High Heat

by Richard Castle

  “Is it possible the body was in the Dumpster when you did it?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No. I would have seen it.”

  “It was dark. Are you sure?”

  Now he was nodding. “Yes. I’m not tall enough to get the bag over the side. I have to use the door. I would have seen it.”

  “And would anyone else have emptied garbage after you? One of the chefs, maybe?”

  “No. They leave it for me in the morning.”

  That told Heat the body had been deposited sometime between 11 P.M., when Jose had left work, and 9 A.M., when he arrived to begin preparing for the day.

  “Jose, do you happen to know when your garbage company does its pickups?”

  “Tuesday morning.”

  Of course. Which the killers may well have known.

  Satisfied Jose had nothing more to add to her investigation for the moment, Heat approached the Dumpster.

  The sliding metal door on the side was still open, as Jose had left it. Heat scanned the area immediately in front. But there were no footprints visible, bloody, muddy, or otherwise.

  She peered inside. The body had been loaded in feetfirst, so the stump of the neck was facing her. Heat understood why Jose had gotten sick. Even with all the corpses she had seen in various states of defilement, this was tough on her stomach, too. She could see where the machete had cut through smoothly, but also the hack marks from where the assailant had to begin sawing.

  The body was rolled up in a carpet, which told Heat how it had been transported there. Underneath, the Dumpster was about a quarter full with trash bags, making a kind of bed for the body and carpet to lie on. No additional trash bags had been dumped on top, which was a lucky break—less contamination, more of a chance the Evidence Collection Team might be able to get some useful information out of the scene.

  The killers had obviously hoped the body would remain unseen in the carpet for a few hours until garbage pickup time, and then be transported to a landfill, where it would be unceremoniously entombed for all time.

  “Call the precinct and tell them I want Benigno DeJesus pulled off whatever he’s doing and to make this his first priority,” she said to the uniform who was now standing near her. “I don’t think there’s going to be much here, but if there is, Benigno will find it. And if I’m not here when he gets here, tell him I want prints expedited. I don’t know if our vic is in the system or not, but maybe we’ll get a break and get an ID.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And tell the sergeant to let Dr. Parry know what’s coming her way. I want this to be her top priority.”

  “Got it, Captain.”

  “And one more thing, if I’m not here when DeJesus gets here. Once they get the body out, I’m afraid someone is going to have to go looking through the rest of the Dumpster for the head.”

  The cop was wincing, but he said, “Yes, sir.”

  “And if we don’t find it in this Dumpster, I want every Dumpster around here checked. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Heat shifted her gaze upward, looking at the corners of nearby buildings. None of them had any cameras, either. She wondered if the killers knew that this alley and the building in front of it were surveillance blind spots, and if they had selected this Dumpster for that reason.

  She shifted her eyes back to the alley, trying to imagine the killers carrying the body in a rolled-up carpet sometime in the dark of night. Then she looked up again. There were no cameras. But there were apartments. She just hoped that New York, the city that supposedly never sleeps, lived up to its tagline. Or at least that this neighborhood had a few insomniacs.

  Heat took out her phone to call Detective Feller. It rang once, twice, and then Heat realized she heard his rather distinctive ring tone—“The Final Countdown” by Europe—coming down the alley.

  “You looking for me?” Feller asked as he came into view. Rhymer was two steps behind him.

  “Sure was,” Heat said. “According to the guy who found the body, the Dumpster didn’t have a body in it as of eleven P.M. last night, and obviously it has one in it now. I want you and Opie knocking on doors in any apartments that have a view of the alley or the back of this building. Maybe someone heard or saw our killers without realizing it. They had the body rolled up in a carpet. I’m betting it took two of them to carry it.”

  “I got a better idea,” Feller said.

  “What’s that?”

  “You know there’s a mosque right up the street, right?” Feller said, gesturing in that direction.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “What do you say we get a warrant and kick the door down? Dollars to donuts we’ll find a couple of Jihad Johnnies hiding out with big-ass machetes under their skirts.”

  “And what, exactly, makes you think we have probable cause for a warrant?” Heat asked testily.

  “Come on, Captain. You heard those guys. It was all ‘Allah Allah bullshit bullshit.’ Where else do you think they’re hiding out?”

  Heat stepped away from the Dumpster and approached Feller. She didn’t want this conversation to be any louder than it needed to be.

  “Let me ask you this, Feller. There’s also a Lutheran church on this block. If they had said, ‘Praise Jesus,’ would you want us to go kicking that door in?”

  “That’s different.”

  “No. It’s not. I don’t want to turn this into a civics lesson, but you know we don’t have a state religion here in America, right? That means Muslims get the same rights as Lutherans, Jews, atheists, and whatever other belief structure you care to name.”

  “Ah, come on. Don’t get all PC on me.”

  “It’s not political correctness, Feller. It’s called the law. And we’ve been hired by the city of New York to enforce it, not create our own version of it based on our biases and prejudices. Are we clear?”

  “You know they did it,” Feller huffed.

  “I only know what the evidence tells me, Detective,” Heat said. “And until the evidence points me in that direction, I’m not going there. Because even if we could find a judge bigoted enough to give us a warrant, another judge would surely throw it out later. And then every piece of evidence we gathered at that mosque would be tossed out before trial. In the courts, they call that ‘fruit of a poison tree,’ and believe me, it would taste pretty nasty if our perps walked because we didn’t take the time to do this the right way.

  “Now,” she said, glaring at him, “are you going to do this canvass? Or do you need two weeks on the bench without pay to think about why it’s important to follow your captain’s orders?”

  “Jeez, okay, okay,” Feller said, holding his hands in the air. “Come on, Opie. You heard our distinguished captain. Let’s go knock on doors and ignore the fact that the killers are watching us do it from that mosque up the street, laughing their towel-headed asses off at us the whole time.”

  Feller turned and departed the alley. Rhymer gave Heat a sympathetic shrug before following his partner.

  Heat watched them go, then walked back up the alleyway. She knew exactly where she was going, of course. Heat had worked the Twentieth Precinct her entire career. She didn’t need Randy Feller or anyone else to tell her about its places of worship.

  Without slowing, she turned right and walked halfway up the block until she was facing an austere, stoutly built concrete structure with stone steps leading up to its entrance.

  To the left of the entrance was a sign. Half of it was in Arabic. The other half read MASJID AL-JANNAH in block letters.

  Heat pulled out her phone and dialed a number.

  “Raley,” she heard.

  “Hey, Rales. How’s it coming with finding our crime scene?”

  “Not good, Captain. This is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is three hundred miles square.”

  “What if I were to make the stack a little smaller?”

  “That would probably help.”

  “I don’t want you to f
orce this. If it doesn’t shake out, it doesn’t shake out. But write this down,” Heat said, then read off the address for Masjid al-Jannah. “See if you can match our video to that location.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  Heat stowed her phone back in her pocket. There was law enforcement, which involved understanding and respecting all statutes, from New York City regulations right on up to the Constitution of the United States. Then there was good police work, which involved developing logically sound hunches and finding the evidence to support them.

  Captain Nikki Heat knew how to do both.

  Once Benigno DeJesus and the rest of the Evidence Collection Team arrived—and Heat was sure they had all they needed to do their job—she excused herself from the scene.

  It went against her instincts as a detective. She was still at the stage where she had to remind herself that she wasn’t a detective anymore.

  Delegate, The Hammer kept telling her, every time she blew off a CompStat meeting (to the ire of the brass downtown) or a meeting with a community leader (to the irritation of said leader) because she wanted to stay involved in an investigation. Leadership means putting people in a position to do their job and letting them do it.

  So Heat got back in her pool car, with the intention of going back to the precinct. Except the car didn’t seem to want to go there.

  Almost involuntarily, she found herself driving south instead of north. Then east, across town.

  She knew exactly where she was going, of course. And exactly what she was doing when she got there. Even if she couldn’t quite admit it to herself or believe what she was about to do.

  The morning rush had eased out and the midday gridlock hadn’t started asserting itself yet, so she crossed town easily enough. She passed the United Nations, then followed signs toward the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

  Then it was under the East River and out on 495, through the borough of Brooklyn. As far as a lot of Manhattanites were concerned, she had already entered the wilds of New York. But she didn’t stop there. She kept going all the way out to Queens—the rural hinterlands of the city—where she was soon parking on an elm-lined street across from Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

  Her first stop was the pool car’s trunk. Thankfully, she found it had the items she needed: a screwdriver, which she discreetly tucked in her waistband, under her blouse; and a pair of blue nitrile gloves and an evidence collection bag, which she slid into the tiny half pocket of her slacks.

  Why an expensive, nicely tailored pair of women’s pants couldn’t have full-size pockets was a gripe for another time.

  Appropriately equipped, she walked with determined strides through a black wrought iron gate. Then it was up a concrete path toward a magnificent nineteenth century limestone building that was perched atop a small hill.

  The Fresh Pond Crematory-Columbarium was one of the oldest facilities of its kind in the city of New York. It had polished marble floors, high ceilings, Tiffany-style stained glass windows, and a peaceful, quiet dignity about its every detail.

  It also housed the remains of Cynthia Heat.

  Nikki hoped those remains would help her answer the question that had been haunting her ever since the half second earlier that morning that had challenged one of the most fundamental assumptions of her life.

  Was her mother dead or not? She couldn’t live anything resembling a settled, sane, balanced life until she knew for sure.

  She pressed a buzzer next to the front door and waited for the lock to be released. When she entered, she found a smiling woman in gold-framed glasses there to greet her.

  “Ms. Heat, yes?”

  “That’s right. Martha?”

  “Yes. Very good. Here to visit your mother?”

  “Yes,” Nikki said.

  The woman might have added, It’s been a while. But at the Fresh Pond Crematory-Columbarium, they were far more decorous than that.

  “You remember the way?” Martha asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Very well. Let me know if you need anything.”

  Heat smiled thinly—just the right amount, she hoped—then started walking across the polished marble. Her heels echoed as she passed countless plaques, laid out in perfectly straight rows and columns. Each marked the spot where the ashes of a cremated New Yorker had been laid to rest.

  The columbarium was designed with privacy in mind. There were nooks and turns and corners and alcoves, architectural features that assured mourning families could be more or less alone with the remains of their loved ones when they chose to visit.

  It hadn’t necessarily been designed for what Nikki was about to do. But it would suit her purpose all the same.

  When she reached the small recess where her mother’s ashes had been stored, she took a brief moment to look up and down the hallway where she stood. During weekends and holidays there were often other mourners. But on a Tuesday morning in October, she had the place to herself.

  She stepped forward and found her mother’s plaque, a handsome bronze piece that read:

  CYNTHIA TROPE HEAT

  B. JANUARY 5, 1950

  D. NOVEMBER 24, 1999

  LOVING MOTHER, MUSICIAN, PATRIOT

  “…THAT WHOEVER BELIEVES SHALL NOT PERISH,

  BUT HAVE EVERLASTING LIFE.”

  Nikki had long ago noted that the words “in him”—which were in every other translation of John 3:16 she had ever seen—had been eliminated. She had dismissed it as Cynthia Heat striking one last blow against the patriarchy. But had her mother—who had left such explicit instructions in her will, including the language on the plaque—been trying to tell her daughter something?

  Or was Nikki Heat about to desecrate her mother’s final resting spot for no good reason?

  “Sorry, Mom,” she muttered.

  Then she slipped the screwdriver out from under her blouse and got to work.

  She knew she could have asked the staff to open the small vault for her. But she didn’t want anyone at Fresh Pond Crematory-Columbarium knowing what she was up to. She was, more than likely, fully within her rights to do what she was about to do. Cynthia Heat was her mother. Nikki was her next of kin. Those ashes belonged to her.

  But she didn’t want any potential red tape to slow her down. Nor did she want to have to answer any questions.

  As she unfastened the first screw, then the second, she couldn’t help thinking back to November 24, 1999, the day that irrevocably changed the course of her life.

  She was in her sophomore year at Northeastern and home for Thanksgiving break. She and her mother were making pies in the Gramercy Park apartment Nikki had called home since her parents brought her home from the hospital. The recipe called for fresh-ground cinnamon—not the pre-ground stuff—so Nikki had been dispatched to the Morton Williams grocery story up the block for cinnamon sticks.

  She was in the spice aisle when her mother called her, which was why Nikki got to hear the harrowing sound of her mother being attacked. She even heard the voice of the attacker, who she later determined was Tyler Wynn. He was her mother’s CIA handler and had employed Cynthia as a piano teacher/covert agent as part of what he called the Nanny Network, a group of domestic employees who spied on the rich families they worked for. It had been incredibly successful throughout the 70s and 80s. However, by 1999, Tyler Wynn had turned traitor, working for other governments, and he killed Cynthia before she could expose him.

  Nikki didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. All she knew was that someone was assaulting her mother. Nikki rushed home. By the time she arrived, she found her mother crumpled on the kitchen floor.

  A knife—her own kitchen knife, a very real knife—was protruding from Cynthia Heat’s back.

  Blood—her own blood, also very real—had poured out on the floor.

  Nikki had cradled her mother in her arms and felt her body going cold. Life was fading from her so quickly. Cynthia Heat was already beyond speech. Her breathing became slow and labored.

&nb
sp; And then it had stopped. Hadn’t it?

  Same with her pulse. Nikki had held her hands against her mother’s wrists and felt nothing.

  Nikki now realized she had never seen the actual entry wound the knife had created. She had only seen the hole in Cynthia Heat’s sweater set. It had never even occurred to Nikki that it mattered whether or not she saw the hole the knife had gouged in her mother, just as it had never occurred to Nikki until that morning that what she had witnessed all those years ago might have been a staged event.

  From there, everything had happened so fast. A paramedic arrived, then a policewoman. She could still see them, coaxing her away from the body, telling her she had to let go. Then they had whisked her mother away.

  The next time Nikki Heat saw her mother was after the cremation. Cynthia Heat’s ashes were presented to Nikki in an urn—the urn she was about to pull out of the wall. Two screws down, two to go.

  Nikki kept looking at the plaque as she worked. November 24, 1999 wasn’t just the most tragic day of her life. It was also the dividing line in her life, the before and after in her personal biography.

  Before that date, she had led a more or less unremarkable childhood and young adulthood. Yes, her parents had divorced when she was little. And, yes, her piano teacher mother was occasionally flighty, disappearing with little or no explanation and then reappearing without any clarification as to where she had been. But they had been happy when they were together. And Nikki, the beneficiary of more than a few of Cynthia Heat’s many talents—not to mention her striking good looks—had been a promising theater student whose talent and charisma hinted at a boundless potential on the stage and in front of the camera.

  After that date, everything changed. Her life became inextricably darker, tinged with a sadness that never seemed to fully leave her. Even when she was doing something that made her superficially happy—enjoying a workout, drinking a glass of wine, laughing with friends—there was a part of her brain pulsing with sorrow. It was like grief was a skin she couldn’t shed. She dropped her theater major and took up criminal justice. She never again appeared onstage. She became obsessed with solving murders—first her mother’s, then other people’s. She became a cop, then a detective. She met a charmingly roguish magazine writer named Jameson Rook and became a captain.