“I don’t know.” When she moaned and strode to the elevator, he caught up with her. “Hang on, I mean I’ve never met him. But hear me out—I was with Cassidy Towne when she got a call from a Derek, and I heard his last name when her assistant said he was on the line.”
Multiple synapses started firing in Heat’s brain at once. “Rook . . . If there’s a connection between Soleil and this Derek and Cassidy Towne . . . I don’t want to say what it means yet, but I have an idea.”
“Me, too,” he said. “You first.”
“Well, for one, what if he is the Texan?”
“Sure,” said Rook. “Timing of the call to Soleil, her reaction . . . Derek could be our killer. Maybe he and Soleil were both involved in that big story Cassidy wouldn’t tell me about. And they wanted it and her killed.”
“Fine, fine, fine. What’s the last name?”
“I forget.” She shoved him and he stumbled back into a potted plant. “Hang on, hang on now.” He took out his black Moleskine notebook and flipped to some early pages. “Here. It’s Snow. Derek Snow.”
The address trace didn’t take long. A half hour later, Heat was parking the Crown Victoria in front of Derek Snow’s fifth-floor walk-up on 8th Street a few blocks east of Astor Place.
She and Rook made the climb of five flights with a squad of heavily armed uniformed cops borrowed from the Ninth Precinct. There was another contingent on the fire escape, both high and low. Their reward for the hike was to knock and get no answer. “It is just past one,” said Rook. “He could be at work.”
“I suppose I could maybe knock on a few doors to see if anybody knows where he works.”
“I don’t think that’s going to help you.”
Nikki gave him a puzzled look. “Why not?”
Rook leaned toward the door and touched his nose. She leaned in and sniffed.
They had a battering ram, but the super was there to unlock the door to the apartment. Nikki entered with one hand over her nose and the other resting on the grip of her service weapon. The uniforms rolled in behind her, then Rook.
The first thing she recognized when she saw Derek Snow’s body was that it wasn’t the Texan. The young African-American sat slumped forward at the kitchen table with his face down on a place mat. The dried pool of blood on the linoleum underneath him came from a puncture in his white shirt, just below his heart. Heat turned to get the OK signal from the cops who had cleared the other rooms of the apartment, and then she turned back to find Rook on one knee doing what she was about to do, checking out his forearms.
Rook turned to her and said the word just as she was thinking it. “Adhesive.”
Chapter Nine
Jameson Rook sat off to the side of the bull pen with his back against his squatter’s desk while the rest of the detectives from Homicide plus a few familiar faces from Robbery-Burglary and a pair from Vice drew up chairs around the whiteboard. Behind them, through the glass wall, he could see Nikki rising from her meeting with Captain Montrose.
Just as cop humor is laced with dark understatement, cop tension is also between the lines. The veteran reporter in him could hear it in the silence—the way the room fell quiet when Detective Heat came into the pen and stepped up to address them. He saw it in the faces turned to her, all experienced, many showing the world-weariness years on the job had etched into them, but all full of attentiveness.