“I know,” said Ochoa, “verify with his receptionist, nurses, and/or hotel staff, etcet-?yadda, etcet-?yadda.”
“Gosh, Detective,” said Heat, “it’s almost like you know what you’re doing.”
Detective Heat stood at the whiteboard and under the heading “Guilford Surveillance Video” wrote two red letters: N.G. It must have been the angle she was writing at that brought on the pinching stiffness from the previous night’s brawl. She let her shoulders drop and rolled her head in a slow circle, feeling the delicious edge of discomfort that told her she was still alive. When she was done, she circled “Matthew’s Mistress” on the board, capped her marker, and yanked the magazine out of Rook’s hands. “Want to take a ride?” she asked.
They took the West Side Highway downtown, and even the river showed symptoms of heat strain. To their right, the Hudson looked as if it was too hot to move and its surface lay there in surrender, all flat and dozy. The zone west of Columbus Circle was still a mess and would surely lead the five o’clock news. The erupting steam jet had been shut off, but there was a lunar-?sized crater that would close West 59th for days. On the scanner, they listened to one of the NYPD quality of life squads report they had busted a man for public urination who admitted he tried to get arrested so he could spend the night in air-?conditioning. “So the weather caused two eruptions that required police action,” said Rook, which made Heat laugh and feel almost glad he was along.
When she’d set up the meeting with Matthew Starr’s former mistress, Morgan Donnelly asked if they could meet her at work, since that’s where she spent most of her time. That fit the profile Noah Paxton had sketched of her when Nikki asked him about her in their conversation earlier that day. As was his way, once he opened up, Nikki’s pen could hardly keep pace. In addition to revealing choice office nicknames, he’d called their romance the inter-?office elephant in the conference room and summed up Starr’s not-?so-?secret mistress by saying, “Morgan was all brains, tits, and drive. She was the Matthew Starr ideal: work like crazy, screw like mad. Sometimes I’d picture them in bed with their BlackBerrys, texting oh-?yeah-?like-?that’s to each other between deals.”
So, with that in her head, when Nikki Heat parked the car at the business address off Prince Street in SoHo Donnelly had given her, she had to double-?check her notes to make sure she had the right place. It was a cupcake bakery. Her sore neck protested when she twisted to read the sign above the door. “‘Fire and Icing’?” she said.
Rook quoted a poem, “‘Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice.’” He opened his car door and the heat rolled in. “Today, I’m going with fire.”
“I still can’t believe it,” said Morgan Donnelly as she sat down with them at a round café table in the corner. She unsnapped the collar flap of her crisp white chef’s tunic and offered the stainless sugar caddy to Heat and Rook for their iced Americanos. Nikki tried to reconcile the Morgan the baker before her with the Morgan the marketing powerhouse Noah Paxton drew. There was a story there and she would get it. The corners of Donnelly’s mouth turned down, and she said, “You hear about things like this in the news, but it’s never anybody you know.”