Naked Heat (14 page)

“Happy to what?” said Ochoa.

“Live in his parents’ basement,” suggested Rook.

But Raley read the last line over Nikki’s shoulder. “ ‘I am happy to have the privilege of doing any favor I can for the famous Detective Nikki Heat.’ ”

Nikki caught Rook’s grimace but moved on. “Let’s split these up and start screening them.”

Raley and Ochoa each took a block of screen captures, about fifteen apiece, and brought them up on their desk monitors. This was one area where Jameson Rook’s knowledge of the victim would clearly be useful, so Nikki entrusted him with a series of files to examine, too, at the desk he had claimed. The remaining prospects she kept for her own perusal.

The work was tedious and time-consuming. Each image had to be opened separately and looked over carefully for any words or, hopefully, sentences to make sense out of the blur. Raley commented that it was like staring at one of those matrix posters they used to have in malls, where, if you squinted the right way, you might see a seagull or a puppy. Ochoa said it was more like looking for the weeping Virgin on the trunk of a tree or Joaquin Phoenix on a piece of burned toast.

Nikki didn’t mind their banter. It made the arduous task merely grueling. As her eyes strained and squinted at her own screen, she reminded them of her tenets of good investigation. Rule #1: The time line is your friend. Rule #2: Some of the best detective work is desk work.

“Right about now, I’ve got a third rule,” called Ochoa from his desk. “Take the early retirement.”

“Got something,” said Rook. All three detectives gathered behind his chair, glad for the excuse to get away from their own desks and monitors, even if it was for nothing. “It’s some decipherable words, anyway. Five words.”

Nikki leaned around Rook to bring herself closer to his screen. Her breast grazed his shoulder, an accident. She felt her face flush but soon got pulled from that distraction by the image on his computer.

stab me n th back

“OK, this is frame 0430. ‘Stab me in the back.’ ” Nikki could feel a small release of adrenaline. “Bring up 0429 and 0431.”

Raley said, “I think I’ve got 0429,” and hurried back to his desk while Rook brought up 0431, which was garbled and unreadable. They had all gathered behind Raley already by the time he said, “Come look.”

His screen, displaying the frame before “stab me in the back,” had a name typed on it. And every one of them knew it.

Heat and Rook stood against the back wall of the Chelsea rehearsal hall watching Soleil Gray with six male dancers run through choreography for her new music video. “Not that I don’t enjoy my backstage access,” said Rook, “but if we know Tex is the killer, why are we bothering with her?”

“We know Cassidy was writing about Soleil because of the typewriter ribbons. And the Texan stole them, right?”

“So you think Soleil and Tex are connected?”

The detective flexed her lips into an inverted U. “I don’t know that they aren’t. Now I have a question for you. Did Cassidy have any tension with our rock star?”

“No more than any other. Which is to say plenty. She tended to open her columns with Soleil’s rehab lapses. Most of it is past history, though. Things I found in archives when I was doing research. Back in the day, Soleil had a wilder side and that always made good copy for ‘Buzz Rush.’ ”

Six years ago, when she was twenty-two, Soleil Gray had been a brooding Emo icon, when Emo was the thing. Although, when the rock band you front has a couple of gold records and you can fill a summer’s worth of venues in North America, Europe, and Australia—and you’re traveling to them on Citation jets—there’s not too much to brood about. The early songs she wrote and sang lead vocals on, like “Barbed Wire Heart,” “Mixed Massages,” and notably, from the band’s second CD, “Virus in Your Soul,” made millions and earned reviewer raves.
Rolling Stone
called her the distaff, pre-hype John Mayer, basically looking right past the rest of the band to the pale lead singer who was perennially staring through a curtain of black sloping bangs with despondent green eyes framed by mascara.

Rumors of drug use gained traction when Soleil started arriving hours late for concerts and, eventually, missing some altogether. A YouTube cell phone video capturing her on stage at Toad’s Place in New Haven went viral, showing her wasted and hoarse, forgetting her own lyrics even with the audience trying to prompt her. Soleil busted up Shades of Gray in 2008. She said it was to go solo. It was more like to go party. The singer-songwriter went a year and a half without writing or recording anything.

Even though clubs and drugs replaced studios and concerts, Soleil stayed in the spotlight after she hooked up with Reed Wakefield, the hot young film actor whose own taste for New York nightlife and ingested substances matched her own. The difference was that Reed Wakefield was able to maintain his career. The couple moved into her East Village apartment after he started shooting
Magnitude Once Removed
, a costume drama in which he played the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. The filming outlasted their affair, which was volatile and punctuated by late-night police visits. Having already broken up her band, Soleil broke up her relationship with Reed and buried her pain in the recording studio with long sessions, creative disputes, and not much output.

The previous May, just days after he had returned to New York from Cannes, where he received a special jury prize for his role as the bastard son of France’s first American ambassador, Reed Wakefield pulled a Heath Ledger and died of an accidental drug overdose.

The impact on Soleil was profound. Once again, she stopped working, but this time to go into rehab. She emerged from the Connecticut facility clean and focused. The very day after her release, she was back in the recording studio to lay down tracks for the ballad she had written on her bunk bed in the Fairfield County manor as her farewell to the actor she had loved. “Reed and Weep” got split reviews. Some thought it was a sensitive anthem to the fragility of life and enduring loss. Others called it a shameless derivative of “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor and REM’s “Everybody Hurts.” But it debuted on the charts in the Top 10. Soleil Gray had officially begun her elusive solo career.

She had also changed how she presented herself to the world. And, as Heat and Rook watched her run through a track from her new CD,
Reboot My Life
, they saw a woman whose career and new hard body had undergone a radical makeover.

The blaring music ended and the choreographer called a five. Soleil protested. “No, let’s go again; these guys move like they’ve got snowshoes on.” She went to her first position, her muscles gleaming in the harsh light of the rehearsal room. The male dancers, panting, formed up behind her, but the choreographer shook his head to the playback engineer. “Fine. Remember this, dickweed, when we’re shooting and you wonder why it sucks,” Soleil said to him and stormed toward the door.

As she drew near, Nikki Heat stepped to intercept her. “Miss Gray?”

Soleil slowed her stride, but only to size up Nikki, as if for a fight. She gave Rook a fleeting appraisal, but concentrated on the detective. “Who the hell are you? This is a closed rehearsal.”

Heat showed her badge and introduced herself. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Cassidy Towne.”

“Now?” When Nikki just stared, Soleil dropped an F-bomb. “Whatever your questions are about her, the answer’s going to be the same. ‘Bitch.’ ” She went to the small craft services table in the corner and got a bottle of Fiji out of a cooler. She didn’t offer one to either of them.

“Your dancing’s awesome,” said Rook.

“It’s crap. Are you a cop? ’Cause you don’t look like a cop.”

Nikki jumped in to take that one. “He’s working with us on this case.” No need to freak her out that the press was there.

“You look familiar.” Soleil Gray canted her head to one side, appraising Nikki. “You’re on that magazine, aren’t you?”

Heat ignored that path and said, “I assume you’re aware that Cassidy Towne was killed?”

“Yes. A tragic loss for all of us.” She cracked the seal on the blue cap and chugged some water. “Why are you talking to me about that dead bee-otch, other than to cheer me up?”

Rook joined in. “Cassidy Towne wrote a lot about you in her column.”

“The scumbag printed a ton of lies and gossip about me, if that’s what you call writing. She had these anonymous sources and unnamed spies claiming I did everything from snorting lines off a Hammond B3 to groping Clive Davis at the Grammys.”

“She also wrote that you fired a .38 at your producer during one of the sessions with your old band,” said Rook.

“Not true.” Soleil grabbed a towel from a wicker basket near the window. “It was a .44.” She wiped the sweat from her face and added, “Good times.”

Nikki opened her notebook and a pen, always a means to help folks get serious about conversations. “Did you have any personal contact with Cassidy Towne?”

“What is this? You don’t think I had anything to do with her murder, do you? Seriously?”

Nikki stayed on her own track, getting her facts in morsels, accumulating small answers, and, in them, looking for inconsistencies. “Did you have any conversations with her?”

“Not really.”

There was a deflection, for sure. “So you never talked to her?”

“Yeah. We went to tea every afternoon and swapped recipes.”

Nikki’s newfound sensitivity about gossip helped her empathize with the singer’s attitude about Cassidy Towne, but her cop sense was telling her this sarcasm was a bluff. Time to move the fences in. “Are you saying you never talked to her?”

Soleil held the cool flat side of the bottle against her neck. “No, I’m not saying never.”

“Did you ever see her?”

“Well, sure, I guess so. It’s a small town if you’re famous, you know?”

Did Nikki ever know. “When was the last time you saw Cassidy Towne, Miss Gray?”

Soleil puffed her cheeks and made a show of looking thoughtful. Nikki felt her acting was on a par with the dog walker from Juilliard—in other words, unconvincing. “I can’t remember. Probably a long time ago. Obviously not important to me.” She looked over at the dancers coming back from their five. “Look, I have a music video to shoot, and it ain’t happening.”

“Sure, I understand. Just one more question,” said Nikki, with her pen poised. “Can you tell me your whereabouts from one to four
A.M.
the night Cassidy Towne was killed?” With the Texan as the probable killer, Soleil’s alibi—in fact everyone else’s alibi on this case—became less significant. Still, Nikki clung to the procedures that always worked for her. The time line was hungry. Feed the time line.

Soleil Gray took a moment to count nights and said, “Yes, I can. I was with Allie, an A & R assistant from my record label.”

And you were with her all that time? All night?”

“Um, let me see . . .” Soleil’s manner lit up Heat’s radar. The searching she was doing carried a whiff of stall. “Yuh, pretty much all night, till about two-thirty.”

“May I have the name and a contact number for the assistant, Allie?”

After she gave Heat the information, Soleil quickly added, “Oh, wait. Just remembered. After I was with Allie, I hooked up with Zane, my old keyboard guy from Shades of Gray.”

“And what time was that?”

“. . . Three, I guess. We had a late bite and I went home to bed about four, four-thirty. Are we done?”

“I have one more question,” said Rook. “How do you build upper arms like that? You going to be opening for Madonna?”

“Hey, way things are going? Madge is gonna be opening for me.”

The soft elevator chime echoed across the desert-rose marble lobby of Rad Dog Records until the sound was lost in the high, vaulted ceiling. A blonde woman in her early twenties was the only one to step off. She looked up from her BlackBerry, spotted Heat and Rook at the security desk, and walked over to them.

“Hi, I’m Allie,” she said while she was still twenty feet away.

After they shook hands and made introductions, Nikki asked her if it was a good time to talk. She said it was, but she could only be away from her desk for five minutes. “Did you see
The Devil Wears Prada
?” asked Allie. “Mine wears Ed Hardy, and he’s a guy, but the rest is pretty dead-on.” She escorted them across the reception area to a sofa grouping. It was made of hard molded plastic and didn’t do much to absorb the sound that bounced around the room. Nikki was struck by how comfortable the sofa was.

Rook settled in opposite them on a large white molded plastic chair. “Looks like we’re waiting for the next shuttle to the space station.” Then he looked down at the coffee table and saw Nikki’s cover on top of a stack of magazines. He picked up a day-old
Variety
, pretended to scan the headline, and tossed it over the
First Press
.

“Is this about the murder, the gossip columnist?” Allie swept her hair behind her ear and then twirled the ends with her fingers.

Nikki had figured word would reach her from Soleil before they got there, and it had. That might account for the assistant’s nervous tics. Time to find out. “It is. How did you know?”

Her eyes grew wide and she blurted, “OK, Soleil called me and said you might come.” Allie licked her lips, and her tongue looked like it was wearing a pink sock. “I’ve never dealt with the police like this. At concerts, I have, but they’re mostly retired.”

“Soleil Gray said you were with her the night Cassidy Towne was killed.” Heat got out her reporter’s spiral notebook to signal this would be on the record. And waited.

“I . . . was.”

Hesitation. Just enough to make Nikki press. “From when to when?” She uncapped her stick pen. “As exact as you can be.”

“Um, we got together at eight. Went over to the Music Hall at ten.”

“In Brooklyn?” said Rook.

“Yeah, in Williamsburg. Jason Mraz had a secret show. He’s not on our label, but we got passes.”

Nikki asked, “How long were you there?”

“Jason went on at ten, we left at about eleven-thirty. Is that good?”