Rook said, “That was right around Thanksgiving. No friends or relatives came to stay with you the week before Thanksgiving?”
“Of course, that is not one of our traditional UK holidays, so let me give it a fair bit.” He made a steeple of his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Well, now that I think it over, it comes to me that a college mate of mine did arrive and stayed with us that week. Your mentioning Thanksgiving jogs my memory because the kids were going to be off school. We were planning to leave that weekend for London and he was going to mind our flat while we were chocks away.” Maggs recognized the implications and grew unsettled. “But if you’re thinking he had anything to do with it, no. I couldn’t believe that, not him.”
She turned her spiral to a fresh page. “May I have the name of this friend?” Carey closed his eyes slowly and his face went slack. “Mr. Maggs, I am going to ask you again to give me the name.”
In a voice that had gone strangely toneless, he said, “Ari. Ari Weiss.” Then he opened his eyes. He looked as if the admission had hollowed something out of him.
Nikki spoke quietly, but persistently. “Can you tell me how I could get in touch with Ari Weiss?”
“You can’t,” he said.
“I have to.”
“But you can’t. Ari Weiss is dead.”
“Confirmed,” said Rook, hunched toward the screen at his desk back in the precinct. Heat crossed over to him as he referred to it. “Obituary for Ari Weiss, MD, says the graduate of Yale School of Medicine and Rhodes Scholar—which is probably how he met up with Carey Maggs, up at Oxford—died of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. It says here, that is a malaria-like parasitic disorder which, like Lyme disease, is usually tick-borne, although it can come from transfusion, blah, blah.”
“Rook, a man’s dead, and all you can say is, ‘blah blah’?”
“Nothing against him. It’s just I’m one of those people who hears about rare diseases delivered by ticks and I start scratching and checking my temperature every five minutes.”
“You’re a prize package, Rook. Lucky me.” She hitched a thumb at the obit on his screen. “Meanwhile, a potential lead hits another dead end. When did he pass?”
“2000.” Rook closed the webpage. “That eliminates him as a suspect for Nicole Bernardin’s murder, anyway.”
Nikki tried to stay upbeat in the face of yet another lead coming to an apparent dead end. She was making a mental note to do some of her own research later on Ari Weiss, when Roach startled her.
“Detective Heat?” Nikki turned to see the partners standing before her, looking grim.
“Tell me,” she said.
“We’d better show you,” said Ochoa.
As she and Rook followed Roach across the bull pen, Raley said, “I scored this a few minutes ago, but I waited for Sharon Hinesburg to clear out for her two-hour lunch.” He sat at his desk and keyed some strokes on his computer keyboard.
Ochoa said, “It’s the statement for November 1999 on your mother’s separate account at New Amsterdam Bank and Trust.” The monitor filled with a financial PDF. Raley rolled his chair back so Nikki could lean in to read it.
Rook bent over beside her to look and let out a low moan. Heat turned away, her face drained of color.
As if to confirm the reality she feared, Detective Raley said in a hushed voice, “According to this, your mom received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit the day before she was killed.”
“Detective, do you have some idea what this means?” asked Ochoa.