“I’m not accusing, Eddie, I’m just asking this to get into the load Captain Montrose was carrying,” said Nikki gently. “You guys didn’t take it any further?”
“We wanted to, but the Huddleston family, they were begging for closure. They’d had enough, so pressure came from downtown to move on, especially since there’d been official disposition. And then Charles got his promotion and took over the Twentieth, so it fell away.”
Heat handed him the mug shot of Sergio Torres. “This guy would have been doing some low-level dealing north of 116th and in the Bronx back then. Ever come across him?”
He studied it carefully and said, “No, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t around. I was Homicide, not Narcotics.”
“Speaking of which, does this guy look familiar? He worked Narco around then.”
Eddie took the picture of Steljess and said, “Mad Dog.”
“What do you know about him?”
“Total dipshit, that’s all you needed to know. He was undercover but everyone knew he crossed over. Went native, you could smell it on him.” He handed the picture back. “I hear they drummed him out. Good riddance.”
“Well said,” from Rook.
After Heat took back the pictures, she said, “One more question, if you don’t mind, Eddie. Who was the big player then?”
“In drugs? Uptown and in the Bronx?” He chuckled. “One man, Alejandro Martinez.”
On the flight back to LaGuardia Nikki said, “Nice one, thinking about Eddie.”
“Not a problem. I am an investigative journalist, you know.”
“Oh? And I understand you also have not one, but two Pulitzers.” She drilled his ribs with her knuckle.
“Do I say that too often?”
“Not really. Maybe if you just carried the awards around it would be more subtle.” She laughed and said, “But you did put your talents to good use. Even if we don’t know all the answers to this yet, we do know one thing.”
“If you’re dyeing your hair black, keep out of direct sunlight?”
“Absolutely.” Then she grew serious. “At least we know Captain Montrose was working on something and not... you know.”
“Dirty?”
“And I knew it. And now that we’ve talked to Eddie, I truly know it. So thanks, times two, Pulitzer boy. For the idea and the plane ticket.”
Rook turned to her and said, “I don’t know who you’re trying to redeem, Montrose or yourself, but I do know one thing. I’m with you on either.”
Heat had multiple voice mails from Ochoa when they got off the plane. “What’s up, Miguel?” she said in the taxi line.
“Where are you? I hear jets.”
“At the airport. Rook and I just went to Florida.” And then she couldn’t resist adding, “For lunch.”
“Man, my frostbite has frostbite. I want to get suspended.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Heat, “best week of my life.”
“First off, Steljess did have his old cuff case and holster but no scrapes matching that leather bit. Same on Montrose’s leathers. OK, more on the captain. Raley and I went to Forensics and personally checked out the questions you had about his weapon. He had a full magazine minus one bullet.” Whatever relief Nikki had felt after meeting with Eddie Hawthorne flushed out of her. A deep sadness gripped her. Rook read it on her and mouthed a silent “what?” but she waved him off. Then Ochoa said, “But hang on. I checked his backup magazine from his belt and discovered something interesting.”
Heat said it first. “One’s missing.”
“Even better. Not only is one missing, the top load in his gun’s mag was the orphan from that spare clip.” Nikki could feel her spirits rise back up while Detective Ochoa continued, “No prints on the cartridge, which is also strange — not even Montrose’s.”
“Not just strange,” Heat said, “significant. I mean, come on, how does a dead man reload?”
Evening rush hour traffic back to Manhattan gave Rook an extra thirty minutes in the rear of the cab to work out a scenario to spin over Ochoa’s revelation. “This is big. No disrespect to the vaunted Mr. le Carré, but this is bigger than Call for the Dead. This is a dead man’s bullet. Hey, I think I have the title for my article. I should write it down. No, I’ll remember, it’s that good.” Nikki didn’t even bother trying to reel him in. He was not only more entertaining than the Taxi TV embedded in the driver’s seat back — she had the Sam Champion promo memorized by now, anyway — Rook was like the broken clock that managed to be correct two times a day. For once he was thinking out loud about something she wanted to hear. Because she was sorting it out, too.
“OK, here’s how it spools for me,” he said. “Montrose is parked in the car and bad guy X, in the passenger seat, has got his gun somehow. Don’t know how that happened but I say it did, otherwise this doesn’t play.”
Heat said, “We can sift the details later. Keep going.”
“Fine, so Montrose’s weapon is in the hands of his passenger, who has either been holding it on him or he takes the captain by surprise. Anyway, the passenger jams the gun under his chin, and pow. Which also explains why a chin shot and no eating the barrel.”
Nikki agreed so far. “And why Lauren expressed reservations about the trajectory.”
“Yes. Now, here is where we go a little Mission: Impossible, but stay with me because it’s absolutely feasible. Montrose is dead. The issue for the shooter becomes how do you sell this as a suicide if the residue is on your hands, not the victim’s? Answer: You hold the gun in the dead man’s hand and fire another shot. Problem 2: Then the magazine is down not one, but two bullets, leaving a lot of messy questions to complicate things. So what the killer does is fit the gun into Montrose’s hand, hold it out the car window, squeeze off the second shot to get residue on the captain, right? Then replace that second bullet by using gloved hands to take one of Montrose’s own bullets — guaranteed to match his weapon — from the spare mag on his belt. The killer slides that round into the top of the clip. It looks like a perfect one-shot suicide, and he splits.”
“You don’t often hear me say this, Mr. Conspiracy Theory, but I think you’re on to something.”
Rook said, “Yes, but it’s pure hypothesis, right? And that doesn’t hold water.”
“So leaky that if you took this theory to the Department, you’d need a mop.”
“We could give it a try. I mean you do know a good water damage service, don’t you, from the crime scene?”
They rode in silence a moment, Nikki staring at the silhouette of the Manhattan skyline in the greening sky of twilight. Then she pulled out her cell phone. “What?” asked Rook.
Heat didn’t answer. She dialed 411 and asked for the number of On Call water damage restoration.
Rook said, “I was joking, you know.”
DeWayne Powell from On Call met them in front of the Graestone Con dominiums, where Heat had seen him parked the day of Montrose’s shooting. “You got here fast,” she said.
“When you’re name’s On Call, that’s what you do. Besides, I have two brothers who are firefighters, so I like to do what I can to help out, you know?”
“Must be handy,” said Rook, “having a few of the Bravest in the family when you’re in the water clean-up business.”
DeWayne beamed a sunny smile. “Know how lawyers chase ambulances? I do fire trucks.”
“Tell me what you were doing here the other day,” said Nikki.
“I’m happy to go through it with you again, but I already told those other detectives everything I saw. Not much to add when you saw nothing.”
Heat shook her head. “I don’t mean about the shooting. I mean, why were you called in?”
They needed flashlights by then, but DeWayne had three in his van and they took them up on the roof. He shined his at an array of orange safety cones connected together by yellow tape. “That’s where I did my patching. Building’s going to redo the whole roof, so that’ll be it until spring.”