They brought Jameson Rook upright slow and easy, by the numbers, and cut him loose. Fortunately, the pooled blood was only from hitting his nose on the floor when he toppled over trying to escape. The EMTs did a check to make sure it wasn’t broken, and Nikki came in from the bathroom with a warm facecloth. Rook used it to swab himself clean while he told Detective Nguyen from the First Precinct what had happened.
After he’d left the OCME, Rook had come straight there to his loft so he could type up the day’s notes for his article. He grabbed a beer, walked up the hall, and as soon as he arrived at his office, he saw that the whole place had been ransacked. He turned to Nikki. “It was like Cassidy Towne’s crime scene, except with electronics from this century. I was just getting my cell phone to call you when it rang, and it was actually you on the caller ID. But as I went to answer, he came up behind me and put that pillowcase over my head.”
“Did you struggle?” asked the detective.
“You kidding? Like crazy,” said Rook. “But he had the pillowcase around my head real tight and had me in a choke hold.”
“Did he have a weapon?” asked the detective.
“A knife. Yes. He said he had a knife.”
“Did you see it?”
“I had a pillowcase blindfolding me. Plus, last year I got taken hostage in Chechnya by some rebels. I found that you live longer if you don’t ask to see the knife.”
“Good call,” said Nguyen. “What next?”
“Well, he sat me in this side chair, told me not to move, and started to tape me down.”
“Did you ever see him? Even through the pillowcase?”
“No.”
“What did his voice sound like?”
Rook thought a moment. “Southern. Like Wilford Brimley.” And then he added, “Oh! But not the look-at-that-Wilford-Brimley’s-doing-TV-commercials-now Wilford Brimley. Younger. Like from Absence of Malice or The Natural.”
“So . . . Southern.” Nguyen made the note.
“I guess that would be easier to fit on the APB than Wilford Brimley’s IMDb credits, yes,” said Rook. “Southern, it is.”
Nikki turned to Nguyen and said with simple authority, “The accent was North Texas.”
Nguyen turned an amused side glance to Heat, who smiled and shrugged. He turned his attention back to Rook. “Did he say anything else to you, say what he wanted?”
“Never got that far,” answered the writer. “His cell phone rang, and next thing I know he leaves me sitting there and goes out.”
Heat interjected, “He must have had somebody outside watching the street who tipped him that I was coming up.”
“So we have an accomplice,” said Nguyen, making that note.
Rook continued with his story, “While he’s out, I try rocking myself over to the desk, where I have scissors and a letter opener. But I tipped over. And there I was, stuck. He came in here briefly and left, then a while after that I heard all sorts of commotion out there. And a gunshot. And then nothing until now.”
Rook listened silently as Nikki recounted in detail to Detective Nguyen the story of how she had decided to drop by and pick Rook up, and how she’d gotten ambushed at his front door. And then she described the essentials of the fight in the great room and the pursuit that came afterward.
When she was finished, Detective Nguyen asked if she could come to the precinct to meet the sketch artist. She said she would and he left, leaving Forensics behind for prints and samples.
Waiting for the elevator to arrive and take her and Rook down, Nikki found her badge in her blazer side pocket and clipped it on her hip. Rook turned to her and said, “So. You just came over without my OK? What if I had been ‘entertaining’ someone?”
They got on the elevator, and as the doors closed, she said, “That’ll be the day, you entertain anyone. Anyone but yourself.” He looked over at her and laughed, and then she did, too. And when they stopped laughing, they still held eye contact. Nikki wondered if this was going to turn into a kiss, and her mind was racing to figure out how she felt about that when the car reached the lobby and the outer door opened.
Rook pulled the elevator gates open for her and said, “Close call, huh?”