“Because he’s a person I’m interested in knowing more about.”
“I see. And because he’s Latino and a criminal, you ask us?” Guzman stood and tossed the photo. It fluttered halfway across the coffee table and landed facedown. “This is racist. This is the marginalization we rise up to fight against every day.”
Milena Silva stood, too. “Unless you have a warrant to arrest us, we are leaving.”
Nikki was done with her questions and held the door for them. When they were gone, Ochoa said, “You read El Corazón de la Violencia?”
She nodded. “Lot of good it just did me.”
* * *
The remainder of the afternoon she spent using her focus on work to fend off the malaise that had settled like a toxic fog in the halls of the Twentieth Precinct. In any other field, after the startling death of a leader, business would have closed for the day. But this was the New York Police Department. You didn’t clock out for sadness.
For better or worse, Nikki Heat knew how to compartmentalize. She had to. If she didn’t put an airtight lock on her emotional doors, the beasts pounding on the steel plates to get out would eat her alive. The shock and sadness, they were to be expected. But the raging howls she worked hardest to silence came from guilt. Her last days with her mentor had been contentious and full of suspicions; some voiced, some merely contemplated—her own dirty secrets. Nikki hadn’t known where it was all leading, but she had clung to a tacit belief that there would be a resolution that would make the two of them whole again. She never imagined this tragedy cutting short the story Nikki thought she was telling. John Lennon said life was what happened while you made other plans.
So was death.
Blunt as they had been back at the crime scene, Nikki took the advice of Feller and Van Meter and sat down to unpack the facts of the Montrose death without prejudice. Detective Heat got out a single sheet of paper and penciled details. Making her own private Murder Board on the page, she especially focused on the captain’s strange new behaviors in the days ramping up to this dark one, logging them all: the absences, the agitation, the secretiveness, his obstruction of her case, his anger when she insisted on doing the sort of investigative work he had trained her to do.
Heat stared at the page.
The questions lingering in the back of her mind stepped forward and raised their hands. Clean or dirty, did Captain Montrose know what the stakes were? Was he trying to protect her? Is that why he didn’t want her looking into the Graf murder too deeply? Because if she did, a bunch of armed guys were going to try to stack her garbage in the park? Were they CIA contractors? Foot soldiers from drug cartels? A Colombian hit squad? Or someone she hadn’t even landed on so far?
And did these guys go for him next?
Nikki folded her sheet of paper to put in her pocket. Then she thought a moment, took it out again, and crossed over to the squad’s Murder Board to write it up there. No, she was not buying the suicide. Not yet.
* * *
“This is an official call,” said Zach Hamner, making Heat wonder what their other conversations had been. “I just received a formal complaint from an organization called . . .” She could hear papers rustling on his end and helped him out.
“Justicia a Garda.”
“Yes. Nice pronunciation. Anyway, they are alleging harassment and racist statements based on a meeting you had with them earlier today.”
“You can’t be taking this seriously,” she said.