Deadly Heat Page 28

  Officer Slaughter said, “About one-thirty, the night nurse came in to take his temp. She didn’t realize it till later, but she had a pair of reading glasses in her front pocket he must have boosted when she leaned over to check his dressing.” The uniform indicated the eyeglasses on the counter.

  Rook bent over them. “Temple’s been snapped off the frame.”

  “Yeah, we figure he used the metal end to pick his cuffs.”

  Rook said, “He didn’t tear off somebody’s face to use as a mask to get out, I hope.” The three cops stared at him. “Spoiler alert: Silence of the Lambs?” Then he said, “Continue, Officer Slaughter.”

  “He overpowered an orderly when he came in, put on his scrubs, and waited for shift change so he could walk out past me.” The cop appealed to her, “I never saw him come in, so how could I know what he looked like?”

  Alone in the elevator, Rook said to Nikki, “I’m sorry, but if your name’s Slaughter, you ought to have a little more swing in your dick. Just sayin’.”

  “Glad you’re having such a good time,” she said. “I’ve got twenty-four hours to stop a bioterror plot, we still have nothing to go on, and my best hope to get a lead is my damned locksmith serial killer who just escaped. And you want to joke?”

  He paused and said, “I mean, if your name was Slaughter, wouldn’t you at least hit the gym?”

  Bellevue Hospital turfed to the Seventeenth Precinct, so on the cab ride uptown, Heat called Feller and assigned him to become best friends with the One-Seven detectives and to make sure Glen Windsor’s renewed APB extended to Amtrak, the airports, and the cut-rate buses in Chinatown. When she hung up, Rook said, “I’ve been doing some thinking.”

  “More gags for your stand-up?”

  “No, about the case. Jeez, what do I have to do to get you to focus?” Then he became sober and continued, “I don’t think you need this APB.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Rainbow is going to come to you.”

  “Right.”

  “Nikki, look at his pattern—and the evidence. Think of what you saw in your interrogation last night. Windsor is not just obsessed with you, he’s a full-goose borderline personality. Narcissistic, for sure, and I’ll bet grandiose. Clinically, that’s an ego that feeds on being the center of everything.”

  “So you’re saying I should just call off the search?”

  “No, I’m saying he’s going to reach out again like he did before. He has to. This is his moment, and he needs to engage you to claim it.”

  “Engage me, like when he said I brought his game to the next level?”

  “Exactly. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he won’t make contact. But, in case he does, I’d be thinking how to play him.”

  Heat said, “This is the thing I hate most. Playing games.”

  “You not only have to play this one, Nikki, somehow you have to figure out how to beat him at his own game.”

  This was the essence of Rook, she thought. Sometimes he wore the clown paint. Sometimes he brought the goods. “If you’re so smart,” she said, “why don’t you tell me how to do that?”

  He stared out his window a moment and then said words that echoed from a dream. He said, “You know.”

  Heat and Rook walked into a bull pen blanketed by a quiet as toxic as doomsday ashfall. The palpable tautness radiated from a single empty desk—the one with the “Detective S. Hinesburg” nameplate. Everyone continued his or her work, but with a hollow look, not so much from mourning as from disillusionment. Somehow one of their own had gone bad. It felt different than corruption; cops on the take were still as much a reality in New York as anywhere. This was different. This was treason inside the Blue Line.

  The lights were off inside the precinct commander’s glass office. Rhymer reported that Captain Irons had e-mailed saying he would be at One Police Plaza for an indefinite period that morning. The squad speculated whether he would ever be back, following his nightmare double-whammy. “Not a good day to be the Man of Iron,” said Detective Malcolm, with typically mordant understatement. “Bad enough he holds a press conference embracing a dude who turns out to be a serial killer. Now his office punch gets outed as a bioterror spy.”

  “Fail,” said Reynolds.

  “Epic fail,” added Feller.

  Raley and Ochoa came in from their all-nighter at Hinesburg’s apartment. Benigno DeJesus followed them in his navy evidence collection unit windbreaker carrying two cardboard boxes of items he and his crew had collected there. He said they were headed to the lab and then to Internal Affairs. But since he also had to bag and tag Hinesburg’s desk, he’d brought along the apartment boxes to give Heat a chance to look them over before they went downtown. “Just wear gloves,” he said.

  Rook and the squad gathered around as Nikki lifted the lids and carefully picked through the contents, replacing each in its carton following examination. She scanned the stack of open mail and bills, finding nothing useful. Underneath a toiletry kit of noncontroversial prescription meds, she found an evidence-bagged pocket pistol and held it up. “A Smith & Wesson M&P9 Shield,” said Detective DeJesus in his precise, curator’s manner.

  Through the cellophane bag, Heat examined the 9mm, a favorite for deep undercover work because of its subcompact size. Feller scoffed. “Hinesburg had backups for her backups—for all the good they did her.” Nikki pondered that thought then returned the pistol to the box.

  “Anybody check this computer?” she asked, holding up a brand-new laptop.

  Detective Raley hinged it open and, while it booted, said, “Spent a couple hours on it. Nothing juicy saved on the drive, that I could find. No maps, no calendar entries for Saturday. But she had a link to a cloud e-mail service with the ‘keep me logged in’ box checked, so I was able to access it. Mostly Web shopping receipts, but there was one sent e-mail Hinesburg must have forgotten to delete.” He paused while it loaded. “Check it out.”

  He turned the screen to Nikki, and she read it twice out of disbelief. The recipient’s e-mail address was some alphanumeric scramble, not a proper name, but the Web domain ended in .fr, signifying France. The subject line read: “Heat.” And the message itself said: “Arrives today. Hotel Opera, Rue de Richelieu.”

  Rook said, “That was our hotel. And the date she sent this is the day before you and I went to Paris last month. Where we met Tyler Wynn.”

  “Ready for the real smoking gun?” said Detective Ochoa, who excused himself and reached past Heat into the second box. He came out with a vanilla cell phone and held it up.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  Ochoa handed it to her. “Can you believe it? Genius actually kept the burner cell. Slipshod and half-assed to the end.”

  While Heat opened the Outgoing Calls list, Raley pulled a slip of paper from his vest pocket. “The last two outgoings match these phone numbers I pulled. They fit the times for the warning calls that went out to both Salena Kaye and Vaja Nikoladze. You’ll see there’s two other numbers in Recents. One was Tyler Wynn’s apartment. The other, I tried calling to see what it was but got a disconnect.”

  Heat said, “I recognize this number… At least it looks familiar.” With a furrowed brow she took out her own cell phone and scrolled a few seconds until she found what she was looking for. She grabbed her keys and raced to the door, calling out, “Roach, Feller. Get your cars and follow me—now.”

  NINETEEN

  Overhead space heaters recessed into the apartment canopy took the chill out of the morning air on the Upper East Side. Heat and Roach waited behind the potted firs that flanked both sides of the lobby entrance. A black luxury town car sat poised in the circular cut-stone drive with the engine shut off. Detective Feller had replaced the car service driver and the motor block ticked as it cooled. “Lobby now,” he whispered into his walkie-talkie. “Doorman first, suspect behind.”

  Raley and Ochoa nodded an acknowledgment to Heat from behind their cypress. She heard the automatic inner door of the vestibul
e slide open and put her hand on her holster. Then the outer doors parted at the shiny brass frame. The uniformed doorman led the way, waving the town car up for his tenant. As soon as the second man passed by, the detectives stepped in from both sides, bracing and cuffing him.

  “Hey! What the bloody hell is this?”

  Heat said, “You’ll be riding with us today, Mr. Maggs.”

  Carey Maggs sat with his hands clasped before him in a relaxed fashion on the table of Interrogation One. “You can’t simply detain me without cause. I may not be a United States citizen, but I am afforded due process.” He may have possessed the cultured air of Oxford and worn the bespoke threads of a millionaire businessman, but when Nikki responded to his protest with stone silence, the Brit reacted the way they all did when they were dirty, from gang bangers to sous chefs. His eyes roved to the magic mirror, either to wonder who lurked behind it, watching, or to check himself out to see how he was doing—or both. Maggs didn’t appear as uncomfortable with her silence as she would have liked, and he brought it back to her, sounding anything but fazed. “I’ve heard about these sort of bully-boy tactics on the news, but I must say, Detective Heat, I never expected this sort of grot from you.”

  “Well, I guess we all hold a few surprises.”

  “Perhaps you could end the suspense a bit and tell me why you snatched me up like some common criminal and brought me here.”

  Heat held her cards. Experience had taught her not to get ahead of things, to let this interview build, in spite of the crushing time pressure she felt. If she jumped right to the information she needed—the when and where of the bioterror event—Maggs would smell her desperation, and the power balance would tip to him. If she kept him worried about how much she already knew, he might give up more, and sooner. So Nikki didn’t answer his question. Instead, she adopted a detached mode to match his.

  A moment passed. She withdrew a photo of Petar Matic from the file in front of her. “When we last spoke on the telephone, and I asked if you could identify the man in this picture, you stated that you didn’t know his name but that you had seen him lurking near your apartment the week Ari Weiss stayed with you. The week my mother was murdered.”

  He didn’t bother to look at the picture. “That’s correct.”

  “You also said you were suspicious of him and called the police to report it.” He flicked his brows and shrugged, showing agreement. “We’ve run a computer check of records at your neighborhood’s precinct, the Nineteenth. There’s no record of any call, any complaint, any visit to your building.”

  “Maybe the police didn’t log it. Or, who knows…?” At last she could see the slightest fissure in the façade of calm as he improvised. “Maybe I didn’t actually call it in myself. I may have left it to the doorman, yes.”

  “Which is it, Mr. Maggs?”

  He shrugged. “Eleven years is a long time, love.”

  Heat smiled at the man across the table she believed had ordered her mother killed after she uncovered his terror plan. “You don’t need to tell me.”

  Her smile unsettled Carey Maggs. Heat liked that. But just as she was about to move to her next question, the door burst open and Bart Callan strode in followed by Yardley Bell. “Heat, we’re tagging in,” said Callan.

  “Excuse me,” said Nikki, rising. She opened her arms, gesturing them out.

  Carey’s eyes widened. “Who the hell are they?”

  Nobody left. Anything but. “I’m Special Agent Callan and this is Agent Bell, Department of Homeland Security. We have some questions for you about your terror plot.”

  As the words were spoken, she saw the look on Maggs, saw her carefully built sandcastle kicked over, and cursed to herself. “Agents?” she said. “Maybe we should take a moment?”

  Bell stood with her arms folded and glowered at Heat. Callan jerked Nikki’s chair over by its back so he could plant one foot on it and lean on his knee, looming over the table. “Let’s start by finding out what your number was doing on the cell phone of a spy we busted in a bioterror plot.”

  “Am I to understand you are accusing me of terrorism because someone happened to have my number in a phone?” He turned to Heat. “Fuck this, I want my lawyer.”

  Nikki called a time-out. They left Maggs to stew at the table and adjourned to the Observation Room. The shouting began as soon as the air lock closed.

  “How about a courtesy heads-up before you barge in on my interrogation?”

  Bell said, “You’re talking courtesy? Seriously?”

  “I looped you in about the arrest.”

  “An e-mail after the bust is not looping in,” said Callan.

  “Not looping in is what screwed the pooch at the helipad last night,” added Agent Bell. “We should have been there for the takedown. Not playing catch-up.”

  Heat pointed through the glass at Maggs. “His phone number was in Recents on Sharon Hinesburg’s burner cell. I didn’t want to lose him.”

  Yardley Bell moved nose-to-nose with Heat. “Bullshit. You made another unilateral decision to cut us from this process. From our own fucking case. Why?”

  “Because,” said Nikki, “there are too many moving parts.”

  “What’s that mean? You don’t trust us?”

  Heat didn’t answer. Just refused to blink. Callan finally spoke, in a more civil tone this time. “Let’s hash all this out later. We have a mission. What have you gotten from him so far?”

  Nikki stepped away from Bell. “Feigned innocence. I was just starting to piece him off when you came in.”

  Yardley stepped away muttering, “Jesus…”

  “All right, let’s be pragmatic,” Callan said. “First, he gets no lawyer.”

  “I guess I could invoke an Article Nine and hold him for a psych evaluation,” suggested Nikki. “I’d like to buy some time for my detectives to report back. I’ve got crews tossing his home and business, and Rook’s doing some financial digging.”

  “What kind of financial?” asked Callan.

  Before Nikki could respond, Bell jumped in. “Why are you farting around with a bogus psych hold, Heat? The National Defense Authorization Act allows federal officers to detain any terror suspect for an indefinite period, period.” She brandished the federal DHS badge hanging around her neck. “Now are we a team?”

  In their rekindled, albeit fragile, spirit of cooperation, Special Agent Callan dispatched his top forensic specialists to join Heat’s detectives at Carey Maggs’s apartment atop the Upper East Side high-rise, as well as at his brewery gastropub at the South Street Seaport. Much as in the searches that had been made at Salena Kaye’s SRO in Coney Island, Vaja Nikoladze’s compound upstate, and Sharon Hinesburg’s one-bedroom, they’d hunt for material evidence like computers, mail, and receipts, as well as sniff-sweep for bioagents.

  Saying he felt his “asshole puckering by the minute” as noon arrived one day before the bioterror target date, Callan also activated military resources to stop and search every truck coming into Manhattan, augmenting the spot checks NYPD had already initiated at key zones around the island. He also triggered the army and National Guard roll-out of the disaster medical apparatus they had discussed in the bunker at Homeland headquarters. The Fort Washington Armory uptown in Washington Heights plus the two armories at opposite ends of Lexington Avenue were being converted to vast indoor medical triage centers. Underneath the RFK Triboro Bridge, the soccer fields of Randall’s Island would quietly overnight become a military tent city for mass casualties.

  Higher-ups held to their decision not to announce the coming threat. “Without specifics, all it would cause is panic.” At that moment, everyone in that precinct knew what that felt like.

  They decided to let Detective Heat continue as lead in the interrogation. Unfortunately Carey Maggs decided to continue his pose of indignant innocence. Several hours into his genteel stonewall Detective Rhymer slipped into Interrogation One and passed Heat a file of research he had pulled from his bank canvasses. She perused
it and gave Maggs a look of significance. “Let’s talk about Salena Kaye. You recall Salena Kaye, right?”

  “By name I do. But only because you’ve been flogging on about her as if we should be mates. Wouldn’t know her if I tripped on her, as I’ve made clear.”

  “We know that Salena Kaye was busy lately contacting radical jihadists, searching for volunteers to martyr themselves. I called it volunteering, but she has been offering a hundred thousand dollars to the families of whoever signs up.”

  “If you say. I still don’t see how this has bugger all to do with me.”

  “One hundred thousand dollars. Where would a registered physical therapist like Salena Kaye get her hands on a spare hundred grand or two?”

  “Ask her.”

  “She’s dead. And you know it, don’t you?” Maggs kept his eyes passive during the silence that followed. His expression gave away nothing. “I want you to tell me. Whom did she hire and where are they?”

  “I guess we’re stumped” was all he said.

  Accustomed to the denials, she pressed on and held up a scanned page from the file Rhymer had brought her. “Just got some interesting information here. Salena Kaye’s personal account received a wire transfer for two hundred thousand dollars this week from a bank named Clune Worldwide Holdings.” She set that page down and took out the next sheet. “This is a copy of the receipt from the credit card Salena Kaye used at Surety Rent-a-Car the other day when she tried to rent a box truck. We ran a search and the line of credit was funded through Clune Worldwide Holdings.” She paused. No response, so she produced another page. “The personal bank statement of Sharon Hinesburg.”

  “Another name you insist I should know.”

  “See these yellow highlights?” She held the statement up; he barely gave it a glance. “These are one-thousand-dollar payments wired electronically into Hinesburg’s account from Clune Worldwide Holdings.”