On her drive to midtown, Heat calmed herself to the rhythm of her wiper blades
in the rain. Rook had hit a hot button but apologized, saying he was freaked about
that orange string ending on her picture. Nikki cut him slack for that. In fact, she
found herself extra vigilant, scanning windows and rooftops outside the precinct on
the walk to her car. Even the thunder cracks made her jumpy. By the time she
ascended the elevator to Quantum Recovery’s floor, she decided snapping at Rook
called for some smoothing over later.
Joe Flynn’s assistant sat with the lights off in her dead boss’s office. Grim
midday sun, filtered through rain clouds, erased the colors from the large-format
paintings on his walls. The young woman’s eyes were puffy and cried-out. Nikki
approached the interview gently, empathically. But her questions about the private
investigator’s recent activities, behavior, new clients, etc., brought no more
light into that room. The PI’s schedule had been to-pattern; his attitude remained
good-humored; he had no conflicts, disputes, or threats in his life. The only thing
out of the ordinary was that Flynn had misplaced his iPad, prized because it was a
beta version, a gift from Apple after he recovered a lost prototype. It still hadn’
t turned up. The assistant said her last communication with Joe Flynn had been when
he left the office a few days before. She didn’t find it odd that he didn’t check
in, because he did that sometimes when he was on a case. He called it the romance of
chasing international art thieves, and had always surfaced, eventually, with jet lag
and cool stories. “Did he say where he was going?”
“Not specifically,” said the assistant. “Just to meet someone with information
about a stolen painting Joe wanted to recover.”
“The Cézanne?” asked Heat. The assistant raised her head up in surprise. Nikki
took out her photocopy of Boy in a Red Waistcoat.
“How’d you know?”
Randall Feller arrived, and Nikki put him on checking phone logs, e-mail, Internet
history, and bank records. He suggested his routine checks could wait, and that he
should ride shotgun with Heat to her meeting in the Bronx. The detective didn’t
take his no easily.
Heat did a little bit of self-talk crossing the Harlem River. Her encounter with
Algernon Barrett about a month ago had been contentious and, essentially,
nonproductive. Back then, Barrett was a person of interest in her mother’s murder
hiding behind his lawyer’s pantsuit, so Nikki bad-copped him into losing his temper
to see what shook loose. Nothing did, so this time—especially since she didn’t
regard him as a potential murder suspect—she decided to play nice, to be the
kinder, gentler cop, and see if that got any more out of him.
The Jamaican had risen from poverty, coming to New York in the early 1990s as an
immigrant running illegal horse bets from his sidewalk food cart. His live-in
girlfriend, a business major at Fordham, drew up a marketing plan for a company to
sell Algernon’s Caribbean spice rub recipes, and within two years, Do the Jerk
broke the million-dollar profit ceiling and kept climbing. When Heat pressed the
button to announce herself at the driveway on an industrial block of 132nd Street,
the iron gates that rolled aside led to the headquarters of a food empire built on
the lore of a New American’s success story.
She found the pair as she had left them a month ago. Except for the clothing,
Algernon Barrett and his lawyer might have never departed his office. The jerk spice
magnate in the track suit sat behind his desk with a turquoise Yankees cap floating
atop his shoulder-length dreadlocks. At a side chair, Helen Miksit acknowledged Heat
without standing. Nikki began her charm offensive by leading with a smile and
energetic handshakes for both.
“Thank you for making the time. You must be busy. I noticed a lot of people lined
up in your parking lot. Are you holding a job fair?”