Frozen Heat (2012)

  The three of them took seats on red leather bar stools in the empty pub, and Nikki said, “Actually, I do have some serious business to discuss. I’m investigating my mother’s murder, and since you knew her so long, maybe you can help provide some information.”

  “Of course. Now I feel even worse for blathering on. Whatever I can do.” Then his eyes widened. “I’m not a suspect, am I? Because that would pretty much suck, especially considering how I felt about her. I mean, Cynthia was wonderful.”

  She didn’t tell him whether he was a suspect or not because she hadn’t decided. Instead, Nikki moved forward with her questions. She’d prepped carefully, knowing an interview like this would be tricky because she faced the challenge of not revealing that her mother had been a spy. So Heat decided to proceed as she would with any other interrogation of an eyewitness or person of interest and see what shook out: nervous behavior, inconsistencies, lies, or even new clues. “Think back, if you can, to the month leading up to her killing,” she began. “November of ‘99. Did you see any changes in my mom’s behavior?”

  He thought it over and said, “No, not that I recall.”

  “Did she confide any worries? Seem agitated? Mention anybody who was bothering her, threatening her?”

  “No.”

  “Or say that she felt like she was being followed?”

  He thought and wagged his head. “Mm, nothing of that sort, either.”

  And then Heat tried to ascertain if her mother had been snooping his home. “During that last month she worked for you, did you or your wife ever get a feeling that things in your house were disturbed?”

  His brow was puzzled. “Disturbed in what way?”

  “Any way. Items in disarray. Items out of place. Items missing.”

  He shifted on his bar stool. “I’m trying to makes sense of this, Detective.”

  “You don’t have to, just think back. Did you ever come into a room and find something was moved? Or gone?”

  “Why would that be? You asked me if she was agitated. Are saying your mother had developed some mental problem and gone klepto?”

  “I’m not saying that. I’m just asking if things were disturbed. Do you need to think about it?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Let me ask about other people who may have been in your home back then.”

  “You do realize that was ten years ago plus.”

  “I do. So I’m not talking about plumbers or deliverymen. Houseguests. Did you have anyone staying with you?”

  “Hello. You think somebody we knew might have killed her?”

  “Mr. Maggs, it would be helpful for you not to keep guessing what I’m trying to learn and just focus on the question.”

  “Brilliant. Carry on.”

  “I just want to know if you had any houseguests. Overnight, weekends?” Heat had circled a notation in Joe Flynn’s surveillance log that a man, about thirty, had been at the Maggs residence that week just before the PI got pulled from his stakeout by her dad. “Anyone stay in your apartment with you while my mom was there giving lessons?”

  He shook his head slowly as he thought. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Rook said, “That was right around Thanksgiving. No friends or relatives came to stay with you the week before Thanksgiving?”

  “Of course, that is not one of our traditional UK holidays, so let me give it a fair bit.” He made a steeple of his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Well, now that I think it over, it comes to me that a college mate of mine did arrive and stayed with us that week. Your mentioning Thanksgiving jogs my memory because the kids were going to be off school. We were planning to leave that weekend for London and he was going to mind our flat while we were chocks away.” Maggs recognized the implications and grew unsettled. “But if you’re thinking he had anything to do with it, no. I couldn’t believe that, not him.”

  She turned her spiral to a fresh page. “May I have the name of this friend?” Carey closed his eyes slowly and his face went slack. “Mr. Maggs, I am going to ask you again to give me the name.”

  In a voice that had gone strangely toneless, he said, “Ari. Ari Weiss.” Then he opened his eyes. He looked as if the admission had hollowed something out of him.

  Nikki spoke quietly, but persistently. “Can you tell me how I could get in touch with Ari Weiss?”

  “You can’t,” he said.

  “I have to.”

  “But you can’t. Ari Weiss is dead.”

  “Confirmed,” said Rook, hunched toward the screen at his desk back in the precinct. Heat crossed over to him as he referred to it. “Obituary for Ari Weiss, MD, says the graduate of Yale School of Medicine and Rhodes Scholar—which is probably how he met up with Carey Maggs, up at Oxford—died of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. It says here, that is a malaria-like parasitic disorder which, like Lyme disease, is usually tick-borne, although it can come from transfusion, blah, blah.”

  “Rook, a man’s dead, and all you can say is, ‘blah blah’?”

  “Nothing against him. It’s just I’m one of those people who hears about rare diseases delivered by ticks and I start scratching and checking my temperature every five minutes.”

  “You’re a prize package, Rook. Lucky me.” She hitched a thumb at the obit on his screen. “Meanwhile, a potential lead hits another dead end. When did he pass?”

  “2000.” Rook closed the webpage. “That eliminates him as a suspect for Nicole Bernardin’s murder, anyway.”

  Nikki tried to stay upbeat in the face of yet another lead coming to an apparent dead end. She was making a mental note to do some of her own research later on Ari Weiss, when Roach startled her.

  “Detective Heat?” Nikki turned to see the partners standing before her, looking grim.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “We’d better show you,” said Ochoa.

  As she and Rook followed Roach across the bull pen, Raley said, “I scored this a few minutes ago, but I waited for Sharon Hinesburg to clear out for her two-hour lunch.” He sat at his desk and keyed some strokes on his computer keyboard.

  Ochoa said, “It’s the statement for November 1999 on your mother’s separate account at New Amsterdam Bank and Trust.” The monitor filled with a financial PDF. Raley rolled his chair back so Nikki could lean in to read it.

  Rook bent over beside her to look and let out a low moan. Heat turned away, her face drained of color.

  As if to confirm the reality she feared, Detective Raley said in a hushed voice, “According to this, your mom received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit the day before she was killed.”

  “Detective, do you have some idea what this means?” asked Ochoa.

  Nikki didn’t reply. Because she would have had to say that it meant it looked like her mother had sold out her country.

  Her head became light. Heat turned back to see the document again, hoping she had been mistaken, but the image clouded before her eyes. Small trembles made her hands start to shake, and when she crossed her arms on her chest to hide them her whole body began quaking from the inside, radiating out to her joints. As her legs grew weak, she heard Rook’s voice, sounding like it came from the end of a tunnel, asking if she was all right. Nikki turned away to cross to her desk but changed her mind when she got halfway across the room and wove unsteadily out of the bull pen, smacking her thigh into a chair or maybe a desk on the way out.

  When she got to the street, fresh air didn’t help. Nikki’s head still cycloned in a whirl of panic. Even in the bright morning light her vision remained fogged by a deep blue haze, the way condensation forms on a shower door. She rubbed her eyes, but when she opened them again the mist had crystallized, making her view a solid sheet of blue ice. Behind it, shadowy figures moved, seeming familiar to her, but unrecognizable. A face looked back at her through the frost. It looked like her own, through a clouded mirror. But it might have been her mother’s.

  She didn’t k
now which.

  Somewhere behind her, Heat heard her name being called. She ran.

  She didn’t know where.

  Rubber squealed and a truck horn blasted. Defensively, Nikki put out her palms and touched the hot grill of a semi as it skidded to a stop. She stayed on her feet, but the jolt fractured the veneer of ice she was looking through enough for her to see how close she had come to getting hit by a truck.

  Nikki turned and bolted through traffic on Columbus Avenue, running somewhere, anywhere.

  Away.

  FIFTEEN

  A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback fronts the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History across from Central Park. Surrounding the famous bronze, a dozen titles listing the achievements of the great president are carved into the stone wall of the parapet: Ranchman, Scholar, Explorer, Scientist, Conservationist, Naturalist, Statesman, Author, Historian, Humanitarian, Soldier, and Patriot. Before these words sits a line of granite benches arranged for contemplation.

  When Rook caught up with Heat, she was on the Statesman bench, doubled over, hyperventilating.

  Nikki saw his shoes and pant legs before he spoke, and without raising her head, she just whispered, “Go.” He ignored that idea and sat on the bench beside her. Neither said anything for a time. She kept her face to the ground; he rested his palm on her back. It rose and fell with her breathing.

  He reflected how, just a few short nights before, the two of them had held each other on the Pont Neuf in Paris while he’d contemplated the thick stone walls channeling the Seine. And Rook recalled wondering what would happen if one of them ever cracked.

  Now he knew.

  And he set about shoring up the damage.

  “It’s not conclusive, you know,” he said as soon as her breathing leveled off. “It’s just a bank deposit. You can project the bad thing if you want, but sounds to me like you’d be breaking one of your own rules if you jumped to a conclusion without hard evidence. That’s my job.”

  Not a chuckle from her, not even a scoff. Instead, she folded her arms across her knees and rested her forehead on them. Finally, she spoke. “I wonder if it’s worth it. Seriously, Rook, maybe I should just shut it down. The whole investigation. Leave the past in the past, keep all the bad stuff, I dunno … frozen in time.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “It’s not unthinkable, and that’s a first.” Nikki sighed and her breath hitched. Then in a small, plaintive voice, she said, “But then I keep telling myself I’m doing this for her.”

  “Are you?”

  “Why else?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself because you need to find out the part of her then that’s part of you now. That’s the best reason I can think of to keep going.” He paused and added, “Or you could just throw in the towel because it got difficult, like Carter Damon did.” Heat sat up and glowered at him. “Hey,” he said, “I’m pulling out all the stops here.”

  “No kidding. Comparing me to that washout? Not too manipulative.”

  “I have my moments.” He looked past her to the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue that loomed over Central Park West. “He was a force of nature, wasn’t he? Did you know he was once NYPD commissioner? They told him the department was hopelessly corrupt and lazy. TR turned it around in two years. You remind me of him. Although you’d have to work on the mustache.”

  Nikki laughed. Then she grew pensive and stared deeply into him, seeing something there precious and infinite. Finally she stood. “Time to get back to work?”

  “If you insist. And if you’re crazy enough to keep going, I’m crazy enough to follow.”

  Algernon Barrett was the next name on the list of wealthy tutoring clients Nikki had gotten from the PI who’d tracked her mother, and when Heat pulled up to the gate of his business, she asked Rook if they had the wrong address. Located on a dead-end street of cement factories and auto scrap yards in the Bronx, Barrett’s Jamaican catering company, Do The Jerk, appeared anything but prosperous. “Know how they say not to judge a book by its cover?” asked Rook, stepping around weeds on their walk up the fractured walkway to the front entrance. “Do judge a caterer by his cockroaches.”

  However, as they waited in the small lobby that seemed suited more to a car wash, Rook drifted to the windowed double doors giving onto the food preparation plant and said, “I take it back. You could eat off the floor in there and not be a rodent.”

  They paced twenty long minutes before the receptionist answered a phone buzz and led them down a dingy, Masonite-paneled hall to the owner’s office. Algernon Barrett, a whip-skinny Jamaican with an impressive set of Manny Ramirez dreds cascading from under his knit cap, didn’t get up. He remained seated behind his massive desk, peering around an accumulation of spice bottles, unopened UPS cartons, and horse racing magazines scattered there, making no effort even to acknowledge them. In fact, with his designer sunglasses on, it was hard to tell if he was even awake. But his attorney certainly was. Helen Miksit, a former star prosecutor who had quit for private practice and carved an equally strong reputation on the opposite side of the aisle, sat in a folding chair beside her client. The Bulldog, as she was known, didn’t extend any courtesies, either.

  “I wouldn’t bother sitting,” she said.

  “Nice to see you again, too, Helen.” Nikki extended her hand, which the lawyer shook but without rising.

  “Your first lie of the morning. Trying to remember the last time we crossed paths, Heat. Oh, right, the interrogation room. You were putting the pins to my client Soleil Gray. Right before you badgered her so much she killed herself.” That was untrue; they both knew the famous singer had jumped under that train in spite of Nikki’s words, not because of them. But the Bulldog was all about living up to the nickname, so to argue the point would only feed the beast.

  In his own form of defiance, Rook grabbed two folding chairs that faced the big screen showing a cable poker tournament and swung them around for him and Nikki. “Whatever,” said Miksit.

  “Mr. Barrett, I’m here to ask you some questions about the time that my mother, Cynthia Heat, was your daughter’s music tutor.”

  The Bulldog crossed her legs and sat back. “Ask away, Detective. I’ve advised my client not to answer anything.”

  “Why not, Mr. Barrett? Do you have something to hide?” Heat decided to press. With this attorney in the mix, niceties would be ignored and/or crushed.

  He sat up in his chair. “No!”

  “Algernon,” said Miksit. When he turned to her, she just shook her head. He sat back again. “Detective, if you want to know about Mr. Barrett’s top shelf line of Caribbean-inspired jerk rubs and marinades, great. If you want to inquire about franchising one of his Do The Jerk gourmet trucks, I can see you get an application.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “See, I operate a profitable company and mind my own business, yeah.”

  “Then why the expensive lawyer?” asked Heat. “You need protection for some reason?”

  “Yes, he does. My client is a new citizen and wants the protection afforded every American from undue pressure by zealous police. We ‘bout done here?”

  “My questions,” said Nikki, “are part of a homicide investigation. Would your client prefer to conduct this interview down at the precinct?”

  “Your call, Heat. My meter runs the same wherever I am.”

  Nikki sensed Barrett was hiding behind counsel because he had a volatile emotional side, and she tried to get a rise. “Mr. Barrett. I see you’ve been arrested for domestic violence.”

  Barrett whipped off his glasses and sat bolt upright. “That was long ago.”

  “Algernon,” said the Bulldog.

  Heat pressed on. “You assaulted your live-in girlfriend.”

  “That’s all been cleared up!” He tossed his glasses on the desk.

  “Detective, do not harass my—”

  “With a knife,” said Heat. “A kitchen knife.”


  “Don’t say anything, Mr. Barrett.”

  But he didn’t back down. “I did my anger management. I paid for her doctor. Got that bitch a new car.”

  “Algernon, please,” said the lawyer.

  “My mother was stabbed with a knife.”

  “Come on. Things get crazy in the kitchen!”

  “My mother was stabbed in her kitchen.”

  Helen Miksit stood, towering over her client. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  Algernon Barrett froze with his jaw gaping and sat back in the chair, pulling on his shades. The Bulldog sat, too, and crossed her arms. “Unless you want to charge my client formally, this interview has concluded.”

  Back in the car, they had to wait out the long convoy of Barrett’s gourmet trucks clearing the lot as they deployed for the streets of New York. Rook said, “Damn lawyer. That guy was going to be a talker.”

  “Which is exactly why the lawyer. The too-bad part is that I wanted to try to pull some information out of him before I got to the knife, but she made me change it up.” With only one name remaining on the list of her mother’s clients, the elation Nikki had felt at scoring these leads began to feel like an unfulfilled promise.

  “Well, it wasn’t a total loss,” said Rook. “During all the drama, I pocketed this jar of Do The Jerk Chicken Rub.” He pulled out the spice bottle and showed it off.

  “That’s theft, you know.”

  “Which will only make the chicken taste better.”

  A half hour later, they’d just pulled off the Saw Mill Parkway on their way to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit the last person on the list when Heat got an excited call from Detective Rhymer. “It may not be anything, but it’s at least something.” He said it with just enough of his Southern roots coming through to make him indeed sound like Opie. “Remember sending me to IT to chase down whether Nicole Bernardin used Internet cloud storage?”