“Heat, you still there?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m just sorting out what to do.” And how fast she needed to do it. She looked at the wall clock and became short of breath. “This is good info to have.”
“I thought it would be.” He paused, then continued, sounding small and contrite. “And sorry I said what I said. You know. About Irons being a boob. That was totally douchy. I apologize.”
Funny thing, she thought. Boobs can become heroes and assholes can show some heart. “Thank you, Zachary.”
“Gentlemen, we have not a minute to waste,” Detective Heat began when everyone had formed a semicircle. She recapped the heads-up call from The Hammer, which elicited universally pissed-off faces and a smattering of curses. Nikki called a halt. “I’m with you—obviously more so—but getting mad isn’t going to help.”
“This won’t shut the case down,” said Feller.
“Really,” said Ochoa. “Do they think we’re just going to drop it because you go to Staten Island?”
Heat said, “Of course you are capable of keeping it going. Especially this group. But we need to see this for what it is.”
“Round one,” said Rook.
“Exactly. This is the opening salvo in an orchestrated legal and power offensive. The idea is to dismantle progress one piece at a time and, eventually, to ‘make it go away.’”
She took a moment to register contact with each of them. “We can’t let that happen. This case has been a difficult one from the start. A lot of contradictions. A lot of conflict—even in here. Which is fine. It’s what you get with cops who have passion. I want that. But now we have entered a new phase.” She walked to the board to point at Captain Irons’s name up there as a murder victim.
“We need to drill down.” Nikki turned to look at his name again and milked the silence. Then she selected a new red marker from the cardboard sleeve. “This squad has twenty-four hours to be brilliant. Twenty-four hours to live up to its reputation as the top-clearing homicide squad in the NYPD.”
Heat opened the red marker and used it to draw a circle around her earlier translation of Fabian Beauvais’s tattoo: “Unity Makes Strength.” Then, in that same red ink, Nikki divided the board into four equal quadrants. She wrote a name in each, going clockwise: “Raley. Ochoa. Feller. Rhymer.” Capping the marker, she squared herself to her detectives. “Your assignment today is to examine every case detail inside your square. If you aren’t the detective who brought in the lead, become familiar and dig into it. If you did bring it in, go back over your own work and be critical. ‘What did I overlook?’ ‘What didn’t I ask?’ ‘Who didn’t I talk to?’ ‘What do I know now that I didn’t then that opens new lines?’ Talk to each other. If you have an expertise or hunch, poach that item from your colleague and run with it.”
Their attention was rapt and she took advantage of it. “Four victims: Fabian Beauvais, dropped from the sky; Jeanne Capois, tortured; Shelton David, home invasion victim; Captain Irons—line of duty. This is a bear of a case on the worst day to work it. But we all know that the solves don’t get handed to us. They come by donkeywork.” She tapped the whiteboard. “Something already up here could bring this home. Be diligent. Be thinking. Be cops.”