Frozen Heat (2012) (13 page)

“Maybe she had opportunities with orchestras over there in Europe,” Nikki suggested.

He shook no. “Nah. Cindy never auditioned for an orchestra here or there. Never got a recording contract. She just kissed it all off.”

“What do you suppose changed her?” Rook asked. “Was it Nicole?”

“Maybe. But not like a relationship thing. They were too into men.” He paused. “Except one, and you’re looking at him.” He smiled, then the dimples faded. “Something happened over there that summer. Cindy went away a ball of fire and let it all go cold.” His fellow orchestra members began to file in for rehearsal. Leonard stood and picked up his Members Only jacket off the back of his chair. “What I’d still give to have one ounce of your mom’s talent.”

Rook dialed the car service driver he had hired for the morning to let him know they were finished, and the black town car pulled up to Gate Three of the campus just as he and Nikki finished their short hike from the Copland School. “Tell you one thing I’ve learned,” he said when they had merged onto the LIE for the ride to the precinct. “The way he described your mom … driven, competitive, but nurturing? Professor Shimizu was wrong. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Rook, would you mind if we not?” Nikki lowered her window and closed her eyes, putting her face to the wind while she thought.

After a mile of silence, the driver said, “Mr. Rook? Since you were kind enough to get me a coffee, I picked up a paper, if you’d like to read it.”

“Sure, why not?

The driver backhanded the
Ledger
to him. Rook had hoped for the
New York Times
, but a little sensationalism never hurt anybody. At least that’s what he thought until he saw the headline on the front page of the tabloid. “Holy …”

Heat half turned from the window. “What?” Then she saw the headline herself and grabbed the newspaper out of his hands and read it, speechless with anger.

By Tam Svejda, Senior METRO Reporter

Heat folded the tabloid in half and slapped the seat with it. Rook didn’t often hear Nikki swear, but this might be an occasion. “Well this just sucks,” she said. Her jaw muscles knotted and her lips whitened from flexing them together.

He should have known better, but Rook said, “Well, it is factual, at least.”

“Don’t even,” she said. Then a thought came to her and she gave him an appraising look. And he knew why. They’d been down that road before with this reporter.

“No, I did not source that story to Tam Svejda.” Her gaze stuck, and it made him uncomfortable the same way he’d seen her make hardened suspects come unglued in the interrogation box. “First of all, when would I?”

“During your Google session in the wee hours this morning?”

“Ha!” He took the
Ledger
from her and examined the top of the front page. “Past deadline for this edition.” He handed it back to her. “Plus, why would I?”

That slowed her down but didn’t end it. “Well, you and this Tam Svejda, your bouncing Czech …”

“… Have a history, I know. Just because I slept with her a couple of times doesn’t indenture me to source all her stories.”

“You told me it was once.”

“True.” He smiled. “Meaning once upon a time. In a galaxy far, far away.” When she seemed partially mollified, he said, “Want me to call her?”

“No.” And then, after reflection, “Yes.” But her look said not really.

The earthquake was still managing to keep the city scrambling. The latest infrastructure fail forced their car to detour onto the Queensborough Bridge to get across the East River, because the Midtown Tunnel had been shut down by the Bridge and Tunnel Authority. The driver turned on 10-10 WINS, which reported that the closure was due to slight water ponding mid-tunnel from a mystery leak. “Leaks. Seems to be the theme of the morning,” said Rook. Nikki didn’t appear amused.

After dropping Rook curbside in front of the Midtown offices of the
New York Ledger,
Heat continued on to the Two-oh, where she entered to the buzz of her squad working its assignments. She spotted Sharon Hinesburg hastily closing an Uggs shopping window on her computer, boss-buttoning the screen to the fingerprint database homepage. “Missed you yesterday, Detective Hinesburg.”

“So I hear. It’s what I get for not plugging in my phone Saturday night.”

“No, it’s what I get, which is one of my detectives out of reach, and that cannot be. Are we clear?” Hinesburg answered with an overblown military salute, which, like most of what she did, irritated the piss out of Nikki, but she let it slide, point having been made. She assigned her to follow up on Nicole Bernardin’s phone records for any leads and moved on to her own desk.

To her disappointment, the pitch of activity in the bull pen was just the sound of wheels spinning. Every update she got—on fingerprints at the Inwood town house, on tracking her headhunter business to get a tax ID, on sports clubs, on credit card statements—all came up either empty, delayed, or devoid of useful leads. On any other case, she would have called on her wisdom and experience gathered over the years to remind herself that it’s impossible to see the trail until it reveals itself. She would remember that crimes got solved by hard work and patience. But this was not any other case. Even though she had succeeded in not only ID-ing the victim but finding a huge connection to her mom’s cold case, Nikki wanted to capitalize on the momentum, and immediately would be nice. A decade was a long time to be patient.

Rook came in with a grin to go with her latte. “You find out who leaked to Tam?” she asked in hushed tones after she drew him into the kitchenette.

“I did. And I didn’t even have to sleep with her to find out. I just tricked her by pretending I already knew. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Tam Svejda’s not the smartest one in the room, even when she’s the only one in it.”

“Very witty, Rook. Save it for your next article. All I want to know is who.” She scoped the area for privacy. “It’s Irons, right? So obvious.”

“Well now, there you go, running off on one of your cockamamie conspiracy theories.”

“OK, let it out; have your fun.”

He stroked his chin theatrically, relishing the opportunity to feed the great detective some of her own words. “I prefer to deal in hard facts rather than indulge myself with a mere crumb of a hunch.”

“Do you want to wear this coffee?”

“It was Sharon Hinesburg.”

Heat was still weighing how to deal with that information when Captain Irons called her into his glass office for an update. Even knowing he had a short attention span and simplifying her briefing to the broad strokes didn’t stop him from wandering off-topic, and early on. “Since I called you from Boston yesterday to tell you about what Rook and I learned about our Jane Doe and her connection to my mother, we’ve been focusing on anything we can learn about Nicole Bernardin.”

“Did you get any seafood up there?”

“Excuse me, Captain?”

Irons leaned back in his leather chair and his weight caused the springs to groan. “Man, I loves me my Boston chowdah. Legal Seafood’s a must on every trip.”

“Yes, they’re quite well known,” she said, but only to keep him engaged while she continued with the business of a double homicide investigation. “So, now that we have the Bernardin ID, we are tasked with following a series of new avenues. We have limited forensics leads from her town house, but we can track other aspects of her life through her banking, business and personal. These haven’t borne fruit just yet, but—”

“Was Rook doing any writing on your getaway?”

“Sir?”

“Any new magazine pieces in the mix?” Irons sat up in his chair to the twang of sprung metal protesting. “It’s just he mentioned the other day he might be doing something to follow up the other article, and I was wondering if he’d been on that, or not.” Maybe Irons didn’t have a short attention span. Maybe his attention was just stuck on other things. “You see my mention in the fish wrapper this morning?”

“Yes I did. In fact, sir—”

“You ought to show it to Rook. Let him see other reporters are nibbling at this, too.”

It wasn’t lost on her that Irons’s take-away from the piece was his own mention. “Rook is not only aware of the article, but he knows it was sourced by a leak, sir. Inside our squad.”

“Someone here slipped that to the
Ledger
?” Irons tilted his head and peeked over her shoulder through the big window that looked out onto the bull pen. “Know who?”

For anyone else, Heat would have claimed ignorance. “Detective Hinesburg,” she said.

“Sharon? You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Huh. Well, they had to get it from somewhere.” He took a pull from his coffee mug, seeming unfazed by the leak, and then confirming it after he swallowed with a loud gulp. “Probably a good thing it’s out there.”

“I disagree, Captain.” Heat didn’t like the look of self-amusement she saw after she said that, she but pressed on. “This case is at a stage where we don’t want it played out in public and have to deal with the circus that comes with that. Not before we have a chance to run down all our investigative threads.”

“Yeah? And how’s that going, Detective?” His smile made the wisecrack worse, in her view. It wasn’t just dismissive, it illustrated a closed mind-set.

“As I was just telling you—so far, it’s slow going. But to be realistic …” she said, then paused to give it emphasis, recognizing that her commander’s background was administration. His police experience came from quiet offices on floors numbered by double digits instead of street-level investigation. So she offered a version of the speech she’d given herself minutes before. “… to do this properly, we need to be patient, work it tenaciously, and understand that it’s still very early in this case.”

“Ha. This case has been ten years of stall.” He flicked his copy of the
Ledger
so it slid across his empty desk toward her. “The paper has it right. This thing ain’t cold, it’s frozen.” He stood, signaling the meeting was over. “Let’s air it out and see what a little publicity brings.” Sure, thought Nikki. Like his fifteen minutes of fame.

Sharon Hinesburg’s phone rang as Heat passed her. She heard the detective say that she’d be right in and saw her hurry into the captain’s glass cube, closing the door. Nikki sat to read a file at her desk, but couldn’t resist swiveling her chair so she could look over the top of it into Irons’s office. Roach came over to her.

“Just to let you know,” said Ochoa, “I came up zip on stalker complaints by Nicole Bernardin. Same with orders of protection. Nothing. Her hairdresser has Monday off, but he’s happy to meet, so I’m heading to his place in the West Village now to see what dish he has that might be useful.”

“Good, keep me up,” she said. But then the partners lingered, so she waited.

Raley cleared his throat. “I know you don’t go for gossip.”

“You’re right.”

“But this, you need to know,” said Ochoa. “Tell her, pard.”

“They’re sleeping together,” Raley said in his lowest whisper. He didn’t turn, but he let his eyes flick toward Irons and Hinesburg. Heat let her eyes drift to the pair in the office and saw Irons wagging a finger at Detective Hinesburg, but they both seemed to think something was funny. “On the way in this morning, I saw Wally drop her at the far corner down on Amsterdam so they wouldn’t walk in together.”

Heat remembered how she and Rook used to put on charades like that before they were a public item, but she said, “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“They kissed each other before she got out. And it was full-tonsil exploratory.”

Sharon Hinesburg falling off the grid Sunday and the media leak that had made Irons the hero now made sense in a way that got Heat angry. Angry at being saddled with Hinesburg in the first place. Angry that Irons had crossed the line with a squad romance. Angry that, as a result, a toxic dynamic had been created in her unit that jeopardized her case. And angry, most of all, at herself for not having seen it coming. But she took a beat and said, “You two know how I feel about gossip. So this goes no further.” And then she added, “But keep me posted.”