Frozen Heat (2012)

  Detective Heat had worked enough autopsies to grab hold of all the indicators and form the right questions. “Are you seeing any hypothermia?”

  “Negative.”

  “So we also can assume she was already dead when she became exposed to the frigid temps?”

  “I’d definitely make that bet,” said Dr. Parry. “One more thing. I should have enough digital flexibility to get some fingerprints for you soon. I know you need these yesterday, but I’m being patient so I don’t tear tissue by being hasty.”

  “How soon?”

  “Hasty girl.”

  “How soon?”

  “Within the hour, for sure.”

  “Hey, Lauren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is good news,” said Nikki. “Thanks for being a pest.”

  After she hung up, Rook came over to join her and said, “You do know that if we weren’t in your workplace, I’d give you a shoulder rub or a hug or both.”

  “Thank you for not.”

  “You’re my hero, seriously. I don’t even know how you are coping.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please, not here, not now.”

  “‘Nuff said.” He raised both hands in a surrender gesture. Rook knew her well enough to know that, in spite of all the passion that boiled inside, Nikki came factory-equipped with a firewall that kept it locked up. Her feelings ran deep and hot, which made it a life’s work for her to compartmentalize. Jameson Rook unexpectedly held some keys to those locks and wisely let the subject drop. He switched gears with a survey of the room, which buzzed with a level of activity he’d never seen before. “Looks like you’ve got the taskmaster thing down, Detective Heat. Or is it taskmistress? So hard to know these days.”

  “It’s a start” was all she allowed.

  “And what are you planning to do?”

  “Me? Keep riding herd. Beg, borrow, and steal a bunch of uniforms to get out and canvass with the Jane Doe photo, as soon as I have a clue where to show it. Maybe I’ll take a drive down to Thirtieth Street to surf the autopsy when she thaws.”

  “I think you and I have more important work to do.”

  Nikki gave him the wary squint he’d seen so often. “Why am I not liking this already?”

  “Cute,” he said. “Always your first reaction. Until what? Sweet vindication.” He left for the Murder Boards, and, after hesitating, she surrendered and followed. When Nikki got there, he faced the two boards, balancing his hands like scales. “Is it I, or does there seem to be a bit of an imbalance?”

  “First off, plus ten for grammar.”

  “All part of the writer’s toolbox,” said Rook.

  “And, secondly, yes, I focused my briefing on the new murder. The details of my mother’s case are too vast to post on one board.” She tapped her temple. “But trust me, it’s all in here.”

  “Which is why,” he said, matching her move by tapping the nearly blank board, “we need to concentrate our efforts here.”

  “Rook, I have been there. I have lived it for over a decade.”

  “Not with me, you haven’t.”

  “But I cannot lose traction on the new case.”

  “Come on, you yourself said solve one, solve the other.” He swept his arm to the bustling squad room. “You’ve already got one plate spinning beautifully. What’s to lose by sorting through the cold case with your experience and my fresh eyes?”

  “But that means going backward. More than ten years.”

  He smiled and nodded. “With apologies to Prince, we’re going to partner like it’s 1999.”

  “Prince may forgive you but rule me out.” Rook held his ground, affirming the logic of his idea by letting brash silence and flickering eyebrows do the work. At last, she said, “We don’t have time to go through the whole case.”

  “Well, how about we start by talking to the lead detective on it?”

  “He retired,” she said, the quickness of her reply designed to tell him she not only kept up on the details but that this would be no small undertaking. “Who knows where he is now?”

  “I don’t know about right this minute, but at noon today Carter Damon, NYPD, retired, will be at P.J. Clarke’s on West Sixty-third having lunch with us.”

  “Rook, you are incorrigible.”

  “I know. I tried being corrigible once. Lasted a summer right before puberty. Corrigible was kinda dull. Incorrigible was not only more fun, it got me laid a lot. Which is also fun.” He checked his watch. “Ooh, quarter to twelve. Subway, or are you driving us to our appointment?”

  Rook didn’t say much on the short walk to the 79th Street station. He kept the walk brisk to thwart Nikki from changing her mind and staying at the precinct to probe the new lead rather than traveling back in time with him. Standing in the aisle of the subway car for the two-stop ride south, she did say, “You actually knew the name of the lead investigator and where to find him?”

  “Let’s just say I needed a hobby during my recuperation. A guy can only watch so many telenovelas.” The doors parted and she followed him out onto the platform.

  The subway station at West 66th Street was always busy around lunchtime; however, damage from the earthquake made the pack of humanity extra dense that day. The rails and underground structure had been OK’d by MTA engineers, but superficial damage still needed a cleanup and the platforms there were halved by caution tape to keep riders away from all the tile that had broken off the walls. Many subway stops in the city had public art installations themed for their neighborhood, and their stop; the one for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts had an impressive wall mosaic stretching the length of the station. Whole chunks of the masterpiece had fractured in the morning shake, sending glass bits of costumed warriors, opera singers, and back-flipping gymnasts to the floor. The elevator up to the sidewalk had also been tagged out of service, and Heat and Rook found themselves blockaded by an elderly woman struggling her walker up the steps. They introduced themselves to her by first names and each offered Sylvia an arm to grip for the remaining five steps. A stranger behind them, a hard-looking gangsta from Uptown with a neck and arms full of scary ink poked Heat’s shoulder. Then he volunteered to carry the old woman’s walker. Welcome to New York City in an emergency.

  Up top, Sylvia left them for the Barnes & Noble, singsonging her thank-yous to Heat, Rook, and the gangsta, who had quietly gone his way in the opposite direction, toward Juilliard. Nikki noticed he had a clarinet case over his shoulder.

  Walking through Dante Park where Broadway crosses Columbus, they saw a small band of demonstrators rallying under the Philip Johnson Timesculpture shouting warnings of doom to them about the omen of the quake. One shook a homemade sign at Nikki as she passed. It read, “The End Is Near!” Crossing the street to the restaurant, she paused to look back at the words on the sign and hoped so. Then Jameson Rook took her elbow and escorted her back to the beginning.

  The P.J. Clarke’s at Lincoln Square had only opened for business two years before but already vibed old New York saloon, the sort of joint where you could get a great burger and a brew or order something icy fresh from the raw bar without a health care card. The original P.J.’s, which opened on the East Side more than a century before, was where Don Draper and his fellow mad men hung out, as did real-life throwbacks like Sinatra, Jackie-O, and Buddy Holly, who proposed to his wife there on their first date. When Nikki Heat followed Rook across the distressed wood plank floor to their table, she only spotted one familiar face. He wasn’t a celebrity but he made her knees go weak.

  Carter Damon might have retired from the NYPD, but a cop’s habits run deep, and he sat with his back to the wall so he could monitor the room over his Bloody Mary. He stood to shake both their hands but kept his gaze on Nikki, even as he gripped Rook’s. Something broken lurked in that look; something that, for her, read sadness or awkwardness or, maybe, vodka. Perhaps all of the above.

  “You grew up,” Damon said as they all sat. “I just got older.” Sure, he had m
ore salt in with the pepper of his brush cut and cop-stache, and some pouches had begun to swell his eyes, but Damon, at fifty, still had the lean body of a guy who kept himself in shape. He fit perfectly into the image frozen in her head from the first time she saw him on the worst night of her life.

  “I’m sorry for your loss” had been his first words. Nikki, nineteen years old then, looked up at the floating head from where she sat in the living room chair beside the piano. She hadn’t even noticed him approach. Lost in a fog, she had been transfixed by her mother’s blood, still damp but cooled on the thighs of her jeans from when Nikki had cradled her body on the kitchen floor until the paramedics and the policewoman finally coaxed her away. As Detective Damon had introduced himself, camera flashes from the kitchen strobed behind him, each one making her flinch. When he had told her he would be the detective investigating this crime, the defining word—”crime”—came punctuated, like chain lightning, by a double strobe that jolted her, ripping away her haze, and hurtled her into an alertness, a hyper-clarity, that had made every minute detail store itself like digital video. She had noticed his gold shield clipped to the breast pocket of his sport coat, but instead of a dress shirt underneath, he had worn an old, stained Jets tee with a threadbare collar, as if he had rushed there from home, his Thanksgiving eve turned upside-down by a phone call from Dispatch at the Thirteenth Precinct. Nine-one-one from a Gramercy Park apartment. Units responding. Report probable homicide. Suspect or suspects fled before discovery.

  Nikki had been two blocks away, in the spice aisle of the Morton Williams supermarket, when it happened. In hindsight, it always seemed so trivial, so banal, to be running her fingertip along the alphabetical row of jars, her biggest problem in the world trying to find cinnamon sticks—sticks, not ground—while her mother was drawing her last breaths. Elated to find them, she had cell-phoned to do a victory dance and to ask if she needed anything else. After six rings the answering machine grabbed the call. “Hello, this is Cynthia Heat. I’m unable to come to—” and then a squeal of feedback as her mother picked up. She’d been kneading crust for the pies they were baking and had to wipe the butter off her hands before she could get to the phone. And, as usual, she didn’t know how to turn off the answering machine without disconnecting, so she let it roll, recording everything while Nikki listened.

  “I may need evaporated milk. I have an open can in the fridge, let me see how much is left.” Then a crash of glass followed by her mother’s scream. Nikki had called out to her loud enough to turn heads in the market. Her mother hadn’t answered her, only screamed again, and the phone dropped, smacking onto the floor. By then Nikki had bolted from the market, forcing open the in door with all her strength, dodging cars across Park Avenue South, calling to her mother, begging her to speak to her. In the background, she had heard the muffled voice of a man and a brief scuffle. Then her mother had whimpered, and her body dropped hard beside the phone, followed by the clang of a knife also hitting the floor. Then Nikki heard suction, as the refrigerator door opened. The wine bottles, chilling on the door for their Thanksgiving feast, had tinkled. Then she heard the snap and hiss of a soda can popping open. A pause, then footsteps walking away, followed by silence. She still had a block to go when she heard her mother’s weak moan, and her last word. “Nikki …”

  “Thank you for coming on short notice,” said Rook.

  “You kidding? Whatever I can do.” He glanced at Nikki again. “I will admit, though, this is tough for me.” He drank down another swallow of his cocktail, observing her over the rim. Nikki wondered if Carter Damon was tasting failure.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  Damon set down his glass. “Sure, I bet it’s ten times worse for you. But as a cop yourself now, you’ve got to know how it gnaws at you. The ones you never solved. They keep you awake.”

  Nikki gave him the best smile she could muster and said, “They do,” letting her neutral reply politely acknowledge a fellow detective’s pain over justice left unserved, without letting him off too easy for not getting the job done.

  Her response had an effect. His face ashed and his attention went to Rook. “Is this meeting about an article? You going to write a story about this case? Because I think you pretty much covered it in the one you did a couple months ago.” There it was again. How Nikki hated that article. Favorably as it portrayed her, as one of the city’s top homicide investigators, CRIME WAVE MEETS HEAT WAVE, Jameson Rook’s cover profile for a major national magazine, gave Heat fifteen minutes she wanted back. Damon must have clocked the disdain in Nikki’s expression, and he lobbied her, saying, “It’s not like there’s anything new to bring to the party.”

  “Actually, there is,” said Rook.

  The ex-cop’s shoulders drew back, and he raised his head a little taller as he took the writer’s measure, too experienced, too wary to buy some journalist at face value. But when he saw Detective Heat’s nod of affirmation, he said, “Well, hot damn. Seriously?” He smiled to himself. “You know, they say don’t cash out, never give up hope …”

  Carter Damon’s words rang hollow to Nikki because he had done exactly both. But she hadn’t come there to cast blame. Rook’s strategy to revisit history with fresh eyes held enough merit for her to play it out. So she briefed the ex-lead on the developments of the morning: the Jane Doe knife vic in her mom’s suitcase. He perked up with every detail, nodding with his full body. When she finished, he said, “You know, I remember logging that stolen luggage.” He paused while the waiter took drink orders. Nikki asked for a Pellegrino and Rook a Diet Coke. Damon pushed his unfinished Bloody Mary across the red-and-white checked tablecloth and said, “Coffee, black,” and the instant the waiter cleared earshot, he inclined his head back to stare at the ceiling and recite from memory. “Large American Tourister, late seventies vintage. Blue-gray hardside with a chrome T-bar pull handle and two wheels.” He tilted back to Rook, since he knew Nikki knew the rest. “We figured it for carrying the haul from the burglary.”

  Rook asked, “Is that where you left it, as a homicide to cover an apartment burglary?”

  Damon shrugged. “Only thing that made sense.” But then, when Rook peeled the elastic band from around his black Moleskine to take notes, the ex-detective bristled and said, “This isn’t for an article.” When they both shook no, he cleared his throat, no doubt relieved he wouldn’t appear in print as the cop who couldn’t bring it home. “There had been a burglary along with it.”

  “When?” asked Rook. “Nikki got back to the apartment within minutes of the murder.”

  “Whoever did the burglary did it before. The theft came from the back of the apartment, the master bedroom and the second bedroom-slash-home office. Could have even been done while the two ladies were in the kitchen. They had the mixer going, the TV on, busy talking and whatnot. But my money is it came down during the substantial time gap after she left for the market.”

  Rook turned to Nikki, having heard this for the first time. “I took a walk.” The muscles tightened in her neck. “That’s all. It was a nice night. The weather was mild for then, and so I just walked for about a half hour.” She crossed her arms and turned profile to him, clearly shutting down that subject.

  “What got stolen?”

  “It’s all in the report,” said Damon. “She has a copy.”

  “Broad strokes,” said Rook.

  “Some jewelry and small decorative pieces, you know, antique silver and gold. Cash. And the desk and files got a good cleaning out.”

  Rook asked, “How common is that? Jewelry, gold, and papers from a desk?”

  “It’s different. But not unheard of. Could have been an identity thief going for socials, passports, and like that. Or just an amateur doing a quick grab to sort later.” He picked up on the skeptical glance Rook gave Nikki and said, “Hey, we’d ruled out everything else.”

  “Take me through it,” said Rook.

  Carter Damon said to Nikki, “You have all this.”

 
The ex-detective had a point. But the value of this began and ended with Rook hearing the first-person take from the official investigator, not his girlfriend and victim. “He’s new,” she said. “Humor him.”

  The drinks came and they waved off ordering. Damon blew across his coffee, took a sip, and started counting on fingers. “One, we ruled out Nikki. Obviously not on premises, we have her alibi on the phone machine married to the time code on the supermarket security cam, end of that story. Two, no sexual assault.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been a motive, even if it never happened, right?” asked Rook.

  The ex-cop made a face and bobbed his head side to side. “I don’t like it. That’s not to say you don’t get both a burglary and an assault, because you do see that. But in a tight time frame like this one—and I’m assuming it came down in the half hour she took her walk—experience tells me it’s going to be one or the other. I think Mrs. Heat spotted the burglar and that was that.”

  “Three,” said Rook, waiting.

  “Three. We cleared her dad. Touchy subject, but always the top of the list is husbands and, especially, ex-husbands. The Heats’ divorce had been recent but, by all accounts, amicable. And just to dot the i’s, Jeffrey Heat alibied clean. He was away on a golf vacation in Bermuda, where we had local authorities notify him of the murder.” Rook side-glanced to Nikki, who remained stoic, giving him her profile, as before. At least until Damon asked her, “So how’s your dad doing now?” and some unseen string pulled her face taut. “You in touch with him lately?”