“No,” he said, “the one thing I can be sure of is that this is all about you.”
“Very glib, Rook. Excellent. Jot that in your cute little Moleskine. You can use it later. Or maybe refer to it someday when you want to remember exactly what you said to me that tore the fabric.” She reached in her gym bag and came up with the keys to his loft. “Catch.”
He snagged them on the downward arc. They bit into his palm when he closed his fist around them. “You’re kicking me out?”
“My mess. I’ll clean it up.”
Rook felt the full gravity of that statement. And its broad exclusion. He searched her face but saw only a cold mask. So he pocketed the keys and left.
Nikki made it a point not to watch him walk out. Or to notice Raley and Ochoa, who would have absorbed their encounter from across the room like it was some scene from a silent movie requiring no subtitles, and would pretend not to be gawking, even though they were.
As she flopped into the easy chair beside the piano, Nikki found herself reliving a night ten years before, in fine detail. Just like back then, dazed, empty, and terribly alone, she watched a Forensics team work that same apartment from the same perspective. Surrounded by broken glass and toppled furnishings, Nikki felt as shaken as any earthquake could cause her to feel, making the very ground under her feet suspect and untrustworthy.
The twin Murder Boards gave her no better sense of grounding as she sat alone in the bull pen before sunup, on her second cup of coffee, studying the dual case displays from a chair in the middle of the room. Nikki had been there almost three hours. Unable to sleep after ECU and Forensics wrapped and Jerzy had screwed a square of plywood over the blast hole, Heat showered and hitched a ride uptown to the Two-oh in the blue-and-white the commander of the Thirteenth Precinct had posted outside her building as a courtesy.
The boards read exactly as they had when Heat left the squad room the night before, except she had updated them with a new section for a third homicide: Don’s. It took massive emotional effort for Heat to push aside—for now—the pain of his death so she could concentrate on solving it. She drew a separate box in green marker to delineate Don’s area. Beneath his name and time of death, the bullets were: “Shotgun.” “Unknown Male Shooter,” with the sketchy physical description of height and weight, “Taxi Escape,” and the words she despised writing, “At Large.”
Evidence did not connect Don’s killing to the others. Common sense did. That’s why she put Don up there with her mother and Nicole Bernardin. Experience had taught the detective to mistrust coincidence. She knew she was the target and that the attack had come after she started digging into the other two murders. That answered one of the questions still posted up there, “Why now?” The bigger one that remained preceded it: “Why?”
That would lead to “Who?” Or so she hoped.
Nikki heard the rumble of a subway, but there was none nearby. The venetian blinds clanked against the metal window frames and the fluorescents began to sway gently in the overheads. She heard an auxiliary secretary up the hall go “Whoo!” and someone else called out, “Aftershock!” Nikki watched the blinds settle and turned back to the boards, wishing that somehow the mini-quake had made something shake loose.
This exercise of hers, patiently waiting out the Murder Board to reveal a solution or, at least, a connection, usually paid off. Far from metaphysical, there was no incense or any incantations involved. And it wasn’t like playing Ouija, either. The practice was simply a means of quieting her mind and studying the puzzle pieces to let her subconscious find a fit. And, indeed, something up there was trying to speak to Nikki, but it eluded her. What was she missing? Heat began to blame herself for not having a quiet mind, but she stopped. “No self-reproach,” she whispered. If Nikki Heat had one ally she needed to rely on and keep positive, it was herself.