Deadly Heat Page 12

  “And we’re out of time, Detective,” said Greer Baxter. “Good luck with that, and good luck apprehending… the Rainbow Killer.”

  In the taxi downtown, Rook said, “Pretty lucky you just happened to have those head shots in your pocket like that.”

  “Yeah, said Nikki. “Imagine having them ready to show the very night I was on live television. Couldn’t have planned it any better.”

  He gave her hand a squeeze. “Didn’t have to.”

  The next morning at the Twentieth, Wally Irons came to Heat’s desk before he even unlocked his office. His doughy complexion was mottled with salmon blotches of agitation. “Happened to catch you with Greer Baxter last night on the ten o’clock news. As your precinct commander, isn’t it proper you clear all media contact through me?”

  Heat wanted to laugh in his face. She wanted so badly to be insubordinate and say, You mean, clear it with you, or clear a path to the camera? Or, You mean, clear it with you like Sharon Hinesburg does—on her knees? Instead, Detective Heat maintained her professionalism and told him the truth. “I didn’t want to do the interview. I was directed to by the office of a commissioner at One PP. Would you like to speak to him?”

  Irons stood there, vapor-locked, gloriously impotent, and said, “Next time tell me.” And he was gone.

  Like clockwork, Detective Hinesburg sauntered in five minutes behind Irons, the interval designed to maintain the fiction that she wasn’t sleeping with the boss. She grumbled about the assignment Heat had given her to canvass Coney Island for Salena Kaye sightings. Nikki named some of the hotels and extended stays she knew of, and Hinesburg reported that she’d come up empty at every one of them. All but certain Sharon was deep-throating insider tips about the serial killer to Greer Baxter, the Ledger, and others, Heat isolated her with the task of following up on the calls that were coming in about Tyler Wynn and Salena Kaye after their pictures had been shown on TV. “Fine. Long as I don’t have to drive back out to Coney,” she said.

  A uniform held up a cautionary hand to Nikki on her way back from the precinct kitchen. “Might want to keep some distance. Got a badass here.” She relaxed against the wall and turned a spoonful of yogurt upside down on her tongue while a pair of officers wrestled a shackled biker into Interrogation One. Following close behind strode the biker’s attorney, Helen Miksit. The sight of the lawyer made Heat wonder which badass the uni had warned her about.

  “Counselor, what a pleasant surprise. Business so tough you’re defending Sons of Anarchy now?”

  Helen Miksit, nicknamed the Bulldog for both her physical appearance and interpersonal skills, reacted sourly to seeing Heat. “More like son of Manhattan’s top cosmetic dentist, not that I owe you that explanation. In fact, thought I’d get in and out of here without having to deal with you.”

  “Do you ever return phone calls, Helen?”

  The lawyer paused, annoyed, then shouted through the open door to her client, “I’ll be right in. Howard, say nothing. You hear me? Say nothing.” Miksit pulled the door closed and turned to the uniform who had warned Nikki. “He have to stand here?” Heat gave the officer a smile and he moved on. “Detective, you’re a fucking pest. Two calls a day, sometimes more.”

  “All I want to do is have a short interview with Mr. Barrett.” Algernon Barrett, the self-made millionaire who’d emigrated from Jamaica and made his fortune as the chef-founder of Do the Jerk chicken rubs and spices, had also been one of Nikki’s mom’s piano clients. “Barrett may be able to help me locate two dangerous suspects I’m tracking down.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Heat. You remember when I was a DA and we worked together? I kicked cops with weak links like that out of my office on a daily basis so we wouldn’t have the judge kick me out of court.”

  “I’m not any cop, Helen, and I know you remember that.” Nikki saw that register with the lawyer and pressed her case. “I want two minutes to show some pictures. Look at the upside. I’ll stop calling you.”

  Helen Miksit pressed her lips together, as close as she ever came to a smile. “Tomorrow.” She stepped into Interrogation One. As the door closed, she said from inside, “Call first.”

  Heat found Rook and Detective Rhymer in the temporary command center they had set up for themselves in the booth Raley used for video screening. The two of them worked phones, calling retailers of the signature goods favored by Tyler Wynn. When Nikki asked how it was going, they looked up at her with the vacant stares of galley oarsmen.

  Rook said, “You know, it’s funny. A good idea seems so damned invigorating—until you actually have to do the work.”

  “It’s tedious, but we’ll get there,” said Rhymer, ever Opie in his optimism.

  “Let me catch you up,” said Rook. He moved to the giant presentation pad he had set up on an aluminum easel—complete with a status grid for each item. “So far, his bespoke shoemaker in Paris says Monsieur Wynn is not due for a new pair for about a year, according to his buying cycle. C’est dommage. The Barbour coat department at Harrods is checking with management before they will share customer information.”

  “I’ll call New Scotland Yard, if we need help,” said Heat.

  Rook’s eyes lit up. “Scotland Yard? God, I love this work.” As he continued with his list, he explained they were starting with calls to Europe and the US East Coast. They planned to work their way west along with the time zones. California, he observed, was still in bed.

  “I should point out one thing before you get in too deep,” she said.

  “Am I going to hate this?” asked Rook.

  “He may be ordering under an alias.”

  “I do. I do hate that.” He turned to Rhymer. “And I was so happy up till Scotland Yard.”

  On her way out, Heat said, “We’ve got a couple of Wynn’s AKAs in his jacket, but I’d also call your best friend the butler. Find out what other names he might have used.” She opened the door and pulled in Raley, whose hand gripped the knob from the hall.

  “It’s him,” he said, nearly breathless. “Your serial killer’s on line two.”

  She raced for her desk and grabbed the line lit by the blinking red dot. “Heat.”

  “Slow it down, Detective,” said the chillingly altered voice. “I called you, remember?” And then he laughed a joyless laugh. “Rainbow Killer, huh? Kinda like that. Red, yellow, purple, green. Green… Wonder who’s green. Do you wonder who’s green?”

  “Let’s talk about what’s going on here, OK?” She sat down and picked up a pen, just in case. “Who am I talking to?”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “I’ve got to call you something. You know my name. What about you?”

  “Sure, OK, how about you call me Fuck You? Because if you think you can work the psych bullshit on me by trying to personalize, that’s what I am. I am Fuck You.”

  “Come on, I was only—”

  “Rainbow, then,” he said, suddenly pleasant. “Yeah. Call me Rainbow. Fuck You Rainbow.” He laughed again and then cut himself off, turning ice-cold. “Think you almost got me yesterday at that fucking locksmith’s, huh? Think you’re smart?”

  “Smart enough,” she said, testing him with a bit of defiance.

  “Oo, the bitch pushes back.” He paused, and she could hear his electronically altered breathing. It sounded like Brillo. “Well, I’ll give you that one. Never had a cop this smart.” And then he added, “We’ll see pretty soon how smart. Think green.”

  Click. The line went dead.

  EIGHT

  Of course there was not one detective in that precinct who had not been thinking in colors. Wondering every moment who the other end of that green string connected to—bent on beating the killer there again like they had with the locksmith. The difference this time was that they not only wanted to spare a life, they really wanted this bastard.

  “Fuck you, Rainbow,” said Randall Feller when the detectives listened back to the recording.

  During the playback, Heat circled the o
nly note she had made during the brief conversation: “Nvr hd cp ths smrt.” She weighed those words and put in a call to the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Virginia. Nikki had worked several cases recently where she reached out for a Center assist. Dealing directly with the analyst she had befriended there felt different than the muck and mire she tried to avoid in dealing with the feds. This felt more personal. Her own Bureau boutique, FBI-Lite, she thought, and smiled.

  The NCAVC analyst told Heat she had already been briefed on the case, and indeed she knew just about everything, including the colored strings. Heat said, “We’ve run this string MO through our RTCC data banks, of course, but I want to see if you get any hits on something kind of new.” She recapped the call she’d just gotten and could hear a keyboard clacking on the analyst’s end of the line as she spoke.

  “Detective, can you send me WAV files of both those calls for me to scrub here?”

  Nikki told her she’d attach them to an e-mail right after they hung up. “Meantime, there’s a marker we haven’t run for cross-check yet. You’ll hear it yourself at the end of today’s recording. He said he’d never had a cop this smart.”

  “Oh…” The analyst felt the gravity of that, same as Heat. “I’ll bet you want me to look for intersections of serial homicides involving direct voice contact with law enforcement and get back to you with any hits.”

  “This is why you do what you do,” said Nikki.

  “Just helping the good guys, Detective Heat.”

  At first, Nikki thought it was a hallucination. The stress she’d been under, the crazy hours she’d been keeping, things like that could bring on an episode. She rolled her chair to peek around her computer screen. Across the bull pen, inside Captain Irons’s glass fishbowl, it looked from the back like… Yes, it really was… DHS Special Agent Callan shaking hands with Wally. Wally, rising wide-eyed from his desk. Wally, whose jaw had gone slack and whose mouth gaped like an oxygen-starved goldfish, to complete the full aquarium effect of his office. Then both men turned, and the captain’s face shaded crimson, as he extended a hand to greet the lovely female guest, Agent Yardley Bell.

  Frozen, Heat could only stare back when Irons gestured through the glass wall to the bull pen and the two federal agents turned her way. Nikki watched both of them smile at her. At least Bart Callan’s seemed genuine.

  A minute later Nikki sat in a guest chair in the fishbowl with Irons standing beside her looking superfluous. “If you need me for anything,” said the captain.

  “No, just your office will do it.” Callan looked around. “Unless you’ve got some other place we can meet privately.”

  Wally added, “There’s Interrogation, you could use that.”

  “We’re good here,” said Yardley Bell. They waited for Irons to read their silence. He gave a two-finger salute and left. Bell closed the door and leaned on it. Callan dragged a guest chair closer to Nikki’s and sat.

  “Am I becoming old hat?” asked Heat. “Because carjacking me to your warehouse in Queens felt a little more special.”

  Bell said, “Don’t feel ambushed. Agent Callan and I were in the area and thought we’d just drop in.”

  “Golly.” Nikki borrowed her credulous grin from Joey on Friends.

  “Wanted to ask you about Eugene Summers,” said Callan. “You and Jameson Rook spent some time at his apartment in Chelsea, and we were wondering why.”

  “Are you interrogating me? Seriously?”

  “Not at all. This is purely informational. We just like to close all the loops in our investigation.” He grinned. “Belt and suspenders.” He sounded about as credible as Bell’s claim about being in the neighborhood. Clearly, with this effort, they wanted something, and Heat told herself she’d better focus. As a skilled interrogator, she knew she needed to put her head in theirs and be them. What would she be after?

  The code.

  Could it be they were looking for the code? Or evidence one existed?

  “We obviously know Summers was once run by Tyler Wynn,” continued Callan.

  “So what did you talk about?” asked Bell.

  “Did you ask him?” Heat asked.

  “Kind of asking you,” she replied. Yardley gave Heat a soft stare, but the moment crackled with meaning. About dominance in the interview. And maybe about something else, too.

  “Naturally, I wanted to know if Summers had heard from him.”

  “And?”

  “He hadn’t.”

  “And what else?” Bell’s gaze didn’t waver.

  She knew the best strategy was to tell the truth. Since Nikki would never give up the code, she did the next best thing. She told a truth. “Tyler Wynn has very specific tastes, and we wanted to get a track on him through his consumer trail. We didn’t know how far to trust Summers, so Rook used the cover of picking his brain for a magazine article to get the specifics we needed.” Heat stopped there. She’d seen so many people over-talk when they were on thin ice, when the best thing to do is get off it—and fast. She sat back in her chair and let them work.

  “So this would be Rook’s version, too?” asked Callan.

  Nikki shook her head derisively. “Version?” She stood and asked them to follow her.

  The pleasure Heat hoped to get out of putting it in the agents’ faces by leading them inside Rook’s retail tracking center was quickly offset by his reaction to seeing Yardley Bell. And hers to seeing him. Nikki couldn’t write a clear caption to their expressions. Was it just the way old lovers looked at each other, or were these the smiles of unfinished business? She stepped right between them and said, “This is the makeshift command post Rook has set up with Detective Rhymer to pick up Wynn’s consumer trail.”

  “Quaint,” said Agent Bell.

  Heat said to Rook—and pointedly, “I was telling the agents how you and I met with Eugene Summers for the purpose of getting this enterprise going.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And we’ll see how polite the Maven of Manners is after he finds out his in-depth interview wasn’t for any article.” Smart. Even if Rook hadn’t picked up on her cautionary note, he knew enough to be circumspect.

  Yardley Bell said, “I’d like to see what your process is, Jamie.” She turned to the others. “Could you give us a moment?”

  Heat didn’t like getting split up. Not tactically, not personally. But when Rhymer slid out with his Diet Pepsi and half-eaten club, Callan held the door for Nikki. She hesitated and left, too.

  Alone again in the captain’s glass house, Heat said, “So, was divide and conquer part of your drop-in strategy?”

  “For the record, it wasn’t my idea to come here to brace you.”

  “Who’s running your case, Agent Callan?”

  “It gets complicated. It’s my office, my control, but Agent Bell packs major Beltway clout. She Bigfoots my whole day whenever she gets a wild hair.” He threw his palms open. “And here we are.”

  “This is why I told you I didn’t want to get tangled up inside your little investigative community,” she said.

  “I want to talk to you some more about that.”

  “You can save it.”

  “What if I said I agree with you?” He waited while she had time to absorb that surprise. “That’s right. I’ve been giving it some thought since our cocktails the other night, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be on this team.”

  She studied him warily. “Just like that, you change your mind?”

  “More like a change of heart.” He rolled his chin to the glass like he didn’t want an interruption. Or scrutiny, maybe. “Heat, I think I’m feeling a little personal about you, and that wouldn’t be good for a close working relationship.”

  “Right,” she said immediately, but then felt at a loss; not prepared for this, not at all.

  One teenage summer on Cape Cod she had gotten it in her head to teach herself to windsurf. Starting after breakfast and going until sundown, Nikki’s day did not
become the blissful, athletic sail she had envisioned. Instead, it devolved into a relentless series of crashes, spills, and wipeouts punctuated by mere seconds of balance until a sudden gust or rogue wave pitched her into another endo. Nikki stared at Bart Callan and wondered how her entire life had become like that day. Of all the curves she’d been thrown lately, of all the complications she had pulling at her, this one could be the most damaging. She sensed jeopardy if she mishandled this.

  “I didn’t want to say anything about it, but I know you sort of got the vibe,” he said, then waited for her to respond. She didn’t, so he continued, “I sure got it from you.”

  And there it was. The second wave, the blindsider. Had she flirted? She sure didn’t feel she had. Did she have a few “what if” thoughts? Who didn’t? As she regained her center, Heat knew exactly what she had to say. “Bart, you need to know something.” She made sure the eye contact left no ambiguity. “I am in a relationship now.” She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t tell him he was a nice guy or anything that might leave a door open or be subject to interpretation. For good measure, she added, “It’s important to me.”

  He nodded and said, “I hear you.”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  Then his gaze swept to the hallway where Yardley Bell stood in close conversation with Rook. “But let’s keep in touch.” He looked back at Nikki and said, “You never know.”

  As soon as her surprise company departed, Heat jumped back into the pressing business of hunting the serial killer. It wasn’t until nine that night, in the back of the town car he had ordered to drive them to his loft, that they were able to connect. “What did you and Agent Yardley talk about?”

  “If you’re wondering if I mentioned The Thing, I didn’t mention The Thing. Give me some credit.”