High Heat

  Nikki was oblivious to it. All that mattered was that she again had her mother in sight. Cynthia Heat was continuing to scurry west, still stooped over her stolen shopping cart. But unless she had Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak tucked under her layers of clothing, she wasn’t going to get away this time. Nikki sprinted the final twenty-five yards and grabbed her mother by the shoulders, spinning her around.

  “Hey, what’s your problem?” the woman howled.

  Nikki was now staring her full in the face. It was dirty, weather-lined, sunburned, and while the cheekbones were vaguely familiar, it was definitely not the face of Cynthia Heat.

  “Get your hands off me, cop lady,” the woman growled. “There ain’t no law against being homeless. Not even in Man-freakin’-hattan.”

  Heat immediately released her grasp. Her face was already flushed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I thought—”

  “I know my rights. I’m gonna find one of these fancy lawyers around here and sue you for police brutality.”

  “Ma’am, I’m very sorry,” Heat said, backing away.

  “You damn cops. You’re always hassling us. I got rights, you know. I think you hurt my back. I feel a—”

  Heat quickly pulled out her wallet and grabbed a twenty-dollar bill. She planted it face up on top of the woman’s shopping basket.

  “My apologies, ma’am,” she said, then began walking away.

  “Thank you!” the woman hollered after her. “Bless you! God bless you!”

  Heat waved without looking. God bless me, Heat thought. And then Please, God, help me get a grip.

  Four subway stops and four blocks later, Heat had mostly shaken off the bizarre experience of seeing her long-dead mother—or, in this case, not seeing her.

  Heat was now standing in front of a classic Greenwich Village brownstone that matched the address she had been able to find for Joanna Masters.

  It was an early twentieth-century single-family home that probably cost its original occupants a few thousand dollars and was now worth a few million. That’s if it ever went on the market. And homes like that one seldom did.

  Heat rang the bell and waited, half wondering if a butler was going to come to the door. Instead, it was a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length brown hair who held herself in a way that made it pretty obvious she was not the help. She was also walking with a cane.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “Joanna Masters?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Nikki Heat. I’m a detective with the NYPD. May I come in, please?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about Tam Svejda.”

  “Oh, certainly,” Masters said, stepping away from the door. “Why don’t you join me in here?”

  Masters pointed her toward a sitting room whose furnishings perfectly fit the dwelling in which it sat: they were a little old and a little dated, but they told you the person sitting in them had all the money she needed to replace them anytime she chose. And, to be clear, she chose not to.

  The Queen Anne–style couch Masters had apparently set up as her sickbed had extra pillows and a blanket. On the coffee table in front of it were two prescription bottles, a glass of some gruesome green concoction that might have been wheatgrass, a box of tissues, and a Michael Connelly novel, half finished.

  “A Harry Bosch fan, I take it?” Heat asked.

  “That’s actually a Mickey Haller. But yes,” Masters said as she hobbled in behind Heat. The woman pointed to an antique chair whose wooden arms appeared to have been hand-carved long ago. “Take a seat, please. Can I get you anything to drink? I know you’re on duty, but…water? Juice?”

  Heat declined, then watched as Masters slowly lowered herself back onto the couch, going through an elaborate routine that she had clearly practiced more than once. It ended with Masters contorted into a half seated, half lying position with the cane propped next to her.

  “How are you feeling?” Heat asked.

  “Some days are better than others,” Masters said. “My advice to you is if you’re going to get shot, don’t. But if you have a choice, try not to get shot in the back. You don’t realize how much you use your back for everything until it stops working so well. Though they tell me I’m lucky. Had the bullet been two inches over I would have probably been paralyzed. Or dead.”

  Masters let that somber thought linger for a moment. “Anyhow, I doubt the NYPD is coming here for a medical update. What’s this about Tam? Is she okay?”

  Heat looked around the room. There was no television, no sign of a device with Internet connectivity. There were only old newspapers stacked a safe distance away from the fireplace—meaning Joanna Masters likely got her news the same way the brownstone’s original inhabitants did.

  “I’m sorry, Joanna,” Heat said. “Tam has been murdered.”

  As Heat told Masters about the video, the woman gasped several times. Heat could sense a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction from the former Red Cross volunteer, who had clearly envisioned herself meeting a similar end more than once.

  “Those…those animals,” she said when Heat was through. “It’s like life means nothing to them.”

  “I guess you’ve experienced that firsthand.”

  “You can only imagine,” Masters said.

  “Do you mind talking about what happened to you over there?”

  “No, I…I guess not.”

  “You were there as a Red Cross volunteer, is that right?”

  “Yes. I know to a lot my friends around here that makes me very strange. I’ve had a…a very comfortable life, Detective Heat. I don’t say that to brag, I just…Well, it’s the truth. It’s not like I did anything to deserve being born into a wealthy family. And I’m certainly not complaining. It’s just that, I don’t know, I reached a point in my life where going to the latest benefit to help the next art museum, hospital, or pet shelter just didn’t feel like enough. I needed…more of a sense of purpose than that.”

  “I understand,” Heat said.

  “I had been a donor to the Red Cross since, gosh, I can’t even remember. My father had been on the board there, so I was on the board there. And I kept seeing these images their volunteers brought back of these people in Syria, who…who…”

  “Had nothing?”

  “No, that’s just it,” Masters said, propping herself up in her sickbed. “They actually weren’t the prototype of the bedraggled, wretched, rag-wearing refugee, where you couldn’t really see yourself in them. They were people who had been doctors and lawyers and shopkeepers. Just…ordinary people, the kind of people we pass every day on the streets of New York. Except, through absolutely no fault of their own, this civil war had turned their lives upside down and inside out. And here I was, living in my brownstone, scooting out to my cottage in the Hamptons like all my friends, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt like I had been charged by this knowledge and I had to do more than write checks.

  “So I signed up. All my society friends thought I was suffering from some kind of midlife crisis. It was like, ‘Uh-oh, here comes Joanna’s big crusade.’ Even the people at the Red Cross tried to talk me out of it. But I was willing to pay my own way, and they really did need the help. So off I went.”

  Masters smiled and cocked her head. “This is usually the part where people start looking at me like what I really needed was a good shrink. Why aren’t you, Detective Heat?”

  “Because I understand that life sometimes presents you with situations where you feel you have no choice but to react in a certain way,” Heat said. “Because if you don’t, it turns out you’re not the person you thought you were.”

  “Yes…Yes, I suppose that’s it. Would you mind if I used that explanation with my friends?”

  “Be my guest,” Heat said.

  Masters cleared her throat. “Anyway, I’ll skip the travelogue part, because I sense that’s not what you’re interested in. Suffice it to say, I had been in the country for ab
out a month, and was just outside a city called Deir ez-Zor. It’s in the eastern part of the country and it sits along two fairly major roads—M-20 and Route 4—which made it a pass-through point for a lot of refugees. It’s also probably the largest city close to the Iraq border, so it’s been a battleground for several years now.

  “ISIS was shooting at anything that tried to come into the city’s airport. They weren’t even allowing humanitarian aid to be flown in. Meanwhile, they literally had parts of the city under siege, not letting anything in or out. I think it was part of their strategy to starve civilians into submission. I was part of a truck convoy that was trying to break through with food, water, and medicine. We were in one of the northern suburbs when a detachment of ISIS fighters came upon us.”

  Masters’s gaze was fixed on some indeterminable point in the distance. Heat could tell a part of her was no longer in a New York brownstone, but, rather, had been transported half a world away.

  “The sad thing was, we were actually trying to give them some food,” she continued. “They had been separated from their supply line and they were clearly hungry and we…Well, maybe it was partly a bribe for them to leave us alone, but there was a real humanitarian impulse there, too.

  “I couldn’t tell you what exactly was said. Our convoy leader was trying to convince them we were there as peaceful aid workers, working under the auspices of the Geneva Convention. But, of course, the Geneva Convention is…well, it’s not even a joke to those people. It might as well have been negotiated by an alien species. These ISIS fighters are mostly young and illiterate. Half of them are fighting because they just don’t know any better or because someone has promised them sex or food or money. They only know what their imams and their leaders tell them.”

  Masters paused and took a drink of her wheatgrass.

  “Anyhow,” she said as she put the glass back down, “things broke down pretty quickly, and the next thing I knew they were shooting at us. We started running toward the trucks, but a bullet caught me in the back first. Thank God one of my fellow volunteers was this big burly Turkish guy or else I probably would have ended up like Tam, with a starring role in some awful video. He scooped me up with one arm like I was a rag doll, stuck me in the back of the truck, and we outran them. From there it’s been all hospitals and visits from Red Cross executives who are nervous they’ve lost a donor.”

  Heat smiled. Masters gave a polite chuckle.

  “That’s the short version,” Masters said. “I could give you the long version, but…well, not that I mind the company—as you can see, it’s just me here. But what does any of this have to do with Tam? Do you think they picked her because she wrote about me?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest,” Heat said. “That’s why I’m here. Had you been in touch with Tam recently?”

  “No. Not really. Not since the story. I mean, she called me the next day, to see if I liked it, but that was it, really.”

  “Was she planning on doing any kind of follow-up?”

  “I don’t…I don’t think so. Not that she told me. We were pretty much done as far as I was concerned. She told me she was going to give me my bullet back when she was through with it, but—”

  “Wait. Your bullet?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Masters said. “I guess that’s part of the long version. I eventually ended up in Istanbul. The bullet had lodged next to my spine. It was a pretty delicate surgery to get it out. When they were done, they gave it to me, like, I don’t know, a present or something. When I showed it to Tam she got very interested. She asked if she could borrow it. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ It felt kind of creepy to keep it around, to be honest. She said she was going to give it back. But, honestly, if she forgot, I wouldn’t have made an issue out of it.”

  “Is this the bullet?” Heat asked, pulling the evidence bag containing the deformed slug out of her half pocket and dangling it in front of Masters.

  “Yes, that’s it. Where did you get it?”

  “It was on her computer at work,” Heat said. “We thought maybe someone had sent it to her as a threat or something.”

  “No, that’s just my little old bullet, dug out of my little old back.”

  “But what was…What was Tam planning on doing with it? Was she working on some kind of story?” Heat asked, genuinely perplexed.

  When the NYPD removed a slug out of a victim—like the one recently plucked from Ochoa’s buttock—it was sent to ballistics for testing. But that was in an attempt to match it to the gun of the shooter. It’s not like there was some great mystery as to who the shooter was in this case. And, in any event, there was no recourse even if they did figure out which illiterate ISIS teenager fired the shot. The boy was probably dead now himself.

  “Search me,” Masters said.

  “Do you mind if I hang on to it for a while?” Heat asked.

  “Suit yourself. Believe me, I don’t need it.”

  Heat wasn’t sure if she did, either. But her every instinct told her this bullet and Tam Svejda’s death were two parts of one story. She just didn’t have all the connective tissue to put it together yet.

  Nikki Heat didn’t believe in the occult. She left that to Rook and his active imagination. But she almost felt like Tam was trying to reach out to her through that bullet, to whisper the one secret that would help Heat make sense of everything.

  She couldn’t quite hear what Tam was saying. Not yet. But as she departed Joanna Masters’s house, having pumped her dry of any further information and then refilled her glass of wheatgrass, Heat was determined to continue listening.

  The shouting was loud enough that Heat could hear it even before the elevator doors to the Twentieth Precinct detective bull pen slid open.

  “So you’re trying to say you weren’t aiming for me?” Ochoa was bellowing.

  The doors parted. For the second time that afternoon, Heat was looking at a middle-aged person whose locomotion required the aid of a cane. Miguel Ochoa was standing stiffly next to a chair that already had a pillow placed on it. He was, rather pointedly, not sitting down.

  “How could I have been aiming for you?” Raley yelled back. “I hit asphalt first! Did you miss that part of the report?”

  “You hear that, right? You hear him dragging out the s, don’t you?” Ochoa said to Rhymer, who seemed to be listening sympathetically. “He said ass-phalt. Is this fun for you, homes? Huh? You enjoying yourself?”

  Heat sidled up to Feller, who looked like all he needed was a beer in front of him to turn this into an outing at the comedy club.

  “Ballistics came back on the slug they pulled out of Ochoa’s caboose,” Feller said, then tilted his head toward Raley. “It seems this is another sad case of leprechaun on Mexican violence.”

  Raley turned toward Feller.

  “I did not shoot him. I shot the asph—”

  Raley saw Ochoa’s eyes going wide. “The pavement,” he corrected himself. “My bullet struck the ground first, then unfortunately and accidentally ricocheted into Ochoa.”

  “Accident, huh,” Ochoa said. “And this ‘accident’ just ‘accidentally’ happened on the eighteenth.”

  “What are you talking about?” Raley asked.

  “A day when I’m squad leader,” Ochoa said.

  “That is the most rid—”

  “When you were clearly seething with jealousy because I—properly, I might add—introduced myself as detective squad leader to Lana Kline. That, homes, is motive. And I think it’s pretty clear means and opportunity were not in question.”

  “Would you stop it, already? Did you miss the beginning of that ballistics report? It said the bullet skipped off the assss-phalt you assh—”

  “Okay,” Heat broke in. “So not that this isn’t charming, watching you two practice your act for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, but can I ask for a status update on our ISIS case?”

  As Raley and Ochoa continued staring each other down, Feller jumped in.

  “We got Jihad Johnny and Tal
iban Timmy in Interrogation One right now,” he said. “But so far they ain’t said anything.”

  “You detained them peacefully?” Heat asked.

  “If you consider getting called a motherfucker fifteen times ‘peaceful.’ Yeah. No incidents.”

  “And is ECT going through their apartment right now?”

  “Affirmative,” Feller said. “So far, all we can confirm is that the suspects are guilty of leaving their dishes in the sink. But our guys are going to turn the place inside out. I’m sure they’ll get something.”

  “What about you? You got anything new?” Raley asked.

  Heat told them about her dead end at Miksit’s office, but also about the bullet she and Rook found on Tam’s desk, its link to Joanna Masters, and its unclear significance.

  “So I’m just not making much traction so far on what Tam was doing and whether it had anything to do with her abduction,” Heat finished.

  “Well, I’m not sure I can shed a ton of light on that,” Raley said, ignoring Ochoa’s continued glares. “But I did have a chance to pull Tam’s financials. It’s all pretty ordinary up until Wednesday, when she got herself a plane ticket to Cleveland for the next day.”

  “Cleveland?” Heat said. “What would possibly take a New York–based metro reporter to Cleveland?”

  “Don’t know. She rented a car at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. The next charge is dinner at a restaurant called Jackalope Lakeside in Lorain, Ohio.”

  “Too bad Rook’s not here,” Feller interjected. “We’d learn all about the mythology of the great horned hare.”

  “You know, a mammal’s horns are actually made of the same substance as human hair,” Raley said.

  “Aaaaand it’s like he never left,” Feller said.

  “Anyhow, the next charge after that is the Motel 6 in Lorain. Then we’re on to breakfast the next morning at a place called Mutt and Jeff’s. Then…nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “The last charge was processed at 7:54 A.M. Friday morning.”