NYPD cordoned off a wide area around the scene of Soleil Gray’s suicide to keep media and fans at a distance so the medical examiner, Forensics, and the chief’s squad from One Police Plaza that routinely investigated any officer-involved death could do their jobs with privacy and focus. Other investigative personnel, including Parks and Rec and representatives from the train company and its insurance carrier were present but would have to wait their turns. To maintain the dignity of the deceased and to give the technicians privacy, a line of portable vinyl screens had been erected on both sides of the train tracks where most of the singer’s remains were strewn. Twelfth Avenue had been closed off between West 138th and 135th Streets, but news photographers, paparazzi, and mobile TV newsrooms had staked out elevated vantage points both in Riverbank State Park and on the opposite side of the tracks, on Riverside Drive. OCME deployed a tent fly to mask the scene from the half dozen news choppers that had positioned themselves overhead.
Captain Montrose visited Detective Heat where she waited alone in one of the police personnel vans, still shaken, holding a cup of coffee that had grown cold resting in both her hands. He had just come from a huddle with the chief’s unit and told her that their initial interviews of Rook, the two paparazzi, the Parks officer, and the motorcycle cops all corroborated her story that the woman jumped of her own volition and that Heat had done everything she could to diffuse the situation and prevent the suicide.
The skipper offered to let her take a few days off to recover, even though she was not going to get put on leave or desked. Nikki gave it to him straight. She felt deeply upset but knew that this case wasn’t closed yet. The cop part of her—the part that could compartmentalize the human tragedy and stuff down the trauma she felt from what she had witnessed two hours before—that part viewed Soleil’s death objectively as a loose end. Vital information died with her. Heat knew she had cleared the mugging of the book editor, but many questions remained that she could no longer get answers for out of Soleil Gray. And the Texan, Rance Wolf, who was potentially her accomplice and the lead-pipe cinch to have been the killer of three people, was still at large. And as long as the last chapter of Cassidy Towne’s book was unaccounted for, there was every reason to believe he would kill again to get it. Unless the need to do so had also died with Soleil Gray.
“I’m feeling it, Captain, but that part will have to wait.” Detective Heat poured her cold coffee out the open door and onto the gravel. “So if that’s all, I need to get back to work.”
Back at the precinct, Heat and Rook had a moment alone for the first time since it had happened. Even though a police cruiser had brought them back to the Two-Oh together, she’d ridden up front in the partner seat in silence; he had the back to himself and spent most of the ride trying to shake the image of what he had seen. Not just the grisly death of Soleil Gray, but the anguish he’d observed in Nikki. Both of them had seen their share of human tragedy in their careers. But whether it was Chechnya or Chelsea, nothing prepared you for witnessing the instant life leaves a body. When he took her elbow and stopped her in the hall on the way to the bull pen, he said to her, “I see the brave front, and we both know why. But just know I’m here, OK?”
Nikki wanted right then to indulge herself in a brief squeeze of his hand, but not at work. And Heat also knew it wouldn’t be wise to open the door to her vulnerability just yet. So that was it for sentiment. She nodded and said, “Let’s bring this home,” and pushed on into her squad room.
Detective Heat kept herself in motion, not giving anyone an opening to ask her about how she was doing. She became instead all about doing. Nikki knew she would have to deal with what she had experienced at some point, but not yet. And she reminded herself that, by the way, it was not she but Soleil Gray who had experienced the worst of it.