Evening rush hour traffic back to Manhattan gave Rook an extra thirty minutes in the rear of the cab to work out a scenario to spin over Ochoa’s revelation. “This is big. No disrespect to the vaunted Mr. le Carré, but this is bigger than Call for the Dead. This is a dead man’s bullet. Hey, I think I have the title for my article. I should write it down. No, I’ll remember, it’s that good.” Nikki didn’t even bother trying to reel him in. He was not only more entertaining than the Taxi TV embedded in the driver’s seat back—she had the Sam Champion promo memorized by now, anyway—Rook was like the broken clock that managed to be correct two times a day. For once he was thinking out loud about something she wanted to hear. Because she was sorting it out, too.
“OK, here’s how it spools for me,” he said. “Montrose is parked in the car and bad guy X, in the passenger seat, has got his gun somehow. Don’t know how that happened but I say it did, otherwise this doesn’t play.”
Heat said, “We can sift the details later. Keep going.”
“Fine, so Montrose’s weapon is in the hands of his passenger, who has either been holding it on him or he takes the captain by surprise. Anyway, the passenger jams the gun under his chin, and pow. Which also explains why a chin shot and no eating the barrel.”
Nikki agreed so far. “And why Lauren expressed reservations about the trajectory.”
“Yes. Now, here is where we go a little Mission: Impossible, but stay with me because it’s absolutely feasible. Montrose is dead. The issue for the shooter becomes how do you sell this as a suicide if the residue is on your hands, not the victim’s? Answer: You hold the gun in the dead man’s hand and fire another shot. Problem 2: Then the magazine is down not one, but two bullets, leaving a lot of messy questions to complicate things. So what the killer does is fit the gun into Montrose’s hand, hold it out the car window, squeeze off the second shot to get residue on the captain, right? Then replace that second bullet by using gloved hands to take one of Montrose’s own bullets—guaranteed to match his weapon—from the spare mag on his belt. The killer slides that round into the top of the clip. It looks like a perfect one-shot suicide, and he splits.”
“You don’t often hear me say this, Mr. Conspiracy Theory, but I think you’re on to something.”
Rook said, “Yes, but it’s pure hypothesis, right? And that doesn’t hold water.”
“So leaky that if you took this theory to the Department, you’d need a mop.”
“We could give it a try. I mean you do know a good water damage service, don’t you, from the crime scene?”
They rode in silence a moment, Nikki staring at the silhouette of the Manhattan skyline in the greening sky of twilight. Then she pulled out her cell phone. “What?” asked Rook.
Heat didn’t answer. She dialed 411 and asked for the number of On Call water damage restoration.
Rook said, “I was joking, you know.”
* * *
DeWayne Powell from On Call met them in front of the Graestone Con dominiums, where Heat had seen him parked the day of Montrose’s shooting. “You got here fast,” she said.
“When you’re name’s On Call, that’s what you do. Besides, I have two brothers who are firefighters, so I like to do what I can to help out, you know?”
“Must be handy,” said Rook, “having a few of the Bravest in the family when you’re in the water clean-up business.”
DeWayne beamed a sunny smile. “Know how lawyers chase ambulances? I do fire trucks.”
“Tell me what you were doing here the other day,” said Nikki.
“I’m happy to go through it with you again, but I already told those other detectives everything I saw. Not much to add when you saw nothing.”
Heat shook her head. “I don’t mean about the shooting. I mean, why were you called in?”
* * *