Nikki stood in the precinct break room staring through the observation window of the microwave at the spinning carton of barbecued pork fried rice. Not for the first time, she reflected on how much time she spent in that building observing through windows, waiting for results. If it wasn’t into interrogation rooms at suspects, it was into microwave ovens at leftovers.
The chirp sounded and she took out the steaming red carton with Detective Raley’s name Sharpied on two sides, triple exclamation points included. If he really meant it, he would have taken it home with him. And then she thought about the glamour of the cop’s life. Finishing off the workday with more work, eating a dinner of leftovers that aren’t even your own.
Of course, Rook had tried to press for an evening. The obvious advantage of his generous offer to engage Casper was that the meeting ended at dinnertime, and even on a humid, uncomfortable night, there was nothing like sitting outdoors at the Boat Basin Café with some baskets of char-?grilled burgers, a galvanized bucket of Coronas planted in shaved ice, and a view of the sailboats on the Hudson.
She told Rook she had a date. When his face started to rearrange, she told him it was in the bull pen with the whiteboard. Nikki didn’t want to torture him. Yes, she did, just not like that.
In the after-?hours quiet of the bull pen, without phones or visits to interrupt her, Detective Heat once again contemplated the facts laid out before her on the landscape of the jumbo porcelain enamel board. Just half a week ago she had sat in this very chair with the same late night view. There was more information for her to look at this time. The board was filled with names, timelines, and photographs. Since her previous night of silent deliberation two more crimes had gone down. Three, if you counted the assault on her by Pochenko.
“Pochenko,” she said. “Where did you Pochenk-?go?”
Nikki went meditative. She was anything but mystical, but she did believe in the power of the subconscious. Well, at least hers. She pictured her mind as a whiteboard and erased it. Clearing herself, she became open to what sat before her and whatever patterns formed in the evidence so far. Her thoughts floated. She batted stray ones away and stuck to the case. She wanted an impression. She wanted to know what spoke to her. And she wanted to know what she’d missed.
She let herself travel, gliding above the days and nights of the case using the big board as her Fodor’s. She saw Matthew Starr’s body on the sidewalk and revisited Kimberly surrounded by art and opulence in her faux-?preppie grief, saw herself interviewing the people in Starr’s life: rivals, advisors, his bookie and Russian enforcer, his mistress, doormen. The mistress. Something the mistress said pulled her back. A nagging detail. Nikki paid attention to nags because they were the voices God gave to clues. She stood and went to the board and faced the mistress info she had posted there.
Office romance, love letter intercepted, top performer, left the company, muffin shop, happy, no motive. And then she looked to the side. Nanny affair?
The former mistress had seen Matthew Starr in Bloomingdale’s with a new mistress. Scandinavian. Nikki found Agda personally inconsequential and, more importantly, properly alibied for the murder. Yet what was that nag?
She put the empty Chinese take-?out carton on Raley’s desk and slapped a Post-?it note to it, thanking “Raley!!!” and taking perverse glee in her triple exclamations. Underneath, she wrote another note to bring in Agda for a 9 A.M. chat.
There was a blue-?and-?white from the One-?Three parked outside her apartment when she got there. Detective Heat said hi to the officers inside it and went upstairs. She didn’t call her captain to wave it off that night. Barbara Deerfield’s neck bruises were fresh in her mind. Nikki was exhausted and ached for sleep.
No indulgence for her. She showered instead of bathing.
Nikki got into her bed and smelled Rook on the pillow beside her. She pulled it to her and breathed deeply, wondering if she should have called him to come over. Before she could answer, she was asleep.