Rook, immediately sympathetic to the impact of what she saw, draped a hand on her shoulder that Nikki never even felt. She was too transfixed by the contents of the Godiva box. The candies had all been removed to make room for two items: a spice jar full of cinnamon sticks and a chef’s knife.
The bomb sergeant said, “When I saw this I thought, ‘OK, somebody’s playing a practical joke on you.’ It wouldn’t be the first time we rolled out to a prank.” Then he studied her and, seeing her reaction, gave her some quiet space. He didn’t know the symbolism of these everyday items. He didn’t know that on her freshman Thanksgiving break from Northeastern, Nikki was helping her mom do some baking and left the apartment to buy cinnamon sticks at the Morton Williams up the block. He didn’t know that while she was out on her errand, someone attacked her mother with her own chef’s knife and left her for Nikki to find her dying on that very kitchen floor. He didn’t know any of that. But the person who had put this package together, then broken into her apartment, then left it in her living room, did.
Closure is more than elusive, it is an illusion. But in the years since her mother’s murder, thanks to the healing of time and by ultimately solving the case, Heat had made a tenuous peace with the formative tragedy of her life. Now, in an upending instant, the act of a sick mind had ruptured that detente.
“Captain Heat,” said a CSU technician peeking around the corner from her entrance hall. “Something for you to see.” Nikki and Rook joined her in the foyer, where the evidence specialist indicated a folded piece of paper on the Oriental runner. “This just floated down on your rug when I opened the closet door to lift prints off the knobs. It must have been wedged up high in the door crack.”
“By someone who knew it would be dusted,” said Rook. Nobody disagreed.
Heat snapped on the pair of blue nitriles offered by the technician, who then handed her the slip of paper. Nikki unfolded it carefully, even though she knew there would be no fingerprints on it for her to spoil.
The single sheet of plain, multiuse paper contained a brief message printed on an inkjet or laser. It contained no greeting, no salutation, no addressee. The writer got right to it:
So Blackwell’s Landing this morning, huh? Yeah, I saw you. Did you and King’s boyfriend have a cry and sniff his sheets? I had a gut feel about you and King. And now you think you can pick up where he left off. Fucking me over. Think again. You don’t know who you’re fucking with. But you will.
Nikki felt a lurch inside, as if she were rocketing skyward in the Coney Island Cyclone. But her alarm and anguish quickly resolved into anger at Timothy Maloney. Anger served Heat well. It gave her something to do instead of something to feel.
As CSU continued its work, Heat sought some physical outlet for her as-yet-undirected energy. She threw herself into cleaning up the broken glass and wasted Gavi on the kitchen floor while Rook sat at the counter absorbing the download of her ricocheting thoughts. “Want to know the big message from all this?” she asked.
“You mean Maloney’s big subtext of, ‘I can have you anytime?’”
A dustpan full of glass shards clanged into the trash can. Heat banged the broom head against the rim to shake off any slivers embedded in the bristles. “He’s going to have a challenge there, trust me.” She crouched and swabbed the wine and stubborn bits of glass up from the tiles with a wad of paper towels. “No, my big takeaway is to see Maloney in a different light in this case.”
“You mean killing Lon King? I thought he had slid down that totem pole.”
“He had. Especially after you brought the whole automotive safety conspiracy into this.” She tossed the wad of towels into the trash, and a shower of bits of glass plinked against the big chunks of broken bottle like sleet. She grabbed for another fistful of paper towels. “Now I’m renewing my interest in him.”