One more indicator would be to look at the exterior of the suitcase for any major blood collection along the hinges or seams. Taking care not to disturb it, she knelt on both knees, palmed one hand on the cargo deck for balance, and dropped her head, leaning over far enough for her eyebrow to nearly touch the floor. Slowly, methodically, she ran the beam of her flashlight from right to left along the bottom edge of the case.
When her light reached the left corner of the suitcase, Nikki gasped. Her vision fluttered and a vertigo sensation swept over her. The light slipped from her hand and she toppled over onto her side.
Lauren said, “Nikki, you all right?”
She couldn’t really see anything in that moment. Hands came on her. Lauren Parry cradled her head off the floor. A pair of EMTs started for the ramp, but by then Nikki had recovered enough to sit herself up and wave them off. “No, no, I’m fine. It’s OK.” Lauren crouched beside her at eye level to check her out. “Really, I’m OK,” said Nikki.
But to her friend, her face said anything but. “You scared me there, Nik. I thought you went over in an aftershock or something.”
Heat swung her legs over the back of the truck and let them dangle. Raley and Ochoa approached, followed by Feller. Ochoa said, “What’s up, Detective? You look like you saw a ghost.”
Nikki shivered. This time, not from the refrigeration. She twisted to look behind her at the suitcase and then slowly turned back to the others.
“Nikki,” said Lauren, “what is it?”
“The suitcase.” She swallowed hard. “My initials are on it.”
The detectives and the ME all looked at one another, puzzled. Finally, Raley said, “I don’t get it. Why would your initials be on that suitcase?”
“Because I carved them there when I was a kid.” She could see them processing that, but it was taking them too long, so she said, “That suitcase belonged to my mother.” And then she added, “Her killer stole it the night she was murdered.”
Nikki Heat marched toward the homicide bull pen of the Twentieth Precinct at a determined clip that left little doubt in the minds of the detectives trying to keep up with her that she had recovered from the shock of her discovery, and then some. “Briefing in ten,” she called out to her squad as she strode through the door. On her way to her desk, she said, “Detective Ochoa, fire off the Jane Doe head shot to Missing Persons. Include Westchester, Long Island, New Jersey, and Fairfield County cops while you’re at it. Detective Raley, erase that whiteboard and roll the second one over beside it so we can work both Murder Boards at once.” Heat broomed aside the morning’s pile of message slips and dusted away grains of acoustical ceiling tile that the 5.8 shaker had snowflaked onto her desktop. Then she hit her keyboard, e-mailing Lauren Parry at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner the same message she had given her verbally fifteen minutes before at the crime scene: to interrupt her the moment she had any information, no matter how minor.
She hit send and a cardboard coffee cup materialized on her blotter. Nikki swiveled in her chair to find Detective Feller lurking there. “In lieu of flowers, consider this the apology coffee for my big mouth this morning. Tall, three pump, hazelnut mocha, if I remember. Right?”
Actually, her drink of choice was a grande skim latte with two pumps of sugar-free vanilla, but “Close enough” was all she said. He was trying to make amends, but she was focused places other than coffee flavorings at the moment. “Thanks. And let’s put it behind us, OK?”
“Won’t happen again.”
As soon as Feller stepped away, she set the tepid cup at the back of the desk, beside her unread messages, and started a to-do list on a letter pad. One third down the page, she bulleted “additional manpower” and stopped. That would require clearance from the precinct commander, a hurdle the detective didn’t relish. Heat scanned across the bull pen into the PC’s glass office that looked out onto her squad. The glass also let the squad look in and had the effect of a creating a life-sized diorama out of that movie
Night at the Museum
. Captain Irons was inside the exhibit, hanging his jacket on a wooden hanger. Heat knew he was next going to go through his ritual of tugging the fabric of his white uniform shirt, and he did—all in his constant quest to eliminate button pucker on the gut that lipped over his low-slung belt.
“Excuse me, Captain,” said Heat at his door. “A word?” True to form, Wallace “Wally” Irons paused before he invited her in, as if he were searching for a reason not to but had come up empty. He didn’t ask her to sit, which was fine with Nikki. Every time she sat across the desk from him, all she could do was envision the wonderful man who had occupied that chair until he got killed and Irons, a career administrator, got tapped to replace him. Captain Irons was no Captain Montrose, and Heat bet both cops in that room knew it.
Adding further awkwardness to the dynamic, the top brass at One Police Plaza had offered her Wally Irons’s job after she passed her exams for lieutenant with record scores. But Heat got soured by the ugly departmental politics surrounding the whole process. It made her realize how much she would miss the street, so Nikki not only declined taking Irons’s command from him but passed on the gold bar, too. Yet the fact that she had come a hairsbreadth from being the one on the other side of that desk made the unspoken friction between the detective and her commander loud and clear. From her perspective, he was an organizational survivor concerned more with career than justice, someone she constantly had to out-think or out-maneuver to get the job done right. For Irons, Nikki Heat was his Faustian bargain. She was a detective of incredible value whose case clearances made his CompStat numbers look hot ‘n’ juicy downtown, but that same damned competency also diminished him. In short, Nikki Heat represented a daily reminder of everything he was not. Ochoa had told her he recently overheard Irons whisper to Detective Hinesburg in the kitchen, “Know what it’s like having Heat around? It’s like a football team with two head coaches.” Nikki shrugged it off and reminded Ochoa she wasn’t one for the gossip mill. Besides, she’d kind of known that without him telling her. To smell the paranoia you didn’t have to be much of a detective. Kind of like Irons.
“Word is you made quite a discovery this morning,” he said, not sounding so much interested in the actual discovery as praising his networking. Nikki kept her briefing to the broad strokes, building it as a multiple homicide worthy of high status and, most importantly, of added manpower from the beginning. The captain held out two palms to her. “Whoa, whoa, let’s not run away with the bit in our mouth here. Now, I understand your personal enthusiasm to hit code red with this, but, somehow, these resources have to be accounted for.”
“Captain, you see my numbers. You know I always exercise great restraint in overtime and—”
“Jeez, overtime?” He shook his head. “So it’s not just pulling uniforms and detectives from other squads, it’s OT for your crew, as well? Oh, man …”
“Money well spent.”
“Easy for you to say. You don’t know what it’s like to have this job and …” He realized the road he’d put himself on and slapped it in reverse. “Easy for you to say, is all.”
“Captain, this is big. For the first time in ten years, I have a fresh lead to my mother’s murder.” She had learned never to take his obtuseness for granted, so she spelled it out for him. “The stolen luggage is a direct link between the two cases, and I am confident that if I can find the killer of this Jane Doe, I can find my mother’s killer, as well.”
He softened his face into a doughy grimace attempting compassion. “Look, I know this is charged by a highly personal element for you.”
“I can’t deny that, sir, but I assure you that I would pursue this just as vigorously regardless of my—”
“Knock, knock?” Detective Sharon Hinesburg leaned in the door. “Bad time?”
Captain Irons beamed at Hinesburg and then reeled his unmoored attention back to Nikki, offering her a sober look. “Detective Heat, let’s put a pin in this discussion until later.”
“But a simple yes would wrap it up.”
He chuckled. “A for effort, I’ve got to respect that. But I need more convincing, and right now, I’ve got Detective Hinesburg on my calendar.” He made a gesture to his desk agenda as if that settled that.
Apparently, thought Heat, Hinesburg was now booking formal appointments for her brownnosing. She slipped by her detective, the low performer in her unit, on her way out of the office. “Squad meeting in three minutes, Sharon.” The glass door closed softly behind her and she heard muffled laughter.
Detective Heat put her irritation in her back pocket. Nikki was too professional to get sucked into that quicksand and too driven by the gravity of the new lead to let petty office politics draw focus from her mission. Raley had finished positioning the two large blank whiteboards in an open V-angle against the painted brick wall of the bull pen, and she went right to work, prepping the Jane Doe Murder Board first. At the top corner of the left-hand board, Heat posted eight-by-ten color prints of the victim from various angles: a facial close-up; a side view of her head; an overhead shot of her body in the fetal position inside the suitcase; and a detail view of the stab wound. Beside these, she put up photos of the delivery truck from five angles: front, rear, the two sides, and an overhead she had asked the photographer from the Evidence Collection Unit to grab from a fire escape. In New York City people did a whole lot of looking down at the street from their apartments and offices. The top view of the cargo box, including its telltale graffiti, might jar an eyewitness’s memory and help that wit track the vehicle’s journey. Any information like that, however small, could nail down how and when the suitcase got inside the truck. Or who put it there.
A burst of applause made her turn from the boards. Jameson Rook had entered the bull pen for the first time since he took the slug to save her life, and the full squad rose to its feet, cheering him. The intensity of the clapping grew as patrol uniforms, civilian aides, and detectives from other squads in the station gathered at the doorway behind Rook and joined in the standing o. He seemed taken aback and caught Heat’s eye, clearly moved by the spontaneous group welcome. As if the morning hadn’t been emotionally raw enough for her, Nikki found herself choking up at his reception and all that a gesture like that meant from the fraternity of cops, who weren’t known for overt demonstrations of sentiment.
When it died down, he swiped at one of his eyes, swallowed hard, smiled at the gathering, and said, “Garsh, do you do this for everybody who delivers coffee?” During their laughter, he crossed to Nikki and handed her a paper cup. “Here ya go. Grande skim latte with two pumps of sugar-free vanilla.”
“Perfect,” she said, and as soon as she had, Randall Feller’s face peered around from behind Detective Ochoa, wearing a slighted expression.
Rook noticed the group had remained in place, staring at him. “I guess I should say a few words.”
“Do you have to?” said Detective Raley, eliciting more chuckles.
“Just for that, I will. But I’ll be quick.” He indicated the Murder Boards behind Heat. “I heard there’s some new casework to be done, and I don’t want to slow it down.”
“Too late,” said Nikki, but she was smiling and they both laughed.
“I guess ‘thank you’ is my beginning and end. Thanks for the support, the cards, the flowers … Although a naughty nurse would not have been unwelcome.”
“As long as he didn’t have too much back hair,” said Ochoa.
Rook continued, “And I’ll say it for the last time. Thanks to Detectives Raley and Ochoa. Roach, thank you for rolling up your sleeves for my transfusion that night. I guess that now makes us officially …”
“… Creepy,” called out Detective Rhymer, who had come down from Burglary.
“No, man, it’s all good,” said Ochoa. “Know what you have now, Rook? You have the power of Roach Blood.”
Raley added, “Use it wisely.”
Nikki cleared her throat. “About done?”
“Done,” answered Rook.
Heat went official. “My squad, pull up chairs for the briefing.”
As the visitors departed and her people began to form up around the Murder Boards, Rook got close and studied her, speaking in a gentle voice. “Hey. You doing any better since our call?”
She shrugged ambivalently. “I’ll be fine. Putting the shock behind me. I’m sort of in all-out task mode now. Except I got Iron-gated.” Rook followed her glance to Irons, who was still in his office with Hinesburg. “He’s balking at giving me OT and resources.”
“Drone.”
“I don’t know what I can do to convince him.” She shook it off. “Hey, thanks for the latte. Any chance you can swing by my apartment to see how it did in the quake?”
“Already did. Minimal breakage. I re-straightened the pictures, refruited the fruit bowl, re-tchotchked your tchotchkes, and sniffed the range for gas. All is well. Oh. Except your elevator is out. Three flights was no picnic, but I’m a trouper.”
Nikki thanked him, but instead of saying you’re welcome, he rolled up a chair. “What are you doing?”
“Getting ringside for my briefing.” He read her objection and said, “Come on, you really didn’t think I came all the way up here to bring you coffee, did you?”
Heat began with details. The major headline, she didn’t need to put into words. Not with this group. It rang loud and clear to everyone in that room who knew the lead detective and her history. If that didn’t say it, the parallel boards and her ultra-focused demeanor did. This was The Big Case. The case of Nikki Heat’s lifetime.