A hand on Heat’s shoulder nudged her awake. She blinked. Still dark. Rook sat beside her, holding out her ringing cell phone. Heat cleared her throat and said her name into it. Listened, then moaned.
“What?” asked Rook.
“He’s out. Rainbow escaped.”
Heat got to Bellevue in record time because she didn’t have to get dressed. In her exhaustion at 2 A.M., Nikki had collapsed onto her bed still dressed. Four short hours later, she and Rook strode into Glen Windsor’s room on the second floor of the hospital, both wearing the same clothes as the night before. She looked at the empty bed and said, “Somebody explain this to me.” An NYPD uniformed officer standing with a pair of unis from Hospital Police lowered his eyes to the floor. She went to him. “What’s your name?”
“Slaughter.”
“Your first name.”
“Nate.”
She canted her head to put herself in his field of view. “Listen to me, Nate. I know this feels awful. But you’ve got to put it in your back pocket. This guy’s very resourceful, so hold off on the blame. Just tell me how it came down.”
Officer Slaughter said, “About one-thirty, the night nurse came in to take his temp. She didn’t realize it till later, but she had a pair of reading glasses in her front pocket he must have boosted when she leaned over to check his dressing.” The uniform indicated the eyeglasses on the counter.
Rook bent over them. “Temple’s been snapped off the frame.”
“Yeah, we figure he used the metal end to pick his cuffs.”
Rook said, “He didn’t tear off somebody’s face to use as a mask to get out, I hope.” The three cops stared at him. “Spoiler alert: Silence of the Lambs?” Then he said, “Continue, Officer Slaughter.”
“He overpowered an orderly when he came in, put on his scrubs, and waited for shift change so he could walk out past me.” The cop appealed to her, “I never saw him come in, so how could I know what he looked like?”
Alone in the elevator, Rook said to Nikki, “I’m sorry, but if your name’s Slaughter, you ought to have a little more swing in your dick. Just sayin’.”
“Glad you’re having such a good time,” she said. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to stop a bioterror plot, we still have nothing to go on, and my best hope to get a lead is my damned locksmith serial killer who just escaped. And you want to joke?”
He paused and said, “I mean, if your name was Slaughter, wouldn’t you at least hit the gym?”
Bellevue Hospital turfed to the Seventeenth Precinct, so on the cab ride uptown, Heat called Feller and assigned him to become best friends with the One-Seven detectives and to make sure Glen Windsor’s renewed APB extended to Amtrak, the airports, and the cut-rate buses in Chinatown. When she hung up, Rook said, “I’ve been doing some thinking.”
“More gags for your stand-up?”
“No, about the case. Jeez, what do I have to do to get you to focus?” Then he became sober and continued, “I don’t think you need this APB.”
“Why not?”
“Because Rainbow is going to come to you.”
“Right.”
“Nikki, look at his pattern-and the evidence. Think of what you saw in your interrogation last night. Windsor is not just obsessed with you, he’s a full-goose borderline personality. Narcissistic, for sure, and I’ll bet grandiose. Clinically, that’s an ego that feeds on being the center of everything.”
“So you’re saying I should just call off the search?”
“No, I’m saying he’s going to reach out again like he did before. He has to. This is his moment, and he needs to engage you to claim it.”
“Engage me, like when he said I brought his game to the next level?”
“Exactly. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he won’t make contact. But, in case he does, I’d be thinking how to play him.”
Heat said, “This is the thing I hate most. Playing games.”
“You not only have to play this one, Nikki, somehow you have to figure out how to beat him at his own game.”
This was the essence of Rook, she thought. Sometimes he wore the clown paint. Sometimes he brought the goods. “If you’re so smart,” she said, “why don’t you tell me how to do that?”
He stared out his window a moment and then said words that echoed from a dream. He said, “You know.”
Heat and Rook walked into a bull pen blanketed by a quiet as toxic as doomsday ashfall. The palpable tautness radiated from a single empty desk-the one with the “Detective S. Hinesburg” nameplate. Everyone continued his or her work, but with a hollow look, not so much from mourning as from disillusionment. Somehow one of their own had gone bad. It felt different than corruption; cops on the take were still as much a reality in New York as anywhere. This was different. This was treason inside the Blue Line.
The lights were off inside the precinct commander’s glass office. Rhymer reported that Captain Irons had e-mailed saying he would be at One Police Plaza for an indefinite period that morning. The squad speculated whether he would ever be back, following his nightmare double-whammy. “Not a good day to be the Man of Iron,” said Detective Malcolm, with typically mordant understatement. “Bad enough he holds a press conference embracing a dude who turns out to be a serial killer. Now his office punch gets outed as a bioterror spy.”
“Fail,” said Reynolds.
“Epic fail,” added Feller.
Raley and Ochoa came in from their all-nighter at Hinesburg’s apartment. Benigno DeJesus followed them in his navy evidence collection unit windbreaker carrying two cardboard boxes of items he and his crew had collected there. He said they were headed to the lab and then to Internal Affairs. But since he also had to bag and tag Hinesburg’s desk, he’d brought along the apartment boxes to give Heat a chance to look them over before they went downtown. “Just wear gloves,” he said.
Rook and the squad gathered around as Nikki lifted the lids and carefully picked through the contents, replacing each in its carton following examination. She scanned the stack of open mail and bills, finding nothing useful. Underneath a toiletry kit of noncontroversial prescription meds, she found an evidence-bagged pocket pistol and held it up. “A Smith amp; Wesson M amp;P9 Shield,” said Detective DeJesus in his precise, curator’s manner.
Through the cellophane bag, Heat examined the 9mm, a favorite for deep undercover work because of its subcompact size. Feller scoffed. “Hinesburg had backups for her backups-for all the good they did her.” Nikki pondered that thought then returned the pistol to the box.
“Anybody check this computer?” she asked, holding up a brand-new laptop.
Detective Raley hinged it open and, while it booted, said, “Spent a couple hours on it. Nothing juicy saved on the drive, that I could find. No maps, no calendar entries for Saturday. But she had a link to a cloud e-mail service with the ‘keep me logged in’ box checked, so I was able to access it. Mostly Web shopping receipts, but there was one sent e-mail Hinesburg must have forgotten to delete.” He paused while it loaded. “Check it out.”
He turned the screen to Nikki, and she read it twice out of disbelief. The recipient’s e-mail address was some alphanumeric scramble, not a proper name, but the Web domain ended in.fr, signifying France. The subject line read: “Heat.” And the message itself said: “Arrives today. Hotel Opera, Rue de Richelieu.”
Rook said, “That was our hotel. And the date she sent this is the day before you and I went to Paris last month. Where we met Tyler Wynn.”
“Ready for the real smoking gun?” said Detective Ochoa, who excused himself and reached past Heat into the second box. He came out with a vanilla cell phone and held it up.
“Is this what I think it is?”
Ochoa handed it to her. “Can you believe it? Genius actually kept the burner cell. Slipshod and half-assed to the end.”
While Heat opened the Outgoing Calls list, Raley pulled a slip of paper from his vest pocket. “The last two outgoings match these phone numbers I pulled. They fit the times for the warning calls that went out to both Salena Kaye and Vaja Nikoladze. You’ll see there’s two other numbers in Recents. One was Tyler Wynn’s apartment. The other, I tried calling to see what it was but got a disconnect.”