When she told the Southampton investigator what to look for, she asked, “Won’t I need a warrant?”
“Oh, right,” said Heat. “That’s my second favor.”
The other detective laughed and told her she knew just who to call. “That’s the virtue of a tight community.”
Nikki finished the conversation feeling fortunate to have crossed paths with Inez Aguinaldo, who, at each step, obliterated the cliché of the small-town cop. She placed the phone back in its cradle and rotated her chair so she could reassess the Murder Board on the other side of the squad room. The latest addition was a purple line drawn with an arrow from Zarek Braun to a new name in handwriting she could hardly recognize as her own: CAPT. WALLY IRONS.
Tilting her head, she peered into the darkness of his office. In the coppery glow of the sodium streetlamps spilling in the window, Nikki made out a familiar shape: the reflection, in dry cleaner plastic, of his media-ready, dress uniform shirt. The light began to slowly diffuse as in the form of a headless ghost-man; however, it was no apparition. Just a blur from bone-deep fatigue. The aura faded away and, the next thing Heat knew, a hand was gently rocking her shoulder while a voice from a distant tunnel asked her to wake up.
Her eyes popped open and she arched up in her task chair. Roach stood over her. “Sorry to startle you,” said Ochoa. “My BCI man just called. They’ve cornered Earl Sliney and Mayshon Franklin.”
The cobwebs dissolved and she got to her feet. As she grabbed her coat, Raley asked, “What about him?” Across the bull pen, Rook had his head down on a desk.
She called out, “Rook,” and his head gophered up. “We’re rolling.” Through his walrus yawn he called shotgun.
They convoyed with gum balls lit but no sirens across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn; Heat, Rook, and Feller leading Raley, Ochoa, and Rhymer in the Roach Coach. Behind them the Manhattan skyline set the low ceiling ablaze like a CGI special effect and the car got buffeted by forceful gusts advertising the imminent arrival of a hurricane.
Rook scrolled his iPad and called out occasional tidbits about the storm. “Whoa, with the freak convergence of meteorological factors and the full moon tomorrow night, they say there could be storm surges of eleven to twelve feet. Know what that means, don’t you? Ocean-view dining in Times Square.”
“If I have to sit back here,” said Detective Feller, “can I at least have some quiet?”
The silence that followed lasted a full ten seconds before Rook finger-swiped another Web page and horse chuckled. “Are there any fans of irony here? The Metropolitan Opera announced it’s canceling performances of The Tempest, due to—wait for it—the hurricane. Gotta love it.” Another burst of wind pounded the Taurus and he hollered at the window, “‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!’”
“Uh, Rook?” said Heat.
“Yeah?”
“First of all, that’s King Lear, not The Tempest. And second? Put a sock in it?”
“You didn’t tell me to put a sock in it when I hit Alicia Delamater with the old Zoo Lockup.”
“No, that was…That was timely,” Heat exited the bridge onto Broadway and looped back toward the East River passing Peter Luger’s.
“I was thinking you’d say ‘inspired.’ See what history gives us?” He twisted to Feller in the backseat and explained the bluff he had pulled out of the Nikki Heat playbook.
Detective Feller gave him a thumbs up. “I do the same thing to spook the amateurs, except I call it Cellmate Lice Buddy.”
“Ew,” blurted Rook. “I’ll confess now to anything.” Which made all three laugh, at least until they saw the roadblock of flashing lights up Kent Street.
At the staging area beside the defunct Domino Sugar plant on South Third, Detective Ochoa shook hands with Senior Investigator Dellroy Arthur. “Pleasure to meet you in person,” said the BCI lead. Heat immediately noticed the plainclothes detective’s badge, the state police’s distinctive “golden stop sign,” which had a mourning band across it just like hers. He told them all he was sorry for their loss, never mere words among the law enforcement brotherhood. Heat thanked him for the wishes and the solidarity, and then they did what cops do—got to work.
“Here’s how it came down,” began the SI. “NYPD got a call that someone had cut through the fence around the bicycle course they’re creating over there.” They all turned toward Havemeyer Park, a vacant lot that was in the process of being developed into a BMX pump track complete with moguls and dirt berms. “Patrol showed up and observed two men drinking beer and riding the course. The pair evaded the officers on their bikes, but the unis pursued and saw them enter that construction site.” Heat and her group pivoted up Kent, where the concrete skeleton of a ten-story building jutted up into the blustery night.
Heat asked, “What put them on your radar?”
“Simply put, shots fired. That brought out the incident squad from the Ninetieth, which interviewed the responding officers, who ID’d Earl Sliney as one of the perps based on our APB. His companion fits the general description of his known associate, Mayshon Franklin.” The state detective fired up his iPad and they gathered around while he stylus-walked them through the street map to indicate street closures and exit chokes. “We’ve got them boxed on the ground. Unfortunately in this wind we can’t bring air support.”
“How do you know they’re still in there?”
“More shots fired. They’re somewhere on an upper level from the round I heard.” Arthur laid out his plan, which was to employ a dual SWAT team pincer incursion, starting at ground level and clearing each floor to the roof. The construction company had e-mailed him PDFs of the architectural plans and he indicated each phase, and the timing, of each team’s movement so they didn’t cross fire each other. When he’d finished, the BCI man asked, “Any questions?”
“Just one,” asked Heat. “Can you take them alive?”
“Guess that’s up to them.”
If it hadn’t been for his customized vest, which proclaimed JOURNALIST instead of NYPD, Rook might have made the cut. But the New York State Police senior investigator was “not playing games,” as he put it, and the writer got ordered to wait at the staging area. “It’s my own fault. The bling did me in,” he said to Heat, indicating the two Pulitzer medals embroidered onto his body armor.
“Plus no badge, no gun, no training.”
“That’s right, rub my nose in your so-called superior qualifications.”
Heat and Feller joined the first SWAT team; Raley and Ochoa fell in with Team-Two. Dellroy Arthur had done his homework, radio communication was ongoing, and the incursion teams were first order. None of that minimized the danger of entering a dark construction high-rise at night with a howling wind obscuring sound and blowing objects at you out of nowhere while armed suspects—one, a killer who shoots old ladies—waited God knows where.
Methodically, over the space of thirty minutes, stairwells, elevators, air shafts, and port-a-potties were cleared on ten of the ten floors. That left only the roof. Air support would have made the job so much easier. Or a taller building in the vicinity that could put observers on its top floor. The teams waited at their entrance points on opposite corner stairwells for the go, when they would storm the rooftop simultaneously. After confirming readiness, the green light came.
They burst onto the surface and quickly found cover behind the bulky AC units on one side of the roof, and stacked metal crossbeams on the other. What they hadn’t planned was for Sliney and Franklin to be astride their bikes, pedaling like mad for the edge of the building instead of laying down fire. While Heat and each team ran at them shouting to freeze, she tried to picture the iPad map to recall how close the nearest building was. And how far down.
Whether they had some Thelma and Louise death pact, or had seen Matt Damon leap from too many heights into windows and make it, Sliney and Franklin sped forward
without hesitation. The men made no sound. No whoop, no rebel yell, no scream. They simply pedaled their fiercest until they ran out of roof.
Neither one hit the ground.
Coming off the ledge, it was clear they would not make the other side. Sliney must have realized that quickly because he made an X Games midair dismount and desperately wrapped both hands around the cable of the construction crane next to the building. In a wild junction of flashlight beams, they saw him grip it, but he wore no gloves. His momentum, gravity, and friction combined to skin the meat off his palms as he cried out in his horrific slide down the braided steel. The giant lift hook at the bottom of the cable stopped him. The point snagged under his jaw and tore his neck open wide, leaving him to swing lifeless, head thrust back, in the fifty-plus gusts.
An interrupted scream and metal-on-metal impact brought all the lights to whip below to the seventh floor. Mayshon Franklin had stayed with his BMX, but a burst of wind had thrown him back into the side of the building where he crash-landed atop the construction-site elevator. From what Nikki could make out in that light, it appeared the bike had bent around the hoist and its gear works with the rider blanketing it, spiked there by the handlebar poking up out of his lower back.
When Mayshon Franklin moaned, Heat called out, “He’s still alive,” and bolted for the stairs.
With Franklin living, but destined for prolonged surgery and complete sedation, Heat left Williamsburg when the OCME van transported Earl Sliney’s remains to the Brooklyn Borough morgue in East Flatbush at one-thirty in the morning. She insisted her squad get some sleep and to make sure their homes were buttoned up for the hurricane, a Category Two monster, just three hundred miles away at that hour. With a third-floor apartment in a protected block, Nikki felt reasonably certain her place would survive.
Just for peace of mind, she had put in an earlier call to Jerzy, her building super, and he cheerfully agreed to keep tabs on it. So instead of going home, she set out for the Twentieth Precinct to crash for the night. Rook had made use of his long wait in the staging area to check on his loft as well. Then he called his mother to make sure she was OK. After receiving a blustery vow that no piffling storm would dare take on Margaret Rook, star of Broadway, summer stock, and Sardi’s, he rode back to Manhattan with Heat.
He dozed against the passenger door. Heat craved sleep, too, but the task of holding her lane in the wind lash crossing the East River kept her plenty alert. It felt about the same as her trip over, but something new had been added to the swirl of skyscraper-devouring clouds and the buffeting of the car: a humid scent of the tropics. It made her reflect once more on inevitability. And how you can name a beast and even know it’s coming, but little can be done to stop it.
Early the next morning, after four hours of openmouthed sleep on the break room couch and then raiding her file drawer for the emergency wardrobe she kept there, Nikki made a breakfast of peanut butter on an apple she had sectioned. Rook came in looking too rested for a man who’d slept in an empty jail cell. He held two Grandes of Starbucks heaven. “Is that home cookin’ I smell?”
She slathered a slice of her apple and held it out. “Offer you a Pink Lady?” she asked, knowing full well she was setting him up.
“In a heartbeat, if we had more privacy. But hold the thought about the peanut butter.” He took the apple and they sat there in the lounge watching Channel 7’s coverage of Superstorm Sandy. “I liked it better when they were calling it the Frankenstorm,” he said. “Monster hurricane, Halloween…So what if it sounds too flip? I say, if we’re going to get pounded by a hurricane two years in a row, we’re allowed to laugh it off.”
He saw Keith Gilbert on-screen, live from the Port Authority Emergency Management Office. “Shutting up now,” said Rook, using the remote to turn up the volume.
“Landfall,” said the commissioner, “is predicted to come about twelve hours from now, give or take. Best guesstimate for location is still slightly south of New York metro, but that would still put the city and the harbor in the powerful upper-right quadrant of the cyclone. Port Authority is therefore closing LaGuardia Airport at seven-fifteen P.M. JFK, Newark Liberty, Teterboro, and Stewart International will remain open, but with all flights canceled. Maritime facilities are closed.…”
Nikki watched her prime murder suspect smoothly presenting his best face and virile composure in the looming crisis. As if reading her mind, Rook said, “You do know that all this macho chill only enhances his appeal as a candidate. Hell, watching this, it’s a shame he can only run for senate in one state. I’ll bet he could get elected from New Jersey, too. He’s a slam dunk.”
“Not everything is inevitable, Rook.” With that, she picked up her Starbucks and strode to the bull pen to get to work.
Her squad had already assembled when she got there. She invited them to coffee-up fast and then gather at the Murder Board. While they hustled out to empty bladders and re-caffeinate, her desk phone rang. “Peace offering,” were the first words she heard. It was Zach Hamner. “So, please don’t hang up.”
“Go ahead.”
“I just processed an order to relieve you from duty.”
Nikki sat on the edge of her desk. “Am I being dense here? In what world is that a peace offering?”
“Because I am turning this over to your precinct commander.”
“I don’t have one. He’s dead.”
“That’s my point. But you will have one tomorrow. An interim white shirt they’re plucking from cubicle land. This order to place you on administrative leave came through my office from the deputy commissioner of Personnel. But you know how it works here in the Puzzle Palace. Somebody else squeezed somebody else’s balls up the food chain, and, suddenly, you’re tapped for the sidelines.”
“What sidelines?”
“Specifically, your orders are for desk duty on Staten Island, TFN. So that is my peace offering to you. A gift of twenty-four-hours’ notice.” The implications took a lap in Nikki’s head. Gilbert or his lawyers got to somebody at City Hall or One Police Plaza, and this is the monkey wrench that got thrown in to the gears of her case.
“Heat, you still there?”
“Uh, yeah, I’m just sorting out what to do.” And how fast she needed to do it. She looked at the wall clock and became short of breath. “This is good info to have.”
“I thought it would be.” He paused, then continued, sounding small and contrite. “And sorry I said what I said. You know. About Irons being a boob. That was totally douchy. I apologize.”
Funny thing, she thought. Boobs can become heroes and assholes can show some heart. “Thank you, Zachary.”
“Gentlemen, we have not a minute to waste,” Detective Heat began when everyone had formed a semicircle. She recapped the heads-up call from The Hammer, which elicited universally pissed-off faces and a smattering of curses. Nikki called a halt. “I’m with you—obviously more so—but getting mad isn’t going to help.”
“This won’t shut the case down,” said Feller.
“Really,” said Ochoa. “Do they think we’re just going to drop it because you go to Staten Island?”
Heat said, “Of course you are capable of keeping it going. Especially this group. But we need to see this for what it is.”
“Round one,” said Rook.
“Exactly. This is the opening salvo in an orchestrated legal and power offensive. The idea is to dismantle progress one piece at a time and, eventually, to ‘make it go away.’”
She took a moment to register contact with each of them. “We can’t let that happen. This case has been a difficult one from the start. A lot of contradictions. A lot of conflict—even in here. Which is fine. It’s what you get with cops who have passion. I want that. But now we have entered a new phase.” She walked to the board to point at Captain Irons’s name up there as a murder victim.
“We need to drill down.” Nikki turned to
look at his name again and milked the silence. Then she selected a new red marker from the cardboard sleeve. “This squad has twenty-four hours to be brilliant. Twenty-four hours to live up to its reputation as the top-clearing homicide squad in the NYPD.”
Heat opened the red marker and used it to draw a circle around her earlier translation of Fabian Beauvais’s tattoo: “Unity Makes Strength.” Then, in that same red ink, Nikki divided the board into four equal quadrants. She wrote a name in each, going clockwise: “Raley. Ochoa. Feller. Rhymer.” Capping the marker, she squared herself to her detectives. “Your assignment today is to examine every case detail inside your square. If you aren’t the detective who brought in the lead, become familiar and dig into it. If you did bring it in, go back over your own work and be critical. ‘What did I overlook?’ ‘What didn’t I ask?’ ‘Who didn’t I talk to?’ ‘What do I know now that I didn’t then that opens new lines?’ Talk to each other. If you have an expertise or hunch, poach that item from your colleague and run with it.”
Their attention was rapt and she took advantage of it. “Four victims: Fabian Beauvais, dropped from the sky; Jeanne Capois, tortured; Shelton David, home invasion victim; Captain Irons—line of duty. This is a bear of a case on the worst day to work it. But we all know that the solves don’t get handed to us. They come by donkeywork.” She tapped the whiteboard. “Something already up here could bring this home. Be diligent. Be thinking. Be cops.”
The squad flew into its work without hesitation, all of them going to their desks, except Rhymer, who lagged behind to faithfully copy the items listed in his box into his notebook. Raley, the media king, brought his iPhone to the mix and made a photo capture of his section. In short order, the bull pen filled with the buzz of investigators working phones to call back eyewits, confer with other divisions and precincts, and to debrief each other about leads and clues. Heat worked as liaison and free-floater, connecting thoughts and waving off the obvious time wasters. Rook self-directed, cherry-picking from the board and free-associating on Internet searches.
Raging Heat Page 25
