“And do what? Screw up my investigation?”
“No, just to keep track. Let them know what you were doing. And when. That was all.” Even in the dim light Nikki could see Hinesburg’s features draw slack under shame’s gravity. Heat wondered, was Sharon’s incompetence real or, as the playwright said, was she just being wise enough to play the fool? “I never knew it would go this far. When people started dying, I freaked. Nikki, do you have any idea how much pressure I’ve been under?”
At that point Heat went with fool.
“Then they started asking me to do more than just inform. When I saw what happened to other people, I didn’t dare say no. They had me slow down the investigation wherever I could. And then warn them when you were coming on a raid. And what did I get for all my stress? A few thousand extra and the joy of fucking Wally Irons to keep my job.” She wiped away a clear string of snot. “They’ll try to kill me, too, you know.” Wheels started turning. “I want protection.”
Heat had heard those very words a few hours before. From the corpse staring out at them from the rear seat of the chopper.
“Sharon, the bomb you triggered killed a man.”
“I’ll deal. I know stuff.”
“Start now. When and where’s the bioterror event?”
“That, I don’t know. Honest.”
“Who’s running it? Who’s running you?” Sirens grew in the near distance. “Now would look better for you, Sharon.”
Glen Windsor’s play came so suddenly she found herself halfway to the ground before she realized he’d made his move. She didn’t see it, but figured later that it must have been some kind of break-dancer’s body pop. He bounced his chest off the tarmac and flung his calves at the back of Heat’s knees, taking her down. She dropped the flashlight, but held on to her gun. When she came up, he was running toward the river full speed with his hands cuffed behind him.
Nikki made a fast check of Hinesburg. She stood nearby but had the rabbit look in her eyes. Torn, Heat turned back to Windsor, approaching the tail of the Sikorsky, steps from diving into the water. She braced, called, “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” then fired low, planting one in his calf. He crumpled, moaning on the tarmac against the red and white safety curb at the river’s edge.
A voice behind her shouted, “Heat, gun!” Nikki hit the deck at the same time she heard the distinctive crack of a.40-caliber. She rolled, presenting the smallest target to the shot direction, and braced to fire. But she held.
In the shadows, she recognized Special Agent Callan standing over Sharon Hinesburg, who was sprawled on the blacktop under the nose of the copter. “Clear,” he called. Strobing lights from police cruisers and plain wraps flashed outside the gate and reflected off the badges of unis rushing toward them. Heat got up, dragged Glen Windsor away from the river’s edge, and dropped him hard. Then she ran to Callan, getting there just as he kicked a pistol away from Hinesburg’s hand. In his own he held his P226 Elite. Nikki could still smell gunpowder.
“She was going to back-shoot you,” he said. “You’re fucking lucky I made it.”
Heat told the uniforms, “Get paramedics, two down. Hurry.” She knelt beside Hinesburg. She had a fat hole in her temple.
Her eyes looked just like Salena Kaye’s.
Dry lightning sparked to the north when Heat finished her debrief with the shooting team. Lauren Parry had wrapped up her exams of Salena Kaye and Sharon Hinesburg, preliminarily finding both causes of death obvious, but worthy of follow-up. The ME told Nikki she’d pull an all-nighter and perform the postmortems so she could have the findings first thing in the morning.
She found Bart Callan sitting with his elbows on his knees on the short wooden ramp that led from the tarmac to the boarding area of the modular. He stared blankly at the sheet over Hinesburg’s body and the numbered yellow marker the shooting team had placed beside his ejected casing. He didn’t acknowledge Heat. She stood beside him and followed his gaze, then said, “Tough to take someone out. Especially a cop.”
He held up the evidence bag with the pistol inside it. “Hinesburg’s backup piece. Mini Glock Twenty-six. Nine millimeters to spoil your day.” He set the bag down on the ramp between his shoes. “I can live with the kill. Lose a cop, save a cop.”
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you.”
He gave the shortest nod and said, “Guess you had your hands too full to pat her down.”
“You could say my attention became somewhat divided by his escape attempt.” She realized her palm still rested on him and drew it away. “You got here fast, thank God. I’d barely put out the ten-thirteen.”
“I was already en route.” When he saw her reaction, he said, “Soon as I heard about your meet, I thought I’d better get over here and cover your idiotic butt. Any complaints?”
“None.” Then she asked, “Heard about it how?”
“Yardley Bell told me.”
“Agent Bell? How did she know?”
He picked up the evidence bag and stood. “Didn’t ask. I just assumed she heard it from your boyfriend.”
Rook spun through the revolving door at the entrance to Bellevue Hospital and shouted her name as the door spit him out into the lobby. “Nikki!” echoed in the cavernous atrium renovators had built five years before, encasing the old stone hospital in glass like a living museum display. When he reached her, Rook grabbed Heat in his arms, clinging tight, whispering in her ear, “Holy shit, Nik, sometimes you scare the hell out of me.” When they kissed, he sensed her reserve and studied her. “You OK?”
She considered a moment and let it go at “Been a hell of a night. Glen Windsor is upstairs getting his calf sewn up. Soon as he’s out, he’s mine to interrogate.”
They found a couch to wait on in the Hospital PD Squad Room near the ER, and she bulleted the sequence of events, first going back to how she knew from the sound of Salena Kaye’s phone call something was up; how she sounded either drugged or under duress, and how she’d even slipped Heat a hidden message.
“But what gave you the idea to connect her to Rainbow?”
“That by itself would have been a Jameson-esque leap, but it’s been bugging me how quickly Kaye just vanished off the street when I chased her out of that deli.”
“After my Jameson-esque takedown?”
“What have I started?” She pressed her forefinger on his lips and continued, explaining the DMV trace on the silver minivan that made Glen Windsor a probable. “I couldn’t be certain, but I figured, if he was setting me up, I could get there early enough and get in position to take him.”
“And if it hadn’t been a setup by Rainbow?”
“Then, worst-case scenario, I could still apprehend Salena Kaye.”
He processed it and said, “Well done. Very Nikki-esque.”
“Don’t even.”
“Hinesburg, though… Man.”
“I have to admit, I feel sort of blindsided, too. I guess I started to have inklings that I must have denied-I mean she was a flake-but that security video from Coney Crest was the big domino, knocking down all the others. Every one of her cute little screwups and oversights started looking more like sabotage: telling me Wynn’s bomb was a timer when it was a remote…”
“Because she triggered it…”
“Screwing up the tipster call from the rent-a-car guy who spotted Salena Kaye…”
“So she could warn her…”
“And on and on.”
“It’s ingenious. Incompetence masking subterfuge. And there she was, hiding in plain sight in the middle of your bull pen.” He reflected and said, “One good thing. You flushed out the mole. No more looking over your shoulder before you say something.”
“I sure hope not.” She shaded that thought and got his attention.
“What?”
“Know how Callan got to the heliport so fast? Yardley Bell told him about my meet.”
He thought about that. “How would Yardley know?”
Nikki gave him an appraising look. “You tell me.”
“Wait, you don’t think I-Nikki, seriously?” She said nothing, one part interrogation technique, the other not wanting to think it was so. “Hey, I will admit to a lot of things. Yes, I went to Nice with her. Yes, I told her when I was trying to track down Tyler Wynn through his… through his wine and custom shoe purchases.”