Raging Heat (23 page)

Lunch talk in the bull pen centered on guessing what documents Beauvais took that cost him his life. “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” said Rhymer. “Maybe just the fact that he ripped off the ID theft network was enough. I mean, come on, we’ve all seen how heads of crime families mete out punishment to keep the soldiers in line.”

“Did you just say ‘mete’?” asked Ochoa.

“It’s a legitimate word. Ask our writer.”

Rook hung up the phone at his desk and kick-rolled his chair over to the group, spinning a circle on his trip. “Mete, as taken from the Latin
meta
, meaning boundary or goal. Plus-ten for Opie.” He scooted over beside Heat. “This just in. Remember Hattie? My new bestest friend from the poultry slaughterhouse?”

“So much for my turkey sandwich.” Nikki wrapped the remainder and set it on her desk.

“I just talked to her.”

“How’d you manage that?” asked Raley. “We’ve been calling and calling, and dropping by her apartment and work, and she’s been MIA.”

“Count the Pulitzers. I’m just sayin’.” Raley gave him two middle fingers to count. Rook continued. “Since they were friends, I wanted to find out from Hattie if Fabian Beauvais ever mentioned any documents. Guess what? He did ask if she could hide something for him. Hattie said yes, but Beauvais never said what it was or gave anything to her. And right after that, he got shot at in Queensboro Plaza. End of conversation.”

“Hang on, though,” said Nikki. “The slaughterhouse manager told us Beauvais showed up at work, injured. Meaning after he’d been shot. Where was Hattie?”

“Away helping her niece through a home detox. She never saw him.”

“So we still don’t know what he was holding, or where it is now,” said Ochoa.

“Without rekindling a squad conflict here,” said Heat, “can I at least throw out the most no-brainer of possibilities? That Beauvais got some goods on Keith Gilbert?”

To her surprise, it was Rook who first jumped in. “Just to keep that ball in the air, it sure gives a reason for some sort of payoff scenario at Conscience Point.”

“But what about Sliney then?” Ochoa’s question had an air of protest.

His partner said, “Could be parallel tracks, Miguel.” Raley held his arms out like train rails. “Beauvais rips off Sliney’s people, Sliney goes after him, track one. Beauvais shakes down Gilbert, Gilbert goes after him, track two.”

“If that’s true,” said Detective Feller, what do you suppose the Haitian had on him? A love letter from a mistress? Evidence of a love child? Some medical secret that would harm his candidacy?”

“Kenyan birth certificate.” said Rook. “Aw, come on, don’t say you weren’t thinking it, too.”

On the walk to her car to drive to the ballistics lab, Heat did what most New Yorkers were doing that day. She made a sky check and found it difficult to believe that in twenty-four hours those hazy, mundane skies would darken with the leading edge of a hurricane. Even with her attention drawn upward, she heard the crunch of sidewalk grit under a shoe, a little too close. She palmed the butt of her weapon and spun.

Heat found her own image reflecting back in Lawrence Hays’s aviators as he stood before her, grinning. “You know, even with your hand on that Sig I could still draw and shoot you before you cleared leather. If I wanted to.”

“I might surprise you.”

“You’d have to.”

She assessed him and felt no threat. He even took a step back and kept his hands visible. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The CEO of Lancer Standard seemed to be enjoying himself. He held up the first two fingers of his right hand, a plain-view sign of nonlethal intent, and dipped them into his front-jacket pocket. He came out with a slip of paper and offered it. When she opened it, she saw a Bronx address written there. “How recent?” Nikki asked.

“You’re welcome” was all he said. Then Hays strode off toward Amsterdam Avenue. She noticed the slight limp, verification that this was personal.

Heat put the assault plan together quickly, first dispatching Roach, Feller, and Rhymer up to the Bronx neighborhood to stake out the address in case Zarek Braun left. While they positioned themselves to observe, Nikki coordinated with the Emergency Services Unit to rustle up a SWAT team, then contacted the Forty-eighth Precinct about setting up traffic control. The idea was to keep people out and create choke points to keep her suspect in. None of this was new; Nikki had organized these raids more times than she could count.

But this one carried an extra crackle. “No room for mistakes,” she told the incursion team—and herself—as they armored-up in the staging area around the corner from the house. She envisioned Braun’s calm expression emptying the HK at her. Played back the mental picture of the scars and burns on the torso of Lawrence Hays. “Always think cover. Always just think.”

ESU had already taken survey photos of the building before she got up there, and she spread them on the hood of her Interceptor to familiarize herself with the ways in and of the exposure hazards. Next Heat knelt behind a junker refrigerator on a corner patch of lawn to scan the block with binoculars. This was an economically depressed area with a mix of abandoned duplexes and run-down saltbox cottages. In the growing dark she could make out Halloween decorations on some of the graffiti-tagged neighborhood doors. “You’ve cleared the surrounding houses?” she confirmed with the ESU commander.

“Affirm.”

“Don’t want any kids walking into this.” Satisfied all was ready, she said, “We’ll go in five.” Heat rose up from her hide and saw the worst possible thing she could see at that moment. Captain Wallace Irons, who must have bought his body armor at a big and tall came waddling up the street tugging Velcro and checking his sidearm.

When he reached her, Wally said, “What the hell is he doing here?” Rook finger waved from where he was standing off to the side in his personal bulletproof vest that read
JOURNALIST
instead of
NYPD
.

“Observing.”

“This is a police-only, restricted area.”

“Yes, sir, I know, but I have everything in hand. Rook is going to lag back with you while I go in.”

“Change of plan,” said Wally. “I am leading this incursion.”

“Sir, with all due respect—”

“Then you will respect a direct order from your commander, Detective.” He took in the staging area looking to Heat more like a cloddy equipment manager hanging with the jocks. “Don’t you think I hear all the talk? How I’m an armchair cop? Well, that gets put to rest here and now.” He swiveled his head. Protruding from his flak vest he could have been a turtle poking out of his shell. “Where’s my ESU CO?”

“Here, sir.” The commander of ESS-3 stepped forward.

“You boys in position?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That the house?”

“It is.”

“Show me your position map.” Wally bodychecked Heat aside and the ESU leader performed his show-and-tell using the chart Heat had marked up. Irons asked no questions. After the briefing he turned to Heat. “You’re backup.”

“Sir, may I ask you to reconsider?”

The captain persisted, talking right over her. “Stay here. Make your move when I go in.” He turned back to the ESU commander. “Follow me.” And just that rapidly, just that recklessly, just that narcissistically, the Iron Man hustled across the street where he crouched behind a parked car, paused, and led the Go Team to the front door of the cottage.

“What the hell is he doing?” asked Feller.

“Wally being Wally,” said Rook. “I wonder if he’ll wear the body armor to his press conference.”

“Get ready to move,” said Heat into her walkie. “He’s at the door.”

Captain Irons’s voice echoed across the empty street. “NYPD, open up!” An instant later, the ESU battering ram popped the door and Wally led the charge inside. Heat and her detectives trotted to cover and made the parked car. That’s as far as they got.

A bright flash filled all the windows of the house and was instantly followed by a deafening boom.

W
hile Nikki Heat sat on the curb the next morning waiting for the bomb squad to give the all-clear to go inside the house, she watched the sun rise grimly through wood smolder and thickening clouds. Rook found a spot beside her and handed over a coffee from the bodega that had just opened outside the restricted zone. Although he had remained on scene all night, they had not spoken since the blast. She had immediately kicked into emergency leadership mode—fire-walling her personal feelings about the close call so she could manage the crisis and its aftermath. In this interval before the next phase, they sat in silence, sipping their drinks, awaiting the magic of caffeine.

At last, Rook said, “So I can assume when you said you’d handle Wally Irons for me, this isn’t what you meant.”

She paused. “Dark.” Then, turning to him, said, “You may be more cop than I knew.”

“Hey, you said I could only ride along again if I could be me. Here I am.”

Captain Irons had been the only fatality. The ESU team that entered with him heard the telltale metallic click when he rushed over to read the message written on the strip of duct tape on the wall, and took cover. Two made it out the door, the other dove into the empty fireplace. The SWAT officer said he yelled to the captain to stay put, not to move, but in his inexperience and panic, Irons tried to get out, too. Human-flight instinct sealed his fate. The instant he took his foot off the pressure plate that was rigged to an explosive device under the floor, he was cooked.

Heedless of their own safety, the pair of officers who’d bailed out the front door heroically reentered through the flames and hauled their wounded comrade out. Kevlar and his leap into the hearth saved his life. Surgeons spent an hour extracting nasty shards of glass and pieces of wood from his calves, but he’d probably be released from Bronx-Lebanon by lunchtime.

NYPD Counterterror had joined in the sweep of the small box of a house. Commander McMains made the trip there from the OEM hurricane HQ in Brooklyn along with the mayor and the chief. A bomb and a dead precinct captain became top priority, and the Counterterrorism boss needed to assess the degree and scope of the threat. There would be no conversation about the task force that morning. When the site had been declared safe, Cooper McMains came out of it and rested a hand on Heat’s shoulder. “You sure you want to go in there?”

When Nikki got inside, stepping on glass and plaster and nails, holding a handkerchief over her face in a useless attempt to filter the fumes, she understood what he meant. The duct tape that had been on the wall above the gaping hole in the floor had been recovered way across the room. A CSU tech had sealed the charred and disfigured specimen in a plastic evidence bag. She held it in her hands and concentrated on not letting them tremble as the other detectives and Rook watched. There were two words written in black Sharpie on the tape:
BYE HEAT
.

For Nikki, this was just chilling confirmation of what she already knew and had tried to avoid thinking about until later. But for the hubris of Wallace Irons, that could have been the last thing she saw before she died. Heat passed the specimen around, and nobody said a word. Until Rook broke the charged silence. “He left out the comma.”

The duct tape went off to Forensics for prints. Nobody disputed whose they would find. “Thing I want to know,” said Ochoa, “is if this Zarek Braun knew you were coming, or if he just thought maybe you might come.”

“A lot of bang for a maybe,” said Detective Feller. “I’m thinking setup.”

Of course Heat had already made the triangulation between getting the address and the detonation. When Hays gave her that paper, was he priming the fuse? Or did Zarek Braun know it was only a matter of time before she tracked him and set the booby trap for that inevitability?

Commander McMains came to her when she stepped outside. “Nobody will think less if you decide to stand down. It’s been a hell of a night for you, Heat.” She didn’t answer, just squared her gaze to his. “I didn’t think so,” he said. “Obviously, this is still your case, but let me assure you that we’re heightening the APB for this Zarek Braun and all available resources will be on this.”

“Thank you, Commander.” But she knew by how quickly he got called by the chief back to the motorcade headed for the OEM Situation Room that Braun would be looked for with half an eye. His key word was “available” resources. With a Category One hurricane bearing down on the city in less than twenty-four hours, Heat knew this would be her battle to wage.

That didn’t mean she would be alone. With all recent differences forgotten, Raley and Ochoa came to her first, offering split shift, ’round-the-clock Roach protection. Soon after, Rhymer and Feller did the same. The solidarity meant everything to her, she told them. “But I want us to focus on taking this to him, not hunkering down for protection.”

Heat tasked Roach and Rhymer to canvass the neighborhood with pictures of Zarek Braun, Fabian Beauvais, and just to be thorough, Lawrence Hays, which she had downloaded from an antiwar Web site and texted to them. “Talk to residents, talk to shop owners. Get a sense of when Zarek Braun was last here, if anybody was with him, did he have girlfriends or boyfriends, what he was driving, the works.”

She put Detective Feller on checking him through the RTCC. “See if there are any hits on disturbance calls or neighbor complaints on this street. A guy like Braun might be the type to get in a beef with someone over nothing, or just creep somebody out. Don’t overlook the smallest thing, even a hassle with a meter maid over an opposite-side parking ticket.” Eager to be useful, Rook went off with them, barnacling onto Raley and Ochoa.

Lauren Parry stepped out of the house and told her friend she should go home and take a nap because her enhanced team of MEs would be a long time painstakingly collecting the remains of Captain Irons.

Heat said, “Thanks, Mother,” and said she’d hang there nonetheless. Nikki felt a quarter-inch from meltdown and worried what would happen if she stopped working.

The bomb squad sergeant gave her the prelim on the device. As expected, a pressure-sensitive plate had been cut into the floor with a bath rug placed over it as camouflage. The explosive material was C-4, military grade, with the primer set to trigger when the pressure came off the plate. She tried not to imagine herself on that rug, reading that message, but it was hard. Would she have run for cover like the captain, or would she have held it together? Thankfully, she didn’t need to know.

Zach Hamner phoned and Heat was surprised that the caller ID was his office at One PP, not his cell. “You working on a Sunday?” she asked.

“It’s storm watch, Heat, there is no weekend here.” As if he took a day off, anyway. Heat imagined that Zach Hamner probably went to the beach in his suit and tie. He nearly—but not quite—sounded compassionate as he checked on her after the ordeal.

“I’m fine. But I’m not the one OCME is working on in there.”

He asked her how Irons managed to get in that position, and when she told him, he muttered, “Fuck.…” And then he sniffed and added, “A boob to the end.”

“Excuse me, you asshole.” The trauma of the ordeal started to boil over, and The Hammer was the lucky caller. “Wally Irons was a lot of things, but you know what he is now? A cop who died in the line of duty.”

Zach started to retract, but she plowed him down. “So listen to me, you fucking little fuck. If you say anything to malign a brother cop who gave up the ultimate sacrifice, I will come down there personally and feed you your goddamned BlackBerry. Right after I stuff your balls down your throat.” Then she saw Lawrence Hays hanging around her car and hung up.

“I’m saving you some trouble, Detective.”

“How did you get into my crime scene?”

Hays ignored that, like accessing a restricted area was nothing to a man like him. He just stood there with his arms folded, his butt resting on the trunk of the Taurus, waiting for her. “When I heard the news, I figured, if I were Nikki Heat, I’d come looking for the guy who gave me this address. Here I am.” He took off his aviators so she could see his eyes.

What assuaged her wasn’t what she saw there. This guy was so schooled in psyops, he could adopt any attitude and appear credible. The fact was, though, it made no sense for him to set her up. Unless Hays was working with Zarek Braun. Her gaze drifted down to the scar tissue peeking through the V in the neck of his polo shirt. “I think we’re good,” she said. “For now.”

“Smart.” He slipped the sunglasses back on and said, “Now. You want an assist?”

“As in?”

“Come on, you know what I do.”

“Mr. Hays, if you’re offering your professional services, I decline. This is a police matter, and NYPD is capable of handling it. Besides, I think one mercenary operating in this city is enough.”

He took a moment to survey the thin scrim of smoke still curling off the house and said, “You’d better hope so.”

Her squad reassembled two hours later following the neighborhood canvass. “You called it,” said Feller. “Real Time Crime DB had a ping. Two weeks ago, a guy living in one of the row houses up the block called in a beef about a foreigner making lewd sounds and gestures to his teenage daughter. The Four-eight sent a uni, but the citizen said there must have been some mistake.”

Ochoa said, “We did a door knock at the home of the complainant. The family was jumpy, seeing how they just got let back in after the all clear. But they ID’d Braun from the photo.”

“Even better,” continued Raley in full-Roach overlap, “the foreign dude freaked them out so much—which is why they lied to the uniform—that they kept tabs on him.”

“May I?” asked Rook. “I so seldom get mistaken for a detective.” He opened a page of his notes. “Last time they saw your Cool Customer was Thursday. He came by with a big duffel bag and some power tools. Ran a circular saw for about an hour, did some hammering, and left with the tools but not the duffel.” He closed his notebook. “Sounds to me like a booby trap installation.”

“Thursday. You do know that’s before we saw Hays,” observed Feller. Heat told them about the CIA contractor’s visit and her feeling Lawrence Hays was an unlikely, and to move on. Nobody disagreed.

Detective Rhymer’s cell rang, and while he stepped away to take the call, Raley asked if Heat knew what would be happening next at the precinct. “I hate to get practical, but has anybody told you who’s coming in to replace…you know?”

“I don’t think anyone’s thinking that far ahead, Sean. My best guess is One PP’s focused on storm watch and little else. I’d be surprised to hear anything before Sandy’s done.”

“Hey?” said Opie, sounding a lot like the TV Opie. “Guess who that was.”

“No,” said Heat, reading the triumph on his face. “Really?”

Rhymer slipped his cell phone back in his pocket. “Alicia Delamater will be happy to meet me to pitch concepts for the secret Sean Combs reboot party.”

At two that afternoon not a single drop of rain was falling on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Sandy still churned off the Georgia and Carolina coasts, tracking northeast with enough menace to cause the mayor to order evacuations of the most flood-prone zones in the city. A mix of urgency and fatalism filled the streets with some New Yorkers hurrying to stock up, get sheltered, or leave before the subways and trains shut down at seven; the rest took it in stride and carried on as normal, either ignoring reality or just content to ride out nature’s spectacle when it arrived the next day.

The latter group was not about to let an annoying tropical cyclone keep them from Sunday brunch at Daughters of Beulah. Sidewalk service at the trendy Columbus Avenue bistro had been closed due to the arrival of forty-mile-per-hour winds, but every inside table was filled, and the mimosas and Bloody Marys flowed in denial-reinforcing volume.

While he stood near the curb outside, a strong gust parted Detective Rhymer’s sport coat and he scrambled to yank his badge off his belt, since few marketing directors carried a police shield. He had just pocketed it when a cab pulled up and a woman, dressed to impress, got out.

After handshakes and introductions, he pulled one of the ornately scrolled brass handles to open the door for her and they entered in a swirl of air that shook the potted palms in the reception area. “Our party is complete now,” he said to the hostess. When Nikki turned to face them from behind the podium Alicia Delamater’s eyes actually double blinked like a vaudeville comedienne’s.

“I’ve got the perfect table for you,” said Heat. “At the police station. It’s much quieter. We’ll actually be able to talk.”

Alicia Delamater didn’t share Detective Heat’s desire for a nice chat. She sat with her hands folded on the interrogation table doing what most people did in that room—trying at first not to look in the mirror, but then surrendering to glimpses, which became glances, which became lingering self-appraisals. To Nikki, that was the magic of the magic mirror: the spirit-crushing view of the guest reflected back in one of life’s low moments.

But it still didn’t open her up. This woman’s relationship with Keith Gilbert was Heat’s best chance yet to get inside to find out what was going on with him, with Fabian Beauvais, with Conscience Point, and more. It presented a tricky dynamic. Alicia was not a suspect or even charged with a crime. But she was involved somehow, or she wouldn’t have gone underground. For now, Nikki just wanted knowledge. Any scrap to run with and gain some new traction. She had invited Rook into the interview because that day in her house at Beckett’s Neck, Delamater seemed attracted to him. That allure had, unfortunately, not translated into any advantage. And so the three of them sat. One of them making mirror checks but not speaking.