“Why not?”
“Nothing I can pinpoint. It’s an instinct.”
“Hey, I’m the one with hunches and instincts, and you hate that.”
“Well now it’s my turn. And as irrational as it may seem, I want you to respect
that.” They regarded each other a moment, and in spite of the argument, all the
good feelings held fast. Maybe that’s what a relationship was, she thought. She
reached out and he took her hand. “Look, you know what I’m juggling. All I’m
saying is, with everything else I have to look over my shoulder about, I don’t want
you to be another one.”
He reached out his other hand and she took that, and they faced each other. He
smiled. “So. We good?”
Heat regarded him and knew that, above all else, Jameson Rook was a good man she
could trust. Nothing else mattered. “We are good.” She squeezed both his hands and
they walked in together.
While Nikki received her shot of an antiviral, she thought through her day for any
clue where she might have picked up that smallpox marker. A disturbing notion came
to her. After quick calls to Benigno DeJesus and Bart Callan, the orange string
Rainbow left on the pillow got priority-messengered to the DHS lab for testing. A
certain conspiracy-hungry boyfriend would be quite proud of her.
One thing Heat did know for certain: There was no way in hell she would spend
another minute in sweats at the cop shop. She opened her bottom file drawer where
she kept what she called her emergency wear: backup apparel for those days she
spilled coffee or got blood on her clothes.
After a quick change and a review of the Murder Boards, she decided it was time to
hit the phones again. That was how an investigation worked. You got a new scrap of
information and followed it up by talking to someone about it. Sometimes you got
another scrap that moved you forward, sometimes not. But you kept making rounds,
occasionally feeling like a tethered pony walking a circle at a kids’ zoo, but you
just continued plodding until something shook loose.
First call went to Carey Maggs at Brewery Boz. He came on the line sounding extra-
Brit, which was to say deliciously cranky and jovial about it. “Catching you at a
busy time?”
He chuckled, “Is there any other kind? You know, just running a business and saving
the world in a failing economy. I’m like your Clark Kent, only not slim enough for
the tights, I suppose.”
She thought of the peace march he was sponsoring that weekend, and her heart ached
wanting to warn him about the looming terror possibility, but where did something
like that stop? There were hundreds of public events, conventions, bike-a-thons, and
street fairs on the weekend calendar. Maybe if Rook optioned her article to
Hollywood, he’d have enough money to give everyone in New York City an award at
SUNY and get them all out of town. Putting that aside, she broke the news to Maggs
about Ari Weiss: that his old friend had not died of a blood disease at all, but had
been murdered.
“Christ in heaven,” he sighed.
Weiss’s murder was not only new information, the stabbing matched her mother’s so
closely that Nikki texted Maggs a picture of her killer, Petar Matic. She heard the
chime on his cell phone as it arrived, then a deep exhale and some tongue clicking
from Maggs’s end as he studied it. “Know what? I have seen this guy.”
“You’re sure?”
“No doubt. It’s the greasy long hair and the slacker eyes. Who is he?”
“He was my boyfriend.”
“Uh-oh, low bridge, sorry.”
“… Who killed my mother.” She heard a whispered curse and continued, “It’s
likely he stabbed Ari as well. Do you recall when you saw him, and where?”
“I do very well because I called the police about him. He was hanging about in the
front of my apartment building a number of times and I wanted him dealt with.”
“When was this?”