Raley added, “Oh, and even the maid’s room got tossed. Which is odd. It’s pretty spare. Just some clothes and makeup. And no wall safe in there.”
“Somebody was looking for something,” she said.
“And we can’t tell if they found it.”
“What about the maid?” asked Heat.
“Nowhere to be found,” said Ochoa. “Missing as missing can be.”
“And here’s reason we called. The maid’s not only Haitian, but in her room we found a picture of a guy who could be a boyfriend.” Raley paused. “He’s got a tatt on his shoulder.” In butchered pronunciation he said, “‘L’Union Fait La Force.’ Pardon my French.”
FIVE
hey surrendered their fireside table, checked out of the room — unused — and drove west, pausing only for a pit stop in Sagapanack for takeout at Townline BBQ. “So much for our romantic dinner,” she said.
“I don’t think of it so much as a romantic dinner as an incursion. But that’s fine. Rain check tomorrow night,” said Rook as they joined the red ribbon of taillights on 495. “How do you feel about an intimate rooftop supper for two? I’m sure Alton Brown has something in his Good Eats repertoire. I’ll look in the index under ‘Fussy, and Travels Well Up a Fire Escape.’”
“Or you could just consult Alicia Delamater. I’ll bet she’s carried more than one covered dish across the lane to Casa Cosmo.”
“I’d say a hot dish. Sure explains why Keith Gilbert said his wife never goes there.”
“Come on, Rook, it’s obviously the other way around. The wife never goes there, so it’s the perfect place to stash his mistress.”
“Not so stashed, as it happens. That’s the way it is with secrets; we both know that. Sooner or later, it all comes out.”
There it was, served up like a big softbalclass="underline" Nikki’s opening to come clean about the task force and relieve the pangs that had troubled her all day. She almost seized it, but held back, telling herself it was too speculative, to wait and see. In truth she knew it wasn’t the job’s hypothetical nature, but its disruptive one. Her emotions were swirling enough about his potential marriage proposal, why open the touchy subject of a new gig involving lots of absences for international travel?
“Wonder if it’s possible Fabian Beauvais sniffed out Gilbert’s illicit relationship and that’s what bought him a skydive without a parachute,” he said. “Like, could that money be a blackmail payoff?”
“What is that, theory number ten?” Even though Heat teased him, she had already added that notion to her growing list of maybes. But Nikki kept that list stowed away. She had seen too many detectives fall in love with one theory too soon and shut the door to all the other possibilities.
“An observation?” she said. “Keith Gilbert has to know by now that we were nosing around out there. If his caretaker didn’t tell him, Alicia certainly did. That was almost three hours ago, and yet, no reaction. No call, no text, no thunder from the department’s brass mountain.”
“You know, Detective, it gets curiouser and curiouser. I had no idea when I pitched this case as a story to First Press it would end up being so juicy. An alien crashing to earth from the heavens now could herald the fall of a rising political star. Writes itself, doesn’t it?” And then he quickly added, “They don’t, just so you know. They never do.”
If Detectives Raley and Ochoa felt tired, it didn’t show on them when Heat and Rook ducked under the caution tape and entered the apartment on West End Avenue later that night. The exhilaration of piloting their own case had made the day timeless for Roach, who were on opposite sides of the living room, each conferring with a different CSU tech near bright portable work lights that made it feel more like noon than midnight.
“Oh, sure, you guys flit off to the Hamptons on a mini-vacation and leave the heavy lifting to us,” said Ochoa as the four of them gathered near the bloodstain.
Heat wanted to get right to the potential tattoo connection, but engaged in the ritual cop game of playing against emotion in response to the masked thanks he’d just offered for the opportunity. “Yeah, well, until you rudely interrupted, we were hobnobbing with J-Lo and Jerry Seinfeld and Martha Stewart. We only came back to laugh at all the evidence you two overlooked.”
Protocols met, Roach began the recap with a tour. The shambles matched Roach’s phone description. The luxury apartment looked as if a bear had gotten into a cabin and clawed every possible hiding place for food. Bookcases, clothing armoires, and furniture had all been scraped, dumped, or slashed. Valuables — and there were plenty left behind by the burglar or burglars — had been photographed, inventoried, and filed in banker’s boxes labeled NYPD Forensics. CSU technicians were still dusting for prints and plucking fibers in the maid’s quarters when they got there.
Heat asked, “Did we flip the mattress like that?”
“Found it that way,” answered Detective Raley. And then, sensing the graveness that descended on his squad leader as she stooped to inspect the modest personal belongings scattered on the floor — a hairbrush, a small crucifix, store-brand makeup, and a shattered votive candle — he added more gently, “We found bimonthly stubs in the victim’s checkbook made out to her. The name’s Jeanne Capois.”
“Yeah, I got it on your missing persons call alert.” She rose up and went to the window. “Was this locked like this?”
Ochoa nodded. “And no sign of exit.”
“Any blood in here?”
The tech in the hairnet and sterile suit said, “No. But still checking.”
Nikki said, “What about the picture?”
“Pulled these off the floor underneath the box springs.” Ochoa held out three cellophane evidence envelopes. The first two contained group photos of friends: one at a nightclub; another from Battery Park with Lady Liberty in the background. “Must have gotten knocked off the bulletin board.”
Heat noted the small corkboard, askew on the wall, with a tropical sunset photo push-pinned into it above a trio of faded rectangles where these shots had been posted. Only one woman was common to both pictures. Black, mid-twenties, beautiful. The third shot was a solo of a black man, also mid-twenties. It had been taken on the Coney Island boardwalk, and he had his shirt off. On one of his shoulders the Haitian tattoo faced the camera.
“We’ll get this to Forensics to verify the tattoo match,” said Raley, anticipating her.
“Anybody in the building know her or see her recently?” asked Heat. Her answer came with a big Roach grin that said yes. “It’s almost like you guys know what you’re doing.”
Wilma Stallings, an elderly housekeeper from an apartment up the hall had identified Jeanne Capois when Roach knocked on doors during their routine canvass earlier in the day. She repeated to Heat and Rook that she hadn’t heard any of the commotion because, at seventy-eight, she’d become hard of hearing. QVC blasting in a back room might also have been a factor. “Such a shame. Mr. David was a wonderful man. I told the other detectives he should have just let them take what they wanted. Are you sure you won’t sit? The couple I work for is away at their place in Stowe.”
They followed her to the living room and Nikki doubled back over ground Roach had covered with her, to get her own take on the missing woman and her life. Wilma had last seen Jeanne Capois about ten the evening before. “She seemed upset. Usually that young lady had a bright smile and all the time in the world. But when I saw her in the hall she was poking that elevator button like it was video blackjack. And not so much as a hello in return.”