“Yes. So quit while you’re ahead.” She closed the file and stared at the passing marshes and woodlands, seeing none of it, really. Less than a minute passed, and Rook was back, as if he’d hit reset. “There must be some reason your own mother never mentioned such a good friend.”
“Rook?” she said. “Don’t make me shoot you.”
“Shut up?”
“Thank you.”
He concentrated on the view again, glimpsing the last of the solitary islands of rock just before the train entered an underpass and the concrete wall blocked it from sight.
Even though they had to detour around a frozen zone set up on Dyckman due to a gas leak caused by the earthquake, they still made record time getting to Nicole Bernardin’s apartment in the northernmost section of Manhattan. Her building, a slender two-story town house facing Inwood Hill Park across the avenue, would be Realtor-listed as a charming Tudor. The neighborhood felt safe and looked well maintained, the sort of quiet street where people used canvas car covers and the half walls surrounding porches gleamed with fresh coats of paint. Heat and Rook entered the town house to find a different picture entirely.
From the downstairs foyer, in every direction they looked, the disarray was alarming. Cabinets and closets stood ajar. Paintings and pictures ripped from hooks sat askew, with busted frames tipping against wainscoting and doorjambs. An antique china cabinet in the dining room lay split open on its side with shattered crystal glassware surrounding it like ice chips. Strewn decorative objects covered all the floors as if the whole place had been shaken. “Tell me this wasn’t from the earthquake,” said Rook.
Detective Heat put on a pair of blue gloves. Raley handed him a pair and said, “Not unless the earthquake walked around crushing everything under size eleven work boots.”
Touring the ransacked town house shrouded Nikki in yet another suffocating cloud of deja vu. Her own apartment—once the scene of her mother’s murder—had also been tossed back then, although not so thoroughly violated. Detective Damon had called that an interrupted search. This one clearly went on nonstop until the perp either found what he was looking for or was satisfied he never would.
Ochoa met her in the doorway as she entered the upstairs master bedroom. As they stepped around the fingerprint technician who was dusting the cut glass knob, she asked her detective, “Any sign of blood anywhere?”
He shook no and said, “No obvious sign of struggle, either. Although I don’t know how you’d ever be able to sort that out a hundred percent in all this mess.”
“I can give you about ninety-nine-point-nine percent, if that’s helpful,” said the lead for the Evidence Collection Unit, Benigno DeJesus, as he rose up from kneeling on the rug behind a tossed mattress. Nikki’s shoulders immediately relaxed when she saw him. The crime scene was in excellent hands.
“Detective DeJesus,” she said. “To what do we owe this honor on a Sunday?”
He pulled down his surgical mask and smiled. “I don’t know. I had an uneventful day planned when Detective Ochoa called to tell me about this case of …,” he paused and then, in his typically understated fashion, continued, “some interest. So here I am.” She gave Ochoa a quick study, wondering what favor Miguel had traded for pulling in the best evidence man in the department on a day off, but Oach’s stoic face gave nothing away.