Driving Heat (11 page)

“The Spliff?” asked Rook.

“Roach,” explained the detective with a sneer of condescension.

“Ah…a nickname for a nickname.” Rook nodded and smiled. But then he twisted around to one side of his headrest to address Nikki. “But why do this to you?”

“I think it’s kinda in the diagnosis,” she said. “Paranoid personality disorder?”

“But wait a minute. It was my loft he was outside of in the middle of the night. You don’t suppose he’s got some fixation on me because I took him down, do you?” When
Feller cackled, Rook shot back, “That’s right, Randall, I took him down. And now, he’s put me on his crazy payback list.”

“But it was her car.”

“Let’s all be clear, I’m not sure it was Maloney I saw. And whether it’s me or Rook or both of us he wants to hassle, I say, bring it on.”

Roosevelt Island takes some work to get to, which is part of its appeal.
The needle of land in the middle of the East River has one F
train subway stop and an aerial tramway hoisting passengers across the river from 2nd Avenue. But if you want to arrive by car, the only option is to drive over the bridge from 36th Avenue out of
Long Island City. Detective Feller’s Taurus came off that span and made the turn north on Main for the quarter-mile ride to Blackwell’s Landing, a luxury apartment tower on the
island’s north end.

They found a spot beside the pair of patrol cars in the parking lot and walked a flagstone path lined by daffodils and tulips toward the lobby. “Definitely a two-income building,”
said Feller, taking in the neatly groomed lawn, the blossoming trees, and the whisper-quiet grounds that surrounded the high-rise of tinted glass and modular concrete panels. Like most of the
residential complexes on the island, this one felt like a suburban college campus or an Olympic Village.

The concierge regarded their badges gravely as they entered and escorted them across parchment-colored terrazzo tiles to the elevator, saying only “Tenth floor,” in a tone of
profound sadness that could only have come from hospitality training.

When Heat and Rook stepped into the elevator, Feller palmed the door open from the outside. “Listen, you got it from here, right?” He punctuated the remark with a glance toward Heat
and added, “I got a thing I gotta do.”

“Yes, the thing,” she said. “Go to. We’ll find our own way back to the precinct.”

“Oh, but I’m not going to the precinct after,” said Rook. “I, too, have a thing.” The buzzer started to protest their holding the door open. “Never mind,
I’ll work it out. See you, Randy.”

As the elevator door closed, they heard Feller mutter, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

A sergeant from the Public Safety Department let them into the apartment. Because the city leased Roosevelt Island to the State of New York, the crime scene fell under its jurisdiction, and Heat
was there as a guest. After she had badged and logged in, a Roosevelt Island Public Safety Department detective led her and Rook from the foyer to the living room, where they found Sampson
Stallings hunched forward on the couch with his back to them. The room was a sunlit and airy showplace with a high vaulted ceiling and broad windows that looked onto a breathtaking panorama of the
river and the Upper East Side to the west and the landmark Octagon to the north. Both views were lost on Lon King’s partner, whose head hung in grief.

Stallings rose to shake their hands and invited them to sit. Heat, who had her own connection to violent loss, expressed her condolences, which only caused his bloodshot eyes to glisten anew. He
smiled bravely, but his lips, framed by the tight salt-and-pepper curls of his goatee, quivered, betraying the miserable imprint of heartbreak.

Rook stayed out of the conversation, letting Nikki lead Stallings to share reminiscences about his life partner of a decade. Business would come soon enough; she understood that every
investigation had a heart, too. “Thank you for listening to me go on,” he said, plucking a tissue from the box on the coffee table, which caused Nikki to observe that Lon King had set
up his living room a lot like his practice, right down to the Kleenex placement. “It feels better to talk.”

“A page out of the Lon King playbook.”

He gave her an appraisal. “You knew him?”

She smiled. “Probably more accurate to say he knew me. Dr. King didn’t give up a lot.”

“You should have tried living with him.” Stallings let out a laugh, then retreated from it as if in shame.

“So he never mentioned me?” When he shook his head no, she said, “What about other patients, clients…”

“No, as I mentioned to the detective yesterday…”

“Detective Aguinaldo?”

“Yes, nice woman. As I told her, Lonnie was very discreet. Oh, once in a while, he’d share a story—a doozer, he’d call them, usually funny—but never a name. It
wouldn’t have meant anything to me, anyway.”

“He never mentioned them, even if they threatened him?”

“Lon kept it all locked down, you understand?” He made a tamping gesture with his slender artist’s hands.

Rook joined in with a question that seemed to Heat more than just something out of left field. “Sampson, did Lon ever mention someone offering him money to talk about his clients or
cases?”

“Well, he had some serious debt issues, we know that. From his gambling. But he would never, never cross an ethical line and sell out his patients.”

“I believe that,” said Rook. “But my question is, did anyone ever try to induce him to?”

“Not that I know of.”

Rook nodded to Heat, signaling that was all he wanted to ask. His question gave her pause. Why the hell was he sniffing around a potential bribe? Was this related to some critical piece of
information he was holding back on? Her anger started to rekindle, but she set it aside. Something to deal with later. Nikki brought the conversation back to her own agenda.” Do you mind
going over what happened this morning again?” Stallings shook his head no and sipped some water from a CamelBak bottle. Heat gestured to the RIPSD man sitting on the bar-stool near the
kitchen. “I know you already told the detective.”

“That’s fine, I understand.”

“The report I got was that you confronted an intruder here?”

Stallings nodded and gestured to the running clothes he was wearing. “This morning, I got up and laced up my New Balances.” As if to excuse this self-indulgence, he explained,
“We all handle our shit differently. When he got stressed, Lonnie paddled. Me, I pound pavement. He used to call it my cleansing run. So I went out, did my route—well, as much as I
could.” His lip trembled again. He diverted their attention by gesturing across the river. “I do a circuit from here to the tram to warm up, then along the East River Walk over there
just past Gracie Mansion, and back. It all came crashing down on me on the tram and I couldn’t stop weeping. I got off and hopped on the next one back. When I went to put my key in the door,
it was ajar.” He measured a quarter inch with his thumb and forefinger. “I thought, maybe I got distracted from the trauma and all, and got careless, but when I pushed the door, some
guy’s right there. He trips me and shoves me to the floor and books it down the stairwell. I’m pretty fast, but by the time I got it together to chase him, he was gone.”

“And nothing’s missing?” she asked.

Stallings shook his head no. “Before you arrived, the detective and I did a walk-through of the whole place. I don’t see anything disturbed, and the burglar didn’t have
anything in his hands.”

Nikki asked him for the beginning and end times of his run and, after she made a note, asked, “You called it your circuit. Was it your routine every day?”

“Yeah, five days a week. I’m sort of compulsive about it.”

“So, it’s possible,” said Rook, “that someone was watching this place to get to know your routines and thought he had time to get in and out. But you surprised him by
cutting it short, and he didn’t have time to get what he wanted.”

“Or he got it, and it was in his pocket,” added Heat. “Do you know where Lon kept his flash drives?”

Stallings escorted them to the second bedroom, which was King’s office on one side and Stallings’s painting studio on the other, and which smelled pleasantly of resin and oil paint.
At the desk, he reached to open a wooden Levenger box, but Heat stopped him and gestured to the RIPSD detective, who was already wearing gloves. He lifted the lid. The box was empty.

“He kept a dozen or more thumb drives in there,” Stallings said. He surveyed the desktop. “His iPad Mini’s missing, too, now that I really look.”

“Our lab will dust soon as they get here,” said the detective. “And ask Mr. Stallings to write up a methodical inventory.”

Stallings drew his brow low, trying to digest the concept. “Why would someone be watching this place, our routine, coming in here? He was the man who killed Lonnie, wasn’t
he?”

“Mr. Stallings, is this the man who was in your apartment?” Heat brought up Maloney’s pic on her BlackBerry and held it out for him to study. The RIPSD detective moved closer
to shoulder-surf it.

“No, definitely not him.” But when Nikki started to take her phone away, he said, “Wait, wait.” He examined the picture again and handed it back. “I have seen him,
though. Lonnie and I went out for duck last week at Le Colonial, you know, on East Fifty-Seventh? We had a window table, and I saw a guy walk by—this one—and start staring in from the
sidewalk. When Lon spotted him, the guy just made that double finger point thing to his eyes, and left.”

“Did Lon say who he was?” asked Heat.

“All he said was ‘ex-client.’” He snickered. “Paging Dr. Taciturn. I used to tell him that if he was any more chill, I could use his face as a canvas.”

“His name’s Timothy Maloney. Did Dr. King ever mention that name?”

“Not that I recall.”

Heat turned to the Roosevelt Island detective. “He’s ex-NYPD. I’ll email you this pic and his sheet. Meanwhile, we should get out a description of the intruder.”

“Going to need some NYPD co-op, Captain, if you don’t mind. The building’s cams are down for upgrade and we don’t have a sketch artist.”

Nikki turned to Sampson Stallings. “Actually, I believe you do.”

Smiling his first true smile in a day, one fueled by purpose, the renowned portraitist sat at his drafting table, opened his Strathmore pad to a fresh page, and began work on what could be his
greatest work of all: the one that could lead to his partner’s killer.

Sampson Stallings worked with silent intensity in flowing, sure-handed strokes. Heat had to fight the same urge she battled whenever she walked by the row of souvenir street caricaturists on the
east side of Central Park; the overwhelming desire to stand behind him and stare over his shoulder. But she respected the artist’s solitude and, in mere minutes, he had finished. Stallings
carefully tore the sheet off his gummed pad and presented it to the detectives. As Rook came up behind Heat for a glimpse, both reacted immediately. “It’s him,” said Rook.
“The dude we surprised in the basement on York Avenue.”

When they got back to the lobby, Rook admired on his iPhone the photo
Heat had just broadcast of Stallings’s intruder sketch.
“You know,” he said, “if it weren’t for the grief part, I would have asked Sampson to give me the original. With a signature, of course.”

“Nice. The day after his partner is murdered.”

“I did respect the grief part, remember? I distinctly said that. Why are you being so crispy with me?”

“Because you’re being so—obstructive.”

“How? What did I do?”

Nikki clenched her teeth, then thought, No, out with it. “Your question about King getting offered a bribe.”

“That was a perfectly proper question.”

“You’re not working with me, Rook. No, worse. You’re working against me. If you know something, share. What’s more important, your article or finding the
killer?”

As he pondered his answer—hesitating in a way that further pissed Nikki off—his phone chimed. He checked the screen and grinned. “My Hitch! is arriving.” They turned
toward the street, where a giant plastic thumb could be seen approaching, floating above the trellises in the community garden. “I push a button, and a car comes. This could be what the
Internet is all about.”

“So you’re not going to help? Not going to answer?”

“Nikki, this is all going to work out for both of us, you watch. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some legwork to do.” And then he was gone. Without a hitch.

“What do we know, Miguel?” called Heat from the doorway as she strode
into the homicide bull pen. Detective Ochoa snagged
a deli coffee from his desk and met with her at the Murder Board, which she scanned for fresh ink.

“All right, as you can see we have the sketch you just got from Sampson Stallings out to all units, plus media.”

“I knew that when I sent it out,” she said, making a mental note not to send her anger at Rook sideways to others. Especially not Ochoa. A little more softly, she asked if he agreed
that this was the runner they had encountered the day before charging out of Lon King’s medical tower.

“Most definitely. Oh, and since you wanted to hear something you didn’t know…” His cheeks dimpled—obviously he was slightly amused by his little bit of
pushback—then he continued, “An eyewit on York Ave gave us a partial plate on that MKZ he fled in. Crunched it down and traced it to a gypsy cab reported stolen from East Harlem
yesterday morning. Traffic Division spotted it, abandoned, blocking a hydrant down in the Alphabets.”

“Any chance for prints?”

“Forensics is dusting now. It’s going to take some time to isolate all the prints. They said it was like
Hands on a Hardbody
down there.”

“Well, we now have a face to go with those hands. Maybe we’ll get a positive. What about Tim Maloney?”

“Still no handle on him, Cap,” he said, addressing her by rank for the first time. “We’ve still got units watching his place, but no activity. I even sent a bogus mail
carrier to knock on the door. Nothing. He could be in there, just trying to jerk our chains, but we can’t go for a warrant.”