Rook bent over them. “Temple’s been snapped off the frame.”
“Yeah, we figure he used the metal end to pick his cuffs.”
Rook said, “He didn’t tear off somebody’s face to use as a mask to get out, I
hope.” The three cops stared at him. “Spoiler alert: Silence of the Lambs?” Then
he said, “Continue, Officer Slaughter.”
“He overpowered an orderly when he came in, put on his scrubs, and waited for shift
change so he could walk out past me.” The cop appealed to her, “I never saw him
come in, so how could I know what he looked like?”
Alone in the elevator, Rook said to Nikki, “I’m sorry, but if your name’s
Slaughter, you ought to have a little more swing in your dick. Just sayin’.”
“Glad you’re having such a good time,” she said. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to
stop a bioterror plot, we still have nothing to go on, and my best hope to get a
lead is my damned locksmith serial killer who just escaped. And you want to joke?”
He paused and said, “I mean, if your name was Slaughter, wouldn’t you at least hit
the gym?”
Bellevue Hospital turfed to the Seventeenth Precinct, so on the cab ride uptown,
Heat called Feller and assigned him to become best friends with the One-Seven
detectives and to make sure Glen Windsor’s renewed APB extended to Amtrak, the
airports, and the cut-rate buses in Chinatown. When she hung up, Rook said, “I’ve
been doing some thinking.”
“More gags for your stand-up?”
“No, about the case. Jeez, what do I have to do to get you to focus?” Then he
became sober and continued, “I don’t think you need this APB.”
“Why not?”
“Because Rainbow is going to come to you.”
“Right.”
“Nikki, look at his pattern—and the evidence. Think of what you saw in your
interrogation last night. Windsor is not just obsessed with you, he’s a full-goose
borderline personality. Narcissistic, for sure, and I’ll bet grandiose. Clinically,
that’s an ego that feeds on being the center of everything.”
“So you’re saying I should just call off the search?”
“No, I’m saying he’s going to reach out again like he did before. He has to. This
is his moment, and he needs to engage you to claim it.”
“Engage me, like when he said I brought his game to the next level?”
“Exactly. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he won’t make contact. But, in case he does, I’
d be thinking how to play him.”
Heat said, “This is the thing I hate most. Playing games.”
“You not only have to play this one, Nikki, somehow you have to figure out how to
beat him at his own game.”
This was the essence of Rook, she thought. Sometimes he wore the clown paint.
Sometimes he brought the goods. “If you’re so smart,” she said, “why don’t you
tell me how to do that?”
He stared out his window a moment and then said words that echoed from a dream. He
said, “You know.”
Heat and Rook walked into a bull pen blanketed by a quiet as toxic as doomsday
ashfall. The palpable tautness radiated from a single empty desk—the one with the
“Detective S. Hinesburg” nameplate. Everyone continued his or her work, but with a
hollow look, not so much from mourning as from disillusionment. Somehow one of their
own had gone bad. It felt different than corruption; cops on the take were still as
much a reality in New York as anywhere. This was different. This was treason inside
the Blue Line.
The lights were off inside the precinct commander’s glass office. Rhymer reported
that Captain Irons had e-mailed saying he would be at One Police Plaza for an
indefinite period that morning. The squad speculated whether he would ever be back,
following his nightmare double-whammy. “Not a good day to be the Man of Iron,”
said Detective Malcolm, with typically mordant understatement. “Bad enough he holds
a press conference embracing a dude who turns out to be a serial killer. Now his
office punch gets outed as a bioterror spy.”
“Fail,” said Reynolds.