Raging Heat

by Richard Castle

  “Will do.”

  She withdrew another blowup from her file and posted it. “We still don’t have anything on the van’s wheelman, but we do have a street-cam capture of the driver of the Impala while demonstrating the urban tactical capabilities of the Heckler & Koch assault carbine.” She posted the photo and somebody behind her, probably Opie, whistled. The picture showed the face of a man she’d nicknamed the Cool Customer illuminated satanically by the brilliant tongue of flame radiating from the G36 as he emptied his C mag at her.

  “Does he even have a pulse?” asked Rhymer. “Dude’s laying down lethal fire, but he looks like he’s chilling at the fishing hole.” Cool Customer, indeed.

  “We don’t have any ID on him yet, but this photo is circulating now. It’s out to NYPD, Homeland, FBI, DOD, and Interpol.” Heat’s eyes lingered on the eight-by-tens; then she addressed the group. “As we work these guys I want to know a couple of things. What is such a highly trained collection of contractors doing in New York City? And why come after me? And Fabian Beauvais? And Jeanne Capois, if—as I suspect—they also killed them? And who are they working for?” Keith Gilbert’s head shot loomed over her shoulder. “I have an idea, but I want proof. I want to find a solid connection.”

  Ochoa raised one finger. “Miguel?”

  “Kinda not how you usually go at it, is it.” The detective didn’t make eye contact with Nikki. He remained slouched back in his chair, concentrating on the toes of his shoes as he spoke. “I mean, you always tell us to keep an open mind…”

  “…Beginner’s eyes,” added his partner.

  “…And now you’re pushing for proof against Keith Gilbert when there’s other leads, too. All I’m saying.”

  That was saying a lot. That was saying her case leadership had come into question. Not only that, it was being challenged within the squad. Quietly, but a challenge nonetheless. Had her reprimand so upset these two that they would rift-out on her like this? “Let’s talk about it.”

  “Yeah, let’s.” Detective Raley went up to the board. Space was getting tight but he found room and put two mug shots up: one of each of the pair from the ATM who had also chased and shot at Beauvais in the video from Queensboro Plaza. “Let’s talk about these thugs. Thug-One: Mayshon Franklin. Twenty-eight, in and out of prison three times, not counting juvie. Convictions for assault, weapons possession, and credit card theft.”

  He moved to the second photo, and the tougher-looking character. “Thug-Two: Earl Sliney. This is our shooter from the video. Age, thirty-seven. Older than his partner, but apparently no wiser. Also a juvenile offender; also numerous stretches as a guest of various states. A deuce in Colorado for check fraud and ID theft, a bid in Florence, Arizona, for an armed home invasion robbery; closer to us, he stacked five years upstate at Dannemora for kneecapping a drug dealer who shorted his cut. Earl Sliney is currently at large with a warrant for a recent murder in Mount Vernon, New York. He shot and killed an elderly woman hiding in her bathtub trying to call 911 during an armed home invasion.” Raley strode back to his seat. The move reminded Nikki of an improv comic she and Rook saw once who dropped the microphone and exited the stage after he scored the un-toppable laugh.

  Nikki sat on the front table and took a moment to consider Roach. And how the pressure she felt could sometimes create harm where she least wanted it, to those who least deserved it. It had been on her mind all the way back to the precinct. It had been she who told Raley and Ochoa to take point on the home invasion case. And from that work came the receipt in Jeanne Capois’s purse that led them to Chelsea. And in her irritation, she’d thoughtlessly bigfooted them on the sidewalk and sent them away.

  Would an apology make that right? Or maybe this wasn’t pushback about her smacking them down. Maybe they truly had doubts. Maybe they smelled something about this case she was missing. “You like these guys for this,” Heat said, not challenging, not buying, either.

  “We like being open to that,” said Ochoa.

  Raley nodded. “We feel like things went one way in a hurry.”

  “Way big a hurry,” repeated his pard. “Just noticing what we’re noticing, boss.”

  Roach, her best detectives, were kicking the ball back by feeding Heat her own training lectures. “All right, fine. Tell you what. Follow this thread. See if you can track these two. Relatives, known associates, the usual. Obviously, they’re stealing bank card skims, so I’d start there. Maybe you can get more hits from the same source of the ATM still photo. By the way, where’d that picture come from?”

  Nobody said anything. Then Rhymer cleared his throat. “Um, got a call from Rook yesterday after he got his tip from that woman at the chicken place.”

  Thinking back, trying to recall the name, she asked, “You mean Hattie?”

  Rhymer nodded. “Yeah, exactly, that’s the one. Anyway, Rook asked me to call some of my old pals in Burglary and Fraud to surf for Beauvais in their ATM perp database.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Heat in disbelief. “Rook. Rook called and asked you to do that?” First Roach, now him? Nikki thought, Et tu Opie?

  The detective shrugged. “Sort of felt like the same thing you’d ask for, if you were around.”

  Heat dismissed them to tackle their assignments. She returned to her desk and felt that tug of barbed wire pull snug across her back muscles again.

  She almost called Rook. Not to share IDs on Thug-One and Thug-Two, but to reopen the conversation about enlisting her crew as a personal research team for his article. She didn’t call because she knew where that would go, which was the same no-fly-zone she decided to avoid at his kitchen counter that morning. So she busied herself with follow-ups while she waited for the search warrant to make it uptown from the DA’s office.

  Still no Alicia Delamater sightings. Either Gilbert’s mistress had slipped past U.S. Customs, or her attorney lied and she never left the country. There’s a stretch—a lawyer being untruthful.

  She located an address for Hattie Pate, Fabian Beauvais’s pal from the chicken slaughterhouse who’d tipped Rook off about the ATM crew and the Queensboro Plaza gunplay. She put it in a group text to Raley and Ochoa for them to investigate. Nikki didn’t add a smiley face but hoped the gesture would thaw the chilly air between them.

  In her renewed sense of open-mindedness, she e-mailed the Real Time Crime Center and asked them to run Fidel “FiFi” Figueroa and Charley Tosh. Figueroa and Tosh, the Dumpster divers who got arrested with Beauvais had, according to Rook, a history of dirty tricks and harassment against Keith Gilbert’s campaign. She didn’t know exactly what she could learn from them, but it wouldn’t hurt to close the loop.

  Detective Sergeant Aguinaldo of SVPD returned her call to confirm that she would meet Nikki at Cosmo in Southampton to facilitate the service of the warrant and the search for Gilbert’s handgun. Also, after the Russian doctor named the commissioner as Beauvais’s shooter, Heat had asked her to run a check on reports of gunfire the night of his treatment. “Sorry,” said Aguinaldo. “I’m afraid there are no reports in that time frame. Which doesn’t surprise me. I mean, we’d already know. ‘Shots fired’ would be big news in the village.” The news blanketed Heat under another layer of worry about making her case airtight. And kept the door open that it could have been Earl Sliney who shot the Haitian, and not her prime suspect.

  “Thanks for checking, anyway.” Then, never one to give up, Heat said, “Would I be pushing my luck to ask you another favor?”

  “Name it.”

  “That patrol officer you told me about.”

  Inez Aguinaldo was right there with her. “The one who encountered the man staggering to the LI-Double-R?”

  “Yes, what do your uniforms call it?”

  “Catch and release. When I talked to Officer Matthews he wasn’t certain it had been Mr. Beauvais, but he did say the man had an accent and acted sick. You’re thinking maybe it was
n’t sickness?”

  “Maybe he’d been shot,” said Heat. “Could you—”

  “—Talk to him again? You bet. I’ll even see if he can join us when you get to Beckett’s Neck.”

  If Fabian Beauvais had been shot while in the Hamptons, that would end the speculation about whether one of Earl Sliney’s rounds tagged him on that Queensboro Plaza security video. It might also put a lid on the internal discord that had arisen about this case. First from Rook, and now from the go-to guys in her crew who’d had their heads turned, either by doubt about the evidence or aggravation at her.

  Since Gilbert’s gun would be a key link in that chain of evidence, when Nikki got word the search warrant was just blocks away she started to saddle up to be set to leave the instant she got it in hand. During a ritual desk check, her phone rang. OCME. She paused to take it.

  Lauren Parry said, “Just finished the postmortems on your two Dead at Scenes from Chelsea. First, cause of death. —Nikki Heat.” Thankfully, the ME knew her friend, and could tell from the lack of response that Nikki was on a mission. So she skipped the wisecracks and got right to the rest. “Roderick Floyd, the one you shot. He’s got scratch marks on his neck and cheeks. In your incident report from last night, you didn’t mention scratching him.”

  “Correct. My only physical contact was a takedown with my right leg to the back of his knees.”

  “That would follow, because these excoriations look days old.”

  “Lauren, you thinking Jeanne Capois?”

  “That would be consistent with the appearance and age of the scratch marks. We’ll lab his DNA against her fingernail residue, but here’s why I called. You’ve never heard me go out on a limb like this, but I know what we’ll find. I am confident that Roderick Floyd was one of her attackers.”

  After Nikki hung up, she stood in front of the Murder Board, letting her gaze bounce back and forth from the photo of Roderick Floyd, the paramilitary killer of Jeanne Capois, to Earl Sliney, the street player who fired at Fabian Beauvais on video. What she tried to reconcile was how—or if—they fit together. They had such different backgrounds, such different profiles: one, tactical; the other, a hoodlum. The only common thread Heat could see was their history of home invasions. The information she’d just gotten from the medical examiner all but confirmed Floyd as part of the crew that broke into the apartment on West End and killed the owner when he tried to stop them with a baseball bat. They had also chased after Jeanne Capois, torturing her behind some trash cans near a prep school.

  Sliney had a fugitive warrant for a home invasion homicide. Were those home invasion dots connecting, or were they just dots? Was this tactical crew working with the street thugs? Or did they even know about each other? Heat simply couldn’t see a pattern emerging—yet. She knew something was there, but every time she got close to seeing the horizon, it was as if a swirl of angry clouds kept the view hidden from her.

  Every administrative aide in the station house knew the importance of that search warrant. So much so that one held the door while the other rushed in to hand deliver the paper to Heat when it arrived. As she inspected the doc to verify the date and signatures and seals, Detective Feller called her name. “Trying to get to the Hamptons,” she said, brandishing the warrant.

  “I think you’re going to want to hear this.” And when he told her what it was, Heat turned from the door and followed him into the conference room.

  Her gut flipped the instant she walked in and saw the Russian sitting with his elbows propped on the conference table. Ivan Gogol’s chin rested in both hands, the corners of his mouth were pushed downward, and an ominously blank yellow tablet sat in front of him with a capped stick pen resting on it at an angle. “I cannot write this statement.”

  “Mr. Gogol,” she began gently, softly—hopefully, “is there something I can help you with? Would you like a translator?”

  “Nyet, I cannot make this statement because is lies.” Heat felt herself go flush. Detective Feller whispered a curse and turned away in frustration.

  Nikki tried to see what could be salvaged here. Maybe if she broke it down in pieces. “Well, we don’t want you to go on record with anything you don’t feel comfortable with.” She rested a hand on his sleeve and, even though she landed on an archipelago of moles, she left it there. “Let’s start with what you will attest to.”

  “Nothing. I will swear to nothing.” He pushed the pad away like a disappointing meal.

  Dauntless, she pressed on. “Let’s take this a step at a time. You told us you treated Fabian Beauvais for a gunshot. That much is true, right?” She eased the pad back to him.

  He pulled up into a shrug and left his shoulders like that, nearly touching his ears, as he said, “I cannot be sure. He was black man. His name, I can no longer be sure.” Heat took the photo of Beauvais from Feller and held it up, but before she could ask him, Ivan said, “Is him? Not him? I cannot be sure now. Very traumatic night. I had been sleeping, you know, I startle awake.”

  No sense prolonging the agony. “Mr. Gogol? Mr. Gogol, please look at me. Thank you. I need you to think about this before you answer. Just yesterday you told us that this man here,” she tapped the Beauvais picture, “had been shot and that you treated him, and that he told you the name of who shot him was Keith Gilbert. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Mr. Gogol.”

  “This man say many things. Maybe delirious or drunk from getting in bar fight and shot that way. Yes, that is what I think happened. The drinking.”

  Nikki stared at Ivan Gogol. His wasn’t the face of a liar. What she read on him was fear. Almost panic. Someone had said—or done—something to turn him into a wreck. Heat’s concern for him blended with her own as she witnessed a critical piece of her case—her airtight case—deflate before her eyes. “Ivan, if you are at all afraid, please know that the NYPD will provide you with—”

  “Enough. I will say nothing more.” He pushed the pad away again with such force that the pen slid off the table and clacked somewhere below on the linoleum. Nobody reached to pick it up. It was going to be of no use.

  The old salts working the Atlantic off Long Island didn’t have Doppler radar, computer models, or satellite imagery to predict a brewing storm. They smelled the air, watched the birds, or consulted the Farmers’ Almanac, if the pages hadn’t been torn out in the privy. Of course, they also got surprised a lot. In 1938 the Long Island Express slammed into the Northeast killing about eight hundred people who got little advance notice. So much for red skies in the morning.

  Detective Heat only had sunshine and sixty-two degrees to ponder as she drove past the exit for the Fire Island National Seashore. Instead of scoping out weather telltales, her attention went to patrolling side and rearview mirrors in case a certain Impala or vehicle yet-to-be-detected seemed to be following. After the attack in Chelsea she knew Captain Irons would insist on a uni driver or even try to make her take a blue-and-white to Southampton, so Nikki ducked out to her plain wrap Taurus right after the busted interview with Ivan Gogol to ensure some needed solitude for the trip.

  Could it really have been only two days before that she covered this same road with Rook? So much had changed in that span, and little of it for the better. Notably Rook, not riding along. Whatever he was doing at that moment, she only hoped it would not result in further disruption. Nikki pushed to stay positive. Sure, the Russian doctor had crapped out, yet she had her warrant. But the situation felt much too fluid to let her relax.

  Heat had begun by seeing Beauvais’s planetarium crash and the home invasion on West End Avenue as two different cases. But then came the connection between the Haitian couple as lovers. And now—thanks to Lauren Parry—the forensic nexus between the SRO goons and Jeanne Capois tied them together, as well. However, the rise of Earl Sliney as the possible shooter jumbled things. Nikki wondered, was she really
working one case, or could she possibly be back to two?

  Along the drive she’d spot-checked the AM radio for updates on the hurricane. The latest report said Sandy had crossed Cuba as a Category Two with wind speeds of 114 miles per hour, causing the unconfirmed deaths of eleven people. The eye didn’t make landfall on Hispaniola, but, as it churned north, Sandy’s powerful swirl dumped twenty inches of rain and killed about fifty souls in Haiti. As of eight that morning, NOAA had tropical storm warnings out for southeast Florida, and the entire Eastern seaboard of the U.S. had started getting serious about disaster readiness.

  When the newscaster said, “We go now, live, to a joint news conference with the mayor, the governor, and a commissioner of the Port Authority,” Nikki cranked up the volume. Hizzoner sounded like his usual easygoing self as he announced he had already opened his Office of Emergency Management Situation Room and that all city agencies were synergizing in response to the coming weather event. The governor cited regular discussions with FEMA and the president, who was monitoring the situation closely. The MTA was preparing to move buses and trains to higher ground in the next twenty-four hours. The mayor chimed in that citizens could also expect to see workers sand bagging subway entrances and fastening plywood over sidewalk ventilation grates to prevent flooding. That image gave Nikki her first visceral feeling about a storm that had seemed so abstract until then. And the feeling she got was not just of impact but something more portentous: inevitability.

  A reporter asked the governor if the charges against Commissioner Gilbert would adversely impact readiness. The question was followed by a pressroom full of murmurs.

  “I’ll answer that,” said Keith Gilbert. Heat pictured him stepping to the microphone, sparing the governor from a perilous moment. “Shortly after I was sworn in last July, well before anybody even knew about this storm, I led the Port Authority in a readiness drill, rehearsing for an emergency such as this. We did it in full-scale, war games style using JFK, Newark Liberty, and the Bayonne Bridge as venues. Three months ago. This is how we roll. We plan. We prepare. Now we execute.