“Randall Feller, you rock.”
“Just wait. The plate came back belonging to a Chevy Impala. Ready? It’s registered to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.”
After telling Detective Feller to stay in Flatbush to continue working the Haitian community, Nikki sat on the galvanized metal steps beneath the school’s service door for a moment to take stock of this new information. She wasn’t sure where it would lead, but Heat knew something bigger than she could yet see was going on. And now this Port Authority connection made it increasingly more difficult not to leap to the conclusion that beckoned her with increasing urgency.
Nikki fogged out the work of the CSU team before her. Shut out the street noise and chatter. Quieted, undistracted, creating solitude amid the chaos, she conjured a mental picture of the Murder Board six blocks away and, in reviewing every development that surfaced in this case, she began slapping imaginary Post-its on the eight-by-ten photo of one Keith Gilbert.
Whose Hamptons’ address and phone number did they find with all that money in the Haitian’s closet? Slap. Whose dog most likely left those bite marks on Fabian Beauvais’s jeans—the jeans splattered with shellac that probably came from the renovation at Cosmo? Slap. Whose Southampton neighbor-slash-mistress far-too-coincidentally claimed to employ Beauvais? Slap. Whose organization owned the car driven by the two thugs searching for Beauvais—who also fled his SRO in Flatbush? Slap. In Heat’s imagination, enough pastel sticky notes ringed the head shot to make it look like Gilbert wore a Hawaiian lei.
But that was far from a collar.
Knowing where this all pointed wasn’t enough to act upon. These were indicators, for sure. Incriminating? Not yet. Forget the fact that she had not discovered a motive. Or even a mode of Beauvais’s death to establish means. Heat did not have one solid connection implicating Keith Gilbert in anything more sinister than hiring an illegal day laborer to reshingle a second home.
That was, until Detective Rhymer’s urgent text.
“I found it here inside this one,” said Rhymer when Heat arrived. He indicated the yellow sidewalk box dispensing freebie catalogs for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. The plastic newsstand was wedged between a red one with free copies of the Village Voice and the blue container for handouts of Big Apple Parent. “I said, ‘OK, what if she wasn’t captured but was on the run, in a panic,’ you know? Since we didn’t find her purse at the murder scene, I thought maybe, if she didn’t drop it, or if the bad guys didn’t take it, maybe she stashed it on the fly. I walked the beeline from the home-invasion building, checking tree limbs, trash cans, even the roofs of parked trucks. Two blocks into it, dang.”
His Southern accent came out on that last word, making Heat think of little Opie Rhymer, a boy in the hills with a bloodhound. With work like this, maybe he didn’t need one.
Ochoa had pull up the Roach Coach and, with gloved hands, he carefully placed the contents of Jeanne Capois’s purse on the hood. Raley powered up the inexpensive pay-as-you-go cell phone inside it as Heat and Rhymer looked on. The purse items seemed to be standard fare, including a lipstick and compact, hair scrunchies, chewing gum, a MetroCard, ring of keys, grocery list, a few random business cards, and a stick pen. Her wallet still had cash in it: just a few dollars and some U.S. and Haitian gourde coins mixed together. In the photo windows were a picture of a middle-aged couple, most likely her parents, and a smiling shot of Fabian Beauvais standing proud over a barbecue of grilled fish.