Raging Heat (21 page)

“Got into some trouble for being trigger-happy for a UN peacekeeper—which I had no problem with—and so, when he got drummed out, we used him. Mainly for sabotage at first, then for our extraction teams in places I will not name, but you have seen on the nightly news. He had a lot of skills but, man, it was his temperament. The guy kept himself so mellow. I swear he pumped Freon instead of blood.”

Heat thought of her nickname for him and pictured Braun’s cool, casual air sauntering toward her on West Sixteenth. A trickle of discomfort ran through her and she wondered if her face registered the same uneasiness she just saw on Lawrence Hays. “Are you going to tell me if he still works for you or make me guess?”

“In my business you get a share of madmen acting out. That’s the life. Things happen in battle we can’t judge sipping mineral water in air-conditioned comfort. So there’s leeway. Zarek Braun, though. Braun is in a league of his own. I’m not going to run it all down, but during a covert action we were asked to spearhead called Operation Dream Catcher, we started getting feedback from the field about atrocities and some majorly diabolical shit. So, when I made a trip over there to our little hamlet in our undisclosed location, I had a sit down with him.” Hays tapped the photo on the table showing Braun passively emptying the gun. “This is what he looked like through the whole conversation. Long story short, I booted him. That night Zarek Braun set an IED in my base camp. Killed my best bodyguards.” The CEO stood and pulled up his black polo shirt to reveal a salad of pinched, discolored tissue, jagged scars, and disfiguration from burns. He let the fabric drop and said, “I don’t know where he is now.”

“You can find out.” Hays gave her a blank look, but she now knew it was personal with him so she pushed harder. “This guy is not only out there in the city firing assault rifles at cops like it was Kandahar, Mr. Hays, I need him for multiple homicide cases I’m working. You want him to pay? I can get him. Will you at least say you’ll help?”

Lawrence Hays considered, and Nikki thought just maybe she had reached him. But then he said, “I make it a point of never saying anything.” He pressed a button and the door automatically opened to let in their escorts.

Feller got out and folded in the side mirror so Heat could snug her car close to the Roach Coach when she double-parked outside the precinct. She was gauging the width of West Eighty-second to make sure she’d left enough room for traffic to pass when her phone rang. “Hey,” said Rook. “Can you meet me? I mean right now.”

R
ook was waiting for her just where he said he’d be, in the playground by the swing set. But not so much by the swing set as on it, and when Heat spotted him after her short walk down Amsterdam from the precinct he looked all of eleven years old with one heel planted on the ground, leg extended, pivoting from the chains. All he needed to complete the effect would be to play bombardier with his spit over an ant.

A troupe of marathoners left the running store across the avenue on a training run, and the slapping of their waffled soles on pavement drew his attention Nikki’s way as she approached. The late October sun had already set, kids were home having supper, and Tecumseh Playground was all theirs. The awkwardness of the prior night muted the greetings. He kept seated in his swing; she took the empty one beside him, leaving them to sway shoulder-to-shoulder but facing opposite directions.

“Hope you don’t feel too exposed here, but I wanted some neutral ground away from work, or your turf or mine.” Then he added, “And away from liquids. If you plan on dousing me, you’re going to have to push my face into that drinking fountain.”

Nikki wished she could laugh, but her soul felt encased in shame. “Not one of my proudest moments.” She offered that olive branch and studied him, trying to get a fix on his state of mind. She got it. His brow was set low and he wasn’t smiling.

“You know, you hit me where I live when you accused me of being out to undermine you.”

Nikki started to speak, desperate to get out ahead of this; to let Rook hear all she had been mulling about her behavior, not just the previous night, but everything leading up to it. If she could just come up with the words to make this right, maybe she could reset them to where they were before. But this was his meeting, and he had something to get off his chest, too. “It’s not easy pulling off the balancing act we do,” he said, echoing Lon King’s observation from that morning’s emergency counseling. “The job stress, the hours, the travel, the disagreements.…”

He paused and watched another wave of after-work marathon trainers set a course for Central Park. Heat didn’t speak, just yielded the moment, even though this conversation was feeling like the prelude to an ending—like the watershed after three years, with each making civilized promises to stay friends on Facebook. It didn’t make her feel any better when he finally continued. “But what I always counted on as our glue was the value we shared. And that’s trust. When you called my actions and motives into question on this case, you weren’t just going after my journalistic integrity, Nikki. You made a laser strike at who we are.” Salt stung her eyes and she wondered if she’d feel this same drill boring into her heart every time she passed this playground. But then he took an unexpected turn.

“Which is why I wanted to give you something that would symbolize our trust and cement it for the future.” Her chest fluttered as he reached into his side-coat pocket.

“Rook. What are you doing?”

“Something that can’t wait another minute. It’s why I called and said I needed to see you right away.” His hand came out of his pocket, but he wasn’t holding a jewelry box. It was a small Ziploc bag. “Ta-da.” He beamed triumphantly and held it before her. She looked through the cellophane and found no engagement ring in there. “You can’t see what this is? Here, I’ll hold it up to the light.” He dangled the bag so that it was backlit by the Chirping Chicken fast food sign, which had just come on.

She examined it, dumbfounded. “Is that…?”

He bobbed his chin. “That’s right. A bullet. But not just any bullet. A .38 caliber bullet.”

Thoughts of both a breakup and a marriage proposal sufficiently elbowed aside, Heat snatched the bag from him and pored over the mangled slug inside it. “Where did you get this?”

“After our little—shall we call it, dustup on the rooftop—I couldn’t sleep when I got home.”

“Me, neither, I was thinking all about you.”

“Yes. Ahem, I also was thinking about the case. Especially your theory about some kind of payoff happening at Conscience Point. So I thought, screw it. I got up and drove out there. Arrived about four
A.M.
Sat in that parking lot with my flashlight and thought to myself, if Fabian Beauvais’s gunshot was indeed a slicer, maybe, just maybe, the slug got lodged somewhere.”

“So you found a bullet? How long did it take you?”

“About nine hours. Dug this one out of the banister on the steps to the deck of the rec center. Detective Aguinaldo found a second one about an hour after she showed up.”

“What? Rook, I talked to her, she never mentioned any of this.”

“Because I made her promise to let me tell you. The one she found got nested in one of the shingles on the side of the building. Very soft wood, so that slug is pristine. She kept that one and sent it to the NYPD ballistics lab to run for you.”

“Any sign of the gun?”

“Boy, you want everything, don’t you?”

“No, I’m good. In fact, this is one of the nicest gifts you could have given me.” ‘One of,’ she thought.

“Comes at a price, though.”

“Yeah?”

“I want your trust. That’s what got me out of bed and driving a hundred miles to Conscience Point. To do what you would do. Follow the leads where they go, and let the truth be told.” He jiggled the bullet in the bag. “And even if I hadn’t found this, don’t you know you can always trust me?”

“Yes, of course.” Nikki drew what felt like her first full breath of the day. “I am so glad this is behind us.” She rested a hand on his thigh and noticed he didn’t respond. “…It is behind us, isn’t it?”

“I want back in the precinct. Divide and conquer’s one thing. But getting banished is how this weirdness got started.”

Nikki threw “Boy, you want everything, don’t you?” back in his face. She chuckled alone. He still hadn’t taken her hand. “I’ll talk to Captain Irons about letting you back in.”

“Good.” And Rook stood. “Let me know when, and I’ll see you there.”

“Seriously? Don’t you even want to get some dinner tonight?” He sucked in his lips, hesitating. “Rook, I thought we were moving forward from this.”

“We are. I’m just not in the let’s-get-together-tonight place yet. Just being honest.” Much as that stung, she understood. To think otherwise was to minimize the impact of what she’d done. Heat thanked him for the bullet and walked back to the precinct with it.

On her way up Amsterdam she turned and stopped, watching him walk the opposite way. How weary was Nikki of seeing his back?

Heat woke up the next morning alone, and feeling every bit of it. Her alarm was still ten minutes from ringing, so she opened the app to kill it with extreme prejudice, and while she did, her phone rang in her hand, startling her. The caller ID said it was Detective Raley.

“So. You do wake-up calls now, too?”

“This will help you rise and shine. We found Opal Onishi.”

The woman facing Nikki on the couch in Greenwich Village still had pillow marks on one side of her face. Opal Onishi balanced them out with the perplexed frown she gave Heat’s badge. “You said Homicide, right?”

“That’s my division, yes.” Nikki didn’t want to tip her yet that she’d found her former address in the purse of a murder victim. She’d hold it back until she got answers to a few preliminaries without that grim spoiler coloring things. So Heat redirected the subject. “I just have a few questions to ask and I’ll be on my way. Sorry to wake you up on a Saturday morning.”

“No problem. My roommate crashed with her boyfriend, so I was up anyway to feed her cat.”

“Your roommate, Erika?” Nikki always did her homework.

“Yeah, Erika. Is she in some kind of trouble? She’s not like a crazed killer like in
Single White Female
, is she?”

Heat said, “No, actually we only know of Erika because she works with you at Location Location. That’s how we found you here at her place.”

Opal, who was still in her mismatched Gap flannels from bed, cleared her throat and folded her legs, pulling her knees toward her chest. “You were looking for me?”

“We tried you at your old apartment.”

“Yeah, I moved out of there.”

“Quite suddenly.”

“Uh, right.” She lit a cigarette and waited for Nikki to say something, and when she didn’t, Opal filled the void. “Yeah, well, I had a bad breakup with my girlfriend. She was coming around all hours, you know, just being a bitch, so I…” Opal finished the thought by sliding one palm off another like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier.

“I know how that goes.” Heat poised her pen over her notebook. “May I ask your girlfriend’s name?”

“Ex. Do you have to involve her? She’s an actress on a movie that’s filming in town.” Again, Heat left a space. Opal Onishi filled it with a woman’s name that Heat probably didn’t need but wrote down anyway. What she really wanted to know was why Jeanne Capois had her address and if it was relevant to the murders. And why the sudden move? Nikki didn’t buy the harassing-lover story at all, and picked at that.

She appraised the living room of the East Village one bedroom, which was over-filled with cardboard cartons and stacked furniture. “Did you file any complaints against your girlfriend?”

“With the police? Nah. I just moved.”

“At midnight.”

Opal seemed smart and came up with quick answers. Some might even be true. “It’s easier to double-park a cargo van then. No traffic.”

Nikki decided to follow another course. “I’d like to show you a picture and ask if you can identify the person.” She placed an enlargement of the photo of Jeanne Capois on the coffee table. Opal stubbed out her cigarette and picked up the picture. Nikki couldn’t be sure if it was hesitation or simply an attempt at recollection, but she felt like it took a few seconds too long to answer.

“…Jeanne.” She offered the picture back. “Jeanne.” Heat let her keep it.

“Do you know her last name?”

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Sorry, but I only know her as Jeanne.”

“And how do you know her?”

Again, that fraction of waffling gained the detective’s notice. Opal said, “I hired her to clean. She’s a maid.”

Heat noted her use of the present tense. But still, why all the mulling for simple answers? “May I ask when she did housekeeping for you?”

“Gee, I’d have to think. I dunno, three weeks ago, last time?”

“How did you hear about her?”

A pause, then, “Through a service or something, yeah. I don’t remember the name.”

Nikki offered, “Happy Hazels?”

Quickly, this time, jumping at it, Opal said, “Yeah, that’s it. Happy Hazels.”

This was all feeling improvised so Heat kept at it. “Did you pay her cash or check?” A long shot, but a paper trail from a check register might be useful.

“Cash.”

“How much?”

“Wow, you bear down.” Then she searched the ceiling. “I guess, what, fifty bucks?”

“You tell me.”

“Fifty. Why are you asking about Jeanne?”

“She’s a victim in a homicide investigation.” Heat watched her reaction, always crucial, but especially when there’s a sense of something being off. Opal Onishi’s face grew slack and she sat, staring into the middle distance. To Heat’s mind, a strong response, considering the hesitation at recalling her name.

“Fuck…What happened to her?” Unguarded at last.

Nikki kept it in simplest terms, for now. “Jeanne Capois was found beaten and strangled on the street uptown.” She turned to a blank page, wanting to take advantage of the openness shock always brought. “When Jeanne came to your place, did she mention any threats against her?”

“No,” she said, low and dazed. She gave the same reply when she quizzed her about whether Capois seemed agitated, worried, or talked about being followed. Then Nikki brought out the photographs and sketches, She presented them, one at a time, to Opal, who had slid to a spot on the couch beside her. The young woman shook her head to each one: Fabian Beauvais—no; the four mercs who had attacked Heat a block from Opal’s old apartment in Chelsea—no; the gangstas in the ATM shot—no; Keith Gilbert…Hesitation.

“Opal, do you recognize him?”

“Of course, he’s that politician. Kind of a dickwad, if you ask me.”

“You have no other reason to know of him?”

“No, why should I?”

Heat smelled something here. Rather than jam her, she offered an escape hatch. “Opal, I talk to a lot of people in my job. And I sort of get a sense when someone is not being open with me.”

“Are you accusing me of lying?”

“I’m saying if there is anything you aren’t sharing, for any reason, this is the time to tell me.” She read her interviewee, sitting again with her back against the armrest of the couch with her knees pulled into an upright fetal position. “If you are afraid of someone, I can give you protection.”

Opal Onishi digested that but said, “I answered all your questions, right?”

At the door Heat gave her a business card. “In case you remember anything.” Or, she thought, watching her take it, if you decide to tell me why your hand is shaking.

Rook met Heat on the sidewalk outside the precinct at nine that morning. “What did Wally say?”

“Don’t worry about Wally, just come in.”