FOUR

James stood at the edge of Erin’s bed. She was asleep, her chest rising and falling gently. He took her hand in his. It was limp, cold. His eyes travelled up her arm to her shoulder, where a thick wrap of bandages covered her wound. If he were to remove them right now, after going through a couple layers of blood and ointment, he would see stitches that patched up the bullet wound. No bones broken, that was a good thing. He would only need to wait for her flesh to patch itself up, get the stitches out, and she would be out of the hospital in no time.

He watched as Patricks dozed on. She looked so calm for who was just shot. A smile rose up on his face involuntarily; looking at her with this much tranquility, it was surreal. He gave her hand a squeeze. “Remember that time, that Latin Kings case? I promised you that no harm will come to you. That you’ll always be safe,” he spoke gently, even though he knew she couldn’t hear him. “When I saw you falling, I didn’t know how to react. I’m a cop, I should know better, but that was just so unexpected, so out-of-nowhere. For a moment there, I thought you… I thought…”

His voice cracked. He cleared his throat. “Look, I’m not going to pretend and say I understand what happened yesterday. I don’t. I really don’t. We’ve been on this case for a couple days now, but we have nothing to show for it. We still have no idea what this murder was about. Whatever this is, I’m sorry, Erin, that you had to end up in the crossfire. It won’t happen again. We’ll figure this out.”

As he stood up to leave, he wondered if what he said were the right words. He remembered the days at Columbia University with Erin when she would’ve said the same things to him, back when they spent countless hours in the library, pouring over their combined notes. As the sun set and the windows turned black, Finnegan sat back in his chair and rub his face, taking a moment to rest his eyes. The day before a final was always stressful.

“I’m never going to get this. How am I supposed to get this?” Finnegan said. He stared at the stacks of notes with equal parts contempt and shame. “Screw it, I’ll just sell coffee.”

Patricks laughed good-naturedly. She sat back too, glad to take a little break. “Come on, James. I know you already got this. It’s just the problem of remembering and not freaking out completely. Feel free to freak out a little. It’ll keep you awake.”

“Thanks,” he said glumly, falling forward and planting his face in the desk. “I think I’m past freaking out.”

Erin ruffled her friend’s hair playfully. “Hey, it’s not like I’m doing any better. I don’t get it either. I really don’t. We’ve been studying for hours, but I’ve got nothing to show for it. But hey, maybe a little longer and something will click. Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out.”

Finnegan looked up and exhaled loudly. “I guess.”

Looking back, the detective distinctly remembered getting a fantastic score on that particular test. Finnegan turned his head to look at Patricks on the bed over his shoulder. He gave a little smile. They’ll figure this out. They’ll get through this somehow. They just needed to push a little bit more.

 

 

When Finnegan arrived at the once-quiet warehouse, now filled with bright blue flashes of cop cars, Peebles and the replacement ME were waiting for him. Dr. Elizabeth Azri and Detective Finnegan shook hands politely, exchanging dry hellos. Peebles gave his partner a clap on the back.

Finnegan addressed Peebles first: “Did CSU come up with anything here?”

“Nothing. Uniforms are checking security cameras around the area now, but nothing’s coming up. And the place is totally clean. There’s not even a fingerprint,” he replied, flipping through his notes.

“That’s a bit odd. How d’you get a body into a freezer without leaving behind a single print?”

Peebles shrugged. “He must’ve been careful. Gloves and all, I mean.”

“Speaking of bodies, Detective Finnegan,” the ME started. “I should think we’ve delayed moving the body long enough. Now, seeing that the CSU yielded no evidence or clue as to what this murder was about, the autopsy should be performed as soon as possible. Then we’ll have something more concrete to work with.”

“Absolutely not,” he said resolutely, not looking at her.

“Not…?”

“Not. You’re not to touch the body, nor is anyone else.”

Her jaw fell open as if unable to believe what she was hearing. Who the hell was this guy?

“This case is more than strange, and dangerous. I don’t want a repeat of what happened to Dr. Patricks. And we don’t know who we’re dealing with. If we attempt to transport the body, it is vulnerable and I don’t want to risk it getting stolen. Until we have a better idea of what we’re up against, the body stays put.”

Azri stared at him, but he was staring right back at her. The game was won; Azri conceded defeat and nodded stiffly.

“Finnegan,” Peebles interrupted. He had just gotten off his BlackBerry. “That was CSU. They want us at the apartment. They’ve got something.”

 

 

“When we first saw this computer,” Jefferson, a genius MIT-graduate and a personal technological consultant, or as the guys in the precinct called him, “tech geek,” explained, “we had no idea where to start. I mean, look at it. This is ancient, no one’s used these computers in a long time. But, that’s just the hardware. We took a closer look and the software is totally new and advanced. I don’t know how the hardware is handling it but somehow, it seems to be working perfectly.”

“Working perfectly?” Peebles repeated unsurely. “Last time we tried it, it just showed a blank screen. You couldn’t do a thing on it.”

“That’s because it was heavily encrypted. Powerful layers of encryption, unlike any software we’ve seen before. But,” he threw on a switch and clicked a few keys on the keyboard, “I managed to crack the first code.”

The Mac’s originally old-fashioned green-and-black command screen was suddenly filled with long program codes. After a minute of Jefferson typing away on the keyboard, breaking through the firewall, breaking the encryption, doing a little pizzazz, the Mac revealed a familiar aurora wallpaper with tiny icons scattered over it. The titles, however, were gibberish.

“‘HGEATZTPWIZDFWE’?” Peebles read. “I thought you said you cracked the code.”

“Aha, I said I cracked the first code,” he replied. “All these documents are under a different key. I got a lucky shot with unlocking this first one, but it’s gonna take a lot longer to break all these codes. But, we did find one document that wasn’t encrypted.”

Microsoft Word bobbed at the bottom as it launched, and a document popped up before them. It was short, containing only three words.

“ROCK, HILL, SKY,” he read. “We think it might be a clue to the encryption process…”

“It’s not.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not. It’s got nothing to do with the code,” Finnegan said resolutely.

Peebles stared at him. “How d’you know?”

“They’re referring to each of the secret rooms,” he replied simply. The others simply blinked at him. He sighed and explained, “ROCK"the wall. HILL"the stairs. SKY"apparently there’s one more.”

“Well, SKY would be referring to"”

“The ceiling,” the two detectives said simultaneously. Everyone scrambled out the room and began tapping every ceiling panel, looking for an odd sock that would lead to their next clue.

The kitchen turned up empty. “What now? I thought it’d be in the kitchen,” Peebles said. “Do we just check every single room?”

Finnegan walked through the apartment, neck craned up and eyes fixed on the ceiling. There was nothing special about this ceiling. The panels looked like any other plaster ceiling in Manhattan. They were even painted in a typical, boring colour. But he stepped into the bathroom and he knew he was right where he was supposed to be. The entire room was painted a light shade of blue, and the ceiling was dotted with little white cumulus clouds.

“It’s the sky,” he said.

The ceiling above the shower was painted a different shade of blue than the rest of the bathroom. The odd sock. CSU quickly provided him with a stepladder. Detective Finnegan pushed the ceiling panel up and suddenly, a box popped down and stopped an inch from his face, dangling from a piece of string.

Finnegan, having survived a small heart attack just now, let out a breath. He moved his face from under the box and clumsily untied the string that held it up. He turned it in his hands and flipped the lid open.

Empty.

There was a sigh of disappointment across the room. Finnegan, just as disappointed, closed the box again. He was so sure…
Wait…

Finnegan took a second glance. On the front there was a familiar insignia.

A golden kiwi.

 

 

Finnegan replaced the landline on its base, clicking the line closed, and let out a breath. Peebles rolled in his chair to Finnegan’s desk.

“Anything?” he asked.

Finnegan sighed. “One day, I’ll beat you at a wheelie chair race and you will never roll around the precinct ever again.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Finnegan decided to drop it. No point arguing about it now. “Uniforms visited Vissicchio’s apartment. The place was vacated. She’s nowhere to be found.”

“You don’t think she’s running?”

“My thoughts exactly,” he said. “So I tracked her recent purchases on her credit card and apparently Vissicchio booked a last-minute flight out to Nevada. Some place near Black Mountain.”

“That’s out in the middle of nowhere, what’s she doing there?”

He shrugged.

“But if she’s flying out of here in a hurry, she’s either got a some sort of emergency that might not mean anything, gotten assigned to a investigation in Nevada, or she killed Heat and is now on the run.” Finnegan bolted to his feet and quickly scribbled KATE VISSICCHIO under SUSPECTS on the Murder Board. “But what’s her motive? There is no reason for her to murder Heat.”

“Well, didn’t they say they were rooming together until recently?” Peebles reminded him. “Maybe that has to do with it. Maybe they had a fight, Heat moved out, but they still had a matter to attend to.”

“And those boxes. Whatever was in them, it’s gone. And Vissicchio looked very scared to even talk about them. But then… how does a sword fit into all this?”

“And that weird cabinet?”

“Yeah, there’s something else going on here. We’re missing something…”

“Why don’t we go ask her?”

“What, go get her from Nevada?”

“Why not?”

“Too much effort and too little time.” Regardless, Finnegan grabbed his coat to leave.

“Wait, whoa! You’re just gonna leave me here while you go to Nevada?”

“I’m not going to Nevada, Peebles. Run a background check on Vissicchio. I want to everything she has to do with Heat. I’ll be back in an hour or so,” he said over his shoulder.

“Not going to Nevada?” Peebles muttered. “He never listens to me.”

 

 

“Back again?” Curtis said as she greeted the detective with crossed arms.

Finnegan forced a smile. “Hello, Miss Curtis.”

“Hello, Detective. What is it this time?”

“I need to ask some questions about one of your writers, Kate Vissicchio.”

“Kate?” she repeated, confused. “She doesn’t even work here anymore.”

“What?”

“She quit a couple months back.”

“Do you have any idea why she quit?”

She shook her head.

Maybe he asked the wrong question. He tried again, “Did anything unusual or strange happen before she quit? Did she seem agitated, nervous, paranoid? Perhaps a fight between co-workers, or anything like that?”

Curtis made a show of mulling it over. She snapped her fingers. “Yes, yes, now that you mention it. Kate and Renee had a big fight shortly before she quit.”

Bingo. “Any idea what the fight was about?”

She shook no. “But it was pretty intense. They locked themselves in an empty conference room. I, or any of the others, could hear what they were saying, but we could hear some muffled shouting. When they came out, Kate’s and Renee’s eyes were both watery, as if they were just crying. Perhaps this incident, though I don’t know the cause as I’ve told you, set into motion everything that happened. They did split up soon after.”

“Come again?”

“Oh, Renee moved out and got an apartment for her own and Kate did the same only a few days after the fight.”

The detective wrote this down. Kate and Renee fought, Kate quit the job, and they moved out all around the same time. The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. He just had to figure out why.

 

 

Peebles was bobbing up and down in his chair when Finnegan returned to the precinct. He had a big piece of news to share and he was getting impatient. As soon as Finnegan landed, deliberately slow as he kept an eye on Peebles’s anxiousness, he bolted up and launched into a rapid-fire speech, “You remember how Allen, Heat’s brother, said she asked him for money, even though she made a lot of money, which we thought was very unlikely given her rather not-so-prominent job as a journalist? Well, I finally ran her financials and guess what? Her spending is a lot more than whatever paycheques she’s getting from the Times. Turns out she’s been making periodic cash deposits, a lot of it too, directly into her account, which beefs up her budget a lot more than her official job. And about half that money was sent in a wire transfer into a separate account.”

“Wire transfers?” Finnegan repeated. “From who?”

“Oh this is where it gets really good,” Peebles replied excitedly. “I traced the transfers and the money was sent to none other than Kate Vissicchio’s account.”

“Vissicchio? As in her ex-roommate?”

“Exactly.”

“And where’s she getting her money from?”

“Don’t know. They’re all cash deposits. Untraceable.”

Peebles handed over the files so his partner could look it over. Finnegan skimmed and looked up with wide eyes. “Renee stopped making the wire transfers a couple months ago, just after Vissicchio moved out and quit her job at The Times. That can’t be a coincidence.”

Finnegan tapped his chin in thought. “Is it me or does this sound like a drug dealer case to you?” he said suddenly.

Peebles blinked. “What, you mean, like, Heat and Vissicchio involved in some sort of black-ops organisation dealing drugs and making lots of money until… Vissicchio gets booted off the team, kicked out of the house, and is left with nothing. She’s angry and needs the money, which Heat now has. So she kills her ex-teammate out of revenge and takes the money? What about their jobs at The Times then?”

“It’s possible that they held positions in The New York Times because it was easy to bury any evidence that led any criminal activity involved with their work to them. And working the newspaper, you’re constantly updated on what’s going on around the city, which would probably come useful.” Finnegan bit his lips. “This is a good theory, but we can’t prove any of this.”

“Unless we find drugs or any sign of secret black-ops dealing in Vissicchio’s apartment.”

“But we didn’t find any at Heat’s, and if our story’s correct, she’s the one that still holds a position in the operation.”

“Didn’t we? The encrypted computer? The locked cabinet?”

“No drugs.”

“So? Vissicchio could’ve gotten rid of the drugs easily.”

“Then what makes you think she won’t have gotten rid of the drugs at her place? She’s probably on the run right now in Nevada.”

Peebles shrugged. “Doesn’t hurt to hope that she slipped up in the haste. And maybe she wasn’t as secure with her secrets as Heat. We could find unencrypted files or something.”

“The box,” Finnegan remembered. “The strange box in Vissicchio’s apartment with the kiwi insignia, the exact same one from Heat’s apartment. If we figure out what that insignia and the box mean"” Finnegan grabbed the phone. “I’ll contact the DEA.”

“I’ll get a search warrant.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“I’m working with the youngest, the best detective in the city. I think we’ll be fine.”

Finnegan shook his head, however. “I hate it when you get all confident.”