“I hear you, but what about what Emile said about changing passions?”
“Uh, with all due respect? Merde. I refer you back to my Olympics versus personal trainer theory. One’s a passion, the other is a J-O-B job.”
Heat said, “All right, maybe it wasn’t necessarily a passion, but you saw her face in those pictures. My mom was having a ball. And probably earning just enough money to make it hard to quit. Maybe the work got to become golden handcuffs.”
“Not that the subject of handcuffs doesn’t titillate me, but that’s also a hard sell. Responsible young woman turns into Paris Hilton in one summer? Doubtful.” His salad and her soup arrived. He took a bite of tender lentils and then continued, “Do you think she had something going with this Tyler Wynn?”
Heat put her fork down and leaned over her plate toward him. “You are talking about my mother.”
“I’m trying to help us-correction, help you-get an understanding of what happened over here to change everything back then.”
“By going to some pretty seedy places.” Her quiet tone was what unnerved him. And the steely gaze.
“Let’s put a pin in it.”
“Good idea.”
“Besides,” he said, “we already hit pay dirt with a suspect. I hope you told Raley and Ochoa to put out an APB on Ryan Seacrest.”
She laughed and said, “Roach had the same response when I called them. Obviously a bogus name, but they’re going to run phone records to see where that call originated last Sunday.”
“It tells us one thing, for sure. Someone definitely wants to get his hands on something. And since the timing of that call came after Nicole’s town house got tossed, we know he didn’t find it.”
“Assuming that it’s the same person looking,” she said.
“Well fine,” he said, teasing her. “If you want to be all ‘objective’ in this investigation instead of leaping to conclusions, go ahead.”
“Objective’s kinda what I do,” she said.
“Kinda,” he said with a tentative edge. Her look told him Nikki knew exactly what he meant by that jab, but she let it go and concentrated on her soup.
A subtle breeze had given the night a soft spring warmth, and when they left the restaurant, Heat and Rook decided to bypass the taxis and walk back to their hotel. They strolled arm in arm over the footbridge to Ile de la Cite, skirting the cathedral and the Palais de Justice until they came to Pont Neuf and stood in one of the bridge’s semicircular bastions to stop the world and enjoy the spectacle of Paris at night reflected in the Seine.
“There it is, Nikki Heat, the City of Light.” She turned to him and they kissed. A dinner bateau passed underneath them, and a happy couple on the top deck called out “ Bon soir ” and raised champagne flutes to them in a toast.
They mimed a toast back to the couple, and Nikki said, “Amazing. No, magical. What is it about this place? The air smells better, the food tastes like nothing I’ve ever had…”
“And the sex. Did I mention the sex?”
She laughed. “Only constantly.”
“Who knows what it is?” he said. “Maybe it’s Paris. Maybe it’s us.”
Nikki didn’t answer that, only nestled against him. Rook stood holding her, feeling her breath against the soft of his neck, but at the same time he felt drawn to silently watch the hypnotic flow of the Seine. Its dark waters streamed underneath them, a powerful force channeled between thick walls of stone revetment engineered to be impenetrable and to keep nature itself within controlled, reliable boundaries. He wondered what would happen if one of the walls ever cracked.
They didn’t set an alarm. Instead Heat and Rook awoke at daybreak to pink light filtered under a thin canopy of gray clouds. Turning to each other, they smiled and said their good mornings. Rook began to slide under the sheet, but Nikki mumbled, “No, stay up here with me this time,” and drew him to face her. The two made love again to the peal of morning church bells and the scent of heaven’s own bakery across the street at Au Grand Richelieu. “All in all, not a bad way to start another day of homicide work,” said Heat on her way to the shower.
As he had calculated, their warm pastries lasted from the bakery door to the espresso bar he had discovered the afternoon before. They found one pair of open stools at the high top counter in the window, and each drank a blood orange juice and a cafe au lait as they watched a businessman standing on the sidewalk turn his back to the wind and expertly roll his own cigarette.
Nikki checked her voice and e-mails. Roach, ever keen about keeping her in the loop, had closed their workday reporting that the request was in process on the phone records search for the Seacrest call to the Bernardins. The wheels of international bureaucracy turned slowly, but Detective Raley said Interpol was helping, so that was something positive anyway. Forensics had promised fingerprint test results on the found glove by morning, and Irons had told Ochoa he would check with the lab personally on his way in. Heat pocketed her phone then took it out again to double-check the time in New York, and determined it was too early to call.
Rook said, “I’ve been doing some further reflection.” He paused, knowing this remained a touchy area. “And I think you got more than a shoe box of memories yesterday. My gut tells me we got a new lead, and it’s Tyler Wynn,”
“Why am I not surprised to hear this?”
“Relax, I’m speculating in a totally new direction, seeing him in a whole other light.”
“Let me guess. He’s no longer William Holden, he’s Jason Bateman.”
“He’s not a lover, he’s a spy.” Heat laughed. “Hear me out, Detective.” He waited until she stopped chuckling and then he leaned closer to her, trying his best not to have madman eyes. “International banker has sort of a phony ring to it. Kind of like ‘embassy attache’ or ‘government contractor.’ It sounds to me like a cover.”
“OK… And what is the possible connection to my mother?”
“I don’t know.” She scoffed and took a sip of her coffee. He repeated, “I don’t know.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“I don’t know!” he hissed. “Isn’t this great?!!” This time his eyes had indeed widened madly. Nikki looked around self-consciously, but nobody in the cafe had noticed. Even the man on the sidewalk smoking the roll-your-own had turned the back of his blue suit to them. Rook startled her, grabbing Nikki by the elbow. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Tyler Wynn-air quotes-international investment banker-was using your mother just like his fake job. As a cover. Pretending to be her lover.” He paused. “Notice I said, ‘pretending.’ Which is why Cindy quit and moved back to the U.S. when she married your dad.”
Heat finished her coffee and slid a euro under the saucer. “Rook, you need to know. There’s out of the box and there’s out of your mind.”
He worked on her the whole way back to the hotel, and one point of his logic she found hard to refute. That they came to Paris to look into the change in her mother’s life, and since Tyler Wynn had been such a factor-spy or not-they’d be remiss not to see if Uncle Tyler was still around to talk to. “Or is that too sensitive an area for you?” he asked. A crafty move on Rook’s part because, even if it were, the challenge aspect of his question made it impossible for her to back down.
Up in their hotel room Rook paced, spitballing how best to approach checking out Tyler Wynn. “I still have some viable clandestine contacts over here from the days I worked my Russia-Chechnya article. Also, there are a few favors I could call in at CIA and NSA. No, wait… Maybe we should start incrementally and make a vanilla sort of inquiry through the U.S. embassy… Or possibly, Interpol. On the other hand,” he rambled, going back and forth, “this is potentially important enough that we could step it up to the DCRI-that’s the French equivalent of the CIA, if you didn’t know.” He noticed Nikki getting on her cell phone. “Who are you calling?”
She held up a finger for silence. “ Bonjour, Mme. Bernardin? C’est Nikki Heat. First of all, thank you for your hospitality and for those wonderful photographs. I am so grateful to have them.” She nodded and said, “You, as well. I was hoping I could ask a favor. Do you have phone number for Tyler Wynn?” Heat smiled at Rook and began writing it down.