Thoughts of both a breakup and a marriage proposal sufficiently elbowed aside, Heat snatched the bag from him and pored over the mangled slug inside it. “Where did you get this?”
“After our little—shall we call it, dustup on the rooftop—I couldn’t sleep when I got home.”
“Me, neither, I was thinking all about you.”
“Yes. Ahem, I also was thinking about the case. Especially your theory about some kind of payoff happening at Conscience Point. So I thought, screw it. I got up and drove out there. Arrived about four A.M. Sat in that parking lot with my flashlight and thought to myself, if Fabian Beauvais’s gunshot was indeed a slicer, maybe, just maybe, the slug got lodged somewhere.”
“So you found a bullet? How long did it take you?”
“About nine hours. Dug this one out of the banister on the steps to the deck of the rec center. Detective Aguinaldo found a second one about an hour after she showed up.”
“What? Rook, I talked to her, she never mentioned any of this.”
“Because I made her promise to let me tell you. The one she found got nested in one of the shingles on the side of the building. Very soft wood, so that slug is pristine. She kept that one and sent it to the NYPD ballistics lab to run for you.”
“Any sign of the gun?”
“Boy, you want everything, don’t you?”
“No, I’m good. In fact, this is one of the nicest gifts you could have given me.” ‘One of,’ she thought.
“Comes at a price, though.”
“Yeah?”
“I want your trust. That’s what got me out of bed and driving a hundred miles to Conscience Point. To do what you would do. Follow the leads where they go, and let the truth be told.” He jiggled the bullet in the bag. “And even if I hadn’t found this, don’t you know you can always trust me?”
“Yes, of course.” Nikki drew what felt like her first full breath of the day. “I am so glad this is behind us.” She rested a hand on his thigh and noticed he didn’t respond. “…It is behind us, isn’t it?”
“I want back in the precinct. Divide and conquer’s one thing. But getting banished is how this weirdness got started.”
Nikki threw “Boy, you want everything, don’t you?” back in his face. She chuckled alone. He still hadn’t taken her hand. “I’ll talk to Captain Irons about letting you back in.”
“Good.” And Rook stood. “Let me know when, and I’ll see you there.”
“Seriously? Don’t you even want to get some dinner tonight?” He sucked in his lips, hesitating. “Rook, I thought we were moving forward from this.”
“We are. I’m just not in the let’s-get-together-tonight place yet. Just being honest.” Much as that stung, she understood. To think otherwise was to minimize the impact of what she’d done. Heat thanked him for the bullet and walked back to the precinct with it.
On her way up Amsterdam she turned and stopped, watching him walk the opposite way. How weary was Nikki of seeing his back?
Heat woke up the next morning alone, and feeling every bit of it. Her alarm was still ten minutes from ringing, so she opened the app to kill it with extreme prejudice, and while she did, her phone rang in her hand, startling her. The caller ID said it was Detective Raley.
“So. You do wake-up calls now, too?”
“This will help you rise and shine. We found Opal Onishi.”
The woman facing Nikki on the couch in Greenwich Village still had pillow marks on one side of her face. Opal Onishi balanced them out with the perplexed frown she gave Heat’s badge. “You said Homicide, right?”
“That’s my division, yes.” Nikki didn’t want to tip her yet that she’d found her former address in the purse of a murder victim. She’d hold it back until she got answers to a few preliminaries without that grim spoiler coloring things. So Heat redirected the subject. “I just have a few questions to ask and I’ll be on my way. Sorry to wake you up on a Saturday morning.”
“No problem. My roommate crashed with her boyfriend, so I was up anyway to feed her cat.”