High Heat

by Richard Castle

  Nikki was just staring, too stunned to move. All the color had drained from her face. It wasn’t wrong to say she looked like she had just seen a ghost, because to Nikki that’s what Cynthia Heat was.

  She had died in Nikki’s arms. Hadn’t she?

  Her lifeblood had oozed out all over Nikki’s shirt. Hadn’t it?

  Nikki had seen the knife sticking out her mother’s back. Hadn’t she?

  The garbage truck rumbled in front of her, its diesel engine spewing exhaust, its air breaks announcing its halt with a sharp hiss. The noise broke Nikki out of her trance, and she started running up 82nd Street, in the direction of the bus shelter.

  As soon as she was clear of the truck, she veered into the street, nearly getting run over by a speeding Uber driver. The car screeched to a halt just inches from Nikki’s hip, its driver shouting curses in her direction.

  Nikki didn’t care. She didn’t even break stride. She was hell-bent on reaching that bus shelter.

  She couldn’t see her mother anymore. The parked cars were obscuring her view of the bench.

  “Mom!” she shouted. “Mom!”

  Two cars, parallel parked so close to each other their bumpers were touching, blocked Nikki’s path. She didn’t go around but just leapt on top of them, using the combined bumpers like a step.

  Once she landed on the other side, she could see the bus shelter clearly.

  The bench was empty.

  Nikki ran up to it. A man was leaning against the shelter, his face buried in that day’s Ledger.

  “Did you just see a woman sitting here?” Heat asked him frantically.

  “Lady, there are eight million people in this city and half of them are women. Now, if she had looked like you, maybe—”

  Heat ignored the rest. She looked down 82nd Street, but there was no way her mother could have covered the entire block in the amount of time since Nikki had seen her.

  She turned her attention toward Columbus Avenue and took off at a sprint, nearly knocking over an old man taking his dog for a morning pee.

  “Hey, watch it!” he yelled. His words bounced off Nikki’s back.

  She reached Columbus and looked left, then right. It was just a busy New York avenue in a vibrant residential part of the city. There was no hunched homeless woman. No overstuffed grocery cart.

  No Cynthia.

  Was it even possible for her to have gotten away? Nikki marked her mother’s birthday every year—a ritual that usually ended with her getting good and righteously drunk—so she knew her mother would have recently turned sixty-six. It would have been a remarkably fast getaway for a woman well into her seventh decade, even one who is a former spy.

  Nikki scanned up and down the block again. She looked high and low. She looked with beginner’s eyes and veteran’s eyes and everything in between.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Her mother, one of the best spies the United States government ever had the honor to employ, had vanished just as quickly as she had appeared.

  For the next twenty minutes, Nikki Heat scoured two full blocks of Columbus Avenue. She checked every possible nook, cranny, and hiding spot. Then she rechecked.

  And yet, for all that effort, she came up just as empty as she had on first glance.

  Finally, she began staggering back to the Two-Oh, her brain a blur of thoughts.

  When her eyes had first fallen on the woman sitting on the bench, all the neurons and synapses dedicated to storing data about her mother’s face had instantly fired. In those early nanoseconds, when it was all feeling and no thinking, Nikki had been absolutely sure about who she had seen.

  Now her rational mind was kicking in. And it was throwing doubt into the equation. Her mother, alive…It was impossible, right?

  Surely, it had just been the stress of the moment, the shock of the threat against Rook. The traumatized brain can play all kinds of tricks on itself. There were Native American religious rituals that involved dancing beyond exhaustion, which triggered hallucinations. Was this some version of that?

  Or maybe it was some kind of regression in the stages of grief, like she was going back to square one: denial.

  Or it was some bizarre form of substitution: Now that Rook, the man who had become her world, was being brought into peril, her psyche was retreating back to her mother, the woman who had been Nikki’s world in childhood.

  Or…

  Get out of your head, Heat!

  The thought hit her with a jolt. If she permitted herself, she could fall down into the alternate universe where her mother was still alive and she would never leave it. The obsession over solving her mother’s murder had, at one point in her life, been all-consuming. She could too easily see herself becoming obsessed with this new fantasy.

  And she couldn’t allow that. Not with Rook in danger.

  So she shoved that vision of her mother down deep, where she would deal with it another time. Or not at all.

  She picked up her pace. By the time she made it back up to the bull pen, Ochoa was the only one left. He was standing in front of the flat-screen television that had been bolted into one of the corners.

  “Bad news, Captain,” he said.

  “More?” Heat asked.

  Ochoa tilted his head toward the TV, which was muted. “Afraid so. It looks like that video has been leaked to the media.”

  He pointed to the bottom-of-the-screen crawl on the local all-news station. TERRORIST GROUP CLAIMING ISIS TIES DECAPITATES NYC JOURNALIST IN BRUTAL VIDEO…BUNDLE UP! FARMER’S ALMANAC PREDICTS SNOWY WINTER FOR THE NORTHEAST…STOCKS MIXED ON—

  Heat looked back at Ochoa.

  “They haven’t actually played it, have they?” she asked.

  “No. They’ve been congratulating themselves for their restraint. But you know it’s going to be on the Internet any second, if it’s not there already.”

  Heat shook her head. It would be an additional horror for the victim’s family—not only losing their daughter or granddaughter or niece, but having her execution forever available on the Web for the entertainment of the sickos who would click it over and over again.

  It was also a potentially negative development for her investigation. Once the video became readily available, there was always a possibility some attention-seeking lunatic would claim to be responsible. And without being able to hold back critical information from the public, it would be more difficult for her detectives to figure out if said lunatic was just playing them.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be working with McMains right now?” Heat asked.

  “He’s in a meeting,” Ochoa said. “But I’m next on his agenda. Don’t worry, Cap. We’ll get this—Oh, hey! Legs Kline!”

  Ochoa grabbed the remote off the wall, where it was attached with Velcro, and turned up the volume. The screen cut to the man who was improbably surging in the polls, threatening to turn the two-party system on its ear.

  “You’re not really thinking about voting for that guy, are you, Oach? I think if he had his way we would have built a wall that kept your family from coming here.”

  “Nah, he’s cool with us. He wants my people around so we can mow his lawn.”

  Ochoa continued: “Besides, did you hear about his private jet? It’s this 737 with a king-sized bed in it. How cool is that? Talk about joining the mile-high club in style.”

  “And this makes him qualified to be president…how exactly?” Heat asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m actually voting for Lindsy Gardner. Baby got back!”

  “So you’re voting for a candidate because you like her ass?”

  “It sounds kind of shallow when you put it that way. Let’s just say I like her domestic policies.”

  Heat just shook her head.

  “Anyhow, shhh, press conference time,” Ochoa said. “If I weren’t so devoted to Lindsy’s, uh, domestic policies, I might vote for this guy just for the entertainment value. It’s like watching Beverly Hillbillies reruns.”

  Heat rolled h
er eyes. The screen now read: LEGS KLINE/INDEPENDENT PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE/IN NYC FOR UNION SQUARE RALLY.

  “Oh, jeez, he’s here?” Heat said.

  “Hey, not our problem. Union Square, that’s the One-Three’s mess.”

  Heat was paying attention despite herself. She knew Rook was supposed to be off somewhere, away from the candidate, visiting Kline Industries facilities. But she half hoped something about his schedule had changed and he had decided to join the candidate—and that he had decided to keep his phone off so he wouldn’t be bothered by calls from his editor.

  Maybe she’d catch a glimpse of him. Then she could call the Thirteenth Precinct and have him detained for his own safety.

  The camera was now trained on a tall, angular man who stooped a little to compensate for his size. Michael Gregory Kline had grown to his adult height, six foot six, by the time he was a freshman in high school. The legend was that when he tried to go out for the football team, he was so skinny the coach cut him, declaring, “Sorry, son. You’re just all legs.”

  The name had stuck. Its decidedly un-presidential folksiness might have been a disqualifying factor in a different era. But now it was a major drawing card for a candidate who was polling well with Americans tired of voting for candidates they deemed inauthentic and elitist.

  They also liked his easy Texas charm and aw-shucks country boy humility. They liked his stories about how he flew a crop duster to help put himself through college, even though he barely fit in the cockpit. They liked his tales of steer-rasslin’, varmint-huntin’, and other activities that required dropping the “g” at the end of a gerund.

  But he was also clearly no fool. He hadn’t gone from struggling wildcatter’s son to billionaire by accident. He had grown up riding the boom-or-bust cycle of the Texas oil industry and decided there had to be a better way. Shrewdly, over many years and many eighteen-hour workdays, he built an empire that took oil money made during prosperous times and plowed it into businesses that would still churn a profit when things were lean.

  He grew his business prodigiously, reinvesting nearly every penny he made, barely taking a salary and continuing to live in a small 1920s Craftsman-style house just outside Dallas long after he should have moved to a bigger house and better neighborhood. He often talked about his meteoric rise, stressing that the simplicity of his management practices could be applied to government.

  “You don’t spend what you don’t have,” he said constantly.

  Or: “If you invest in the future, you’ll find you like what you have when you get there.”

  He was also way ahead of the curve when it came to matters like sustainability, recognizing years before most of his petroleum industry buddies that some of the notions being preached by the Sierra Club crowd—like harvesting natural resources in ways that didn’t deplete them or looking for ways to use less energy and cut down on waste—not only made sense for the environment, but for the bottom line as well.

  Kline had first come to public prominence when he wrote a best-selling business memoir entitled It’s Good to Be Good. Long before Google pioneered its “Don’t Be Evil” corporate philosophy, Legs had promoted similar values within Kline Industries: the idea that you could make money and be a responsible corporate citizen. He was said to put incredible pressure on his managers to turn a profit, but also to do it the right way.

  Heat knew Rook was trying to pry deeper into the Legs Kline rags-to-riches story. Was there a more calculating, ruthless side to Legs, a side that had spurned business partners and gouged out eyeballs on his way to the Forbes list? Was there rot beneath the gilding? Or had Legs Kline really perfected the art of making omelets without cracking any eggs?

  “Well, hey there, everyone,” Kline said to the journalists arrayed around him, smiling at them almost like he was surprised to see them. “Don’t tell Lise, but I’ve spent the morning enjoying one of the seediest parts of New York City.”

  Lise was Kline’s wife. The reporters around him seemed to draw in their collective breath. Was Legs Kline about to admit he had gone to a strip club? An off–Times Square peep show?

  Then, with the timing of a seasoned comic, he said, “The bagels.”

  Everyone laughed. “Had three of them for breakfast this morning. Lise’s been getting on me about my weight, so shhh, okay? But I will say, off the record, they were delicious. Can’t get bagels like that in D.C., that’s for sure. One more reason I don’t trust Washington.”

  More laughter followed. Every Legs Kline press conference was like that: off the cuff, informal, like it had been thrown together at the last second. The insider talk was that Kline was going out of his way not to appear too slick or too organized. He also eschewed podiums or any apparatus that visually separated him from the People. These were the subtle acts of genius contrived by his media advisors so their candidate seemed thoroughly uncontrived.

  “Mr. Kline, your Democratic opponent, Lindsy Gardner, was here last week,” began a poofy-haired guy with a Channel 3 microphone cover. “She says you don’t have the proper experience to be president, having never held elected office. How do you respond to that allegation?”

  “Well, I certainly don’t want to get on the bad side of Lindsy the Librarian,” Kline said, a smirk on his face. “Not sure I can afford the overdue fines.”

  Another round of chuckles rippled through the crowd. Poofy pressed on: “And your Republican challenger, Caleb Brown, says your economic plan will result in higher taxes for working-class Americans.”

  “Well, for starters, that’s not true,” Kline said. “But I have to admit, I’m surprised Mr. Brown even read my economic plan. I thought he was too busy picking the wings off House flies.”

  Chuckles abounded. He would be there all week. Try the salmon. And don’t forget to tip your waiters and waitresses.

  “Mr. Kline,” interrupted a woman from CNN before Poofy could lob another softball. “By now you’ve surely heard about the gruesome ISIS-style video that was released this morning.”

  Kline instantly went solemn. “I did hear about that. I did,” he said. “Haven’t seen it yet. Don’t think I want to. But I did hear about it.”

  The CNN woman pressed on: “You’ve made your stance on immigration from Muslim countries quite clear throughout this campaign. Would you—”

  “Now hang on a second, young lady. Hang on,” he interrupted, then shook his head.

  “Look, I know that I’m running for office now, and that folks are thinkin’ I’m goin’ to start actin’ in a certain way. And if I was a normal Washington politician, I know I’d be expected to use something like this to score what the pundits like to call ‘political points.’ Because you’re right. I do worry about keeping Americans safe in this dangerous world of ours. I worry about that all the time. It’s one of the biggest reasons I decided I wanted this job.”

  He swallowed hard, in a way that made his prominent Adam’s apple bob up and down.

  “But I have to tell you, there’s a time and place for scorin’ political points, and this isn’t it. I think you know by now I’m not a Washington politician. I’m just a boy from Terrell, Texas. And in Terrell, when you hear about a family that’s lost a loved one, you take your hat off, you bow your head, and you say a little prayer. I hope all of America is doing that right now for this poor woman and her family.”

  As if to emphasize the point, he hung his head extra low. From any other candidate, it would have seemed like political theater. But from Legs, it seemed genuine. That was what had made him so irresistible to the segment of voters that didn’t care a whit about his lack of foreign policy experience or that he couldn’t quite explain how a bill became a law.

  The camera panned out at that point, to capture the entire press corps assembled around Legs. All of them, even Poofy, were taking a moment of somber silence.

  Heat quickly scanned the mob of reporters. When she didn’t see Rook, she left Ochoa standing by himself in front of the television.

 
She would be offering prayers for the victim’s family, yes. But at the moment she had other prayers that were more pressing.

  Not ten minutes after the Legs Kline press conference broke up, Heat was in her office, sitting in an office chair that might as well have had spikes in it, for how jumpy she was.

  She had tried Rook’s mobile phone three more times. Still no answer.

  When her desk phone finally rang, she practically lunged at it, not even bothering to look at the caller ID on the screen.

  “Heat.”

  In return she heard not “hello” or “hi, it’s so-and-so” but rather, “We have ourselves a situation.”

  Zach Hamner, the senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters, seldom bothered with salutations, pleasantries, or introductions. He was known as “The Hammer” because it was how he was most often deployed by the people who gripped his handle. He was not only capable of making any precinct commander’s life an unbearable hell, but he seemed to enjoy it. Heat had heard it said that The Hammer had all the warmth and compassion of a sea slug, but she thought that was unfair. To sea slugs.

  In truth, Heat wouldn’t have made it to captain without The Hammer working as her behind-the-scenes champion at One Police Plaza. He was, in that sense, her patron. The only problem was his ideas about patronage seemed to have been exclusively informed by Niccolò Machiavelli.

  “What’s up, Zach?”

  “It’s not what’s up, it’s what’s going down,” Hamner said in what, for him, passed as an attempt at sheer hilarity.

  He paused for laughter. When it didn’t come, he got down to business by making his favorite pronouncement: “I’ve just come from the commissioner’s office.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “He’s seen the beheading video.”

  “Okay.”

  “He also just saw a stirring performance by presidential candidate Legs Kline. Were you watching by any chance?”

  “I got to the part where he tried to recruit the reporters for a prayer circle, then walked away. What did I miss?”