“Educate me.”
“Radio frequency identification. You know how your E-ZPass lifts the gate at a highway toll booth, or a security tag on a leather jacket sets off an alarm in a department store? Those are transponders that emit radio signals. Well, technology has now shrunk them down to chips smaller than a grain of rice, and manufacturers and retailers are planting them in their products for inventory control and consumer research. And how do they do that?” He paused to frame the significance. “They electronically track the chips to see where their products are distributed geographically.” He slapped her thigh to punctuate his excitement.
“You’re scaring me, Rook, going all geek on me.”
“I can’t help it. Don’t you see? Of course you see. If we find enough products on the Tyler Wynn list that have RFID chips embedded in them, the little transponders could lead us right to his door, no matter what name he used.”
Begrudgingly, reservedly, but, in the end, objectively, Heat admitted Yardley Bell’s idea had merit. She told Rook she would assign more manpower and resources to the task first thing in the morning.
“And can you call it a task force?”
“No.”
“I’ve always wanted to be on a task force.”
“You’ll have to save it for that video game you play in your boxers.”
He turned away, watching Bryant Park go by his window. “Why do you hurt me?”
Upstairs in Rook’s kitchen, he put some flame under a pot of water for angel hair to go with his scampi while she poured the Sancerre. Without naming it, they had taken to eating meals in more since the poisoning attempt. On high alert was not the way either wanted to live, or admit to living. “How you holding up?” he asked.
“Not exactly brain-dead. But I’m working on it.”
He lifted his glass. “Here’s to the living brain-dead. Makes you almost a zombie.” After they toasted, he said, “If you want to kick back and take a shower, I’ll keep busy sweating some garlic and sautéing these shrimp.”
“You know what I’d really like to do?” she said.
“I do. You want to take another shot at The Thing.”
“Rook, we’re alone. We can call it the code.”
He put on a mock pout. “Oh, you mean the code. I was hoping when you said you wanted another shot at The Thing…”
“You disgust me,” she said with a laugh.
As she walked to the back hall, he called out, “I hid a copy in my office. It’s in the top filing cabinet drawer under ‘Nikki’s Top Secret Code.’ ” And then she could hear him laugh.
Wide awake at 4 A.M., Heat eased out of bed, pulled on some gym shorts and a workout top, and slipped out of the room. Minutes later, she walked barefoot across Rook’s rooftop and sat on the wall to stare at the city that also didn’t sleep much.
The spring thunderstorms forecast for that morning hadn’t arrived yet, but ominous clouds rolled in from the west, swallowing the ambient light of New York City and spitting it back the color of spilled blood.
Nikki fought despair. Out there in those concrete canyons a serial killer roamed free. So might the man responsible for her mother’s murder. Not to mention his accomplice, who almost killed her. Heat looked all around, felt vulnerable, then told herself she didn’t care. She almost believed it.
So far, Heat had managed to rescue one target of the serial killer, but still had no solid leads-nothing she’d call traction. Her quest for Wynn and Kaye remained stalled, with the added attraction of federal meddling: Bart Callan, vigorous, competent, and misguidedly personal; Yardley Bell, disruptive to Nikki’s case and threatening to her relationship.
Downstairs in Rook’s bed, Heat had tried to clear her mind of these demons. Since she couldn’t sleep, she decided to be productive and mentally projected the lines, dots, and squiggles of her mom’s code on the pale canvas of the ceiling. The solve still would not come.
So she changed the scenery. Resting a bare heel on the ornate scrollwork of the frieze beneath her, Heat listened to her breathing instead of the taxi horns, night sirens, and the doop-doop of garbage trucks at work. She let her eyes gloss over until she no longer saw the iconic Empire State and Chrysler Buildings looming out of the cityscape. Instead, her vision fused with the thin curtain of urban haze in the middle distance. Piano notes from her childhood songbook appeared and merged with the blurred apartment lights in the high-rises before her. Then those strange pencil notations surfaced like watermarks. Nikki could see the characters as clearly as she had on the page where they were written, so embossed were they in her mind’s eye.
But whether studied on paper, a ceiling, or the crimson Tribeca skyline, they still told her nothing.
“How long have you been at this?” came the voice behind her. Nikki had wedged the access door open and didn’t hear Rook come out on the roof.
She tilted to her right where dawn tried to muscle through the stubborn sky. “A couple of hours, maybe.”
“Not tonight. I mean total.” She didn’t answer because he knew damned well how long. So he said, “Almost a month, Nikki. It’s time.”
“No.” Heat said it so sharply pigeons flew. Much more measured, she added, “I’m not taking this to Homeland. Or Yardley.”
“I agree.”
“Then what?”
“You trust me, right?” he asked. “I mean really, really trust me?”
“What.”
“I know a guy. A code breaker.”
Heat didn’t say no this time. She just continued to stare out at the city slowly coming to life. Then she nodded almost imperceptibly and turned to him for the first time as he stood there on the roof. “Rook?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not wearing any clothes.”
Rook found Keith Tahoma where he knew he would at seven in the morning. In Union Square playing simultaneous games at a pair of Parks Department chess tables. And winning both.
Nikki watched the skinny old guy in sunglasses, with the George Carlin whiskers and gray ponytail, dancing from game to game, talking smack and busting some blatantly OCD moves. Through a taut smile she muttered to Rook, “Are you kidding me?”
Even though Heat had accepted intellectually that it was time to get some expert help with the code, Rook still had to overcome her emotional reticence. “Look, you said yourself that Wynn may be trying to cover up something imminent.” He tapped the copies of the marked-up music they had scanned. “We might be sitting on the answer to that right here. And the longer you delay, the greater the chance you’re blowing your shot at stopping whatever conspiracy you believe is heating up. Now, if you want to be all proud and stubborn and bang your head against the wall while time slips away, go ahead. But if you seriously want to crack this, I trust my expert completely.”
Rook’s expert tore open six packets of sugar, dumped them all at once into his coffee, paddled-stirred the paper cup waving his pipe cleaner arms, and then sipped with a stage wink across the café table at Nikki. “Mr. Tahoma, I hear your grandfather was one of the Navajo code breakers back in World War Two,” she said.
“You’re a friend of Rook’s, you call me Puzzle Man, OK? And yeah, my shi’nali was a Windtalker, damn straight.” He blew across his coffee and set it down. “He and his unit created codes for the Marines rooted in our Navajo language. Totally skunked the Japanese. Is it in my blood? Duh. I spent the Cold War in the army eating schnitzel and cracking signal traffic out of East Berlin, basically getting medals I can never wear for turning the Soviets into jackasses. The NSA snatched me up, and next thing, I’m breaking down secret cables about who shot down an airliner over Korea, which tent Gadhafi sleeps in, and who’s buying ammo for the Chechen rebels.”
“Is that where you and Rook met, Chechnya?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Star Trek convention.”
Rook gave her a rueful shrug. She asked Tahoma, “I assume you’re no longer involved in government work?”
“What gave me away, the
shorts and flip-flops?” His high-pitched laugh turned a few heads, then he leaned in to her speaking in a low voice. “I was invited to pursue independent interests when a psychological review suggested I might be borderline.” He cocked an eye and grinned, “Like that’s a drawback in the spook trade.”
In a weird way, his nuttiness made it easier for Nikki to make the leap. An on-the-spot, unscientific gut profile told her that Puzzle Man possessed a genius-level knack that also made him such a social misfit that he survived by operating under strict personal rules. He was a head case who not only broke codes, he lived by one, too.
Plus, Rook had nailed it. The longer she sat on this, the more likely she was to squander the opportunity, either to find Wynn or to head off whatever he was involved with-or both. Time to give Puzzle Man his shot.
Ten minutes later, at the kitchen table of his cluttered shoe-box apartment above the Strand Book Store, where he worked part-time, Keith Tahoma swept aside the draft of the 3-D anacrostic-Sudoku puzzle book he was designing and studied the copies of Heat’s coded sheet music. She tried to give him the provenance; that the pencil marks between some of the notes appeared in the songs of Nikki’s old piano exercise book, and how her mother, whose handwriting this was, had been killed hiding some unknown secret information from spies. But when she began to speak, Puzzle Man just snapped a finger at her to stop, keeping his eyes riveted to the pages. After a few minutes, he looked up at the two of them and said, “Man, I am impressed. And I’ve seen them all, Vigenère ciphers, Polybius squares, Trimethius tableaux, Alberti discs, the Cardano grille, Enigma machines, Kryptos… I’ve trained in acrophony, redundancy, word breaks, Edda symbols. But this. Wow.”
“What does it say?” asked Rook.
“Beats the fuck outta me.” Heat’s chin dropped to her chest. “But dispirit not. Give me some more time to rassle this gator.”
At the door on the way out, Rook said good-bye, but Puzzle Man didn’t hear. He was already lost in the code.
Nikki’s first order of business when she arrived at the Two-Oh was to pull in Malcolm and Reynolds to help Rook and Rhymer set up their RFID track on Tyler Wynn. She knew Captain Irons would pitch a fit when he got a whiff of the redeployment of assets from the serial killer investigation, but the electronic consumer tracking presented the hottest lead in either case, and Detective Heat’s training and experience dictated the hot lead was the lead you followed until a hotter one came along.
That happened mid-morning.
Raley and Ochoa came to her desk, each one trying to get there first. “Detectives, you’ve got those funny looks again,” said Heat.
“I know you don’t like curse words in the bull pen,” said Ochoa, “but see this grin? This definitely is my shit-eater.”
Raley said, “We spent all morning over in Long Island City at Bedbug Doug’s HQ. You should see the place; it actually has a giant metal sculpture of a bedbug on the roof.”
“Anyway,” continued his partner, “we went there to go over the victim’s accounting books, like you had us do with Conklin.”
“And you found a connection to one of the other victims?”
“No,” said Ochoa, “but we found something you’d call an Odd Sock. Made us wonder if it might point to a new victim.”
“These are copies from Douglas Sandmann’s accounts receivable.” Raley held up a file. “We found a pattern of him performing bedbug checks in buildings, but getting paid by a third party who has no connection with the buildings Doug inspected.”
Ochoa picked up. “So we asked his wife about it, and she says, ‘Oh, yeah, Doug made some money on the side from that guy because he could get into buildings and apartments pretending to do his inspections.’ ”
“But he was really snooping undercover for the guy who paid him. You know, the third party,” said Detective Raley.
“And here’s what set off the alarm bells in our heads,” continued Ochoa. “Know that little hand snipped from the oil painting the serial killer left us? This third party guy is in the art business.”
“I assume you got a name,” said Heat. Raley opened the file. Nikki reeled when she saw who it was.
By the time Heat, Rook, and the other detectives rolled down to the marina on the Hudson at West 79th Street, Parks Enforcement had already found Joe Flynn’s body. It bobbed three feet under the surface of the river, tethered between the marina dock and the fifty-foot ketch he had lived on. They didn’t need a coroner to know he was beyond CPR; Flynn’s eyes bulged in their sockets, peering skyward through the murky water from a swollen face. His body had bloated with gas, and his skin had changed color to a pallid shade of green.
Distant thunder mixed with the pair of diesel 60s from the harbor unit response boat that slowed up to kill its wake on the other side of the Boat Basin’s wave wall. The smooth water in the protected marina broke with the first drops of the approaching storm. Heat got down on one knee. Through the dimpled river surface she could see the wooden handle of a small knife, something a painter would use-perhaps a palette knife-protruding from Joe Flynn’s throat. She also noted that his body wore no shoes. He had a sock of a different color on each foot: one light, one dark.
“Boat’s clear,” said Detective Feller, climbing from belowdecks to the cockpit. “Detective Heat?” The slight waver in Randall’s voice made her and all the others turn his way.
Nikki put on her crime scene gloves and climbed aboard.
Wordlessly, Randall Feller stood aside from the hatch to allow her to pass. To preserve fingerprints and DNA, Heat avoided touching the polished brass rail as she descended the teak steps leading below to the main cabin, an opulently appointed space which functioned as the galley and den. Nikki heard footfalls behind her and made room for the other detectives and Rook to come below.
The cabin had sufficient height for them all to stand, and there-right before them, at eye level-an eight-by-ten head shot of Joe Flynn, captured from the Quantum Recovery Web site, dangled from the ceiling. It hung from a row of equal, six-inch lengths of colored string: red, yellow, purple, and green. Colors of the rainbow.
Finally, after a few silent moments of watching the latest victim’s photo wave slightly with the rocking of the boat, Heat said, “Do you all see the pattern?”
“Hard to miss,” said Ochoa. “Each color of string corresponds to the string found with one of the victims.”
“And there’s a new string,” said Feller, speaking for the first time with a voice that sounded thick in his throat. They all followed him behind the photo. Taped to its back, a new color-orange-was strung like a clothesline to the forward cabin, where its end disappeared around the bulkhead door.
Together, Roach moved to the forward compartment to see if it linked to some clue to the killer’s next target. They were only gone a moment.
Both detectives returned looking ashen.
NINE
“I’m ordering protection for you, Heat. Trust me, this asswipe isn’t going to get near you.” The springs of the executive chair creaked under Captain Irons as he rocked back and crossed his arms in front of his belly. She tried to ignore the fact that his hands could barely meet and he had to be satisfied lacing his fingers.
“I certainly appreciate the support, Cap, but-”
“No buts. I can’t have the NYPD’s cover girl killed on my watch.” So nice to know, she thought, that his concern for her safety was really just the flag Wally wrapped around his worry that her murder could be a career hindrance. Nikki would push back on the round-the-clock detail he had proposed, and win. But even she had to admit how deeply unsettling it had felt to follow the orange string into the forward cabin of that boat and see it link from the latest victim to her own picture. The captain’s cover girl ref wasn’t lost on her, either. The serial killer’s photo of choice was a printout of her cover shot from Rook’s FirstPress.com article.
“With all due respect, sir, risks like this come with the job. I’m armed, trained, and this guy’s wors
t nightmare. Plus with two big cases in my lap, there’s no way I can be hamstrung in my investigations by tripping over a detail of unis or grade-threes who can’t keep up.” Or worse, Sharon Hinesburg, she thought but had the restraint not to mention.
“Not making me feel any better here, Heat. You’ve not only got two cases going, but two death threats. I’d say wake up and smell the coffee, but there might be cyanide in it.”
“Hilarious, sir.”
“You know damn well what I mean.”
Since Heat couldn’t convince her precinct commander with logic or bravado, she played her ace: fear. “Your call, Captain. Which is why it’ll be too bad when the media gets word that you did something to slow me down and impede progress on these cases.”
“Who would say something like that?”
She shrugged. “Things get out. You know that.”
He paused and signaled his surrender by telling her to watch her ass and to call in backup even if she heard an alley cat screech. Heat left his office feeling relieved. Good thing she didn’t tell Irons about the return call she’d just gotten from her NCAVC friend in Quantico. The FBI analyst told Nikki she had gotten two hits when she added the terms “law enforcement outreach” and “electronic voice alteration” to her database search for multiple unsolved homicides. In each case a suspect claiming to be a serial killer had made anonymous contacts with detectives, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 2002 and Providence, Rhode Island, in 2007.
Both detectives were dead.
Heat called Helen Miksit to tell her she’d be a half hour late for the appointment she’d made with Algernon Barrett that day. Predictably, the Bulldog bristled, accusing Nikki of playing a mind game to throw her client off balance. “Counselor, if I wanted to play a mind game, I wouldn’t have made this courtesy call. I would have left you sitting there wondering where the hell I was.”
She needed the extra time to contact the homicide squads in Bridgeport and Providence. Heat could have delegated these checks to her own crew, but that might have raised alarms, and next thing, she’d have been shackled to a protection detail. The detectives in both out-of-state departments recalled the cases clearly and didn’t need to research old notes; cop killings never go cold.
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