“I know,” said Ochoa, “verify with his receptionist, nurses, and/or hotel staff, etcet-yadda, etcet-yadda.”
“Gosh, Detective,” said Heat, “it’s almost like you know what you’re doing.”
Detective Heat stood at the whiteboard and under the heading “Guilford Surveillance Video” wrote two red letters: N.G. It must have been the angle she was writing at that brought on the pinching stiffness from the previous night’s brawl. She let her shoulders drop and rolled her head in a slow circle, feeling the delicious edge of discomfort that told her she was still alive. When she was done, she circled “Matthew’s Mistress” on the board, capped her marker, and yanked the magazine out of Rook’s hands. “Want to take a ride?” she asked.
They took the West Side Highway downtown, and even the river showed symptoms of heat strain. To their right, the Hudson looked as if it was too hot to move and its surface lay there in surrender, all flat and dozy. The zone west of Columbus Circle was still a mess and would surely lead the five o’clock news. The erupting steam jet had been shut off, but there was a lunar-sized crater that would close West 59th for days. On the scanner, they listened to one of the NYPD quality of life squads report they had busted a man for public urination who admitted he tried to get arrested so he could spend the night in air-conditioning. “So the weather caused two eruptions that required police action,” said Rook, which made Heat laugh and feel almost glad he was along.
When she’d set up the meeting with Matthew Starr’s former mistress, Morgan Donnelly asked if they could meet her at work, since that’s where she spent most of her time. That fit the profile Noah Paxton had sketched of her when Nikki asked him about her in their conversation earlier that day. As was his way, once he opened up, Nikki’s pen could hardly keep pace. In addition to revealing choice office nicknames, he’d called their romance the inter-office elephant in the conference room and summed up Starr’s not-so-secret mistress by saying, “Morgan was all brains, tits, and drive. She was the Matthew Starr ideaclass="underline" work like crazy, screw like mad. Sometimes I’d picture them in bed with their BlackBerrys, texting oh-yeah-like-that’s to each other between deals.”
So, with that in her head, when Nikki Heat parked the car at the business address off Prince Street in SoHo Donnelly had given her, she had to double-check her notes to make sure she had the right place. It was a cupcake bakery. Her sore neck protested when she twisted to read the sign above the door. “ ‘Fire and Icing’?” she said.
Rook quoted a poem, “ ‘Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice.’ ” He opened his car door and the heat rolled in. “Today, I’m going with fire.”
“I still can’t believe it,” said Morgan Donnelly as she sat down with them at a round café table in the corner. She unsnapped the collar flap of her crisp white chef’s tunic and offered the stainless sugar caddy to Heat and Rook for their iced Americanos. Nikki tried to reconcile the Morgan the baker before her with the Morgan the marketing powerhouse Noah Paxton drew. There was a story there and she would get it. The corners of Donnelly’s mouth turned down, and she said, “You hear about things like this in the news, but it’s never anybody you know.”
The girl came from behind the counter and set a sample plate of mini-cupcakes in the center of the table. When she stepped away, Morgan continued, “I know getting involved with a married man doesn’t make me look like the best person. Maybe I wasn’t. But when it was happening, it seemed so right. Like in the middle of all the pressure of the job there was this passion, this amazing thing that was just ours.” Her eyes filled a little and she swiped her cheek once.
Heat studied her for tells. Too much remorse or not enough were red flags. There were others, of course, but those indicators formed the baseline for her. Nikki hated the term, but so far Morgan’s reaction was appropriate. But the detective needed to do more than take her temp. As the ex of a murder victim, she had to be checked out, and that meant getting answers to two simple questions: Did she have a strong revenge motive, and did she stand to gain from the man’s death? Life would be so much simpler if Heat could just have her check off boxes on a questionnaire and mail it in, but it didn’t work that way and now Nikki’s job was to make this woman a little uncomfortable. “Where were you when Matthew Starr was killed? Say, between twelve-thirty and two-thirty P.M.?” She started throwing the high heat to catch Morgan off guard.
Morgan took a moment and answered without any defensiveness. “I know exactly where I was. I was with the Tribeca Film people for a tasting. I won a catering contract for one of their after-parties this spring, and I remember because the tasting went well and I was driving back here to celebrate that afternoon when I heard about Matthew.”
Nikki made a note and continued. “Did you and Mr. Starr have any contact after the affair ended?”
“Contact. You mean, did we still see each other?”
“That. Or any contact at all.”
“No, although I did see him once a few months ago. But he didn’t see me and we didn’t talk.”
“Where was this?”
“Bloomingdale’s. At the lunch counter downstairs. I was going to get a tea and he was there.”
“Why didn’t you speak to him?”
“He was with someone.”
Nikki made a note. “Did you know her?”
Morgan smiled at Nikki’s perception. “No. I might have said hello to Matthew, but she had her hand on his thigh. They seemed preoccupied.”
“Can you describe her?”
“Blond, young, pretty. Young.” She thought a moment and added, “Oh, and she had an accent. Scandinavian. Denmark or Sweden, maybe, I don’t know.”
Nikki and Rook traded glances, and she could sense him looking over her shoulder as she wrote “Nanny?” in her notes. “So otherwise no contact at all then?”
“No. When it was over, it was over. But it was very cordial.” She looked down at her espresso and then up at Nikki and said, “Bullshit, it was painful as hell. But we were both grown-ups. We both went our ways. Life goes…well…” She left that unfinished.
“Let’s go back to the end of your relationship. It must have been difficult in the office. Did he fire you when it was over?”
“It was my decision to leave. Working together would be awkward for us, and I sure as hell didn’t want to deal with the gossip residue.”
“But still, you had a big career there.”
“I had a big love there. At least I told myself it was. When that ended, I wasn’t focused on my career so much.”
“I’d be angry as hell,” said the detective. Sometimes the best way to ask a question was not to ask it.
“Hurt and fragile, yes. Angry?” Morgan smiled. “It ended up for the better. A relationship like that, you know, the fun-and-convenient, going-nowhere kind? I realized I was using that relationship to stay out of relationships, just as I was with my work. Do you know what I mean?”
Nikki shifted uncomfortably in her chair and managed a neutral “Uh-huh.”
“At best it was a place holder. And I wasn’t getting any younger.” Nikki shifted again, wondering how she had ended up as the one feeling uncomfortable. “Matthew was good to me, though. He offered me a huge chunk of money.”
Nikki snapped out of herself and back to the interview and made a note to check that out with Paxton. “How much did he give you?”
“Nothing. I wouldn’t accept it.”
“It’s not like he would have missed it,” said Rook.
“But don’t you see?” she said to him, as if he never would. “If I took his money, then that would be what it was all about. It wasn’t like people said. It wasn’t about rising to the top on my back with my legs in the air.”
Rook persisted. “Still, nobody would have to know you took his money.”