“Look what just came in from Ballistics.” Detective Raley rose from his desk holding up a printed report.
Nikki rushed across the bull pen to him, her internal voice pleading with every step, Please let this help, please let this help…
“It’s the finding on the slug found in the garage door frame at Nathan Levy’s house,” he said. “It was a .38.”
“Not a .22?” she asked. “Lon King was killed with a .22. Prelim on Abigail Plunkitt is also a .22.”
“Same with the drone slugs recovered at Washington Square,” added Ochoa.
“But Levy claims the drone shot at him,” said Ochoa. “But that’s out of pattern if it’s a .38. Which means either his drone weapon got swapped—”
“Or he’s lying, and staged the potshot,” added Raley.
Heat held up the interoffice envelope which, from all the signatures on it, looked like it had been in circulation since the Kerik era. She read the date of submission, and her chest became a furnace of rage. “Two days it took this to reach us! Goddamnit, if we’d known about this discrepancy even thirty-six hours ago, we could have been all over this guy. Now”—she crumpled the envelope and tossed it in the trash—“right now. Somebody find out if Nathan Levy is registered to own a gun—especially a .38.”
Back in her fishbowl, she called Detective Feller, who was patrolling the waterfront in a Zodiac borrowed from the Harbor Unit. He had been working a slow recon of Long Island City all morning and had gotten the notion to mix it up and check the Gowanus Canal, which was where she caught him, motoring in the Brooklyn channel’s 4th Street Basin, with no luck, so far. With the ballistics foul-up fresh in mind, she double-checked him on running the skiff through the boat registry.
“Affirm. Boat registration is handled through DMV, and they’ve still got tech capability—but no matches. I also put it through New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. No hits there, either. At least not yet. Of course, it could always be unregistered or stolen. If the RTCC was up, we could do a quicker check. But I have some Harbor Unit pals on it.”
“How much more do you have to cover?”
“I never knew there was this much waterfront in this city. It’s slow going,” he said, “but I’m working it, boss. I’ll freakin’ swim it, if I have to.”
Nikki paced her office, frustrated, panicked, desperate to do more than wait and hope. But what could she do? Thoughts of Rook pummeled her, attacking from every direction. Where he might be. What he was doing. What was happening to him. Whether he was alive. Instead of helping herself, all she was doing was dragging herself deeper into her own vortex of despair and speculation. “Stop,” she said aloud. “Stop right there.”
What Heat needed was to be useful. And busy. What bases weren’t being covered? All of them were; what she lacked was results. She flopped in her chair and put her face in her palms to think in isolation. What any detective does is follow the hot lead. What was it that Randall Feller had just said? The boat. That was the last sighting of Rook. But with five hundred miles of New York City waterfront, even if you carved out everything but Queens, Brooklyn, and Lower Manhattan, that was still quite a haystack in which to find a needle. Assuming the boat was even in the water anymore, and not trailered somewhere inland. Or out of state. If they got lucky with registration, they might get a line on it. But how long would that take?
She balled up her fists against her temples. Think, Nikki, think. When the hot lead is at the end of a cold trail, and the technology you always used as a crutch goes belly up, what can you do? She thought of her combat training. When disarmed, trapped, or overpowered, what is your strategy?
Embrace the obstacle.
She stood up, crossed to the bull pen, and stuck her head in. “Call me if anything pops.”
Raley looked up from his desk. “Where are you going?”
“Back to school,” said Heat.