“I’ve been hacked?” Rook straightened up from hunching over the desk and beamed at Nikki. “This is wonderful!... I mean, not so good for the computer but... Oh, man, excellent news. But also bad. It’s complicated. I’ll shut up.”
Heat was focused on other ramifications. “Can you tell who installed this RDA?”
“No, it’s heavily encrypted. Whoever hid this on the hard drive really has skills.”
“Rook was out of the country recently, could it have happened then?”
Magoo shook his head. “This was installed the other day. Anybody been in your loft? Maybe you left your laptop somewhere unattended?”
“Mm, no. I’ve had it with me at all times. Working at her place.” The same thought came to Heat, but Rook voiced it. “The water on the bathroom windowsill. Whoever it was didn’t break in to steal something. They broke in to probe me. Well, my computer. I feel so... violated.”
“Listen,” said Magoo, “I could try to break into it and see who it was. In fact, I’d love the challenge. But you have to know something. If I crack it, I may set off an alert to tell whoever it is that they’ve been busted. You want me to do that?”
“No,” said Nikki. Then she turned to Rook. “Get yourself another computer.”
Magoo left with a check that included a fee for his services plus the cost of a new, clean laptop he promised to return with inside the hour. As soon as the door closed, Nikki said, “I am so sorry I doubted you.”
Rook made a small shrug. “I don’t see it so much as doubting me. I think it was more like pouring sulfuric acid on my character and virtually shredding me as a human being.”
She smiled. “So we’re good now?”
“Way good.” Then he said, “Damn. I am so easy.”
She moved close and put her arms around him, pressing her groin against his. “Hey? I’ll make it up to you.”
“Count on it.”
“Later.”
“Tease.”
“To work.”
“Too bad.”
Heat began with her Priority List on the presentation pad. First in order was Sergio Torres. She might not have had the assets of the NYPD at her disposal, but she did have resources at the FBI. A few months before, while tracking down the serial killer from Texas who duct taped her to a chair in that very room, Nikki had contacted the Bureau’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Virginia. During the process of investigating that case, she had forged a friendship with one of the NCAVC analysts. Heat got on the phone to her.
The beauty of a professional relationship in law enforcement is that little needs to be said to conduct business. Nikki supposed it was the residue of the code, attributed to John Wayne, of “Never complain, never explain.” Heat said she was working a case on her own and wanted to run a name without going through NYPD. “Mind if I ask your interest in the subject?” asked her analyst friend.
“He tried to kill me and I took him out.”
“Give me everything you’ve got, Nikki,” she said without pause. “We’ll run this SOB so you even know his favorite ice cream flavor.”
Heat fought off an unexpected well of emotion at the gesture and with coplike understatement thanked the analyst and said she’d be interested in whatever she learned.
Riding a sense of goodwill from the kindness of others, Nikki opened her cell phone to Recents and scrolled to Phyllis Yarborough’s number from the call she had made that morning. “I’m taking you up on your offer. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“That guy who tried to kill me in Central Park the other day. His rap sheet undervalues his skill set. If it’s not ethically compromising to you given my job status, I was wondering if you could run him through your RTCC database and see if anything pops.”
As with her FBI contact in Quantico, Phyllis Yarborough did not skip a beat. “Give me the spelling of his name,” was her reply.
Rook was already up and running on his new MacBook Air and jumped to his feet when she finished her calls and came into his office. “I have run down a very interesting piece of information on one of our players,” he said.
“Do tell.” Nikki sat in the guest chair and let herself melt into the soft cushions, feeling newly upbeat and admitting to herself she was enjoying this new work arrangement with Rook.
“I ran some Googles and Bings on some of the names we’ve got on Murder Board South. Not exactly Philip Marlowe gumshoeing bad guys in The Big Sleep, but it has its rewards. I can snack, for instance. Anyway, I had gotten around to checking out our human rights activists at Justicia a Garda. Milena Silva, as presented, is an attorney. However, Pascual Guzman... know what he did before he left Colombia? A college professor at Universidad Nacional in Bogotá. And what did he teach?”
Nikki took a stab. “Marxist philosophy?”
“Try computer science.” Rook sat back at his desk and referred to his screen. “But Professor Guzman left the university. Why? It was in protest because he claimed the computer programming he was doing in his department was being used by the secret police to spy on dissidents.” Rook punched the air with his fist and stood. “That’s it. This is the guy who hacked my computer.”
“But why?”
“OK...” He came around the desk, pacing. “Want to hear my theory? Guzman... and a cadre of radicals he recruited here in New York embraced violence too much for their friend and ally, Father Gerry Graf, who was fine with the protests but not with the bloodletting to come. They fight. Graf has to go. They kill Graf, done and done. But no. Here comes Detective Nikki Heat with all her smarts and tenacity and they say, Heat has to go. They try to bushwhack you in the park, thoroughly underestimating the heat that is Heat. And when that doesn’t work, they try to take you out another way: hack me to get you in trouble with One Police Plaza and knocked off the case. Boom.”
“Let’s arrest them right now,” said Nikki.
Rook’s zeal deflated and he slumped down on the edge of his desk. “When you say that, it’s like you’re saying my theory is crazy and unsubstantiated.”
Heat smiled. “I know.”
“Well, come on, doesn’t it make sense?”
“Parts of it do. Especially Guzman being a computer guy. But... ,” she paused, slowing down to model behavior for him, “. . . but it’s all based on conjecture. Rook, have you ever thought of writing crime fiction instead?”
“Nah,” he said. “I’m all about keeping it real.”
They were planning their next moves when the impact of the severe winter cold charted their immediate course. The TV and radio news was all over a major breaking story at the power plant on the East Side, where one of the giant, ninety-five-foot-tall boilers that pumped thousand-degree steam through underground pipes and heated Lower Manhattan had exploded. A mechanic was injured and expected to survive, but the consequence was that there was a steam shutoff in the entire zone serviced by that plant. The spectacular TV helicopter pictures of the crippled plant went split screen as the anchor showed a map of the affected area which would be without steam for the next two or three days.
Nikki said, “Look, my apartment’s right in the middle of the zone.”
“Man,” said Rook. “Gotta feel sorry for the buildings that don’t have their own boilers ’cause the landlords are too cheap to upgrade from district steam, huh?” He chuckled and then read from her expression that she was living in one of them. “You’re kidding. Oh, I am loving the irony, Nikki: No heat. And minus-degree temperatures tonight? Let’s go get some of your clothes and lady-whatevers and bring them here.”
“You’ll use anything to get me to shack up here, won’t you?”
“Steam failure, water hammer, act of God, I am above nothing.”