Deadly Heat

People talked about seeing red. Heat saw a blaze of white, the way an electric spark touched off the magnesium powder in an old-time photographer’s flash lamp. The anger and frustration that had been building up during the week since she met Yardley Bell exploded. Nikki’s first words could have been more inspired, but shouting “How dare you?” right in the woman’s face got her off to a pretty good start at releasing her caged fury. Hours later, Heat still could see Bell’s expression and enjoyed the fact that she had brought her own dose of shock and awe to the day.

  Rook and Roach must have feared Heat would hit her because they took hold of her shoulders and dragged her back a few feet from the agent, even as she continued to unload. It all came out: Bell’s smug intervention; forbidding Nikki to return and talk to Vaja when he was a legitimate person of interest; wasting critical time busting Algernon Barrett when the real suspect—“a freaking biochemist”—sat right there, untouched. “And then,” Nikki added, scolding her, “if that’s not enough, you not only spiked my plan for the raid—”

  “I told you,” Bell shouted back, “it was a tactical clusterfuck to walk in.”

  “Then what do you call driving in with all the cars committed so there’s no vehicle perimeter?”

  “A fucking car wouldn’t have done any good when he headed for the woods, Detective.”

  “And yours wasn’t much good when it came to capturing him alive, Agent.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “You recklessly caused the death of the one person who might have told us how to stop this terror plot. Vaja was twenty yards from heading into our roadblock. Why the hell didn’t you just let him go?”

  “Because I am not going to—and never will—leave anything to chance. He dealt the play. I brought him down.”

  “You certainly did. And now where are we?”

  “Easy to throw blame, huh? Especially when you start to believe your own press. You think you have the smarts to figure it all out, but you can’t, so you disrespect me. Heat, you need to remember what every good investigator knows: You cannot get the whole picture—ever. There’s always going to be something that surprises you. Something you never saw coming. Or believed possible. Better pray it doesn’t kill you.”

  Heat shrugged herself loose from her protectors and walked away to cool off.

  With their prime suspect too dead to interrogate, the investigation suffered a forced reboot into forensic mode. The best of the best from Homeland Security showed up in a caravan of unmarked white panel trucks. Callan shooed the Staties and locals out of the area, fearing they’d probably trample more evidence than they found. Heat cut her own detectives loose to head back to the Upper West Side and keep working the Rainbow case. Certainly the looming catastrophe of a mass bio attack had tacitly dwarfed the serial killer investigation, but it had not set it aside. Death goes on.

  “You don’t need to stay, either,” she told Rook.

  “You going to be all right?”

  “I already am. I just lost it. Past history,” she said. “Done.”

  Rook studied her as only he knew how, searching Nikki’s eyes with a tender, caring appraisal that made her feel more human just for his closeness. Satisfied enough with what he saw, he said, “Truth is, I can stay here and be told to wait in a car, or spend the evening in my own office pulling together research for a new article I’m going to pitch Monday morning.” He smoothed a lock off her forehead with his fingertips. “And take that as a vote of confidence, Detective Heat, that there will, indeed, be a Monday morning.”

  As he walked off, though, he couldn’t resist a parting Rook-shot. “That is, if you live upwind of New York. I hear Edmonton is lovely this time of year.”

  A troop of cyber and bioforensics technicians joined their Homeland Security counterparts who distributed themselves throughout the house and kennel. They performed basic searches for material evidence, plus fingerprints, computer assessment, bioagent and chemical sampling, and photo-documentation. There was even an expert to blow the safe embedded in the floor of the master bedroom closet.

  “By the way, safe’s empty,” Callan told Heat after the all clear. In the second bedroom, which Nikoladze had set up as a home office, he pointed to the overflowing wire basket under the shredder. “Motor on that thing is still warm. It appears the good doctor had a bit of a confetti party before we arrived.”

  “Vaja knew we were coming,” said Nikki.

  “He sure knew enough to hide in the kennel,” said Bell. She had been keeping her distance since their altercation, but professionals had a way of clearing air—or at least setting personal ugliness aside—in favor of a mission. “That could be because he spotted us, maybe caught a reflection of binoculars from the hill, you never know.”

  “And it is possible he was a compulsive shredder,” offered Callan.

  Heat said, “But put both together, and what do you think?”

  “I think we keep looking,” said Bell.

  The kennel disturbed Heat in a way that caught her by surprise. The Georgian shepherds all had been rounded up and taken to a local shelter for care and examination, so the long, vacant barracks with the pea green walls lit by harsh fluorescents gave off an eerie morgue vibe. It could have been Room B-23 at OCME, except it was above ground. There was only one cage, in the near corner. The dogs slept in a series of individual open pens that ran the length of the east wall; each had a waist-high enclosure that had been left open to give them freedom to roam.

  As Heat walked the length of the outbuilding with Callan and Bell, she had the morose sense that she was retracing the steps of Nicole Bernardin the way she had only theorized in the bull pen with her squad. On that night a month before, Nicole would have been alone, snooping for evidence of Tyler Wynn’s deadly plot. It cost the agent her life. At the far end, they reached a wall of supply shelves full of dog food, vitamins, and grooming supplies. Beside it sat a bulkhead door. It didn’t exist in the zoning blueprints they had acquired, and it looked like it led to a basement. “Sorry, sir… ladies,” said the man in the white biohazard coveralls and gas mask. “No entry without a moon suit.”

  “You guys love your drama,” said Callan. “This what you call an abundance of caution?”

  “Sir, this is what we call saving your life. Our crew down in the basement has encountered evidence of bioagents.”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Heat, “but I’m all for the moon suit.”

  A few minutes later, after donning protective suits, including gas masks attached to metal air tanks on backpacks, they descended the aluminum steps to the basement in which Dr. Vaja Nikoladze, internationally acclaimed biochemist, Soviet defector, and peace activist, had built his laboratory to culture biological agents for terror. Nikki thought, This is a James Bond villain’s lair with bad lighting.

  In size, it equaled the footprint of the building above and housed a fully stocked scientific lab, complete with test tubes and beakers, a centrifuge, and thermo-glass isolation chambers with safety glove sets built into the front panels. Four high-tech refrigeration units had labels stuck to the doors, but instead of the Little League pictures or dental appointment reminders found on most reefer doors, the labels were in Latin—some of the names Heat recognized from the CDC research she’d been reading: Bacillus anthracis; Vibrio cholerae; Ricinus communis; Filoviridae Ebola; Filoviridae Marburg; Variola major. Like sentries along a countertop stood numerous hermetically sealed, cylindrical stainless steel containers, each slapped with a bright orange sticker displaying the universal symbol for biohazard. “Love the stickers,” said Bell, her voice muffled by the mask. “As if he didn’t know what he was handling.”

  “The question remains,” said Nikki. “Who was he handling it for? We still need to find them.”

  Heat and the DHS agents left the basement to the technicians and their sampling equipment, ascending the steps burdened by the worst piece of news: There was a gap in the row of sealed canisters, and the space was marked with a circular ring l
eft on the counter. It appeared that one of the twenty-gallon containers had been removed and was unaccounted for.

  Topside, a forensic specialist on his knees inside the cage called them over. She indicated the drain in the floor and said, “This cage has been hosed and scoured with a laboratory grade solvent. It’s going to make DNA sampling a bear.” Then she rose and beckoned them to a spot on the inside cage wall where she held up an instrument that appeared to be an oversized cell phone. The plasma screen filled with an extreme close-up of the grating with a video-enhanced quality. “See what I’m picking up here?”

  “That blood?”

  “It is. And, unless one of those dogs is this tall, it’s probably human. I’ll swab and test.”

  “Nicole Bernardin would have been the right height,” said Heat. “And she had a stab wound that would have been in her back about there.”

  “I could see someone backing into that and leaving a smear,” said the forensic tech. “I’m also picking up fibers. Do you have the clothing from your victim?”

  “I do.”

  “Get it to me. I’ll be able to give you an answer in the morning.”

  In her dream state, Nikki assumed that the tempo of the dew plink on her windshield had picked up until she opened her eyes to find one of the DHS agents softly rapping his knuckle on her side window. “Sorry, Detective, I tried not to startle you,” he said when she got out and stretched an unappeasable back cramp. “We finally found his cell phone.”

  The evidence bag with the phone inside it sat on the galley table between Agents Callan and Bell in the RV command center. After walking more than four hours of grids in the woods, the flashlight team Heat had squinted at in her doze had located it not far from Nikoladze’s ATV escape path. “Mind if I see it?” asked Heat.

  Yardley Bell pinched a corner of the plastic bag and handed it over to Nikki. While Heat unsealed the pouch, Bell said, “Oh, we ran a Customs check on the nutty professor. Vaja Nikoladze made three trips to Russia this year.”

  “Probably accessed the smallpox culture there somehow and smuggled it out to grow here.” Nikki held up the phone. “Anybody got a stylus? I don’t want to touch the screen.” The communications geek at the console whipped his out with fast-draw speed and seemed quite pleased with himself. Holding the phone in her gloved hand, Heat opened the window for Recents.

  “We’re way ahead of you,” said Bell. “Vaja got a call about forty-five minutes before the raid. We’re running the number now.”

  Nikki looked at it and slipped the phone back into the bag. “You don’t need to. I know this number. It’s a burner. The same one somebody used to call Salena Kaye at the rent-a-car.” Heat zip-sealed the evidence bag then gave voice to what she had suspected ever since Tyler Wynn’s bomb went off. “Someone is tipping off our perps.”

  SIXTEEN

  Rook surprised Nikki in the Homicide Squad Room with a change of clothes when she rolled in just before six. “I fantasized about you in these butt-cupping jeans and your brown leather jacket to fight crime today,” said Rook. “I couldn’t find your Wonder Woman bulletproof bracelets at my place, though, so if you encounter any automatic weapons fire, you’re going to have to rely on your lightning reflexes.”

  “Thanks, Rook, that’s sweet.”

  “I just figured after a night in the field you’d want to tidy up. Oh, I also brought you a latte. Just how you like it. Sugar-free, two pumps of strychnine.”

  After she changed, Nikki filled him in on the discoveries up in Hastings-on-Hudson, ending with the phone tip-off. Even though they had the bull pen to themselves, he lowered his voice. “So that pretty much sucks. How do you think the information is getting out to all our suspects?”

  “Not so much a how, Rook, as a who.” Then, she said, “I was thinking on my drive down. Would I be too pushy to ask, where the hell is Puzzle Man?”

  “Probably still working it.”

  “Probably?”

  “Right. I’ll see if I can encourage him.”

  Nikki met with each detective over the next few hours to get an update on case progress. It felt like anything but. Salena Kaye had gone underground and Rainbow had gone strangely silent. “At least he hasn’t killed anyone else,” said Detective Malcolm.

  “Considering Heat’s next, I think we can call this a win, so far,” added Reynolds.

  Rook caught her eye and they met up in the kitchen. “Puzzle Man gave me the old ‘I was just about to call you’ BS. No matter. He says he may be close to something.”

  “Really…” Nikki had been disappointed enough recently that her skepticism overshadowed her optimism. “Any hints?”

  “No spoilers. And that’s a quote. But I twisted his arm, and he says he can meet us tonight. Café Gretchen at seven-thirty.”

  “Great.”

  “Although for him that could be nine. The one thing Puzzle Man can’t seem to figure out is how to read a clock.”

  “You leave me brimming with confidence,” she said, and left him to microwave his container of instant oatmeal.

  On her return to the bull pen Heat hesitated in the doorway, taken aback to find the visitor sitting beside her desk. “Agent Bell?”

  “Good morning. Although, it sort of feels like the days and nights have melded, doesn’t it?” Her smile seemed genuine enough, but Nikki approached Yardley Bell with healthy caution.

  “Kinda.” Heat allowed a neutral smile; no harm being civil to see where this was going. “What’s up?”

  “Brought you a peace offering.” She indicated the coat rack behind Nikki, where the blazer she had left for testing at DHS hung on a hanger. “And relax, our lab has certified it as non-lethal.”

  “Thank you.”

  “As is that piece of orange string you sent over. It came back negative for smallpox.” Which left Heat still wondering where she could have picked it up. “I also have some news for you. Is this a good place?”

  Heat surveyed her bull pen full of cops working phones and computers, and sat in her task chair. “Works for me.”

  “First, forensics. We not only put our lab on priority turnaround, we have the capability of starting some of this process in the vans, on-scene and in-transit.” Agent Bell didn’t take out a file, a pad, or even an iPad. She did, however, elevate her gaze slightly above Nikki’s hairline occasionally, as if reading bullet points in the air. “Fingerprints. In addition to Nikoladze’s, we scored several lifts from Tyler Wynn down in the lab. Also one from Agent Bernardin.” A sense of tainted relief enveloped Nikki. Putting the three people together in that basement tied the elements, albeit in disquieting affirmation. Bell moved on to her next bullet. “The cage. More prints there. Bernardin. Salena Kaye. That crooked cop.”

  “Carter Damon?”

  “Yes. And Petar Matic. These IDs came quickly since they’re all in the database.” Out of habit, Heat made notes. Bell waited for her to catch up. “That dried blood on the cage does match type for Nicole Bernardin. We can’t get an exact match for her yet due to the sabotage of her toxicity lab work at OCME. But there’s also a fiber match to her clothing, so we’ll be able to run a DNA on that just to close all the loops.” She paused and looked up. “Oh. We also have a positive match for the lab solvent that was used to disinfect Bernardin’s skin.”

  Nikki reflected on the cage, the drain in the floor, and Nicole Bernardin’s awful fate after discovery—caged, killed, and then baptized in a cleanser by Satan’s own. Heat said, “So we have confirmed she was murdered there. That’s good to know. Unfortunately that doesn’t move us forward with new info.”

  “This does. We got the same reading from her clothes as your blazer. Smallpox. Consider yourself up to the moment on the forensics.”

  “Good. And I do appreciate this new sense of cooperation.”

  Agent Bell shrugged. “You and I got off on the wrong foot from day one. Last night’s little… confrontation… got me thinking about that. This is me just wanting to see if we can stay close and
avoid any more conflict. Especially considering my last piece of intel.” She made a perimeter check and lowered her voice. “One of our deep-cover informants from one of the jihadist terror cells in New Jersey says he was contacted earlier this week by Salena Kaye.”

  “So you’re calling this a Muslim extremist terror plan?”

  “Not necessarily. He confirms from his other undercover sources that Ms. Kaye has been making the rounds of numerous affiliations. She’s basically shopping for a martyr she can recruit to deliver the punch.”

  “Has she found anyone?”

  “Don’t know. We only know one thing. We know it’s happening Saturday.”

  Nikki felt a chilliness blow through her at the narrowing of the strike window. What had been two or three days to stop this calamity had been given a haircut to two. Heat and Bell held eye contact, one absorbing the alarming implications the other had already processed.

  “Excuse me, ladies.” Captain Irons appeared, standing over them. “Heat? My office?”

  Irons closed the door and said, “Do you know what it’s like to sit and watch everything going on around you and not be part of it?” Her answer, especially in that moment, would not have been terribly empathic, so Heat didn’t reply. She just waited for Wally to get to his point, so she could get back to work. “I sit here sometimes and I look out there and… Well, it’s hard to sit on the sidelines. Anyhoo, I was thinking, maybe there was something you could give me to help you with.”

  She thought a few seconds. “Cat burglars. Whoever crept into my apartment the other night knew how to get in and out without a trace.”

  “You want me to run cat burglars through the database?”

  “Yes. See who’s out of prison, any recent activities, especially around the areas the victims lived or were found.” When she said it, his face lit up. Heat would have felt better about this bolstering if he weren’t her precinct commander.

  “On it,” he said as she left.

  When Heat returned, she didn’t find Yardley Bell at her desk anymore. But she saw the agent across the bull pen, standing in front of her Tyler Wynn–Salena Kaye Murder Board, studying it. Rook came up behind Nikki wrapped in a smog of artificial cinnamon, stirring his oatmeal. “Hey, look who’s here.” Then his brow creased. “You two aren’t going to have a duel or anything, I hope.”