Crashing Heat

by Richard Castle

  Roach went in one direction, while Heat and Rook headed in the other. “Nothing in the trunk of the car?” she asked him.

  “My car at home, yes. My rental car here? No.”

  They circled around the building, intercepting Roach at the front door. Heat saw they were empty-handed, but she asked nonetheless. “Anything?”

  They both spread their arms. “Nada,” Ochoa said.

  They scattered again, eyes on the ground, in case they’d missed something. They hadn’t. Ochoa and Raley joined her in front of the building again. Somehow she’d lost Rook along the way. She cupped her hand over her eyes, turning as she scanned the college grounds around the unused building. As she came full circle, facing the front entrance again, she stopped short. There, standing at the threshold, was her husband.

  “Would you all like to come inside?” He swung the door open wider and gestured for them to enter.

  “How’d you get in there?” Ochoa asked, eyes narrowed.

  Rook’s eyes danced. “When it became clear that we weren’t going to find a tool lying around that can pry plywood from a window, I started trying all the windows again. You know, just in case we missed one.”

  Raley nodded approvingly. “And you found one that was unlocked?”

  “Not exactly,” Rook said. “I did, however, find one with a loose pane of glass. I barely touched it, and kabam! It fairly shattered at the gentle touch of my fingertips.”

  “Kabam?” Ochoa repeated.

  Raley raised a brow. “It ‘fairly shattered’?”

  Heat kept quiet. She’d been on the receiving end of his gentle fingertips and knew firsthand just how shattering they could be.

  She led the way, skirting past Rook. Roach followed, and behind them, Rook closed the door. “Okay, guys. Let’s fan out.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Raley asked.

  “A concealed space,” Rook said, nodding knowingly. “In fact, a lair. A place not easily found. Hidden from sight. A—”

  Heat held her hand out to stop him. “We get it, Rook. It’s a secret room.”

  “Well, fine, if you want to call it something as mundane as that.”

  “So it’s a place where people get together and do hush-hush things?” Raley asked.

  “Exactly,” Rook said.

  “Sounds exactly like a secret room to me,” Ochoa said.

  Heat clapped her hands. Instantly, they stopped their banter. “If you’re done, let’s find the secret, confidential, hush-hush lair, okay?”

  “Aye, aye, Cap,” Ochoa said.

  Before they scattered, she held up her phone with the picture she’d taken of a page from Chloe’s notebook. On it was what she now thought was a symbol of the Tektōn society: a triangle with the letter T inside of it. “Look for this, too,” she said, and once again, they fanned out in search of a way in.

  “Hey! Hey, guys, I found it!” Rook’s voice bellowed through the ground floor of the vacant building.

  Heat tried to pinpoint the direction of Rook’s voice. She thought it had come from her left. She headed in that direction, calling to Rook as she walked. “Where are you?”

  “The two hundred hallway. All the way at the end.”

  “One hundred hallway right here,” Raley called. His footsteps grew louder as he came back toward her.

  “I got three hundred,” Ochoa called.

  Heat could clearly hear where they were coming from. She started for one of the two remaining hallways. Just as she read 200 on a placard at the entrance to the corridor, Rook called to them again. “Are you coming, or am I on this adventure by myself? I will say, it’s very dark down in the depths of hell.”

  Ochoa looked at Raley. “He doesn’t have a clue about what he’s saying, does he?”

  “Not a one.”

  “We gotcha,” Heat said, walking down the two hundred hallway, Roach by her side.

  But they didn’t actually have him. Or know where he was. The end of the two hundred hallway was empty. Rook was nowhere in sight. Display cases were mounted to the walls, all of them currently empty and covered with a thick layer of dust. Doors to offices or classrooms lined each side of the corridor. They tried each door they passed. Every one of them was locked.

  “Where is he?” Raley turned around. “Dude, where are you?”

  “He’s a ghost,” Ochoa said.

  “No, not a ghost.” Rook’s voice drifted to them, but he was still hidden from sight. “Although now that you mention it, I kind of feel like a being from the shadowlands.”

  Heat spun around one more time, her irritation mounting. “Dammit, Rook. Where are you?”

  Ochoa joined in. “Bro. Seriously. Show yourself.”

  The three of them stood in a circle, back to back to back. Heat wanted to count to three, as if she needed the leverage to coerce a rascally child to cooperate. But Rook was an adult—and far more mischievous than any kids she’d ever met. Which, granted, were not many. Her niece, but she was perfect and didn’t require any extra supervision.

  Just when Heat was about to put her foot down and shout out that he had better show himself, and right now, the display case at the end of the corridor suddenly opened outward. Out stepped Rook, arms spread wide. He stayed frozen in place like that, a goofy smile on his face. He was waiting for their reaction, Heat knew. She was thrilled that he might have found what they were looking for, but her aggravation trumped her curiosity.

  It was like a game of chicken: Roach and Heat against Rook. Finally, Rook caved. He dropped his chin to his chest, heaving a sigh. “All right, all right. I get it. But look, it’s a hidden door.”

  “I can see that.” Heat came up to him, scanning the doorframe and the backside of the built-in shelving unit. There were no obvious clues to suggest that it doubled as a door. She really did have to give Rook credit for the discovery. “I give. How did you find it?”

  He perked up again. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  Heat stepped back so Rook could close the secret door. It clicked into place. This time, she ran her hand up one side of the shelving, across the top, and down the other side. There were no levers. No obvious means of detecting that it was a door or how to open it.

  “It’s very well done, but I once wrote an article on the history of magic. I came across quite a bit of information on secret passageways. You might be surprised to learn that they were a fairly common occurrence in houses of old. They led to hideaways. Think Prohibition and speakeasies, illegal gambling dens, and the like. Of course I put two and two together. Magic and secret door. I realized that there didn’t seem to be a basement floor—”

  “Right, no stairwell or elevator leading down,” Ochoa said.

  Rook snapped his fingers and pointed at him. “Exactly. If there was a secret door, it would lead to a basement, and if there was a secret lever to open said door, it might come in the form of the triangle T symbol.”

  “Is there one?” Heat asked, impressed by his discovery, despite the dramatic flair. He came by his histrionics honestly. His mother had taught him well.

  Ochoa was running his hand around the perimeter of the display case just as Heat had. “I give. How do you open this bad boy?” he asked once he came up empty.

  “Allow me.” Rook walked past the next door and crouched at an old-fashioned ventilation grate in the floor. He pried it off and plunged his hand into the darkness. Heat heard a click and, voilà, the locking mechanism released. Still holding the grate, he returned to them triumphantly. “The symbol,” he said, showing them the faint image of the T in the triangle pressed into one corner of the metal.

  “Impressive,” Raley said.

  “Yeah, nice work.” This time Ochoa clapped Rook on the shoulder. “Your neediness comes in handy now and then.”

  “Try ‘comes in handy all the time,’” Rook said.

  Roach gave him no reaction.

  Heat turned to the dark entrance in front of her. The smell of dank soot hit her first. It was thick
and heavy, like the remains of a massive bonfire after a warm drizzle. The cool air coming up from the insulated basement hit her next. She peered into the darkness, stifling the shudder working its way up her spine. She felt as if she were in a bad horror flick where the heroine has the choice to proceed into obvious danger or retreat to safety. The heroine, of course, in a too-dumb-to-live move, goes right into the lion’s den.

  At the moment, she felt like that B-movie character, ready to descend into unknown depths where, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, they might come across a room full of decades-old skeletons. Or worse, a pit of spiders.

  Rook took hold of her arm so she couldn’t go any farther. “Be careful. There is a flight of stairs, and they seem pretty steep.”

  She tamped down her runaway thoughts. Rook was the one with the active imagination, not her. She was the sane, sensible one. But right that second, their roles had reversed. She put her palm against the cool stone wall and took a deep breath, forcing her mind back to Chloe Masterson. She pulled up the images of the photographs they’d gotten from Professor Daily. Heat had snapped pictures of each one with her cell phone. Skimming through them now, she came to the one she wanted. It was a photo of a dark open doorway with a glimpse of stairs leading downward. “She was here. Chloe was exactly where we are right now, only she was alone.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t alone,” Rook said. “What if the killer was with her?”

  There were two reasons Chloe might have been with someone. Heat voiced them aloud. “Either she thought she could trust the person, or she knew she was with a killer but thought she could protect herself. Either way, she walked down into the depths of hell and to her own death.”

  That was a sobering thought. The four of them stood in silence for a moment. Nikki had seen the lifeblood drain out of a person. One second they were alive, the next they were a shell, all semblance of the person they’d been completely gone. She’d seen it happen with her own mother, or at least she thought she did at the time. It was that personal experience that drove her to take a moment to honor each victim. Working through the scene of an actual murder and replaying it in her mind made it real. She could see Chloe in her mind’s eye, standing in awe at the threshold of the secret passageway, her killer perhaps by her side, ushering her down. Cautioning her to be careful. Maybe even guiding her with a hand on her lower back.

  “Let’s have some light,” she said, needing to move on to the next part of Chloe’s actions.

  At the same moment, as if it had been choreographed, Ochoa and Raley took out their cell phones and turned on their flashlights, aiming them down into the depths below. It smelled stale. Dungeon-like. Not a place Heat would choose to go alone. But Chloe had—maybe.

  Roach took the lead, aiming their flashlights on the crumbling stone steps. Rook brought up the rear. They all walked carefully, testing each step before putting their full weight down.

  “There must be another way in.” Rook’s voice echoed against the stone walls. “There is no way the members of Tektōn traverse this stairway to secret meetings together.”

  Heat had to agree. This didn’t strike her as a regularly used meeting place. “But Chloe was here. I can feel it.”

  “Since when do you act on a feeling, Heat?”

  In front of her, Roach mumbled their agreement. They were right. Heat looked at the clues and broke down the evidence into facts. Rook, on the other hand, acted on gut and instinct. He provided the story. They balanced each other out, but right now that balance was skewed.

  She didn’t have to answer Rook’s question, because they had reached the bottom of the stairway. Ochoa and Raley shone their flashlights into the dark room and stopped in their tracks. Heat and Rook flanked them on either side.

  The walls were rough stone, the ground packed dirt. There were no windows. No natural light filtered in. The single room was simply dank and dark.

  Rook gave a low whistle. “This is a bona fide dungeon if I’ve ever seen one.”

  Ochoa arched a brow skeptically. “Have you actually seen one, bro?”

  “I have, actually. I did a story once on torture devices in seventeenth-cent—”

  Ochoa put his palm out. “Forget I asked.”

  Raley shook his head. “Why’d you go there, man?”

  “Momentary lapse.”

  Rook’s face fell, but Heat stepped in to put a stop to their squabbling. “Focus, guys. Let’s take a look around.”

  They split up. Roach started around the perimeter of the room from the left. Heat and Rook both took out their own cell phones, turned on their flashlights, and took the right side. She kept hers directed at ground level, while he shone his on the wall and ceiling. They moved slowly, taking in every square inch. A few minutes later, Raley’s voice sliced through the room. “I think we got something.”

  Heat and Rook were by his side in an instant, all of their lights shining on the wall. “It’s a loose stone,” Raley said. “And look. The symbol.”

  The stone wobbled under his hand as he pressed it, but he couldn’t immediately dislodge it. Rook stepped up to it, running his fingers around the edges. “Fascinating. I bet this is how messages were left. A secret way to correspond.”

  It was a good theory. Raley touched the edges again until he found a groove. He gripped it with his fingers and, after a minute, he managed to pry the stone from its housing.

  They four of them shone their light into the exposed crevice. There, shoved into the back of the space, was a slip of white paper.

  Heat tugged on one of the nitrile gloves she always had with her, stuck her hand into the open space, and pulled out the paper. The three men gathered close around her as she unfolded it.

  Darkness falls

  To the night we come

  The bird sings

  The forest beckons

  And to the end of the game

  We go

  “It’s like a message in a bottle, but better,” Rook said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice.

  “It’s like a movie,” Ochoa said. “Secret messages behind a rock in a hidden dungeon? Who does this?”

  Rook looked as happy as a pig in a mud pit. “It’s a poem in the wall. It’s like the Dead Poets Society. It’s a clue, people. And we get to decipher it.”

  Roach had left Cambria late the night before, and Heat and Rook had pushed the case aside for a raucous tumble between the sheets. They’d needed to forget for a little while, and that had done the trick.

  The next morning, she stared at the murder board, back on the case. Lines crisscrossed down from Chloe’s photo to the different things they’d learned. A photo of Chloe’s long-lost biological father, Christian Foti, was on one side. Her roommate, Tammy, was on the other.

  Heat and Rook had made a connection between the article Chloe had been researching and Cambria U’s secret society, Tektōn. From there, they’d formed a tenuous connection to the Freemasons. Chloe’s own photographs had led them to Zabro Hall on campus, and to the hidden room.

  And to the message in the wall.

  Darkness falls

  To the night we come

  The bird sings

  The forest beckons

  And to the end of the game

  We go

  Heat had taken pains to write it exactly as it had been put down on the paper, and had used a magnet to hold the original at the top right corner of the board. She’d told Ian about it, but was holding off turning it in as evidence. After staring at it until the letters blurred together into one mass, she wrote the words again, this time on a blank page of a notebook.

  When she’d been a theater major in college, before the switch to criminal justice, she’d been exposed to plenty of literature along the way. She tried to pull hidden meaning from the lines of the poem, but was drawing a blank. “Darkness falls” could be interpreted in a few different ways: It was nighttime. The sun set. There were no stars in the sky. But these were all literal translations. What could the subtext be?
Was there subtext?

  To the night we come? Who was “we”? The night wasn’t an actual place, so where were they going?

  She moved on to the next line. Who was the bird? Could the bird be a person? She pondered this before realizing the meaning. “Chloe!” she said aloud. “The bird could be Chloe.”

  With his typically perfect timing, Rook walked in at just that moment. “The bird could be Chloe?”

  It was a far cry from solving the murder, but if she was right, then they could at least connect the poem to the victim. It would validate that they were on the right path. “I’m trying to decipher the poem. To look for hidden meaning.”

  Rook beamed. “I’m so proud. My sweet little analytical Nikki Heat, delving into the abstract world of words.”

  “Trying,” she corrected. “And not doing a bang-up job at the moment.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “Just that Chloe could be the bird.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “That’s it, huh?”

  “I gave up on the first two lines.”

  He sat down next to her on the edge of the bed, reading aloud from the page on her lap. “‘It was nighttime. The sun set. There were no stars in the sky.’ All of that is fairly obvious, don’t you think?”

  She bristled, embarrassed at her amateur poetry analysis. “No, I don’t, which is why I moved on to the bird.”

  He studied the poem on her paper for a moment before standing and moving to the murder board. He withdrew one of his special Blackwing 602 pencils from the inside pocket of his tweed blazer, using it to point to the poem she’d written there. “Here’s what I think. Are you ready?”

  She slid to the very edge of the bed, forearms on her knees. “I am more than ready.”

  His expression instantly shifted from professorial to flirtatious. “Why, Detective Heat, I didn’t think you were—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “I’m not. Carry on, Professor.”

  He nodded, but gave her a stern look. “Very well, but we will come back to this discussion at a later date.”