She almost called Rook. Not to share IDs on Thug-One and Thug-Two, but to reopen the conversation about enlisting her crew as a personal research team for his article. She didn’t call because she knew where that would go, which was the same no-fly-zone she decided to avoid at his kitchen counter that morning. So she busied herself with follow-ups while she waited for the search warrant to make it uptown from the DA’s office.
Still no Alicia Delamater sightings. Either Gilbert’s mistress had slipped past U.S. Customs, or her attorney lied and she never left the country. There’s a stretch—a lawyer being untruthful.
She located an address for Hattie Pate, Fabian Beauvais’s pal from the chicken slaughterhouse who’d tipped Rook off about the ATM crew and the Queensboro Plaza gunplay. She put it in a group text to Raley and Ochoa for them to investigate. Nikki didn’t add a smiley face but hoped the gesture would thaw the chilly air between them.
In her renewed sense of open-mindedness, she e-mailed the Real Time Crime Center and asked them to run Fidel “FiFi” Figueroa and Charley Tosh. Figueroa and Tosh, the Dumpster divers who got arrested with Beauvais had, according to Rook, a history of dirty tricks and harassment against Keith Gilbert’s campaign. She didn’t know exactly what she could learn from them, but it wouldn’t hurt to close the loop.
Detective Sergeant Aguinaldo of SVPD returned her call to confirm that she would meet Nikki at Cosmo in Southampton to facilitate the service of the warrant and the search for Gilbert’s handgun. Also, after the Russian doctor named the commissioner as Beauvais’s shooter, Heat had asked her to run a check on reports of gunfire the night of his treatment. “Sorry,” said Aguinaldo. “I’m afraid there are no reports in that time frame. Which doesn’t surprise me. I mean, we’d already know. ‘Shots fired’ would be big news in the village.” The news blanketed Heat under another layer of worry about making her case airtight. And kept the door open that it could have been Earl Sliney who shot the Haitian, and not her prime suspect.
“Thanks for checking, anyway.” Then, never one to give up, Heat said, “Would I be pushing my luck to ask you another favor?”
“Name it.”
“That patrol officer you told me about.”
Inez Aguinaldo was right there with her. “The one who encountered the man staggering to the LI-Double-R?”
“Yes, what do your uniforms call it?”
“Catch and release. When I talked to Officer Matthews he wasn’t certain it had been Mr. Beauvais, but he did say the man had an accent and acted sick. You’re thinking maybe it wasn’t sickness?”
“Maybe he’d been shot,” said Heat. “Could you—”
“—Talk to him again? You bet. I’ll even see if he can join us when you get to Beckett’s Neck.”
If Fabian Beauvais had been shot while in the Hamptons, that would end the speculation about whether one of Earl Sliney’s rounds tagged him on that Queensboro Plaza security video. It might also put a lid on the internal discord that had arisen about this case. First from Rook, and now from the go-to guys in her crew who’d had their heads turned, either by doubt about the evidence or aggravation at her.
Since Gilbert’s gun would be a key link in that chain of evidence, when Nikki got word the search warrant was just blocks away she started to saddle up to be set to leave the instant she got it in hand. During a ritual desk check, her phone rang. OCME. She paused to take it.
Lauren Parry said, “Just finished the postmortems on your two Dead at Scenes from Chelsea. First, cause of death. —Nikki Heat.” Thankfully, the ME knew her friend, and could tell from the lack of response that Nikki was on a mission. So she skipped the wisecracks and got right to the rest. “Roderick Floyd, the one you shot. He’s got scratch marks on his neck and cheeks. In your incident report from last night, you didn’t mention scratching him.”
“Correct. My only physical contact was a takedown with my right leg to the back of his knees.”
“That would follow, because these excoriations look days old.”