“So I hear. It’s what I get for not plugging in my phone Saturday night.”
“No, it’s what I get, which is one of my detectives out of reach, and that cannot be. Are we clear?” Hinesburg answered with an overblown military salute, which, like most of what she did, irritated the piss out of Nikki, but she let it slide, point having been made. She assigned her to follow up on Nicole Bernardin’s phone records for any leads and moved on to her own desk.
To her disappointment, the pitch of activity in the bull pen was just the sound of wheels spinning. Every update she got—on fingerprints at the Inwood town house, on tracking her headhunter business to get a tax ID, on sports clubs, on credit card statements—all came up either empty, delayed, or devoid of useful leads. On any other case, she would have called on her wisdom and experience gathered over the years to remind herself that it’s impossible to see the trail until it reveals itself. She would remember that crimes got solved by hard work and patience. But this was not any other case. Even though she had succeeded in not only ID-ing the victim but finding a huge connection to her mom’s cold case, Nikki wanted to capitalize on the momentum, and immediately would be nice. A decade was a long time to be patient.
Rook came in with a grin to go with her latte. “You find out who leaked to Tam?” she asked in hushed tones after she drew him into the kitchenette.
“I did. And I didn’t even have to sleep with her to find out. I just tricked her by pretending I already knew. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Tam Svejda’s not the smartest one in the room, even when she’s the only one in it.”
“Very witty, Rook. Save it for your next article. All I want to know is who.” She scoped the area for privacy. “It’s Irons, right? So obvious.”
“Well now, there you go, running off on one of your cockamamie conspiracy theories.”
“OK, let it out; have your fun.”
He stroked his chin theatrically, relishing the opportunity to feed the great detective some of her own words. “I prefer to deal in hard facts rather than indulge myself with a mere crumb of a hunch.”
“Do you want to wear this coffee?”
“It was Sharon Hinesburg.”
Heat was still weighing how to deal with that information when Captain Irons called her into his glass office for an update. Even knowing he had a short attention span and simplifying her briefing to the broad strokes didn’t stop him from wandering off-topic, and early on. “Since I called you from Boston yesterday to tell you about what Rook and I learned about our Jane Doe and her connection to my mother, we’ve been focusing on anything we can learn about Nicole Bernardin.”
“Did you get any seafood up there?”
“Excuse me, Captain?”
Irons leaned back in his leather chair and his weight caused the springs to groan. “Man, I loves me my Boston chowdah. Legal Seafood’s a must on every trip.”
“Yes, they’re quite well known,” she said, but only to keep him engaged while she continued with the business of a double homicide investigation. “So, now that we have the Bernardin ID, we are tasked with following a series of new avenues. We have limited forensics leads from her town house, but we can track other aspects of her life through her banking, business and personal. These haven’t borne fruit just yet, but—”
“Was Rook doing any writing on your getaway?”
“Sir?”
“Any new magazine pieces in the mix?” Irons sat up in his chair to the twang of sprung metal protesting. “It’s just he mentioned the other day he might be doing something to follow up the other article, and I was wondering if he’d been on that, or not.” Maybe Irons didn’t have a short attention span. Maybe his attention was just stuck on other things. “You see my mention in the fish wrapper this morning?”
“Yes I did. In fact, sir—”