Heat turned to him, quiet, but firm. “Are we debating this? We’re not debating this.” He blew some air and squeezed the steering wheel while both men looked straight ahead at nothing over the hood of the car. “Point made, it’s all good. You’ve got your assignment. Let’s meet up at the Murder Board in an hour.”
The Roach Coach departed without a word or a nod. Great, she thought as she watched it drive off; now they were both pissed at her. Kind of like she was at herself.
Waiting, buzzing, then waiting again, no answer came to Heat’s vestibule call up to Apartment Three. After pressing the other apartment buttons on the aluminum panel with no response, she rang up the building superintendent. He lived at another property on Bleecker Street, so she waited fifteen minutes while he made it up from his Greenwich Village neighborhood. Not too many years ago, she would have phoned the tenant, but, as was more often the case in digital times, there was no landline listed to the place. The super accompanied her to the door with his ring of keys and stood by while she knocked. Nikki announced, “NYPD, please open up,” knocked again, then put an ear to the door but heard nothing. She also sniffed, however, but got no telltale decay odor.
The super advanced to the lock but Heat signaled him to step aside, which he did, taking three steps back. With one hand on the butt of her Sig, Nikki turned the lock and pushed the door wide open. Once again she said, “NYPD.” This time it echoed off the bare hardwood floors and empty walls of the apartment.
The super peered in and said, “What the fuck?”
Nobody home. Not even a home.
The homicide bull pen at the Twentieth was shy one detective when Nikki Heat began her morning briefing. She had already phoned ahead to dispatch Randall Feller to Brooklyn to pick up Dr. Ivan, expatriate physician and auto-parts courier. If Zach Hamner wanted to cover his ass with a sworn statement about treating Fabian Beauvais’s gunshot wound and hearing him name Commissioner Gilbert as his shooter, she was happy to provide the paper. Knowing Feller’s weariness over bridge and tunnel runs, she’d told him to look at the bright side. “Hurricane’s coming. How many times can you go to a doctor’s office and pick up new wiper blades?” He actually laughed as he hung up.
She began her meeting with good news. “I’m getting my search warrant for Keith Gilbert’s gun, which is registered to his address in Southampton. I’ll be driving out there as soon as the physical docs arrive. It’s taking forever because every lawyer in the DA’s office is scrutinizing it to make sure the language is Dream-Team-proof.” Even though she felt upbeat about the warrant, the mood of the bull pen was mixed. Rhymer seemed fine, but Raley and Ochoa were still in a sulk. Nikki attempted to lighten things up. “Roach, I think I saved you boys some wheel spinning.” They were attentive but passive when she recounted her visit to the vacant apartment in Chelsea, and it was Rhymer who raised a hand.
“Did you get an ID on the tenant?”
“The name is Opal Onishi. Her lease shows her occupation to be a food stylist, but the document is four years old, and her employer at that time is no longer in business. Hello, economic downturn.”
“Cell phone?” asked Ochoa, breaking his silence.
“Straight dump to voice mail, so it’s turned off. Would you keep trying it?”
“As long as it’s authorized by you,” he said. His partner extended a be-cool hand to him to wave him off.
Nikki let that one go and kept to business. “Meantime, Detective Raley, would you run a check on Opal Onishi for priors and get a photo of her from DMV?”
“Might want to check Facebook, too,” said Rhymer, sounding very Southern. “If she’s a poster, you might get a line on her.”
“Very good, Mr. Rhymer. You want to handle that one?”
“No, I’ve got it,” said Raley, volunteering, but with a passive-aggressive bite to it.
Nikki turned to the whiteboard and posted blowups of official-looking ID photos under the police-artist sketches of the goons from the SRO. “We have names now for this unsavory pair.” She markered each name as she said it. “First, is Stan Victor. Mr. Victor left Chelsea last night with a broken nose and some three-inch galvanized framing nails in his wrist. His partner, Roderick Floyd, left in a coroner’s van.” In red marker she printed DECEASED in all caps. “These are the two men Rook, Detective Feller, and I encountered at the flophouse rented by Fabian Beauvais. A third, who also died at the scene, was one Nicholas Bjorklund.”
She posted a third picture, too, beside the others: a photo ID of the man she had claw hammered. She printed DECEASED in red under him, too, and then went back to the podium to refer to notes. All eyes followed her, mindful and — in spite of chafed feelings — respectful of her ordeal battling those formidable men.