“Well, before you put on your gold lame jumpsuit, I need you to check something out for me.” She swore him to silence, then gave him the short version of Tyler Wynn’s connection to her mother and Nicole. After Ochoa muttered his third “Fuuuck …,” she said, “Wynn’s shooting came the night before Nicole’s murder. I want you to get on Customs and the airlines for names of passengers arriving from the Paris airports to JFK or Newark last Wednesday. Don’t forget connections through London and Frankfurt, and wherever. Run the manifests through the database for any names that are on the watch list or show priors for assault or weapons busts. Do the same with Interpol.”
“You think it could be the same killer?”
“I don’t know what I think, but if there’s any chance it was a hit by one person, it’s worth clearing. I don’t love the different MO, but he may have used a knife on Nicole because he couldn’t travel with a gun.”
“Yeah, and a gun is so hard to find in New York,” said Detective Ochoa. “But I’ll get rolling on it.” He cleared his throat and said, “Now I guess it’s on me to tell you some not so good news.”
“Let’s have it.”
“It’s the glove.”
“No fingerprints?”
“Worse. No glove.”
“What?”
“Captain Irons just called in from the lab. He went there this morning to bang on doors for results, and somehow, it got lost.” The vacuum of silence on her end was so complete he said, “Detective Heat, you still there?”
All she said was “Somehow?”
Rook said, “Somehow?” with the same shading of disbelief when he got back to the room and she told him about it. “I don’t think somehow is the reason. I think it’s more like someone.”
“And he’s off.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because I knew this would propel you into Area Fifty-one. Rook, for once, can you try doing what I do for a living and deal in hard facts instead of indulging in wild speculation?”
“Want to talk facts, Nikki? All right, fine. Exactly how often does key information go missing in an important homicide investigation?” She just stared at him. “OK, forget I even asked that. But come on, this is different. This has spook written all over it.”
“Or incompetence.”
“When I hear that word, I only think of one man. The man of Iron.”
“Guess I’ll have to wait until I get back to suss that out.” She unwrapped the paper around one of the ham and cheese baguettes he’d returned with. But Rook’s brain crackled too much to eat. He set aside his sandwich after a single bite and paced the room. When Nikki saw him tapping madly on the screen of his iPhone, she said, “I hope you’re playing Words with Friends with Alec Baldwin, because if you’re still in foil hat mode over this lost glove, let it rest.”
“I’m off the glove—for now. I’m searching my contacts.”
“What for?”
“You may like to play it fast and loose with the facts,” he said, teasing her with her own words to him, “but as an investigative journalist with not one, but two, Pulitzers on his mantel …”
“Two, you say.” She took another bite.
“… I like to verify facts independently.” He stopped scrolling. “Ah, here we go.”
“All right, Mr. Woodward—or is it Bernstein?—what are you planning to verify?”
“I want to confirm what Tyler Wynn told us about being CIA and running your mother through his Nanny Network. To me, everything he said made perfect sense. In fact, I felt a certain vindication in his story. I don’t know if you could tell that or not.”
“I had an inkling. So whom are you going to verify this with?”
“An old deep-cover source of mine from when I was researching my Chechnya piece for First Press. His name’s Anatoly Kije. This guy’s incredible. Straight out of Tinker, Tailor. An old school Russian spook for SVR—which is what the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service calls itself now instead of KGB. Everybody’s rebranding. KGB, KFC …”
“Rook.”
“Sorry. Anyhow, my boy Anatoly lives here in Paris, and if anyone would know about Tyler, your mother, and anything else going on in that network, he would. In fact, he may be able to shed light on those questions Tyler Wynn had the bad manners to die before he answered. May he rest in peace.”
“All right. Assuming this KGB guy—”
“SVR guy.”