Frozen Heat (2012) (30 page)

Next came recorded footage of Captain Irons standing with his gut to the crime scene tape, in his glory, with his name plastered on the screen and a sea of microphones pointing at him. “Our suspect’s name is Hank Norman Spooner, age forty-two, a self-employed apartment sitter. Mr. Spooner was apprehended without incident by myself and Detective Sharon Hinesburg from my precinct, the Twentieth, as well as officers assisting from Midtown North.”

Rook said, “This gets better every minute.” Heat didn’t respond; she just stood transfixed as Irons answered one of the questions shouted at him from the press frenzy.

“The suspect came under our scrutiny this weekend after one of my team received an anonymous phone call expressing regret for the murder of Nicole Bernardin last week, as well as for the death of another victim, Cynthia Trope Heat, in 1999.” Nikki flashed back on Roach’s account of the giddy Saturday night appearance of Irons and Hinesburg listening to an audio recording behind closed doors. Reporters shouted more questions all at once. “That’s right,” answered the captain, “the caller implicated himself in both murders and said he couldn’t live with it anymore. His call contained sufficient detail about both crimes that we felt assured he was our man and, upon tracing him to this address, made tonight’s arrest. He is currently in custody up in the Twentieth Precinct, and is in the process of making a formal confession. May I say that the citizens of New York City will sleep better tonight, knowing we have taken this individual off the streets, and I am proud to have led the team that brought this case to a safe and swift conclusion. Thank you.”

Heat’s cell phone rang. It was Ochoa. “What about a heads-up?” she snapped. Not even a hello.

“Hey, I’m just hearing about it myself. Captain iced us all out. Except for Hinesburg, nobody had a clue. I’m calling you first off to make sure you knew. I guess you did.”

“Oh, Miguel, I’m sorry I flared.”

“No sweat. It blows, we all get it. I’m heading in now to see what’s what and do as much damage control as I can. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Do,” she said and hung up. Nikki threw down enough cash to cover the check and tip and started for the door. Rook was already holding it for her.

On the walk back to his loft, he said, “I wonder how many items on the Kama Sutra menu Big Wally scored by mentioning Hinesburg on TV.”

“Save it, Rook.”

“Hey, I’m pissed, too. This is how I cope.”

“Then cope with your inside words. I’m not up for conversation now.” But then after three strides, she said, “He’s screwing the whole thing up. No, worse than that. What scares the hell out of me is that he’s just getting started screwing it up. I’m out of there less than a week, and he’s not only got the wrong guy but he’s potentially doing irreparable harm to these cases.”

“Then stop him.”

“How?”

They waited at the crosswalk, and he stepped to face her eye to eye. “You know how.”

“No,” she said. “I told you I would never do that.”

“Then, fine. Let Wally be the bull in the china shop while you watch it on TV.” The light turned and he walked on. She caught up with him.

“I hate you.”

“Inside words,” he said.

The next morning, Heat arrived ten minutes early for her seven o’clock coffee meeting with Zach Hamner, hoping to use the time before he showed to quell the upset she felt at stooping to see the weasel. But when she walked into the cafe near One Police Plaza, he was already finishing off a combo breakfast consisting of a Denver omelet, home fries, bagel and cream cheese, juice, and an espresso. Hamner didn’t rise when she came in, just gave her a nod and pointed to the chair across from him. “You’re early,” he said, checking the time on his BlackBerry.

“I can wait outside and you can finish your meal.” She had told herself on the subway ride downtown that she wouldn’t be snarky with him, but Zach Hamner made it hard to resist. The NYPD senior administrative aide to the deputy commissioner of legal affairs liked to swing his dick, and Nikki figured it got all its length from his title. Every transaction, large and small, was a power play to him, and forcing her to come all the way down to the Cort Cafe, for a conversation they could have easily completed the night before on the phone when she’d called him, constituted a command appearance to prove who swung the longest rope.

Zach pretended to be oblivious to her annoyance. “No, I can eat while we talk. Coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

He finished his bagel, making her wait out his chew while he surfed new e-mails on his phone. Heat conceded that Zach “The Hammer” Hamner had cause to be unhappy with her. And, clearly, this ceremony of disrespect was payback for the political capital she’d cost him two months before. That was when she’d stunned the Police Commission by declining the promotion he had engineered for her to take command of the Twentieth Precinct.

When he took his sweet time to flick a sesame seed off the sleeve of his charcoal pin-striped suit, she almost walked out. In these few short minutes of proximity, the viscousness of his world—a power broker’s bazaar of trades and leverage—brought back the agony that had sent her fleeing from the bump in rank. This was why Heat had refused to call him when Rook mentioned it the week before. But now, with Irons in danger of blowing up her mother’s case, Nikki knew she had no choice but to suck it up and acquiesce.

And so did Zach Hamner.

He set his BlackBerry to the side and said, “So. Trouble on Eighty-second Street?”

“As I said last night on the phone, I’m on mandated leave at the worst possible time. Captain Irons engineered that, and now that I’m sidelined, he’s bigfooting both of my investigations and putting them at risk.”

“And one of them’s your mother’s homicide, right?”

He knew that already, but she played along and swallowed it. “That’s why I’m asking for your help.”

“I tried to help you once before and that didn’t go so well.”

“Let’s be honest, Zach, you would have been helping yourself with my promotion, too.”

“Enlightened self-interest. You can’t hitch your wagon to a star without creating one.” He flashed a mirthless grin and let it drop. “I misjudged you, Heat. You pissed on me in public.”

Fulfilling her role in the transaction, she said, “I’m truly sorry if I caused you trouble,” and watched him process those words: the entire reason for the trip.

“OK, then,” he said, satisfied to get the deference he wanted. “Wally Irons. Tough one. They love him at One PP. His CompStats are stellar.”

“Come on, Zach. His CompStats versus The Hammer?”

He liked the sound of that. “Your cell phone charged? Good. Stay aboveground this morning so I can reach you.”

“Thanks for this.”

“Oh, hey, listen,” he said. “Let’s understand ourselves here. You’ll get a chance to thank me. The bill will come due someday.” He slid the check for his breakfast across to her. “And it’ll be a lot more than just this.” Then he left without a good-bye.

Two hours later Detective Heat might have entered the bull pen of the Twentieth Precinct to applause, but she got ahead of that. Nikki had called Roach and told the two of them to pass the word to keep her return low-key. Zach Hamner warned her that Irons had to choke down the orders from the top of the food chain and not to rub his nose in it. But The Hammer had worked his magic getting her reinstated, with the sole face-saving bone thrown to the captain that she agree to return for a follow-up with the shrink for the blowup in his office. “That’s all I have to do?”

“For them,” Zach had said. As if she needed to be reminded of his banked IOU.

She dug in immediately by having Hank Norman Spooner brought up from his holding cell to Interrogation One while she read the confession he’d written the night before. The suspect also had a rap sheet that she studied. In the nineties he had worked as a security guard but got dismissed following complaints for petty thefts in the offices he patrolled and for stalking several females in the apartment buildings he’d been hired to protect. Spooner did probation and suspended sentences for those and had been served with several orders of protection. He also had a peeper charge in Florida from when he had worked as crew on a cruise ship, which had constituted his sporadic employment for much of the prior decade. He did ninety days plus probation for that; otherwise, no other jail time.

Nikki asked Detective Rhymer if anyone had checked Spooner’s cruise dates against the murders, and when he said no, she gave him that assignment and wondered how the hell Wally Irons could have gone on TV and called this an investigation.

The inevitable confrontation with her precinct commander came as she put her old friend, the Sig Sauer, in the lockbox in the hall outside Interrogation One. “Welcome back, Heat.” She spun the combination and turned to the voice. There he stood with Detective Hinesburg at his elbow.

“Captain.” Brevity, she thought, was face saving’s best friend.

“What’s going on here? I understand you called my prisoner up.”

“Yes, sir,” said Heat, keeping things deferential. “I have a few questions to ask him. I also have one for you. Any news on that missing glove?”

“Nada. And I’ve been a thorn in the butt of Forensics.”

Detective Hinesburg chimed in. “Immaterial now, isn’t it? Now that we’ve got our man.”

Hinesburg’s stupidity might have been amusing to Heat in a
Real Housewives
sort of way if the detective didn’t do so much damage. “And what about the guy I shot who wore that glove? Does ‘our man’ have any bullet holes, or did you notice?”

“No,” Sharon said, “I’d definitely notice that.”

Irons interceded on behalf of his detective-slash-secret girlfriend. “Obviously, we’re not talking the same person, Heat. Which is telling me your shotgun shooter is probably from another case altogether. An old grudge. Like maybe a holdout from that death squad that tried to get you in Central Park last winter.”

Detective Heat could see this was going nowhere good and looked to move things along. “Guess we’ll see. Excuse me.”

“Hang on,” said Irons. “We already got a signed confession, why you going in there?”

She held up Spooner’s file. “Captain, with all due respect, everything in his confession is public knowledge. Every detail has appeared in magazine articles like Rook’s one about me, news reports, news leaks …” Nikki managed not to look at Hinesburg, whom she was certain had also sourced the numerous follow-up stories to her first leak. The latest reports had even given away critical media hold backs, such as the railroad grime on Nicole’s clothing and the matching precision stab wounds in the backs of her mother and Bernardin.

Irons waved both palms at her. “Whoa, let’s get to this flat out, Detective. Published or not, this guy confessed to it all. And you should be happy ‘cause it takes your dad off the list. So what’s on your mind, going in there? Is it our job to get the guilty off, or to get them off the street?”

“It’s our job to get the truth. And that is precisely what I have in mind. Because if this man is lying to get his moment of fame, or whatever, the killer is still out there. Now let me do my job. Because if you arrested the wrong guy, would you rather find out now or when the DA throws your case out at a press conference?”

Nikki loved watching Wally’s eyes widen at that notion. “OK, Heat. You’ve got one shot. Take it. I’ll be watching.”

Hank Norman Spooner’s eyes lit up when Detective Heat entered the airlock door into the interrogation room. A smile that felt a little too grand to Nikki greeted her as she took her seat across the table from him. She said nothing, just let first impressions enter, unfiltered. These always proved valuable, and to absorb them, she shut out everything else: the stakes of the case; the upheaval of the week-plus since the freezer truck; the audience of Irons and others behind the mirror. For Nikki Heat, it always came back to Beginner’s Eyes.

He hadn’t shaved but still managed to appear clean-cut. His sheet put him at forty-two, but she would have subtracted seven years. Attribute that to the slight build and the boyish face. And the hair. Neatly trimmed and parted, it was red. Not red in the bright sense but softer. Auburn. The day’s growth of whiskers had a blonder hue, making them disappear on his cheeks which, she noticed, had begun to blush as she studied him. And he still smiled that too-friendly, too-familiar grin. His teeth had some yellow in them, and he knew it, judging by the way he kept his upper lip. His hands were folded on his lap under the table, so they would have to be read later. To Nikki, hands were the best tells, second only to the eyes. His stayed on her, expressing what she could only call bliss. And the eye contact was good. Like the smile, too good. Her beginner’s impression got borne out by his opening sentence.

“I can’t believe I’m meeting the real Nikki Heat.”

Hank Spooner was a fan.

She decided not to acknowledge that and maintained a clinical distance, turning her attention down to his file. The fan card could be played later, if needed. What she wanted right then was to listen and to learn. If this was indeed the killer, Nikki wanted to pick up the bits of information that would tell her that. If he wasn’t, she needed to pay attention for the inconsistencies to get to that, too. Heat did what she did in every interview: set aside her bias and paid attention.

“I have some clarifications I need regarding your statement.”