In the meantime, she would have to stay quiet about what she had found. If she brought this out into the bull pen right now, it would only create confusion and take their investigation down a blind alley. She couldn’t let the other detectives see this.
Because if she thought like a cop—rather than like a wife and a lover—she would have instantly shoved Jameson Rook to the top of her suspect list, even going so far as to issue a warrant for his arrest.
Heat dabbed her eyes on the sleeve of her blouse, sniffed back the mucus that was trying to run out her nose, and spit one more time in the trash can. She stood and walked over to where she had left the scarf.
Then, before she tossed the bag back in the corner, she took the scarf and stuffed it inside, knowing no one else would ever think to look for it there.
If anyone saw Nikki Heat sneaking off to the bathroom with a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a plastic garbage bag with vomit sloshing around in it, they didn’t say anything.
Maybe they were too busy to notice. Or maybe they felt like vomiting themselves.
They had reason to. Six o’clock had passed—less than six hours until the terrorists’ deadline—and they still didn’t have a single credible lead.
The SWAT teams sent to survey—and possibly move in on—suspected terrorists had, by that point, come back empty. Raley was getting nowhere with the video. The Evidence Collection Team had culled a tremendous amount of nothing from the SUVs. The only fingerprints they found belonged to Rook and Aguinaldo.
The teams of detectives they had canvassing Central Park, in the hopes someone had seen the transfer from the black SUVs to the new “clean” vehicle or vehicles, had so far yielded nothing. The Computer Crimes Squad was also reporting a null result.
The tips line had continued fielding calls, with spikes in activity as the segment featuring Heat’s press conference led the news at both five and six o’clock. Aguinaldo look-alikes had been spotted in all five boroughs, often sitting idly in pizzerias, window-shopping on the street, or walking a dog the real Aguinaldo did not have. There were fewer Jameson Rook sightings. He was well known enough that people tended not to get him confused with random civilians.
Desperation had settled in. New theories were thrown against the wall in hopes they might stick. None did. Muharib Qawi, the Masjid al-Jannah imam, had come in and was serving as a kind of on-call Islam expert. Yet nothing he said was helping.
There was plenty of door slamming, wall punching, and desk kicking. And while it may have momentarily relieved frustration, it was also not helpful in the long run.
It had reached the point that, at five minutes to eight, when Heat’s phone rang, she snatched at it so violently she nearly dropped it.
“Heat,” she said, barely even looking at the incoming number.
“Hello, Captain. This is Jen Forbus from Lorain. You called earlier?”
Forbus sounded more subdued than she had earlier. There was no hint of the cheerfulness that had been in her voice before.
“Yes. I was wondering if you had a chance to track down those men who Tam Svejda exchanged numbers with.”
“I did and I didn’t,” Forbus said.
“What does that mean?”
Forbus took a moment, like she didn’t know where to start. “Tam got the numbers of six guys,” she eventually began. “I spoke with three of them, and they said she never called. One of them said she called but he never called back. He said he felt like she was up to something and he didn’t want to be a part of it.”
“Up to…what?”
“He wouldn’t say. I think once he sobered up in the morning, he realized Tam wasn’t interested in him for the same reason he was interested in her. And he thought Tam wanted him to do something…well, I’m not sure if it was illegal. But it sounded like, whatever it was, he didn’t want to do it. I tried to press him for specifics but he didn’t really have any. He just said he felt like she was trouble, and he didn’t want any trouble.”
“Okay,” Heat said, “what about the other two?”
“One said Tam called and left a message and that he called her back. But then he never heard from her. And the final one…”
“What?”
Heat heard Forbus breathe deeply on the other end of the line.
“He’s missing,” she said.
“Missing? As of when?”
“No one is quite sure. His name is George Lichman. He’s a single guy, no kids, lives by himself. His parents are in Elyria, which isn’t far. He normally comes around for Sunday dinner and when he didn’t do that, they called him and didn’t get an answer. By Tuesday, his father went over to the apartment, which is in Vermilion, the next town over from us. The father said his son wasn’t there, and neither was his car.”
“Did they report him missing?”
“No. The dad said George hadn’t been particularly happy and had been saving up money so he could leave his job and do something else—maybe go back to school so he could be a cop, if that’s not ironic enough. The family figured he must have just taken off and was going to call when he was settled somewhere new. I think when I showed up and started asking questions was the first time they got really nervous.”
“Were you able to go over to the apartment?”
“That’s actually where I started,” Forbus said. “I had the super let me in, and nothing looked out of place. But it also didn’t look like he had left for any long trip. The closet and drawers were still full of clothing. I talked to some neighbors. They weren’t exactly sure the last time they had seen him, just that it had been a few days. They were garden-style apartments, so everyone had their own entrance and kind of kept to themselves.”
“Is it possible he disappeared on Friday, the same day as Tam?”
“That was the theory I was trying to nail down,” Forbus said. “I can’t say I confirmed it. But I also definitely haven’t ruled it out. It seems pretty certain no one has seen him this week or over the weekend. As for when in the previous week they had last seen him, everyone’s recollection was a little hazy. Sorry I can’t be more precise.”
“No, I understand,” Heat said, having talked to her share of neighbors with imperfect recall.
“I’ve told the family I’ve added him to our Missing Persons database,” Forbus said. “But between you and me, I’m operating as if we have another murder on our hands.”
Heat took a moment to mark the memory of George Lichman. It wasn’t quite her full ritual, being as it wasn’t her case. But she still felt like she needed to honor him.
“There’s one other thing I came across that might be of interest,” Forbus said. “I tracked down the last guy to be with her at Grown and Sexy, which was the last place she visited during her bar crawl on Thursday night. This was the guy who walked her to her car and then walked back into the bar.”
“Oh, right.”
“He admitted right away he was hoping his act of chivalry might be rewarded in some way, even it was just a little hug or something. He got nothing, of course. But he said as he was walking away he saw something in the back of her car that caught his attention.
“Now,” Forbus continued, “he admitted this was several drinks into the evening, but he was pretty adamant about what he saw. He said she had a self-contained breathing apparatus in the back of her car with a couple of extra air tanks.”
“Like…scuba equipment?”
“No, scuba throws in the element of being underwater—that’s what the u stands for. This is for when you’re above water.”
“And what was she doing with that?” Heat asked.
“Search me. The guy said he recognized it because he had used them before. OSHA is a lot tighter than it used to be about requiring workers to use a self-contained breathing apparatus for certain jobs.”
“So was Tam planning on using it at the mill somehow? Or…”
“No clue. I just thought I’d mention it in case it makes sense with some other part of your investigati
on.”
“I understand. Thank you,” Heat said.
Except she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all.
They wrapped up the call with promises to keep in touch. Then Heat walked over to the murder board. She drew a line to Tam’s name and then the words self-contained breathing apparatus.
Then she paused over the punctuation. Very deliberately—because it seemed to neatly sum up everything at the moment—she turned the period into a question mark.
Confucius once said, “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
It was great wisdom—for a fortune cookie.
For the detectives of the Twentieth Precinct, who knew all too well what would happen at the stroke of midnight, it was little solace. Stopping was not an option in their thought process. Neither was slowing down.
And yet, as the hours until midnight grew smaller, they still had nothing to show for all the doors they’d knocked on (or down), all the empty leads they had followed, or all the energy they had expended.
Heat purposefully did not look at the clock on the bull pen wall. It felt too much like admitting defeat.
Instead, she had taken to doing two things, over and over again. She would go to a computer where the precinct’s main e-mail in-box was up and hit refresh. When that yielded nothing, she returned to the murder board, sure that if she just looked at all those lines and circles, they would coalesce into a whole she had not seen before.
At ten o’clock, another news broadcast brought in a new flurry of “tips,” none of which materialized into anything real. At eleven o’clock, the cycle repeated itself.
Hamner was, by that point, white as paper. He had made every conceivable threat he could think of to spur action, browbeating precinct commanders across the city. He had sent out random patrols, authorized overtime, dispatched K-9 Units and soundly berated every single officer who failed to deliver the results he expected.
None of it helped.
By 11:55, with their options as exhausted as they were, the detectives had settled into an eerie silence.
Ochoa was standing—his throbbing hindquarters made sitting untenable—going through half of the Counterterrorism Task Force list again. Rhymer was seated, going through the other half.
Raley had his earphones on. He had confirmed that the voices from the first video matched the ones from the second—if that mattered at all—and was now back to a painstaking review of any fringe background noise he could pick up. His efforts to determine the brand of the corrugated steel in the background had been a failure. Too many manufacturers used ostensibly the same mold.
Feller was pacing and perspiring, taking occasional glances at the murder board as he did so.
Heat was leaning against a desk by the murder board, but she was no longer looking at it. She had been attempting a form of meditation, trying to clear her conscious mind so her subconscious might be able to provide a new answer.
“Four minutes ’til midnight,” Hamner said, breaking the quiet.
He walked over to Heat, put a gentle hand on her shoulder, and in a voice hoarse from screaming said, “I’m sorry, Captain. We did everything we could. Is there…someone you want to call, perhaps? Some place you want to go? It took them about an hour and a half to release the video last time. I can have an NYPD chaplain accompany you to your apartment, maybe? There’s no need for you to be here.”
He let that thought linger out there.
Heat shook him off. “No, I…I don’t want to be thinking later I might have been able to do something if only I was at the precinct. I’m staying here until—”
Until the bitter end, she thought, but did not speak it out loud.
“Okay,” Hamner said softly. “Your call. If you change your mind…”
Heat shook her head. Finally, because she could no longer help herself, her gaze fell on the bull pen’s clock. Other precincts had replaced their old analog pieces with digital versions, preferring the precision of an LED screen to the comparative vagueness of the big hand and little hand.
Not the Two-Oh. They had the same time-worn timepiece that had been there since whenever the place was built. Its once-white background had turned yellow. Its glass facing had a permanently smoky look about it, even though the Twentieth Precinct had gone smoke-free more than twenty years earlier.
Heat watched as the second hand circumnavigated the numbers one through twelve. The minute hand was now on the last hash mark before the twelve. The hour hand was off the twelve by such an imperceptible amount that it appeared to be standing straight up.
The second hand began its next trip around. It swept by the two, the five, the eight. There was no stopping it.
There was no stopping any of this.
It hit the twelve. The second hand, minute hand, and hour hand were now one, standing at perfect attention. Midnight had come.
And, with one more tick of the clock, it was gone.
Somewhere, the unthinkable was happening.
For a while, no one moved. It was like the wake had already begun.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. It was now Thursday, technically. October 20 would take the place of November 24 as the most horrible square on Heat’s calendar, an anniversary that would fill her with unspeakable heartache for as long as she lived.
Every once in a while, someone cleared his throat or wiped his brow. No one wanted to leave. That would have been an act of surrender, and also a kind of betrayal of their captain and friend. They all knew, without being told, that in some short amount of time, Nikki Heat was going to need them like never before.
It was perhaps a quarter after midnight, with Heat, Hamner, and the detectives still in a strange kind of suspended animation.
Then a loud noise came from downstairs.
Shouts. Applause. A tremendous and happy racket.
As if they were sharing one brain, everyone in the bull pen seemed to have the same reaction.
First, their chins lifted, as if they had been brought out of trances. Then their heads tilted, as if they couldn’t figure out what they were hearing. Then their necks craned toward the source of the sound, as if they were trying to make sense of what was happening.
Hamner took two steps toward the commotion, then stopped himself. Feller ceased his pacing.
Ochoa muttered, “What the—”
Then the elevator doors opened. And there, standing completely unharmed, in the middle of crowd of police officers, with appropriately enormous grins on their faces, were Jameson Rook and Inez Aguinaldo.
Heat instantly felt a flood of warmth, relief, and joyful tears, all combining into one emotion that came gushing in. A cry escaped her lips, but unlike the anguished moan that had involuntarily come out of her when she had thought she’d lost him, this was more like the ecstatic, astounded yelp of a Powerball winner.
Rook had started walking out of the elevator and had just barely made it past the doors when Heat, who had broken into a run, leapt into his arms. If she hadn’t driven him into the wall, she would have knocked him over.
“Oh, Rook,” she said into his neck, and then she kept muttering the only words that came to her mind: “You have no idea. You have no idea.”
“I can’t…” he began, but he didn’t seem to be able to form any more words himself.
Heat gripped him tighter. Her feet were barely touching the ground as she dangled on him. It was all coming out of her like a cathartic jet stream: the tears, the emotion, the mindless thankful babble. She was aware there were hands pounding Rook on the shoulder, that Aguinaldo, who had also just barely made it out of the elevator, had been surrounded by happy, hugging cops. Heat didn’t let it distract her from her immediate goal, which was to deliver the greatest embrace of Rook’s life.
“I can’t…” he said, and then faltered again.
Heat was really enveloping him now. She was never letting go. Never, ever again.
And finally Rook completed his sentence.
“I can’t breathe,” he choked out.
“Oh, sorry,” Heat said, relaxing her stranglehold just slightly.
She went down off her tiptoes. They both took a full breath—Rook’s more urgent than Heat’s.
In that moment of bliss, Heat was incapable of anything resembling rational thought. It was Hamner who was trying to make order out of the chaos, and he eventually corralled the attention of the mob that had pushed into the bull pen.
“Detective Aguinaldo, Mr. Rook, I think I speak for the commissioner and every man, woman, and transgender individual on the force when I say I am incredibly happy to see your safe return,” he said as the officers congregated nearby beamed at this rare moment of humanity from The Hammer.
Then it ended and Hamner returned to form: “But I need to remind everyone there is still an active investigation, and that American ISIS is still a threat. So I need to know: how did you escape, and what can you tell us about this menace?”
Before Aguinaldo could respond, Rook took charge.
“I think it only appropriate we let the hero of the day explain,” Rook said. “Lana?”
Heat was so shocked to hear the name that she was sure she did a double take as the tall, striking figure of Lana Kline emerged from the scrum. She was flanked, as always, by her aide-de-camp interns, Justin and Preston, who were grinning obediently. Her hair and clothing were perfect as ever, like she was prepared for a press conference to break out at any moment.
“Oh, believe me, I’m not the hero here,” Kline said modestly.
Preston immediately jumped on this suggestion: “With all due respect, Ms. Kline—”
“You really are,” Justin finished for him.
“Nonsense, boys. All I really did was tap into the capabilities of Kline Enterprises. I told my daddy what was happening and I told him I’d be just devastated if anything happened to Jamie. And Daddy sprang into action. Daddy is the real hero here.”
“But how did he even locate Detective Aguinaldo and Mr. Rook in the first place?” Hamner asked. “We had every officer in New York City looking for them. We were monitoring a million surveillance cameras. We had choppers in the air.”
High Heat Page 28
