“You thinking about lunch?” asked Rook.
“I’m thinking about sitting right here until I get a call back from Keith Gilbert’s office.” She checked her watch. “Talk about the runaround. I can get his home number in the Hamptons in less than ten minutes, but I can’t get connected to his office on Park Avenue South after two hours. Reception ships me to voice mail. I call back. They bicycle me to media relations.” She picked up her phone again. He put his hand on hers and returned it to the cradle.
“I think you should stop calling.”
“Are you kidding me? You, Mr. Dogged Investigative Reporter?” Then she noticed Rook was looking past her. Nikki turned and couldn’t believe what she saw.
Or, more accurately, whom.
An administrative aide escorted the tall man in the chalk, pinstripe suit into the bull pen and gestured to Nikki. “Detective Heat?” The commissioner smiled and extended his hand as he came to her. “Keith Gilbert. You wanted to talk with me?”
Keith Gilbert made full eye contact when he shook her hand—something Heat always paid attention to. In her line of work, the eyes were not only the windows to the soul, they also afforded a panoramic view of its darker regions. But she registered none of the shifty tells like floor staring, sideways averting, or the dead-fixed glare. Framed by deep creases in his lean, sun-weathered face, Gilbert smiled openly and took her measure, too, making Nikki wonder if the guileless reading she got from him was as carefully masked as the one she was returning.
“This is Jameson Rook,” Nikki released his hand and the two men gripped.
“Commissioner,” Rook said as they sawed air. “It was a few years back, but we met briefly at—”
“—The Robin Hood Foundation gala, right?”
While Rook beamed at Heat, Gilbert stroked the short bristles of his goatee. “Trying to remember which year, but I do recall you were in a very serious huddle with Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams when I busted things up.”
“’Oh-nine. And you tried to strong-arm us to pony up twenty grand apiece to race Sir Richard Branson to Halifax on your sailboat.”
“It’s a ninety-foot Trimaran, and the privilege of crewing was all for charity.” Then he winked an aside to Nikki. “Never ask a journalist to pay for anything.”
While Rook and Gilbert enthused about Aretha Franklin filling the Javitz Convention Center with “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” it bought Heat time to gather herself from the Port Authority commissioner’s unexpected drop-in. She had not yet organized her questions but had no desire to postpone and risk losing him to his busy schedule or wall of handlers. Then, behind his back, she spotted the Murder Board in plain view with the ink still drying on his name in big fat letters. “You know what?” she said, already steering him to the door. “We should go someplace we can speak more privately.”
She ushered him into the conference room, much less onerous than one of the mirrored interrogation boxes. Rook followed them. To further keep things respectful, Nikki ignored the long table and indicated the trio of cloth chairs in the corner as an informal seating area. As he took one of them and set his slim briefcase on the floor, Heat said, “I’d offer you coffee, Commissioner Gilbert, but it’s kind of stale, and you caught me by surprise.”
“My chief of staff said you’d left three calls. I wanted to find out why all the urgency.”
“Not that I mind the personal visit, but it’s kind of heroic.”
“I was on the Henry Hudson anyway. Quite literally in the neighborhood, coming back from a disaster survey of the George Washington Bridge.”
Rook leaned forward. “Problem with the GWB?”
“I should have said ‘readiness survey.’ Reporters…Look, I know you work with Detective Heat from those First Press articles you wrote about her. Impressive.”