“Thanks for this.”
“Oh, hey, listen,” he said. “Let’s understand ourselves here. You’ll get a chance to thank me. The bill will come due someday.” He slid the check for his breakfast across to her. “And it’ll be a lot more than just this.” Then he left without a good-bye.
Two hours later Detective Heat might have entered the bull pen of the Twentieth Precinct to applause, but she got ahead of that. Nikki had called Roach and told the two of them to pass the word to keep her return low-key. Zach Hamner warned her that Irons had to choke down the orders from the top of the food chain and not to rub his nose in it. But The Hammer had worked his magic getting her reinstated, with the sole face-saving bone thrown to the captain that she agree to return for a follow-up with the shrink for the blowup in his office. “That’s all I have to do?”
“For them,” Zach had said. As if she needed to be reminded of his banked IOU.
She dug in immediately by having Hank Norman Spooner brought up from his holding cell to Interrogation One while she read the confession he’d written the night before. The suspect also had a rap sheet that she studied. In the nineties he had worked as a security guard but got dismissed following complaints for petty thefts in the offices he patrolled and for stalking several females in the apartment buildings he’d been hired to protect. Spooner did probation and suspended sentences for those and had been served with several orders of protection. He also had a peeper charge in Florida from when he had worked as crew on a cruise ship, which had constituted his sporadic employment for much of the prior decade. He did ninety days plus probation for that; otherwise, no other jail time.
Nikki asked Detective Rhymer if anyone had checked Spooner’s cruise dates against the murders, and when he said no, she gave him that assignment and wondered how the hell Wally Irons could have gone on TV and called this an investigation.
The inevitable confrontation with her precinct commander came as she put her old friend, the Sig Sauer, in the lockbox in the hall outside Interrogation One. “Welcome back, Heat.” She spun the combination and turned to the voice. There he stood with Detective Hinesburg at his elbow.
“Captain.” Brevity, she thought, was face saving’s best friend.
“What’s going on here? I understand you called my prisoner up.”
“Yes, sir,” said Heat, keeping things deferential. “I have a few questions to ask him. I also have one for you. Any news on that missing glove?”
“Nada. And I’ve been a thorn in the butt of Forensics.”
Detective Hinesburg chimed in. “Immaterial now, isn’t it? Now that we’ve got our man.”
Hinesburg’s stupidity might have been amusing to Heat in a Real Housewives sort of way if the detective didn’t do so much damage. “And what about the guy I shot who wore that glove? Does ‘our man’ have any bullet holes, or did you notice?”
“No,” Sharon said, “I’d definitely notice that.”
Irons interceded on behalf of his detective-slash-secret girlfriend. “Obviously, we’re not talking the same person, Heat. Which is telling me your shotgun shooter is probably from another case altogether. An old grudge. Like maybe a holdout from that death squad that tried to get you in Central Park last winter.”
Detective Heat could see this was going nowhere good and looked to move things along. “Guess we’ll see. Excuse me.”