Naked Heat

by Richard Castle

  She had startled him from a thought. His Moleskine dropped to the floor, where he left it. He almost stood, but that would be dorky, so he just sat a little straighter, feeling all the cop stares turned his way. "Uh, yeah, actually, I have something very interesting now that I hear he worked at the Dragonfly. Before I knew the specific hotel, I assumed the connection might be he was one of Cassidy Towne's sources. Cassidy paid her sources for their tips. That's unusual. Richard Johnson of 'Page Six' at the Post told me he doesn't pay tipsters. Other papers don't have the budget. But she did, and they were mostly in personal service industries. Limo drivers, private trainers, cooks, masseuses, and, of course, hotel employees. Concierges." He started to relax as he saw the nods of understanding from the detectives.

  "That's a viable theory, so we'll go with that for now," said Heat, as one of the detectives handed Rook his Moleskine with a nod and a smile.

  "I'm not done," Rook said. "That was where I came down before I just heard he worked at the Dragonfly. That's the hotel where Reed Wakefield died last May. Soleil Gray's fiance."

  Heat didn't like to bigfoot Malcolm and Reynolds, but she wanted to check out the Dragonfly herself. Those two detectives could cover the other angles, but she wanted to check out the Reed Wakefield death. Nikki called ahead to Lauren Parry to tell the ME she would be later than planned. While she had her friend on the phone, Heat asked her if she could look up the coroner findings on Wakefield, then she and Rook headed for SoHo. Lauren called back while Nikki was parking in an open space in front of Balthazar, just around the corner from the hotel on Crosby.

  "COD was toxic overdose, ruled accidental," said the medical examiner. "Deceased was a habitual user, a self-medicator. Looked from his history like one of those seesaw cases, you know, took something to bring himself up, then something else to level it off, something else to set him down. Blood work and stomach showed high alcohol, plus toxic amounts of cocaine, amyl nitrate, and Ambien."

  "I have the file on its way to my office, but I'm on the road. Is there a notation in yours about the inquest?"

  "Yeah, of course. And we all talked about it here, too, so I remember it pretty well from the office buzz. They took a close look, especially after Heath Ledger, to cover all the bases. He was depressive, distraught after his engagement broke off, but gave no hints of suicidal thoughts. They interviewed coworkers, family, even the ex."

  "Soleil Gray?"

  "Right," said Lauren. "Everyone says the same thing. He was pretty much to himself the final month of shooting his last movie. When it wrapped, he went to the hotel in SoHo, basically, to cocoon and shut out the world."

  Nikki thanked her for the crib notes and apologized for being late. "If you want, I could just get your Derek Snow report over the phone."

  "Not on your life," said Lauren. "You get your happy ass down here when you're done." And then she left it with a cryptic "I promise to make it worth your while."

  It was a difficult time to visit the Dragonfly. The staff was clearly shaken by the news of the concierge's murder, but, as one of those small hotels with a casual air but impeccable couth, they soldiered on without letting their high-end guests know anything was amiss. Though nobody could miss the accumulation of expensive flower arrangements filling the area around the concierge desk, no doubt from devoted travelers who mourned Derek Snow.

  The manager and night manager, who got called in early for the interview, met Heat and Rook in the bamboo-paneled lounge, which had not yet opened. Both had been on duty during the weeks Reed Wakefield stayed there, up to his death. They confirmed what Lauren had conveyed in her synopsis, and it jibed with what Heat, Rook, and most New Yorkers knew about the tragedy. The actor checked in alone, spent most of the time in his room, leaving only occasionally, like when housekeeping needed to service it, or at night. He came and went alone because it was clear that was what he wanted. He was polite but kept to himself. The only complaint he made was to insist housekeeping re-close his drapes and leave the lights off in his room when they were finished.

  The night of his death Wakefield did not go out, nor did he have any visitors. When he didn't answer his door the next day--he had specified 11:30 to 12:30 for his service--the housekeeper let herself in and discovered his body in the bed. She mistakenly assumed he was sleeping and left quietly, but then became concerned, and two hours later was when they discovered that he was dead.

  "What was his relationship like with Derek Snow?" When the two managers reacted, Nikki said, "I'm sorry. I know this is a difficult time, but these questions need to be asked."

  "I understand," said the manager. "The fact is, Derek was quite popular with all our guests. He was so well suited to the job and had a passion for it. He was naturally friendly, discreet, and masterful at bookings for theater or impossible restaurants."

  Nikki asked again, "And was he also popular with Reed Wakefield?"

  The night manager, a thin young man with pale skin and a British accent, said, "Truth be told, I don't think Mr. Wakefield availed himself extensively of Derek's services during his stay. That's not to say they didn't pass the greetings of the day, but that might be the extent of it."

  "Did Soleil Gray ever visit him?" asked Heat.

  "Mr. Wakefield?" The manager looked at the night man, and both shook no.

  "Not during that period, as far as we recall," said the night manager.

  "Did Soleil Gray ever come to this hotel at all?"

  "Oh, yes," said the manager. "She was a frequent visitor to this lounge in particular and for certain parties, as well as being a guest of the hotel from time to time."

  "Even though she could almost walk here from her apartment?" said Rook.

  "Mr. Rook, the Dragonfly is a destination experience for travelers no matter how far they come." The manager smiled. That wasn't the first time he had said that. Probably not the first time that day.

  Heat asked, "What was her relationship like with Derek Snow?"

  "Same as everyone's, I suppose," said the manager. He turned to the night manager. "Colin?"

  "Absolutely. Quite. Nothing out of the ordinary."

  His certainty and exuberance seemed a little heavy-handed for Nikki's taste. So she just went for it. "Were they lovers?"

  "No, of course not," said the manager. "That would be a breach of policy. Why do you ask that?"

  Nikki directed herself to the night manager. "Because you are hiding something." She paused for effect and watched pink splotches surface on his cheeks. "What is it, then, did they fight? Deal in drugs? Arrange cockfights in her room? You can tell me here, or you can tell me Uptown in a more official setting."

  The manager looked at his colleague, whose scalp was showing beads of perspiration through his thinning blond hair. "Colin?"

  Colin hesitated and said, "We had a bit of . . . an incident . . . involving Miss Gray. You have to understand crossing this line of discretion is very difficult for me."

  "We're here for ya, Colly," said Rook. "Let her rip."

  Colin withered under his manager's look. "One evening last winter," he began, "Miss Gray was a guest of the hotel and had a lapse in her sobriety. At two-thirty A.M., on my shift, as it happens, she, ah . . . had to be subdued in the lobby. Derek Snow was still about, and I asked him to help me escort her into her room. In the process, a firearm she had in her handbag discharged, and the bullet grazed Derek's thigh."

  "Colin?" said the manager, obviously unhappy.

  "I admit, we did not adhere to procedure and report this, but the plea was made by Derek not to make a fuss, and, well . . ."

  "She paid you guys off," said Heat. Not a question.

  "In a word, yes."

  "And there's no police report of this." Again, Heat didn't have to ask. When Colin shook his head, she said, "How bad was his wound? Doctors are required to report those to the department."

  "It was a graze but enough for several stitches. Miss Gray was acquainted with a physician who gave cast physicals for the film indus
try, and an arrangement was made."

  Now that Detective Heat understood the connection between Soleil Gray and Derek Snow, she asked a few more questions, details that satisfied her and allowed her to check later, and ended the meeting. After she got the contact information for Colin, she showed the police rendering of the Texan. "Have you ever seen this man here?"

  They both said no. She asked them to think of him in a different context than as a guest, perhaps on someone's security detail. The answer was still no, although the manager kept the picture.

  "That's all for now," said Heat, "except a question about one more person. Has Cassidy Towne ever come here?"

  "Please," said the manager. "This is the Dragonfly."

  On the walk back to the car, Rook laughed and said, "Or we can talk to you in a . . . 'more official setting.' That goes on my list of Heatisms, along with Zoo Lockup and blast matrix."

  "I was showing some refinement. After all, it was the Dragonfly."

  Rook said, "So the question for me remains, why was Derek calling Soleil Gray the night of Cassidy's murder?"

  "Right there with you," said Heat. "And the freak-out reaction from her."

  "I don't suppose that's because the concierge couldn't get her the table she wanted at Per Se."

  "Not being a fan of coincidences, I'd say a call with that timing, two bodies with stab wounds, duct-taped to chairs . . . Derek Snow has to be related to Cassidy Towne, but how? And if Soleil wasn't complicit in her murder, is she feeling in some kind of danger herself?"

  "Here's a nutty idea. Ask her."

  "Yeah, and she'll be straight with me, too." And then she said, "But you know I will."

  As Nikki headed north on First Avenue toward the OCME, Rook said, "With or without the lobby gunplay, I'm still going with the premise that Derek was a Cassidy tipster."

  "Well, we're pulling his phone records, let's see if you're right." She blew air out between her teeth. "Sordid, isn't it? Thinking people are spying on you for cash. What you ate, what you drank, who you're sleeping with, all so Cassidy Towne can put it out to people in the Ledger."

  "Most of it was true, though. She told me she got something wrong early on, right after she started her column, about Woody Allen having an affair with Meryl Streep. Her source said he was obsessed with her ever since Manhattan. Not true, totally blew it. The other papers pounced on it and called her the Towne Liar. From then on, she said if it wasn't true and verifiable--from two sources--she'd rather let someone else scoop her."

  "Noble. For a scumbag."

  "Yes, and none of us ever read those columns, do we? Come on, Nikki, the problem is if you take them seriously. They're like the sports section for peeping Toms, which is just about everybody."

  "Not I," she said.

  "Look, I agree with you that it's scummy. And not just because I am intimidated by your impeccable command of grammar. But, at the same time, she was only covering what people were doing. Nobody made Spitzer mount a call girl in over-the-calf socks. Or Russell Crowe toss a telephone at a hotel night manager. Or Soleil Gray blow a hole in a concierge's pants with a handgun."

  "Right. But who says we have to know all that?"

  "Then don't read it. But it doesn't make the secrets go away. You know, my mom's been putting together a night of Chekhov readings at the Westport Playhouse. She was rehearsing one last weekend, 'The Lady with the Little Dog.' There's a passage about this guy Gurov that I'm going to excerpt in my article about Cassidy. It goes something like 'He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all . . . full of relative truth . . . and another life running its course in secret.' "

  "And your point?"

  "My point, Detective, is that everybody's got a secret, and if you're in the public eye, you're fair game."

  They stopped at the light and Nikki turned to him. He could see that for her this was more than just an abstract topic. "But what if you're not used to being in the public eye, or didn't choose to be there? I ended up with the world reading about my mother's murder. That's not a scandal, but it was private. You write stories about Bono, and Sarkozy, and Sir Richard Branson, right? They're equipped for all this intrusion, but does it make it any better that they need to be? Shouldn't some things be allowed to be kept private?"

  He nodded. "I agree." And then he couldn't resist. "Which is why I will never again even write the word 'pineapples.' "

  "Going to give you plenty to reflect on here today, Detective Heat." Lauren Parry's formality with Nikki was only invoked when Heat's BFF was pulling her leg or prepping her for news beyond her workaday coroner reports. Heat could tell from her friend's face that there was no joke coming after that setup.

  "What are we dealing with, ME Parry?" she said in matching attitude.

  The medical examiner led Heat and Rook to Derek Snow's body on the table and picked up his chart. "As usual, the tox disclaimer notwithstanding, we have a cause of death from a single thoracic knife wound in the intercostal tissue between ribs, causing perforation of the left ventricle."

  "Stabbed in the heart," said Rook. When Lauren gave him an eye roll, he shrugged. "You want layman's terms, or disclaimers about calling your physician after four hours, who's your guy?"

  Nikki asked, "Did he also have signs of torture?"

  Nodding, Lauren beckoned her closer to indicate the victim's left ear. "See the little blood flecks? Same as on Cassidy Towne. I took some ear canal shots for you."

  "Dental picks?" said Heat.

  "Don't need to explain it to you, do I?" The memory of being harassed herself by the Texan made Nikki wince involuntarily. Lauren said nothing, but put a hand on her shoulder in comfort. Then she took it off and said, "There's more." She flipped back the top page of the chart to indicate the matching adhesive remnants found on both Cassidy Towne and Derek Snow.

  Rook said, "Little doubt we're dealing with the same killer, is there?"

  "It gets more interesting."

  "Wow." Rook rubbed his palms together. "This is like the late-night infomercials. 'But wait, there's more.' "

  "You have no idea," said Lauren.

  Nikki lifted the sheet to verify the scar on Derek's thigh. When she found it, she joined Rook and Lauren at the ME's lab bench, a stainless-steel surface laden with an array of macabre instruments that were part of dissecting and analyzing the dead. In the center of the long counter, a small white towel covered a tray. The ME set her chart down and folded back the towel halfway, exposing the blade of a plastic knife the color of dried Elmer's glue. "This is a polymer mold I made from Cassidy Towne's stab wound. The killer worked clean, an expert plunge and withdrawal, so I was able to make an excellent cast from her puncture."

  Heat recognized it immediately, the arc of the edges coming together dead center at the tip, which was sharpened to a point, and, most distinctive, the fullers, those twin grooves running parallel the full length of the flat. "This was his knife. The Texan's," she said.

  "A Robbins and Dudley Knuckle Knife, according to the catalog on the server," said Lauren Parry. "Exactly like"--she peeled back the remaining half of the towel--"this one here." Beside the first cast on the tray rested a mold of the identical blade.

  "Get out," said Rook. "If this were a TV show, this is where they'd go to a commercial."

  A slight smile showed at the corners of the ME's mouth. It wasn't often that she had the occasion to be a little theatrical, and she was obviously enjoying her moment. The dead ones didn't appreciate her work. "Well, if they ran a commercial now, you'd miss the biggest part."

  "I don't know what could be bigger," said Nikki, looking over her shoulder at Derek Snow's corpse. "You just linked Cassidy Towne's exact murder weapon to Derek Snow."

  "But I didn't." Lauren waited until both their faces clouded, puzzling. She pointed to the first blade replica. "This knife cast here? Taken from Cassidy Towne." Then she picked up the second one. "This knife cast here? I took from Esteban Padilla."

  "No way!" Rook turned a circle and stomped a f
oot. "Coyote Man?"

  All Nikki said was "Lauren . . ."

  "Yup."

  "The Texan stabbed Coyote Man, too?"

  "Well," said Lauren, "his knife did, anyway."

  Heat was still processing all this through the haze of her astonishment. "Whatever made you think to take a mold from Padilla?"

  "The puncture on both victims had a lot of material displaced at the center, or what we call the neutral axis of the blade. It's negligible, but visible if you're looking. Soon as I saw the similarity, I ran the molds."

  "You're a jock," said Nikki.

  "Not done yet. When the molds matched, I ran one more test. Know that bloodstain you pointed out to me on the wallpaper at Cassidy Towne's brownstone? It wasn't hers. It was Esteban Padilla's. A perfect match."

  "Best autopsy ever," said Rook. "I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did."

  Chapter Ten

  Nikki was not about to let this wait for a meeting back in the bull pen. Momentum on this case was picking up, and even though she wasn't sure where her new clues would lead, she was going to ride it, and hard. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was only a few blocks north of the Derek Snow crime scene, so Heat got on her cell phone and called Ochoa to tell him she'd meet him and Raley in the East Village in five minutes for a briefing.

  "You sound pumped. Did you get a confirm that Snow had the same killer as our gossip lady?" Ochoa asked.

  She looked over at Rook, riding shotgun with her down Second Avenue and said, in her best infomercial announcer voice, "But wait, there's more."

  The two detectives were out canvassing Derek Snow's neighborhood when she reached Ochoa, so instead of going to his apartment, they made a plan to meet up at Mud Coffee just off Second. Traffic flow on East 9th was one way the wrong way for her, so Heat bypassed it, pulled into a loading zone on St. Mark's Place, tossed her placard on the dash, and walked it. Rook was a marathon and 10-K runner, but he had to work to keep pace with Nikki.