They needed her in Interrogation. Nikki walked there on autopilot, still reeling from the knockdown punch. She couldn’t grasp it, didn’t want to believe it. Rook was not only back but out on the town while she waited for him like some Gloucester sea captain’s wife pacing the widow’s walk, searching the horizon for a mast. No beard, no sweat moons, he was scrubbed, shaved, and had his Hugo Boss sleeve laced through the elbow of his hot gym-rat agent.
Detective Raley caught up with her at the door to the Observation Room as she was preparing to go in, and Heat shoved Rook out of her head, even though she still felt brittle from the shock. “Not so good news on the security cam,” said Raley. He was holding a banker’s box with a Chain of Evidence form taped to the side.
“I assume that’s the tape, right?”
“Tapes, yes. The tape, no. When I unlocked the cabinet, the one in the deck had run itself out and the label was dated two weeks ago.”
“Lovely,” said Heat. “And nothing from last night?”
“These tapes haven’t recorded anything for several weeks. I’ll check, but we’ll be lucky if we see anything.”
Nikki pondered briefly. “Screen what you have here anyway and pull faces. You never know, we may see Graf there and connect him with someone.”
Raley disappeared up the hall with his box of tapes. Nikki continued into Interrogation.
* * *
“You already asked my client that question,” said the old man. Simmy Paltz poked a finger bent from arthritis on the legal pad on the table in front of him. He looked to be a hundred, all skin and bones, withered and leathery. He wore a 1970s Wemlon tie in a big knot, but Nikki could have fit a hand right down to her wrist in the gap created between Simmy’s pilled collar and his rooster neck. He seemed sharp enough though, and certainly a hard-line advocate. Heat guessed one way to keep your costs down in a small business was to retain your grandfather or great uncle as counsel.
“I wanted to give her time to rethink her answer, let her memory do its work,” replied the detective. Then Nikki directed herself to Roxanne, who was still wearing the same vinyl and contempt as she had in her office at six that morning. “You’re absolutely certain you had no dealings with Father Graf?”
“Like what, in church? Don’t make me laugh.” She sat back and nodded in satisfaction to the old dude. “He wasn’t a client.”
“Did anyone else have access to the locker with your security tapes?”
“Ha,” from the lawyer. “Fat lot of good your warrant did.” His eyes looked huge to Nikki behind the smudged eyeglasses that covered half his face.
“Ms. Paltz, who had keys?”
Roxanne looked to her attorney, who gave the go-ahead nod, and she answered, “Just me. The one set.”
“And there are no other tapes, Roxanne?”
“Who is she,” said the lawyer, “the Homeland Security?”
Roxanne continued, “Truth is, that plastic bubble in the ceiling does the job of keeping everyone in line anyway. Far as the clients know, it’s on and they behave. Sort of the way when you call customer service and they say, ‘This call may be monitored.’ Their way of saying watch your mouth, asshole.”
Heat turned a page of her notepad. “I’d like the names of anyone who was there last night, say from six o’clock on. Dommes, doms, clients.”