Heat Rises (2 page)

Her sense of the victim was that he wasn’t a physically active person. The sizable roll of soft fat around his midsection suggested a lot of sitting, or at least an occupation that didn’t involve movement or strength like sports, construction, or other manual labor. As with most people, the skin on his upper arms was pale compared to his forearms, but the contrast wasn’t great; no farmer’s tan. That told her not only that he was indoors a lot, but that he either wore long sleeves most of the time or didn’t likely tend a garden or play golf at a club. Even this long after summer there would be more residual tanning. She stepped close to examine his hands, being careful not to breathe on them. They were clean and soft, underscoring her feeling about his indoor life. The nails were neat but not manicured; she usually saw that among middle-aged men who were wealthy or young urban groomers who were more fit. The hair was sparse up top, befitting the age Lauren had fixed, as were the strands of white mixed in with its dull, iron filings color. The brows were wildly bushy, sometimes an indicator of a bachelor or widower, and his salt-and-pepper goatee gave him an air of academia or arts and letters. Nikki looked again at his fingertips and made note of a bluish tinge that looked to be within the skin itself and not topical like from oil paint or ink stains.

Bruises, welts, and abrasions were everywhere, front, back, and sides. Torso, legs, and arms. In keeping with her open-mind approach, the detective tried not to ascribe the marks to a night of sadomasochism. Possible, even likely, given the setting, but not for certain. There were no obvious cuts, punctures, bullet holes, or bleeding she could see.

The rest of the room was immaculate, at least for a torture dungeon. The
CSU
vacuuming and print dusting might yield some forensic evidence, but there was no visible trash, cigarette butts, or any clues such as a conveniently dropped hotel matchbook with a killer’s room number on it, like you saw in old movies on
TCM
.

Again, keeping an open mind, Nikki refused to conclude there even was a killer in the classic sense. A homicide? Possibly. Murder? Still just possibly. The door had to be left open for an accidental death from a consensual torture session gone too far, resulting in a panic flight from the dom in the relationship.

Heat was sketching her own diagram of the room layout, something she always did as a personal companion to the one filed by the Crime Scene Unit, when Detective Ochoa came in after his interview of the cleaning crew. He had a sober tone as he quickly greeted Nikki, but softened when his gaze fell on the ME.

“Detective,” said Lauren with a little too much formality.

“Doctor,” he replied, matching her reserve. Then Nikki caught Lauren taking something out of the side pocket of her suit and slipping it into his hand. Detective Ochoa didn’t look at it, just said, “Right, thanks,” and stepped across the room, where he turned his back and fastened his watch to his wrist. Nikki could do the math on where The Oach was when he was awakened by the dead body call.

Seeing these two go through this charade of non-intimacy gave her a twinge. She lifted her pen above her diagram and paused, reminded of how not long ago she and Rook had similarly conspired to low-key their affair—also fooling no one. That was back in the summer heat wave, when he was a ride-along journalist researching Nikki’s homicide squad, and ultimately Nikki, for the feature story he was writing for
First Press
. Having her picture on the cover of a respected national magazine was a mixed blessing for the publicity-shy Heat. Bundled with the annoyance and unhappy complications of her fifteen minutes came some unexpectedly hot times with Jameson Rook. And now, some form of a relationship. Well, she thought—something she had been doing a lot of lately—not so much a relationship but a . . . what?

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 precinct, 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.”