At times like these, without the work to hide in, without the martial arts to quiet it, the replay always came. It had been ten years, and yet it was also last week and last night and all of them thatched together. Time didn’t matter. It never did when she replayed The Night.
It was her first Thanksgiving break from college since her parents divorced. Nikki had spent the day shopping with her mother, a Thanksgiving Eve tradition transformed into a holy mission by her mom’s new singleness. This was a daughter determined to make this not so much the best Thanksgiving ever, but as close to normal as could be achieved given the empty chair at the head of the table and the ghosts of happier years.
The two squeezed around each other as they always had in the New York apartment-sized kitchen that night, making pies for the next day. Over tandem rolling pins and chilled dough, Nikki defended her desire to change majors from English to Theater. Where were the cinnamon sticks? How could they have forgotten the cinnamon sticks? Ground cinnamon never flew in her mother’s holiday pies. She grated her own from a stick, and how could they have overlooked that on their list?
Nikki felt like a Lotto winner when she found a jar of them on the spice aisle at the Morton Williams on Park Avenue South. For insurance, she took out her cell phone and called the apartment. It rang and rang. When the message machine kicked on, she wondered if her mom couldn’t hear the phone over her mixer. But then she picked up. Over the squeal of recorder feedback she apologized but she had been wiping butter off her hands. Nikki hated the sharp reverb of the answering machine, but her mother never knew how to turn that damn thing off without disconnecting. Last call before closing, did she need anything else from the market? She waited while her mom carried the portable to check on evaporated milk.
And then Nikki heard glass crash. And her mother’s scream. Her limbs went weak and she called for her mom. Heads turned from the check stands. Another scream. As she heard the phone on the other end drop, Nikki dropped the jar of cinnamon sticks and ran to the door. Damn, the in door. She brute-forced it open and ran out in the street, nearly getting clipped by a delivery guy on a bicycle. Two blocks away. She held the cell phone to her ear as she ran, pleading for her mom to say something, pick up the phone, what’s wrong? She heard a man’s voice, sounds of a scuffle. Her mother’s whimper and her body dropping next to the phone. A tah-tang of metal bouncing on the kitchen floor. One block to go. A clink of bottles in the fridge door. The snap-hiss of a pop top. Footsteps. Silence. And then, her mother’s weak and failing moan. And then just a whisper. “Nikki…”
FOUR
Nikki didn’t go home following the movie after all. She stood on the sidewalk in the warm, spongy air of the summer night looking up at her apartment, the one where she had lived as a girl and that she had left to go to college in Boston, and then left again on an errand to buy cinnamon sticks because ground wouldn’t do. The only thing up there in that two-bedroom was solitude without peace. She could be nineteen again walking into a kitchen where her mother’s blood was pooling under the refrigerator, or, if she could bat the image balloons away, she could catch some news on the tube and hear about more crimes—heat-related, the Team Coverage would say. Heat-related crime. There was a time when that had made Nikki Heat smile.
She weighed texting Don, to see if her combat trainer was up for a beer and some close-quarter bedroom grapples, against the alternative of letting some late night comic in a suit help her escape without the crowded bathroom in the morning. There was another alternative.
Twenty minutes later, in her empty precinct squad room, the detective swiveled in her chair to contemplate the whiteboard. She already had it burnished in her head, all the elements-to-date pasted and scrawled inside that frame which did not yet reveal a picture: the list of fingerprint matches; the green five-by-seven index card with its bullet points of Kimberly Starr’s alibis and prior lives; photos of Matthew Starr’s body where he hit the sidewalk; photos from the M.E. of the punch bruising on Starr’s torso with the distinctive hexagonal mark left by a ring.
She rose and walked up to the ring mark photo. More than studying its size and shape, the detective listened to it, knowing that at any time any piece of evidence could gain a voice. This photo, above all other puzzle pieces on the board, was whispering to her. It had been in her ear all day, and its whisper was the song that had drawn her to the squad room in the stillness of night so she could hear it clearly. What it whispered was a question: “Why would a killer who tossed a man over a balcony also beat him with nonlethal blows?” These bruises weren’t random contusions from any scuffle. They were precise and patterned, some even overlapping. Don, her combat boxing instructor, called it “painting” your opponent.
One of the first things Nikki Heat had implemented when she took command of her homicide unit was a system to facilitate information sharing. She logged on the server and opened the read-only file OCHOA. Scrolling through pages, she came to his witness interview with the doorman at the Guilford. Love that Ochoa, she thought. His keyboard skills are crap, but he took great notes and asked the right questions.
Q: Had vic lef bdg anytm drng curse of morng?
A: N.
Nikki closed Ochoa’s file and looked at the clock. She could text her boss, but he might not see it. Like if he was sleeping. Drumming her fingers on the phone was only making it later, so she punched his number. On the fourth ring Heat cleared her throat, preparing to leave a voice mail, but Montrose picked up. His hello was not sleepy and she could hear the TV blasting the weather forecast. “Hope it’s not too late to call, Captain.”
“If it is too late, it’s too late to hope. What’s up?”
“I came in to screen that surveillance cam video from the Guilford and it’s not here yet. Do you know where it is?”
Her boss covered the phone and said something muffled to his wife. When he came back to Nikki, the TV sound was off. He said, “I got a call tonight during dinner from the attorney representing their residents board. This is a building with wealthy tenants sensitive about privacy issues.”
“Do they have issues with their fellow tenants hurtling past their windows?”
“You trying to convince me? For them to give it up it will take a court order. I’m looking at the clock and thinking we’ll wait to find a judge to issue one in the morning.” He heard her sigh because she made sure he did. Heat couldn’t stand effectively losing another day waiting for a court order. “Nikki, get some sleep,” he said with his usual gentle touch. “We’ll get it for you sometime tomorrow.”
Of course the skipper was right. Waking a judge to cut a warrant was capital you spent on high-priority matters against a ticking clock. To most judges this was just another homicide, and she knew better than to push Captain Montrose to squander a chip like that. So she switched her desk lamp off.
Then she switched it back on. Rook was pals with a judge. Horace Simpson was a poker pal at the weekly game she always ducked when Rook invited her. Simpson was not as sexy a name drop as Jagger, but last she heard, none of the Stones was issuing warrants.
But hang on, she thought. Eager was one thing, owing a favor to Jameson Rook was another. And besides, she had overheard him boasting to Roach he had a dinner date with that groupie in the halter who crashed Nikki’s crime scene. At this hour, Heat might be interrupting the application of his autograph to a new and more exciting body part.