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of his panhandler’s disguise, put on a hat, and acted like he belonged with the news snappers, but when the sonar ping had sounded for Nikki, she dismissed it, breaking one of the cardinal rules of investigation that she preached to her squad: Always notice what you are noticing.
    “All right,” said Hamner with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s stipulate I was doing some background on you—”
    “You had me tailed.”
    “—But I had a reason.”
    Count on that, thought Nikki. Zach “The Hammer” Hamner always had a reason. Or, more likely, a strategy.
    “I’m waiting,” she said.
    “You’re sorta blindsiding me here. I’m still herding my ducks.” He chuckled, trying to regain footing. “Can you meet at our usual deli for breakfast, say, tomorrow or early next week?”
    The seasoned interrogator kept his feet to the fire. “Background on me for what? Tell me now, or I’ll start asking around.”
    Nasal breeze crossed his phone’s mouthpiece. Then came the creak of executive leather as he sat. “A job, since you insist on squeezing me. A promotion. Again.”
    His “again” carried some stank. Three years before, Zach identified Heat as a rising star and campaigned for her to take command of her precinct after the death of the beloved Captain Montrose. The ugly politics of the process gave her second thoughts, however, and she left him at the altar, declining both her promotion to captain and the command, to remain a street detective. A gamesman has a long memory, she decided. And yet, he still played the game. Why this time?
    It had to be Wally Irons. The man who took the precinct command Heat had declined proved himself to be an inept self-promoter with no copsense nor any clue how to manage people. Captain Irons’s sole talent rested in his astonishing ability to survive in the face of his gaffes, usually buffoonish or egregious. The whole squad bet that the exposure of his secret affair with one of his homicide detectives, Sharon Hinesburg, would trigger the end of his command. Especially since his lover turned out to be a mole for a terror organization. Yet, after two weeks of intensive meetings downtown and a monthlong leave of absence, the Iron Man returned to flip on the lights in his precinct commander’s office without so much as a wink about his transgression—or a hint of how he kept his post.
    The tongue-in-cheek speculation ran to holding blackmail photos of the mayor. Rook theorized Wally was like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, “a human cockroach, only freakishly mutated. Like that deviant species they discovered that survives chemical spills, nuclear meltdowns, and Real Housewives marathons.”
    These were Nikki’s thoughts as she eyed the empty desk in the bull pen. The desk that had been assigned to Sharon Hinesburg’s replacement, a grade-three who transferred from the Organized Crime Unit, a gifted, instinctive investigator whose single drawback turned out to be her bust size. And when years of innuendo from Captain Irons turned to harassment, and finally, an “accidental” grope, Detective Camille Washington just didn’t show up one day last week. Now, Nikki assumed Irons was out and she was Zach Hamner’s candidate—again.
    She was mistaken.
    “The commish directed the head of Counterterrorism to create a new task force, and he wants you on it. You do remember Commander McMains?”
    Of course she did. Nikki especially recalled how he stepped in to help her shut down that bioterror plot. “Good cop. Good person.”
    “He thinks the same. Which is why your name tops his short list. This is big, Heat. We’re definitely thinking outside the boroughs with this job. We need someone who can liaise with our foreign law enforcement partners to meet the challenges of all cross-border criminal activity that impacts New York City.”
    Nikki wondered, was he reading this? Probably not. Most likely, Zach wrote it and accessed his talking points from memory.
    “Under McMains, you would