“Remember I told you about drop boxes? We’d use these pictures as a means to secretly show each other the locations of our various hiding places.”
Feeling a wave of exhilaration starting to lift her, she thanked Summers and hung up just as Rook returned to join her from his back office. He came into the great room brandishing the jumbo magnifying glass from his desk that had been decommissioned to the role of paperweight. “I knew this impulse buy would come in handy someday.” He held it over one of the photos of Nicole Bernardin.
“I already saw this,” said Heat. “Taken somewhere here in New York, right?”
“Have a closer look and see where.”
Nikki leaned over and peered through the lens. Rook moved it off the image of Nicole and aligned it on the background. When Heat saw the enlarged sign come into focus behind Nicole, she shot her eyes up at him and said, “Let’s go.”
When Heat and Rook got to the Upper West Side, they both felt thrust into a replay of their photo moment at the Notre Dame Cathedral when Nikki had put one foot on the brass marker at Point Zero and he’d framed the shot. Only this was not a sentimental reenactment of her mother’s pose. They were restaging one by Nicole to learn its message and, hopefully, find a killer.
“We want to be somewhere around here,” Nikki said, circling on the sidewalk near the street corner. Using the old picture for reference, Heat moved closer to the phone booth. “This it?” Rook stood a few feet away, looking at her image on his iPhone screen. He fanned the fingers of his left hand, directing her to shift a few inches to the side, and she did.
“Set,” he said. Then Nikki rotated and, behind her, saw the small green sign Rook had magnified in the background of Nicole’s photo: “W 91st ST.”
“All right, so we had the charms on the bracelet reversed,” said Rook. “It’s nine and one, not one and nine. But what do you suppose Mademoiselle Bernardin was pointing to?”
Nikki studied the photo again and struck Nicole Bernardin’s spokesmodel pose. “This here, this is what she’s going for.” Nikki’s styling indicated a subway grate, about the surface area of a coffee table, recessed in the concrete.
“Why would she be pointing here?” asked Rook. “It’s just a ventilation grate.” The ground rumbled, and a rush of air came up to warm their faces through the screening as a subway passed below and continued onward. Rook said, “Son of a—I know!” He bent over and tried to look through the mesh. “It’s not the grate, Nikki, it’s what’s down there. Oh, this is cool.” His face lit up. “This is cray-cray cool.”
“Rook. Shut up and talk to me.”
“There’s an abandoned subway station down there. Holy crap, I did an article on it for the Gotham Eye when I was freelancing after J-school. Fifty years ago the city closed the station when the extension of the new platform at Ninety-sixth Street stretched all the way down to Ninety-third and made this stop obsolete. They just sealed off this station and left it to rust. If you look out the window of the One train, you can still see the old ticket booth and gates when you roll by. It looks spooky, all frozen in time. In fact, the MTA old-timers still call it the Ghost Station.” Rook paused while another train sped under them, quaking the ground. “Ghost Station. Not a bad hiding place for something like a drop box, if you ask me.”
Rather than mock him for spinning another wild theory, Nikki recalled Nicole Bernardin’s forensic results that reported grime consistent with a railroad environment on the soles of her shoes and on the knee of her pants. So instead of tweaking Rook, she asked one question. “How do we get down there?”