Detective Hinesburg said, “When?” and moved off to her desk.
Ochoa checked in from Rolling Service Limousine. In the background of his cell phone call, Nikki could hear a pneumatic wrench and could envision a town car getting a new tire. “Got something weird over here. You ready for weird?”
“A manifest from Reed Wakefield with a suicide note on it?” said Nikki.
“No Reed Wakefield manifest. In fact no manifests at all from the night Wakefield died. I already had Raley check the records we pulled, they’re not in with ours, either. We did our survey before the Reed Wakefield deal surfaced, so we assumed it was just Padilla’s day off. But come on, this is all the manifests for this whole company from that night. It’s like every one of their drivers took the night off and didn’t have one booking. You see what I’m getting at?” Nikki processed the significance of the missing records. The gravity. The reach. The tire gun whirred again. “You still there?”
“So what’s the deal over there, Oach? How do they account for that?”
“Manager just gives me a dumb-ass look and says, ‘Don’t ask me.’ Good luck proving anything, these guys are too slick.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, “they’ll claim burglary or one of the drivers did it. Even Padilla himself, out of spite.” And then she added, “Just to confirm, it was a night Padilla was working, right?”
“That they confirmed. Just before they canned him.”
“So, what? They’ve just been ripped out of the book?”
“No. Actually, they’ve been sliced.”
An hour later, Nikki left Captain Montrose’s office after briefing him on all developments so he could turn around and do the same thing with his superiors down at One Police Plaza. He trusted Detective Heat and told her she was covering all the bases he would. The extra briefings were to satisfy the media pressure on 1PP. Mindful of his upcoming promotion review, the skipper made it his hobby to smile and dial, keeping them in the loop almost hourly.
Raley had set up shop at his desk, with digital copies of surveillance cam video from the parking garage where Perkins had been mugged that morning, as well as from camera-equipped stores and residences all along 96th Street. “I’ve got a long night ahead of me, but if we get lucky, maybe one of these’ll give us a pretty picture of the assailant.” As he loaded one of the time-coded videos, he asked, “So you don’t think it was the Texan?”
“Wouldn’t rule anything out, Rales, not on this case,” Nikki answered. “But I broke Wolf’s collarbone and put one in his shoulder. Perkins is no Ironman, but whoever overpowered him like that had to have some strength. So I’d bet against the walking wounded.”
She made her way over to Rook at his squatter’s desk across the pen from hers, to get an update on Cassidy Towne’s manuscript. She got a strange vibe off him before he even spoke. Nikki dismissed it, chalking it up to more of Rook’s schoolboy jealousy over her reunion with Petar. “What are you getting out of this, anything?”
“I’m a quarter of the way in,” he said. “All pretty much as Mitchell Perkins advertised. Reed Wakefield’s backstory. She’s setting the table but no bombshells yet. She could use an editor, though.” That strange look crossed his face again.
“What?”
“There’s an extra hard copy on your desk. Actually, in. I put it in your file drawer.”
“Rook, either you tell me what’s on your mind, or I swear, we don’t have a Zoo Lockup, but I’ll organize one just for you.”
He considered a beat then opened his messenger bag and took out a newspaper. It was the afternoon edition of the New York Ledger, folded open to the “Buzz Rush” column. The editors had decided the brand-name value of the column had only inflated since Cassidy Towne’s murder, so they were keeping it, but with guest columnists until they settled on a permanent choice. That day’s “Buzz” was bylined anonymously by someone called The Stinger.
Nikki felt her face flush when she saw the lead item.