High Heat

by Richard Castle

  “I don’t know,” Aguinaldo said. “I kept hoping someone at one of these stores would recognize this particular Laura Hopper and give me some kind of trail to follow. But while a lot of people knew instantly it was a Laura Hopper, none of them knew which Laura Hopper it was. Which is why I currently look like I’ve been shopping Black Friday for three hundred straight days.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” Raley said, then looked at Feller and Ochoa. “How come you guys didn’t come up with anything like that?”

  Feller was about to respond, but quieted when he saw Aguinaldo still wasn’t in the mood.

  “So we don’t know which Laura Hopper this was,” Heat said. “But we do know it showed up at our crime scene. And that gets us back to our original question, which now only becomes that much more confounding. How is it a women’s scarf—a one-of-a-kind, world-famous, absurdly expensive women’s scarf at that—shows up in a New York City mosque as part of a beheading video shot by two kids who, if their apartment is any indication, don’t have more than two nickels to rub together?”

  “Could it have been Tam’s?” Aguinaldo asked.

  “Not on a journalist’s salary,” Heat said. “Besides, I’ve known her for years and I’ve never seen her wear any scarf, much less one like that.”

  It was one of the oddest odd socks of Heat’s career, and she couldn’t even begin to make sense of it. Not with the current evidence.

  Neither could anyone else, apparently. The detectives of the Twentieth Precinct were holding an anti-staring contest: a game where no one could look at the other.

  Eventually, Ochoa offered, “The real ISIS traffics in all kinds of stolen goods. They’ve stolen artwork, antiques, anything they can get their hands on they think has value. It’s how they fund their empire. That and oil. Maybe these wannabe ISIS kids are just trying to act like the big boys?”

  “Possible,” Heat said. “Before you head out on canvass with Opie and Feller, why don’t you check in with the Central Robbery Division and see if anyone has reported a Laura Hopper stolen, either from a store or an individual. I’ve got to think something this valuable would be insured, so a person who had it stolen from them would file a report. It might give us something to go on.”

  “Got it,” Ochoa said.

  “Okay, I think everyone knows what they’re doing, except for you, Inez,” Heat said. “But I’ve got a special assignment for you.”

  A look of pure horror was settling in on Aguinaldo’s face.

  Then Heat said, “Go home. Take a shower. You reek.”

  “And we have a winner of the insult-off,” Feller said, scooping up the three twenties and shoving them at Heat.

  She collected the money, then immediately handed it to Aguinaldo. “And get yourself some nice takeout, courtesy of your generous colleagues.”

  As the detectives dispatched themselves to their assignments and Heat returned to her office, she felt a buzz against her thigh.

  She looked down to see a text message from Lauren Parry.

  CAN YOU COME DOWN HERE?

  Then, two seconds later, there came another one:

  ALONE.

  For the second time that day, Nikki Heat was making the trip down to room 23B. And also for the second time, she realized she was nervous about it.

  Lauren Parry didn’t request a solo audience with Nikki for routine matters, especially not since Heat had been promoted to captain.

  This had to be about her mother’s ashes. For as much as Heat wanted to know the outcome, she also feared it in a way that was unexpectedly complicated.

  Because, on the one hand, she had—despite her best efforts not to—allowed herself to entertain this fantasy that her mother was still alive. It was a fairy tale, yes. But doesn’t everyone have an inner child who loves fairy tales? To think that she and her mother might someday cook dinner together again. Or that they might enjoy the symphony by each other’s side. Or that Cynthia Heat might someday hold her grandchildren…

  Grandchildren? Jesus, Nikki. Snap out of it.

  Then there was the opposite result. Which was that Cynthia Heat was still as dead as she’d been for these seventeen years. And as much as Heat had tried to not let herself believe the fairy tale, she knew she would wind up mourning her mother’s death all over again.

  So if Heat’s heart was pounding as she opened the door to room 23B, it wasn’t because the walk down had been particularly strenuous.

  “Oh, hey, Nik,” Parry called out from the other side of the lab.

  That told Heat they were alone. If there had been other people around, Parry would have called her Captain Heat.

  “Hey, Laur,” Heat responded.

  Then she eyed the plastic evidence bag with her mother’s remains, on the counter next to where Parry was standing. Heat quickly averted her eyes so it wouldn’t seem like she had been staring at it.

  “Thanks for coming down,” Parry was saying. “I got the word from the feds that we’re going to be deprived of Tam Svejda’s company first thing tomorrow morning. What happened?”

  “Yardley Bell happened.”

  “I thought you two were cool now…”

  “We were,” Heat said. “Until she stole my suspects.”

  “So do you still care about some results I got this afternoon?”

  “Absolutely,” Heat said. Then she put on a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin and added: “And not because I’m planning to continue looking into the case now that it’s federal. This is only because I’m such an admirer of your work.”

  Parry didn’t need Heat to draw a road map for her. “Well, I appreciate that,” she said. “So now that we understand this is all strictly academic, you remember that whitish powder I found in the treads of Tam’s shoes?”

  “The stuff I thought might be cocaine or heroin?”

  “Right. Except the mass spectrometer ended up with a far different take on it. Our mystery powder, once I separated it from the common dirt and grime that was also in her shoe, turns out to be zinc.”

  “Zinc?”

  “Right. So not something you’d put up your nose. Though I guess lifeguards at the beach have been known to put it on their noses.”

  Heat crossed her arms. “What would that be doing on the bottoms of Tam’s shoes?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you that’s why you get that fancy, flashy detective’s badge of yours?” Parry said. “I’m just the girl who did well on her MCAT’s, remember?”

  “Yeah, but…I mean, where else is zinc found?”

  “Where is it not found is a better question,” Parry said. “You’re taking me back to my organic chemistry days—which, believe me, I’m trying to forget—but if memory serves, zinc is the second most common trace metal in the body after iron. It’s essential for the immune system, for healing cuts, all kinds of important things. That’s when it’s absorbed in the blood, of course. The stuff that’s in metal form can be all over the place, too. You spray it on cars to deter rust. It’s in gutters, fuses, you name it. It’s probably in a lot of Americans’ pockets right now.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The penny. It’s almost all zinc, with only a little thin coating of copper on the outside,” Parry said. “Then if you’re talking zinc oxide, which is the stuff the lifeguards use, it’s found in a ton of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. I mean, it’s everywhere. I think it’s even used in printing inks.”

  “Printing inks, like the kind the New York Ledger uses? Was she hanging around a printing press?”

  “It’s possible,” Parry said. “It’s also possible she went on a hiking trip three weekends ago and got some in her shoe. Zinc is naturally occurring and pretty common in the earth’s crust. That’s one of the reasons we’ve found so many ways to use it. It’s cheap.”

  Heat tried to imagine how traces of zinc came to be in the treads of Tam Svejda’s shoes. But she quickly recognized it as yet another piece that didn’t want to be wedged into the puzzle just yet
.

  Or ever. Zinc might have been another odd sock. But it also could have been a red herring—something that had absolutely no significance.

  “Well, okay, good to know,” Heat said.

  Her eyes drifted back to the evidence bag, then snapped back to Parry.

  “Any…anything else?” Heat asked, her voice catching just a little.

  “Yeah, remember that stuff on Tam’s body that smelled like kerosene?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Big surprise: It’s kerosene. But don’t start asking me questions about how it got there or what it might mean, because I’m just going to have to remind you about that badge of yours again.”

  “Okay, got it,” Heat said, now rather pointedly looking at anywhere other than the counter.

  “Now,” Parry said. “About the stuff in this bag that you’ve been trying not to look at ever since you walked in.”

  Heat felt color rushing to her cheeks and stared down at her shoes instead.

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Where did you get it, anyway? From a crematory or…”

  Heat’s heart was pounding again. “It’s…It’s difficult to explain. Can you just…What is it? What did you find?”

  Parry ignored Heat’s faltering and went on. “Well, it’s crematory remains, no doubt. All the organic matter is gone, of course. Including the DNA. When you bake something at that high a temperature, all you’re left with is bones. But these bones…”

  Heat had subtly grabbed on to the top of a lab table for stability. “What about them?” she asked.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” Parry said, before uttering three words that changed Heat’s life forever:

  “They’re not human.”

  Not human. As in, not her mother.

  Heat sucked in a large gasp of air. Beyond that, she seemed to be outside her own body. She looked down and saw her knuckles whitening as she gripped the lab table extra hard, but she had no knowledge of telling her hands to do that. There was a throbbing in her ears, though she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. She tried to form words but found her mouth had gone dry.

  “You need to get it under a microscope to see it,” Parry continued, seemingly unaware of the turmoil in which she had just plunged Nikki Heat’s entire existence. “But once you do, it’s pretty obvious. Some of it was definitely avian—you can tell, because bird bones are a lot less dense than human bones. There was also what might have been either squirrel or rat. Some kind of small rodent, though beyond that, I couldn’t say. You’d need someone who knows animals a lot better than I do. There was also some larger mammal. Not dog, though. Maybe a deer.”

  “A deer?” Heat managed to choke out.

  “When I was first looking at it, I thought it might have been from a pet crematory. Until I came across the deer. Then I started to think that maybe this was roadkill. You know the Department of Public Works takes all the critters it scrapes off the road and burns them up.”

  “Roadkill,” Heat repeated.

  She finally gave up on trying to stay standing—it was either find a chair or hit the floor. Luckily, there was a stool within easy grabbing distance. She slid it under herself just in time.

  Roadkill. The ashes that Heat had lovingly placed behind that plaque in the most beautiful columbarium in New York, that she had faithfully visited for seventeen years, that she had communed with, that had made her feel closer to her mother’s spirit…All along, they had been the remains of animals people had hit with their cars.

  “Girlfriend, you okay?” Parry asked, her brow creased with concern. “You look like you’re going to faint.”

  “Yeah, I…I just…I think I skipped lunch.”

  “And now your blood sugar is low. Hang on.”

  Parry disappeared into the next room. Heat leaned an elbow on the counter. Ever since that half second that morning, there had been a part of her that was absolutely convinced her mind must have been playing some elaborate trick on itself.

  Now here was hard evidence it wasn’t. And it had taken Heat’s neatly ordered universe and given it a big-bang-style shake-up.

  Her mother wasn’t dead. Whatever had happened on November 24, 1999 had been little more than a clever piece of stagecraft by a woman who certainly had the sense of theater to pull it off.

  The questions started pouring into Nikki Heat’s head, unbidden: What had been so important or threatening or intimidating that it made Cynthia Heat feel she had to disappear from everyone in her life, her own daughter included? Where had she been all these years? What had she been up to? Why was she suddenly coming out of hiding now?

  Nikki was just starting to wrestle with that and so much more when Parry returned with a small bottle of orange juice, which she opened for Heat.

  “Here, drink some of this, and then hang out until you start to feel better,” Parry said. “I can’t have you falling over on me. I know most of my patients are a little late for the Hippocratic oath, but every once in a while I have to pretend to be a real doctor.”

  “Thanks, Laur,” Heat said, grabbing the orange juice and taking a large swig of it for Parry’s benefit. “But I think I’m actually already feeling better.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely,” Heat said.

  Which wasn’t true. Not even a little bit. But there were now things she had to start getting straight. And she couldn’t do it sitting in room 23B.

  The only person in the bull pen when Heat returned was Raley, and he was deep in concentration, his eyes fixed on the pixels in front of him, a pair of earphones snug over his head. There was no point in bothering him.

  The shadows were growing long outside. It was after seven o’clock. The Twentieth Precinct’s day shift was long gone and the swing shift was already out on the streets, making New York safer.

  No one would necessarily expect Captain Heat to still be there. She took advantage of that fact and made her exit. She was going home.

  But not to the Tribeca loft she and Rook shared.

  To her place. To the apartment in Gramercy Park, where she had known a happy childhood, where her parents had lived together until they split, where her mother had continued to reside after the divorce, where Nikki had returned during semester breaks in college, where she continued living by herself up until she met Rook.

  And where her mother was murdered.

  It had been a big step for Nikki when she listed the apartment for sale shortly before she and Rook had gotten married. They had already been living full-time in Rook’s place for a while, of course. But somehow Heat had trouble letting go.

  Her hesitation hadn’t been because she somehow doubted that she and Rook would last. She already knew she was in love with him for better or worse and would never be whole without him.

  It was what the apartment represented: her independence. Saying you’ll be with one person for the rest of your life is one thing. Saying you’re surrendering the ability to be on your own is quite another.

  When Heat listed the place, she expected it to go quickly. Gramercy Park apartments often did.

  Except, apparently, for hers. There had been one ridiculous lowball offer early on, then nothing. Was it because people still remembered what had happened there? Or because the kitchen was in need of updating? Or had she—subconsciously, perhaps—set the price too high, knowing she wasn’t really ready to let go?

  Whatever the case, the apartment still hadn’t sold after a year on the market. The realtor kept making subtle hints about dropping the asking price, but Heat had put her off, always making an excuse about how she would think about it when she had a free moment—which, of course, she seldom did.

  Rook had been a prince about the whole thing. From a strictly economic standpoint, it made no sense to continue paying the maintenance fees, taxes, and utilities for a place they never used. She should have simply cut the price, taken what she could get, and moved on. It wasn’t like they needed to make top dollar.

 
; But Rook recognized there were more than just financial considerations at stake. So, showing wisdom unusual for a hunky man-child such as himself, he had been careful never to suggest any course of action. He let Heat have her time when it came to her space.

  Heat grabbed an unmarked car rather than dealing with the subway, then found street parking upon arrival. Bob Aaronson, the doorman, greeted her with the appropriate amount of noisy surprise—it had been a while—and when she stuck her key in the front door, she found the lock was a little sticky.

  The air inside smelled stale. Not only had there not been offers, there hadn’t even been many people viewing it of late. It was like the Multiple Listing Service entry had concluded with: UNMOTIVATED SELLER. DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME.

  The place had been decluttered by the realtor to make it seem more appealing to the would-be buyers who were no longer showing up. But otherwise, it was exactly the same as when Nikki had lived there.

  For that matter, it was pretty much unchanged from when Cynthia had lived there. The furniture was the same. The drapes were the same. Even the paint was the same. The most ambitious thing Nikki had done was get the kitchen tile replaced. But she had only done that because the blood wouldn’t come out of the grout.

  Nikki had never intended to maintain the place as some kind of shrine. She just liked it the way it was. It suited her. And, generally speaking, she had been too much of a workaholic to even entertain the concept of tackling major renovations or redecorations.

  As she stepped in and closed the door behind her, she found herself back on November 24, 1999. She walked to the kitchen, remembering the exact spot on the floor where she’d found her mother, so prone, so dead-seeming, the knife protruding from her back. She remembered falling to her knees next to her mother, holding her mother, all of it. She saw the blood splatter, the gore everywhere.

  Sometimes she wasn’t sure whether other memories were real or whether they were the crime scene photos that she had stared at so many times.

  Heat took a deep breath then left the kitchen. She wasn’t there for a macabre nostalgia trip. Nikki Heat was many things. But she was, first and foremost, a cop.