An interrupted scream and metal-on-metal impact brought all the lights to whip below to the seventh floor. Mayshon Franklin had stayed with his BMX, but a burst of wind had thrown him back into the side of the building where he crash-landed atop the construction-site elevator. From what Nikki could make out in that light, it appeared the bike had bent around the hoist and its gear works with the rider blanketing it, spiked there by the handlebar poking up out of his lower back.
When Mayshon Franklin moaned, Heat called out, “He’s still alive,” and bolted for the stairs.
With Franklin living, but destined for prolonged surgery and complete sedation, Heat left Williamsburg when the OCME van transported Earl Sliney’s remains to the Brooklyn Borough morgue in East Flatbush at one-thirty in the morning. She insisted her squad get some sleep and to make sure their homes were buttoned up for the hurricane, a Category Two monster, just three hundred miles away at that hour. With a third-floor apartment in a protected block, Nikki felt reasonably certain her place would survive.
Just for peace of mind, she had put in an earlier call to Jerzy, her building super, and he cheerfully agreed to keep tabs on it. So instead of going home, she set out for the Twentieth Precinct to crash for the night. Rook had made use of his long wait in the staging area to check on his loft as well. Then he called his mother to make sure she was OK. After receiving a blustery vow that no piffling storm would dare take on Margaret Rook, star of Broadway, summer stock, and Sardi’s, he rode back to Manhattan with Heat.
He dozed against the passenger door. Heat craved sleep, too, but the task of holding her lane in the wind lash crossing the East River kept her plenty alert. It felt about the same as her trip over, but something new had been added to the swirl of skyscraper-devouring clouds and the buffeting of the car: a humid scent of the tropics. It made her reflect once more on inevitability. And how you can name a beast and even know it’s coming, but little can be done to stop it.
Early the next morning, after four hours of openmouthed sleep on the break room couch and then raiding her file drawer for the emergency wardrobe she kept there, Nikki made a breakfast of peanut butter on an apple she had sectioned. Rook came in looking too rested for a man who’d slept in an empty jail cell. He held two Grandes of Starbucks heaven. “Is that home cookin’ I smell?”
She slathered a slice of her apple and held it out. “Offer you a Pink Lady?” she asked, knowing full well she was setting him up.
“In a heartbeat, if we had more privacy. But hold the thought about the peanut butter.” He took the apple and they sat there in the lounge watching Channel 7’s coverage of Superstorm Sandy. “I liked it better when they were calling it the Frankenstorm,” he said. “Monster hurricane, Halloween…So what if it sounds too flip? I say, if we’re going to get pounded by a hurricane two years in a row, we’re allowed to laugh it off.”
He saw Keith Gilbert on-screen, live from the Port Authority Emergency Management Office. “Shutting up now,” said Rook, using the remote to turn up the volume.
“Landfall,” said the commissioner, “is predicted to come about twelve hours from now, give or take. Best guesstimate for location is still slightly south of New York metro, but that would still put the city and the harbor in the powerful upper-right quadrant of the cyclone. Port Authority is therefore closing LaGuardia Airport at seven-fifteen P.M. JFK, Newark Liberty, Teterboro, and Stewart International will remain open, but with all flights canceled. Maritime facilities are closed.…”
Nikki watched her prime murder suspect smoothly presenting his best face and virile composure in the looming crisis. As if reading her mind, Rook said, “You do know that all this macho chill only enhances his appeal as a candidate. Hell, watching this, it’s a shame he can only run for senate in one state. I’ll bet he could get elected from New Jersey, too. He’s a slam dunk.”
“Not everything is inevitable, Rook.” With that, she picked up her Starbucks and strode to the bull pen to get to work.
Her squad had already assembled when she got there. She invited them to coffee-up fast and then gather at the Murder Board. While they hustled out to empty bladders and re-caffeinate, her desk phone rang. “Peace offering,” were the first words she heard. It was Zach Hamner. “So, please don’t hang up.”
“Go ahead.”
“I just processed an order to relieve you from duty.”
Nikki sat on the edge of her desk. “Am I being dense here? In what world is that a peace offering?”
“Because I am turning this over to your precinct commander.”
“I don’t have one. He’s dead.”
“That’s my point. But you will have one tomorrow. An interim white shirt they’re plucking from cubicle land. This order to place you on administrative leave came through my office from the deputy commissioner of Personnel. But you know how it works here in the Puzzle Palace. Somebody else squeezed somebody else’s balls up the food chain, and, suddenly, you’re tapped for the sidelines.”
“What sidelines?”
“Specifically, your orders are for desk duty on Staten Island, TFN. So that is my peace offering to you. A gift of twenty-four-hours’ notice.” The implications took a lap in Nikki’s head. Gilbert or his lawyers got to somebody at City Hall or One Police Plaza, and this is the monkey wrench that got thrown in to the gears of her case.
“Heat, you still there?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m just sorting out what to do.” And how fast she needed to do it. She looked at the wall clock and became short of breath. “This is good info to have.”
“I thought it would be.” He paused, then continued, sounding small and contrite. “And sorry I said what I said. You know. About Irons being a boob. That was totally douchy. I apologize.”
Funny thing, she thought. Boobs can become heroes and assholes can show some heart. “Thank you, Zachary.”
“Gentlemen, we have not a minute to waste,” Detective Heat began when everyone had formed a semicircle. She recapped the heads-up call from The Hammer, which elicited universally pissed-off faces and a smattering of curses. Nikki called a halt. “I’m with you — obviously more so — but getting mad isn’t going to help.”
“This won’t shut the case down,” said Feller.
“Really,” said Ochoa. “Do they think we’re just going to drop it because you go to Staten Island?”
Heat said, “Of course you are capable of keeping it going. Especially this group. But we need to see this for what it is.”
“Round one,” said Rook.
“Exactly. This is the opening salvo in an orchestrated legal and power offensive. The idea is to dismantle progress one piece at a time and, eventually, to ‘make it go away.’”
She took a moment to register contact with each of them. “We can’t let that happen. This case has been a difficult one from the start. A lot of contradictions. A lot of conflict — even in here. Which is fine. It’s what you get with cops who have passion. I want that. But now we have entered a new phase.” She walked to the board to point at Captain Irons’s name up there as a murder victim.
“We need to drill down.” Nikki turned to look at his name again and milked the silence. Then she selected a new red marker from the cardboard sleeve. “This squad has twenty-four hours to be brilliant. Twenty-four hours to live up to its reputation as the top-clearing homicide squad in the NYPD.”
Heat opened the red marker and used it to draw a circle around her earlier translation of Fabian Beauvais’s tattoo: “Unity Makes Strength.” Then, in that same red ink, Nikki divided the board into four equal quadrants. She wrote a name in each, going clockwise: “Raley. Ochoa. Feller. Rhymer.” Capping the marker, she squared herself to her detectives. “Your assignment today is to examine every case detail inside your square. If you aren’t the detective who brought in the lead, become familiar and dig into it. If you did bring it in, go back over your own work and be critical. ‘What did I overlook?’ ‘What didn’t I ask?’ ‘Who didn’t I talk to?’ ‘What do I know now that I didn’t then that opens new lines?’ Talk to each other. If you have an expertise or hunch, poach that item from your colleague and run with it.”