High Heat

by Richard Castle

  Well, mostly sure.

  Somewhat sure.

  Okay, a little sure.

  Whatever the odds actually were, there was only one way to beat a bluffer in poker, whether it was a professional liar like James Patterson or an ethically ambivalent federal agent like Yardley Bell.

  Call them on it.

  “You know what, Yardley?” Heat said. “That sounds like a load of fun. And let’s see how much resolve you have when every Muslim in New York is protesting outside your office.”

  “We can ruin you, Nikki. You know that.”

  “I’d like to see you go ahead and try,” Heat said. “I’ll make sure DHS has so much egg on its face, your bosses are going to wonder if they should just quit and open an omelet shop.

  “In the meantime, here’s how this is going to go. You’ve got until noon today to release those boys. If you don’t, I’m going to the Ledger, and then I guess we’ll see who is going to ruin whom.”

  “You’re throwing away your career, Heat. Don’t do it.”

  “You want a fight, Yardley, you got it,” Heat said. “I can’t tell you how much I’m going to enjoy this.”

  She slammed down the phone, feeling rectitude in every part of her body.

  Except for her hands. Those were shaking.

  Half an hour later, Heat had her detectives assembled around her, having called them back into the bull pen.

  Well, most of them. Raley was at home, taking a well-deserved nap—hopefully followed by a much-needed shower. In his absence, Heat took it upon herself to inform everyone about the results of his all-nighter and its significance.

  The grim faces around her reflected the bleakness of their reality. Ochoa, Rhymer, and Feller had struck out on their canvass, both the previous night and that morning. And while they had only been able to leave business cards at some of the apartments that faced the alley, they knew that was the police equivalent of playing the lottery.

  Aguinaldo, now rested from her shopping trip, had spent the morning trying to run down the scarf from other angles, surfing fashion Web sites and calling auction houses that had sold off Laura Hopper scarves. So far, she had no leads.

  It was more than twenty-four hours since they had first become aware of this crime and more than seventy-two hours since it had been committed. Those were critical hours. And everyone assembled knew the statistics: most cases were solved within the first forty-eight hours or not at all.

  But there they were, still without a single credible suspect. It was time to regroup. And fast.

  “Okay, so here’s the deal: We’re basically starting over,” Heat said. “But we’re starting over with two significant advantages. We know who the victim is and we know where the killing happened. Miguel, do you still have that list of known Muslim extremists from McMains?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, we’re going to divide and conquer. I want each of you to take a quarter of that list and start working through it. See if any of the people or groups on there have ties to Masjid al-Jannah. See if Muharib Qawi will come in and help us. We made the mistake of getting a little bit of tunnel vision on El-Bashir and Al-Aman. Let’s try to broaden our scope now.”

  All around her, heads were bobbing.

  “I’m going to work the Tam Svejda angle,” Heat announced. “She was up to something out in Ohio. I’m going to try and figure out what.”

  “Sounds good, Captain,” said Ochoa, whose heroic-but-pathetic act of limping toward his desk for the folder he had gotten from McMains had the effect of breaking up the meeting.

  Heat followed him, then veered off to Raley’s desk. He had been the one to contact the Lorain Police Department the day before. Heat could have woken him up to ask him who he talked with, but it seemed much more humane to search his desk for his notebook first. Ignoring the lingering smell of body odor, she moved aside printouts and manuals pertaining to audio de-filtering until she found a small wire-bound pad.

  After a few page flips she came across Lt. Jen Forbus, Lorain PD. It was followed by a phone number.

  Heat dialed it. As the line rang, Heat reminded herself she needed to recalibrate her manners. She wasn’t going to be dealing with a brusque, impatient, perpetually ironic fellow New Yorker. The person on the other end of the phone would be polite, straightforward, and courteous.

  And Heat would just have to bear it.

  Moments later, Heat heard the kind of cheerful, middle-of-America accent she had been expecting.

  “Lorain Police Department Detective Squad. This is Lieutenant Forbus. How can I help you today?”

  “Lieutenant Forbus, this is Captain Nikki Heat of the NYPD,” she said, then forced out, “How are you today?”

  “Why, hello, Captain Heat. I’m doing just super, thank you for asking. How are you?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “Gosh, that’s just great,” Forbus said. “So what can I do for you today?”

  “Thank you for asking,” Heat said, feeling pleased with herself that she had forged such an instant bond with this hinterland-dweller. But now, having established friendly relations, it was time to get on with it.

  “Yesterday afternoon, I think you spoke with one of my detectives, Sean Raley?”

  “Oh, yeah, he sure seemed like a nice fellow.”

  “He absolutely is. I was calling to see if you had a chance to circulate the picture he sent you?”

  “We sure did,” Forbus said. “Because, you know, we don’t have any of our own cases. People out here are too simpleminded to even think about committing crimes. So we really have nothing better to do than ask ‘how high’ whenever a big-city detective tells us to jump.”

  Forbus continued, her tone every bit as friendly: “As a matter of fact, you know the only reason we in Ohio exist at all is to make New Yorkers feel superior to us. We love it when you refer to us as flyover country. It makes us feel so special that you sometimes consider waving to us as you pass above us in your fancy jet air-o-planes. Why, the little boys and girls in Lorain spend most of their time staring up into the sky, saying to themselves, ‘Gee, I hope those fancy New Yorkers are looking down on us right now.’

  “No, the fact is, Ohio isn’t good for much. All we do here is beat the crap out of your sorry basketball team and pick your next president for you.”

  Heat still hadn’t spoken. She couldn’t get her mouth to work.

  Forbus finally giggled. “Captain Heat, I hope you know I’m messing with you right now.”

  “Right! Right, of course,” Heat stammered.

  “Good. Now as for your victim. We took her picture around yesterday. There’s no doubt she attracted a lot of notice, mostly from our male citizens. She started at the Jackalope, where she ate by herself at the bar. She was there for thirty-five minutes. She ordered a Caesar salad, a yellow Lake Erie perch, and a glass of white wine, which she only half finished. Then she paid her bill, tipped twenty percent, and left.”

  “Did she say anything about what she was doing out there?”

  “Nope. The bartender admitted he gave her his very best service, on account of her being pretty much the most beautiful woman who had ever walked into the place. But it sounds like she shut him down pretty good. He said he couldn’t get more than five words out of her at a time. She was just staring at her phone most of the time. It was the same story at Mutt and Jeff’s the next morning. She came. She ordered. She ate. She kept her head down. She left.”

  “Oh. Well, I’m sorry to have troubled—”

  “Oh, wait. There’s more. After she left the Jackalope Thursday night, she hit East 28th Street, and everything changed.”

  “What’s on East 28th Street?”

  “Pretty much every dive bar in town. You’ve got City Bar, Three Star, the International Lounge, Grown and Sexy.”

  “Grown and Sexy?” Heat asked.

  “The Grown and Sexy Lounge, ‘Where the grown come out to play.’ That’s what its sign says, anyway,” Forbus said. “Th
ese are steelworker hangouts. I don’t want to say we’re only in business because they’re in business. But they do keep us busy. They stay open at all hours to accommodate the shifts at the mills, so no matter when you get off work, you can go pound a few. They’re the kind of places that pretty much serve both beers.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Bud and Bud Light,” Forbus said. “Anyhow, your victim apparently hit the row and hit it hard.”

  “She did?”

  “Why do you sound so surprised?”

  “I guess I’m not, it’s just…She was traveling on business, yet no charges from any of those places showed up on her card.”

  “Oh, Captain Heat. Have you ever been to a steelworker’s bar? You’re looking at a male–female ratio of about ten to one. Do you think a woman like Tam Svejda had to buy herself a drink at any of those establishments? To me the only surprise is that we didn’t have to send a car out there to break up fights between the guys who were lining up to get her next round.”

  “Fair point. Okay, so she goes to these bars, men start tripping over themselves, and…then what?”

  “Well, it sounds like she was a lot more friendly to them than she was to the bartender at the Jackalope, that’s for sure.”

  “Friendly how?”

  “Just flirting a lot. Though she was pretty skillful about not letting anyone get too close. She’d kind of flirt with one, then move on and flirt with another, then move to the next bar and flirt some more. It was just a little chitchat, apparently. But you can’t imagine what a stir she made around here.”

  “What was she chitchatting about?”

  “Everything and nothing. Which is another way of saying I really don’t know. These are blue-collar guys, Captain Heat. They’re not exactly forthcoming with the police. They pretty much think of us as the people who are there to ruin their fun. And even the ones that will talk to us aren’t providing us court transcripts of their conversations. From the best we could figure she was just asking them questions about where they lived, where they worked, what they did there, that sort of thing. Just your basic biographical stuff. The kind of stuff we ask all the time. It sounded like she was interviewing them, but they probably didn’t know they were being interviewed.”

  “Mostly because they were too busy leering at her,” Heat suggested.

  “Well, exactly. I talked to some of the guys myself and most of them were just falling over themselves to tell me how hot she was. And let me tell you how much I enjoyed that.”

  “But did she go home with anyone?”

  Forbus laughed. “In their dreams, yeah. No, the furthest any of them got was that a few of them gave her their phone numbers. At which point, they became instant legends with their buddies. But I talked to a bartender at Grown and Sexy, which was her last stop. He said she left alone. One of the guys walked her out to her car—we have nothing but gentlemen here in Lorain—but then he came right back in.”

  “Did you talk to any of the guys who handed out their digits?”

  “Afraid not. People’s memories tended to get real fuzzy at that point, on account of the drinking and the late hour.”

  “In other words, they worried they were going to get their friends in trouble.”

  “Bingo,” Forbus said.

  “Well, you can assure them we’re not thinking this was some kind of sexual assault gone wrong. We know she left alone. We also know she was in one piece at breakfast the next morning. What I really want to figure out is if those steelworkers whose numbers she took had anything in common. I can’t imagine it was their charm or the cleverness of their pickup lines. She was obviously after something specific.”

  “Oh, I’m not done with those guys,” Forbus assured her. “I was talking to them in the bars, so they weren’t going to give up anything there. Not in front of the other guys. But I’ll get them at home sometime later. If they don’t cooperate, I’ll find a way to get some leverage on them. It shouldn’t be hard. I’ll get you those names, Captain Heat, it’s just going to take me a little bit of time.”

  “Okay, I really appreciate that.”

  Forbus promised she’d be back in touch as soon as she knew more. The women swapped mobile numbers and e-mail addresses.

  “By the way, I wasn’t kidding about picking your president,” Forbus said as they wrapped up the call. “You know Ohio has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1964.”

  “I know,” Heat said.

  “For the record, we’re going to vote for Lindsy Gardner,” Forbus said. “A librarian for president is exactly what this country needs.”

  After settling the phone back on the receiver, Heat wandered back out to the bull pen and to the murder board, which no longer contained the mug shots of two young New York Muslims.

  It was, in truth, a depressingly empty board. Tam Svejda’s professionally done portrait was there. The words zinc and kerosene were underneath her. A picture of Masjid al-Jannah hung nearby. So did a picture of the Laura Hopper scarf from the video.

  Grabbing a dry-erase marker, she drew a line from Svejda’s picture, then she drew three circles, also connected by lines. In the first she wrote Joanna Masters’s bullet. In the second, New York → Cleveland → Lorain, Ohio. In the third, Interviewing steelworkers.

  She paused for a moment, then drew another line and a fourth circle. In that one, she scrawled a question mark, signifying they didn’t know where Svejda went next. It also neatly summed up what Heat could figure out about what this sequence of events meant. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

  She wished Rook was there. He had a way of staring at the murder board, of looking at the exact same words she was, and yet forming them into a completely different story.

  Heat was doing little more than staring at the board’s white space, lost in concentration, when she heard a commotion coming from the far hallway.

  “I said get your motherfuckin’ hands off me. I ain’t no suspect no more. I can walk without you grabbing my arm.”

  It was a “New Yawk” accent that, by now, she recognized. She just never thought that, of all the places fate and circumstance might have taken Hassan El-Bashir, he would again be treading the floors of the Twentieth Precinct. Certainly not voluntarily.

  Her first reaction was relief. Yardley Bell had, improbably, done the right thing. Calling her bluff had been the correct decision, for all involved.

  Her second reaction was curiosity. What was El-Bashir doing back there? He rounded the corner with the day-shift desk sergeant behind him.

  “He showed up saying he wanted to talk to the ‘lady captain,’” the sergeant said apologetically. “I tried to get a statement out of him, but—”

  “But I ain’t talking to no one but the lady captain,” El-Bashir finished defiantly.

  “Well, hello, Hassan,” Heat said. “It’s very nice to see you again. It’s Captain Heat, by the way.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. Look, can we talk? I spent the night getting anal probes from whatever X-Files, Area 51, black-ops bullshit place that fed lady put me in and I just want to get home.”

  “Okay,” Heat said. “Would my office be okay?”

  “Better than the one-way mirror room,” he huffed.

  “Right this way,” Heat said, gesturing toward her office and holding open the door for him.

  “You all right, Captain?” the sergeant asked.

  “Yes. Thank you, Sergeant.”

  Heat closed the door behind El-Bashir, who had already taken a seat in front of her desk. She consciously chose the chair next him, rather than put the desk between them. It was a small gesture, a trick of psychology as much as anything, but it established a small measure of intimacy with a citizen who, understandably, had some trust issues regarding law enforcement at the moment.

  “So what’s up, Hassan?” she asked, angling her chair toward him.

  Out of the presence of the desk sergeant—and anyone else in uniform—he now seemed more relaxed, no
longer feeling the same need to show how tough he was.

  “Yo, I just wanted to say thank you, Captain Heat,” he said. “I don’t know what those feds were going to do to me, but I think I was heading for some waterboarding at Guantanamo or some shit. But that fed lady, she told me you did me a real solid, with that audio stuff. She said you even stuck your neck out for me and kind of forced her to let me go.”

  “Just doing my job, Hassan,” Heat said.

  “Yeah, I know. I just…Well, let’s just say I ain’t been around a lot of cops who are decent like that, you know? I mean, some of them pretend to be your friend but you know it’s bullshit, because they’re just trying to get close to you so they can bust you or so you’ll snitch on someone else. But you? Man, you for real. That fed lady said I owed you big time, and she’s right.”

  “Well, you’re welcome,” Heat said, giving him a warm smile, hoping perhaps he would remember in his future interactions with the NYPD that the vast majority of cops really were motivated by the same good angels that she was.

  El-Bashir shifted in his seat a little bit. Heat sensed he had something else on his mind, but she was going to let him come around to it in his own time.

  Finally, he came out with: “So, I got something to tell you. I think…Well, I don’t know if it matters or not. To be honest, I wasn’t gonna say shit about this. In my neighborhood, snitches get stitches, you feel me? You don’t go volunteering nothing to the cops. But I feel like…Well, I owe you one.”

  Heat nodded.

  “So you remember how I told you we were at Masjid al-Jannah on Saturday night, Skyping with that imam in Saudi Arabia?”

  “Of course.”

  “That wasn’t bullshit. We really were Skyping—and just Skyping. But the thing is…well, I don’t know what was about to happen, but something was going down right around the time we left.”

  Heat could practically feel the bolt of energy coming up from her chair, but she kept herself calm.

  “What do you mean, Hassan?”

  “So we were done with our Skype, and we were getting ready to leave, when we heard something behind the mosque. I went over to the window and looked out, and I seen these two big black SUVs pulling up. They had these tall antennas, like they were cop cars or something.”