“It was and it wasn’t. The girl was distracted—obviously—by the ton of bricks I dropped on her. So it wasn’t until a few minutes into my interview, after she started to recover, that she noticed some of the things in the place were out of whack. We did some room-to-room checking, and that’s when we knew there’d been a B&E overnight.”
Nikki surveyed the room they were standing in, the one King used for counseling sessions. She’d been in there fewer than ten times over the last three years, yet it appeared as tranquil and welcoming as ever. “Doesn’t appear tossed to me.” Then she added, “Going from memory.”
“You’d have to know what to look for.” Ochoa walked them past the psychologist’s overstuffed chair to the small desk off to the side. “Josie said there was a laptop there that’s gone.”
“Any chance the doctor could have taken it with him or come back for it?” asked Rook.
“I wondered the same. She says no. The MacBook stayed there all the time. He didn’t like lugging them and always used the cloud or thumb drives. To that point, the rest of the room is neat, no hacked-open pillows or tossed books off the shelves, right? But check it out…” Ochoa carefully slid open the single desk drawer by its edges instead of the handle, using the fingertips of his gloved hands. The slim drawer was a mess: spilled paperclips ripped from a box, a tangle of pencils and pens upended out of a teak tray, a torn deck of gold Kem playing cards, even a matchbox from The Dutch had been poked open and shaken empty.
Heat said, “A search for thumb drives?”
“A safe bet,” said Ochoa. “Josie says he kept them in this drawer, but in one of those leather zip pouches from that froufrou stationery-geek catalog.”
“Levenger?” said Rook, a little too quickly.
Ochoa shook his head and groaned, “Oh, man. So busted.” Then the detective led the way out of the room. “Let’s see if Josie’s up for showing you the rest.” Since the encounter would come sooner or later, Nikki followed behind to get it over with. She had a homicide investigation to conduct and couldn’t do the job if she hid from witnesses for personal reasons. It might have been better, though, she thought, if only Rook hadn’t been along today.
“Josie,” said Detective Ochoa, “this is my precinct commander, Captain Heat.”
Lon King’s receptionist looked up from a deep-trauma stare at Nikki. The two women made eye contact and, in it, Heat saw clear recognition. But then came something unexpected. The young woman extended a hand to shake and said only, “Hello.” While she watched Josie give Rook a similarly polite, neutral greeting, Heat wondered, was it training or common sense not to out the client of a psychologist? Whether it was due to professionalism or courtesy, Nikki was grateful for the discretion and embarked on the rest of the tour undistracted.
As with the counseling room, the other areas of the office suite had been disturbed, not ransacked. Whoever did it wanted something specific. This was a surgical strike. “Josie, did Dr. King keep any drugs here? Prescription meds, I mean?” asked Nikki.
“No, he counseled only and didn’t prescribe. Not even any samples.”
The spilled playing cards in the desk made Heat think about the jumbo debt to Fat Tommy. “What about money? Did he keep any cash here, perhaps in a safe or locked drawer?”
“There’s a metal box in the file room, but that’s petty cash.” When she took them into the back room and put on gloves to open the file drawer, the petty cash box indeed turned out to have been pried open, however the variety of small bills and receipts was still inside, albeit stirred. Then Josie’s face lost color. “This is too creepy,” she said. “This drawer was completely full of files. Patient files.” Heat, Rook, and Ochoa drew around her as she pulled the drawer out. It hit the end of its runners with a hollow bonk. Empty.
After the four of them had pulled open every drawer of all the filing cabinets, they determined that exactly half the files were gone, encompassing patients with last names beginning A through M. The N-to-Z cabinets seemed full and undisturbed, at least at a glance. Heat’s gaze came to rest on the yawning Hastings-to-Henderson drawer, the one where her file would have resided—and felt a gnaw.
Rook’s eyes lifted to hers, and when they met, they both looked away.
Back out in reception, the lead CSU tech, an Australian transplant named Murphy, gave Heat and the others his prelim. “All right, then, here’s your quick-and-dirty, just to get us started, mind you. Your intruder, or intruders, were pro or semi-. Door lock shows no signs of forced entry. Inside, not much of a pillage, is it? More of an incursion, really. Here’s the tally: A-to-M surname files stolen; laptop missing, as noted; the hard drives have been expertly removed from the two desktops; and lastly, the Dragon speech recognition app, probably used for postsession notes dictation, has been removed from both computers, as well. All up, I’d call this a fairly neat operation, with whoever pulled it off taking his sweet time after closing yesterday with loads extra to fill the shopping trolley before dimming the switch and fucking off.”
“Do they have a security camera?” asked Ochoa.
“Sure enough, mate.” Murphy pointed up to a lipstick cam. Its lens had been blacked over with spray paint.
“Maybe it caught something before they disabled it,” said Heat. “Josie, did you guys record your video on-site or at a security company?”
“The building management handles that. I’ve never really needed to know where.”
The building’s super met them in the lobby, holding open an elevator at the south end of the banks. They got on without much conversation other than to hear his grim, “I hope you fry that bastard who killed the doc,” on the one-floor descent to the basement. He led them through a labyrinth of stored office furniture and medical equipment, some of it swaddled in plastic, to a large shed that had been constructed in the corner. “We use this for storage,” he explained as he ran through a chunky ring of keys at the end of a belt chain.
The super flipped on the lights once he had got the shed door open, revealing a space about as large as a two-car garage. He led them toward a closet door at the far end of the room, past aluminum racks whose shelves were filled with desk lamps, out-of-date telephone equipment, bulky old-tech TVs, stacks of medical-office-appropriate framed art, empty aquariums, and potted artificial plants.
“Hannibal Lecter hasn’t sent anyone here looking for severed heads, has he?” said Rook.
The super laughed but stopped abruptly. “What the hell is this?”
The hasp on the closet door hung open. The padlock sat on the bench beside it.
Heat and Ochoa put their hands on their sidearms. Rook took a step back and brought the super with him out of the way. The two cops took positions near the closet. Nikki nodded to the detective and began her silent three-count. Then the lights went out and the door slammed behind them.
“The door, the door,” called Ochoa. In the absolute blackness of the shed, they scrambled hopelessly, bumping into each other and the racks until the super lit the flashlight on his belt and they oriented themselves to the exit.
By the time they raced out into the basement, the elevator was purring toward the first floor. Rook asked where the stairs were, but by the time he got an answer, Nikki and Miguel were already taking them two at a time.
The passenger door was slamming on a waiting MKZ when the two cops pushed through the lobby congestion and bolted down the six granite steps to the sidewalk. They both yelled, “NYPD, freeze!” but the Lincoln burned rubber—in reverse—on York Avenue, backing up through its own tire smoke at high speed against traffic, barely missing a northbound ambulette.
Heat and Ochoa gave chase, and a block away, the car lurched to a stop, but only long enough for a gear shift followed by another piercing squeal as it right-turned onto the ramp to the FDR south and was long gone.
Since it fell within their precinct, detectives from the Nineteenth tagged in to continue the B&E investigation at Lon King’s office. Heat, however, carved out one
piece of turf for her team. They had lucked out and got to the digital recording closet just before the intruder could gain access, so the security video from the York Avenue medical tower would travel crosstown to the West Side with her.
With Roach taking co-lead, and Nikki feeling pressure to dive into the administrative tasks that were piling up in her absence, she rode back to the Two-Oh without Rook, who said he had plenty to keep him occupied anyway. As he waved from the back window of his cab, she hoped at least some of his attention would shift to wedding logistics.
Captain Heat went about her new duties with a spirit of enthusiasm, even though answering compliance emails from One PP, booking meetings with community leaders, and ignoring station-house nicotine enthusiasts pestering for an e-cig policy felt very little like policing. Nikki was glad that two of the four walls of her new office were all glass so she could at least peer out into her old familiar space, the homicide bull pen, and keep tabs on the case. From inside her goldfish bowl, she liked what she saw. Rook might have been right, that punting a key leadership appointment amounted to a stagger out of the starting gate, but watching Raley and Ochoa in action gave her confidence that her stumble might pay off.
“Knock-knock,” said Roach in unison at her door.
“Did you guys rehearse that, or are you just that joined at the hip?”
“Totally ad-libbed,” said Ochoa.
Raley shivered. “Kinda creeps you out, don’t it?”
The pair didn’t make a move when she gestured to her guest chairs. “Thanks, we’re on the fly,” Miguel said. “Just wanted you to sign off on something. The security video just arrived from Lon King’s medical building and I wanted to pull Sean off screening river cams and put him on that.”
“It’s the hot lead,” added Raley, selling Heat with another one of her own detective’s edicts: In any investigation, always follow the hot lead.
“Go for it.” Then, as they started off, she stopped them. “What do we hear about Lon King’s family?”
“Detective Aguinaldo just got off the phone with his partner,” said Ochoa. “He is a portrait artist who does official likenesses of governmental leaders. You know, those stiff oil paintings you see in state houses and courtrooms? She tracked him down in Vermont, where he’s doing Senator Leahy, and said he would be returning to the city on the next jetBlue. She’s going to meet his plane at JFK.”
“Keep me looped,” Heat said. Then she added, “By the way. What’s the freshness date on the recordings from the medical building?” Heat tried to sound nonchalant, asking a mundane procedural question to camouflage her concern that her own face might appear on Raley’s monitor and spark some personal awkwardness.
“I talked to the private contractor who set up the building’s system,” said Raley. “It’s not high-risk retail or a bank, so they went economy. There’s only ten days’ worth of room on the drive before it resets and records over itself. So it shouldn’t take me too long to scrub through, if that answers your question.”
“It does.” The date of her last appointment fell outside the window. She relaxed. “Thanks, Rales.”
But Nikki’s sense of relief did not last. Later that afternoon, Detective Raley returned while she paced her office on a phone call, executing an order from the deputy commissioner to lend fifteen of her patrol officers to the Critical Response Unit, to monitor the protests that had broken out after the arrest of a Syrian college student engaged in counterfeiting. The detective hand-signaled that he’d come back, but she didn’t like the tension she read on him and pointed to a chair. Sean sat and waited out her call.
When she at last put down the phone, two more lines rang. Nikki ignored them and gave Raley her attention. He rose and said, “I think you should see something.”
Heat followed him to the former storage closet Raley had converted into his makeshift screening facility and closed the door. After he had taken a seat at his worktable, she stood behind him to surf the image frozen on his monitor. It was of an empty hallway; the date and time stamp in the lower left corner showed it to be from 9:14 A.M., six days prior. “What floor are we on?”
“Twelve. Lon King’s hallway. Ready?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but double-clicked the trackpad. The video unfroze. There was no sound, but time code started to roll, counting seconds and video frames. The elevator arrived and a man walked out, advancing with full face in clear view of the camera. He entered the psychologist’s office without hesitation and closed the door.
“Roll it back,” said Heat, unable to keep the rasp of sudden dryness out of her voice. The detective rewound four seconds and froze the image on the screen. Even with the graininess of the security video there was no doubt that Lon King’s visitor was Jameson Rook.
“Jameson Rook, reporting as ordered, Captain.” He slid into one of the guest chairs angled in front of her desk and crossed a leg as he leaned back. “I have to tell you that this driving up and down town all day is cutting into my nuptials planning. Speaking of which: I told Jill Krementz that the only way she can come is if she’ll be our wedding photographer. I’m teasing, of course. Unless she says yes.” He let out a self-satisfied laugh and flicked his eyebrows. Then he saw Heat’s expression, and his smirk withered. “What?”
“Ever since you saw the body at the river this morning you’ve been…off. Now I know why.” Nikki woke up her iPhone, which sat poised in the center of her empty blotter, and swiveled it toward him. Rook leaned forward, elbows on the edge of her desk. He watched himself on the security video; Heat watched him grow a shade paler.
When the clip finished he sat back in his chair. A few seconds passed with the background chatter of the precinct as the only sound. At last he said, “You know, sometimes I hate technology.” Then, a little too quickly recovered from his video smack to suit Nikki, he gave a minor shrug, saying nothing.
“You’re not going to tell me what this was about?” she asked.
“I think it’s probably best we not get into it.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Nikki, who rarely swore and always discouraged swearing among the squad, lost her filter. “Rook, we already are into it.”
“All right, I can see that. But can we keep some sense of scale here?”
“Scale?” Heat spoke so loudly that heads turned in the homicide bull pen. She got up and closed the door, calming herself by the time she regained her seat behind the desk. “Let’s enumerate, shall we? One: You had knowledge of a homicide victim you didn’t disclose. Two: You—my fiancé—had a meeting with my shrink without telling me. Where do I put that on the goddamned scale?”
“If I’m hearing you, I’d guess way up there.”
“Stop. Stop being glib. This is not a glib moment for me.”
“I apologize. I’m sorry.” He nodded in a belated attempt at conciliation. “But I’m not trying to be glib, I’m trying to play this down.”
“You can’t.”
“Because,” he pressed on, “you don’t have anything to worry about. Yes, I had some meetings with Lon King. And that—”
“More than this one? Not feeling too assuaged here, Rook.” “If you let me finish, you will.” He paused and cocked his brow toward her. She made a steeple of her fingertips in front of her lips, a listening pose. He continued. “My conversations with King had nothing to do with you.” He sat back and crossed his leg again, as if what he had just said qualified him to drop the microphone.
“That’s it?”
“Yup. All there is to it.”
“Not to me.”
“But it’s the truth. You were never mentioned. The psychological community has strict protocols when it comes to being discreet. You saw that yourself today when Josie never acknowledged you as a client in front of me or Ochoa.” He couldn’t help himself and added, “Even though, much like me, you didn’t disclose your relationship with the victim to your own squad.”
“OK,” she said. “This is going nowhere good.”
“Which is
why I said, maybe we shouldn’t walk this path.”
“And you won’t tell me why you were seeing him?” When he didn’t reply, she gave him a frown and said, “He counseled cops. You weren’t in therapy with him, were you?”
“That, I’ll answer. No. The reason I was seeing him has to remain confidential. It’s my right as a journalist not to disclose.”
“You saw him about a story you’re working on? What?”
“Nikki, I’d love to tell you, but there’s too much else going on with this. My ability to do my job depends on my sources’ knowing that I will honor confidentiality. I have to invoke my constitutional right.”
“To what, act like an ass? I’m looking for a killer.”
“And I guess I am, now, too.” He twisted to peer through the glass at the Murder Board. “Any developments?”
“Do not press it, Rook.”
“You’re freezing me out?”
As angry as she was, Heat knew that Rook, although a pain in the butt—frequently delivered solutions to cases. She would be spiting herself to close him off as a resource, even though he wasn’t playing fair. Her phone rang. It was Lauren Parry. Nikki asked her to hold. “This could be about Lon King’s autopsy,” she said to Rook. “I need the office to myself. But don’t leave the building.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“You’re underfoot, as usual.” As he rose, she added, “There’s a complication here. Our little drama aside, you could be material to this investigation.”
“How cool am I?”
“And since Roach is officially in the mix, they’re going to need to interview you.”
“Nothing to say. It’s all puddin ’n’ tame with me. Ask me again, I’ll tell ’em the same.”
“You have fun with that,” she said, and he left her to her call with the medical examiner.
The sunniest voice at the Office of Chief Medical Examiner greeted Nikki when she picked up. “Rockin’ that uniform look this morning, Ms. Heatness. It’s like you were all Beyoncé, but without the shoulder pads.”
Driving Heat Page 4