Fariq opened his car door. “You see? I may have reached out to just the right person.”
“The Syrian’s playing you, Captain.” Detective Ochoa pulled his bag of Earl Gray out of his chipped old friend of a mug and watched it twirl, waiting for the drips to subside. “He’s pulling your chain.”
“I told her the same thing.” Rook stepped on the pedal of the break-room garbage can. The lid yawned back to make a landing zone for Ochoa’s teabag. He turned to Nikki. “What were my exact words? Allow me to refresh your memory. ‘The Syrian security thug wants us to take his word for it that it’s not them but some prankster in a Guy Fawkes mask? I don’t think so.’”
“Settle down, fella,” she said. “I never saw anybody so needy about being right.”
“Aha, so I am right!”
“Only in the sense that I haven’t proven you wrong yet.” She flashed Rook a quick smile and picked up her coffee cup. “There’s time.”
Heat moved along to the bull pen to bring herself up to speed on the Murder Board. In the short time since she had gotten back to the precinct she had already called the bureau chief of intelligence down at One Police Plaza to report her encounter with Fariq Kuzbari and relay his message. The chief had seemed to be more intrigued by why Fariq had chosen a police captain as his lucky target than by the actual content of Heat’s encounter. She hung up feeling as if her call had been nothing but bureaucratic wheel spinning. A pair of incoming calls from the same building was more blatantly unsettling. In the first one, her district superintendent reprimanded her for blowing off the CompStat meeting. Heat’s defense that she was following a hot lead on two murders led only to a fresh rebuke for not balancing her duties. Of course when the chief of detectives phoned minutes later, the axe he had to grind was a demand for more results on the double homicides. And soon. While he filled her ear with not-so-veiled threats about stepping in himself, Nikki’s gaze drifted from her cluttered desktop to the coatrack holding her uniform shrouded in plastic. Staring at the gold captain’s bars on the collar, Heat thought that they perfectly summarized the job: heavy metal.
Raley joined her to stare at the board. It should have been a roadmap to the killer of Lon King and Fred Lobbrecht. Instead it was more like roads under construction. “Whoever is behind this Big Hack Attack, it’s killing us,” he said. “We’re spending man-hours on things that used to take seconds. Feller has been smelling his own BO all night on stakeout hoping to nab Barsotti, and Rhymer, he’s getting carpal tunnel flipping mug book pages. Opie says he’d have a better chance of finding the dude who broke into King’s apartment by walking 5th Avenue, scoping out pedestrians face by face.”
“Tell him when he runs out of mug books to try it,” she said. “Whatever works.”
“Here’s what we should be doing with our manpower,” said the detective. “Putting some of us on you to make sure you don’t get your day spoiled by Maloney.”
“He’s an ex-cop, he’d spot the tail,” said Detective Aguinaldo from her desk.
Heat nodded in agreement. “Which is why I want to change things up. A BOLO is not going to turn him up, especially with our street cams all blacked out. And Inez is right, he’s too savvy to get caught following me.”