Of course there was not one detective in that precinct who had not been thinking in colors. Wondering every moment who the other end of that green string connected to-bent on beating the killer there again like they had with the locksmith. The difference this time was that they not only wanted to spare a life, they really wanted this bastard.
“Fuck you, Rainbow,” said Randall Feller when the detectives listened back to the recording.
During the playback, Heat circled the only note she had made during the brief conversation: “Nvr hd cp ths smrt.” She weighed those words and put in a call to the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at Quantico, Virginia. Nikki had worked several cases recently where she reached out for a Center assist. Dealing directly with the analyst she had befriended there felt different than the muck and mire she tried to avoid in dealing with the feds. This felt more personal. Her own Bureau boutique, FBI–Lite, she thought, and smiled.
The NCAVC analyst told Heat she had already been briefed on the case, and indeed she knew just about everything, including the colored strings. Heat said, “We’ve run this string MO through our RTCC data banks, of course, but I want to see if you get any hits on something kind of new.” She recapped the call she’d just gotten and could hear a keyboard clacking on the analyst’s end of the line as she spoke.
“Detective, can you send me WAV files of both those calls for me to scrub here?”
Nikki told her she’d attach them to an e-mail right after they hung up. “Meantime, there’s a marker we haven’t run for cross-check yet. You’ll hear it yourself at the end of today’s recording. He said he’d never had a cop this smart.”
“Oh…” The analyst felt the gravity of that, same as Heat. “I’ll bet you want me to look for intersections of serial homicides involving direct voice contact with law enforcement and get back to you with any hits.”
“This is why you do what you do,” said Nikki.
“Just helping the good guys, Detective Heat.”
At first, Nikki thought it was a hallucination. The stress she’d been under, the crazy hours she’d been keeping, things like that could bring on an episode. She rolled her chair to peek around her computer screen. Across the bull pen, inside Captain Irons’s glass fishbowl, it looked from the back like… Yes, it really was… DHS Special Agent Callan shaking hands with Wally. Wally, rising wide-eyed from his desk. Wally, whose jaw had gone slack and whose mouth gaped like an oxygen-starved goldfish, to complete the full aquarium effect of his office. Then both men turned, and the captain’s face shaded crimson, as he extended a hand to greet the lovely female guest, Agent Yardley Bell.
Frozen, Heat could only stare back when Irons gestured through the glass wall to the bull pen and the two federal agents turned her way. Nikki watched both of them smile at her. At least Bart Callan’s seemed genuine.
A minute later Nikki sat in a guest chair in the fishbowl with Irons standing beside her looking superfluous. “If you need me for anything,” said the captain.
“No, just your office will do it.” Callan looked around. “Unless you’ve got some other place we can meet privately.”
Wally added, “There’s Interrogation, you could use that.”
“We’re good here,” said Yardley Bell. They waited for Irons to read their silence. He gave a two-finger salute and left. Bell closed the door and leaned on it. Callan dragged a guest chair closer to Nikki’s and sat.
“Am I becoming old hat?” asked Heat. “Because carjacking me to your warehouse in Queens felt a little more special.”
Bell said, “Don’t feel ambushed. Agent Callan and I were in the area and thought we’d just drop in.”
“Golly.” Nikki borrowed her credulous grin from Joey on Friends.
“Wanted to ask you about Eugene Summers,” said Callan. “You and Jameson Rook spent some time at his apartment in Chelsea, and we were wondering why.”
“Are you interrogating me? Seriously?”
“Not at all. This is purely informational. We just like to close all the loops in our investigation.” He grinned. “Belt and suspenders.” He sounded about as credible as Bell’s claim about being in the neighborhood. Clearly, with this effort, they wanted something, and Heat told herself she’d better focus. As a skilled interrogator, she knew she needed to put her head in theirs and be them. What would she be after?
The code.
Could it be they were looking for the code? Or evidence one existed?
“We obviously know Summers was once run by Tyler Wynn,” continued Callan.
“So what did you talk about?” asked Bell.
“Did you ask him?” Heat asked.
“Kind of asking you,” she replied. Yardley gave Heat a soft stare, but the moment crackled with meaning. About dominance in the interview. And maybe about something else, too.
“Naturally, I wanted to know if Summers had heard from him.”
“And?”
“He hadn’t.”
“And what else?” Bell’s gaze didn’t waver.
She knew the best strategy was to tell the truth. Since Nikki would never give up the code, she did the next best thing. She told a truth. “Tyler Wynn has very specific tastes, and we wanted to get a track on him through his consumer trail. We didn’t know how far to trust Summers, so Rook used the cover of picking his brain for a magazine article to get the specifics we needed.” Heat stopped there. She’d seen so many people over-talk when they were on thin ice, when the best thing to do is get off it-and fast. She sat back in her chair and let them work.
“So this would be Rook’s version, too?” asked Callan.
Nikki shook her head derisively. “Version?” She stood and asked them to follow her.
The pleasure Heat hoped to get out of putting it in the agents’ faces by leading them inside Rook’s retail tracking center was quickly offset by his reaction to seeing Yardley Bell. And hers to seeing him. Nikki couldn’t write a clear caption to their expressions. Was it just the way old lovers looked at each other, or were these the smiles of unfinished business? She stepped right between them and said, “This is the makeshift command post Rook has set up with Detective Rhymer to pick up Wynn’s consumer trail.”
“Quaint,” said Agent Bell.
Heat said to Rook-and pointedly, “I was telling the agents how you and I met with Eugene Summers for the purpose of getting this enterprise going.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And we’ll see how polite the Maven of Manners is after he finds out his in-depth interview wasn’t for any article.” Smart. Even if Rook hadn’t picked up on her cautionary note, he knew enough to be circumspect.
Yardley Bell said, “I’d like to see what your process is, Jamie.” She turned to the others. “Could you give us a moment?”
Heat didn’t like getting split up. Not tactically, not personally. But when Rhymer slid out with his Diet Pepsi and half-eaten club, Callan held the door for Nikki. She hesitated and left, too.
Alone again in the captain’s glass house, Heat said, “So, was divide and conquer part of your drop-in strategy?”
“For the record, it wasn’t my idea to come here to brace you.”
“Who’s running your case, Agent Callan?”
“It gets complicated. It’s my office, my control, but Agent Bell packs major Beltway clout. She Bigfoots my whole day whenever she gets a wild hair.” He threw his palms open. “And here we are.”
“This is why I told you I didn’t want to get tangled up inside your little investigative community,” she said.
“I want to talk to you some more about that.”
“You can save it.”
“What if I said I agree with you?” He waited while she had time to absorb that surprise. “That’s right. I’ve been giving it some thought since our cocktails the other night, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be on this team.”
She studied him warily. “Just like that, you change your mind?”
“More like a change of heart.” He rolled his chin to the glass like he didn’t want an interruption. Or scrutiny, maybe. “Heat, I think I’m feeling a little personal about you, and that wouldn’t be good for a close working relationship.”
“Right,” she said immediately, but then felt at a loss; not prepared for this, not at all.
One teenage summer on Cape Cod she had gotten it in her head to teach herself to windsurf. Starting after breakfast and going until sundown, Nikki’s day did not become the blissful, athletic sail she had envisioned. Instead, it devolved into a relentless series of crashes, spills, and wipeouts punctuated by mere seconds of balance until a sudden gust or rogue wave pitched her into another endo. Nikki stared at Bart Callan and wondered how her entire life had become like that day. Of all the curves she’d been thrown lately, of all the complications she had pulling at her, this one could be the most damaging. She sensed jeopardy if she mishandled this.
“I didn’t want to say anything about it, but I know you sort of got the vibe,” he said, then waited for her to respond. She didn’t, so he continued, “I sure got it from you.”
And there it was. The second wave, the blindsider. Had she flirted? She sure didn’t feel she had. Did she have a few “what if” thoughts? Who didn’t? As she regained her center, Heat knew exactly what she had to say. “Bart, you need to know something.” She made sure the eye contact left no ambiguity. “I am in a relationship now.” She didn’t elaborate. Didn’t tell him he was a nice guy or anything that might leave a door open or be subject to interpretation. For good measure, she added, “It’s important to me.”
He nodded and said, “I hear you.”
She smiled. “Good.”
Then his gaze swept to the hallway where Yardley Bell stood in close conversation with Rook. “But let’s keep in touch.” He looked back at Nikki and said, “You never know.”
As soon as her surprise company departed, Heat jumped back into the pressing business of hunting the serial killer. It wasn’t until nine that night, in the back of the town car he had ordered to drive them to his loft, that they were able to connect. “What did you and Agent Yardley talk about?”
“If you’re wondering if I mentioned The Thing, I didn’t mention The Thing. Give me some credit.”
“Maybe some,” she said, wrapping it in a tease. “But seriously, you did make a quick pickup of my Eugene Summers meaning.”
“Hey, I can be as duplicitous as the best of them. Except with you, of course. With you I am an open book, especially between the covers.” He wanted to be playful. Heat wanted to be reassured.
“Then what did you two talk about?”
“Well, per her request, I gave her a quick primer on my Tyler Wynn project.”
“How much?” Heat chafed at this interference in her case. Callan called it: Bigfoot.
“Enough to find out I may be chasing my tail. Like you, Yardley pointed out he used numerous aliases, plus the fact that he might be doing his shopping through some third party.”
“So that’s her contribution? To basically piss on your investigation?”
“No, actually, she was quite helpful. Nikki, she gave me this brilliant new strategy to follow.” If Rook had a clue how much his exuberance chapped her, he didn’t let on. “Yardley says more and more retailers are using RFID technology.”
“Educate me.”
“Radio frequency identification. You know how your E-ZPass lifts the gate at a highway toll booth, or a security tag on a leather jacket sets off an alarm in a department store? Those are transponders that emit radio signals. Well, technology has now shrunk them down to chips smaller than a grain of rice, and manufacturers and retailers are planting them in their products for inventory control and consumer research. And how do they do that?” He paused to frame the significance. “They electronically track the chips to see where their products are distributed geographically.” He slapped her thigh to punctuate his excitement.
“You’re scaring me, Rook, going all geek on me.”
“I can’t help it. Don’t you see? Of course you see. If we find enough products on the Tyler Wynn list that have RFID chips embedded in them, the little transponders could lead us right to his door, no matter what name he used.”
Begrudgingly, reservedly, but, in the end, objectively, Heat admitted Yardley Bell’s idea had merit. She told Rook she would assign more manpower and resources to the task first thing in the morning.
“And can you call it a task force?”
“No.”
“I’ve always wanted to be on a task force.”
“You’ll have to save it for that video game you play in your boxers.”
He turned away, watching Bryant Park go by his window. “Why do you hurt me?”
Upstairs in Rook’s kitchen, he put some flame under a pot of water for angel hair to go with his scampi while she poured the Sancerre. Without naming it, they had taken to eating meals in more since the poisoning attempt. On high alert was not the way either wanted to live, or admit to living. “How you holding up?” he asked.
“Not exactly brain-dead. But I’m working on it.”
He lifted his glass. “Here’s to the living brain-dead. Makes you almost a zombie.” After they toasted, he said, “If you want to kick back and take a shower, I’ll keep busy sweating some garlic and sautéing these shrimp.”
“You know what I’d really like to do?” she said.
“I do. You want to take another shot at The Thing.”
“Rook, we’re alone. We can call it the code.”
He put on a mock pout. “Oh, you mean the code. I was hoping when you said you wanted another shot at The Thing…”
“You disgust me,” she said with a laugh.
As she walked to the back hall, he called out, “I hid a copy in my office. It’s in the top filing cabinet drawer under ‘Nikki’s Top Secret Code.’ ” And then she could hear him laugh.
Wide awake at 4 A.M., Heat eased out of bed, pulled on some gym shorts and a workout top, and slipped out of the room. Minutes later, she walked barefoot across Rook’s rooftop and sat on the wall to stare at the city that also didn’t sleep much.
The spring thunderstorms forecast for that morning hadn’t arrived yet, but ominous clouds rolled in from the west, swallowing the ambient light of New York City and spitting it back the color of spilled blood.
Nikki fought despair. Out there in those concrete canyons a serial killer roamed free. So might the man responsible for her mother’s murder. Not to mention his accomplice, who almost killed her. Heat looked all around, felt vulnerable, then told herself she didn’t care. She almost believed it.
So far, Heat had managed to rescue one target of the serial killer, but still had no solid leads-nothing she’d call traction. Her quest for Wynn and Kaye remained stalled, with the added attraction of federal meddling: Bart Callan, vigorous, competent, and misguidedly personal; Yardley Bell, disruptive to Nikki’s case and threatening to her relationship.
Downstairs in Rook’s bed, Heat had tried to clear her mind of these demons. Since she couldn’t sleep, she decided to be productive and mentally projected the lines, dots, and squiggles of her mom’s code on the pale canvas of the ceiling. The solve still would not come.
So she changed the scenery. Resting a bare heel on the ornate scrollwork of the frieze beneath her, Heat listened to her breathing instead of the taxi horns, night sirens, and the doop-doop of garbage trucks at work. She let her eyes gloss over until she no longer saw the iconic Empire State and Chrysler Buildings looming out of the cityscape. Instead, her vision fused with the thin curtain of urban haze in the middle distance. Piano notes from her childhood songbook appeared and merged with the blurred apartment lights in the high-rises before her. Then those strange pencil notations surfaced like watermarks. Nikki could see the characters as clearly as she had on the page where they were written, so embossed were they in her mind’s eye.
But whether studied on paper, a ceiling, or the crimson Tribeca skyline, they still told her nothing.
“How long have you been at this?” came the voice behind her. Nikki had wedged the access door open and didn’t hear Rook come out on the roof.
She tilted to her right where dawn tried to muscle through the stubborn sky. “A couple of hours, maybe.”
“Not tonight. I mean total.” She didn’t answer because he knew damned well how long. So he said, “Almost a month, Nikki. It’s time.”
“No.” Heat said it so sharply pigeons flew. Much more measured, she added, “I’m not taking this to Homeland. Or Yardley.”
“I agree.”
“Then what?”
“You trust me, right?” he asked. “I mean really, really trust me?”
“What.”
“I know a guy. A code breaker.”
Heat didn’t say no this time. She just continued to stare out at the city slowly coming to life. Then she nodded almost imperceptibly and turned to him for the first time as he stood there on the roof. “Rook?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not wearing any clothes.”
Rook found Keith Tahoma where he knew he would at seven in the morning. In Union Square playing simultaneous games at a pair of Parks Department chess tables. And winning both.
Nikki watched the skinny old guy in sunglasses, with the George Carlin whiskers and gray ponytail, dancing from game to game, talking smack and busting some blatantly OCD moves. Through a taut smile she muttered to Rook, “Are you kidding me?”
Even though Heat had accepted intellectually that it was time to get some expert help with the code, Rook still had to overcome her emotional reticence. “Look, you said yourself that Wynn may be trying to cover up something imminent.” He tapped the copies of the marked-up music they had scanned. “We might be sitting on the answer to that right here. And the longer you delay, the greater the chance you’re blowing your shot at stopping whatever conspiracy you believe is heating up. Now, if you want to be all proud and stubborn and bang your head against the wall while time slips away, go ahead. But if you seriously want to crack this, I trust my expert completely.”
Rook’s expert tore open six packets of sugar, dumped them all at once into his coffee, paddled-stirred the paper cup waving his pipe cleaner arms, and then sipped with a stage wink across the café table at Nikki. “Mr. Tahoma, I hear your grandfather was one of the Navajo code breakers back in World War Two,” she said.
“You’re a friend of Rook’s, you call me Puzzle Man, OK? And yeah, my shi’nali was a Windtalker, damn straight.” He blew across his coffee and set it down. “He and his unit created codes for the Marines rooted in our Navajo language. Totally skunked the Japanese. Is it in my blood? Duh. I spent the Cold War in the army eating schnitzel and cracking signal traffic out of East Berlin, basically getting medals I can never wear for turning the Soviets into jackasses. The NSA snatched me up, and next thing, I’m breaking down secret cables about who shot down an airliner over Korea, which tent Gadhafi sleeps in, and who’s buying ammo for the Chechen rebels.”
“Is that where you and Rook met, Chechnya?”
“Fuck no,” he said. “Star Trek convention.”
Rook gave her a rueful shrug. She asked Tahoma, “I assume you’re no longer involved in government work?”
“What gave me away, the shorts and flip-flops?” His high-pitched laugh turned a few heads, then he leaned in to her speaking in a low voice. “I was invited to pursue independent interests when a psychological review suggested I might be borderline.” He cocked an eye and grinned, “Like that’s a drawback in the spook trade.”
In a weird way, his nuttiness made it easier for Nikki to make the leap. An on-the-spot, unscientific gut profile told her that Puzzle Man possessed a genius-level knack that also made him such a social misfit that he survived by operating under strict personal rules. He was a head case who not only broke codes, he lived by one, too.
Plus, Rook had nailed it. The longer she sat on this, the more likely she was to squander the opportunity, either to find Wynn or to head off whatever he was involved with-or both. Time to give Puzzle Man his shot.
Ten minutes later, at the kitchen table of his cluttered shoe-box apartment above the Strand Book Store, where he worked part-time, Keith Tahoma swept aside the draft of the 3-D anacrostic-Sudoku puzzle book he was designing and studied the copies of Heat’s coded sheet music. She tried to give him the provenance; that the pencil marks between some of the notes appeared in the songs of Nikki’s old piano exercise book, and how her mother, whose handwriting this was, had been killed hiding some unknown secret information from spies. But when she began to speak, Puzzle Man just snapped a finger at her to stop, keeping his eyes riveted to the pages. After a few minutes, he looked up at the two of them and said, “Man, I am impressed. And I’ve seen them all, Vigenère ciphers, Polybius squares, Trimethius tableaux, Alberti discs, the Cardano grille, Enigma machines, Kryptos… I’ve trained in acrophony, redundancy, word breaks, Edda symbols. But this. Wow.”
“What does it say?” asked Rook.
“Beats the fuck outta me.” Heat’s chin dropped to her chest. “But dispirit not. Give me some more time to rassle this gator.”
At the door on the way out, Rook said good-bye, but Puzzle Man didn’t hear. He was already lost in the code.
Nikki’s first order of business when she arrived at the Two-Oh was to pull in Malcolm and Reynolds to help Rook and Rhymer set up their RFID track on Tyler Wynn. She knew Captain Irons would pitch a fit when he got a whiff of the redeployment of assets from the serial killer investigation, but the electronic consumer tracking presented the hottest lead in either case, and Detective Heat’s training and experience dictated the hot lead was the lead you followed until a hotter one came along.
That happened mid-morning.
Raley and Ochoa came to her desk, each one trying to get there first. “Detectives, you’ve got those funny looks again,” said Heat.
“I know you don’t like curse words in the bull pen,” said Ochoa, “but see this grin? This definitely is my shit-eater.”
Raley said, “We spent all morning over in Long Island City at Bedbug Doug’s HQ. You should see the place; it actually has a giant metal sculpture of a bedbug on the roof.”
“Anyway,” continued his partner, “we went there to go over the victim’s accounting books, like you had us do with Conklin.”
“And you found a connection to one of the other victims?”
“No,” said Ochoa, “but we found something you’d call an Odd Sock. Made us wonder if it might point to a new victim.”
“These are copies from Douglas Sandmann’s accounts receivable.” Raley held up a file. “We found a pattern of him performing bedbug checks in buildings, but getting paid by a third party who has no connection with the buildings Doug inspected.”
Ochoa picked up. “So we asked his wife about it, and she says, ‘Oh, yeah, Doug made some money on the side from that guy because he could get into buildings and apartments pretending to do his inspections.’ ”
“But he was really snooping undercover for the guy who paid him. You know, the third party,” said Detective Raley.
“And here’s what set off the alarm bells in our heads,” continued Ochoa. “Know that little hand snipped from the oil painting the serial killer left us? This third party guy is in the art business.”
“I assume you got a name,” said Heat. Raley opened the file. Nikki reeled when she saw who it was.
By the time Heat, Rook, and the other detectives rolled down to the marina on the Hudson at West 79th Street, Parks Enforcement had already found Joe Flynn’s body. It bobbed three feet under the surface of the river, tethered between the marina dock and the fifty-foot ketch he had lived on. They didn’t need a coroner to know he was beyond CPR; Flynn’s eyes bulged in their sockets, peering skyward through the murky water from a swollen face. His body had bloated with gas, and his skin had changed color to a pallid shade of green.
Distant thunder mixed with the pair of diesel 60s from the harbor unit response boat that slowed up to kill its wake on the other side of the Boat Basin’s wave wall. The smooth water in the protected marina broke with the first drops of the approaching storm. Heat got down on one knee. Through the dimpled river surface she could see the wooden handle of a small knife, something a painter would use-perhaps a palette knife-protruding from Joe Flynn’s throat. She also noted that his body wore no shoes. He had a sock of a different color on each foot: one light, one dark.
“Boat’s clear,” said Detective Feller, climbing from belowdecks to the cockpit. “Detective Heat?” The slight waver in Randall’s voice made her and all the others turn his way.
Nikki put on her crime scene gloves and climbed aboard.
Wordlessly, Randall Feller stood aside from the hatch to allow her to pass. To preserve fingerprints and DNA, Heat avoided touching the polished brass rail as she descended the teak steps leading below to the main cabin, an opulently appointed space which functioned as the galley and den. Nikki heard footfalls behind her and made room for the other detectives and Rook to come below.
The cabin had sufficient height for them all to stand, and there-right before them, at eye level-an eight-by-ten head shot of Joe Flynn, captured from the Quantum Recovery Web site, dangled from the ceiling. It hung from a row of equal, six-inch lengths of colored string: red, yellow, purple, and green. Colors of the rainbow.
Finally, after a few silent moments of watching the latest victim’s photo wave slightly with the rocking of the boat, Heat said, “Do you all see the pattern?”
“Hard to miss,” said Ochoa. “Each color of string corresponds to the string found with one of the victims.”
“And there’s a new string,” said Feller, speaking for the first time with a voice that sounded thick in his throat. They all followed him behind the photo. Taped to its back, a new color-orange-was strung like a clothesline to the forward cabin, where its end disappeared around the bulkhead door.
Together, Roach moved to the forward compartment to see if it linked to some clue to the killer’s next target. They were only gone a moment.
Both detectives returned looking ashen.