“Shadowing. You mean like . . .” She let it fall off. This took Nikki down an all-too-uncomfortable road.
“Like the ride-along you and I had, yes. Exactly. Without the sex.” He paused to read her reaction, and Nikki did her best not to let it show. “The editors got such a good response to my piece on you, they wanted to follow up with another like it, maybe turn it into an occasional series on kick-ass women.” He studied her again, got nothing, then added, “It was a nice article, Nik, wasn’t it?”
She tapped the tip of the ballpoint twice on the pad. “Were you here to do that today? Shadow her?”
“Yeah, she got an early start every day, or maybe just continued from the night before, I could never tell. Some mornings I’d show up and she’d be at her desk in the same clothes as the day before, like she’d been working there all night. She’d want to stretch her legs so we’d walk up to H&H for some bagels and then next door to Zabar’s for the salmon and cream cheese, and then come back here.”
“So you did spend a fair amount of time with Cassidy Towne over the last few weeks.”
“Yep.”
“Then, if I need to ask you for cooperation, you may have some information about who she saw, what she did, and so forth.”
“You don’t need to ask, and yes, I know tons.”
“Can you think of anyone who would want to kill her?
Rook scoffed. “Let’s dig around this mess and find a New York phone book. We can start with the letter A.”
“Don’t be smart.”
“Shark’s gotta swim.” He grinned, then continued. “Come on, she was a mud-slinging gossip columnist, of course she had lots of enemies. It was in the job description.”
Nikki could hear footfalls and voices entering the front and put away her notes. “I’ll have you give a statement later, but I don’t have any more questions for you now.”
“Good.”
“Except one. You didn’t kill her, did you?” Rook laughed, then saw her expression and stopped. “Well?”
He folded his arms across his chest. “I want a lawyer.” She turned and left the room and he called after her, “Kidding. Mark me down as a ‘no.’ ”
Rook didn’t leave. He told Heat he wanted to stick around in case he could be helpful with anything. She had the push-pull thing going: wanting him away from her in the worst way because he was such an emotional disruption; but then seeing the benefit of his potential insights as they went over the wreckage of Cassidy Towne’s apartment. The writer had been to plenty of crime scenes with her during his ride-along last summer, so she knew he was scene-friendly, at least trained enough not to pick up a piece of evidence in his bare hands and say, “What’s this?” He was also a first-person witness to the most profound element of his magazine story, the death of his subject. Mixed feelings or not, she wasn’t going to begrudge Jameson Rook that professional courtesy.