Frozen Heat (2012)

  Rook came over to Nikki’s desk when she hung up her phone. “Malcolm and Reynolds checked in while you were on your call, so I took the message for you. Let’s see if I got all this. They said they’re glad you’re not dead…. At least I think that’s what they said.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. And then they gave me an update on the Forensics work at Carter Damon’s storage unit. How’m I doing?”

  “Ass like yours, you could be my personal secretary anytime. What’s up with the van?”

  “They found a set of work boots in it. Size eleven, same as the kind that stomped through Nicole’s apartment. Lab will check them for a carpet fiber match.”

  Nikki moved over to the Murder Boards, where she made a notation for the boots next to the other data for the Bernardin apartment. “What else?”

  “Traces of blood in the cargo area inside the van. Malcolm said he knew you’d be all over that, and assured you that DeJesus is handling that personally.” He waited while she logged “Blood/DNA” on the board, and then he continued, “Finally, they have good lifts off all surfaces and door handles. They’re running fingerprint IDs now.”

  When she capped her marker, he asked, “So who were you on with so long?”

  “Prefecture of Police in Paris, France.”

  “That’s a toll call, you know.”

  “Worth every penny.” He followed her back to her desk and she picked up her notes. “Get this. No record of any attack on Tyler Wynn. No record of his death. No record of him being in the Hopital du Canard. No record of him leaving the country.”

  Rook stroked his chin. “Were we even there?”

  “No. Not according to hospital records or detectives in Boulogne-Billancourt. They never spoke to us. It never happened.” She tossed her notes on the desk.

  “How are you bearing up?”

  “It’s like a Road Runner cartoon. I’m fine, as long as I don’t stop and look down.” She touched his arm. “And how about you? How’s your poor wrist after grinding on that bolt half the night?”

  “Hey, five more minutes and I would have cut through that thing. How do they make it look so easy on Storage Wars?”

  “Real life is never like TV,” she said.

  “Especially reality shows.”

  Nikki’s phone rang and she picked it up. “Homicide, Detective Heat.” The color left her face. She dropped the phone on her desktop and rushed to the door.

  Rook chased after, “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything.”

  Heat didn’t wait to use the lockbox. She just handed her Sig to the guard as she raced into Holding. Sprinting past cells of drunks, burglars, and public urinators, she arrived at the back where the isolation cell door stood open and three officers in blue gloves knelt over Petar.

  He had pitched forward off his bunk and lay sprawled on his back with a fresh, open gash in his forehead where his head had smacked the concrete. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and his skin was deep purple with crimson webs of capillaries coloring it. His tongue looked blue enough to be called black and protruded from his open mouth from a pool of froth that capped a trail of pungent, bloody vomit that ran down his neck and onto the floor. The crotch of his orange coveralls was drenched with his urine and his bowels had released in death.

  The officers rose up from him. One ran out, clutching his mouth. Nikki found herself taking an unconscious step back and bumped into Rook. One of the uniforms said, “We tried to CPR him, but he was gone by the time we got the cage unlocked.”

  “Did anyone see what happened?” she asked.

  She was speaking to the officers, but one of the other prisoners said, “He just got his dinner and started retching something fierce.” The prisoner added a demonstration, but Nikki turned away to survey the cell.

  A food tray sat on the floor with an empty plastic juice bottle tipped on its side. Nothing else had been touched. “Nobody gets near him until the ME,” said Heat. “And nobody in here eats or drinks anything until we know what poisoned him.”

  “And who,” said Rook.

  TWENTY

  Nikki splashed more cold water on her face and rose up to see herself in the mirror above the women’s room sink. Her lips began to turn downward and tremble, and she looked away, only to force herself to go back for a brave stare, but the trembling only grew and grew and her eyes were rimmed with tears. Before they could roll down her cheeks, she bent to the faucet again and scooped more water onto herself.

  Unlike with his handler’s faked death in Paris, Detective Heat had the means and cause to verify that Petar Matic had indeed expired. A call to her friend, Lauren Parry, brought the medical examiner from a sound sleep to the holding cell in less than forty-five minutes. Dr. Parry’s prelim squared with the eyeball evidence. Poison, introduced through an innocuous, half-pint plastic bottle of apple juice. Strong stuff, too. In all her years, Lauren had never seen such a ferocious attack by an outside toxin. “This dose—of whatever the hell it turns out to be when we lab it—was designed to put him down fast and hard. Full organ shutdown with no chance of resuscitation. Better believe I’ll be double-checking the seals on my moon suit when I do his postmortem.”

  Petar’s postmortem.

  Heat dried her face with some paper towels and held them to her closed eyes. Behind the lids she was thirteen, on a school ski trip to Vermont where she had lost her way on the trail and skied onto a steep incline that had iced over. When she fell that day, she had lost her gloves and a ski that had spun sideways down the ice and clattered off a precipice into a gulch she couldn’t see. The gloves had stopped yards below, but to go for them she would risk following the ski.

  Alone and in peril, Nikki had clawed her fingernails into the ice, trying to pull herself to safety. All she had to do was make it ten feet up the incline and grab hold of a rock. Halfway there, her fingertips lost purchase and she slid back to where she had begun. Sobbing, and with skin raw from ice burn, she found the strength to draw herself up the slope again. Almost there, reaching out for the chunk of stone which sat just inches from her grasp, she lost her grip again. The slide took her farther down, all the way to her gloves, which fell over the cliff when she skidded into them.

  Heat opened her eyes. She was in the precinct restroom. But she was still on that frozen slope.

  “Got something for you on our poisoned food,” said Detective Feller when she came back into the bull pen. “The delivery kid from the deli where Holding places our orders got spiffed a twenty at his bike rack by someone who said they’d handle this one.”

  “Excellent. Did he give you a good description?” she asked.

  “Yes, and when I heard it, I showed him this.” Feller held up the APB pic of Salena Kaye on his cell phone. “Positive ID.”

  “I’ll see that and raise you one,” said Raley, coming through the door clutching a photo print. “Just pulled this still from my surveillance screening of the OCME cams. Check out who dropped off the bad gas at the loading dock.” He held up the shot for them all to see: Salena Kaye in a delivery uniform and baseball cap.

  Rook joined them from his desk and said, “That is one naughty nurse.”

  “Yeah,” said Raley. “Too bad this surveillance tape has been sitting around unscreened for a couple of days. If we’d only seen this day before yesterday, we might have gotten her before she rabbitted.”

  “Or got Petar,” added Feller.

  “Refresh my memory,” said Rook. “Who was it who said he wanted to take point on the gas truck, personally? Then delegated it to his secret weapon?”

  Nikki took the still from Raley and walked it into Irons’s office and shut the door. Less than three minutes later, the captain must have decided not to summon the press, after all. He grabbed his coat and left in a hurry.

  Exhausted, but unwilling to go home with things in such flux, Heat spent the night at the precinct. Rook came in at daybreak with a latte and fresh change of clothes for her. “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

  “Ish
,” she said. “Tried to grab a few winks in one of the interrogation rooms, but, you know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “My dad’s an early riser, so I called him a little while ago to fill him in, so he wouldn’t hear it on the news first.”

  “How’d he take it?”

  “Closed, as ever. But at least he didn’t screen me out when he saw the caller ID, so that’s a start.”

  Rook thought back to the brittle exit from her father’s condo after she had asked him for the bank statements. “You’re either stronger than I thought you were or a glutton for punishment.”

  “Aside from all the personal crap? I really thought I had this case locked down.” She led him to the twin Murder Boards. Both were brimming with new notes she had made on them in the predawn hours. “I thought once I nailed the killer, I’d be done. But Petar ended up—well, he ended up just the consolation prize.”

  “You know, Nikki, that’s the tragedy of all this. I was feeling that your old boyfriend and I were just starting to bond.” He looked at her innocently. “What, too soon?”

  “A little,” she said, but smiled in appreciation of his usual effort to try to make her laugh, in spite of. “This nerve’s still a bit exposed. But don’t give up, OK?”

  “Deal.”

  She contemplated one of the boards with a bleak sigh. “This one …” Nikki tapped Tyler Wynn’s name, now featured prominently. “He called the orders. Because of him, my mother died, Nicole died, Don died.”

  “Carter Damon, also.”

  “Right. And why?” She shook her head. “Damn, I really thought I’d be done.”

  Most of the squad gathered early. Clearly, sleep was not anybody’s priority. Roach came in a little later, but only because they had paid a visit to the MTA headquarters on the way in to check surveillance video from the 96th Street station. “They’re making dubs for us now,” said Detective Raley, “but we logged Nicole Bernardin going over the platform toward the Ghost Station with the leather pouch and then coming back without it the same night she died.”

  “Any idea what was in it?” asked Rhymer.

  “None. I never even touched it.”

  Detective Feller joined them. “Any guess who Nicole left it for?”

  Heat bobbed her head side to side. “I would only be guessing.” Although Nikki did have one idea she would keep to herself.

  Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds came into the bull pen with fresh news from Forensics. The blood traces in the cargo hold of Carter Damon’s van matched Nicole Bernardin’s type. “They’re running it at the DNA lab for confirmation,” said Reynolds. “But I’d bet we hear a ding, for sure.”

  Malcolm added, “Carpet fibers match positive for Damon’s work boots. And, even though there’s more fingerprints on that vehicle than an airport lap dancer, they also managed to isolate three big hits: Damon, Salena, and Petar.”

  Behind them they heard raised voices and a door slam and all turned toward the glass office to see Captain Irons in a muffled shouting match with Detective Hinesburg, whose mascara had raccooned down the sides of her cheeks. “Trouble in the diorama,” said Feller.

  “You guys didn’t see this morning’s Ledger?” asked Reynolds. “Metro column was all about wondering how a prisoner could die in custody.”

  Ochoa said, “All the papers are on that.”

  “Yeah, but Tam Svejda has a source who says one of the detectives dropped the ball on identifying Salena Kaye from surveillance video.”

  “And we know who that source is, don’t we?” said Feller. “The survivor.”

  Ochoa agreed. “Hey, if Wally’d knock a kid over to get on camera, why wouldn’t he save his ass by throwing Sharon Hinesburg under the bus?”

  “Or, in this case, under the pressurized gas truck,” added Rook.

  Heat cleared her throat. “Much as you know I love forming a gossip circle, maybe we could keep our heads in the game and get back to work?” But as they all returned to their desks, her own gaze drifted to the glass office and she secretly hoped if Hinesburg didn’t get transferred, at least she’d get a nice, fat suspension.

  Rook joined her. “I’m going to head out. I have some work of my own to do. Outside stuff. No big deal.”

  “Liar. You’re going to work this up as your next article, aren’t you?”

  “All right,” he said, “as long as you’re forcing my hand, my editor at First Press e-mailed me to say that they’re going to do a major launch for a new online version of the magazine and think an exclusive on this case would be a perfect cover story to premiere on the new website.”

  “And you know how much I loved the last article.”

  “I promise, nothing about your sexual prowess, strictly facts.”

  “Pants on fire.”

  “Let me put this another way,” he said. “Would you prefer I do the article of record, or Tam Svejda?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Get crackin’, writer boy.”

  “You won’t be sorry.”

  “I already am.”

  “Can I buy you lunch later?”

  She lowered her eyes from his. “You go on. I’ve got something to do around lunchtime.” When he studied her, deciding whether to ask what it might be, she said, “Go on. I’ll see you at my place after work tonight.”

  When she got to the door, she put her ear to it and heard nothing inside. Nikki rapped lightly to make sure the place was empty, and when nobody answered, she quietly slipped in and twisted the lock on the knob.

  Taking care not to disturb Detective Raley’s screening notes that were stacked in neat piles along the counter in front of the monitor, she sat behind the console in the little closet he had converted to his surveillance media kingdom. Heat smiled when she saw the cardboard Burger King crown she had awarded to him in a squad meeting after he had found the security cam footage of a gigolo’s street abduction last winter. Then she took a memory key out of her pocket, plugged it into the USB port, and put on the earphones.

  Nikki didn’t know how many times over ten years she had listened to the audio of her mother’s murder. Perhaps twenty? First, she had made a crude dub of it by holding a dictation recorder beside the answering machine before Detective Damon could take the mini cassette from the apartment. The quality was poor so, when she became a detective, Heat wrote herself a pass into the Property Room and got the phone cassette copied as a digital file. That WAV sounded much cleaner, yet with all the times she had listened to it, straining to analyze the muffled voice of the killer in the background, she had never gotten closer to identifying it.

  She always did it in secret because she knew it would seem ghoulish to anyone who didn’t know she was only doing a clinical playback. This was a search for clues, not an obsession with reliving the event. That’s what she told herself, anyway, and felt it to be true. Her focus was on background, not foreground. She especially hated hearing her own voice on it, and always—every single time—stopped the audio just before it picked up her coming into the apartment and screaming.

  That was too much to bear.

  Of all the times she had listened to it, though, this was the first time she had knowing that the muffled voice was Petar’s.

  Homicide 101. In any murder case, the likely killer is close in. You clear husbands, wives, exes, common-laws, estrangeds, children, siblings, and relatives before you move on to the other likelies. Beyond her father, they looked for boyfriends in her mother’s life but not in Nikki’s. But then, who was the lead investigator but Carter Damon, Petar’s accomplice-after-the-fact and obstructionist-for-hire.

  Nikki listened again and yet listened anew. She heard the familiar small talk with her mother about spices, the checking of the fridge, her screams, and the dropped phone. The mumbled voice of a man. She paused and played it back. And then she played that section back again and again.

  At straight-up noon, Heat sat on the twelfth floor, in the tranquil room on York Avenue, at the session she’d booked that morning with Lon King, Ph.D. Nikki t
old the department psychologist about her history with the recording and that, for the first time ever that day, when she listened to it, she heard Petar.

  “And why is this something you want to focus on, this recording?”

  “I guess to ask if I could have been in denial.”

  “That’s always possible, but I wonder if your curiosity goes deeper.”

  “See, this is the part I hate.”

  He smiled. “They all do, at first.” Then, he continued, “I don’t care how resilient you are, Nikki, you have a lot to deal with here.”

  “That’s why I called you.”

  “I’m certain you are not only reliving trauma and loss, but also experiencing a profound sense of anger and betrayal. Not to mention confusion about your own choices and instincts. As a detective, about crime. As a woman, about men.”

  Nikki sat back and rested her neck against the cushion. As she stared at the unblemished whiteness of the ceiling, she tried to wish away the confusion, to grab the handle on the sense of order she’d held just a day before. “I feel like I had the rug pulled. Not just on the case, but on what I thought my own life was. What I thought love was. It makes me worry about what I can trust.”

  “And for you, I know trust is paramount. Mistrust feels … well, it’s chaotic.”

  “Yes,” she said, but it came out in breath without resonance. “Which is what I feel now. I always envisioned solving my mom’s murder would be clean and neat. Now all I feel is …” She swirled a finger like a cyclone.

  “I’m sure. Especially with the betrayal of your intimacy. But could part of it also be because your life has been so defined by this case you don’t know who you are if it’s over?”

  She sat up to face him. “No, it’s upsetting because it still isn’t over and I don’t want to let my mother down.”

  “You can’t. She’s dead.”

  “And the man who ordered it is still out there.”

  “Then you will do what you have to do. I know that just by your unique definition of a leave of absence.” She nodded in agreement but without humor. “I’d ask you to try to keep scale on this, as overwhelming as it all is. Mistrust feeds on itself. It’s like a virus. You can’t do your work—or live your life—second-guessing your instincts. You’ll become the proverbial deer, frozen in the headlights. Who do you trust the most, Nikki?”