The heat came on and the hissing of the vent filled her pause.
“Let’s go back to Captain Montrose,” she said. “In 2004, he worked a famous homicide, the son of the movie star, Gene Huddleston. When the case cleared as a sour drug deal, Montrose never bought it and recently started to dig in again on his own.” Nikki turned to Hamner. “You know all about that, right, Zach? Did your pals in IA tell you he was sniffing around Huddleston when they checked him out?”
“Montrose lit up IA’s radar by acting out of pattern. Their probe was legitimate due diligence.” Hamner said it as if it was so SOP that it bored him.
“Clearly that’s not the only radar my skipper got on.” Heat turned back to the group. “I couldn’t access the official Huddleston case files, but I did have an entertainment insider,” she said, referring to Petar. “My source is highly credible and shared a number of secret rumors about this young man. The most strikingly relevant was that two years before his murder, Gene Huddleston, Jr., was in Bermuda on Spring Break and that he was one of the boys that raped your daughter, Phyllis.”
Yarborough gasped and her hand flew up to cover her mouth. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Detective Heat,” said Atkins, “this is feeling way out of line.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no easy way to go about this.”
“But it’s gossip,” said the Personnel chief. He handed Phyllis a tissue.
“Which I have independently verified,” Heat replied.
Deputy Commissioner Atkins said, “Go on.”
“Jeremy Drew, who confessed to the assault and murder of Amy Yarborough, was extradited in 2002 and began a life sentence in Sing Sing, where I visited him yesterday. In our meeting Drew confirmed for me what I had heard from my source. That the Huddleston family had paid several million to his parents, who were on disability. All in exchange for his silence about the participation along with him by Gene Huddleston, Jr., in the gang rape on the beach that night.”
“Why would he tell you?” asked the deputy commissioner of legal matters.
“His parents have passed away and he has had a religious conversion. This was his first opportunity to clear his conscience. By the way, I checked with Customs, and Huddleston’s passport shows he was in Bermuda then and left the island on the first flight out the morning after the discovery of Amy’s body in Dockyard.
“You know something, Phyllis? Even when I found out Jeremy Drew wasn’t alone that night with your daughter, there was a part of me that didn’t want to believe you were behind all this. But then I couldn’t get past the cruise Montrose booked. A guy in mourning taking a singles cruise? And in the middle of a career crisis while he’s also conducting a secret investigation? I called back the travel agent. The cruise was to Bermuda.”
As a roomful of the best police minds in New York were doing the motive math, Phyllis Yarborough jarred them by speaking. “Nikki . . .” She shook her head mildly in disappointment. Her voice was hoarse and papery. “I can’t believe this of you, overreaching like this. And so hurtful. Are you trying to make me twice a victim with some tabloid conspiracy theory about me?”
“I am sorry for the loss of your daughter, you know that. But this is not a theory anymore. The leather fragment from under Graf’s fingernail matches Harvey Ballance’s cuff case, and the button fragment from the crime scene is from one of his shirts. Harvey is in the hospital and he is talking. About you. And all the money you offered five cops in 2004 to take care of Huddleston.”