High Heat

by Richard Castle

  A cop who realized the case she had spent more time on than any other in her life needed a new timeline, new evidence, new everything. How had her mother pulled it off?

  Heat started with the moment her mother had left her possession. A paramedic—clearly an actress, or one of Cynthia’s spy buddies—had separated Nikki from the body. Then a cop, another paid performer and/or friend, had taken Nikki into the next room while a crew of other pretenders secreted Cynthia Heat away.

  A fraud. All of it. Perhaps aided by Baclofen, if Rook was right. Perhaps something else.

  They had fooled Nikki thoroughly. But was that really so difficult? She was just nineteen then, so naive and trusting of anyone who looked like an authority figure.

  But Cynthia would have needed to fool more than just a gullible teenager. Nikki had seen her mother’s death certificate. It was as official as they came, issued by the city of New York. How had she managed that?

  Heat walked over to the filing cabinet she kept in her small home office and thumbed it open. There were a number of files that pertained to her mother. But there was one, in particular, that Nikki was looking for.

  She was glad the realtor hadn’t decluttered that, too. Letting her fingers walk through the folders, she eventually found it:

  A file labeled MOM’S ARRANGEMENTS.

  This was a dead brain cell coming back to life. In the whirl of activity that immediately followed her mother’s death—when Nikki had been far too stunned by what happened to cope with the more mundane details of death—it had seemed like a blessing: Cynthia Heat had made all of her own arrangements and even had them paid for.

  She had picked out the funeral home. She had selected the crematory urn. And she had even selected, yes, the crematorium. It had all been neatly laid out in her will.

  At the time, it had seemed like such a thoughtful thing for her mother to have done. And Nikki was relieved to have one less thing to worry about.

  Now it struck her as utterly bizarre. Eighty-year-olds fretted over their funeral arrangements. Terminal cancer patients did, too. Cynthia Heat had been forty-nine and in perfect health. What kind of forty-nine-year-old picked out her own funeral urn?

  Nikki opened the file. The services had been held at Gannon Funeral Home, which was clearly a very real, very legitimate place. It was just a few blocks away. She had been there not only for her mother’s funeral, but to pay her respects to others in the years since, mainly neighbors who had passed. The people who ran it were very good at what they did, managing the details of a difficult time in their customers’ lives with professionalism and caring.

  Heat flipped through the paperwork. There was a brochure, a description of the funeral package being purchased. Cynthia Heat had even picked out the limo that would be used to take her remains out to the columbarium. The invoice had been typed on carbon paper—this was 1999, before everything had gone digital. It had been stamped PAID IN FULL at the top of the page. Nikki felt a little flub-flub in her stomach when she saw her mother’s signature at the bottom.

  Nikki kept pawing through the file. She next came to a similar grouping of papers from an establishment called Demming Crematorium. Again, a description of services to be rendered, all very official-looking. Again, an invoice, signed by Cynthia.

  But this time Nikki had no knowledge of, nor experience with, the business. All she knew was that she had been handed the urn with her mother’s alleged ashes in it at the funeral.

  Curious, Nikki plugged “Demming Crematorium New York” into Google.

  More than a thousand results flooded back at her. But even the top one, the one deemed most relevant by the all-knowing Google search algorithm, had “Missing: Demming” in ghostly gray letters at the bottom of it.

  The next one did, too. And everything else on the first page of results. Missing: Demming, indeed.

  She left off the “New York” and tried again.

  This time, all that came up were obituaries of people named Demming that happened to be posted by funeral homes that also had “Crematorium” in their names. But there was no Demming Crematorium.

  Heat leaned back, away from the keyboard. Was there such thing as a business that wasn’t on the Internet in the year 2016?

  Unlikely. But still possible. Especially if it was an old-world-business crematorium, which existed on referrals from other funeral homes, which were also old-world businesses.

  Heat bounced over to the New York State Web page and, after the right series of clicks, checked business licenses. There was no license issued to Demming Crematorium in the “active” section. So she clicked on over to “all,” which included licenses that had lapsed, back to 1984.

  She tried all combinations, knowing how picky databases could be. But whatever she typed in, she got: NO BUSINESS ENTITIES WERE FOUND.

  Which at least told Heat how the death certificate had been procured. The people at “Demming Crematorium” (really more actors, no doubt competent in their bearing) had delivered the ashen remains of “Cynthia Heat” (really incinerated Department of Public Works roadkill) to Gannon Funeral Home, which then went about applying for the death certificate, because that was part of the package Cynthia had purchased.

  Which was how Cynthia Heat’s death became official.

  So that was one mystery solved.

  Now if only Nikki Heat could begin to gain purchase on the many that remained.

  The bottle of Bolla Valpolicella had cost Nikki Heat $13.95 and a sneer from the guy at the liquor store who knew it had only pulled an 81 from Wine Observer.

  Heat didn’t care. She wasn’t drinking for taste. She was drinking for memory.

  It was 1996. She was sixteen. First trip to Italy. Mom with her every nervous step of the way.

  There was something about Europe that made Cynthia Heat come alive in ways she never did stateside. Her gestures became broader. Her face developed this permanent flush. Her voice became more enchanting, her stories more full of mischief. It was like her entire aura started glowing as soon as she cleared customs.

  Nikki, then a teenager, just thought it was the excitement of foreign travel, the opportunity to use her languages—how did she know that many, anyway?—and the thrill of something different. She never understood, until much later, about Cynthia Heat’s colorful history as an operative in the Nanny Network.

  It was only in hindsight that Nikki recognized everywhere they went as a place her mother had been already been—likely in much more exciting circumstances than as a tour guide to her clueless daughter. Cynthia Heat wasn’t just reveling in the present. She was reliving her thrilling past, with her daughter at her side.

  What, then, had Cynthia been thinking when she’d selected their first destination after landing at Leonardo da Vinci Airport, jetlagged but exuberant? It wasn’t the Colosseum, or St. Peter’s, or the Forum, or any of the other of the must-see destinations Nikki had read about in her guidebooks. It was this unremarkable little piazza. Nikki was sure it had a name, though she couldn’t remember it—if Cynthia had ever even told her in the first place.

  Without explanation or deviation from her path, Cynthia led them to this unnoticed place and sat down on the marble steps. She uncorked a bottle of Bolla Valpolicella, took a long swig, then passed the bottle to her daughter.

  Nikki had drunk alcohol before, of course. Her parents believed in letting their daughter have a sip of this or a half glass of that on the right occasion.

  But she had never drunk alcohol like that before. She took the bottle, tilted it back just as her mother had, and took a gulp. Then she handed it back, only to have her mother give her this tilt of the head that said drink some more.

  As the wine worked its way into her bloodstream, Nikki began to soak in what was around her. In the middle of the piazza was a marble sculpture of a Roman god whose face had been corroded by acid rain and whose left arm was only a stub, having fallen off centuries before. Had it been in America, it probably would have been one of the true ce
nterpieces of the metropolis, an ancient wonder the Chamber of Commerce would have featured in every brochure. Here, it was just another chunk of rock in a city that really did have much better to offer.

  Across the street was a simple stone church built in the eighth century AD, making its age unremarkable by Italian standards, but otherworldly to an American like Nikki, who had never seen anything so ancient. She stared at it in wonder, unable to fathom a length of time so out of context with her sixteen years. For more than half a millennium, the church had baptized, married, and buried generations of people, playing host to the drama of their lives. But the Romans just whizzed by it in their Fiats and Vespas without a second glance.

  Just like they didn’t pay attention to the two Americans sitting on the marble steps, guzzling straight from the bottle. Nikki’s mom wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t narrating the scene like she sometimes did, wasn’t doing anything but staring into the distance—or, as Nikki now surmised, into the past.

  Nikki could remember only being in the present. Sixteen is a contentious time in the cycle of a mother-daughter relationship. The teenage wars, which actually begin around age twelve, have been raging for what feels like forever by that point. Both sides are exhausted from the endless cycle of battle—retraining new armies, sending them into the field, declaring victors, counting casualties, drawing new lines only to rip them up the moment the troops are ready to mobilize again.

  That silent bottle of Bolla Valpolicella had been like a peace offering. They simply passed the bottle back and forth until the wine was gone and Nikki was half plastered. Then they ventured forth through the rest of the city.

  Her mother never explained why that piazza had been their first stop. Nikki never told her mother how much she cherished the moment.

  Now, all these years later, the sweet, fruity taste of Bolla Valpolicella took Nikki right back to the piazza, to that feeling of closeness with her mother.

  And Nikki always drank it the same way: straight from the bottle.

  By around nine o’clock, she was well into its contents. The Indian food she had ordered had yet to arrive so the wine was barely pausing at her empty stomach before going straight to her head. When her phone rang, she thought it would be the delivery guy needing to recheck the address, but it wasn’t.

  It was Rook.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said in a warm, sexy voice that made Heat wish he was there to take advantage of her semi-drunken state, so she could then take advantage of him right back.

  “Hey, you,” Heat said, curling her legs underneath her on the couch. “How was the interview with our future president?”

  “Good. Real good. We did half of it on the way to Pennsylvania and then the other half on the next flight. He’s really something else. Especially when you get his guard down a bit. We talked about his business, about his family, about his politics. And not that I agreed with everything he said, but the man really is quite good one-on-one. Charming. Funny. Brilliant in a down-to-earth way. Articulate as hell. He’s like Bill Clinton without the sleaze factor.”

  “Listen to you,” Heat said. “You sound like a cub reporter who’s just met his first rich celebrity.”

  “I know, right?” Rook said, laughing at himself. “Don’t worry. I’ll get ahold of myself before I sit down to the keyboard. I’ll find some disgruntled ex-employee to rip him unfairly just so I can balance the thing out.”

  In the background, Nikki heard some giggling. And maybe the ocean.

  “Where are you, anyway?” she asked.

  “South Beach. Miami was the last stop of the day for the Kline campaign and all the flights out tonight are already overbooked. So I figured I’d scoot on over here for the night then head back to New York in the morning. Sorry, I know how much you were hoping to have me fill the other half of the bed. Believe me, I was, too.”

  “Actually both halves are empty right now.”

  “Oh? Working late?”

  “Not exactly. I’m…I’m actually at my place right now.”

  There was a brief silence on the line. Heat heard a loud group of partygoers pass by somewhere nearby.

  “Ah,” Rook said at last. “What are you doing there?”

  Heat told him about Parry’s lab results and about the fictitious crematory.

  When Heat finished, Rook’s enthusiasm came bursting out of the phone.

  “So, wow, she’s…I mean, she’s really alive? Not that I doubted what you saw, but…Wow! That’s…that’s great, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I…I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “It is, Rook, but…I don’t mean to make this about me, but do you have any idea how much it hurt to lose her? It ripped my life apart for years. In some ways I’m still not over the trauma. I never will be. Couldn’t she have found some way to spare me that? To let me know she was still alive and she would come back someday?”

  “I’m sure she had a very good reason for doing what she did,” Rook said. “If she just up and disappeared like that, it had to be a life or death situation. And I’m sure the death she was worried about was yours. She was protecting you. She couldn’t take any risk that you knew. Your mourning had to be genuine.”

  “Rook, I was an actress,” Heat shot back. “Don’t you think I could have faked tears at a funeral? My mother had seen me cry onstage.”

  “But it wasn’t just the funeral. It was everything. She probably knew people would be watching you. If you didn’t act like she was dead every second of your life, it would have looked suspicious. She couldn’t take the risk you’d cry perfectly at the funeral and then be seen laughing with your friends over a meal two days later.”

  “Yeah, but okay, where the hell has she been since then? Couldn’t she have waited a month until things cooled down and then slipped me a note? She disappeared when I was nineteen years old, Rook. Nineteen! She missed my college graduation. She missed my wedding. She’s missed close to half my life. What kind of mother does that?”

  “A mother who was doing what she felt was best.”

  “Why are you sticking up for her? Whose side are you on, anyway?” Heat blurted, sounding childish even to herself. It was the wine talking. Or the old hurt talking.

  “Hey, hey, I’m on your side,” Rook cooed. “I’m always on your side. You know that. I’m just pointing out that your mom loved you and never would have hurt you if she could have avoided it.”

  “I know, I know. Sorry,” Heat said. She put the cork back on the wine.

  “So what’s your plan now? Do you just wait for your mother to reach out to you? She’s obviously in New York. Maybe she’s just scoping you out, seeing if it’s safe to reestablish contact?”

  Heat reached for a blanket that was folded on the back of the couch and drew it up over her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t actually have a plan. I think that’s part of what scares me. I have to do something proactive, Rook. I can’t just sit here until my mother feels like appearing again. I mean, do you know what it’s like? Walking down the street wondering if I’ll see her around the next corner?”

  “That has to be hard.”

  “And I keep thinking: if she’s still in danger, what if she needs my help? I’m not some clueless nineteen-year-old anymore. I have resources now. I can do something.”

  Her voice was gaining steam now, like she was just realizing the power she had.

  Rook began, “Careful, Nikki. You’ve been down this rabbit hole before. There’s nothing—”

  But Heat was beyond listening. Her brain was already going, her mouth just trying to keep up: “There are two people still alive who were connected with the events that led to my mother’s death—or, I guess I should call it now, her disappearance. Carey Maggs and Bart Callan.”

  Maggs, Rook didn’t need to be told, was the former brewery owner and pharmaceutical magnate who came up with the wicked scheme to dump smallpox on New York City because his business was the only one that made a vaccine.
And Callan was the former operative in the Department of Homeland Security and FBI who helped him do it.

  Both were now incarcerated. Everyone else connected with the plot was dead.

  “Okay,” Rook said. “And I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate. I’m just trying to help you think things through. What is going to make Maggs and Callan willing to talk now?”

  “Because time has passed,” Heat said immediately. “They’re no longer protected by a million dollars’ worth of lawyers. They’ve been stripped of their dignity and their pride. Whatever money and influence they once wielded no longer matters. They’re now just two more inmates in the federal system, facing a long and lousy incarceration that will only end when they leave prison feetfirst. If I can present myself as someone who can pull some strings to make a slightly more comfortable existence for them—even just a cell to themselves or a better work duty—I bet they’d be willing to trade just about anything.”

  Rook stayed quiet for a moment. Heat thought she heard music somewhere in the background.

  “Well,” he said at last. “I guess I can’t think of any harm that will do as long as you don’t whisper a word that you’ve seen your mother. You can’t go blowing her cover. And just, look, be careful, okay? We don’t know what made your mother feel like she had to do this, but whatever it was had to be big enough and dangerous enough that it was worth missing seventeen years of your life. So treat it with respect, all right?”

  “I hear you,” Heat said. And then she heard something else.

  A singsongy voice was saying, “Jaaaammmmiiieeeee! Oh, Jamie! Are you coming? Justin and Preston have gotten us something naughty from the store!”

  “Who is that?” Heat asked. “Is Lana still with you?”

  “Yeah. And Flotsam and Jetsam. And Legs is going to join us once he’s done meeting with some local powerbrokers. Once I told them I had a buddy who could get us into Versace’s old place, one thing kind of led to another, and now I think it’s going to happen.”

  “I’m sorry, what is going to happen?”