High Heat

by Richard Castle

  These men—and there had to be at least three, since there was someone behind that camera—would do whatever it took to get their hands on Rook, even if it meant martyring themselves. Especially if it meant martyring themselves. They wouldn’t stop until Rook’s head was the one bouncing on the floor.

  Subconsciously, she brought her hand to her neck. People who study such things could have told her it was a classic gesture that signified feelings of vulnerability. The moment she realized she was doing it, she lowered her hand.

  Too late.

  “That’s why I asked where Rook was,” Ochoa said quietly. “I figured he’d be safe enough in Montana.”

  “North Dakota,” Heat said distractedly.

  “Whatever,” Ochoa replied. “Don’t worry, Captain. These guys can’t get at him there. I don’t think they even know North Dakota exists.”

  The other detectives weren’t saying a word. They were all just looking at her, seeing how she’d react to the crisis. Ever since she became captain, Heat felt her life had been a series of tests. And she was not only taking them on her own behalf. She was taking them for her entire gender.

  She was the first female captain in the history of the Twentieth Precinct. Some of the men who had come before her had been highly competent commanders who represented the best of what the shield was all about. Others had been careerist fools who had stumbled into the top spot by some combination of luck and the Peter Principle.

  Heat knew she was being judged by a different standard. Maybe it shouldn’t have been that way, there in the second decade of the twenty-first century. But Heat didn’t confuse what should be with what was.

  At that moment, her detectives were wondering: Would the boss keep her cool, assess the situation, and set the squad into action? Like a man. Or would she freak out and give in to her emotions? Like a girl.

  Heat blinked twice. Then she got her priorities straight. She could worry about the case in a moment. Her husband’s life came first.

  “I have to make a phone call,” was all she could say. Then she stumbled into her office and closed the door.

  Her hands were shaking as she pressed the button to speed-dial Rook.

  “Come on,” she whispered fervently as the call connected. “Pick up.”

  There was no ring. The call went straight to voice mail.

  “You’ve reached the personal mobile phone of Jameson Rook,” her husband’s smooth, sexy voice said. “Press one if you want to leave a message for my first Pulitzer Prize. Press two if—”

  Heat jabbed her phone’s pound button to shortcut directly to the leaving-a-message part, then waited what felt like an eternity for the beep to finish. Yet when it was through, signaling that she could begin talking, she realized she didn’t even know what she wanted to say. Her mind had been racing too quickly to formulate anything coherent.

  “Hey, it’s me,” she said, her voice sounding unusually tremulous and uncertain. “Look, it’s really important. You have to call me as soon as you get this, okay? Like, immediately.”

  Heat let that linger for a second. It wasn’t good enough. She had to impress upon him the danger he was in.

  “If you don’t get me for some reason, go directly to the police station in whatever city you’re in. Tell them you need protection because there’s been…there’s been a credible threat against your life. And if you can’t get to the police, at least find someone with a gun who can watch your back, and…Look, just call me, okay? I love you.”

  She ended the call and sagged against the wall. Then she turned and saw the blinds to her office were open. The entire squad could see her.

  Very deliberately, she took a deep breath. Then another. She looked down at her blouse, which was crisply ironed and still tucked neatly into the flat waistband of her slacks. She brought her chin up and straightened her spine.

  Then she opened the door of her office and returned to the bull pen.

  “Play that video again,” she said.

  “Cap,” Raley begin, “you sure you want to—”

  “Play the fucking video, Rales,” Heat said.

  Time froze for a second. Nikki Heat almost never swore, and everyone in the precinct knew it. She fixed her detectives with a steely gaze and addressed them in a raised voice that had rediscovered its resolve.

  “Let’s not allow the sensationalism of this video to distract us,” she said. “This is a murder investigation, people. Murder investigations are what we do here.”

  She pointed at the screen. “That video is our first piece of evidence. It’s also the killers’ first mistake. And I’m sure they’ve made others. I don’t care about untraceable IP addresses. That video is laying down all the bread crumbs we need. We’re going to follow the trail straight to those scumbags, and then we’re going to put them away. Because that’s what we do to bad guys here in the Two-Oh.”

  “Hell yeah,” Feller hooted.

  “We’ll get ’em, Cap,” Rhymer said.

  Roach and Aguinaldo were nodding approvingly.

  The video had knocked Heat off balance. But not for long. She had her legs back underneath her and her team assembled around her. And it was a group of detectives who were as good as any in the NYPD.

  Those ISIS lunatics thought they were going to get Nikki Heat’s husband.

  Not if she got them first.

  They watched the video again, this time with what Heat liked to call “beginner’s eyes.”

  It was a way of thinking as much as it was a way of looking at evidence. Heat had long ago observed that veteran detectives often became jaded. Thinking they had seen it all before, they trusted in their experience to solve the crime and overlooked some of the small details that a nervous beginner, who made sure to take in everything, did not.

  Heat put on her best beginner’s eyes. She noticed the body language of the victim, who hadn’t begged for her life—too proud. She noted that the man with the machete had swung the weapon with his left hand, making him unusual in Arab culture, which considered the left hand unclean and forced children to use their right. She saw the way the men on camera kept looking at someone off camera, probably the person who was in charge.

  When the video ended, Heat instructed Raley to pause it, freezing the frame just before the screen went dark. The threat against Rook was now a thing she had put in its own box. Compartmentalizing was often the only way a cop could keep doing her job, and Nikki Heat was one of the best at it.

  “Okay, first we need to identify our victim,” Heat said. “We know she’s a journalist, but New York City has a lot of those.”

  “Too many,” Ochoa said, then immediately buttoned his mouth when Heat glared at him.

  “Rales, can you give me an estimate of the victim’s height?” Heat asked.

  Raley, who wasn’t known as the king of all surveillance media for nothing, said, “Way ahead of you.”

  He pointed toward the ceiling depicted in the video. It was white corkboard, with recessed florescent lighting fixtures. “Standard commercial florescent light bulbs are forty-eight inches long. All I had to do was take that known factor and use it to extrapolate the height of the victim. It got a little tricky, because the victim is kneeling. But assuming normal thigh-to-calf ratio, she is between five foot eight and five foot ten.”

  “Good work,” Heat said.

  She turned to Detective Feller, a streetwise city native, and said, “Head over to Missing Persons and see if anyone has recently called in a report about a white female under age forty, approximately five-nine. Start in the five boroughs but then go to the suburbs. Not many people on a journalist’s salary can afford to live here. Look at Maplewood, Montclair, Poughkeepsie. You get the idea. Weed out the homeless, the runaways, and the drug addicts, and see if there’s anyone left.”

  “Got it,” Feller said.

  “Opie,” she said, looking at Rhymer, who brought his towheaded clean-cut looks and southern mountain twang with him from Roanoke, Virginia. “Call around t
o the major newspapers and magazines. Talk to the managing editors and see if they have anyone unaccounted for—maybe someone failed to show up for work or isn’t answering her cell phone. But, for God’s sake, don’t tip them off as to what’s going on. Just be as vague as possible.”

  “You betcha,” Rhymer said.

  “Oach,” she said, and the short, powerfully built Miguel Ochoa stepped forward. “I want you to interface with Cooper McMains on the Counterterrorism Task Force. Let’s get a line on any of the extremist groups in the city who might pull something like this. It’s possible we’re dealing with a new element. But if McMains thinks it’s one of his frequent fliers who is suddenly escalating, let’s start kicking down doors and looking for video equipment.”

  “And machetes,” Ochoa said.

  “Yes, and machetes.”

  “Rales,” she said. She was now looking at the nattily dressed Irish-American sitting at the computer. “I need a crime scene. There has to be something in that video that will help us identify where it was shot. Maybe there’s a permit posted on the wall. Maybe there’s a distinctive building we can see out the window. Just keep working it until you find something. We need a where if we’re going to have any chance at coming up with a who.”

  “Yes, sir,” Raley said.

  Inez Aguinaldo, the only detective not yet tasked, shifted her weight. Heat had personally recruited the former military policewoman from the Southampton Village Police Department, out on the tip of Long Island, because Heat liked the woman’s cool. Everything about Aguinaldo was buttoned-down and professional, much like the captain she now reported to.

  “Aguinaldo,” Heat said. “I haven’t forgotten you. I’m just saving the best for last. I want you chasing down our odd sock.”

  When Heat used the phrase “odd sock,” it was to refer to that one piece of evidence that didn’t seem to fit with the others.

  “Or in this case, it might actually be a different piece of clothing, which is why—no offense to the gentlemen here—I want a slightly more discriminating eye working it,” Heat continued, then pointed to the lower left corner of the screen. “Rales, can you zoom in on that spot?”

  Raley complied, enlarging what was otherwise just an empty spot on the floor.

  “Can you sharpen it a bit for me?”

  Raley played with the keyboard and mouse for a minute. Slowly, what had been a blurry, brightly colored blob in the corner gained resolution.

  “Let me just isolate it a little more,” Raley said. “And I’ve got one more filter I can pass it through.”

  With one last dramatic click, Raley brought the spot into focus. It was an exquisite silk scarf, one that looked altogether out of place on the floor of a jihadist’s secret hideout.

  “Give me two printouts of that,” Heat said. “Aguinaldo, I want you to take this around to the department stores and boutiques. See if anyone can tell us more about it. This doesn’t look like an everyday scarf to me. If we’re lucky, it’s some kind of limited edition designer item only carried by one or two retailers, and we can start narrowing down who might have purchased it.”

  “Start at Saks,” Feller volunteered. “If you go in the entrance at Fifth and Fiftieth, the scarves are up on the second floor by the escalator, right next to women’s outerwear.”

  Everyone in the bull pen was suddenly staring at Feller.

  “What?” Feller said, defensively. “They got nice stuff there.”

  “He goes there to hit on the perfume girls when he’s off duty,” Rhymer explained.

  “Might as well toss your line in the water where you know there’s fish,” Feller said, grinning. “I thought you country boys knew that.”

  “Okay, let’s stay focused, people,” Heat said, then turned back to Aguinaldo. “If any of the merchants give you a hard time about giving up customer info, let me know and we’ll expedite a warrant. I’m sure Judge Simpson would do anything to help once he hears his favorite poker buddy is in trouble.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  Heat walked over to a blank dry erase board, grabbed a marker, and, in the spot where they usually attached a picture of the victim, instead drew a large question mark. Then she attached a picture of the scarf.

  The murder board—where she and other detectives would keep track of leads and try to make connections between the evidence they posted there—had officially been started.

  “All right. I want regular reports, people,” Heat called as the detectives began to break up. “If you get a lead, for God’s sake don’t sit on it. I don’t think I need to remind you, but time is not on our side here.”

  She also didn’t need to remind them what was at stake.

  Heat returned to her office, closed the door behind her, and tried Rook again.

  Immediately she heard, “You’ve reached the personal mobile phone of Jameson Rook. Press one if—”

  She hung up, then banged out a text message: CALL ME! 911!

  The message disappeared into the cellular ether. Heat just stood there for a second, momentarily unsure what to do with herself. She looked over at her desk, which was mounded with CompStat reports, complaints about stop-and-frisk, vouchers in need of signing…

  No. She couldn’t face any of that right then. Heat was good at compartmentalizing, but she wasn’t that good.

  The case. The video. Her husband. That was all she could think about.

  She needed a clear head and some fresh air. Or at least the best air New York could offer. That would help her work through the case again. The terrorists hadn’t left her much to go on, but she still wanted to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.

  Before anyone could knock on her door and interrupt her with an overtime request, she fled toward the elevator, the one with half the NYPD shield on either side. Soon she was out on 82nd Street.

  The crisp embrace of an October morning was there to greet her. A city of New York garbage truck was slowly working its way up the street, its crew making collections one and two bags at a time, a malodorous smell wafting behind it. A food cart vendor pushed past, heading in the direction of Columbus Avenue and the promise of greater foot traffic. A sidewalk oak tree—most of its leaves orange or yellow but a few of them still green—stirred in the breeze.

  Heat sat on the steps to the precinct. A group like ISIS presented a unique challenge to even the best detective squad, because much like with an investigation into a random serial killer, the usual investigative paths—Had the victim received any threats? Who might have had motive to kill her? Was there a jealous husband, an angry boyfriend, a crazed neighbor?—weren’t really available.

  Yet unlike with a serial killer, in this case there was no profiling, no patterning, no textbook or behavioral expert to consult. Beyond the anachronistic interpretation of a fifteen-hundred-year-old religious text, there was no real explanation for their actions. Even if Rhymer or Feller did manage to identify the victim, asking why these terrorists had chosen to kill this particular journalist might yield no more results than asking why a shark had chosen to eat a particular fish.

  Without even knowing what she was doing, Heat started walking in the direction of Columbus Avenue.

  She passed a garbage truck making its pickup, then by an apartment building. There was construction on what promised to be a new hibachi place at the end of the block. On the other side of the mostly residential street there were brownstones.

  These were all things she had seen a thousand times or more during her years in the Twentieth Precinct, such that she didn’t notice them anymore. She could force herself to have beginner’s eyes while on a case, but not while on a stroll up 82nd Street.

  So she wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to her surroundings when she suddenly saw something that made her stop in her tracks, something so shocking it was probably the only sight in the world that could have distracted her from the case that had become the most important of her life.

  It was a homeless person, a woman,
sitting on a bench under a bus shelter on the opposite side of the street. She was hunched over. There was a knit cap on her head. She appeared to be wearing most of the clothing she owned: two jackets and an untold number of sweaters and shirts underneath it. In front of her was a small wire-mesh shopping cart, likely stolen from a grocery store, which contained her worldly possessions.

  Nothing about her should have been at all noteworthy, except Heat caught the entirety of the woman’s face from a distance of roughly thirty yards. Their eyes locked for perhaps half a second.

  It was all Heat needed. Human beings are part of the genus homo, a classification of bipedal primates that lack sharp teeth, claws, or any other defensive anatomy. For millions of years, people have relied, instead, on social interaction for their very survival. It has endowed the human brain with some exceptionally well-tuned equipment designed for the recognition and decoding of each other’s facial structures, a talent we retain throughout our entire lives without the slightest bit of practice or training.

  Even Alzheimer’s patients, whose minds are muddled by a thick plaque that has robbed them of the names of their children, will still recognize their loved one’s faces, and will brighten immediately—one could say reflexively—upon seeing them. The ability to recognize familiar faces is that powerful and hard-wired within.

  That’s why there was no doubt in Nikki Heat’s mind during that half second. She knew exactly who it was. She knew because the face was so seared in her memory. She knew because it was nearly identical to the one she saw every time she looked in the mirror.

  The homeless person on the bench was her mother.

  A woman who had been dead for seventeen years.

  The woman—might as well call her by her name: Cynthia Heat—broke eye contact first, looking down in her lap like she hadn’t just been made.

  Before she was Nikki’s mother, she had been a spy, after all. And the first thing you do when you think your cover has been blown is pretend like it hasn’t been, in the hopes that your mark doesn’t register your mistake.