Heat Rises

  After the heat of their romance ratcheted up and rose to even greater intensity, something else happened over time and togetherness. It deepened into what began to feel to Nikki like a Real Deal that was headed somewhere. But where it ended up heading was off a cliff into an abyss where it was suspended midair.

  He had been gone four weeks now. A month of Rook disappearing on his investigation of international arms smuggling for a First Press exposé. A month off the grid while he bounced around mountain villages of Eastern Europe, African seaports, airstrips in Mexico, and God knows where else. A month to let Nikki wonder where the hell they were with each other.

  Rook’s communications sucked and that didn’t help. He told her he would be going deep undercover and to expect some radio silence, but come on. Going all this time in isolation without so much as a phone call was chewing at her; wondering if he was alive, rotting in some warlord’s jail . . . or what? Could he really be out of communication this long, or had he simply not made a good enough attempt? Nikki denied it at first, but after days and nights of trying not to think the thought, she now struggled with the notion that perhaps the charm of Jameson Rook, the rogue globetrotter, was wearing thin. Sure, she respected his career as a two-time Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist, and knew intellectually what came along with all that, but the way he blew out of Dodge, the way he blew out of her life, so easily had her questioning not just where they stood as a couple but where he stood with her anymore.

  Nikki looked at her own watch and wondered what time it was where Jameson Rook was. Then she looked at its calendar. Rook had said he would be back in five days. The question for Nikki was, by then where would they be?

  Heat mulled resources and decided it would be more productive for her to wait for the manager of the underground sex club to arrive and unlock the video closet. That way she could free up her own pair of detectives to snag some uniformed officers and canvass the neighborhood on foot. Since the taxi team had volunteered to hit the diners, all-night workers, and delivery guys, she charged Raley and Ochoa (collectively and always affectionately known as “Roach”) to concentrate on finding an ID or a wallet. “You should do the usual scans. Trash cans, Dumpsters, subway grates, under apartment stoops, or anyplace else that’s a handy place for a dump and run. Not a lot of doorman buildings in this neighborhood, but if you see one, ask. Oh, and check out the Phoenix House up the block. Maybe some of our friends in recovery were up and heard or saw something.”

  Roach’s cell phones chimed about two seconds apart. Heat held up her own mobile and said, “That’s a head shot I just e-mailed you of our vic. If you get a chance, flash it, you never know.”

  “Right,” said Ochoa. “Who doesn’t love to have a picture of a choking victim shoved in their face before breakfast?”

  As they started up the stairs to street level, she called after them, “And make note of any surveillance cams you see with a street view. Banks, jewelry stores, you know the drill. We can drop in and have them do a playback when they open for business later this morning.”

  Detective Heat had to shake off a foul mood after dealing with the manager of Pleasure Bound. Nikki doubted the woman had been awakened by Raley. On the contrary, Roxanne Paltz vibed having been up all night, heavily and severely made up and arriving in a tight vinyl outfit that creaked whenever she moved on the chair in her office. Her granny glasses had blue lenses matching the tips of her spiky, bleach-damaged hair, which gave off the unmistakable scent of cannabis. When Nikki told her the real reason they were there, the dead man in her torture chamber, she lost color and reeled. Heat showed her the picture on her cell phone, and the woman nearly got sick. She sat down unsteadily and drank a sip of the water Nikki gave her from the cooler, but after she recovered, said she’d never seen the guy.

  When Nikki asked if she could have a look at the surveillance video, it got contentious, and Roxanne Paltz was suddenly all about constitutional rights. Speaking with the authority of someone who had been hassled for running a sex trade business, she cited just cause, unlawful search, client confidentiality, and freedom of expression. Her lawyer was on speed dial, and even though it wasn’t even six in the morning, she called and woke him up, Nikki having to deal with her raccoon mascara glower while she parroted back his certainty that no cabinets could be unlocked or video screened without a judge’s warrant.

  “I’m just asking for a little cooperation,” said Nikki.

  Roxanne sat there listening to the attorney on her phone, nodding and nodding, vinyl creaking with each head bob. And then she hung up. “He says to go fuck yourself.”

  Nikki Heat paused and gave a slight smile. “Judging from some of the equipment you’ve got here, this would probably be the one place I could actually do that.”

  The detective knew she would get the search warrant and had just ended her call downtown to get the wheels turning on one when her phone vibrated in her hand. It was Raley. “Come topside, I think we got something.”

  She arrived back up on the sidewalk expecting sun, but it was still dark. Nikki had lost a sense of time and place down there, and she reflected that that was probably the whole idea.

  Detectives Raley, Ochoa, Van Meter, and Feller stood in a semicircle under the green canvas canopy of the corner grocery across the street. Crossing 74th to meet them, Nikki had to pause so she didn’t get run over by a delivery guy on a fat-tired bike. She watched his trailing breath as he passed, with somebody’s order-in breakfast bouncing in the wire basket, and figured maybe she didn’t have the hardest job in the city. “Whatcha got?” she said as she stepped over to the crew.

  “Found some clothes and a shoe wedged in the space between the two buildings here,” said Ochoa, training the beam of his Streamlight Stinger in the wall gap separating the grocery and the nail spa next door. Raley held up a pair of dark trousers and a black tasseled loafer for Heat and then slipped them into a brown paper evidence bag. “Spaces like this? Classic place to stash,” said Ochoa. “Learned that in Narco.”

  “Give me the light, Crime Dog, think there’s more here.” Raley took the mini from his partner and squatted in front of the gap. A few seconds later he pulled out the mate to the other loafer then said, “Well, what do you know?”

  “What?” Ochoa asked. “Don’t be a dick, what is it?”

  “Hang on a sec. If you weren’t packing on the weight, you could have done this instead of me.” Raley twisted his shoulder to get a better angle for his reach into the narrow opening. “Here we go. Another collar.”

  Nikki expected to see something in a leather gimp rig with sharp studs and stainless steel D-rings, but when Raley finally stood and held it up in his gloved hand, it wasn’t that kind of collar at all. It was a priest’s collar.

  In 2005 New York City funded eleven million dollars to modernize the NYPD’s high-tech capability by building the Real Time Crime Center, a computer operations hub that, among numerous capabilities, provides crime reports and police data to officers in the field with startling immediacy. That is why in a city of eight and a half million people it only took Detective Heat less than three minutes to get a likely ID on the victim in the torture dungeon. The RTCC accessed records and spit out a missing persons report filed the night before by a parish rectory housekeeper for a Father Gerald Graf.

  Nikki assigned Roach to stay and continue their canvass while she made the drive uptown to interview the woman who filed the MPR. Detectives Feller and Van Meter were off their shift, but Dutch offered to help Roach continue knocking on doors. Feller appeared at her car window and said if Heat didn’t mind the company, he’d be happy to ride shotgun with her. She hesitated, figuring this was about Feller engineering his opportunity to ask her to catch a drink or dinner later. But a veteran detective was reaching out to help with a case on his own time, and she couldn’t say no to that. If he tried to bend it into a date offer, she’d simply deal with it.

  Our Lady of the Innocents was on the northern border of the precinc
t, mid-block on 85th between West End Avenue and Riverside. At this early side of the morning rush hour, a five-minute drive, if that. But as soon as Heat pulled onto Broadway, they caught a red in front of the Beacon Theater.

  “Glad to finally have some time alone with you,” said Feller while they waited.

  “For sure,” said Nikki, who then hurried to steer the topic away. “Appreciate the assist, Randy. Can always use another pair of eyes and ears.”

  “Gives me a chance to ask you something without the whole world around.”

  She looked up at the light and considered breaking out the gumball. “. . . Yeah?”

  “Any idea how you did on your exam for lieutenant?” he asked. Not the question she expected. Nikki turned to look at him. “Green,” he said and she drove on.

  “I don’t know, seemed like I did all right. Hard to know for sure,” she said. “Still waiting for the results to be posted.” When the department’s civil service test was offered recently, Heat had taken it, not so much out of a burning desire for the promotion, but because she wasn’t sure when it would be given again. Budget cuts from the economic crisis had hit New York as much as any other municipality, and one response the year before had been to cut back on raises by postponing the scheduled rank advancement tests.

  Detective Feller cleared his throat. “What if I told you I hear you aced it?” She gave him a side glance and then concentrated on the driver of the bread delivery truck who had stopped to double-park in her lane without flashers. While she hit her blinker and waited for the passing lane to clear, he went on. “I know this to be a fact.”

  “How?”

  “From some inside sources. Downtown.” He reached for the dashboard. “Mind if I back off the temp? Starting to bake in here.”

  “Help yourself.”

  “I try to keep myself connected.” He turned down the knob one click, then decided on one more before he settled back in his seat again. “Not planning on riding in back of that cab forever, ya hear what I’m saying?”

  “Sure, sure.” Nikki made her swing around the bread truck. “I, um, appreciate the info.”

  “So when you get by your orals and all the other hoops they make you jump through—like teach you the secret handshake, or whatever—do me a fave? Don’t forget your friends on your way up.”

  Whoomph, there it is, thought Nikki. She felt a little embarrassed. All this time thinking Feller wanted to date her when maybe what he really wanted was to network her. She replayed her mental picture of him at the cop bar clowning in his ass gasket lobster bib and wondered if the jester in him was all in fun, or if he was really just a skilled glad-hander. The more he talked, the more that picture emerged.

  “When you get your gold bar, it’s going to be a piece of good news in your precinct for a change. And you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do,” she said. They hit another red at 79th, and unfortunately this was a long one.

  “Not sure, that’s a laugh,” he said. “I mean Captain Montrose.”

  Nikki knew full well what he meant. Her skipper, her mentor, Captain Montrose, was under increasing pressure from One Police Plaza over his performance as commander of the Twentieth Precinct. Whether it was the bad economy, increased unemployment, or a reset to the dark days of the pre-Giuliani disorder, crime statistics were edging up throughout all five boroughs. And worse, they were spiking in election season. Gravity rules, so in response, the shit roll was all downhill to the precinct commanders. But Heat could see her captain was taking an extra pounding. Montrose had been singled out, called down separately for extra meetings and ass chewings, spending as much time at HQ as he did in his office. His personality darkened under the pressure, and he had grown atypically remote—no, more than remote, secretive. It made Nikki wonder whether something else was going on with him beyond precinct perf stats. Now what bothered Heat was that her boss’s private humiliation was Out There as department gossip. If Feller knew about it, others did, too. Loyalty made her deflect it, back up her boss.

  “Listen, Randy, who isn’t getting squeezed these days? I hear those weekly CompStat meetings at 1PP are brutal for all the skips, not just mine.”

  “Seriously,” he said with a nod. “They should put a drain in the floor to let the blood run out. Green.”

  “Jeez, it just turned.” Nikki pressed the accelerator.

  “Sorry. Drives Dutch crazy, too. I tell ya, I’ve got to get my ass out of that cab.” He powered down his window and spat. When he closed it again, he said, “This isn’t just about the performance figs. I have a bud in Internal Affairs. Your man is on their radar.”

  “Bull.”

  “No bull.”

  “For what?”

  He made an exaggerated shrug. “It’s IA, what do you think?”

  “No. I don’t buy it,” she said.

  “Then don’t. Maybe he is clean, but I’m telling you he’s got his neck on the stump and they’re sharpening the ax.”

  “Not maybe. Montrose is clean.” She made a left onto 85th. A block and a half ahead, she could see a cross on the church roof. In the distance, across the Hudson, the apartments and cliffs were pinking from the rising sun. Nikki switched off her headlights as she crossed West End Avenue.

  “Who knows?” said Feller. “You get rank, maybe you’ll be in position to take over the precinct if he goes down.”

  “He is not going down. Montrose is under pressure, but he’s straight as they come.”

  “If you say.”

  “I say. He’s unassailable.”

  As Nikki got out in front of the rectory, she wished she had made the drive alone. No, what she wished was that Feller had just asked her for drinks, or bowling, or for sex. Any one of those, she would rather have dealt with.

  She reached for the bell, but before she could press it, she saw a small head through the stained glass window in the door and it opened, revealing a minute woman in her late sixties.

  Nikki referred to her notes from the RTCC message. “Good morning, are you Lydia Borelli?”

  “Yes, and you’re with the police, I can tell.”

  After they showed ID and introduced themselves, Nikki said, “And it was you who called about Father Graf?”

  “Oh, I’ve been worried sick. Come in, please.” The housekeeper’s lips were quaking and her hands fluttered nervously. She missed the doorknob on her first attempt to pull the door closed. “Did you find him? Is he all right?”

  “Mrs. Borelli, do you have a recent photo I could look at?”

  “Of Father? Well, I’m sure somewhere . . . I know.”

  She led them over thick rugs that muted their footfalls through the living room and into the pastor’s adjoining study. On the shelves of the built-in above the desk several photos in glass frames were perched between books and knickknacks. The housekeeper took one down, swiping her finger along the top of the frame to dust it before she handed it over. “This is from last summer.”

  Heat and Detective Feller stood beside each other to examine it. The shot was taken at some sort of protest rally and showed a priest and three Hispanic protesters, with arms linked, leading a march behind a banner. Father Graf’s face, frozen in mid-recitation of a chant, was definitely the same as the one on the corpse at Pleasure Bound.

  The housekeeper took the news stoically, blessing herself with the sign of the cross and then lowering her head in silent prayer. When she was done, blood vessels showed through her temples and tears streamed down her cheeks. There were tissues on the end table near the couch. Nikki offered her the box and she took some.

  “How did it happen?” she asked, staring down at the tissues in her hands.

  Fragile as the woman appeared, Heat thought better of giving her the details at that moment about the priest’s death in a BDSM torture and humiliation dungeon. “We’re still investigating that.”

  Then she looked up. “Did he suffer?”

  Detective Feller squinted at Nikki and turned away to hide
his face, suddenly making himself busy replacing the photo on the shelf.

  “We’ll have more details after the coroner’s report,” answered Nikki, hoping her dodge was artful enough to be bought. “We know this is a loss for you, but in a while, not just now, we’re going to need to ask you a few questions to help us.”

  “Certainly, anything you need.”

  “What would be helpful now, Mrs. Borelli, is if we could look through the rectory. You know, search through his papers, his bedroom.”

  “His closet,” said Feller.

  Nikki moved forward. “We want to look for anything that would help us find out who did this.”

  The housekeeper gave her a puzzled look. “Again?”

  “I said, we’d like to search the—”

  “I heard what you said. I mean, you need to search again?”

  Heat leaned closer to the woman. “Are you saying someone searched here already?”

  “Yes. Last night, another policeman. He said he was following up on my missing person report.”

  “Oh, of course, sometimes we cross signals,” said Nikki. That could well be the case, but her uneasiness was growing. She caught a look from Feller that said his antenna was up, too. “May I ask who this policeman was?”

  “I forgot his name. He said it, but I was so upset. Senior moment.” She chuckled and then stifled a sob. “He did show me a badge like yours, so I let him roam free. I watched television while he looked around.”

  “Well, I’m sure he filed a report.” Nikki flipped open her spiral reporter’s notebook. “Maybe I could cut through some red tape if you described him.”

  “Sure. Tall. Black, or do I say Afro-American these days? Very pleasant, had a kind face. Bald. Oh, and a little birthmark or mole or something right here.” She tapped her cheek.

  Heat stopped writing and capped her stick pen. She had all she needed. The housekeeper had just described Captain Montrose.