Finally, a reaction. Not a big one, but busy eyes while he processed the news. And how to answer it. He composed himself and chuckled. “Do you have any idea how many cars we have at Port Authority? Thousands. What’s that mean? If a Metropolitan Transportation Authority car was around, do you roust the MTA commissioner?”
“Maybe if his address and phone number turned up in a bloody envelope of cash hidden in a dead man’s closet.” And then she watched him keenly, adding, “Or if a text about him from the dead man warning his girlfriend to run was found on her cell phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
Nikki had achieved what she’d hoped for, putting him off balance. She continued to press. “Tell me about Jeanne Capois.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know her, either, I suppose.”
“You said my name was on some woman’s cell phone?”
“It was a warning text. We found it looking through her effects — after she’d been murdered.”
The commissioner found his calm again and said, “I still don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“You were mentioned in the text.”
He appeared stunned. “Me? By name?” Gilbert had her on thin ice there. His initials in that text message were not the same as naming him. He sensed her hesitation and leaped at the opening.
“Here.” He thrust out his arms, presenting his wrists to her. “If you have something solid, cuff me.” Then it became a taunt. “Come on. Slap ’em on, Detective.” His voice grew loud enough to echo among the stacked chairs and tables at the rim of the empty hall. “Come on, do it!” He came closer, leaning into her like a batter taunting an umpire for a called strike. “Ha ha, you won’t because you can’t. You smell blood but you don’t know whose. You got shit’s, what you got.”
But then his wildly manic performance jerked to a stop. Yet his face remained close to hers, and he spoke in a quiet, chilling tone. “This is no game, Detective. Do not try to browbeat me. Do not come to me with bullshit. Do not go further with this. Because you aren’t man enough, and I am not to be fucked with.”
She rose to her full height, unshaken. “I am getting to the bottom of this, no matter what.”
“You know, my father used to butt heads with a rival in the shipping business. A guy named George Steinbrenner. Steinbrenner had a way with words when people pushed him. Like, ‘Next time you drive me to the wall, I’ll throw you over it.’”
“Steinbrenner was always quotable. Are you borrowing his words to threaten me?”
He smiled. “Don’t take that as a threat. It’s just information.”
And then he left to make his speech.
Nikki discovered a voice mail from Rook on her way back to the car and cursed at missing his call. “Hey, it’s me. Sorry to be off the grid, but I’m in the work cave, you know how that goes. Hate to do this, but I don’t think that dinner’s going to happen tonight. I’ll explain later.” So damned…neutral sounding. No anger, no hurt. No warmth, either. Just the facts ma’am. She decided against calling him back and rolled with the Roach Coach back to the precinct motivated by a strong desire to fulfill Keith Gilbert’s wish and slap on those cuffs.
More out of habit than hunger, Heat sat at her desk picking at a turkey sandwich from Andy’s Deli while she worked the phones. One inquiry was spurred by Gilbert’s comment about the number of vehicles that populated the Port Authority motor pool. The Authority, a joint agency of the states of New York and New Jersey, not only oversaw the operation of area airports, air cargo, marine terminals, major bridges and tunnels, key bus terminals, cross-Hudson railroads, and the new World Trade Center, it also had its own highly respected police force of 1,700 officers — four of which Heat had the pleasure of dealing with that morning at the Widmark. Far from begrudging that detail for picket fencing her and Roach, she saw them as police professionals doing their duty. Given reverse roles, she might have done the same. Certainly they had been effective, even somewhat polite.
PAPD also has a Criminal Investigation Bureau of a hundred detectives, and Nikki’s call was to one of the CIB supervisors.
“Inspector, just doing some I dotting and T crossing,” she began. “One of my detectives investigating a Haitian immigrant named Fabian Beauvais heard that another pair of men had also been working Flatbush looking for him recently. I’m not sure who these two are, but their description made me wonder if they could be plainclothes cops, so I’m making the rounds of other PDs to make sure we’re not stepping on brother detectives’ toes anywhere.”
Inspector Hugo said he appreciated the professional courtesy and that he’d check and get back to her. Heat didn’t mention the nature of her case or the commissioner. She also left out the fact that the men were linked to a Port Authority-registered car. But it struck her as due diligence to make this outreach in the event the Impala was a CIB undercover. If Beauvais was part of a PAPD investigation, that would be game-changing information. Their behavior and demeanor — especially knocking them over fleeing the rooming house — was not very coplike, but there was also something about the staging and precise execution of their dual car escape that smelled like training to her.
A half hour later, Heat convened a catch up at the Murder Board with Raley, Ochoa, and Rhymer to report that PAPD called back and said they have no investigation into a Fabian Beauvais.
“It still leaves the open question of, what was a Port Authority car doing there?” said Ochoa.
“Well, the link to Gilbert is pretty cozy.” Heat flicked a thumb to the plate number on the whiteboard under the sketches of the two men. “We’ve sent the plate out on the alert system, so if we get a ding, we may get our answer.”
Detective Rhymer had made contact with the staffer at Happy Hazels, the agency that placed Jeanne Capois as the housekeeper. “Nothing earth-shattering. Kinda sad, though. They loved her, and had all good things to say. Also Fabian was more than a boyfriend. The both of them apparently came from Haiti at the same time and were engaged. But they said the only thing Jeanne cared about was to somehow get back home for the wedding.”
“I found an anomaly of sorts on Jeanne Capois’s MetroCard,” said Raley. “Her pattern on days off was to take the Three line from the Seventy-second Street station to Saratoga Avenue in Brooklyn, which was the nearest station, I guess, to her fiancé’s place near Kings Highway in Flatbush. You could set your clock to that, twice a week, for half a year. But a few weeks ago, she started using the card to round trip it on the One train from Seventy-ninth and Broadway to the Fourteenth Street stop in Chelsea, then come back to the Upper West Side the same day.”
“Were these at repeating times and days?” Heat knew the value of breaks in habit. Big things like changes in lifestyle and income were key indicators to look for in an investigation, but you sometimes got the biggest breaks from the smallest things, like switching gyms or altering subway stops. “I’m wondering if she had some kind of appointment. Like maybe she was pregnant. Or had medical issues. Is there a clinic near there? Physical therapy, maybe?”
“The trips were all at different times, both day and night.”
“Tell you what I’d like to do,” said his partner. “I say we Roachify this.”
Heat cocked her head to Detective Ochoa. “Did you just say Roachify?”
“I did. As in getting all over this. I want us to go back through her purse, her room, everything, to see if something links up to Chelsea.”
“When you put it like that,” said Nikki, “I’d be foolish to say no.”
She had set her iPhone on her desktop and she caught the thing side-creeping across her blotter from the vibration when she came back from the restroom. Once again, not Rook. Detective Feller was calling in from Flatbush.