She kicked at the grate with her toe. “If Nicole did get down there, she either had a key or she knew another way in.”
“What we need is a hex wrench to turn that bolt. Or, if it won’t turn, one of those handheld rotary cutters to saw off the head,” said Rook. “Those guys on Storage Wars use them all the time. They go through padlocks like buttah.”
“Is there an open hardware store at this hour?”
“No, but I know the next best thing. Remember JJ?” he said, referring to the building super of a gossip columnist whose murder they had solved.
“JJ, as in Cassidy Towne’s JJ?”
“He’s just down on Seventy-eighth. The man owns every tool imaginable.”
Even though it meant waiting a half hour, Heat agreed their best plan was for Rook to hop down to JJ’s. She would stay there and canvass the area for alternate points of entry. When he got in his taxi, he said to her, “Feels like we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it?” She just shrugged and watched his cab drive off. Nikki had gotten somewhere too many times before only to have it be nowhere.
But this did feel different. Not just the recent surge in leads, but something else. Detective Heat—cautious, measured, mistrustful of haste—felt herself propelled forward as if by some unseen hand, nudging her. There had been flashes of that sensation before on this case. Like when she bailed down the hatch in that living room floor in Bayside. Or chased Don’s killer into an exposed stairwell without backup. Or let herself get set up for a night meet under the High Line. Unguarded feelings like these were foreign to her and were usually unsettling—disturbing enough to be walled off.
What was different? she wondered. Was she suffering poor judgment from PTSD, after all? Or was she starting to see her precious emotional compartments as obstacles instead of allies and going with her gut more? Or was there truly some unseen force guiding her?
Or was she just plain obsessed with this case?
Whatever it was, touring in circles and zigzags along Broadway that night, literally searching for a doorway to the past, Nikki had a sense of homing in, and caution had lost its voice. Which was why, when she descended the subway stairs to the 96th Street station and found herself all alone in it, she walked as far south as she could on the platform to see just how close it came to the abandoned station at Ninety-first. Nikki gripped the stainless steel guardrail and used it to lean out over the tracks and peer into the tunnel. It was dark, except for two red lights shining back at her in warning. She couldn’t see the Ghost Station, but its platform was probably only a block and a half away from where she stood. She listened and, hearing no rumble, wondered if she could make it on foot before a train came.
And then Heat stopped wondering and jumped.