“What about the gun?” Nikki asked the M.E.
“Small-?caliber. I’d call it a twenty-?five if you put a gun to my head.”
“Lauren, honey, you need to get out more.”
“I would, but business is too good.” Then she pointed at the dead Russian. “This facial burn and the broken finger. Your work?” Heat nodded. “Anything else I should know about?”
“Yeah,” said Ochoa. “Don’t mess with Nikki Heat.”
Rook was waiting back at the precinct when she and Ochoa came in. “I heard about Pochenko.” He bowed his head grandly. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Ochoa laughed. “Hey, writer monkey’s catching on.”
Again, Nikki ignored the gallows humor. “Ochoa, double-?check the tail we have on Miric. He’s Pochenko’s known associate. I want to know where his bookie pal was when he was shot.”
Detective Ochoa hit the phones. Rook brought a Dean & DeLuca cup to Heat’s desk. “Here, I got you your usual. A nonfat, no-?foam, double-?pump vanilla latte.”
“You know how I feel about frou-?frou coffees.”
“And yet you have one every morning. Such a complex woman.”
She took it from him and sipped. “Thanks. Very thoughtful.” Her phone rang. “And next time remember the chocolate shavings.”
“So complex,” he said.
Nikki picked up. It was Raley. “Two things,” he said. “I’ve got Agda waiting in the outer.”
“Thanks, I’ll be right there. And the other?”
“Before I went home last night, I hocked one in that Chinese.”
Agda Larsson had dressed up for her interview. She wore vintage wear from the East Village accessorized with a pink and white Swatch Beach Volleyball watch on one wrist and a knotted twine bracelet on the other. She pinch-?rolled one of the knots between her thumb and finger and said, “Am I in some sort of trouble?”
“No, this is just a formality.” That was only partially true. Nikki was basically crossing Ts with this interview; however, she did want to satisfy one question, the nagging one. She would work it in at the right time. “How are you coping with all this? Between the murder and the burglary, you must be ready to go right back to Sweden.”
Agda wagged her head in disbelief at it all. “Oh, it is quite upsetting, yes? But we have murder in my country, too. Almost two hundred last year, they say.”
“In the entire country?”
“Yes, isn’t that terrible? It is everywhere.”
“Agda, I want to ask you some questions about life inside the Starr family.”
She nodded slowly. “Mrs. Kimberly said you would want to do that when I told her I was coming here.”
Nikki’s antenna went up. “Did she caution you against talking about those things?”
“No, she said to say what I wanted.”
“She said that?”
The nanny chuckled and shook her blond hair so it fell straight. “Actually, she said it did not matter because the police are incompetent and they could eat it.” Agda read Nikki’s lack of amusement and frowned, a futile attempt to look serious. “She says what she likes, Mrs. Starr.”
And gets what she wants, thought Heat. “How long have you worked for her?”
“Two years.”
“How is your relationship with her?”
“Oh, she can be tough. Out of nowhere, she’ll snap at me, ‘Agda get Matthew out of here to the park,” or she knocks on my bedroom door in middle of the night, ‘Agda, Matthew got sick and threw up, come clean it.’”
“Day before yesterday Mrs. Starr and her son went out of town.”
“That’s right, they went to Dr. Van Peldt’s beach cottage in Westport. In Connecticut.”
“You didn’t leave with them. Did you meet them up there, or possibly at Grand Central?”
Agda shook no. “I did not go with them.”
“What did you do?”
“I stayed the night with a friend at NYU.”