Their attention was rapt and she took advantage of it. “Four victims: Fabian Beauvais, dropped from the sky; Jeanne Capois, tortured; Shelton David, home invasion victim; Captain Irons — line of duty. This is a bear of a case on the worst day to work it. But we all know that the solves don’t get handed to us. They come by donkeywork.” She tapped the whiteboard. “Something already up here could bring this home. Be diligent. Be thinking. Be cops.”
The squad flew into its work without hesitation, all of them going to their desks, except Rhymer, who lagged behind to faithfully copy the items listed in his box into his notebook. Raley, the media king, brought his iPhone to the mix and made a photo capture of his section. In short order, the bull pen filled with the buzz of investigators working phones to call back eyewits, confer with other divisions and precincts, and to debrief each other about leads and clues. Heat worked as liaison and free-floater, connecting thoughts and waving off the obvious time wasters. Rook self-directed, cherry-picking from the board and free-associating on Internet searches.
Shortly before two, Heat came to Rook’s desk. “Mayshon Franklin is out of surgery and in recovery. You mind getting a little wet?”
The first thing the prisoner saw when he opened his eyes was Heat’s badge. He couldn’t help but see it because Nikki held it so close that it was almost touching his nose. It had taken him longer to come out from under his anesthetic than she and Rook had expected, and they spent a quiet hour waiting in bedside chairs listening to the hiss of rain against the window. Far from lost time, it ensured she would be there on wake-up when the haze of pain meds might dull Mayshon Franklin’s instinct to clam up, lie, or ask for an attorney.
With Earl Sliney, the state police’s fugitive now off the board, BCI Senior Investigator Dellroy Arthur had broken camp, happy to leave his accomplice to NYPD. Heat obliged. “Mayshon Franklin, you are under arrest,” she said, removing her shield once she knew it registered.
His eyes were glazed, searching but not making optical sense of his world yet. He tugged lightly at the manacles connecting him to his jail-ward bed. Then he licked his dry mouth and said, “Earl?”
“Earl Sliney is dead, Mayshon.”
He closed his eyes, nodding an of course to himself, and then opened them again. “How?”
As Heat tried to decide how to put it, Rook stepped up behind her and said, “Human Pez dispenser.” That only confused Franklin, and Heat didn’t want him to lock up. Plus, she only had so much time before he would fatigue-out and go under again, so she got to it.
“Look up here, Mayshon.” Nikki held up the ATM security cam freeze of him and his crew and tapped Beauvais. “You recognize him, right? Mayshon, eyes here. Good. You know him?”
Franklin nodded weakly. “We have video of your friend Earl shooting at him a few weeks ago. You were there.” He nodded again, which was encouraging because she wanted him unguarded. “Did he hit him?”
“No, shot at him.”
“Right. We know he shot at him. Did any of Earl’s bullets hit him?” Mayshon shrugged and winced at the effort. “Can you answer yes or no?”
“I don’t know. Mighta hit him, mighta not. I dunno.” He took a breath that stuttered on the intake and his eyes drooped.
“Stay with me, Mayshon, you’re doing great. Almost done.” His lids fluttered to half-mast and Nikki pressed, aware of the short time she had before he zoned. “You and Earl were chasing him, and he had a package. What was it?”
“He stole.”
“What did he steal?”
“From the boss.” He smiled dreamily. “Y’all don’t steal from the boss.”
“What’s the boss’s name, can you tell me that?” He made a face, mimicking a child in trouble and wagged his head on the pillow. She’d come back to that. “What was in the package?”
“Bad stuff, I dunno. Stuff meant for the shred net.”
Since he claimed he didn’t know what was in it, she didn’t want to waste time flogging that. “Tell me about the shred net.” One eye closed. His other lifted like a stoner’s in a music video. “Mayshon. Where’s the shred net?”
“You don’t know? You’re the police.”
“Tell me, help me understand you better, Mayshon.”
“Flatbush. C’mahn, you know.” His speech became increasingly slurry.
“Where in Flatbush?”
“Flatbush, there ya go.” He closed his eyes and muttered in a singsong, “Mar-co.” And then he chuckled, answering in the same cadence, “Po-lo.…”
“Mayshon, don’t play games with me, just tell me where.”
Again he sang, “Po-lo,” then didn’t say anything, and she thought she’d lost him. Then he chuckled again and said, “Whirl ride.”
And then he slept.
Working his iPad in the hall after the floor nurse ordered them to step out, Rook made a spin move on the polished linoleum. “Ha-ha, knew it. Thug-One wasn’t jerking your chain. Look.” He held the tablet out for Nikki to read his search hit. “Marco Polo Worldwide — as opposed to ‘whirl ride’ — Spice Distributor and Wholesaler in Flatbush, New Yowk.” He watched hope cross her face and her wheels starting to turn. “I wouldn’t call ahead.”
“No,” she said on her way to the elevator. “Let’s surprise them.”
When they pulled out of the garage of Brooklyn’s Woodhull Medical Center, the rain surprised both Heat and Rook by still seeming relatively light. Shouldn’t it be more torrential? The wind, however, remained prolific, seemingly limitless. On the drive down Marcus Garvey Boulevard toward Flatbush, plastic bags, tree branches, chunks of billboard, even price numbers ripped from service station signs flew across their path, prompting Rook to say something Nikki only half heard about falling gas prices.
She was busy trying to sway the acting precinct commander of the Sixty-seventh to provide backup at Marco Polo Worldwide. He was understandably reluctant to release assets during a citywide emergency, yet was no match for Heat, who invoked the name of Zach Hamner as her next call, if that’s what it took. The acting PC offered two patrol teams to meet her at the west end of Preston Court in fifteen minutes.
Heat’s Taurus had been blocked in back at the Twentieth, so she and Rook arrived in the drug impound undercover car she had commandeered in her haste. A pair of blue and whites was waiting for them outside the U-Haul parking lot on the corner of Preston at Kings Highway. “Don’t want to jinx it,” she said to Rook, “but we’re only about three blocks from Fabian Beauvais’s SRO. If this turns out to be that shred net, and he ripped them off, it’s an easy walk.”
“Or run,” he said.
More than simply functioning as backup, the patrol officers had good local knowledge. Preston Court was a down and dirty industrial zone, a partially unpaved, two-lane alley lined on either side by low-rise weathered brick and concrete warehouses, mounded quarry materials, and metal-scrap lots bordered by chain link and razor wire. The spice distributor sat a hundred yards east between a tire recycler and a boiler-system repair company. The ranking uni, a sergeant, said all the business on that stretch of Preston loaded their materials in and out the front doors, so there was only a narrow service track running behind the buildings, an easy route to plug with a patrol car on each end. Heat told the sergeant she liked his plan and dispatched him and the other team to the back, keeping one of the uniforms to go in the front door with her and Rook.