“Perfect.” He took the marker and reached for her magazine.

“No, sign this!” She took a step closer and tugged aside the cup of her halter.

Rook smiled. “I think I’m going to need more ink.”

The woman exploded with laughter and clutched Nikki Heat’s arm. “See? This is why he’s my favorite writer.”

But Heat was focused on the front steps of the Guilford, where Detective Ochoa clapped a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of the doorman. He left the shade of the canopy, did a limbo under the tape, and crossed to her. “Doorman says our vic lived in this building. Sixth floor.”

Nikki heard Rook clear his throat behind her but didn’t turn. He was either gloating or signing a groupie’s breast. She wasn’t in the mood to see either one.

An hour later in the solemn hush of the victim’s apartment, Detective Heat, the embodiment of sympathetic patience, sat in an antique tapestry chair across from his wife and their seven-year-old son. A blue reporter’s-cut spiral notebook rested closed on her lap. Her naturally erect dancer’s posture and the drape of her hand on the carved wooden armrest gave her a look of regal ease. When she caught Rook staring at her from across the room, he turned away and studied the Jackson Pollock on the wall in front of him. She reflected on how much the paint splatters echoed the busboy’s apron downstairs, and though she tried to stop it, her cop’s brain began streaming its capture video of the mangled busing station, the slack faces of traumatized waitstaff, and the coroner’s van departing with the body of real estate mogul Matthew Starr.

Heat wondered if Starr was a jumper. The economy, or, more accurately, the lack of it, had triggered scores of collateral tragedies. On any given day, the country seemed one turn of a hotel maid’s key away from discovering the next suicide or murder-suicide of a CEO or tycoon. Was ego an antidote? As New York real estate developers went, Matthew Starr didn’t write the book on ego, but he sure did the term paper. A perennial also-ran in the race to slap his name on the outside of everything with a roof, you had to credit Starr with at least staying in the chase.