Then he realized he had seen a key like this before. In 2005 Rook had been on assignment for two months in New Orleans after Katrina and lived in a rented RV. Since he moved around the area so much, he had rented a mailbox at a UPS store, and this was the kind of key they had issued him. Wonderful, he thought, now all I have to do is go to every mail drop in New York and hope to get lucky.
Rook rapped the key on the kitchen table and tried to recall if he had seen Cassidy go to or near a mail drop. He couldn’t come up with one and wasn’t sure if there was one in this neighborhood. And then he remembered her daughter, Holly. Holly Flanders had said she found out where Rook lived by looking on the waybills for the messenger service her mother used to send him material. He couldn’t remember the name of the service, and there was no way to find that needle in the haystack of Cassidy Towne’s office.
After he locked up, Rook walked to Columbus to hail a cab down to Tribeca, to see if he still had any of the shipping envelopes he had received from Cassidy. As the cab passed West 55th, he had a brain tug that the place was located somewhere in Hell’s Kitchen. He did a Google search of messenger services on his phone, and five minutes later the taxi dropped him outside Efficient Mail and Messenger on Tenth Avenue, a storefront squeezed between an Ethiopian restaurant and a small grocer with hot tables and pizza by the slice. The garbage pileup had gobbled the sidewalk outside, and under Efficient’s dingy awning some of the letters were sputtering in the neon window sign, which read, “Checks Cashed — Copies — Fax.” A little run down, he thought as he went inside, but if the key fits, paradise.
The place smelled of old library and pine disinfectant. A small man in a turban sat on a high stool behind a counter. “You wish to make copy?” Before Rook could say no, the man spoke rapidly in a foreign language to a woman using the sole copy machine. She answered back in a short, angry tone and the man said to Rook, “Be five minute.”
“Thanks,” said Rook, not wanting to engage or explain. He was already at the wall where the bank of brass mail cubbies ran its length from knee to eyebrow. He scanned them and found number 417.
“You rent mailbox? Monthly special.”
“All set.” Rook held up the key and inserted it. It went in cleanly, but the lock didn’t budge. He waggled it with some force, remembering that the teeth of the key had a freshly cut edge and might need some coaxing. Still nothing. He looked and realized that when the counterman had distracted him he had put the key in 416.
The teeth of the key snagged in 417, then it opened. He got down on one knee to look inside and his heart kicked.
Two minutes later, in another cab to Tribeca, he tried Nikki again. She was still in interrogation. This time Rook didn’t leave a message. He slouched back between the seat and back door of the taxi and took the stack of double-spaced, typewritten pages from the envelope. They were curled from having been half-rolled to fit inside the mail cubby, so he flattened them on his thigh and held the paper-clipped packet to the window light to read the chapter title again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
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FADE OUT
Chapter Eighteen
Nikki Heat was big on hands. Sitting in an interrogation room, what she could observe physically about the person across the table was as important as what that person was saying—or not saying. Facial expressions, of course, were key. So were posture, demeanor (restless, fidgety, calm, checked out, and so forth), state of hygiene, and attire. But hands told her a lot. Soleil Gray’s hands had been lean and strong from the rigors of her athletic stage dancing. Strong enough, as it turned out, to overpower Mitchell Perkins with such force that people assumed his assailant had been a man. One of the tells Nikki had misjudged when the singer had been sitting at the table with her lawyer just the day before was the cut on her knuckle which the detective had taken to be from the rehearsal hall, not the street mugging.