The drive from the crime scene to the building that Nick lived in was fairly short, with Nick calling off directions as Judy drove. As always, he was able to do so without any kind of navigational aide; his knowledge of Zootopia's streets probably rivaled those of its best taxi drivers. During the drive, he got a call on his cell phone and continued to provide guidance by indicating the turns with his free paw. From the half of the conversation that Judy could hear, he seemed to be talking with someone at the office of Holly's agent. "That was Thanatopsis's secretary," he said, confirming her guess after he hung up, "They've put together all of the threats Leaps has gotten."
"We can head there after your shower," Judy said.
She had no intention of teasing him about it, but the distinctive and somewhat unpleasant scent of wet canid had begun to fill the car and she was eager for him to clean up and dry off.
In short order, he guided Judy to park in front of a modest twelve-story building in a neighborhood that Judy vaguely knew as being modest and thoroughly middle-class. The slightly tattered awning above the main entrance to the building read "Greenbriar Condominiums" in faded gold letters on a green background.
Nick started to get out of the car and paused with his paws on the door. "Are you coming up, or should I leave the windows cracked open?" he teased good-naturedly.
"If you don't mind," she replied, and when he beckoned her on she quickly followed him into the building and up to his floor.
Judy had occasionally imagined the sort of place that Nick would live in. His closed-off nature made it difficult to narrow it down to a single option, but she had pictured either a squalid bachelor pad that would reflect the same sort of tastes that led to him wearing those awful shirts or some sort of ultramodern glass and chrome domicile that he would have dumped his significant un-taxed income into.
The reality did not match up to either image she had had in her head. Her immediate thought was that it looked like Nick had only just started to move in or was almost done moving out. The main area, a combination living room and kitchen, was larger than her entire apartment, but almost completely empty. There was nothing on the neutral white walls, and the somewhat scuffed wooden floors were almost as bare. With the exception of two large cardboard boxes, the space was completely empty, with not so much as a rug or a single piece of furniture. In fact, the only furniture of any kind that she could see was through the open door to one of the two bedrooms off the main area, and that was a mattress laying directly on the floor. The overall effect was pretty depressing; even a hotel room, with its purposefully unoffensive and bland designed by committee decor, would have looked more like a home. Nick's condo looked like nothing more than a place to sleep. Still, she tried to come up with something positive to say. "Your place is really nice," Judy said, hoping that Nick wouldn't catch onto her insincerity and think that she was pitying him.
Nick chuckled. "You don't have to lie, Carrots. It's a work in progress. I kind of overestimated how much money I'd have left after I bought it; let's just say that Mr. Big did not give me the friends and family discount."
Judy racked her brain for an alternate way to interpret what Nick had just said, but came up blank. "You had Mr. Big launder your money?" Judy demanded, her voice coming out louder and shriller than she intended.
"Money laundering is illegal, Officer Hopps," Nick said with mock formality, "I just so happened to win an amount of money at one of his casinos equal to forty percent of what I could have hypothetically earned over the course of twenty years of hustling. And then I paid tax on my gambling winnings. And once I bought this place, I paid tax on it too. There's a lot of taxes, you know."
"Nick–"
"I did it all before I joined the academy, so you don't have to worry. Besides, I think Mr. Big likes me better now that he's got one over me."
"And what are you going to do if Mr. Big tries blackmailing you for a favor now?" Judy asked, finding herself somewhat appalled by Nick's lack of foresight.
"What are you going to do if Mr. Big tries calling in a favor? He might think we owe him one for Duke Weaselton."
Judy's retort died on her lips. Neither she nor Nick had been officers when they had Mr. Big use his goons to force information out of Duke Weaselton in a manner that was at best extralegal, and at worst a felony. However, since they were both currently officers, it was the sort of thing that Mr. Big could try to take advantage of. He probably wouldn't–she didn't think that Fru Fru would stand for it–but the thought had occasionally pulled at her.
Nick seemed to understand her silence. "Look," he said with a sigh, "There's a lot in my past. And I'm trying, I really am, but there's plenty more I've done before I became a cop."
"I guess I have, too," Judy said, offering the other half to the unspoken apology.
Before the ensuing silence could get awkward, Nick clapped his paws together. "Well, I'm going to hit the shower, so feel free to make yourself at home. Grab something out of the fridge, kick back on the couch, watch some TV..."
Judy chuckled politely at his weak joke. Nick's condo didn't have a couch or a TV, which made a connection click for Judy. "Did you really not watch Black and White because you're not interested or was it because you don't have a TV?" she called after Nick, who had already entered the bathroom and shut the door.
"Can't it be both?" he called back, which was followed by the sound of running water.
Judy considered poking around Nick's condo, but it wasn't as though there was really much to see. She considered her curiosity satisfied when she peeked into the cardboard boxes in his living room; they were full of shirts identical to the one he had worn when they had first met. Judy shook her head at her discovery, wondering if he had obtained them in his hustling days as part of some kind of con or if he actually liked the shirts enough to buy them in bulk. If it was the former, she understood why he still had them; it didn't seem likely that anyone else would want them.
While she was waiting for her partner to finish showering, Judy pulled out Clawhauser's report on Holly Leaps. She sat on the floor in the kitchen and began reading. The straightforward and dry professional language made it seem incongruous that the cheetah had written it, but she knew as well as anyone not to judge based on outside appearances. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much in the dossier that Judy hadn't gleaned from her initial interview with the actress.
Leaps was twenty-seven years old, a Zootopia native that had gotten into acting at the age of eight, playing the ghost of a kit murdered by a wicked stepmother in a convoluted soap opera that Judy recognized as one her grandmother had been a fan of. Her subsequent roles had been a series of parts in other soap operas that progressively increased in importance until she was just short of playing a main character. She seemed to have had a future in the soaps, but had jumped (or, Judy thought wryly, leaped) at the chance to be the co-star of a network television show. Leaps had begun dating her boyfriend, Jacques Lapin, also known as Jacked Rabbit, three years ago. Apparently, he had been her fitness coach at the gym. Then Judy came across something that struck her as odd as she flipped through pages of photos from throughout Holly's career. Prior to her acting roles, she had been a kit model and a regular on the pageant circuit with a history of winning. In each of the photos of a pageant win, Holly's mother, a somewhat rotund brown bunny, was at her side, her kit firmly enveloped in a tight hug. Even after Leaps moved into acting, the mother seemed to always be close by, until she suddenly stopped showing up in the photos. Judy frowned and nibbled at her pen as she scanned through the file again. Holly hadn't mentioned anything about her parents, and while her father had apparently died of a heart attack years ago, there was no indication that her mother was deceased.
Still, it struck her as unusual that the mother, who seemed to be a textbook stage mother, suddenly stopped appearing in photos at right around the same time Holly had started dating her boyfriend. The absence of evidence was not, of course, evidence of absence, but there was no mention in the file of any previous boyfriend. Perhaps Holly had cut a controlling mother out of her life once she started dating, or perhaps Jacques Lapin wasn't the perfect mammal that Holly had described and had taken over control of her life. Both possibilities were definitely worth looking into.
Judy's concentration was suddenly broken by the sound of Nick knocking on the inside of the bathroom door. "Avert your eyes, Fluff. I'm not decent," he said, his voice slightly muffled by the door that separated them.
Judy was sure that Nick had deliberately given her that opening, but she couldn't resist taking it. She turned away so that her back was to the bathroom door and called back, "I've known that for a long time."
She was rewarded with his laugh as she heard the door swing open. "A low blow, Carrots. Keep your back turned; I'm not responsible if you see something your little bunny heart can't take."
A thought suddenly popped into Judy's head, completely unbidden. Would he be embarrassed if I saw him naked? She felt her ears grow warm as she shook the resulting image out of her head. Nick had certainly seemed comfortable enough at the Naturalist Club, but that had been before they really got to know each other, and it wasn't as though he had been nude.
She heard him walk into the bedroom and the rustle of cloth as he got dressed. "I see you reading that file. Find anything interesting?" he asked.
Still with her back turned to him, she nodded. "Maybe. I think we need to look into her mother."
"Her mother?" Nick asked, walking over to where she was sitting and stooping down to look at the papers Judy had spread across his floor.
"Look at the photos," Judy said, "She's in every picture of Holly as a kit and even when she's older she's never far away, but as soon as she started dating her boyfriend..."
"The mother's out of the picture," Nick said thoughtfully.
Judy rolled her eyes at his weak pun. "Worth looking into, wouldn't you say?"
"It's about 9:30 now," Nick said, glancing at his phone, "Why don't we go get copies of the threats from Thanatopsis and then check out the mother after the press conference?"