SIX
FROZEN LADY THAWS C–C-OLD C–C-ASE LEDGER
Insider Exclusive
By Tam Svejda, Senior METRO Reporter
As if last week’s grim discovery of a woman’s frozen body inside a reefer truck on the Upper West Side wasn’t enough to get New Yorkers’ teeth chattering, now the gruesome case has taken an even more chilling turn. Exclusive Ledger sources with knowledge of the investigation confirm that the unidentified stabbing victim has not only been identified as Nicole Aimee Bernardin, a French national with an Inwood address, but that the suitcase police found her in once belonged to a similar stabbing victim from a 1999 case that remains unsolved. The two killings struck an even more bizarre note yesterday when investigators learned Mademoiselle Bernardin knew the prior victim, Cynthia Trope Heat, who was stabbed in her Gramercy Park apartment on Thanksgiving eve ten years ago. Ms. Heat’s daughter, NYPD Homicide Detective Nikki Heat, the modelicious cover cop in a recent magazine article on our Finest, has been assigned the lead role on the case by Precinct Commander Wallace “Wally” Irons, whose savvy choice of Heat has already brought fast results. Are these double DOAs an odds-breaking coincidence or cold serial? Capt. Irons was not available for comment, but this reporter can suggest one: When it comes to cold cases, warm globally, thaw locally.
Heat folded the tabloid in half and slapped the seat with it. Rook didn’t often hear Nikki swear, but this might be an occasion. “Well this just sucks,” she said. Her jaw muscles knotted and her lips whitened from flexing them together.
He should have known better, but Rook said, “Well, it is factual, at least.”
“Don’t even,” she said. Then a thought came to her and she gave him an appraising look. And he knew why. They’d been down that road before with this reporter.
“No, I did not source that story to Tam Svejda.” Her gaze stuck, and it made him uncomfortable the same way he’d seen her make hardened suspects come unglued in the interrogation box. “First of all, when would I?”
“During your Google session in the wee hours this morning?”
“Ha!” He took the Ledger from her and examined the top of the front page. “Past deadline for this edition.” He handed it back to her. “Plus, why would I?”
That slowed her down but didn’t end it. “Well, you and this Tam Svejda, your bouncing Czech…”
“… Have a history, I know. Just because I slept with her a couple of times doesn’t indenture me to source all her stories.”
“You told me it was once.”
“True.” He smiled. “Meaning once upon a time. In a galaxy far, far away.” When she seemed partially mollified, he said, “Want me to call her?”
“No.” And then, after reflection, “Yes.” But her look said not really.
The earthquake was still managing to keep the city scrambling. The latest infrastructure fail forced their car to detour onto the Queensborough Bridge to get across the East River, because the Midtown Tunnel had been shut down by the Bridge and Tunnel Authority. The driver turned on 10–10 WINS, which reported that the closure was due to slight water ponding mid-tunnel from a mystery leak. “Leaks. Seems to be the theme of the morning,” said Rook. Nikki didn’t appear amused.
After dropping Rook curbside in front of the Midtown offices of the New York Ledger, Heat continued on to the Two-oh, where she entered to the buzz of her squad working its assignments. She spotted Sharon Hinesburg hastily closing an Uggs shopping window on her computer, boss-buttoning the screen to the fingerprint database homepage. “Missed you yesterday, Detective Hinesburg.”
“So I hear. It’s what I get for not plugging in my phone Saturday night.”
“No, it’s what I get, which is one of my detectives out of reach, and that cannot be. Are we clear?” Hinesburg answered with an overblown military salute, which, like most of what she did, irritated the piss out of Nikki, but she let it slide, point having been made. She assigned her to follow up on Nicole Bernardin’s phone records for any leads and moved on to her own desk.
To her disappointment, the pitch of activity in the bull pen was just the sound of wheels spinning. Every update she got-on fingerprints at the Inwood town house, on tracking her headhunter business to get a tax ID, on sports clubs, on credit card statements-all came up either empty, delayed, or devoid of useful leads. On any other case, she would have called on her wisdom and experience gathered over the years to remind herself that it’s impossible to see the trail until it reveals itself. She would remember that crimes got solved by hard work and patience. But this was not any other case. Even though she had succeeded in not only ID-ing the victim but finding a huge connection to her mom’s cold case, Nikki wanted to capitalize on the momentum, and immediately would be nice. A decade was a long time to be patient.
Rook came in with a grin to go with her latte. “You find out who leaked to Tam?” she asked in hushed tones after she drew him into the kitchenette.
“I did. And I didn’t even have to sleep with her to find out. I just tricked her by pretending I already knew. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Tam Svejda’s not the smartest one in the room, even when she’s the only one in it.”
“Very witty, Rook. Save it for your next article. All I want to know is who.” She scoped the area for privacy. “It’s Irons, right? So obvious.”
“Well now, there you go, running off on one of your cockamamie conspiracy theories.”
“OK, let it out; have your fun.”
He stroked his chin theatrically, relishing the opportunity to feed the great detective some of her own words. “I prefer to deal in hard facts rather than indulge myself with a mere crumb of a hunch.”
“Do you want to wear this coffee?”
“It was Sharon Hinesburg.”
Heat was still weighing how to deal with that information when Captain Irons called her into his glass office for an update. Even knowing he had a short attention span and simplifying her briefing to the broad strokes didn’t stop him from wandering off-topic, and early on. “Since I called you from Boston yesterday to tell you about what Rook and I learned about our Jane Doe and her connection to my mother, we’ve been focusing on anything we can learn about Nicole Bernardin.”
“Did you get any seafood up there?”
“Excuse me, Captain?”
Irons leaned back in his leather chair and his weight caused the springs to groan. “Man, I loves me my Boston chowdah. Legal Seafood’s a must on every trip.”
“Yes, they’re quite well known,” she said, but only to keep him engaged while she continued with the business of a double homicide investigation. “So, now that we have the Bernardin ID, we are tasked with following a series of new avenues. We have limited forensics leads from her town house, but we can track other aspects of her life through her banking, business and personal. These haven’t borne fruit just yet, but-”
“Was Rook doing any writing on your getaway?”
“Sir?”
“Any new magazine pieces in the mix?” Irons sat up in his chair to the twang of sprung metal protesting. “It’s just he mentioned the other day he might be doing something to follow up the other article, and I was wondering if he’d been on that, or not.” Maybe Irons didn’t have a short attention span. Maybe his attention was just stuck on other things. “You see my mention in the fish wrapper this morning?”
“Yes I did. In fact, sir-”
“You ought to show it to Rook. Let him see other reporters are nibbling at this, too.”
It wasn’t lost on her that Irons’s take-away from the piece was his own mention. “Rook is not only aware of the article, but he knows it was sourced by a leak, sir. Inside our squad.”
“Someone here slipped that to the Ledger?” Irons tilted his head and peeked over her shoulder through the big window that looked out onto the bull pen. “Know who?”
For anyone else, Heat would have claimed ignorance. “Detective Hinesburg,” she said.
“Sharon? You sure?”<
br />
“Yes, sir.”
“Huh. Well, they had to get it from somewhere.” He took a pull from his coffee mug, seeming unfazed by the leak, and then confirming it after he swallowed with a loud gulp. “Probably a good thing it’s out there.”
“I disagree, Captain.” Heat didn’t like the look of self-amusement she saw after she said that, she but pressed on. “This case is at a stage where we don’t want it played out in public and have to deal with the circus that comes with that. Not before we have a chance to run down all our investigative threads.”
“Yeah? And how’s that going, Detective?” His smile made the wisecrack worse, in her view. It wasn’t just dismissive, it illustrated a closed mind-set.
“As I was just telling you-so far, it’s slow going. But to be realistic…” she said, then paused to give it emphasis, recognizing that her commander’s background was administration. His police experience came from quiet offices on floors numbered by double digits instead of street-level investigation. So she offered a version of the speech she’d given herself minutes before. “… to do this properly, we need to be patient, work it tenaciously, and understand that it’s still very early in this case.”
“Ha. This case has been ten years of stall.” He flicked his copy of the Ledger so it slid across his empty desk toward her. “The paper has it right. This thing ain’t cold, it’s frozen.” He stood, signaling the meeting was over. “Let’s air it out and see what a little publicity brings.” Sure, thought Nikki. Like his fifteen minutes of fame.
Sharon Hinesburg’s phone rang as Heat passed her. She heard the detective say that she’d be right in and saw her hurry into the captain’s glass cube, closing the door. Nikki sat to read a file at her desk, but couldn’t resist swiveling her chair so she could look over the top of it into Irons’s office. Roach came over to her.
“Just to let you know,” said Ochoa, “I came up zip on stalker complaints by Nicole Bernardin. Same with orders of protection. Nothing. Her hairdresser has Monday off, but he’s happy to meet, so I’m heading to his place in the West Village now to see what dish he has that might be useful.”
“Good, keep me up,” she said. But then the partners lingered, so she waited.
Raley cleared his throat. “I know you don’t go for gossip.”
“You’re right.”
“But this, you need to know,” said Ochoa. “Tell her, pard.”
“They’re sleeping together,” Raley said in his lowest whisper. He didn’t turn, but he let his eyes flick toward Irons and Hinesburg. Heat let her eyes drift to the pair in the office and saw Irons wagging a finger at Detective Hinesburg, but they both seemed to think something was funny. “On the way in this morning, I saw Wally drop her at the far corner down on Amsterdam so they wouldn’t walk in together.”
Heat remembered how she and Rook used to put on charades like that before they were a public item, but she said, “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“They kissed each other before she got out. And it was full-tonsil exploratory.”
Sharon Hinesburg falling off the grid Sunday and the media leak that had made Irons the hero now made sense in a way that got Heat angry. Angry at being saddled with Hinesburg in the first place. Angry that Irons had crossed the line with a squad romance. Angry that, as a result, a toxic dynamic had been created in her unit that jeopardized her case. And angry, most of all, at herself for not having seen it coming. But she took a beat and said, “You two know how I feel about gossip. So this goes no further.” And then she added, “But keep me posted.”
As Roach moved off, Rook came to her desk. “Did you tell him it was Hinesburg?” She nodded and he said, “Think he’s going to give her a tongue-lashing?”
“Oh, count on it.”
“Listen, Nikki, one more thing about this leak.” And then he spoke the worry that had been nagging her from the moment she read the article in the car. “I imagine your dad reads the papers and watches the news, huh?”
She nodded solemnly, got her cell phone from her pocket, and then surveyed the openness off the bull pen. “I’ll be outside,” Nikki said. “I need to make a personal call.”
Heat came back into the bull pen ten minutes later smelling like fresh air and asked Rook if he wanted to take a ride to Scarsdale. He didn’t say any more than “Sure,” lest she change her mind about bringing him to meet her father. But by the time their gold unmarked crossed Broadway heading toward the West Side Highway, he felt his seat was adequately secured and said, “Can I tell you I’m surprised you asked me along?”
“Don’t feel too flattered. I’m using you.” Nikki’s comment came without eye contact because she was making a show of putting her attention on the road instead of him. “You’re my rodeo clown to distract him so things don’t get too mired.”
“A high honor, indeed. Thanks. Mired, how?”
“With any luck, you won’t have to know.”
“That bad between you two?” Her shrug didn’t satisfy him, so he asked, “How long since you last saw him?”
“Christmas. We see each other birthdays and major holidays.” Rook let silence work for once. Sure enough, nervous spaces need filling. “We’re sort of living the cards and calls relationship. You know, e-gifts instead of gifts. Seems to work for both of us.” She ran a dry tongue across her lips and focused on the road again. “Or seemed to.”
“Didn’t you want that on-ramp?” he asked. Heat blew an exhale through her teeth and circled the 79th Street rotary back to the entrance she had passed in her distraction. Rook waited until she settled into her lane. Out her window, to the west, he watched thunderheads building into giant cauliflowers across the Hudson. “Were you two always arm’s length?”
“Not so much. Didn’t help that my parents got divorced while I was away on my semester abroad in college. They didn’t tell me until I got back and he’d already moved out by then.”
“That was the summer before the…?” He left it unsaid.
“Yeah. He got one of those corporate extended-stay apartments. The Oak, on Park Avenue. Then, after Mom got killed, Dad couldn’t deal. Quit his job, left for the burbs, and started his own small real estate business there.”
“I’m looking forward to finally meeting him. This is kind of a big deal for me.”
“How so?”
“I dunno… Let’s call it future relations.”
Now she did look over at him. “You slow it down, there, bucko. This visit is strictly to tell him firsthand about the new developments in the case. It’s not… I don’t know what.”
“ Father of the Bride?”
“Stop right there.”
“Part Four. Diane Keaton puts Steve Martin on a colon cleanse right before the wedding. Anything can happen, and does.”
“I could let you out right here and you could walk back.”
“Hey,” he said, “you wanted a rodeo clown, you got a rodeo clown.”
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the driveway of a gated condo complex about a half mile from the Hutchinson Parkway. Nikki punched some numbers into the security keypad and waited, running the fingers of both hands through her hair. A sharp buzz vibrated the tiny speaker on the kiosk, and as the gate rolled aside, thunder growled in the distance. Rook said, “Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!”
“Seriously, Rook? You’re meeting my dad and quoting King Lear?”
“You know,” he said, “there’s no bigger pain in the ass than a literate cop.”
To Rook, the Jeffrey Heat who waited for them standing in his open front door held only a faint resemblance to the photos he had seen in the family album. Sure, many years had passed since those pictures captured a more robust version of the man, whose life had been under his own command and whose future loomed brightly, but at sixty-one, time hadn’t aged Jeff Heat, life had. The thousand blows of grief had tempered his kindly, jovial face into a guarded replica, one that had come untethered from trust itself and permanently inclined downwar
d, braced for the next jolt. When he reached to shake Rook’s hand, his smile qualified as a best effort; not fake, just unable to access anything inside that passed for simple pleasure. Like the hug he gave his daughter, it was all about getting it as right as he was able.
His condo had a beige feel. Not just clean, but orderly and male. All the furnishings had the same vintage, circa Y2K, including the beached walrus of a big screen TV, the predictable indulgence of the new bachelor. He asked if they would like anything to drink, and it struck Rook that Nikki seemed almost as much a guest there as he was. They declined, and her father took the leather easy chair, establishing himself in his command center flanked by side tables bearing his phone, TV remotes, a flashlight, a portable scanner, newspapers, and a short paperback stack of Thomas L. Friedmans and Wayne Dyers.
“You home for lunch, Dad?”
“Haven’t gone in yet. Everything you’ve heard about this real estate market? It’s worse. Had to let one of my agents go yesterday.” He reached down to hike up his socks. One of them was black, the other navy.
If her father felt any slight at first reading of the latest on his ex-wife’s murder case in the tabloid at his elbow, he didn’t let on. Instead, he listened quietly as Nikki filled him in on the particulars of the case, the only spike in his emotions coming when she recapped their lunch with the former lead detective, Carter Damon. “Ass,” he said. “And useless. That clown couldn’t find sand at the beach.”
“Tell me something, Dad. Everyone says Mom and this Nicole Bernardin were such good friends. But I never heard of her.” His expression remained neutral, so she said, “Kind of strange, don’t you think?”
“Not really. I never liked her, and your mother knew it. Bad influence, let’s leave it there. After we moved back here to the States about a year before you were born, Nicole Bernardin was out of our lives. Good riddance.”
Nikki filled him in on the visit to the New England Conservatory and described the video of her mother’s recital. “I knew Mom could play, but jeez, Dad, I never saw her like that.”
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