High Heat

by Richard Castle

  All because of November 24, 1999.

  She was working on the last screw, which finally came free. Carefully, quietly, she pulled the plaque away from the wall to reveal a small cubby.

  The urn was inside. It was the same urn she remembered from seventeen years earlier, after the ceremony they had held for Cynthia. Nikki had personally placed it in the cubby. To the best of her knowledge, it hadn’t been touched since.

  Now she was hauling it back out. She grasped it firmly, with both hands. Once she had removed it, she cradled it in her arms for another moment.

  Nikki looked down at the urn, still in disbelief about what she was doing.

  Then she grasped the urn’s lid. It had a tight seal, a ring of plastic that kept it snug against the rim. She tugged, working it back and forth until the seal broke.

  As air that had not been disturbed in seventeen years escaped from the hole, Heat peered inside. She had wondered if perhaps the vessel would be empty. For as much as she wanted her mother to be alive, she was strangely dreading what she would see.

  But, no, there were definitely ashes inside.

  The question was: whose?

  Was that mound of gray cinders all that was left of Cynthia Heat? Or was it…what? Another person? Just some other substance scraped off an empty funeral pyre? Floor sweepings from the crematory?

  Nikki softly set the urn on the ground, then slid the nitrile gloves over her hands. She opened the evidence collection bag, then dipped her hand into the urn. A small fistful would be enough. More than enough.

  “Remember that you are dust,” she whispered. “And to dust you shall return.”

  She sealed the bag, then returned the urn to its rightful place. After restoring the plaque to its spot on the wall, she made her quiet escape from the Fresh Pond Crematory-Columbarium.

  The evidence bag in her pocket didn’t have more than a few ounces of material in it.

  But it felt like it weighed a ton.

  Heat tried Rook’s phone several more times on the way back from her morbid errand in Queens, getting the same distressing non-response each time: straight to voice mail.

  In a failed attempt not to be unnerved about it, she tried to think of all the perfectly benign reasons he might not be answering. He had a dead battery. He’d dropped his phone. He was deep in one of Kline Industries’ mines.

  All of it was possible. None of it reassured her in the slightest.

  As she neared the precinct, she did her best to stuff her anxiety back in a box so she could concentrate on what she had to do next: pay a visit to room 23B.

  It was ordinarily something she would have enjoyed—or at least not dreaded. Which, in itself, requires an explanation.

  For most New Yorkers, a visit to room 23B at the Twentieth Precinct meant their lives had met one of two unfortunate ends: a lonely one, in the case of an unattended death, or a violent one, in the case of a murder.

  In both instances, absent any religious restrictions, the law requires an autopsy. And for all citizens whose bodies were discovered north of 59th Street, south of 86th Street, west of Central Park, and east of the Hudson River, those autopsies were performed in room 23B. That made it a place where most people wouldn’t want to end up.

  Nikki had a different feeling toward it, mainly because of the woman who plied her trade there.

  Medical Examiner Lauren Parry was Heat’s best friend, the maid of honor at her wedding, and one of the very few people who was allowed a glimpse behind the walls Nikki erected to block out most of the rest of the world.

  That’s what made this particular visit to room 23B complicated. Heat always dealt straight with her friend. This time, because of what was in her pocket, she was going to have to come from the side.

  Heat found Parry washing her hands, which meant she was either finishing up an autopsy or about to start one.

  “Hey, I was just about to call you,” Parry said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Well, you said that Jane Doe was top priority, right?”

  “Absolutely,” Heat said, content to pretend like that was the reason she had come to 23B in the first place. “I was actually hoping she wouldn’t be Jane anymore.”

  “No such luck. We already ran prints and got nothing. I’m sorry to say our Jane is a good girl who has never been in trouble with the five-oh. We’re doing DNA as well, but of course that’s going to take longer and I’m not real optimistic if we’ve already struck out on prints.”

  “Okay. What can you tell me?”

  Parry dried her hands on a paper towel. “Not much, to be honest. Jane was a healthy Caucasian female in her early to mid-thirties. She was not pregnant, nor had she ever been pregnant. She had surgery on her left knee about ten years ago or so, but it was arthroscopic and I’m sorry to say it didn’t involve any permanent medical devices for us to play Clue with. She wasn’t a drug addict. She had no tattoos. She exercised regularly. She was a conscientious flosser.”

  “Sounds like a real party girl,” Heat said.

  “Yeah. If I was putting her on Match.com, pretty much the only thing you’d have to add to make her the most boring profile ever is that she likes taking long walks on the beach and watching romantic comedies.”

  “Tell me about her last date,” Heat said. “You got any idea on time of death?”

  “Well, there was no hint of rigor, so she had been dead for at least forty-eight hours when we got her.”

  “Forty-eight hours?” Heat repeated, feeling her brow crinkle.

  “Lividity was a little tricky. She lost a lot of blood after the beheading. The heart stops beating once it no longer receives messages from the brain, but that took a little while in this case, on account of the difficulty that psycho had getting her head off. Plus, even once the heart stops, there’s a lot of blood pressure built up. The carotid artery is like a busy highway at rush hour. Even if cars stop getting on at the entrance ramps, there’s still plenty of traffic left on the road. It keeps spurting pretty good for at least thirty seconds. Have you found the scene yet?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when you do, you’re going to find a pretty big bloodstain, because this body didn’t have a lot of fluid left in it. The better method for determining Jane’s TOD was cell autolysis, also known as cell death. That turned out to be at a very early stage. Between that and the fact that skin discoloration had only just started, my best estimate is that she’d been dead for approximately fifty-four hours by the time I got her, but I’d have to put at least a four-hour margin for error on either side.”

  “Fifty-four hours?” Heat began. “But that’s—”

  “Sunday morning sometime. Conservatively, I’d put it sometime between midnight and eight A.M.”

  Heat stood there, her lower lip grasped between her teeth. As a detective, she had learned that establishing a timeline was a critical piece of any investigation.

  This timeline had a definite gap in it.

  “So, hang on a second, she’s killed early Sunday morning sometime,” Heat said. “But according to the dishwasher we interviewed, there was no body in the Dumpster on Monday night, and certainly a body there on Tuesday morning. So where was she from Sunday morning until Tuesday morning?”

  “Beats me. That’s what you fancy detectives are hired to figure out,” Parry said.

  “It’s possible the killers were just waiting until garbage pickup day,” Heat mused, even though that was also outside Parry’s investigative scope.

  “All I can tell you is that she was probably rolled up in the carpet the whole time. She was stuck to it pretty good.”

  “Please tell me it was a one-of-a-kind handmade Persian.”

  Parry shook her head. “Sorry. DuPont Stainmaster.”

  “Do you have anything good for me?”

  “Depends. How good a nose do you have?”

  “Pretty good, I think.”

  Parry walked over to a lab table. She grabbed a small plastic container with a piece of
denim inside it. Then she walked toward Heat, pulling off the lid at the last second.

  “Smell this. You get anything off that?”

  Heat sniffed at it. “Yeah. Why do I suddenly feel like I’m on a camping trip?”

  “Because you’re smelling kerosene. Or at least that’s my best guess until I have some tests run to confirm it. Her clothes reeked of it.”

  Parry put the lid back on the swab.

  “ISIS has burned some of its captives alive,” Heat said. “You think that was their plan with our victim, but then they decided to behead her instead?”

  “That’s one possibility. Though they were making it hard on themselves if that was their plan. Kerosene doesn’t light nearly as easily as gasoline.”

  “Then they were going to burn the body but they couldn’t get it to light?”

  “I didn’t find any marks on her clothes or her body to indicate they put a match to her,” Parry said.

  “Huh,” Heat said.

  “There’s one other curious thing.”

  “Don’t hold out on me, Laur.”

  “I’m not. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

  Heat’s head cocked to the side as Parry continued: “It came from the victim’s shoes. She was wearing hiking boots. The treads had some good old-fashioned dust and dirt, but there was also a whitish powder that…Well, I don’t know what it is.”

  “A whitish powder. Like coke? Heroin?”

  “Could be. I didn’t get a lot of it, and it was mixed in pretty good with the other dirt. The lab techs are going to have to find a way to separate it out before we can even start to pin down what it is.”

  “All right. Well, keep me looped in.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  Heat made a big show of turning like she was going to leave, like what was about to come next was such an afterthought she had all but forgotten it. Parry had already sat down on a lab stool. She had turned her attention to a tablet, into which she was entering information about the autopsy.

  “Oh, hey, Laur, one more thing,” Heat said.

  Parry looked up from her tablet without speaking.

  Heat pulled the plastic evidence bag from her half pocket and briefly dangled it, then casually tossed it on the table. “Would you mind doing a little workup on this?”

  Parry examined it from where she sat. The medical examiner had seen the human body in virtually every possible state of disintegration, including when it had been reduced to ashes. Now she was the one with the wrinkled forehead.

  “Are those…cremation remains?” the medical examiner asked.

  “Yeah,” Heat said, trying to keep her tone breezy.

  “Whose?”

  “Don’t know. That’s part of the mystery.”

  Parry was shaking her head. “The covalent bonds of DNA start breaking apart at about eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Most crematories get up to eighteen hundred, two thousand. If they cooked it as long as they’re supposed to, I won’t be able to tell you who that was.”

  “I know. But I thought bones still told stories even after the DNA goes silent.”

  “They do. Sometimes,” Parry said.

  “Well, okay. So tell me whatever you can about this person.”

  “Is this for the ISIS case?”

  “No. Something else.”

  “What’s the case number?”

  Heat tried to slide by this by saying, “Can you keep it off-books? It’s…not really an official investigation yet. More something that might turn into an investigation depending on what you find.”

  But it didn’t slide easily. Parry took a long moment to study her friend. Just as the Twentieth Precinct had been Heat’s first station after graduating from the Police Academy, it had been Parry’s first assignment after she completed the last of her medical examiner rotations. Since that time, such a free and easy exchange of favors had passed between the women that they had honestly lost count of who owed what to whom. Heat probably would have said she was in Parry’s debt. But Parry would have said the same thing.

  Yet even within the bounds of that kind of relationship, this was an unusual request. It was explicitly against department policy. It could get Parry suspended or even fired. And, sure, Parry could play with case numbers in a way that not even the most stringent audit would turn it up, but…

  At the very least, it begged a whole lot of questions that Heat wasn’t ready to answer.

  So, yeah, funniest thing, I was just walking along the street today and I happened to see my dead mother dressed like a homeless woman…

  Heat was holding her breath. She could see Parry’s eyes scanning her own in an attempt to divine what might be behind this ask. There was real wonder on Parry’s face. And to Heat, her thoughts were easy to read.

  What’s Nikki not telling me? Why is she asking me to do this? What’s really going on?

  And then Parry suddenly returned her attention to her tablet.

  “Yeah, no problem,” Parry said.

  “Thanks,” Heat said.

  Only then did she let the breath go.

  As she returned to the bull pen, Heat was lost in her thoughts. About her mother. About the ISIS case. About where her husband might be and whether he was, at that moment, already himself doused in kerosene—for whatever reason the killers did that—and slated for an awful end.

  Her distraction was to the point where she did not notice the man who had fallen into step behind her.

  Nor was she aware of the lascivious look on his face.

  Nor did she notice when his hands started reaching for her buttocks.

  “Excuse me, miss,” he growled in a lecherous voice. “But you have an extraordinary ass. Would you mind if I groped it?”

  Heat turned to see the ruggedly handsome mug of Jameson Rook leering suggestively back at her.

  “Rook! Oh, thank God,” she gasped.

  She immediately leapt into Rook’s arms, pressing her entire body against his and grabbing him with both arms. Her near-tackle was so forceful it actually staggered Rook, but Heat wasn’t letting go. If anything, she squeezed even harder, not caring that she was knocking the wind out of him. She buried her face in his neck, grateful for the feel of him, the smell of him, the sound of him, and the sight of him. The taste could come later.

  “Well, this is certainly a nice how-ya-doin’,” Rook said. “I should go away more often.”

  Then she released him, stepped back, and slapped him across the face.

  “Or maybe I should just stay home,” Rook said.

  The journalist rubbed his jaw. “Was it the ass thing? Too crass? For the record, I was going to call you ‘callipygian’ but I felt like that would—”

  “Do you have any idea how worried I was about you?” Heat demanded. “Don’t you ever check your phone?”

  “We were in the air all morning,” Rook said, hauling his phone, with its still-darkened screen, out of his pocket. “Huh. I must have forgotten to turn it back on. We were just having such an intense conversation.”

  “You forgot? And who is we?”

  Heat now saw that Rook was being trailed by a blonde whom even statues would have referred to as statuesque. She was at least six feet tall, with gams that went on seemingly without end. Her A-line dress was hemmed just barely below scandal length, and its sleeveless bodice displayed arms with a perfect health-club tone to them. Atop that rather magnificent display of the female form was a set of perfect smiling teeth, framed by the kind of precisely symmetrical face that Bert Parks used to sing songs about.

  Detective Ochoa had gotten up from his desk, where he was allegedly going through profiles of Muslim extremist groups with ties to New York City, with a smarmy grin plastered on his face.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Rook said. “Nikki, Miguel, I’d like you to meet Legs Kline’s press secretary, Lana Kline.”

  “Hello, Ms. Kline,” Ochoa said, extending his hand. “My name is Detective Miguel Ochoa. I’m the leader of the Twentieth Precin
ct detective squad—”

  “Co-leader,” Detective Raley piped up from behind his computer screen.

  “—and I want you to know if there’s anything you need during your visit to our fine city, you just ask me. The NYPD is here to protect and to serve.”

  Lana ignored Ochoa and beamed at Heat.

  “Captain Nikki Heat,” she purred with a gentle Texas twang. “I feel like I know you already! I know that’s a silly thing to say, it’s just that I’ve read all of Jamie’s articles about you at least three times. And, as you know, Jamie writes so well and has such a knack for capturing the true essence of a person that I already feel this closeness to you. I never had a sister so I don’t know what that’s like. But I felt like you were the sister I would have had. I’m sorry, can I hug you?”

  Before Heat could answer, Lana leaned in for a girl hug, the kind where no one’s makeup gets smeared, no one’s hair gets mussed, and no actual human warmth is exchanged.

  “The only thing I don’t understand is how you could resist marrying such an amazing man for so long,” Lana continued, playfully patting Rook on the chest, letting her hand linger on his pectoral muscle in a way that flirted with passing chummy on its way to something more intimate. “He is such a remarkable talent and so scrumptious on top of it…If it had been me, I probably would have marched him down to the jewelry store after the third date and held him hostage there until he proposed.”

  Her eyes got a shine to them whose luminance was matched only by her lip gloss.

  “Anyhow, I absolutely insisted Jamie bring me here so I could meet you in person,” she continued. “I can’t explain what a thrill this is for me. Daddy and I have such a deep respect for law enforcement. You really are the everyday heroes of our society and his administration will do everything it can to honor your bravery and sacrifice. We think Law Enforcement Appreciation Day ought to be its own national holiday.”

  She said it with a level of sincerity that made Heat think her next pronouncement would be about her abiding love for shelter pets and world peace.