minutes, nothing had moved and nobody had gone in or out. The apartment building super, territorial and nosy, said he had seen Windsor leave his place first thing that morning and he had not come back. Just for drill, Heat asked Rhymer to dial the number of the shop. It rang out and dumped to voice mail.
“What’s the play, Coach?” asked Malcolm.
Heat put on her bulletproof vest. “Roach, take Rhymer and Feller upstairs with you and hit the apartment on my green. The rest of you follow me. We’re taking the store.”
They took ready positions and when Heat radioed the green light, they moved on the double to the front door. Flanked by a pair of ESU tactical officers, Nikki took the lead. With about five critical seconds of window exposure, she raced to the glass door and pulled it open.
And her heart stopped.
A hand grenade dropped from the inside door handle and rolled on the linoleum at her feet.
Heat shouted, “Grenade!” and dove backward onto the sidewalk, where her two armored SWAT companions threw themselves over her body. In the eternity she waited for the blast, Heat replayed the heavy metal clonk on the floor and pictured the green thatched oval spinning before her in slow motion. While it spun, Nikki processed the deaths of Rainbow’s prior detective victims, all of whom had been lured and ambushed. The iPad suddenly made sense.
Time started moving again without a detonation.
The emergency services unit quickly deployed handheld blast shields, and Heat and the others retreated behind them.
Still no explosion.
The bomb squad arrived with men in heavy suits and an armored disposal truck. They sent in a robot to retrieve the grenade. After much examination it was deemed a souvenir prop, the kind you’d see in a joke shop or on a type-A manager’s desk as a paperweight.
The Roach team had cleared Glen Windsor’s apartment with no drama and no Glen Windsor. After the bomb squad had swept the locksmith shop with dogs and sensors, Heat and her crew went in, with the obvious knowledge that they’d not find Rainbow in there, either.
Heat did find something left for her on the glass display counter beside the cash register: the hard drive to her apartment’s disabled lipstick cam. It was tied in a bow of string with all the colors of the rainbow.
Of all the pictures Heat had looked at that day, the one she would have loved to have taken was of Captain Irons when she told him that she had put out an APB on Rainbow. Wally’s elation at the news of a break in the case made a hairpin turn when he learned that the prime suspect was Glen Windsor-the same Glen Windsor whom the precinct commander had photo-opped himself with at his Roosevelt Hospital news conference. The New York Ledger’s full-page photo of the grinning Iron Man with his arm around the rescued victim’s shoulder still sat faceup on his desk, accidentally-strategically placed for the stray office visitor to notice and inquire about.