Nikki thanked her and hung up. Wincing at the outdated French roast, she watched her laptop screen fill with the ME’s attachment. Lauren’s photo reflected her friend’s experience and attention to detail: sharply focused on the pores, lit for clarity, and no flash bounce. The dark brown skin, torn at the edges had been inked with a slogan in an ornate font: “L’Union Fait La Force.”
“Unity Makes Strength,” thought Heat. Then, always eager to use her French, said the words aloud. “L’Union Fait La Force.”
“That’s on the Haitian coat of arms.” Startled, she turned to find Rook standing behind her. “My French is nowhere as good as yours, but I spent some time there after the quake to cover Sean Penn’s mission.”
“It walks,” she said, and stood to kiss him good morning. In his jet lag haze the night before, he’d gamely attempted to unpack from his trip, but mainly just wandered stupidly, making a ludicrous job of it. “Do you even remember me catching you putting your dirty underwear in the bureau drawer instead of the hamper? You fought me all the way to bed.”
“Then I must have been out of it.”
Nikki offered him her coffee. Surprisingly, he drank it without reaction, while she explained the origin of the tattoo.
When she’d finished Rook said, “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“Of course. There’s a possibility I can ID him through the department’s tattoo database.”
“OK, that. And…” He set the mug down and became animated. “Come on, Nikki. This guy might be an alien. Do you know how easy it will be for me to pitch this to the magazine? An alien falling from the sky and crashing into the planetarium? Best. Death. Ever.”
The NYPD’s Real Time Crime Center maintained a computerized catalog of tattoos that proved incredibly useful identifying both suspects and victims. Initially, gang and prison tatts got the focus but, as body art gained mainstream popularity, all sorts of ink from all sorts of people got photographed by detectives and logged into the hard drives on a high floor in police headquarters. If this John Doe from the sky had any recent arrest, however minor, the likelihood that his tattoo would spit out a name and last-known address was very high. So while Rook headed off to get dressed, Heat e-mailed copies of the image to RTCC as well as to Detective Rhymer so he could share it with FBI, Homeland, and Immigration and Customs.
When Nikki went to dump her soggy Melitta grounds, she got a laugh at more hamper confusion. Resting on top of the kitchen garbage was a pair of socks and Rook’s prized Comic-Con baseball cap, obvious casualties of his loopy foray into unpacking. As she rescued them, her eye caught something: a shopping bag lying underneath. It was small and of high-quality paper with braided cord handles from a jewelry store in Paris. Nikki hesitated, then, deciding it was none of her business, took her foot off the pedal. The lid dropped and she started for the bedroom with the cap and socks.
Seconds later, her toe hit the pedal again. She wondered—or maybe rationalized—what if something was in it and he had accidentally thrown away, say, cuff links? Or an expensive pen? She set the souvenir hat and socks on the counter and removed the bag, which had been folded flat. She ran her fingers on its glossy surface and felt nothing. After a hitch of minor hesitation, she opened it and peered inside, where she found a receipt for many thousands of euros.
“Nik, you haven’t seen my Comic-Con hat anywhere, have you?” he called on his way from the bedroom. She stuffed the receipt in the bag and dropped it back in the trash. But not before she saw what the purchase was.
Bague de fiançailles. She didn’t dare give voice to the words this time. But feeling the sudden flush on her face, she listened to her private translation reverbing in her mind: “Engagement ring.”
On the elevator ride down, Rook surveyed Nikki and asked if she felt all right. She nodded, presenting the most unfazed smile she could muster, which seemed good enough for him. But, of course, she knew why he’d asked. The few minutes it took for them to get out of his loft had played out for her as a sluggish walk through a Coney Island hall of mirrors, only underwater. Her mind swirled with a cyclone of emotions. Guilt at having snooped. Exhilaration at the receipt’s meaning. Fear, too. Yes, fear. And more guilt about feeling that feeling. And—fueling the icy center of the vortex—a breath-robbing, knee-jellying numbness. Because she couldn’t figure out how to feel.
The sunlight cut sharp to her eyes when they stepped out of his building onto the sidewalk and he took a long inhale of Tribeca, declaring, “God, I’ve missed this city.”
“Subway, not taxi,” was all Nikki could think to say, choosing a crowded express train over the intimacy of a cab’s rear seat and the conversation opportunity a venue like that threatened to open up.
As they approached Reade Street, Heat lurched into another emotional mode when she made the guy. The long lens puzzle man from the Hayden stood outside the little park in Bogardus Plaza. Only this time he wasn’t holding a camera. He’d gone back to panhandling. “Keep walking,” she told Rook. And when he gave her a curious frown, she repeated it, evenly but firmly. He did as he was told for once, and when he reached the corner and looked back, Nikki had vanished.
Lying there on her back in the gutter under the serving window of the Tribeca Taco Truck, all Heat could see across Reade Street were the man’s boots as he came closer to find out where the hell she went. To her eye, those Lugz looked a little fresh from the box for a derelict. A hand prodded her shoulder. Nikki turned her head to look up at a sidewalk diner in a Rangers cap with the authenticity stickers still on the beak. Around his mouthful of nopalas burrito, he said, “Yo, lady, you sick?” Then he snatched the Ray-Bans off her face and ran. And they say New Yorkers don’t care. Instead of giving chase, though, she logrolled under the chassis of the truck to the street side.
Heat waited until she saw her stalker disappear around the back of the vehicle, then pushed herself to her feet from a tripod stance, keeping her right hand on her holster. She moved swiftly, using the growl of a passing school bus to drown out her footfalls. The guy couldn’t figure out how he could have lost her—Nikki didn’t need to see his face to know that. As she snuck up behind him, he peered around the corner of the taco van, swiveled his head to the right to scan the opposite end of the sidewalk, then craned to survey the café tables in the plaza across Bogardus Garden.
“Don’t worry, I’m right here,” she said, close enough for him to feel her breath on his neck. And then, more sharply, “Ah-ah. Don’t turn around. Drop the cup.” Coins danced on the pavement. “Hands behind your head.” Nikki slid her palm off the butt of her Sig Sauer and pressed his chest against the quilted stainless steel door of the food truck while she cuffed him.
“A little harsh for public solicitation, wouldn’t you say, Detective?” said Rook on arrival. But then he saw the Smith & Wesson .40 caliber she pulled from the panhandler’s waistband. “Hmm. Sir, unless that squirts water, you have some explaining to do.”
The man ignored Rook. And Heat, for that matter. Just stared up at the sky, shaking his head like he was mad at himself. He bristled even more when she plucked his wallet and opened it. Now it was Heat’s turn to shake her head. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“Nikki Heat. This is a nice surprise.” Zach Hamner’s voice annoyed her even more this time. As usual, he oozed the casual jauntiness of a no-worries, above-the-fray networker enjoying his high rung on the political ladder at One Police Plaza. But this time an extra helping of duplicity seeped through the phone along with something new from the senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters—a whiff of apprehension.
“Let’s keep it real, Zach. This is neither nice nor a surprise.” From his end came rustling, and then a door close. Heat waited him out, surveying her bull pen, empty so far, except for Rook, across the room filling his espresso maker with fresh water.
After some throat clearing, Hamner sa
id, “That’s a hell of a ‘good morning,’ Detective.”
“Want to know what my wake-up call was? Busting the Internal Affairs Bureau doofus you sent to shadow me.”
His denial reflex started to kick in, and she cut him off. “And don’t insult me further by playing innocent. When I threatened to parade him through the Twentieth and lock him up in front of my squad, he talked like a starlet on The View.”
Even though she called him a doofus, Heat blamed herself for not acting the day before when the IAB detective caught her attention outside the planetarium. Sure, he had changed out of his panhandler’s disguise, put on a hat, and acted like he belonged with the news snappers, but when the sonar ping had sounded for Nikki, she dismissed it, breaking one of the cardinal rules of investigation that she preached to her squad: Always notice what you are noticing.
“All right,” said Hamner with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s stipulate I was doing some background on you—”
“You had me tailed.”
“—But I had a reason.”
Count on that, thought Nikki. Zach “The Hammer” Hamner always had a reason. Or, more likely, a strategy.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“You’re sorta blindsiding me here. I’m still herding my ducks.” He chuckled, trying to regain footing. “Can you meet at our usual deli for breakfast, say, tomorrow or early next week?”
The seasoned interrogator kept his feet to the fire. “Background on me for what? Tell me now, or I’ll start asking around.”
Nasal breeze crossed his phone’s mouthpiece. Then came the creak of executive leather as he sat. “A job, since you insist on squeezing me. A promotion. Again.”
His “again” carried some stank. Three years before, Zach identified Heat as a rising star and campaigned for her to take command of her precinct after the death of the beloved Captain Montrose. The ugly politics of the process gave her second thoughts, however, and she left him at the altar, declining both her promotion to captain and the command, to remain a street detective. A gamesman has a long memory, she decided. And yet, he still played the game. Why this time?
It had to be Wally Irons. The man who took the precinct command Heat had declined proved himself to be an inept self-promoter with no copsense nor any clue how to manage people. Captain Irons’s sole talent rested in his astonishing ability to survive in the face of his gaffes, usually buffoonish or egregious. The whole squad bet that the exposure of his secret affair with one of his homicide detectives, Sharon Hinesburg, would trigger the end of his command. Especially since his lover turned out to be a mole for a terror organization. Yet, after two weeks of intensive meetings downtown and a monthlong leave of absence, the Iron Man returned to flip on the lights in his precinct commander’s office without so much as a wink about his transgression—or a hint of how he kept his post.
The tongue-in-cheek speculation ran to holding blackmail photos of the mayor. Rook theorized Wally was like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, “a human cockroach, only freakishly mutated. Like that deviant species they discovered that survives chemical spills, nuclear meltdowns, and Real Housewives marathons.”
These were Nikki’s thoughts as she eyed the empty desk in the bull pen. The desk that had been assigned to Sharon Hinesburg’s replacement, a grade-three who transferred from the Organized Crime Unit, a gifted, instinctive investigator whose single drawback turned out to be her bust size. And when years of innuendo from Captain Irons turned to harassment, and finally, an “accidental” grope, Detective Camille Washington just didn’t show up one day last week. Now, Nikki assumed Irons was out and she was Zach Hamner’s candidate—again.
She was mistaken.
“The commish directed the head of Counterterrorism to create a new task force, and he wants you on it. You do remember Commander McMains?”
Of course she did. Nikki especially recalled how he stepped in to help her shut down that bioterror plot. “Good cop. Good person.”
“He thinks the same. Which is why your name tops his short list. This is big, Heat. We’re definitely thinking outside the boroughs with this job. We need someone who can liaise with our foreign law enforcement partners to meet the challenges of all cross-border criminal activity that impacts New York City.”
Nikki wondered, was he reading this? Probably not. Most likely, Zach wrote it and accessed his talking points from memory.
“Under McMains, you would be the NYPD point person working directly with Interpol, New Scotland Yard, the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, and a slew of others. And I hope you know where your passport is, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time in London, Hamburg, Tel Aviv, Lyons, Mexico City, Rio…” The implications resonated immediately and Hamner’s words fuzzed while she watched Rook fiddling with the espresso maker across the squad room. Something cold and melancholy poked her gut.
“…You there? Hello?”
“Uh, yeah.” She gathered herself and tried to reset the course of the call. “Listen, you still haven’t explained why you spied on me.”
“Due diligence is not spying, Detective Heat.” The Hammer was not only back in his wheelhouse but strutting the deck. “This is proper vetting for a key position. We needed to see who you are associating with to make sure we don’t have any surprises. Like gym rats turning up naked and dead on your parlor floor.”
Heat wished Zach was there so she could throttle his face to a bloody pulp with the phone. Don—a hero and ex-Navy SEAL—had no longer been her no-strings sex partner that night he came over to shower after a combat-training workout. Instead of rising to the bait, though, she calmly replied, “My personal life is my own. But we both know that man took a shotgun blast instead of me, and I’m here now because of him.”
“Un-fucking-flappable. See, this is why we need you, Heat.” Maybe it would be worth the drive to headquarters to give him a beatdown there. “And so you know, I’ve taken the step of confidentially clearing your transfer with your precinct commander.”
“What? Irons knows?”
“Transparency. We’re your NYPD.” And then, proving the fine-tuning of his antenna, Hamner said, “I’m vibing hesitation. You are aboard for this, right?”
He broke her pause with, “I’ve been down this road with you once already. You only get so many of these. This is last call, Heat.”
She swiveled her chair from her view of Rook. “I get it. Tell me when you want to meet.”
“Excellent,” he said.
The moment she hung up, Rook came up behind her and startled her. “Who the hell ground decaf in this when I was gone? Smell.” He held out his coffee grinder. “What did The Hammer say about your IAB tail?”
Nikki mulled their conversation of the night before about Rook’s travel absences—then thought about the ring receipt—and punted. No sense making waves right then. “You know him. Double-talk. He says it was just some Internal Affairs zealots getting out of hand. You know how those men in black are.” Before Rook could question her further, she gave the grinder a cursory sniff. “Want me to dust it for prints?”
“‘Unity Makes Strength,’” translated Rook to the squad as Heat posted a hard copy of the tattoo JPEG on the Murder Board. Hearing him say those words made it difficult for her to meet his face when she turned to continue her briefing. But she did, and the corners of his eyes crinkled from that smile that made her heart skip again. And then flutter once more from the pair of secrets she held: the job offer that threatened to make her the globe-trotter for a change and finding the engagement ring receipt in his Simple Human trash can. Neither was so simple to Nikki.
Just before the meeting, Rook had cornered her in the break room, telling her that they needed some Us Time and asking how she felt about canoodling in their favorite booth at Bouley that night at nine o’clock. Her bobblehead nodding felt stupid and inadequate, so she’d said yes loud enough to turn heads in the
hallway. “I’ll take that as a yes!” he’d bellowed back, then inhaled deeply. “Mm, Bouley. I can already smell the wall of apples in the vestibule.”
Randall Feller got a text, jogged out of the meeting, and returned in less than a minute holding a cellophane evidence bag. “Look what CSU found.” He lofted it like an auction item on his way up front to hand it to Heat. “A nylon zip tie. Those of us who’ve worked crowd control and riot duty will recognize this puppy as a double-cuff disposable wrist restraint. And it’s got blood on it.”
“Where’d they make the find?” asked Nikki.
“Food cart vendor who works Eighty-first and Central Park West reported it. Apparently, the bloody zip tie landed in his chestnuts.”
“Schproing,” said Ochoa, kicking off the inevitable gallows laughs.
Rook joined in with, “I can eat around the nylon, but is blood gluten free?”
Heat didn’t have to settle them down. Detective Raley accomplished that by observing the wrist restraints would explain why the victim’s hands were tucked behind him when he crashed into the planetarium. The room grew very still indeed.
“Gentlemen, I believe we are leaving the realm of accidental death as a possibility,” said Heat as she block printed WRIST RESTRAINTS on the whiteboard.
While Feller stepped out to get the evidence bag to Forensics for labbing, Rhymer reported no missing persons hits yet, even though he’d been checking in hourly with all the agencies. Detective Ochoa had met with similar dead ends on the aviation front. He said he contacted all the local airfields for lists of takeoffs and landings, then followed up with the pilots, and tower personnel, none of whom reported any unusual activity, visually or over the radio. The only aircraft over the area during that time were radio station traffic, government, and police helicopters.