She wanted him so dead, but she needed him alive.
All the flashlights revealed a sea of shoes surrounding him. Hundreds and hundreds of shoes: men’s and women’s, old and new, pairs and orphans—all in neat rows of concentric circles around the center, toes pointing at him. “So,” he said. “You came for my shoes.”
“What do you answer to, William or Bill?” Nikki waited again for him to speak and would wait as long as she had to. The suspect had remained silent since they sat down to face each other in Interrogation One ten minutes before. Mostly, he just studied himself in the observation mirror. Occasionally, he looked away, then back, as if to surprise himself. He rolled his muscular shoulders so that they flexed against the orange fabric of his jumpsuit.
At last he asked, “Is this mine to keep?” and seemed to mean it.
“William,” she said. “I’m going to call you what it says here on your rap sheet.” He broke eye contact and looked back in the mirror. Detective Heat studied the file again, although by then she had committed the salient facts to memory. William Wade Scott, male cauc, age forty-four. Basically a low-end drifter whose arrest record traced his movements through the Northeast following his dishonorable discharge on drug charges after Desert Storm in 1991. His beefs ran on the petty side, a ton of shoplifts and disorderly conducts, plus a few arrests that raised the bar, most notably a 1998 electronics store smash-and-grab in Providence that earned him three years as a state guest. Nikki tasked Ochoa to run a double-check with Rhode Island Corrections for the release date because that incarceration alibied him for her mother’s murder.
Behind the mirror in Observation Room 1, Detective Ochoa texted her, confirming William Wade Scott’s prison release in 2001—a year and a half after her mom’s killing. She read it passively, but Rook watched her fists ball under the table after she slipped her cell phone back into her pocket.
In the wake of so many setbacks on her mom’s case over the years, Nikki had hardened herself against despair, but this one stung. However, as ever, Heat’s response to disappointment was greater resolve. And a reality check. Did she honestly believe the killer would fall into her lap on the same day as the new lead? Hell, no. That’s what tomorrow was all about.
Rook turned to Raley and Ochoa in the Ob Room. “That still leaves him as a possible for the Jane Doe killing, doesn’t it?”
“Possible?” said Raley. “Yeah, possible …” The “not likely” was silent. After the raid in Bayside, neighbor interviews said the naked man in the basement was not the owner of the residence on Oceania Street but a homeless squatter, one of a number who had moved into nice, suburban neighborhoods throughout Long Island after residents simply walked away from upside-down mortgages. The block had filed several complaints about the man, but they grumbled that nothing had come of them. But Raley’s follow-up check on the absent homeowner suggested this vacancy hadn’t come from a mortgage walk-off. He pulled up an old 1995 New Jersey arrest against the owner for operating a hydroponic pot farm in the basement, which not only accounted for the floor hatch in his next residence—the Bayside house—but also his abandonment of the property to keep a step ahead of drug enforcement.
“OK,” said Rook, grasping for any good news, “there’s still the suitcase. He possessed the suitcase that connects to Heat’s mom. If he’s not the killer, maybe he knows him.”
Ochoa said, “She’ll get there. You watch. This is her art.”
“Why were you hiding from us in that basement?” Heat asked. No reply. “We identified ourselves as police. Why did you need to hide?”