Nicholas interrupted him. “I must go to New York, sir. Right now. I can catch the first flight.”
Penderley dropped Nicholas’s arm. “You think you can somehow get the FBI to accept you enough to fold you into their ranks, let you be involved in solving her murder? This is the Americans we’re talking about here, Nicholas. Believe me, the FBI in New York have this well in hand. They don’t want or need you.”
Nicholas couldn’t stand here, his breath making clouds in the morning mist, knowing someone had shot Elaine, killed her, and wasn’t already being punished for the crime. He had to act. One more try. “Sir, she was valuable—as a cop, as a person. I owe it to her. I’d owe it to any member of my team.”
“You will stay right here. That’s a direct order, Detective Chief Inspector Drummond. Don’t forget, you have training in the morning back here.”
Training? When Elaine was dead? Was the old bugger nuts?
“Look, take the day. I must call her mother now. The good Lord knows if she’ll even be able to understand me, what with the Alzheimer’s. For heaven’s sake, stand down.”
Penderley marched toward his ancient green Jaguar; the car was so old that Penderley’s own son had learned to drive with it. Nicholas slid behind the wheel of his car, closed his eyes.
Elaine, dead. Maybe they’d misidentified the body. Surely that was possible. She was a foreigner, maybe—but when was the last time that had happened?
He put the car in gear and whipped it around, gravel spitting out from under the tires, glad he hadn’t mentioned his uncle Bo, recently retired FBI special agent in charge of the New York Field Office, now the head of security for the Jewel of the Lion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum. Bo liked Elaine. He would be happy for Nicholas’s help. Especially if Nicholas talked to him before Penderley could shut him down.
The drive from the Peel Center, where Hendon Police College was housed, to Nicholas’s home, Drummond House in Westminster, London, took twenty-five minutes. He left his BMW on the street, double-stepped the stairs, and was at the point of sticking his key in the door when his butler, Nigel, opened it and, seeing his master coming through the door like a Pamplona bull, quickly stepped aside.
“Sir? I wasn’t expecting you home so soon. Is everything all right?”
Nicholas shouted over his shoulder as he ran up the stairs to change, “Everything is completely wrong, Nigel. Grab my go bag. I’m going to New York.”
5
New York, New York
West Bank of the East River
Wednesday, midnight
Special Agent Michaela Caine watched the crime scene techs zip Inspector Elaine York’s body in its black cocoon and line it up on the stretcher. She’d been called to the scene because York, a foreign national and therefore under the FBI’s purview, had been found shot in the chest, washed up on the shore of the East River. She was an inspector with New Scotland Yard, and now she was dead on American soil. This was about as bad as it got.
Mike was freezing, the winter sunset a memory. The crime scene, now lit by four portable klieg lights, cast an unearthly glow and added exactly zero heat. More crime scene techs moved back and forth along the shoreline, searching for anything to explain how and why Inspector York’s body had washed up on shore in this particular spot.