He stood in her office long enough to give it one more scan in case there was a clue that spoke now but hadn’t had a voice the morning of her murder. Finding none, he stepped to the light switch beside the porcelain plaque, and when he flicked it on, the little courtyard through the French doors became bathed in mellow light.
Holding a flashlight and one of Cassidy’s trowels, Rook surveyed the plantings in the terraced rows rising up from the brickwork patio in her cloister. In the subdued lightscape she had created, the colors of the autumn flowers that surrounded him were muted to dark gray tones. Rook switched on his flashlight to illuminate the shadows, shining it around slowly and methodically, passing it over each planter. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. And he certainly wasn’t about to turn the whole garden into an archaeological dig. So he employed another Heatism and looked for an odd sock. He didn’t know the names of most of what he was looking at, just a few, like pink salvia and New York aster. One variety Cassidy had pointed out to him once was Liatrus, also known as blazing star when it was in the last of its bright summer color. Now it had gone to seed heads and faded to rusty brown.
A quarter hour into his search, Rook brought his light to rest on a chrysanthemum. In his beam its flowers were rich-colored and fall-ish but somehow seemed ordinary for what Cassidy had grown around them. . . . Somewhat of an odd sock. He stepped closer and also noticed that unlike the other flowers and plants, this one was buried in the soil but still in its flowerpot. He clamped the flashlight in his armpit and used the trowel to dig out the pot. He removed it from the soil, tapped the pot on the planter to loosen the packed dirt and roots, and then dumped it all onto the bricks of the patio. It was a large enough pot to hold the curve of a chapter of manuscript, but there was none such inside. To be thorough Rook went back to the cavity left by the pot and poked the bottom of it with the point of the trowel blade, to feel for any stack of buried paper, and found none. But he hit something that felt through the wooden handle like a small rock, which would be unusual given Cassidy’s clean, floury soil.
He shined the flashlight into the hole and caught the reflection of a plastic sandwich bag. Rook reached in, pulled it out, and held it in front of his beam. Inside it was a key.
Ten minutes later, after walking every room and closet and examining every cabinet in Cassidy Towne’s apartment, he had found no lock that the key fit. Rook sat down at the kitchen table and studied it. It was a small key, not the kind that fits a door lock but the kind that is more suited for padlocks or lockers. It was fairly new, with a crisp edge on its teeth, and embossed into it was a three-digit number: 417.
He took out his iPhone and called Nikki’s cell and got voice mail. “Hi, it’s Rook. Got a question for you, call me when you can.” Then he tried her at the precinct. The desk sergeant picked up. “Detective Heat’s busy in interrogation and forwarded her phone. Do you want her voice mail?” Rook said yes and left a similar message.
Cassidy belonged to a gym but he had seen her with her gym bag and noticed the hot pink combination lock clamped on the strap, so scratch that off. The key could belong to a public locker like in a bus station, and Rook thought of how many bus and train terminals with lockers there were in New York City. It was also possible it fit some cubby at the New York Ledger offices, but tonight anyway, he wasn’t about to visit there and introduce himself. “Hi, Jameson Rook. I have a key. May I . . . ?”