“You’re kidding. You mean like strip poker?”
“Even better. It’s strip Proust!”
She mulled it over and said, “Shoes off, Rook. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to start even.”
“All right, here we go.” He flattened the pages on his thigh and read, “ ‘Who is your favorite author or authors?’ ” Nikki blew an exhale and frowned, thinking. Rook said, “Playing for your blouse. No pressure.”
“I’ll go with two. Jane Austen and Harper Lee.” And then she said, “You have to answer, too.”
“Sure, no problem. I’ll say a certain Charles Dickens and toss in Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.” He went back to the pages. “ ‘Name your favorite hero in literature.’ ”
Heat reflected and shrugged. “Odysseus.”
“Mine, too,” said Rook. “Pinkie pull.” He held out his little finger and she hooked hers onto it and they tugged and laughed. “Nobody gettin’ nekkid yet. Try this. ‘Who is your favorite poet?’ ”
“Keats,” she answered. For ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ ”
Rook replied, “Seuss. For ‘One Fish, Two Fish.’ ” He went back to the page for his next question. “ ‘How do you wish to die?’ ” They both looked at each other. Then Nikki took off her blouse. He had similar sentiments and took off his sweater.
“I told you I may not want to answer some of these.”
“And therein lies the game, Detective Heat. Moving on to “ ‘What musician has impacted your life the most?’ ”
“Most impactful musician . . . ,” she said, pondering. “Chumbawamba.”
“You’re kidding. Not Bono? Or Sting, or Alanis Morissette, or—really? Chumbawamba? Tubthumping Chumbawamba?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. When my high school drama coach told me a freshman couldn’t play Christine in Phantom, a song about getting knocked down and getting up again resonated very strongly with me.” Still does, she thought. “What about you?”
“Steely Dan for ‘Deacon Blues.’ And James Taylor for everything, especially ‘Secret O’ Life.’ ” Then Rook palmed his forehead, “Oh, oh, no, wait! I forgot AC/DC.”
Heat made a buzzer sound. “Ambivalent reply, Rook. Points off, pants off.” After he complied, he looked at the questionnaire, made a little head shake, and turned to the next page.
“Whoa, whoa, penalty flag,” Nikki said. “You can’t skip questions, let’s hear it.”
He shuffled back and read, “ ‘What qualities do you look for in a woman?’ ” Rook paused. “Minefield, I’m not answering that.” After she made him take off his shirt, he said, “This is not how I saw this game going,” and he turned to the top of the next page. “Payback time. ‘What qualities do you look for in a man?’ ”
“I can answer that. Honesty. And a sense of humor.”
“Uncanny how I have the quality of being both honest and funny. Like if you asked me about your clothes and said, ‘Hey. Does this blood make my ass look fat?’ I’d tell ya.”
“Are you stalling because you’re losing?”
“Fine.” Next he read, “ ‘Who would you have liked to be?’ All right, I’m going to answer this one first. A backup singer for Aretha Franklin. The sequined dress could be an issue, but that would be my other life. You? Who would you be?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Meryl Streep.” He gave her a sympathetic look because they both knew she gave up her theater major when her mother was killed.
“Moving on. ‘What is your present state of mind?’ ”
All Heat could do was think about the turmoil she was experiencing. She didn’t answer and took her slacks off.
“My state of mind . . . ?” said Rook. “The Strip Proust tide is turning. Yay! Next question: ‘What is your idea of misery?’ ”
“Pass. I don’t like how these questions are going.” As she unhooked her bra and set it on the coffee table, she said, “You have to answer, too, Chuck Woolery.”
“Simple. Misery for me is what I felt after I hurt you by not calling after my trip.”
“To coin a phrase, good answer,” said Nikki. “Next?”
“Let’s see . . . ‘What is your motto?’ ” He dropped his head. “I don’t have a motto. Who has a motto?”
“You’ve got a choice, underpants or socks.”
“There. That’s my new motto.”
“Nice try,” she said.
He slid out of his underwear, leaving his socks on. “Take that, Spitzer.”
“I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.’ ” And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become—and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.
Right then Nikki resolved to call her own meeting with Montrose first thing the next day. And let the damned chips fall.
“Hello?” said Rook, bringing her back. “Ready for the next one?” She looked on him with clear eyes and nodded. “Here we go then. ‘What is your ideal dream of earthly happiness?’ ”
Heat paused only a moment to think. Then she said nothing, but stood and slid out of her panties. Rook looked up to her from the couch with a face that she couldn’t resist, so she didn’t. She bent down, taking his mouth in hers. He met her hungrily and pulled Nikki into his arms. Soon, the rhythm of their bodies answered that last question. She didn’t think about it but found her lips to his ear, whispering, “This . . . This . . . This . . .”
SIX
At eight the next morning Nikki sat at a window table at EJ’s Luncheonette, blowing on her large coffee and waiting for Lauren Parry to pick up her phone. Instead of corporate jazz or Soft Hits of the Eighties and Nineties, the programming for anyone stuck on hold at OCME was a loop of short messages about New York City’s municipal opportunities and services. Rather than Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” or Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” the mayor invited you to call 3-1-1 for all your information needs and some monotone DOT administrator extolled the virtues of Alternate Day, Alternate Side Parking. Where were Annie Lennox’s “Sweet Dreams” when you needed them?
“I have a question for you,” said Heat when Lauren finally came on the line. In the background she could hear the snap of gloves and the lid of a metal pail clanging open against a wall. “It’s about that bruise on Father Graf’s lower back. You recall it?”
“Of course. What about it?”
It had come to her in bed with Rook—appropriately enough—at dawn. Heat had been sleepless, mulling the confrontation she planned to bring to her captain in the coming hours. Next to her, Rook turned onto his side and Nikki rolled to face his back, using her fingertips to comb down the sprung hairs on his cowlick. He looked thinner to her than when he had left. His shoulder muscles revealed more cording, and even in the waxy light his ribs were defined by deeper shadows between them. Her eyes traced his vertebrae to the small of his back, where she saw the fading bruise. While they were drying each other from their shower, she asked him where he got it.
Rook told her that two weeks before, he had ridden by cargo ship from Rijeka, on the Adriatic, to Monrovia on the West African coast, where he witnessed what he considered a brazen daylight offload of black market arms. The dealer, who was on the wharf to supervise the transfer of thirty tons of AK-47 rounds, plus crates of grenade launchers, onto waiting trucks, kept glancing up from his Range Rover to the ship’s navigation t
ower, where Rook was lurking, trying to be inconspicuous. But after the convoy lumbered off the pier, Rook went below to his crew quarters, only to be grabbed by three of the dealer’s goons. They put a hood over his head and drove him for over an hour, to a plantation in the hills. There, they removed the sack but handcuffed him while he waited, locked in an empty horse stall in the barn.
At nightfall, he was taken to the great lawn beside the yellow plantation house, where the arms dealer, a former MI6 operative named—or at least using the name—Gordon McKinnon, was at a picnic table tossing back Caipirinhas under strings of fiesta lights shaped like red chili peppers. Rook decided not to let on how much he knew about McKinnon from his research . . . that the former British SIS man had amassed a fortune brokering black market weapons to embargoed nations in Africa . . . that the blood flow from Angola, Rwanda, the Congo, and recently Sudan could be traced to the drunken, sunburned, ginger-haired man right before him.
“Have a seat, Jameson Rook,” he said, and gestured to a wooden stool across the table. “Oh, come on. I knew it was you when you boarded in Croatia.” Rook sat but didn’t speak. “Call me Gordy.” Then he laughed, and added, “But I guess you damn well know that already, don’t you? Huh, am I right?” He slid a tall glass across the rough timber to him. “Drink up, it’s the best fucking Caipirinha on this whole fucking continent. Both my bartender and my cachaça are flown in from Brazil.” Maybe he was too drunk to remember his guest’s hands were cuffed behind him and he couldn’t reach his glass.
“I read all your stuff. Not bad. Bono and Mick. Bill Clinton. Well done. But come on, Tony fuckin’ Blair? And Aslan Maskhadov? I’ve damn sure got more going than that bollocks you wrote about the damn Chechen. Maskhadov, hah! Only regret is I didn’t sell the grenade that killed him.” He tilted his glass back and some of it sloshed down his face onto his Ed Hardy shirt. His barkeep replaced the glass with a fresh one, and he continued, “Hey now, bottoms up. This is your last drink.”
And then he stood, pointing the biggest handgun Rook had ever seen, an Israeli Desert Eagle .50-caliber, right at him. But then he pivoted, sighting to the left, firing into the night. The thunderclap report of the Eagle was followed immediately by hissing and a white-hot glow that filled the grounds with the brightness of frozen lightning. Rook turned to look behind him. In the searing brilliance he could see magnesium flares lined up along the fence posts across the great lawn. McKinnon fired again. His bullet struck another flare, which sparked to life, huffing and fizzing as it spun off the fence into a pasture, illuminating fleeing horses and a pair of Gulfstream IVs parked in the distance.
The arms dealer raised both fists in the air and war whooped to the Liberian sky. He polished off his drink and said in a hoarse voice, “Know what I love? Rockin’ my own life. Did you know I have enough bloody cash to buy my own country?” Then he laughed. “Oh, wait, I already did! Are you aware, Rook, I have been given—are you ready for this?—diplomatic immunity? They made me minister of some shite or other here. Truly. I do what I want and nobody can touch me.”
He brought up the Desert Eagle and stepped closer, training it on Rook again. “This is what happens when you poke it where it doesn’t belong.”
Rook stared into the gaping muzzle and said, “What was it that I rode up here in, a Range Rover? Have your valet pull it back up. Think I’m ready to go.” McKinnon jerked his hand to menace him with the gun. “Put that damn thing away, you’re not going to shoot me.”
“No? What makes you think so?”
“Because you would have done it back in port and left me floating out to the Canary Islands. Because you put on this whole . . . show for me. Because if you kill me, who will write your story, Gordon? That’s what you want, isn’t it? Of course it is. And you gave me some great quotes. ‘Rocking your life’? ‘Minister of some shite’? Brilliant. It’s tough to be a bad boy and have no fan club, isn’t it? You didn’t bring me here to kill me, you brought me here to make you a legend.”
McKinnon rushed up to Rook, locking his elbow around his neck. “What’s with you? Do you have some fascination with death that makes you think you can tease me? Huh? Huh?” He pressed the muzzle against his temple and stared at Rook with wild eyes dancing with the mad light of devil fire from the flares.
Rook sighed and said, “Still waiting for that Range Rover.”
McKinnon set the gun on the table then pushed Rook backward off his stool onto the stone patio, where he landed hard on his handcuffs.
In the time it took Detective Heat to walk from EJ’s on Amsterdam to the sidewalk in front of the precinct, Lauren Parry had called her back. “I just checked the photo of the bruise. It definitely could be from handcuffs. I’ll do a test but hinged cuffs would definitely account for the ladder-shaped bruise at the small of his back.” Then she asked, “What do you suppose it means?”
Heat said, “It means we hope it means something.”
Captain Montrose told her he was busy when she knocked on the door frame and said she needed to talk with him. Heat came in anyway and pulled the knob behind her until it clicked. He looked up at her from some printouts. “I said I was busy.”
“I said I needed to talk.” Detective Heat, the immovable object.
Montrose stared at her from under a thick hedge of furrowed brow. “This is what my life’s come to. Numbers. First they criticize my stats, telling me to step it up, pay my rent. Now they’re sending me these.” The captain lifted the thick spreadsheet off his blotter and let it drop with unmasked contempt. “Target numbers. Micromanaging me. Telling me how many Class C violations to write up this week for blocking sidewalks and littering. Class B summonses, too. Let’s see . . .” He ran his finger along a row. “They want eight seat belt violations and six cell phone tickets. Not five, not seven. Six.
“I don’t make my numbers, they do a number on me. So what’s my choice, fluff my books? Do I tell the uniforms not to take certain robbery or assault reports so the stats don’t work against me? If it doesn’t get written down, it never happened. What do you know, a crime drop in the Twentieth!” He capped his highlighter and tossed it on the desk. It rolled onto the floor, but he made no attempt to stop it. “If you’re determined to interrupt me, sit down.” She took one of the guest chairs and he said, “So how are you going to brighten my already perfect day?”
Nikki knew where to begin. With her goal, simply stated so it wouldn’t get lost. She said, “I want to open the Graf case wider.”
“Did you complete the BDSM checks like I told you?”
“Not yet, but—”
He cut her off. “Then this meeting is over.”
“Captain, with due respect, we’re chasing a foul ball. Promising leads are surfacing and I feel hamstrung not being able to follow them.”
“Such as?”
“OK,” she said, “the money stashed in those cookie tins. Why would you tell me not to reach out to the archdiocese right away?”
“Because it’s not relevant.”
Nikki was struck by his sense of certainty. “How can you know that?”
“Are you questioning the judgment of your commander?”
“It’s a legitimate question, sir.” She made the “sir” carry respect. Nikki wanted her case back, not for him to dig in his heels to prove his rank.
“Your vic was killed in a bondage dungeon—work it.”
“This feels like a roadblock.”
“I said work it.”
She decided to move along, hoping to find an open flank. “I also have a shooting victim with a connection to the priest.”
“And to your negligence for not reporting the tail.”
To Nikki this began feeling like her jujitsu sparring matches with Don. She raised a fact, the captain threw a feint. Heat didn’t take his bait. “We can discuss that later, but let’s not get sidetracked. Father Graf had the phone number of that strip club hidden in his room. Eyewitnesses saw him fighting with the dancer. I want to work that angle, but y
ou have my investigation corralled.”
“You’ll make a fine lieutenant in this department,” he said. “You’re already learning how to shift blame.”
“Excuse me, but I am doing exactly the opposite. I’m taking responsibility. I want you to let me run my case my way.” Since Nikki had made up her mind the night before to reclaim her sense of mission, she pressed onward, making her scariest leap. . . . She addressed the elephant. “What is going on with you, Captain?”
He poked his finger hard enough on the spreadsheet to dimple it. “You know damn well what’s going on with me.”
“I wish I did. I get the pressure,” she said, “I do. But there’s a lot of other stuff I don’t get. Things I’ve observed. Things I’ve learned. And, frankly, it worries me.”
There was a sea change in that room. Her skipper’s anger and irritation gave way to a steely wariness. He studied her with an intense concentration that made Nikki uncomfortable. His head was glistening, and behind him on the window that gave onto the street she noticed an aura of condensation forming on the glass, probably from his elevated body heat. It outlined Montrose like his own ghost. “Learned, like what?” he said.
Her tongue felt like it had a sock on it. “Your search of the rectory the night of Graf’s killing, for instance.”
“Asked and answered already.” His voice was chillingly calm and his face had taken on a flat affect. “If you have more, let’s hear it. Is there more?”
“Captain, let’s not go down this road right now.”
“What road? The one that leads to you implying I had something to do with his death?” Under his measured tone Nikki could sense the next wave of anger building pressure. “Is that what you think?”
When she hesitated, the interrogator in him kicked in. Nikki had always been impressed by how intimidating her mentor could be working a suspect against the ropes. Except now it was all on her. “You’re already knee-deep, Detective, so you’d better bring it—unless you want to go on the record in a formal conduct review.”