“The rest are only a few routine traffic stops — all local residents. Another complaint for a dispute at the home of the same mystery writer — this time he keyed the paint on the car door of his editor — plus some loud music complaints for a sorority beach party that got out of hand.”
“The Thriller flash mob?”
“You are certainly tapped in.”
“I heard about it from Keith Gilbert.”
“So did we that night.” She laughed. “Let’s just say the Thriller was gone. And pretty quickly. I also showed the sketches and the mug photo to the local patrol officers. That’s the beauty of a small town. My patrol sergeant is away on vacation, so I’ll have to show him when he gets back, but I got no hits on the pair of bad guys. One patrolman said he may have seen the man in your photo walking to the late train to New York a while ago, but he can’t be certain. It was nighttime and he found him staggering along the road. The officer thought he was drunk, but the man said he had a bad case of the flu. He seemed lucid, although difficult to understand because he had a foreign accent, so he was a catch and release.”
“That could be Beauvais. When was that?”
“Nine days ago. Is this helpful?”
“You know how it goes, Detective Aguinaldo. You never know until you know.” Heat thanked her for her cooperation and hung up to snag an incoming call.
Detective Feller began without a hello. “’K, here’s the deal. The night manager of a diner that serves Island food on Church Ave. here in Flatbush got braced about six days ago by the pair of goons from our sketches. I didn’t talk to him yesterday, but I did speak to his cousin who works the day shift, and he passed my card along to this guy.”
“Did he know Beauvais?”
“Says he doesn’t. Told them that, too, and they thought he was bullshitting them, so they got a little rough with him. So when they left, he wrote down their plate. Just for safekeeping.”
Heat said, “I wonder if it’s one of the getaway cars from the SRO.”
“It’s not. I ran it.”
“Randall Feller, you rock.”
“Just wait. The plate came back belonging to a Chevy Impala. Ready? It’s registered to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.”
After telling Detective Feller to stay in Flatbush to continue working the Haitian community, Nikki sat on the galvanized metal steps beneath the school’s service door for a moment to take stock of this new information. She wasn’t sure where it would lead, but Heat knew something bigger than she could yet see was going on. And now this Port Authority connection made it increasingly more difficult not to leap to the conclusion that beckoned her with increasing urgency.
Nikki fogged out the work of the CSU team before her. Shut out the street noise and chatter. Quieted, undistracted, creating solitude amid the chaos, she conjured a mental picture of the Murder Board six blocks away and, in reviewing every development that surfaced in this case, she began slapping imaginary Post-its on the eight-by-ten photo of one Keith Gilbert.
Whose Hamptons’ address and phone number did they find with all that money in the Haitian’s closet? Slap. Whose dog most likely left those bite marks on Fabian Beauvais’s jeans — the jeans splattered with shellac that probably came from the renovation at Cosmo? Slap. Whose Southampton neighbor-slash-mistress far-too-coincidentally claimed to employ Beauvais? Slap. Whose organization owned the car driven by the two thugs searching for Beauvais — who also fled his SRO in Flatbush? Slap. In Heat’s imagination, enough pastel sticky notes ringed the head shot to make it look like Gilbert wore a Hawaiian lei.
But that was far from a collar.
Knowing where this all pointed wasn’t enough to act upon. These were indicators, for sure. Incriminating? Not yet. Forget the fact that she had not discovered a motive. Or even a mode of Beauvais’s death to establish means. Heat did not have one solid connection implicating Keith Gilbert in anything more sinister than hiring an illegal day laborer to reshingle a second home.
That was, until Detective Rhymer’s urgent text.
“I found it here inside this one,” said Rhymer when Heat arrived. He indicated the yellow sidewalk box dispensing freebie catalogs for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. The plastic newsstand was wedged between a red one with free copies of the Village Voice and the blue container for handouts of Big Apple Parent. “I said, ‘OK, what if she wasn’t captured but was on the run, in a panic,’ you know? Since we didn’t find her purse at the murder scene, I thought maybe, if she didn’t drop it, or if the bad guys didn’t take it, maybe she stashed it on the fly. I walked the beeline from the home-invasion building, checking tree limbs, trash cans, even the roofs of parked trucks. Two blocks into it, dang.”
His Southern accent came out on that last word, making Heat think of little Opie Rhymer, a boy in the hills with a bloodhound. With work like this, maybe he didn’t need one.
Ochoa had pull up the Roach Coach and, with gloved hands, he carefully placed the contents of Jeanne Capois’s purse on the hood. Raley powered up the inexpensive pay-as-you-go cell phone inside it as Heat and Rhymer looked on. The purse items seemed to be standard fare, including a lipstick and compact, hair scrunchies, chewing gum, a MetroCard, ring of keys, grocery list, a few random business cards, and a stick pen. Her wallet still had cash in it: just a few dollars and some U.S. and Haitian gourde coins mixed together. In the photo windows were a picture of a middle-aged couple, most likely her parents, and a smiling shot of Fabian Beauvais standing proud over a barbecue of grilled fish.
“Uh, Detective,” said Raley, holding out the phone, “you’re going to want to look at this.” Nikki took it from him and shielded the screen from the sunlight so she could read the text he had opened. The message read: RUN. KG THING GO BAD. RUN NOW! JE T’AIME. FAB.
The other two detectives came around to flank her so they could get a peek. Opie let out a low whistle. Ochoa kept his usual cool. “Huh, he said. “I might call that a nexus.”
Heat read the text again and turned to her team. “I think it’s time to have another chat with Keith Gilbert.”
SIX
etective Heat wanted to surprise Keith Gilbert same as he had with her. To Nikki, off guard meant guard down, and she didn’t want him to see her coming by phoning ahead. Even if the commissioner would consent to an appointment, he had shown his hand by applying pressure through his crony at the Office of Emergency Management. Not the move of a man in the full-cooperation mode he professed.
The Port Authority headquarters were on Park Avenue South, but before Heat took a ride down there she made a quick surf of Gilbert’s Web site for his exploratory campaign. Up top she found a Save the Date posting for a policy speech he was making that morning at a businesspersons’ forum sponsored by a local radio station. Leaving Detective Rhymer in charge of the ongoing search of West End Ave., Roach followed Heat’s car to the Widmark Hotel in Times Square. Another light drizzle was falling, reminiscent of the morning Fabian Beauvais smashed into the planetarium. When they parked and met on the sidewalk, Ochoa put his face to the mist and said, “Sure doesn’t feel like a big storm’s coming.”
“You sound like Noah’s neighbor when he saw him building the ark,” said Raley. On the escalator ride from the hotel lobby to the mezzanine, he was still on the topic of Sandy. “Plus this thing’s supposed to be, what, five days away? Monday or Tuesday, I hear.”
“My partner the weatherman.” But Nikki only half listened. Her attention went to the dark-suited security trio at the doors to the Fraunces Meeting Room. Mainly because their attention was on her.