“Why not, Mr. Barrett? Do you have something to hide?” Heat decided to press. With this attorney in the mix, niceties would be ignored and/or crushed.
He sat up in his chair. “No!”
“Algernon,” said Miksit. When he turned to her, she just shook her head. He sat back again. “Detective, if you want to know about Mr. Barrett’s top shelf line of Caribbean-inspired jerk rubs and marinades, great. If you want to inquire about franchising one of his Do The Jerk gourmet trucks, I can see you get an application.”
“That’s right,” he said. “See, I operate a profitable company and mind my own business, yeah.”
“Then why the expensive lawyer?” asked Heat. “You need protection for some reason?”
“Yes, he does. My client is a new citizen and wants the protection afforded every American from undue pressure by zealous police. We ‘bout done here?”
“My questions,” said Nikki, “are part of a homicide investigation. Would your client prefer to conduct this interview down at the precinct?”
“Your call, Heat. My meter runs the same wherever I am.”
Nikki sensed Barrett was hiding behind counsel because he had a volatile emotional side, and she tried to get a rise. “Mr. Barrett. I see you’ve been arrested for domestic violence.”
Barrett whipped off his glasses and sat bolt upright. “That was long ago.”
“Algernon,” said the Bulldog.
Heat pressed on. “You assaulted your live-in girlfriend.”
“That’s all been cleared up!” He tossed his glasses on the desk.
“Detective, do not harass my—”
“With a knife,” said Heat. “A kitchen knife.”
“Don’t say anything, Mr. Barrett.”
But he didn’t back down. “I did my anger management. I paid for her doctor. Got that bitch a new car.”
“Algernon, please,” said the lawyer.
“My mother was stabbed with a knife.”
“Come on. Things get crazy in the kitchen!”
“My mother was stabbed in her kitchen.”
Helen Miksit stood, towering over her client. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
Algernon Barrett froze with his jaw gaping and sat back in the chair, pulling on his shades. The Bulldog sat, too, and crossed her arms. “Unless you want to charge my client formally, this interview has concluded.”
Back in the car, they had to wait out the long convoy of Barrett’s gourmet trucks clearing the lot as they deployed for the streets of New York. Rook said, “Damn lawyer. That guy was going to be a talker.”
“Which is exactly why the lawyer. The too-bad part is that I wanted to try to pull some information out of him before I got to the knife, but she made me change it up.” With only one name remaining on the list of her mother’s clients, the elation Nikki had felt at scoring these leads began to feel like an unfulfilled promise.
“Well, it wasn’t a total loss,” said Rook. “During all the drama, I pocketed this jar of Do The Jerk Chicken Rub.” He pulled out the spice bottle and showed it off.
“That’s theft, you know.”
“Which will only make the chicken taste better.”
A half hour later, they’d just pulled off the Saw Mill Parkway on their way to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit the last person on the list when Heat got an excited call from Detective Rhymer. “It may not be anything, but it’s at least something.” He said it with just enough of his Southern roots coming through to make him indeed sound like Opie. “Remember sending me to IT to chase down whether Nicole Bernardin used Internet cloud storage?”
“Are you seriously asking if I’d forget having to autograph my magazine cover photo to, um … inspire them?”
“Well, it worked. They haven’t found a storage server yet, but one of my geeks had the idea of using the electronic fingerprint of her cell phone to track her mobile Internet searches through location services. Even though we never found her physical phone, they were able to backtrack her billing and dig out the address of her account. Don’t ask me how they do all this, but I’m sure it’s why they enjoy sitting alone in rooms day and night, touching themselves.”