Still no Alicia Delamater sightings. Either Gilbert’s mistress had slipped past U.S. Customs, or her attorney lied and she never left the country. There’s a stretch — a lawyer being untruthful.
She located an address for Hattie Pate, Fabian Beauvais’s pal from the chicken slaughterhouse who’d tipped Rook off about the ATM crew and the Queensboro Plaza gunplay. She put it in a group text to Raley and Ochoa for them to investigate. Nikki didn’t add a smiley face but hoped the gesture would thaw the chilly air between them.
In her renewed sense of open-mindedness, she e-mailed the Real Time Crime Center and asked them to run Fidel “FiFi” Figueroa and Charley Tosh. Figueroa and Tosh, the Dumpster divers who got arrested with Beauvais had, according to Rook, a history of dirty tricks and harassment against Keith Gilbert’s campaign. She didn’t know exactly what she could learn from them, but it wouldn’t hurt to close the loop.
Detective Sergeant Aguinaldo of SVPD returned her call to confirm that she would meet Nikki at Cosmo in Southampton to facilitate the service of the warrant and the search for Gilbert’s handgun. Also, after the Russian doctor named the commissioner as Beauvais’s shooter, Heat had asked her to run a check on reports of gunfire the night of his treatment. “Sorry,” said Aguinaldo. “I’m afraid there are no reports in that time frame. Which doesn’t surprise me. I mean, we’d already know. ‘Shots fired’ would be big news in the village.” The news blanketed Heat under another layer of worry about making her case airtight. And kept the door open that it could have been Earl Sliney who shot the Haitian, and not her prime suspect.
“Thanks for checking, anyway.” Then, never one to give up, Heat said, “Would I be pushing my luck to ask you another favor?”
“Name it.”
“That patrol officer you told me about.”
Inez Aguinaldo was right there with her. “The one who encountered the man staggering to the LI-Double-R?”
“Yes, what do your uniforms call it?”
“Catch and release. When I talked to Officer Matthews he wasn’t certain it had been Mr. Beauvais, but he did say the man had an accent and acted sick. You’re thinking maybe it wasn’t sickness?”
“Maybe he’d been shot,” said Heat. “Could you—”
“—Talk to him again? You bet. I’ll even see if he can join us when you get to Beckett’s Neck.”
If Fabian Beauvais had been shot while in the Hamptons, that would end the speculation about whether one of Earl Sliney’s rounds tagged him on that Queensboro Plaza security video. It might also put a lid on the internal discord that had arisen about this case. First from Rook, and now from the go-to guys in her crew who’d had their heads turned, either by doubt about the evidence or aggravation at her.
Since Gilbert’s gun would be a key link in that chain of evidence, when Nikki got word the search warrant was just blocks away she started to saddle up to be set to leave the instant she got it in hand. During a ritual desk check, her phone rang. OCME. She paused to take it.
Lauren Parry said, “Just finished the postmortems on your two Dead at Scenes from Chelsea. First, cause of death. —Nikki Heat.” Thankfully, the ME knew her friend, and could tell from the lack of response that Nikki was on a mission. So she skipped the wisecracks and got right to the rest. “Roderick Floyd, the one you shot. He’s got scratch marks on his neck and cheeks. In your incident report from last night, you didn’t mention scratching him.”
“Correct. My only physical contact was a takedown with my right leg to the back of his knees.”
“That would follow, because these excoriations look days old.”
“Lauren, you thinking Jeanne Capois?”
“That would be consistent with the appearance and age of the scratch marks. We’ll lab his DNA against her fingernail residue, but here’s why I called. You’ve never heard me go out on a limb like this, but I know what we’ll find. I am confident that Roderick Floyd was one of her attackers.”
After Nikki hung up, she stood in front of the Murder Board, letting her gaze bounce back and forth from the photo of Roderick Floyd, the paramilitary killer of Jeanne Capois, to Earl Sliney, the street player who fired at Fabian Beauvais on video. What she tried to reconcile was how — or if — they fit together. They had such different backgrounds, such different profiles: one, tactical; the other, a hoodlum. The only common thread Heat could see was their history of home invasions. The information she’d just gotten from the medical examiner all but confirmed Floyd as part of the crew that broke into the apartment on West End and killed the owner when he tried to stop them with a baseball bat. They had also chased after Jeanne Capois, torturing her behind some trash cans near a prep school.
Sliney had a fugitive warrant for a home invasion homicide. Were those home invasion dots connecting, or were they just dots? Was this tactical crew working with the street thugs? Or did they even know about each other? Heat simply couldn’t see a pattern emerging — yet. She knew something was there, but every time she got close to seeing the horizon, it was as if a swirl of angry clouds kept the view hidden from her.
Every administrative aide in the station house knew the importance of that search warrant. So much so that one held the door while the other rushed in to hand deliver the paper to Heat when it arrived. As she inspected the doc to verify the date and signatures and seals, Detective Feller called her name. “Trying to get to the Hamptons,” she said, brandishing the warrant.
“I think you’re going to want to hear this.” And when he told her what it was, Heat turned from the door and followed him into the conference room.
Her gut flipped the instant she walked in and saw the Russian sitting with his elbows propped on the conference table. Ivan Gogol’s chin rested in both hands, the corners of his mouth were pushed downward, and an ominously blank yellow tablet sat in front of him with a capped stick pen resting on it at an angle. “I cannot write this statement.”
“Mr. Gogol,” she began gently, softly — hopefully, “is there something I can help you with? Would you like a translator?”
“Nyet, I cannot make this statement because is lies.” Heat felt herself go flush. Detective Feller whispered a curse and turned away in frustration.
Nikki tried to see what could be salvaged here. Maybe if she broke it down in pieces. “Well, we don’t want you to go on record with anything you don’t feel comfortable with.” She rested a hand on his sleeve and, even though she landed on an archipelago of moles, she left it there. “Let’s start with what you will attest to.”
“Nothing. I will swear to nothing.” He pushed the pad away like a disappointing meal.
Dauntless, she pressed on. “Let’s take this a step at a time. You told us you treated Fabian Beauvais for a gunshot. That much is true, right?” She eased the pad back to him.
He pulled up into a shrug and left his shoulders like that, nearly touching his ears, as he said, “I cannot be sure. He was black man. His name, I can no longer be sure.” Heat took the photo of Beauvais from Feller and held it up, but before she could ask him, Ivan said, “Is him? Not him? I cannot be sure now. Very traumatic night. I had been sleeping, you know, I startle awake.”
No sense prolonging the agony. “Mr. Gogol? Mr. Gogol, please look at me. Thank you. I need you to think about this before you answer. Just yesterday you told us that this man here,” she tapped the Beauvais picture, “had been shot and that you treated him, and that he told you the name of who shot him was Keith Gilbert. Isn’t that the truth?”
“I don’t remember.”