“Comes with the territory.’”
Rook thought a moment and said, “You could have told her I was here for security.”
“You?”
“Well…I did cover you.” He took her hand and pulled her closer, so that she stood between his knees.
“I’ve got an appointment with a corpse.”
He looped his legs behind hers and rested his hands on her hips. “Last night was great, don’t you think?”
“It was. And you know what else last night was? Last night.” And she strode to her closet to get dressed for work.
Rook did the cab fishing on Park Avenue South and hooked a northbound whopper, a minivan-cab. He held the door for Nikki, who got in with one last glance over her shoulder, harboring the concern that Captain Montrose had left a blue-and-white on her and she’d be spotted on her morning after with Jameson Rook. “Looking for Pochenko?” asked Rook.
“Not really. Old habit.”
She gave the cabbie Rook’s address in Tribeca.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Aren’t we going to the impound lot?”
“One of us is going to the impound lot. The other is going to go home and change his clothes.”
“Thanks, but if you can stand me, I’ll wear this again today. I’d rather hang with you. Although, checking out a body isn’t exactly our best denouement. After a night like that, the New York thing would be to take you to brunch. And pretend to write down your phone number.”
“No, you’re going to go change. I can’t think of a worse idea than for the two of us to show up in the same cab at my friend’s crime scene first thing in the morning with bed hair and one of us in yesterday’s clothes.”
“We could show up wearing each other’s clothes, that would be worse.” He laughed and took her hand. She withdrew hers.
“Have you noticed I don’t do a lot of hand holding on the job? Slows down my fast draw.”
They rode in silence for a while. As the cab cut across Houston Street, he said, “I’m trying to figure out…did I bite my own tongue when you kicked me in the face, or did you do it?” That earned a fast check from the driver in the rearview mirror.
Heat said, “I want to lean on Forensics to cough up that report on Pochenko’s blue jeans.”
“I can’t recall getting bitten either time,” said Rook.
“Blackout probably set the lab behind schedule, but it’s been long enough.”
“Things were happening fast and, dare I say, furious.”
“I’m betting those fibers match,” she said.
“But still, you’d think I’d remember a bite.”
“Surveillance video be damned, somehow he got in there, I’d bet on it. I know he likes his fire escapes.”
“Am I talking too much?” Rook asked.
“Yes.”
Two blessedly chatter-free minutes later, Rook was out of the cab, standing in front of his building.
“When you’re done, go to the precinct and wait for me. I’ll meet you there after I finish at the impound.” He sulked like a rejected puppy and started to close the door. She held it open and said, “By the way? Yes. I did bite your tongue.” Then she slid the door closed. Nikki watched him grinning on the sidewalk through the back window as her cab drove on.
Detective Heat badged herself through the gate of the city impound, and after she signed in, the guard stepped out of his tiny office into the hot sun to point out the medical examiner van on the far end of the lot. Nikki turned to thank him but he was already inside filling his shirtsleeves with air from the window AC.
The sun was still low in the sky, just clearing the top of the Javits Convention Center, and Heat could feel its bite on her back as she paused to take her long, deep breath, her ritual remembering breath. When she was ready to meet the victim, she walked the long row of dusty parked cars with grease-penciled windshields to the investigation scene. The M.E. van and another from Forensics were parked close to a tow truck still hooked up to a newish, green metallic Volvo wagon. Technicians in white coveralls were dusting the outside of the Volvo. As Nikki got closer, she could see the body of a woman slumped in the driver’s seat, the top of her head pointed out the open car door.
“Sorry to interrupt your morning workout, Detective.” Lauren Parry stepped around the rear of the M.E. van.
“Not much gets by you, does it?”
“I told you Jameson Rook was doable.” Nikki smiled and shook her head, she was so busted. “Well, was he doable?”
“And doable.”
“Good. Glad to see you enjoying life. Detectives just told me you had a close call the other night.”
“Yeah, after SoHo House it was all downhill.”
Lauren stepped to her. “You all right?”
“Better than the bad guy.”
“My girl.” Then Lauren frowned and tugged aside the collar of her friend’s blouse to look at the bruising she saw on her neck. “I’d say it was a very close call. Let’s take it easy, all right? I have enough customers, I don’t need you, too.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Nikki. “Now, you dragged me out of bed for this, it better be worth it. What are you working here?”
“Jane Doe. Like I said, found in her car by the tow truck driver when he dropped it off here this morning. He thought it was heat asphyxiation.”
“A Doe? In a car?”
“I hear you, but no driver’s license. No purse. No plates. No registration.”
“You said you found something connected to my Matthew Starr case.”
“Give a girl a little sex and she gets very impatient.”
Nikki cocked an eyebrow. “A little?”
“And boastful.” The M.E. handed Nikki a pair of gloves. While she put them on, Lauren turned to the back of her van and came out with a clear plastic bag. She pinched it at the corner and held it up so that it dangled in front of Nikki’s eyes.
Inside was a ring.
A ring shaped like a hexagon.
A ring that was a good match for those bruises on Matthew Starr’s torso.
A ring that could have put that cut on Vitya Pochenko’s finger.
“Worth the drive?” said Lauren.
“Where did you find this?”
“I’ll show you.” Lauren took the ring back to her evidence locker and led Heat to the open door of the Volvo. “It was there. On the floor under the front seat.”
Nikki looked at the woman’s body. “It is a man’s ring, isn’t it?”
The medical examiner gave her a long, sober look. “I want you to see something.” The two leaned in through the open car door. Inside it was humming with blowflies. “OK, we have a female, aged fifty to fifty-five. Hard to get an accurate postmortem interval without labbing the rate test because she’s been in that car so long in this heat. My guess—”
“Which is always damn close.”
“Thank you—based on the state of putrefaction is four, four and a half days.”
“And cause?”
“Even with the discoloration that’s taken place over the last few days, it’s pretty clear to see what happened here.” The woman had a thick curtain of hair across her face. Lauren used her small metal ruler to pull the hair aside and reveal her neck.
When she saw the bruising, Nikki swallowed dryness and relived her own choking. “Strangulation” was all she said, though.
“Looks like from someone in the backseat. See where the fingers would have laced together?”
“Looks like she put up a hell of a fight,” said the detective. One of the victim’s shoes was off and her ankles and shins were mottled by scrapes and bruises where she had kicked the underside of the dash.
“And look,” said Lauren, “heel marks on the inside of the windshield over there.” The missing shoe rested broken on the dash above the glove compartment.
“I think that ring belongs to whoever strangled her. It probably came off in the struggle.”
Nikki thought of the woman??
?s desperate last moments and her brave fight. Whether she had been an innocent victim, a criminal getting a payback, or something in between, she was a person. And had she ever battled to live. Nikki made herself look at the woman’s face, if for no other reason than to honor that struggle.
And when Nikki looked at her, she saw something. Something death plus time couldn’t obscure. Images played hazily in the detective’s mind. Grocery clerks, and bank loan officers, and photos of women from society pages, an old schoolteacher, a bartender in Boston. Nothing came to her. “Could you…” Nikki pointed at the woman’s hair and waved her forefinger. Lauren used her ruler to gently draw all the hair off the face. “I think I’ve seen her before,” said the detective.
Heat shifted her weight on her heels, leaned back from the woman about a foot, and tilted her own head to match the angle of hers. And pondered. And then she knew. The grainy photo, at a three-quarters angle with the expensive furniture in the background and the framed lithograph of a pineapple on the wall. She would have to look it up to be sure, but damn it, she knew. She looked at Lauren. “I think I’ve seen this woman on the surveillance tape from the Guilford. The morning Matthew Starr was killed.”
Her cell phone rang and she jumped.
“Heat,” she said.
“Guess where I’m standing.”
“Rook, I’m not up for this right now.”
“I’ll give you a clue. Roach got a call about a burglary last night. Guess where.”
A cloud of dread gathered around her. “Starr’s apartment.”
“I’m standing in the living room. Guess what else. Every single painting in the room is gone.”
ELEVEN
Thirty minutes later, Detective Heat stepped off the Guilford’s elevator on six and strode the hall to where Raley stood with a uniform outside the open door to the Starr apartment. The door frame bore a crime scene posting and the requisite yellow tape. Stacked on the luxurious hallway carpet by the door were plastic snap-lid tubs labeled “Forensics.”
Raley nodded hello and held up the police line tape for her. She ducked under and entered the apartment. “Holy shit,” said Nikki, turning a circle in the middle of the living room. She craned her neck upward to the take in the full height of the cathedral ceiling, believing what she was seeing, yet stunned at the sight. The walls were stripped bare, and all that was left were the nails and mountings.
That living room had been Matthew Starr’s self-proclaimed Versailles. And even if it hadn’t been an actual palace, as a single room it most certainly qualified as a museum chamber with its two stories of wall space graced by some valuable, if not cohesively collected, works of art. “Amazing what happens to the size of a room when you strip everything off the walls.”
Rook stepped over beside her. “I know. It looks bigger.”
“Really?” she said. “I was going to say smaller.”
He flicked his eyebrows. “Guess size is a matter of personal experience.”
She shot Rook a furtive cool-it look and turned her back on him. When she did, Nikki was certain she caught a fast glance darting between Raley and Ochoa. Well, she thought she was certain, anyway.
She made a forceful show of getting down to business. “Ochoa. We’re absolutely sure Kimberly Starr and her son weren’t here when this went down?” The detective needed to know if a kidnapping was rolled into this.
“Daytime doorman said she left yesterday morning with the kid.” He flipped back through his spiral pad. “Here it is. Doorman got a call to help her out with a rolling suitcase. That was about ten A.M. Her son was with her.”
“Did she say where they were going?”
“He hailed her a cab to Grand Central. From there, he didn’t know.”
“Raley, I know we have her cell phone number. Dig it out and see if she picks up. And go easy when you break the news, she’s had a hell of a week.”
“On it,” said Raley, who then head-nodded to the pair of detectives on the balcony. “Just to be clear, are we working this, or is Burglary?”
“Heaven forbid, but we may actually have to cooperate. Sure it’s a twenty-one, but we can’t rule it out as part of our homicide investigation. Not yet, anyway.” Especially with the discovery of the Jane Doe from the surveillance tape and the ring at her death scene likely belonging to Pochenko, even a rookie’s cop sense would tie it all together. What remained was to uncover how. “I expect you to play nice with them. Just don’t give away our secret handshake, OK?”
The pair from Burglary, Detectives Gunther and Francis, were cooperative but didn’t have much information to share. There were clear signs of forced entry; they used power tools, obviously battery-operated, to compromise the front door of the apartment. “Beyond, that,” said Detective Gunther, “it’s all pretty much neatsy tidy. Maybe the lab rats will pick up something.”
“Something’s not lining up for me,” Nikki said. “Moving this haul would take time and manpower. Blackout or not, somebody had to see or hear something.”
“Agreed,” said Gunther. “I had a thought we should split off now and knock on a few doors, find out if anyone heard anything go bump in the night.”
Heat nodded. “Good thought.”
“Is there anything else missing?” asked Rook. Nikki liked his question. Not only was it smart, but she felt relieved he had dropped the seventh-grade innuendos.
“Still checking,” said Francis. “Obviously we’ll know more when the resident, Mrs. Starr, gives it a once-over, but so far, it appears to be just the art.”
Then Ochoa did what they all kept doing, looking at the blank walls. “Man, how much did they say this collection was worth?”
Nikki answered, “Fifty to sixty mil, give or take.”
“Looks definitely more like take,” said Rook.
While Forensics examined the apartment and the Burglary detectives peeled off to canvass residents, Nikki went downstairs to talk with the only eyewitness, the night-shift doorman.
Henry was waiting quietly with a patrol officer on one of the sofas in the lobby. She sat beside him and asked him if he was all right, and he said yes, like he would have said it no matter how bad he felt. The poor old guy had answered these same questions for the first responders, and then again for the Burglary cops, but he was patient and cooperative with Detective Heat, glad to tell someone his story.
The blackout came during his shift, at about nine-fifteen. Henry was supposed to get off at midnight, but his relief called in about eleven and said he couldn’t make it on account of the power outage. Nikki asked the man’s name, made a note, and Henry continued. It was mostly quiet at the door because with the elevator out and all the heat, people who were in were staying in, and many of those who were out were stuck someplace. The stairwell and halls were equipped with low-level emergency lighting, but the building didn’t have a backup generator.
At about three-thirty in the morning, a big van pulled up out front and he thought it was ConEd, because it was big like one of theirs. Four men in coveralls got out all together and jumped him. He didn’t see any guns, but they had big five-cell flashlights and one of the men gave him a punch in the solar plexus with his when Henry challenged them. They got him off the street and into the lobby then used plastic zip cords to bind his hands behind his back and hold his feet together. Nikki could still see some flecks of pale gray adhesive on his deep brown skin where they had duct taped his mouth. Then they took his cell phone and carried him into the tiny mail room and closed the door. He couldn’t give very good descriptions because it was dark and they all wore baseball hats. Nikki asked if he heard any names or could pick out anything unusual in their voices, like if they were high, or low, or perhaps had accents. He said no, because he never heard their voices, not one of them ever spoke. Not even a word. Professionals, she thought.
Henry said he heard them all walk out later and take off in the truck. That’s when he struggled to get free and kick at the door. He was bound too tight, so he had to sta
y like that until the assistant super came in and found him.
“And do you know about what time they left?”
“I couldn’t tell the time, but it felt like it was about fifteen, twenty minutes before the lights came back on.”
She wrote, “Left before end of blackout. 4 A.M., approx.”
“Think a moment. Is it possible you’re confused about these times you’ve given me, Henry?”
“No, Detective. I know it was three-thirty when they got there because when I saw that truck pull up out front, I checked my watch.”
“Sure, sure. That’s good, very helpful to us. But the part that puzzles me is their time of departure. The blackout ended at four-fifteen. If you say they left about fifteen minutes before that, that means they were only here a half hour.” He processed what she was saying and then nodded agreement. “Is it possible you fell asleep or were unconscious during that time? Maybe they left later than four A.M.?”
“Oh, believe you me, I was awake the whole time. Trying to think of a way to get out.” The old doorman paused and his eyes began to rim with tears.
“Sir, are you all right?” Her eyes darted to the patrolman standing behind him. “Are you sure you don’t want medical help?”
“No, no, please, I’m not hurt, it’s not that.” He turned his face from hers and said in a low voice, “I have been a doorman at this building for over thirty years. I have never seen a week like this one. Mr. Starr and his poor family. Your detective talked with William, you know, the day-shift doorman, about that day. He’s still afraid he’ll be fired for letting those fellows slip in that morning. And now here I am. I know it’s not the fanciest work, but this job means something to me. We’ve got some characters living here, but most folks are very good to me. And even if they aren’t, I’m always proud of my service.” He said nothing for a moment and then looked up to Nikki and his lip was quivering. “I’m the gatekeeper. More than anything else I do, it’s my responsibility to make sure bad people don’t get in here.”