While Rook watched from behind the two-way mirror, Heat and Ian sat across from the kid, letting him sweat it out. The silence had to be incredibly uncomfortable for Joseph Hill. To Heat, on the other hand, it was simply a strategy. Her instincts told her that Joseph would wear himself down. She just had to wait and ride the wave.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Hill finally asked when he couldn’t take the pressure anymore. There was a hefty dose of panic in his voice.
Heat glanced at her watch. It had only taken three minutes. “Oh, are you ready to talk now?”
Under the table, he jiggled one leg. The force of the action made the table vibrate. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “I swear. It really wasn’t my fault.”
“What exactly wasn’t your fault?” Ian asked. “The fact that you stole Mr. Rook’s bag, or the assault—”
Joseph’s eyes bugged. “Wait, what?”
Ian leaned back, folding his arms over his chest. Intimidation looked to be his go-to in the interrogation room. “You plowed into them, knocked them both to the ground, and proceeded to hit and kick Mr. Rook. The snatch-and-grab would have been a misdemeanor, but the assault takes the whole thing up a notch. And then, dumbass, you ran from Detective Heat. Not looking too good for you, Joseph.”
Joseph looked like a man who’d been beaten down by the world, not just by the Cambria Police Department, a visiting detective, and a writer.
“Why’d you do it?” Heat asked when he didn’t respond.
From the way he studied his own wringing hands, Heat knew this boy was on the verge of breaking. She pushed again. “Did you know Chloe?”
He leg kept working under the table, and his left eye twitched. “I’ll take your non-answer as a yes,” Heat said. “Did you kill her, Joseph? Is that why you tried to steal the bag?”
“No!”
“You needed to get Chloe’s notebook, right? Is there something incriminating in it? Did she write about you?”
Joseph shoved back in his chair and stood up. “Jesus Christ, are you serious? No! I didn’t kill Chloe. I hardly knew her.”
Ian stuck out his pointer finger then angled it down, indicating that Joseph Hill had better sit his ass back down. Joseph read the gesture for what it was and slowly sank back into his chair. “He said it was no big deal. He said it was his notebook.”
“Who said it was no big deal?” Ian asked.
“I don’t know his name. I didn’t even see him.”
Ian slammed his hand on the table. “Don’t screw with us, kid!”
Joseph jerked back, waving his hands in front of him. “I’m telling the truth. You have to believe me. I’m not even going to get paid, and I’m—oh shit—” He drew back, looking even more terrified than he had just a few minutes before. “Am I going to jail?
“That depends,” Heat said.
“On what?”
“On you cooperating with us,” she said.
Ian leaned forward. “Who’s paying you, Joseph?”
The chief’s stern and unforgiving approach had the desired effect. Joseph started jiggling his leg again and beads of sweat formed on his forehead. “I really don’t know.”
Ian scoffed. “You stole a bag to get Chloe’s notebook, but you don’t know who you did it for?”
Joseph looked like a bobblehead, moving his head in a random combination of shakes and nods. He laid his forearms on the table and looked imploringly at them. “If I tell you what I know, will that help me? Because I can’t go to jail. They’ll kick me out of school.” He looked up at the ceiling, covering his face with his hands. “Oh my God, my parents’ll kill me.”
This time, Heat leaned forward and met Joseph’s gaze. “Tell us what happened and we’ll see what we can do.”
The kid sucked in a shaky breath. “Okay, look. I was sitting in class today—”
“In Mr. Rook’s lecture?” Heat asked.
“Right. Then that guy started talking shit.”
Nikki could hear the voice from somewhere in the lecture hall asking if Rook had killed the girl. “I remember,” she said. “Go on.”
“Someone tapped me on the shoulder.”
“The same guy challenging Mr. Rook?”
“No. That guy was in front of me somewhere.”
“So someone tapped you on the shoulder. What then?”
“When I started to turn around, he told me not to. Kind of freaked me out, to be honest. Cloak-and-dagger shit, you know?”
“We don’t know, which is why we need you to tell us,” Ian snapped.
Heat caught his eye, patting the air with her open palm. His raging cop approach was going to shut Joseph down if he wasn’t careful.
“What did he say?” Heat asked, her voice softer to compensate for Ian’s angry tone.
“He said that the professor was a hack and took his notebook and he wanted it back.”
Nikki balked. Rook was a lot of things, but a hack was not one of them. She shot a glance at the two-way, imagining how Rook was taking the slander against him. Not like a champ, she’d have bet. “And you believed him?” she asked.
He shrugged noncommittally. “He said he’d pay me three hundred dollars if I could get it back. I didn’t think about it too much, I guess.”
From behind the glass, she heard the muffled sound of Rook’s voice. Again, she patted the air, but this time over her shoulder and directed at him.
“Let’s recap,” she said to Joseph. “You were in class, minding your own business, when a man tapped you on the shoulder and offered you three hundred dollars to steal a notebook Mr. Rook had in his possession.”
“It doesn’t sound too good when you put it like that.”
“That’s because it isn’t too good. In fact, it’s pretty bad, because it’s all connected to an ongoing murder investigation.”
Joseph suddenly looked like a light bulb went off over his head. “Oh man, you think this guy’s involved in Chloe’s death?”
“It’s a very strong possibility,” she said.
Joseph sat back, covering his face with his hands again. “I can’t believe I fell for it.”
Heat couldn’t believe he had, either. “Joseph, is there anything else you can tell us about the guy?”
He shook his head. “I never saw his face.”
“How were you supposed to deliver the notebook?” she asked.
“And how were you going to get the three hundred dollars you sold your soul for?” Ian asked.
The sarcasm flew over Joseph’s head. “I gave him my cell number. He said he’d call me at five o’clock and arrange a trade.”
Heat flicked her wrist to check the time. “That’s in three minutes.”
She and Ian shared a look that they both understood. It was not enough time to set up a tap. “Joseph, we’re going to need you to help us,” Heat said. Joseph raised his eyes and waited, so she continued. “When this guy calls, you have to convince him that you have the notebook. We need you to set up the meeting.”
Joseph scraped his fingers over his scalp. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
Ian scowled. “Your other option is for me to throw you in jail. See how well you like that—”
Heat cut him off. They now had less than three minutes, and Ian’s berating Joseph wasn’t going to help the kid stay calm. “You’ll be better at it than you realize, Joseph. All you have to do it say you have the notebook. He’ll tell you where to meet and we’ll do the rest.”
Joseph’s leg started up again. “What if he knows what happened?” His gaze skittered between them. “That I’m here?”
Heat had to admit that it was a possibility. If she’d been the one making a deal with some stranger to steal something for her, she’d have stuck around to make sure it actually happened. They had to take the opportunity in front of them, though. “We’ll cross that bridge when—or if—we get there, okay?”
He breathed out a jagged “Okay.”
Ian opted to step out, leaving Heat al
one with Joseph. In theory, she thought this was a good idea. He’d shown himself to be too hotheaded. But in practice, Ian and Rook being alone behind the mirror could go south real fast. He’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
When Joseph’s phone rang precisely at five o’clock, she didn’t have to think about that particular scenario anymore. Instead, she focused only on coaching the scared kid through the mess he’d gotten himself into.
“Go ahead and answer and put it on speaker,” she said, keeping her voice calm and controlled in order to keep him calm and controlled.
His eyes were wide and his hands shook, but he did as she told him, answering with a shaky “Hello?”
The man on the other end cut right to the chase. “Did you get it?”
He looked at her for direction. Say yes, she mouthed.
“Yes,” he said immediately.
“Any problems?”
Again, his eyes sought hers. She sighed. Say no, she directed silently.
“No,” he said, but to Nikki’s practiced ear, the hesitation he’d given, and the tenor of his voice, made him sound less confident than she would have liked.
“You sure?” the guy on the other end asked. Heat detected a hint of unease in the guy’s voice, which told her he’d heard the tentativeness in his mule’s response, too.
Joseph gulped audibly. “Um, it was nothing. I hid in the lecture hall and saw Mr. Rook put the notebook in his bag. Then, when he was walking through campus, I did a snatch-and-grab. Easy.”
Heat gave a relieved sigh. The boy seemed to have recovered, tossing out the term Ian had used to describe the theft as if it were part of his everyday vernacular.
“Easy getaway?” the man asked.
Heat listened carefully, trying to detect any bit of familiarity in his voice, but she couldn’t say for certain one way or the other, and there were also no clues as to his age or education. Too few words. She rolled her finger in the air, indicating that Joseph should keep talking.
“Totally easy. Knocked him flat on the ground. Kind of felt bad for the guy, to be honest. He is my professor.”
Heat nodded in approval. The guy was slipping right into his role.
“They didn’t see your face or come after you?”
“No, not at all,” Joseph said. “He was laid out on the ground.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He never saw it coming.”
“And they didn’t put up a fight or chase you?” the guy said, and just like that, Heat knew the jig was up. Just like she would have, it seemed the guy who’d tapped Joseph for the snatch-and-grab had, indeed, stayed around to watch it all go down.
Joseph must have sensed it, too, because he scratched his head and looked stumped. “Um, no, there was no fight.”
“Jesus Christ, kid. Do you think I’m an idiot? You are at the police station right now. Are they listening? Because I have a message.”
There was no point in pretending she wasn’t there, so Nikki sat down, the phone face up in the center of the table, and spoke. “What message do you have for me?”
“You and writer boy need to back off.”
The “or else” was implied. “Why did you kill Chloe?” Heat asked, following her gut. This guy wanted the notebook, which had to implicate him in some way. It was only logical that he had killed Chloe to keep her from revealing whatever he wanted kept under wraps...or he knew who did.
“Back off,” he said again, and then the line went dead.
Chief Cooley was holding Joseph Hill for further questioning, but Nikki and Rook had gone back to the hotel and to the murder board. Chloe Masterson’s notebook had helped fill in a few of the gaps, but there was a missing link. “We still don’t know where Chloe went when she left yoga class,” Heat said after she’d written it in the form of a question on the board.
“Or who she was meeting,” Rook said.
“We know she had at least been contacted by or was in touch with April Albright from First Press.”
“Maybe we missed something,” Rook said. They’d spent what felt like hours scouring Chloe’s notes, trying to decipher her shorthand. They’d managed to read some of it, but she’d been cryptic, so whatever they were able to understand was not enough to even form a lead.
“Maybe,” she conceded. She’d wanted more time with the notebook, but the moment Joseph Hill had stolen Rook’s bag, her time had been up. To have kept the notebook would have been unethical. And Nikki didn’t do unethical unless there was no other choice and the ends really did justify the means. She had a code, and she lived by it.
“Ian said he’d let you know if he found anything else.” Rook sat down beside her on the couch in the suite portion of the hotel room. “In the meantime, let’s review what we know.”
They sat side by side, staring at the board. The major gap was still understanding what, exactly, Chloe had been investigating. What was her big story? Wishing that the young woman had told Rook didn’t get her anywhere. “Let’s backtrack,” Heat said. “We know she wanted to talk to you, but why? Let’s assume it was more than just you being her mentor and wanting to run an idea by you. Why you? Why not one of the Cam U journalism professors? Why you?” she repeated.
Rook jumped into musing right alongside her. “I did an article once about being a mentor and choosing a mentor. A person chooses to be a mentor to help others and to share the breadth of their experience. Think about my good friends James Patterson and Michael Connelly. They mentor other writers, guiding them on their journeys to being mystery authors.”
“But you didn’t reach out to Chloe, and she had other choices,” Heat said. “Why did she zero in on you?”
“Other than my—”
“I know, your rugged handsomeness.”
“Because I have done something that she connected to.”
“Did she follow your work? But again, why you?”
Rook had a certain look when he was deep in thought. His brow furrowed. He stared off in the distance, his eyes vacant. And he stroked his chin. All three were in play at the moment, so Heat waited. Following a deep thinking session, he sometimes came up with something brilliant. Heat hoped this would be one of those times.
He snapped his fingers a second later. “Jada said that Chloe knew I’d understand.”
“That you could help her because you knew her story.”
“‘Knew her story,’” he repeated. “I don’t know what she could mean, unless Chloe was writing about something I’d already covered.”
That made sense. “Think back, Rook. What stories have you done that would have piqued her interest?”
He considered for a moment before responding. “I don’t think that’s the right approach. If I had already completed a story, there wouldn’t have been anything more to investigate. I think a better question is: What stories did I start, but not finish?”
They were on the same team, but damn, she hated it when he landed on a better question than she did. “Okay, so what have you started, but then stopped?”
He pointed his index finger to the sky and tsked at her. “Once again, there is a better question. She would not be privy to my abandoned stories, therefore it stands to reason that she was aware of something I’d talked about publicly.”
Dammit again. “Are you done one-upping me?”
He bowed his head. “I do believe I am.”
“Then tell me, oh smart one: When have you spoken publicly about stories you killed?”
“Not often,” he confessed, deflating the entire buildup of the conversation. “My hypothesis about how Chloe learned about one of my stories is a good one, but the how-she-discovered-it part is not so easy to pinpoint. Writers don’t go around sharing their ideas with other people. Intellectual property is a big deal. You never know if you’ll want to come back to an idea you had ten...years...ago...”
She knew him so well. He’d slowed down because what he was saying had triggered a thought. “Tell me.”
“Remembe
r the awards ceremony? Chloe said something about my old journalism notebooks.”
“Right. She said she’d always keep hers, too, or something along those lines.” During a murder investigation, everything was on the table. Heat dug in deeper to explore the idea Rook had brought to the surface. “From what people have said, Chloe was intentional about things in her life. Her job at the paper, her writing assignments, her apartment, her room, her shorthand. She thought things through.”
Rook picked up on her train of thought. “So if she was curious about my old notebooks, it was for a reason. Her being at that ceremony, it wasn’t an accident, was it?”
“I don’t think so,” Heat said. “She brought up your old notes, which means that is what she wanted to find out about.”
“Exactly. Did you bring them?”
“I did. I planned to use them as exhibits during some of my lectures. The point is to show the kids how we keep learning, even after we leave college, and how our investigative skills develop and refine over time.”
Nikki agreed with that perspective 100 percent. The details of every case she’d investigated were catalogued and filed away at the precinct, but what she’d learned through the steps of the investigations always affected how she approached subsequent cases. Her case leading to the downfall of a prominent candidate for president, Lindsy Gardner, had shown her that what happened in the past could come back to haunt you. Similarly, her own past—the trauma of hearing her mother’s scream over the phone and then as she took what Nikki believed to be her last breath—always reminded her about the humanity of the victims and their families, and it informed her every action on the job.
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