Taking care not to disturb Detective Raley’s screening notes that were stacked in neat piles along the counter in front of the monitor, she sat behind the console in the little closet he had converted to his surveillance media kingdom. Heat smiled when she saw the cardboard Burger King crown she had awarded to him in a squad meeting after he had found the security cam footage of a gigolo’s street abduction last winter. Then she took a memory key out of her pocket, plugged it into the USB port, and put on the earphones.
Nikki didn’t know how many times over ten years she had listened to the audio of her mother’s murder. Perhaps twenty? First, she had made a crude dub of it by holding a dictation recorder beside the answering machine before Detective Damon could take the mini cassette from the apartment. The quality was poor so, when she became a detective, Heat wrote herself a pass into the Property Room and got the phone cassette copied as a digital file. That WAV sounded much cleaner, yet with all the times she had listened to it, straining to analyze the muffled voice of the killer in the background, she had never gotten closer to identifying it.
She always did it in secret because she knew it would seem ghoulish to anyone who didn’t know she was only doing a clinical playback. This was a search for clues, not an obsession with reliving the event. That’s what she told herself, anyway, and felt it to be true. Her focus was on background, not foreground. She especially hated hearing her own voice on it, and always—every single time—stopped the audio just before it picked up her coming into the apartment and screaming.
That was too much to bear.
Of all the times she had listened to it, though, this was the first time she had knowing that the muffled voice was Petar’s.
Homicide 101. In any murder case, the likely killer is close in. You clear husbands, wives, exes, common-laws, estrangeds, children, siblings, and relatives before you move on to the other likelies. Beyond her father, they looked for boyfriends in her mother’s life but not in Nikki’s. But then, who was the lead investigator but Carter Damon, Petar’s accomplice-after-the-fact and obstructionist-for-hire.
Nikki listened again and yet listened anew. She heard the familiar small talk with her mother about spices, the checking of the fridge, her screams, and the dropped phone. The mumbled voice of a man. She paused and played it back. And then she played that section back again and again.
At straight-up noon, Heat sat on the twelfth floor, in the tranquil room on York Avenue, at the session she’d booked that morning with Lon King, Ph.D. Nikki told the department psychologist about her history with the recording and that, for the first time ever that day, when she listened to it, she heard Petar.
“And why is this something you want to focus on, this recording?”
“I guess to ask if I could have been in denial.”
“That’s always possible, but I wonder if your curiosity goes deeper.”
“See, this is the part I hate.”
He smiled. “They all do, at first.” Then, he continued, “I don’t care how resilient you are, Nikki, you have a lot to deal with here.”
“That’s why I called you.”
“I’m certain you are not only reliving trauma and loss, but also experiencing a profound sense of anger and betrayal. Not to mention confusion about your own choices and instincts. As a detective, about crime. As a woman, about men.”
Nikki sat back and rested her neck against the cushion. As she stared at the unblemished whiteness of the ceiling, she tried to wish away the confusion, to grab the handle on the sense of order she’d held just a day before. “I feel like I had the rug pulled. Not just on the case, but on what I thought my own life was. What I thought love was. It makes me worry about what I can trust.”
“And for you, I know trust is paramount. Mistrust feels … well, it’s chaotic.”
“Yes,” she said, but it came out in breath without resonance. “Which is what I feel now. I always envisioned solving my mom’s murder would be clean and neat. Now all I feel is …” She swirled a finger like a cyclone.
“I’m sure. Especially with the betrayal of your intimacy. But could part of it also be because your life has been so defined by this case you don’t know who you are if it’s over?”
She sat up to face him. “No, it’s upsetting because it still isn’t over and I don’t want to let my mother down.”