They stopped at a door at the end of the hall with a “Do Not Disturb” dangling from the handle. Wondering about site contamination and forensics, Nikki asked, “Has housekeeping been in here?”
“Yuh, right,” DD scoffed and pointed at the sign. “No little chocklits on his pillow.” Then she rapped twice and said, “Yo, manager.” When she slid the key in, Nikki motioned her back. She and Rhymer rested their hands on their holsters and went in first.
“Holy fuck,” said DD, summing it up for all of them. She backed away and said, “I gotta call the owner,” and rushed out.
Blood covered everything. The bed, especially the pillow and head end of the top sheet, was a dry lake of deep rust. A pile of towels on the floor beside it was likewise saturated in red. The desk, which had been moved to the middle of the room, was covered by the ripped-down shower curtain. On one end of that vinyl sheeting, there was yet another pool of blood that had separated over time, with amber at the edges and deep maroon in the center of the stain. Cinnamon red, like drippings from a candle, clung to the sides of the shower curtain where blood had leaked and made small puddles in the rug, which also looked dried. Clumps of bloody gauze decorated the floor there beside their torn, discarded sterile packaging.
Rook said, “I haven’t seen this much blood in a hotel since The Shining.”
“Looks like I found my ER,” said Opie.
“And makeshift ICU,” said Heat. She left Detective Rhymer in charge of the scene, hoping that, in the middle of all that, Forensics could get some prints and find out who administered to Carter Damon.
When Nikki came back from the Bronx with Rook, Roach was waiting and pounced on her at the door of the bull pen. They led her to their side-by-side desks, where they had organized a briefing. “Bank, first,” said Detective Raley. “Turns out Carter Damon had a money trail of his own.” He opened a file on his monitor and clicked through pages of bank statements as he talked. “Look here. A three-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit went into his account the Monday after your mom got killed. And then, see here? Smaller sums—twenty-five grand—every six months thereafter.”
The shocking conclusion was too obvious not to draw—that a member of the fraternity, an NYPD detective, might have killed her mother by contract and then been retained to screw with the investigation’s progress. Obvious or not, Nikki fought the instinct to close her mind by racing to that conclusion just yet and asked, “How long did he get the payments?”
“Till last month. Then, big change.” He brought up the next page. “Another deposit for three hundred thou, two weeks ago.”
Nikki looked at the date. “That’s the day we found Nicole Bernardin in the suitcase.”
“And the same day we met ex-Homicide Detective Carter Damon for lunch,” added Rook. “Was that a payment for doing Nicole, or for trying to kill you?”
“Or both?” wondered Ochoa. “Phone records tell a story, too.” He gave Heat a copy of the printouts he had researched. Rook read over her shoulder.
“I highlighted three major calls of interest. Bottom of page one, note that Damon made two international calls to a disposable mobile number in Paris. One the night Nicole was killed—to refresh your memory, that would have been two nights before we found the suitcase—and the second call to Paris, same burner cell, right after meeting you and Rook for lunch.”
Nikki took a moment to quiet her mind and said, “All right, just trying this on. Let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, the first call to Paris was about killing Nicole Bernardin. Either to get the order or confirm that he’d killed her. What’s the second call about, do you think?”
Rook said, “Maybe Damon was calling in the hit man who killed Tyler Wynn. He could have been your sniper last night.”
“Yeah, but we checked incoming passengers from Paris through U.S. Customs, remember?” said Ochoa. “No knowns on the watch list.”