“Go on,” said Nikki.
“My attorney found an investigator to follow them, and sure enough, they met for several trysts. Nicer hotels, usually. And once . . . once, on our guided visit to the botanical garden, they disappeared from the tour and rutted like animals behind the herbaceous and mixed borders.
“Neither of them knew that I knew, and I didn’t blame my husband. It was her. It was the slut. So when our summer banquet came, I did it.”
“What did you do, Mrs. Essex?”
“I poisoned the bitch.” She now had every bit of her color back, seeming exhilarated with her story. “I did some research. There’s a new drug kids are into. Methadrone.” Heat knew it very well. It went under the name M-Cat and Meow-Meow. “You know why it’s so popular? Access. It’s found in plant food.” She grinned. “Plant food!”
“That stuff can be fatal,” said Rook.
“Not to Cassidy Towne. I got in the kitchen at the banquet and put it in her dinner. It seemed poetic. To die of plant food poisoning at our garden club event. Either I got the proportions wrong, or she just had an incredible constitution, but it didn’t kill her. She just thought she had picked up some gut-wrenching stomach bug. You know something, I’m actually glad I didn’t kill her. It was more fun to watch the bitch suffer.” And then she laughed.
After she settled, Heat said, “Mrs. Essex, can you verify your whereabouts between midnight and four this morning?”
“Yes, I can. I was on a red-eye from Los Angeles.” And to bring home the point, she added, “With my husband.”
“Then I assume,” said Nikki, “that you and your husband have a good relationship?”
“My husband and I have a great relationship. I got divorced and married again.”
Minutes later, Heat broke the silence of the elevator ride down and said to Rook, “I’m eager to meet more of your sources. Circus cousins, colorful uncles, perhaps?”
“Don’t you worry, I’m just warming up.”
“You got nuthin’,” she said, and stepped into the lobby.
At five-thirty the next morning, Nikki Heat’s combat trainer tried to put a choke hold on her and ended up on his back on the mat. She danced a circle around him as he got up. If Don felt it, he didn’t let on. He deked a move left but she read it and side-slipped his attack from the right. He barely grazed her as he went by. But the ex–Navy SEAL didn’t go flat on the ground this time, instead taking his fall in a shoulder roll, whirling back around on her and taking her by surprise with a back-scissors to her knee on the blind side. They both hit the mat, and he grappled and pinned her until she tapped out.
They sparred again and again. He tried the blindside attack once more, but Nikki Heat didn’t have to be shown twice. She raised her leg in an air kick as he swung around at the back of her knee, and with no leg there to stop him, his momentum carried him off balance. She topped him when he went down, and it was Don’s turn to tap out.