He followed her out of the room. “Ooh, pizza delivery. Now we are talking porn video.”
They ate camp-style, right out of the box, while she filled him in on the surveillance HD Raley pulled from the jewelry store cam and the forensic news about the lab solvent and train residue on Jane Doe. When they were finished eating, he said he’d do the dishes and did so by dropping the pizza carton into the recycling. “Good call on the pie,” he said. “Although I can’t decide whose I like best. Original Ray’s, Famous Original Ray’s, or Swear to God, Folks, This Really, Really Is Ray’s.”
They adjourned from the counter to the dining table, where that afternoon he had spread the printouts he’d made of the PDF case file she sent him alongside his typed-up notes from their meeting with Carter Damon. “In case you’re wondering, Detective Heat, that was a very useful exercise for me to be able to sit down with that guy.”
“I’m glad somebody got something out of it. All I got was pissed.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
She scanned his notes and said, “But I can’t see anything new that you got. Damon was right, it’s all information already in the case file.”
“What I got is a sense of his laxness. Maybe he wasn’t when he started the case, but this is a detective who dropped the ball when it got hard and the investigation called for some old-fashioned doggedness. To me, Carter Damon is Sharon Hinesburg without the nail extensions and push-up bra. The headline for me is that we have to go back ourselves and dig deeper.”
“I disagree. Much as I don’t like Damon’s slacker mentality—”
“—more cop-out than cop—”
“—these are dead ends. Captain Montrose always drilled us to follow the hot lead. And that means we focus on the fresh trail off that suitcase.”
“We can do both.”
Nikki ignored him, plowing onward. “And when we ID our Jane Doe, we’ll be even closer.”
“Why are you resisting this?”
“Beer?” she said, and left him for the fridge. Nikki had just finished pouring them each a perfectly cloudy Widmer Hefeweizen when her cell phone rang. After she listened briefly, Heat said, “Got it. Meet you downstairs from Rook’s in five,” and hung up. “That was Roach. If you want to come, you’d better wear more than a robe.”
“Where are we going?”
“Queens. They found our guy with the suitcase.”
FOUR
The tattoo busted him. As Heat had hoped, the Real Time Crime Center had a match in its computer that connected to a suspect. A week before, the owner of a convenience store in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens had called in a complaint on a shoplifter. The surveillance cam picked him up, and even though the petty crime didn’t have the weight to make the news or light up an All Points, the RTCC logged the tatt into its database, and the hit came within minutes of Detective Raley posting his JPEG on the server. Uniform patrols flashed the picture around Bayside, and a night watchman at a used car lot recognized him as a guy he had seen hanging around lately. The break came when the security guard spotted him again a few hours after the uni visit and tailed him to a nearby house while he put in a cell call to NYPD.