Nikki didn’t acknowledge him because she was immersed in her walk-up scan, making her appraisal of the geography, the sounds, the smells—letting the feel of the area talk to her. Lazy detectives showed up and asked questions. Heat liked to have a few thoughts of her own before she spoke to anyone.
What she observed at 6:20 A.M. was a clear spring morning full of fresh promise. The ball field was empty, but an aluminum bat leaned against the backstop next to a white bucket full of softballs, with three of their companions lying like little white domes in the uncut grass out in right field. Joggers and cyclists were out, but they were being held back at the north and south ends of the blacktop trail, inconvenienced by a murder, and sent off to seek alternate routes. The sun had risen minutes before and had not yet crested the range of high-rise apartments on the West Side, so the strip of tree-lined parkland running along the Hudson remained in shade. A cooling breeze blew across the river from the New Jersey side, strong enough for the gulls to open their wings and coast in place and to mottle the water with shapeshifting patterns. On the idle cricket pitch adjacent to the softball diamond, Detective Rhymer talked with a red-faced man forty pounds too portly for Lycra standing beside his Cannondale Slice. Forty yards away, at the edge of the bike path, Detective Feller interviewed an ashen-faced young woman in batting gloves and a Barnard sweatshirt with sawed-off sleeves. To Nikki, it was all silent movie. Voices were lost in the white noise of morning rush hour on the highway behind her and the churn of a barge transporting a construction crane upriver, most likely part of the Tappan Zee upgrade. But she didn’t need to hear any words to recognize two eyewitnesses who had seen something they would not soon, if ever, forget. Heat knew. She had been about the age of the Barnard coed when she found her mother’s body.
Nikki’s friend Lauren Parry hadn’t seen her yet. The medical examiner’s head was inside the back of the OCME van, prepping her kit for the job ahead. Detectives Raley and Ochoa, partners so inseparable that they had earned the single mash-up nickname Roach, made note of her, rose from where they were crouching at the riverbank, and approached in tandem. “How’d you manage a full-squad turnout here?” asked Rook while the pair came trudging up the grass slope of the Hudson. The other detectives, Rhymer and Feller, also spotted her and started to approach. “Is it a celebrity victim?” Rook continued. “I won’t name names, but there’s a handful whose passing wouldn’t sadden me. Does that make me bad?”
“Very,” replied Nikki. “But I don’t know who we’re working. The turnout is about something else.”
“Do I get a hint?”
The four detectives were nearly within earshot, so Heat kept her reply to one word. “Ambition.”
Rook’s expression lit up as soon as she said it. “Ri-i-i-ight,” he muttered as the synapses fired. Heat’s promotion had created a void in her old position, homicide squad leader. Now four candidates, presenting faces ranging from eagerness to practiced aloofness, drew around the newly minted precinct commander.
“Congratulations, Captain Heat,” said Randall Feller. “Hip-hip!”
Heat held up two palms toward him. “Do. Not.”
The detective’s brow knotted. “What? It’s a big deal.”
“It’s a crime scene.”
Feller was a born cop, but he frequently brought too much street to the job. Correctness was not Randy’s forte, and he provided an example by pointing toward the river and saying, “It’s not like he can hear me.”
“I can,” was all Heat needed to say, and he lowered his gaze to the ground. He would apologize back at the precinct, and she would let it go. The dance was the dance.
“Here’s what we’ve got,” said Ochoa. “The cyclist—”