Raging Heat

by Richard Castle

  “What about the tourist choppers?” asked Rhymer.

  “All grounded. Low ceiling, no customers.”

  A lull of contemplation ended with Ochoa saying, “Come on, Rook, let’s hear it. Close Encounters castaway? Rocket pack malfunction? Bring it.”

  But Rook remained pensive. “Sorry to disappoint, but I know as well as you do, it’s going to be tough to speculate on a means, let alone a motive, without knowing who our victim is.”

  “Buzz killer,” said Raley. “I was kind of hoping for more, you know, Rook signature whack theories.”

  “Oh, they’ll come,” said Nikki as she dismissed the squad. “Meantime, you all know the drill. Keep thinking, keep digging, keep checking, repeat as needed.”

  Taking her own advice, Heat worked the phones, too. She struck pay dirt with the Real Time Crime Center. “Listen up, everybody,” she announced walking to the center of the bull pen. “Turns out our John Doe’s ink is in the tattoo database. It took a while to process because this is far from the only Haitian coat of arms tatt in the system, but the detectives down at RTCC gave it some extra scrutiny and, thanks to spotting a small scar creating a ridge in the slogan, we have a match. Our alien now has a name.” She uncapped a dry erase and recited as she printed it on the board. “Fabian Beauvais.”

  “Which is the identical name the fingerprint lab just gave up,” said Detective Rhymer, cradling the phone at his desk. “Hey, two hits at the same time. Are we supposed to hook our pinkies, or something?” Opie got a sense of the room and blushed. “Forget I said that.”

  “See how this jibes with your info, Ope.” She referred to her new spiral notepad, the red Clairefontaine Pupitre that Rook brought her as a souvenir from France. “Beauvais was indeed Haitian. An illegal who got in the system with a prior arrest for trespassing.”

  Rhymer nodded. “They busted him and some of his pals for Dumpster diving on private property. Midtown North turned him over to ICE for processing and a hearing date. Beauvais bonded out then…surprise, surprise…bail skipped.”

  As Roach saddled up to check out the Haitian’s last-known address in Flatbush, Captain Irons waddled in from his office. “Patrol just responded to a call about a home invasion on West End Avenue and discovered a fatal.” He turned to go, then added, “It’s a pretty exclusive block. Let me know if it’s a VIP so I can do my thing.”

  Everyone knew Wally’s thing was a press announcement. For the Iron Man, getting on TV was more than a duty; it was his passion.

  Always thinking in contingencies, Heat knew this would happen eventually: dueling cases and a short staff. It was one thing to lament Detective Washington’s empty desk, another to be prepared when it came time to divide and conquer. Nikki beckoned Detectives Raley and Ochoa over. “Calling an audible. You two think you’re ready to take the point on this new case, the home invasion?”

  She already knew the answer. And the pair, who recently had been asking to be given more responsibility, didn’t need to debate. Raley said, “Better than ready.”

  Ochoa finished the thought. “Roach-Ready.”

  “Good. Bring along Detective Rhymer as support, but this is your show.” Heat couldn’t help but notice the two seemed a little taller when they rolled to West End Ave. “Detective Feller, you set for a ride with me to Flatbush?”

  But it was Rook who answered, “You bet.” And, as he saw Feller approach, he added, “Shotgun.”

  Rush hour crept the opposite way when they came out of the Battery Tunnel, so the unmarked Taurus Police Interceptor sailed along through Red Hook and Gowanus, turning off Flatbush Avenue onto Avenue D a mere thirty minutes after Heat, Rook, and Feller buckled up outside the precinct. “You don’t care that I have a tendency to get carsick,” said Rook from the rear seat.

  Detective Feller didn’t turn around, just said, “Only if you blow chunks on the back of my head.”

  Nikki caught a glimpse of Rook appealing to her in the mirror, and when she ignored him and went back to looking for the address, he added, “I don’t know if I can live in a world where shotgun doesn’t mean shotgun.”

  They drove right past the building the first time because the street numbers had been pried off the doorframe, leaving only half of a brass 4 dangling sideways from a nail. Heat killed the engine and surveyed the flophouse, a six-story walk-up of graffitied brick, sections of which had been slathered over by brown paint in a sorry attempt to hide the tags. Some teenage girls, huddled clannishly on the stoop, registered the cop car, and split for the bodega next door. A plastic bag of trash flew out an upstairs window. It broke apart on the dead lawn and Feller said, “Home, sweet home.”

  “You might think about waiting here.”

  Rook groaned in protest. “This again? Really?”

  When he had first started riding along, before they were in a relationship, Heat made him wait in the car for fear of liability. And later, because he meddled. Then she gave it up because he had—more or less—proven he knew how to behave himself. Sometimes. Why did she revert today? She glimpsed him again in her rearview and knew why. That jewelry receipt. It impacted her more than she knew. Nikki was worried something could happen to him.

  “Maybe I should go back where I’ll be safer, like hanging off a broken footbridge in the Congo.”

  “Stay close, writer boy,” was all she said.

  They passed some chalky dog turds on the landing of the third floor, and, as they trudged up one more story toward Fabian Beauvais’s room, Rook asked what they guessed the monthly rent ran in an apartment building like this. Feller said, “You don’t go monthly here, dude. This is weekly, at best. No lease, no ID, no job, no prob.”

  “It’s an SRO,” said Heat.

  “Right. Single-room occupancy.”

  Detective Feller scoffed. “More like squalid, wretched, odious.”

  “Uh, actually,” said Rook, “that would be SWO.”

  Feller stopped on the top step of the fourth floor and turned to look down at him. “You’re still pissed I got shotgun, aren’t you.”

  “No, I write for a living, and, with all due respect to the erroneously dubbed three Rs, wretched isn’t spelled with an R, but with a—”

  “Hey!” called Heat just as two men the size of NFL tight ends rushed from the hallway at Feller’s back, shoving him from behind. He flew forward, his body plowing into Heat and Rook. All three tumbled as the pair leaped over them and bolted down the stairwell, skipping half the steps. Detective Feller grabbed the banister and pulled himself off Heat, who rolled herself to her feet and sprang off in pursuit.

  Flying around the turn on the second floor landing, Nikki heard the entry door slam below her and so wasn’t surprised when she reached the front stoop and saw the men had already gained fifty yards on her. She ID’d herself and called a freeze as she sprinted after them, now with Feller and Rook a dozen paces behind.

  At Kings Highway the men separated and, just as Heat hand signaled for Feller to take the one who split left, something unusual happened. Each hopped into a waiting car—one of two nondescript, plateless sedans that sat waiting for them—and then sped off, roaring with far more muscle under their hoods than those little cars should have packed. One of them, a Japanese import, cut a wild, bounding diagonal across the concrete median and fishtailed with the other into the distance until the sound of their souped up engines faded like dying flies.

  They returned to the fourth floor more quietly. Attentively, too, with Heat and Feller resting hands on holsters. Rook hung back on the landing while the cops flanked the door to listen. They shook no to each other. Nikki examined the lock for jimmy marks, but the serially abused relic had more scratches than shine. The two detectives shared ready nods. Heat turned the key the manager had given her and in they went, announcing “NYPD” and fanning out textbook-style to clear the compact room, closet, and lav.

  In contrast to the
grubbiness of the building, the Haitian’s SRO revealed itself to be tidy and immaculate when Feller peeled the aluminum foil off one of the windows to let in the sun. The futon on the floor was neatly made with a week’s worth of T-shirts, underwear, socks, and a pair of jeans folded and stacked in the blue plastic basket beside it. A so-called kitchen, really just a thirty-six-inch Formica counter with a puny, stainless steel sink dropped into it, gleamed. There was no stove, not even a hot plate, but the old microwave oven, which Heat popped open, was empty and smelled like the Mr. Clean with Febreze on the shelf above it.

  Rook said, “This place would go for five thousand a month in Manhattan,” then pressed PLAY on the portable CD unit on the empty bookcase. Rap Kreyol from Barikad Crew blasted and made them jump. He switched it off and said, “Sorry, sorry.”

  “What’s your take?” asked Feller after a quick once-over of the place.

  “You mean beyond the fact that Fabian Beauvais was a neatnik and liked Haitian rap?” Heat turned a circle in the middle of the room. “No personal effects, no pictures, no books, no magazines, only take-out containers in the trash? I’d say he hardly lived here.”

  “How does an illegal who resorts to Dumpster diving afford a place he doesn’t live in? Doesn’t make sense.”

  They spread out to search the room. It wouldn’t take long with three of them and a place that size. Heat took the kitchenette, Feller the shelves and boxes, Rook went into the tiny closet, which lacked even a door. As was the case throughout the whole SRO, the primary repair element was duct tape. It was wrapped around the spigot of the kitchen faucet, it held the empty curtain rod up above the bed, and where Rook stood in the closet, dusty, gritty, and gummy old pieces of it held down the curling linoleum on the floor. But a one-foot strip of shiny and new silver tape was plastered in one corner. “What do you think?” asked Rook. When they joined him, he said, “One of these things is not like the others.”

  Heat and Feller got on bent knees. She took a documentary shot with her iPhone. The other detective took out his blade and cut the length of the tape, opening up a seam in the flooring that curled up. He pulled it back, exposing a rectangular hole in the under-boards, and nested in it was an envelope. Even though she wore gloves, Heat plucked the envelope out by the edges. It was thick and unsealed. And there were several fingerprints on it in what appeared to be dried blood. She folded back the closure, knowing what she’d find, just not knowing the amount.

  “Are they all hundreds?” asked Detective Feller over her shoulder.

  “Looks to be,” she said, leaving the money inside. “If so, there are thousands in here.” Nikki riffled the stack and stopped when she came upon a lump that created a bookmark in the middle of the cash. Feller extracted the tweezers from his Swiss Army knife, and with them, Heat drew out of the money a small piece of scratch paper with an address and a phone number written in ballpoint. And underneath, a word scrawled in pencil. “Can you read this?” She held it out to the other detective who squinted and tilted his head, trying to make it out.

  “Conscience,” whispered Rook in her ear. Startled and blushing, Nikki turned to him. But he was only deciphering the scrawl. “It says, ‘conscience.’”

  The crime scene unit tagged-in and Detective Heat left them to scour Fabian Beauvais’s rental for more clues. She had not turned up a cell phone and asked them to alert her if one surfaced. Meantime, she, Rook, and Feller left to work the new leads. Once more the homicide squad leader felt hamstrung by her personnel shortage. Nikki’s preference would have been to leave a detective to canvass the building and neighborhood, but with Roach and Rhymer deployed on the home invasion, she brought Randall Feller back to the Two-Oh with her to get the envelope labbed for a potential fingerprint and blood match with the dead Haitian’s and to run serial numbers on the ten grand that turned out to be inside it. She would track the phone number and the address herself.

  Of course, the pair of goons that bowled them over in the stairwell deserved some scrutiny, also. Heat called ahead to book a police-sketch artist to meet at the precinct so they could generate some pictures to follow up the Be On The Lookout notice she had transmitted. When she hung up, Rook asked them why they thought the two men had been there.

  “Could be the money,” said Feller. “Whatever they were up to, we surprised them.”

  “Actually,” said Heat, “I believe we were the ones who got surprised.” She made a note that when Raley got free, she’d have the King of All Surveillance Media scrub traffic cams in Flatbush for hits on the two getaway cars, although she didn’t hold much hope there. Their escape setup smelled like a pro execution. Combining that with ten grand and a mysterious note hidden in the floor of a closet told Heat something more was going on than a guy falling out of an airplane. She pressed the gas pedal, as if that would help her find out sooner what it was.

  Back in the bull pen, Nikki hung up her phone and crossed over to the Murder Board. “Bingo.” Rook and Feller joined her there and she pointed to the eight-by-tens of the bloody envelope and the note she had posted there. “As you know, there wasn’t any area code with this phone number, but a telecom records crunch scored a match with the address written there, which turns out to be in the Hamptons. I had them run it twice, and the phone listing is definitely to the same residence.”

  “Show-off,” said Rook.

  Feller tried to peek at her spiral notepad. “You get a name?” Without answering, she uncapped a red dry-erase marker with her teeth and printed it in big block letters. When she finished, Randall said, “Whoa.…” Rook simply had two brows arched in surprise.

  “What about Keith Gilbert?” asked Wally Irons from the doorway of the bull pen. The precinct commander’s fishbowl office looked out upon the Homicide Squad Room, and the VIP name had attracted his immediate attention, even from behind the glass. As a rule—and a sound one—Heat kept the captain out of the loop on most investigations until they closed. The Iron Man had too great a knack for gumming the works, at best; monkey-wrenching the whole deal, at worst. Trapped now, she sketched out the case in its leanest bullet points and explained how she came to identify a rich and powerful Port Authority commissioner as someone she wanted to interview in a suspicious death inquiry.

  “You sure that’s a smart play?”

  “I’m taking it you don’t, sir.”

  Irons peered over his gut to check the shine on his shoes. “I am not going on the record telling you not to follow a lead, Detective. But.” He raised his face to hers. “Keith Gilbert is golf buddies with the fucking mayor. You watch the news, you read the papers. Every night he’s in a tux making rounds at cocktail parties with the biggest political donors in this city, getting greased up to run for senator. Like he needs their Goddamn money.”

  His face clouded and he turned to Rook, as if just realizing he was there. “All this is off the record, right?”

  The journalist winked and mimed a lock and key to his lips.

  Heat had to acknowledge that, for once, her captain’s aversion to stirring trouble was more than his default stance of self-preservation and sycophancy. Keith Gilbert was a force of nature not to be taken lightly. Scion of a wealthy shipping magnate who had let his cargo business go to rust in his old age, young Keith had dropped out of his Harvard MBA program to grab the reins of the family business from his father. Against odds, advice, and common sense, he not only held on to the broke company, he doubled down by committing a fortune to expansion, gambling his own inheritance on a dream.

  Gilbert spent and spent, first renovating the outmoded cargo fleet. Then he spent more, buying up cruise ships from weak players to create a new income stream in tourism, which paid off richly. Through a series of canny moves, luck, and legendary toughness, he boldly saved the broke company and made it flourish.

  He also did it with style. Over the past decade Gilbert’s winning face commonly stared out from multiple covers at newsstands
: paragliding the western mountains of Norway; skippering a yacht in the America’s Cup; holding hands with his society bride at their storybook wedding on the Amalfi Coast; or, more recently, laughing as the charismatic guest at dinner parties inside the Beltway with the DC power elite. As if resurrecting a decaying business wasn’t enough of a challenge, the shipping millionaire had set his compass heading for Washington.

  But charming as he was known to be publicly, the once and future knight of the next Camelot also had a reputation as a bullyboy. Behind his back—always with a look over the shoulder—critics knew he took no prisoners. One joke making the rounds speculated that the environmental affront floating in the middle of the Pacific known as the Great Garbage Patch was really just the remnants of anyone who ever said no to Keith Gilbert or got in his way.

  Heat knew all that. But she also knew doing her job meant not being afraid of uncomfortable places and the powerful that inhabit them. “Sir, I appreciate your caution. And I hope you recognize that I would never approach anyone disrespectfully, whether they were wealthy and connected like Keith Gilbert or poor and marginalized like Fabian Beauvais.”

  “Who?”

  Rook pointed to his name on the Murder Board and mouthed, “Victim.”

  “You’re gonna do this aren’t you, Heat.”

  “The address and phone number of his summer mansion was written on an envelope containing ten thousand dollars hidden in the floor of a dead man’s apartment. I think it’s good police work to at least ask Commissioner Gilbert a few questions.”

  At a loss, Irons said, “Keep me looped in,” and retreated toward his fishbowl.

  “As always, Captain,” said Heat. Detective Feller smirked and returned to his desk.

  Rook seemed lost in the ozone. “Weirdest thing. All this talk made me flash on this vivid dream I keep having. You are a senator.” He shook it off. “Senator Heat. Where’d that come from?”