“Thank you for not interrupting while she was spewing.”
Rook shrugged. “I’d like to say that was sensitivity, but it was really because of the chair. It’s hard for a man to sound authoritative surrounded by toile. OK, now that she’s gone, can I tell you I get a vibe off her I don’t like?”
“Uh-huh, I’m not surprised. That was a hell of a shot she took at your ‘profession.’ Accurate though it was.” Heat turned, in case her inner smile leaked onto her face, and started back to the balcony.
He fell in with her. “Oh, please, I have two Pulitzers, I don’t need her respect.” She gave him a side glance. “Although, I did kind of want to tell her that the series of articles I wrote about my month underground with the Chechen rebels are being optioned for a movie.”
“Why didn’t you? Your self-aggrandizement might have been a welcome distraction from the fact that her husband just died a violent death.”
They stepped out into the afternoon scorch, where Raley and Ochoa’s shirts had soaked clean through. “What have you got, Roach?”
“Definitely not liking suicide,” said Raley. “A, check out the fresh paint chips and stone dust. Somebody banged open those French doors pretty hard, like during a struggle.”
“And B,” Ochoa picked up, “you’ve got your trail of scuff marks leading from the doors across the…what is this?”
“Terra-cotta tile,” said Rook.
“Right. Shows the marks pretty good, huh? And they go all the way to here.” He stopped at the balustrade. “This is where our man went over.”
All four of them leaned to look below. “Wow,” said Rook. “Six floors down. It is six, isn’t it, fellas?”
“Let it go, Rook,” said Heat.
“But here’s our telltale.” Ochoa got on his knees to indicate something on the railing with his pen. “You’ll have to get close.” He backed up to make room for Heat, who knelt to see where he was pointing. “It’s torn fabric. Forensics geek says it’ll test out as blue denim after he runs it. Our vic wasn’t wearing jeans, so this came from someone else.”
Rook knelt down beside her to look. “As in someone who shoved him over.” Heat nodded, as did Rook. They turned to face each other, and she was a little startled by his proximity but didn’t pull back. Nose-to-nose with him in the heat, she held his gaze and watched the dance of reflected sunlight playing off his eyes. And then she blinked. Oh shit, she thought, what was that? I can’t be attracted to this guy. No way.
Detective Heat quickly rose to her feet, crisp and all business. “Roach? I want you to run a background on Kimberly Starr. And check out her alibi at that ice cream place on Amsterdam.”
“So,” said Rook, rising beside her, “you got a vibe off her, too, huh?”
“I don’t do vibes. I do police work.” Then she hurried away to the apartment.
Later, on the elevator ride down, she asked her detectives, “OK, what was so funny that I could have killed you both with my bare hands? And so you know, I am trained to do that.”
“Aw, nothing, just letting the giddy out, you know how it gets,” said Ochoa.
“Yeah, nothing at all,” said Raley.
Two floors of silence passed and they both started a low hum of “It’s Raining Men” before they cracked up.
“That? That’s what you were laughing at?”
“This,” said Rook, “may be the proudest moment of my life.”
As they stepped back out into the blast furnace and gathered under the Guilford canopy, Rook said, “You’ll never guess who wrote that song.”
“I don’t know songwriters, man,” from Raley.
“You’d know this one.”
“Elton John?”
“Wrong.”
“Clue?”
A woman’s scream cut through the rush-hour noise of the city, and Nikki Heat bounded onto the sidewalk, her head swiveling to search up and down the block.
“Over there,” called the doorman, pointing toward Columbus. “Mrs. Starr!”
Heat followed his gaze to the corner, where a large man gripped Kimberly Starr by the shoulders and jammed her against a store window. It thundered on impact but did not break.
Nikki was off in a sprint, with the other three close behind. She waved her shield and hollered at pedestrians to move as she wove through the after-work crowd. Raley fisted his two-way and called for backup.
“Police, freeze,” called Heat.
In the assailant’s split second of alarm, Kimberly went for a groin kick that missed wildly. The man was already on the move and she torqued herself down to the pavement. “Ochoa,” said Heat, pointing at Kimberly as she passed. Ochoa stopped to attend her while Raley and Rook followed Heat, dodging cars into the crosswalk on 77th. A tour bus making an illegal turn blocked their path. Heat ran around the bus’s rear end, through a puff of hot diesel exhaust, emerging on the cobblestone sidewalk that surrounded the museum complex.
There was no sign of him. She slowed to a jog and then a race-walk across from the Evelyn at 78th. Raley was still on his walkie behind her, calling in their location and the man’s description: “…male cauc, thirty-five, balding, six feet, white short-sleeve shirt, blue jeans…”
At 81st and Columbus Heat stopped and turned a circle. A sheen of perspiration glistened on her chest and fed a darkened V-pattern down the front of her top. The detective showed no sign of fatigue, only alertness, seeing near and far at the same time, knowing all she needed was a glimpse of any piece of him to put her back on the run.
“He wasn’t in that good a shape.” Rook sounded a little winded. “He couldn’t have gotten far.”
She turned to him, a little impressed he had kept up. And a little annoyed that he had. “What the hell are you doing here, Rook?”
“Extra set of eyes, Detective.”
“Raley, I’ll cover Central Park West and circle the museum. You take 81st to Amsterdam and loop back on 79th.”
“Got it.” He cut against the grain of the downtown flow on Columbus.
“What about me?”
“Have you noticed I might be too busy to babysit you right now? If you want to be helpful, take that extra set of eyes and see how Kimberly Starr is doing.”
She left him there on the corner without looking back. Heat needed her concentration and didn’t want her focus pulled, not by him. This ride-along was getting tired enough. And what was with that business back there on the balcony? Pulling up next to her face like some perfume ad in Vanity Fair, those ads that promise the kind of love that life just never seems to deliver. Lucky she shook herself out of that little tableau. Still, she wondered, maybe she had just bitch-slapped the guy a little too hard.
When she turned to check on Rook, she didn’t see him at first. Then she spotted him halfway down Columbus. What the hell was he doing crouching behind that planter? He looked like he was spying on something. She hopped the fence of the dog park and cut across the lawn toward him at a jog. That’s when she saw White Shirt—Blue Jeans climb out of the Dumpster at the rear entrance to the museum complex. She kicked it up to a sprint. Ahead of her, Rook stood up behind his planter. The guy made him and took off down the driveway, disappearing into the service tunnel. Nikki Heat called out to him, but Rook was already running into the underground entrance after her perp.
She cursed and leaped over the fence at the other end of the dog park, chasing after them.
TWO
Nikki Heat’s footsteps echoed back at her off the concrete tunnel as she ran. The passage was wide and high, big enough to truck in exhibits for both museums in the complex: the American Museum of Natural History and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, aka the planetarium. The orange cast of sodium-vapor lamps gave good visibility, but she couldn’t see ahead around the curve of the wall. She also didn’t pick up any other footfalls, and coming around the bend, she saw why not.