The crime scene unit tagged-in and Detective Heat left them to scour Fabian Beauvais’s rental for more clues. She had not turned up a cell phone and asked them to alert her if one surfaced. Meantime, she, Rook, and Feller left to work the new leads. Once more the homicide squad leader felt hamstrung by her personnel shortage. Nikki’s preference would have been to leave a detective to canvass the building and neighborhood, but with Roach and Rhymer deployed on the home invasion, she brought Randall Feller back to the Two-Oh with her to get the envelope labbed for a potential fingerprint and blood match with the dead Haitian’s and to run serial numbers on the ten grand that turned out to be inside it. She would track the phone number and the address herself.
Of course, the pair of goons that bowled them over in the stairwell deserved some scrutiny, also. Heat called ahead to book a police-sketch artist to meet at the precinct so they could generate some pictures to follow up the Be On The Lookout notice she had transmitted. When she hung up, Rook asked them why they thought the two men had been there.
“Could be the money,” said Feller. “Whatever they were up to, we surprised them.”
“Actually,” said Heat, “I believe we were the ones who got surprised.” She made a note that when Raley got free, she’d have the King of All Surveillance Media scrub traffic cams in Flatbush for hits on the two getaway cars, although she didn’t hold much hope there. Their escape setup smelled like a pro execution. Combining that with ten grand and a mysterious note hidden in the floor of a closet told Heat something more was going on than a guy falling out of an airplane. She pressed the gas pedal, as if that would help her find out sooner what it was.
Back in the bull pen, Nikki hung up her phone and crossed over to the Murder Board. “Bingo.” Rook and Feller joined her there and she pointed to the eight-by-tens of the bloody envelope and the note she had posted there. “As you know, there wasn’t any area code with this phone number, but a telecom records crunch scored a match with the address written there, which turns out to be in the Hamptons. I had them run it twice, and the phone listing is definitely to the same residence.”
“Show-off,” said Rook.
Feller tried to peek at her spiral notepad. “You get a name?” Without answering, she uncapped a red dry-erase marker with her teeth and printed it in big block letters. When she finished, Randall said, “Whoa.…” Rook simply had two brows arched in surprise.
“What about Keith Gilbert?” asked Wally Irons from the doorway of the bull pen. The precinct commander’s fishbowl office looked out upon the Homicide Squad Room, and the VIP name had attracted his immediate attention, even from behind the glass. As a rule—and a sound one—Heat kept the captain out of the loop on most investigations until they closed. The Iron Man had too great a knack for gumming the works, at best; monkey-wrenching the whole deal, at worst. Trapped now, she sketched out the case in its leanest bullet points and explained how she came to identify a rich and powerful Port Authority commissioner as someone she wanted to interview in a suspicious death inquiry.
“You sure that’s a smart play?”
“I’m taking it you don’t, sir.”
Irons peered over his gut to check the shine on his shoes. “I am not going on the record telling you not to follow a lead, Detective. But.” He raised his face to hers. “Keith Gilbert is golf buddies with the fucking mayor. You watch the news, you read the papers. Every night he’s in a tux making rounds at cocktail parties with the biggest political donors in this city, getting greased up to run for senator. Like he needs their Goddamn money.”
His face clouded and he turned to Rook, as if just realizing he was there. “All this is off the record, right?”