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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rav dreads the prospect of going into the office on Monday. Water cooler chitchat makes him want to hang himself at the best of times, but tomorrow’s session promises to be especially delightful. How was your weekend? Oh, you know. Angry mobs, death threats. Made out with a rock star. You?

Then there’s Howard. He’s not sure what to expect there. Their conversation last night was economical even by the lieutenant’s standards. She asked if he was safe and instructed him not to speak to the media or post anything online. The rest, she said, could wait until Monday.

The New Knickerbockers issue a press release late Sunday morning denouncing the hack and the video as a vicious prank. It doesn’t go as far as Rav would like—it doesn’t mention him personally or address any of the specific allegations contained in the bogus interview—but he supposes Jack’s lawyers have their reasons. Carrie Campbell posts an article in the Times describing the scene outside Rav’s building, in which “a visibly confused Detective Trivedi was nearly assaulted by a crowd of angry fans taken in by the hoax.” The internet promptly rounds on Hayden Beck, and by Sunday afternoon, the blogger’s social media accounts have been deleted and his website taken down.

“It’s not clear whether he even exists,” Howard tells Rav when they meet first thing on Monday. “Computer Crimes has said they’ll look into it, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. A low-priority matter like this—”

He scowls. “Someone orchestrated a mob outside my apartment building.”

“ Orchestrated is a strong word. This was probably just a prank that got out of hand.”

“So that’s it, then? Case closed?”

“You’re entitled to mental health leave, and counseling is available if you need it.” She pauses, her dark eyes holding Rav’s. “In your place, Detective, I’d be grateful if that proves to be the limit of the department’s interest in the matter. So far, no one has bothered to ask how Jack Vale came to have a photo of the two of you together. A photo in which you appear to be on very friendly terms.”

He clears his throat awkwardly. “That was the point, of course. As to the first part—”

“Your personal life is not my concern.” Lifting an eyebrow, she adds, “For both our sakes, I hope it stays that way.”

The message is loud and clear. On your head be it. The Vanderford case is still open. If Rav is wrong about Jack, it’ll be the end of his career. At least she’s leaving it up to him. That shows a lot of confidence in his judgment, and he appreciates that. “I hear you, LT,” Rav assures her. “It won’t be a problem.”

Will is scrolling through Twitter when Rav gets back to his desk. “It’s bizarre. First they love you, then they’re baying for your blood, then they love you again. They’re even turning on each other now, just to prove they’re on the right side. Do any of these people actually care about Jack Vale? Seems like they’re more interested in racking up likes than finding out what really happened.”

“Social media in a nutshell,” Rav says sourly.

“It was good of Vale to call off the dogs. Most people would hold a grudge after being investigated for murder. You look like you legitimately like each other in this photo.” Will frowns, peering more closely at his screen. “Wait, is this your apart—”

“What I’d like to know,” Rav says, a little too loudly, “is who’s behind it. Howard thinks it was a prank, but if so, it’s a pretty elaborate one.”

“Maybe someone has a grudge against you. Somebody you arrested or something.” He shrugs. “We’ll probably never know.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Up for a little drive?”

Half an hour later, they’re standing outside a four-story walk-up in the East Village, one of those old tenement buildings that might have been charming if it had been pressure washed sometime in the last thirty years. The trash bins out front are overflowing, to the delight of the local rat population, and the windows on the top floor are boarded up. “What is this place?” Will asks, looking it over with a dubious expression.

The intercom panel is filthy. No way Rav is touching that with his bare hands. He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a square of stylish patterned cloth.

“Is that a handkerchief?”

“It is.” A real one, too, not the disposable kind. He likes the old-school feel of them. Also, they’re terribly posh.

“Do you actually use it to blow your nose?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s Paul Smith.” Rav uses it to press the intercom button.

Will shakes his head. “You’re a weird guy, Trivedi.”

“Well, I could be a walking beige flag, but I wouldn’t want to steal your thunder.”

The lock buzzes. Rav grabs the door (with the handkerchief, obviously) and they head inside. “Nobody answered,” Will notes as they start up the stairs. “How do they know who it is?”

“Oh, she’ll have a sneaky camera installed around here somewhere.” In fact, he’d be surprised if there was just the one. She’s probably tapped into every security and traffic cam for blocks.

Rav finds the door he wants and knocks, and there’s another loud buzz as the lock gives. “Like a prison,” Shepard mutters.

They head inside, and if Will looked bemused before, he’s properly gobsmacked now. Rav probably looked much the same the first time he walked through this door, stepping from a run-down tenement hallway into a high-tech wonderland full of random bits of finery. The sitting room looks like someone robbed a Best Buy and then hit an estate sale on the way home. A massive server sits beside a century-old horsehair settee, throwing blinking green lights over the silk upholstery. A panel of flatscreens showing everything from code to security footage to stock markets competes for wall space with an ornate gilt mirror. Half the devices in here are probably some shade of illegal. Happily, Rav doesn’t know much about these things, and Will even less, so they have plausible deniability.

“Um,” says Will, glancing around uncomfortably. “What are we doing here?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” says a voice, and Rav turns to find Aisha Khan standing in the doorway to her kitchen, glaring at him from under a fringe of frosted bangs. She’s wearing leopard-print overalls and Hello Kitty high-tops, which is confusing and also very Aisha. Her look, like her décor, speaks volumes—though what it says, Rav hasn’t quite worked out. “I thought I was very clear that I didn’t want you bringing strangers around here,” she says. “And now you show up with a cop ?”

“I’m a cop, Aisha.”

“And I try not to hold it against you, but that doesn’t mean you get a free pass to bring more of them in here. Have you got any idea how many clients I’d lose if anybody found out I was having tea with the NYPD?”

“There’s tea? Fantastic, I could use a cuppa.”

She scowls. “How about a kick in the—”

“Look, there’s nothing to worry about. Shepard is my partner. You can trust him.”

“I don’t trust you .”

“Let’s not be dramatic. If you were that worried about it, you wouldn’t have buzzed us in. Will Shepard, meet Aisha Khan. She’s… what’s the euphemism? A cybersecurity engineer?”

“You mean a hacker,” Will says.

“I do mean that, yes.”

“Since when do you know hackers?”

Since last year, when he met Aisha at a cocktail party hosted by some Wall Street types. Rav scored an invite through friends, but he was on the job that night, discreetly tailing a man he suspected of murdering his business partner to cover up an insider trading scheme. Aisha looked the part, dressed in a little black dress and strappy sandals, but Rav clocked her as an imposter right away. For one thing, she’d teetered uncertainly on those heels, and the tattoos and pierced septum didn’t quite fit the scene. Also, she kept peeking inside her handbag, where Rav subsequently discovered a clever little device capable of nicking data from nearby smartphones. It turned out they were tailing the same guy. Aisha had been hired to find proof of his insider trading. Rav agreed to look the other way on the smartphone hacking if she gave him everything she had on his suspect, and while he couldn’t use her intel in court, it pointed him in the right direction. Rav got his man, Aisha got paid, and they’ve had a mutually beneficial, if not entirely trusting, relationship ever since.

“It’s a long story,” Rav says. “But don’t worry, it’s all aboveboard.” On his side, anyway. “I scratch her back, she… Well, now, come to think of it, I’ve been doing most of the back-scratching lately.”

Aisha rolls her eyes. “As if running a few names through a database is such a huge favor. So you’re here to collect, is that it?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite so transactionally, but I do need your help. This past weekend—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. The Jack Vale thing, right? You wanna know who set you up.”

That throws Rav off a little. Aisha has her fingers in a lot of pies, but even so, he’s surprised the Vale story would ping on her radar. Is she keeping tabs on him? It’s a disconcerting thought. “You think someone was trying to set me up?”

“Trying to set the NYPD up, anyway. Whether you were the target or collateral damage, I couldn’t say.”

“Can you find the source of the hack?”

She settles into a chair in front of a bank of keyboards and screens that wouldn’t look out of place in the NYPD situation center. “The most I can get you is an IP address, and that’s not much help. You’re better off looking into the fake blogger. If I can track down what’s left of his website, there might be some fingerprints in the metadata.”

“We were told it’s all been deleted,” Will says.

She shrugs. “You can dispose of a body, right? Wash the blood off the floor, throw the gun in the East River. But there’s always something left behind for your forensics guys. Same principle here. You have your trace evidence, I have mine. Probably won’t lead us to a specific individual, but hopefully it narrows things down.”

“How long will it take?” Rav asks.

“That depends.” She plucks a lollipop from a pencil holder and starts unwrapping it. “This could be a big project. No way I’m that far in the red with you. How will you make this worth my while?”

“How is this any different from our usual arrangement?”

“Because it’s personal, like you said. Helping you hunt down a murderer—that’s for the greater good. This is for you. So if I help you, will you owe me personally ?”

“What does that even mean?”

“Say things were to get a little hot for me here, and I decided to relocate to London. Would I have the gratitude of a certain well-connected member of parliament?”

Rav can’t recall ever having mentioned his father to Aisha Khan.

That settles it: she’s definitely keeping tabs on him. “My father doesn’t do favors,” he says coolly. “Especially for me. But if it’s connections you’re looking for, I’d remind you that there’s another party with skin in the game.”

“You mean Vale?” She hums thoughtfully around her lollipop. “Interesting.”

“His head of security is former intelligence, and he’s invested heavily in their digital operations. I’ll wager you could help them level up even more, starting with how to protect their social media accounts.”

“You think they’d hire me to consult?”

He looks her over—animal-print overalls, eccentric haircut, pencil holder full of lollipops. If I can persuade them you’re not completely mad. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll certainly put in a word, and this is a chance to show them what you can do.”

She thinks about it for a beat. “Throw in His Lordship’s personal number, and it’s a deal.”

“Pass.”

“Worth a try,” she mutters, spinning her chair around and reaching for her mouse.

Worth a try is exactly how Rav would describe this entire enterprise. He’s not sure what he expects her to find. Only he can’t quite shake the nagging feeling there’s something here, something bigger than a prank. It’s adjacent to the twinge in his gut that tells him the FBI is barking up the wrong tree on the Vanderford case. It’s as if his subconscious is trying to tell him something, but what?

What is he missing?

Rav sips his beer, grimaces, and puts it back down. An IPA, seriously? This is what he gets for letting Will order for him. He pushes it away.

They’re at a cop bar in Bed-Stuy, a place called Hardy’s. Rav makes it a policy to avoid cop bars—they appeal to dinosaurs like Danny Jobs, and he gets enough of that toxicity in the squad room—but they’re having a working drink. Working, because they’re looking into the Vanderford case; on their personal time, because technically, they’re not supposed to be. They face each other across dueling laptops. Will is going through Vanderford’s emails—again—while Rav trawls through the social media profiles of users who’ve made threatening statements about him.

“This is painful,” Will grumbles. “I’ve got zilch over here.”

Rav has the opposite problem. “The entire internet hated this man. Even if I narrow it down to profiles that follow the Nicks, it’s overwhelming.”

“A needle in a hate-stack.” He pauses, waiting for Rav to laugh. This does not happen. “Come on, really? That was good.”

Rav keeps scrolling. “I wish we had access to the algorithm Erika Strauss uses for this. I’ll bet it’s leagues better than ours.”

“Maybe we should be thankful. In a couple of years, Homicide won’t even need grunts like us. AI will be doing it all.”

“Uh-oh, is AI taking over the world again?” Rav looks up to find Ana standing over them. She’s come straight from work: shoulder-length hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, no makeup, no earrings.

Rav glances at his watch. “I thought we said seven?” They’re supposed to be grabbing dinner after this.

“Yeah, but I got my paperwork done faster than I thought.” Her eyes shift to Will, giving him a discreet once-over. “How you doing, Shepard? Listen, if you guys are still working—”

Will nudges a chair out with his foot. “Take a seat. I’m going cross-eyed anyway, and Rav is getting cranky.”

“I’m not,” Rav says.

He is.

Ana settles in and eyes Rav’s untouched pint. She drags it over, sniffs it, and takes a swig. “What?” she says when Rav gives her a look. “We both know you weren’t gonna drink it.”

“Why not?” Will asks.

“Rav hates IPAs.”

“Of course he does.” Will rolls his eyes. “Why didn’t you say something? I could have got you a glass of wine.”

“Here?” Rav snorts. “I think not.”

Ana fake-whispers behind her hand, “In case you haven’t noticed, our boy here is a little bougie .”

Will laughs, and Ana flashes him a winning smile—a bit too winning, in Rav’s estimation. “Tell me about it,” Will says. “Dude carries a handkerchief. A real one.”

“I’ll go you one better. He gets them dry-cleaned.”

Okay, whatever this is, Rav is not up for it. “Do you mind?” he says, gesturing at his laptop.

“You’re right, he is cranky. Looks like it’s just you and me, Shepard.” There it is again—that flirty smile. Is it possible she really does have a thing for Will? Rav has always assumed that was a joke. “Okay, sorry, you guys are trying to work.” She smooths her expression. “Can I help? What’re we doing?”

“Looking for a needle in a hate-stack.” Will pauses significantly.

“Give him a pity laugh,” Rav advises. “That’s twice now he’s launched that lead balloon.”

Ana shrugs. “I can get with dad jokes.”

Since when? Rav shakes his head. Ana’s taste in romantic partners is all over the place, but he would never have guessed she’d be into Classic Ken.

“So you guys caught a new case?” she asks, sipping her pilfered beer.

“Nope,” Will says. “This is still Vanderford.”

“Am I missing something? I thought the feds took over that one.”

“They did,” Rav says, “but I’ve come up with a new angle, and I think it’s got some real merit, so I’m looking into it.”

“And because I’m a sap,” Will adds, “I’m helping.”

“Aren’t you sweet? I hope you appreciate this one, Trivedi.” She eyes Will over the rim of her pint glass, doing some appreciating of her own. “You still have access to the case file?”

“For now.” Also, he had Aisha make him a cheeky offline copy, but he doesn’t mention that part.

“So, what’s this promising new angle?”

Rav leans forward, energized. “As many possible motives as there are for this thing, the one I keep coming back to is that business I was telling you about before, with the Nicks and their master recordings. We’ve looked into the band and their inner circle already, but what happened on Saturday got me thinking. Those fans outside my apartment had been whipped into a frenzy on social media. Some nineteen-year-old kid almost assaulted a cop at his home, in front of dozens of witnesses, because of a phony interview. How much worse must it have been for Vanderford? He was Enemy Number One to Nicks fans. This list?” He shows her the spreadsheet on his screen. “Usernames of people who’ve made threatening statements about him on Twitter. Over a hundred of them, and that’s just one platform. These fans are so obsessed, so emotionally invested, that there’s no such thing as going too far.”

“To the point of murder? That sounds totally ridiculous.” Shaking her head, she adds, “And totally possible.”

“So possible that I hardly know where to start. It’s like Vale’s bodyguard says: most of it is just talk, but how do you tell?”

Ana sips her beer, thinking. “Are there cameras outside your building? I’ve never paid attention.”

“There are. Why?”

“You said those fans were out there for hours, right? Run them through facial, look up their social profiles, and cross-reference it with your spreadsheet. If you get a match, you’re ticking a bunch of boxes. Angry, committed, living in the area. It’s a start, anyway.”

Will rocks his chair back. “That’s not bad, actually.”

“It’s bloody brilliant, in point of fact.” Rav pulls up his email and starts composing a message to his building’s management company. “Remind me why they haven’t made you detective yet?”

“I’m wondering the same,” Will says. “Or is that not what you want?”

She shrugs. “At some point, but I’m taking my time. Doing some courses at CUNY, you know. Figuring out what I like.”

“Smart,” Will says. “You should take your time, especially at your age.”

“My age? What, are you an old man all of a sudden?”

“Older than you, anyway. By a fair bit, I’d say.”

There’s a glint in Ana’s eye now, one Rav has learned to dread. “You flirting with me, Shepard? I gotta say, you wanna be careful about that. I’m a junior officer, remember.”

Will laughs, but it’s awkward. He can’t tell if she’s serious. “I’m not flirting.”

“Just commenting on a female colleague’s appearance?”

Ana. This, right here, is what Rav meant the other day when he said she’d eat Will alive. The poor guy looks like he’s standing on the subway tracks watching a train bearing down on him. On any other day, Rav might find this entertaining, but he’s trying to work here. “She’s fucking with you, Shepard.”

Ana grins.

“Shit,” Will breathes, relieved. “You’re convincing. And mean .”

“Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You Midwestern boys are just so earnest!”

He shakes his head. “I’m getting another drink. Rav, you want something?” Rav declines, and his partner retreats to nurse his dignity by the bar.

“You’re evil, Rodriguez,” Rav says as he types.

“Yeah, but he’s so cute when he blushes.” She’s still grinning, eying Will like he’s a tasty bar snack. “So, how much longer you need?”

“Give me half an hour.” He sends off the email to the management company and opens a new tab. It’ll take a while to get the footage, and even longer to run it through the NYPD’s facial recognition software. In the meantime, there’s always social media. Maybe he gets lucky, and one of these names turns out to be the ginger-haired kid, or someone else he recognizes from the mob.

God, he would love to nail this guy before the FBI does. And if that were to earn him some points with a certain someone, well… that would be a definite bonus.