Heat’s heart raced. He sounded like he was wrapping up, and she needed to do whatever she could to keep this man engaged—for information and to stall him until backup arrived. “If you don’t have control of him, who does?” She waited and got no reply. Nikki strained to listen carefully, assuming he was, once again, repositioning. “And where is he? Talk to me!” Still no response. “And who do you work for…Mr. Jones?”
Her only reply was the echo of a slamming door, on the far side of the garage and a floor below. The sound was the theft of hope.
When the cavalry arrived, it was too late. Heat gave a report to the First Precinct lead, but they both knew that a neighborhood search without a physical description would be a waste of manpower. And unfortunately, since Heat had parked in a municipal garage, the security cams were blacked out along with the other services compromised by the Free Mehmoud cyber attack.
Heat put her head together with Raley and Ochoa back uptown in the bull pen. “Whoever it was,” she said, “it was the second no-fly warning I’ve gotten. First from Congressman Duer, and now from this ‘Mr. Jones.’”
“So do you think this mystery voice guy is with Duer?” asked Raley.
Nikki shrugged. “Hard to say. But—going purely by gut? He had a fed vibe. If he’s not Homeland or a spook, he could be former.”
“And, therefore, contracted out to anyone from Duer, to Swift, to the Syrians, for all we know,” reflected Ochoa.
“One thing, for sure. He was pro. And tapped in. Literally. As soon as I texted my ten-thirteen, he put a clock on our conversation. Which tells me he had access to my phone.”
Raley folded his arms and fixed her with a look. “So. Does this guy in the garage seriously think you would stand down?”
“Or that we would?” said Ochoa.
“If he does,” she said, “he doesn’t know me—or us.”
Annette appeared in the doorway. “Zachary Hamner is calling. Shall I transfer here or your office?”
Heat bolted up. Zach had promised to call her the instant anything broke about Rook. “Mine,” she said and hurried to the door. On her way out she called to her squad leaders to hang tight.
“Heat.” Hamner said it the way people tell Siri to look up a contact: as a fact. Like everything else about the man, his tone was joyless and impersonal. “This isn’t an easy call to make.”
“Oh, God…”
“You might want to close your door.”
“Zach, don’t torture me. Is it Rook? Just tell me.”
“No, it’s not Rook.”
Gathering herself again from another shot to the ribs, she heard him cover the phone and tell someone that he would call back in three minutes, that he had a thing he had to do. Nikki was too relieved to feel insulted to learn that she was a check-off on someone’s to-do list.
He uncovered the mouthpiece and got back to her. “Here’s where we are. I am calling to feel you out on stepping down from your command.” Nikki stretched the phone cord across her desk so she could close the door. “Are you still there?” he asked.
“Step down?”
“I told you it wasn’t an easy call.”
“Less so for me,” she said. “I’ve only been in the job a week. Not even.”
“Yes, and the push I’m getting is that are there are some issues. Telltales. Shall I enumerate?” He barely paused; the question was rhetorical. “Not informing chain of command about high-profile cases. Upsetting community leaders by brooming meetings. Flouting the CompStat process—the CompStat process, for chrissakes—by blowing off the weekly meeting. In your own shop there is leadership unrest due to your perceived lack of commitment to naming your successor as homicide squad leader. And you are spending too much time in the field doing casework instead of sending your people to wear down their shoe leather and report back, like a good administrator should. You still with me?”
“Listening, yes. With you, no.” Reeling as she was from hearing that the same guy who had gone out of his way to offer his condolences and full support was now caving to pressure and squeezing her, Heat still managed to keep her head. When she had taken the job, she knew it meant facing down the machine at various intervals, so she saw this as an early test. One she could have done without, but there it was. If Nikki came back at him whiny or defensive, she’d be finished. So she gave professional resistance, aka tossing the ball back in his lap. “You and your downtown buddies are sending me mixed messages. One chief says, Stay on the case so he can brief the commissioner, but then you say I’m not delegating enough. You want leadership? I made a leadership decision to skip those meetings to follow events in the double homicide that the chief of detectives personally ordered me to stay on top of. Which I am trying to do right now. But here’s the thing, Zachary. I am not only running my precinct to the best of my ability, I am also working my damndest to save a man’s life, and I am going to see that through. If somebody wants me out, I am not quitting. You can fire me and then see where the blowback lands when the press jumps on that, and you know it will.”
In the brief interval that followed, Heat was pleased to hear some throat clearing on the other end. Maybe Zach Hamner, senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, wasn’t accustomed to pushback from lowly precinct commanders. “Well,” he finally said, sounding less like the shark running the table. “This has to be explored further, I see.”
“This is a load of horse crap, and you know it.” She decided to get something out of this annoying call by asking the question begging to be asked. “Who sent you to see if I’d resign my command? Where is this coming from? Who’s trying to get me off this case?”
“That’s absurd.”
“Not how I read it, Zach. Who?”
“Hear this clearly: There is no effort to hinder your speedy closure of this case.”
“‘Speedy.’ Sounds a lot like Swift, doesn’t it?”
He ignored that. “There was merely some concern here at the Plaza that you might be having a difficult time keeping pace with your duties, given the distraction.”
“The distraction?” Her foot nearly slipped off the brake, but she kept her cool, even as she seethed. “If you are characterizing my efforts to resolve the kidnapping of a citizen off the streets of New York—regardless of my relationship to him—as a distraction instead of the very definition of my job as a sworn police officer, you need to take a walk out of that administrative dreamworld and breathe some real-world air. And you can start by taking your head out of your ass.”
Nikki hung up.
Then she threw her typewriter at the wall, causing faces in the bull pen to whip her way. While she had everyone’s attention, she marched to the doorway and said, “Raley. Ochoa. Murder Board update. Now.” If ever there was any ambiguity about her resolve, this third attempt to get her off the case had only stiffened it. Her only hope was that her dogged perseverance wasn’t sealing her fiancé’s doom.
It may have been the first time ever in the history of New York City that a plumbing contractor got whisked through Manhattan in a police motorcade. But Alvin Speyer, the “pipe fitter,” as the stud had been nicknamed in the squad room, interrupted an extramarital tryst to get picked up by Captain Heat in the carriage turnaround of his Times Square hotel and Code Three’d behind a pair of motorcycles to the curb between Patience and Fortitude, the famous marble lions of the NYPL’s main branch.
The first thing Heat noticed when they met Carolyn Jay in her office on the second floor was that she was wearing the same clothes as the day before. “Not my first all-nighter,” said the librarian with a mock-salacious wink. “Thank goodness I’m on good terms with security and the coffee pot in the break room got fixed.”
“But you did make progress, right?” asked Nikki, trying to get to it without appearing disrespectful to the woman who had burned midnight oil to help her.
“It’s a process, right? Catalog interpretation isn’t like the Map Room, where the answer to
every question is a map. But enough headway to ask you to bring…Mr. Speyer, is it? Come in, let me show you why I needed to borrow you.”
It was early enough that Mrs. Jay had the bull pen to herself, so she rolled two chairs from other work stations beside hers. “Let me walk you through my journey. Succinctly, I promise. Time is critical, I can see it that, Nikki. That’s why I bore down. Not so easy with the digital system down, I don’t need to tell you.”
“And I thank you so much for your efforts, Mrs. Jay.”
“Well, hold your applause until we see if it paid off.” She swapped her glasses for the readers on the chain around her neck and picked up a yellow lined tablet full of abbreviations, acronyms, and code numbers in her Palmer Method script. “The key to the whole thing, thanks to Mr. Speyer’s good citizenship, was to focus on the provenance of that boat. From the description, a wooden eighteen-footer, isn’t that right? Please say that’s right.”
“Yes,” said Alvin Speyer.
“Thank God.” She went back to her notes. “A search needs a premise. Mine was that wooden boats are so retro, so high-maintenance that, much like a hot rod enthusiast, any owner would be proud of his craft and consort with like-minded devotees. That led me across the hall to room 217 to explore the Directory of Associations and appropriate newsletter catalogues shelved there. Here’s where I’ll skim for you. I spent hours thumbing through the Oxbridge Directory, Benn’s Media, and others, searching for association newsletters, filtered for this region, of clubs catering to the small-wooden-boat owner. I made my short list and moved downstairs to Microforms, where I pulled the annual newsletters of each organization from the last five years—an arbitrary limit, but it seemed a reasonable time frame given the circumstances. Going on and on, that led me to learn of the Great Upstate Boat Show, held annually up in Queensbury, New York.”
Nikki opened her own notebook. “And you found a contact we can talk to?”
“That was my intent. Instead, I found these.” Mrs. Jay took two color photocopies from a manila file and held them against her chest. “These are prints I made from the boat show’s newsletters from 2010 and 2012. Remember what I said about wooden boats being high-maintenance? There are numerous ads placed by repair and restoration companies. And they like to print brag pictures of their work.” She then placed both ads faceup on her desk for them to examine. “Mr. Speyer, could either one of these be the boat you saw the other night?”
Heat would have been amused by how much the form of the librarian’s question was identical to that of a detective showing a mug shot array to a victim, if she weren’t so focused on the pair of advertisements. One was for a wooden-boat restorer in Glen Cove on Long Island, whose display showed a Brady Bunch–style grid featuring grainy shots of a 1962 Penn Yan, an Electri-craft inboard, and a light-blue eighteen-foot skiff rigged for an outboard. The other craftsman was located near Paterson, New Jersey, and his ad featured only one boat, in a hero shot of an immaculately restored sixteen-footer, also in light blue, also with an outboard-motor mount.
Alvin Speyer leaned over the pages and said, “Hmm.”
While he picked up each page for a closer examination, the research librarian said to Heat, “Of course, I could have phoned these places myself, but given what’s at stake here, I didn’t want to take the risk. I’m no detective.”
“Could have fooled me,” said Nikki.
Carolyn Jay blushed. “Well. More of a Miss Marple than a Nikki Heat.”
“This one,” said Speyer. He held out one of the ads.
“Are you sure?” Heat asked. “You do know that it could also be neither one?”
“No, definitely this one. It’s got the same white center console for the chrome steering wheel. And see the flared lines of the inset for the motor mount on the stern? Never seen that before on a boat. Made me want it when I saw it.” He tapped the page with his forefinger. “This. I’m telling you.”
With a grateful nod to the librarian, Heat took out her cell phone and dialed the number in the ad.
The owner of Natural Neil’s Marine Restorations in Glen Cove, New York, didn’t need to look up the sky-blue skiff in his records because, as with all the boats there, he had worked on it personally. The eighteen-footer had come in along with a number of small vessels damaged when Hurricane Irene blew through in 2011, and he liked the result of his labor so much, he posted a picture of it in his ads a year later. Once Natural Neil felt sure that Heat was who she said she was, he did go to his records to look up the address of the skiff’s owner. Before they hung up, he said, “By the way? It’s not really sky blue. In the trade, it’s known as celeste pallido.”
A half hour later, Detective Feller, in a floppy fisherman’s hat with a rod and tackle to complete his cover, steered his borrowed undercover Whaler from the Red Hook channel into Brooklyn’s Erie Basin. He chugged the man-made cove lazily, pretending to be as much interested in the gulls and puffy clouds as he was in his true focus, which was the wharf line. The barge company that had made the repair payment for the skiff had an address that placed it on a rectangular inlet off Beard Street, just west of the new Ikea. He avoided the narrow channel so he wouldn’t arouse any suspicion, killed his engine, and floated along in the basin, casting his lure and letting his gaze follow the splash, which was always in the direction of the barge dock. After a few casts, he leaned his fishing pole on the gunwale, reached down for his tackle box, and took out a sandwich. On his second bite he put the sandwich down and casually picked up his phone. Heat answered on the first ring. The detective said, “Got your sky blue skiff.”
Randall Feller maintained a low-key surveillance in case he was being observed, even as he took precautions to cover all the bases. With Heat engaged for at least half an hour of travel time from Midtown, the critical priority was to observe keenly in order to learn whatever he could about what was going on at Channel Maritime, while wrapping a net around the perimeter of the wharf that nobody could slip through. The hard part of that job was not being obvious about it. Do it wrong, and you could excel at keeping the bad guys in, but at the expense of driving away their accomplices if, for example, they had recently taken a ride to pick up a pizza and were coming back with it.
Feller’s first goal was to get himself on land. In short order, three vessels from the Harbor Unit responded to his radio call and formed a blockade, keeping out of the sight line of the dockyard. That freed him to reel in his lure and putt-putt across the basin to his car in the Ikea lot a quarter mile east.
He met Heat just as she arrived at the staging area Lieutenant Marr had already been set up around the corner and a block north on Van Dyke in the weed-overgrown parking lot of a deteriorating warehouse. Nikki’s first call after getting Feller’s confirmed skiff sighting was to Marr, asking the veteran Emergency Services officer to command the raid. Even though he worked out of the 108th Precinct up in Long Island City, she had prior experience with him and, with the possibility of Rook’s being held captive in there, she wanted the best: a cool-headed pro who left little to chance and got results. “Shouldn’t we get some observers out there while we do this?” asked Feller.
“Already done, Detective,” said Marr with a smile.
“I just went by, and I didn’t see any.”
The weathered corners of the lieutenant’s eyes were tugged into a genial squint. “That’s good news then. We can relax.” He must have noticed the tension in Nikki, and so went right to work spreading an enlargement of a municipal street map on the hood of his car. How the ESU had managed to pull together a strategy map complete with color-coded markings for containment, deployment, and contingencies in under thirty minutes—while in transit from Queens—mystified her. But all that, along with the calm Marr had already bestowed on her and Feller with his light military demeanor, told her she had made the right choice calling in this man.
“We’re setting up intercepts on land and water. Detective Feller, you’ve already taken care of the harbor; what I’ve do
ne is placed units at these intersections.” He took out an old silver-plated Cross pen and used it as a pointer. “Our choke points are Beard and Dwight, Beard and Van Brunt, Richards and Van Dyke. Fall-back roamers will work Coffey Street between Otsego and Conover.” He triple-tapped the page. “Nobody’s busting out of here without a Double-Oh-Seven jetpack.” He gave Nikki a wink. “That’ll happen one of these days. Not today, I have a feeling.”
“What about air support?” she asked.
“Standby only. Chopper’s going to attract media. Don’t want that. There’s a Bell Four-twenty-nine on routine patrol less than two minutes away in Cobble Hill. If we need a copter, we’ll have a copter, and in a hurry.” He went back to his map.
“Here’s how it’s going to come down. On green, the BearCat parked behind us will enter through the front gate, which is padlocked. That is why God gave us BearCats. Simultaneously, our other assault vehicle will pull up to the east-side fence here, where teams will deploy from its roof over the concertina with mats and Telesteps. Harbor Unit will send two boats up the channel to deploy officers and to discourage a water exit. Each team coming in the gate, over the fence, and up the canal will have target assignments.” Nikki leaned in as he pointed to each spot, which he had color-coded. “The modular office trailer, the warehouse, barge one, barge two, even the minivan and the skiff—just in case Mr. Rook could be located in either one of those.” Reading Nikki’s breathing, he added with resolve, “Know what? If he’s here, we are getting him out, Captain.”
Heat popped her trunk and put on her Kevlar and, while she cinched the tabs, a sour melancholy spread within her, prompted by her memory of Rook, whom she always mocked for vesting up with armor that was stenciled “JOURNALIST” instead of “POLICE” and had two small gold medallions embroidered on it—one for each of his Pulitzers. She would give anything to have him suiting up with her now instead of donning hers to rescue him.
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