Frozen Heat (2012)

by Richard Castle

  “Right, there you go.” Nikki continued sorting and resorting, creating categories of pictures including poses with Tyler Wynn and her mom, Oncle Tyler with Nicole, Tyler with other groups, and then the last stack of remainders—constituting all the solo shots of members of the Nanny Network in those comical, goofy poses, gesturing like spokesmodels.

  Rook went over to the counter to pour some hot water through two Melitta filters of French roast, leaving her to spread that last stack out across the table. She found herself drawn to these more by feeling than reason. What were these pictures telling her? She tried rearranging them by date stamp on the backs. The sequence didn’t teach her anything. She made another order by geography. She stared at that grouping for a while and felt nothing coming back. Then Heat tried something uncomfortable for her: She let go of Cop-Think and went back to something more primal.

  She let Nikki, the seasoned investigator, think like Nikki, the little girl. And when she did, she thought of how her mom used to love to make her laugh by striking those very same Price Is Right model poses at home. Or to Nikki’s greater mortification, in the aisle of a supermarket or at Macy’s. She called it “styling,” and little Nikki would giggle or groan with embarrassment depending on where her mom styled. The funniest places were at home, safely away from the eyes of schoolmates—or anyone, for that matter. Cynthia would sweep her graceful arms and delicate wrists in front of the oven. Then she’d open the door to style the interior. And then do the same for the fridge, opening the crisper and styling a head of lettuce. “Styling,” her mom had said, “is what you do when it’s not polite to point.”

  A new idea triggered by that old memory dawned on Heat. She looked at one photo, then another. Sure, this could have been some running gag or inside joke within the network; the early version of how people nowadays text cell shots of food in the shape of presidents, or forced perspectives of themselves pretending to hold up the Gateway Arch or cradling the Hollywood sign in the palm of a hand.

  But what if it wasn’t a joke?

  What if her mother and Nicole Bernardin and Eugene Summers and her other friends weren’t just goofing but were doing something else? What if they were using what appeared to be a sophomoric joke as cover for something more serious?

  If styling was what one did when it was impolite to point, what if they were pointing at something?

  She called Rook over to the array on the table and shared her idea. “Go with me on this,” she said then tapped the first shot. “Check it out. Here’s our butler, Eugene, in front of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel in Vienna back in 1977. He’s holding the camera in one hand to take his own picture, and with the other, he’s styling toward that booth of tourist brochures.” She went to the next. “Here’s young Nicole in 1980 in Nice. She’s at the outdoor flower market, but look, she’s gesturing to a service locker near the entrance. And even in this one …” She picked up the picture of Cynthia in Paris—the same one Nikki had used for her reenactment to stand in her mother’s footsteps. “In this one, Mom’s styling toward that wooden book vendor’s stall. See it, the one that’s over on the side of the square near the Seine?” She set the photo down with care. “I think these are signals.”

  “Hey,” said Rook, “I definitely think you’re on to something, but I’m the foil hat guy, remember? How do we find out for sure?”

  “I know how.” Heat opened her notebook and flipped pages until she found the cell number she wanted.

  Eugene Summers gave her a chilly reception, obviously still harboring bruised feelings following the slight he’d felt from Rook at lunch. But the butler was, in the end, a man of manners. He took a break from shooting Gentlemen Prefer Bongs out in Bel Air to find a private place to answer her question. He didn’t even play the what-if game. “You cracked the code, so I might as well tell you. Especially since it’s a dead protocol anyway. You’re absolutely correct. We’d adopted those modeling poses as our own little Nanny Network secret language. In fact, it was your mother who came up with the idea of styling. She’d say, ‘Styling is what you do—’”

  ”’—when it’s not polite to point,’” said Nikki, doubling him. And then she asked, “Tell me one more thing. What were you pointing to?” Heat believed she had cracked that one, too, but needed to hear it from him, and without prompting.

  “Remember I told you about drop boxes? We’d use these pictures as a means to secretly show each other the locations of our various hiding places.”

  Feeling a wave of exhilaration starting to lift her, she thanked Summers and hung up just as Rook returned to join her from his back office. He came into the great room brandishing the jumbo magnifying glass from his desk that had been decommissioned to the role of paperweight. “I knew this impulse buy would come in handy someday.” He held it over one of the photos of Nicole Bernardin.

  “I already saw this,” said Heat. “Taken somewhere here in New York, right?”

  “Have a closer look and see where.”

  Nikki leaned over and peered through the lens. Rook moved it off the image of Nicole and aligned it on the background. When Heat saw the enlarged sign come into focus behind Nicole, she shot her eyes up at him and said, “Let’s go.”

  When Heat and Rook got to the Upper West Side, they both felt thrust into a replay of their photo moment at the Notre Dame Cathedral when Nikki had put one foot on the brass marker at Point Zero and he’d framed the shot. Only this was not a sentimental reenactment of her mother’s pose. They were restaging one by Nicole to learn its message and, hopefully, find a killer.

  “We want to be somewhere around here,” Nikki said, circling on the sidewalk near the street corner. Using the old picture for reference, Heat moved closer to the phone booth. “This it?” Rook stood a few feet away, looking at her image on his iPhone screen. He fanned the fingers of his left hand, directing her to shift a few inches to the side, and she did.

  “Set,” he said. Then Nikki rotated and, behind her, saw the small green sign Rook had magnified in the background of Nicole’s photo: “W 91st ST.”

  “All right, so we had the charms on the bracelet reversed,” said Rook. “It’s nine and one, not one and nine. But what do you suppose Mademoiselle Bernardin was pointing to?”

  Nikki studied the photo again and struck Nicole Bernardin’s spokes-model pose. “This here, this is what she’s going for.” Nikki’s styling indicated a subway grate, about the surface area of a coffee table, recessed in the concrete.

  “Why would she be pointing here?” asked Rook. “It’s just a ventilation grate.” The ground rumbled, and a rush of air came up to warm their faces through the screening as a subway passed below and continued onward. Rook said, “Son of a—I know!” He bent over and tried to look through the mesh. “It’s not the grate, Nikki, it’s what’s down there. Oh, this is cool.” His face lit up. “This is cray-cray cool.”

  “Rook. Shut up and talk to me.”

  “There’s an abandoned subway station down there. Holy crap, I did an article on it for the Gotham Eye when I was freelancing after J-school. Fifty years ago the city closed the station when the extension of the new platform at Ninety-sixth Street stretched all the way down to Ninety-third and made this stop obsolete. They just sealed off this station and left it to rust. If you look out the window of the One train, you can still see the old ticket booth and gates when you roll by. It looks spooky, all frozen in time. In fact, the MTA old-timers still call it the Ghost Station.” Rook paused while another train sped under them, quaking the ground. “Ghost Station. Not a bad hiding place for something like a drop box, if you ask me.”

  Rather than mock him for spinning another wild theory, Nikki recalled Nicole Bernardin’s forensic results that reported grime consistent with a railroad environment on the soles of her shoes and on the knee of her pants. So instead of tweaking Rook, she asked one question. “How do we get down there?”

  “Beats me. I remember my PR guide from the transit authority said when they dismantled the
sidewalk entrance, they sealed off the stairs with concrete slabs. Guess they also put in these vents.”

  Nikki got on one knee and tried to pull the grate open. “Won’t give.” Then she got up, looked around, and pointed to the center divider in the middle of Broadway. “There’s another grate out there behind that fence, see?” Heat took a step out into the street without checking traffic. A horn blasted. Rook grabbed her arm and jerked her back just in time; she had almost gotten clipped by a passing gypsy cab.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “Fine. Close one, thanks.”

  “No, I mean are you OK-OK?” He studied her and she knew what he meant. It wasn’t like her to be reckless. It wasn’t her nature to let impatience drive her.

  Heat dismissed him. “All right, fine, we’ve got the walk now, let’s use it.” She didn’t wait for him but hurried to the median that divided the uptown and downtown flows on Broadway. When Rook caught up, she led him between the evergreen shrubs and tulips to the wrought iron fence surrounding the grate, which was much larger than the one on the sidewalk.

  Rook reached both arms through the bars and tried to lift that grate. It wouldn’t budge, either. Another train passed underneath, even louder than the one before, and it blew more wind up at them. “This one must be right above active tracks.” He turned up to her and said, “The one back on the sidewalk would be over the station itself.” But Nikki was already on her way back to it, dodging traffic.

  When Rook rejoined her, Heat had both knees on the sidewalk and had her head down, peering through a hole in the grate. “Come see. There’s just enough light from the street lamp to make out the stairs.” She rocked back to give him room.

  He shut one eye to focus and spied the deteriorated concrete steps littered by cigarette butts, plastic straws, and all colors of gum that had fallen through the grate over the years. “That’s it, all right.” Then he scanned the grate. “It wouldn’t have these hinges if it wasn’t designed to open. Look. Here’s how it’s locked.” He pointed to a hole in the grid, about the size of a quarter, with a hex head bolt screwed into it.

  “Got it.” She squeezed her fingers into the hole and tried to turn it. “That puppy’s on tight. If we could just unscrew that bolt, we could get in.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “You’re seriously thinking of busting this thing open and climbing down there tonight?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “I like the way you think. But can’t we call the MTA or Parks and Rec and see if we can have them open it?”

  “After office hours?” She shook her head. “Besides, by my estimation, after we got all the red tape cleared and signed all the insurance waivers, we’d be doing our climbing using walkers.” And then she added, “And since when did you become the cautious thinker?”

  “Maybe because you’re scaring me. You look like you could use a choke chain tonight.”

  “I’m tired of waiting. Ten years, Rook. And now I feel like I’m this close.” She tried the bolt head again with her bare fingertips, knowing it was useless. “I don’t want it to slip away.”

  Rook felt the fire in her and said, “We’re going to need a tool to get that off.”

  “That’s the Rook I know.”

  He surveyed the area as if he’d miraculously find one to improvise, which would have been just that, miraculous. Nikki pointed across Broadway and said, “Oh, man, talk about a cruel irony.” Maybe a hundred feet away sat a locksmith shop with its lights off. “All locked up for the night.”

  “We could call them.” When Rook read her impatience, he said, “No, we are not going to break in there. I may not always know where to draw the line, but burglary feels like a good place to start.”

  She kicked at the grate with her toe. “If Nicole did get down there, she either had a key or she knew another way in.”

  “What we need is a hex wrench to turn that bolt. Or, if it won’t turn, one of those handheld rotary cutters to saw off the head,” said Rook. “Those guys on Storage Wars use them all the time. They go through padlocks like buttah.”

  “Is there an open hardware store at this hour?”

  “No, but I know the next best thing. Remember JJ?” he said, referring to the building super of a gossip columnist whose murder they had solved.

  “JJ, as in Cassidy Towne’s JJ?”

  “He’s just down on Seventy-eighth. The man owns every tool imaginable.”

  Even though it meant waiting a half hour, Heat agreed their best plan was for Rook to hop down to JJ’s. She would stay there and canvass the area for alternate points of entry. When he got in his taxi, he said to her, “Feels like we’re getting somewhere, doesn’t it?” She just shrugged and watched his cab drive off. Nikki had gotten somewhere too many times before only to have it be nowhere.

  But this did feel different. Not just the recent surge in leads, but something else. Detective Heat—cautious, measured, mistrustful of haste—felt herself propelled forward as if by some unseen hand, nudging her. There had been flashes of that sensation before on this case. Like when she bailed down the hatch in that living room floor in Bayside. Or chased Don’s killer into an exposed stairwell without backup. Or let herself get set up for a night meet under the High Line. Unguarded feelings like these were foreign to her and were usually unsettling—disturbing enough to be walled off.

  What was different? she wondered. Was she suffering poor judgment from PTSD, after all? Or was she starting to see her precious emotional compartments as obstacles instead of allies and going with her gut more? Or was there truly some unseen force guiding her?

  Or was she just plain obsessed with this case?

  Whatever it was, touring in circles and zigzags along Broadway that night, literally searching for a doorway to the past, Nikki had a sense of homing in, and caution had lost its voice. Which was why, when she descended the subway stairs to the 96th Street station and found herself all alone in it, she walked as far south as she could on the platform to see just how close it came to the abandoned station at Ninety-first. Nikki gripped the stainless steel guardrail and used it to lean out over the tracks and peer into the tunnel. It was dark, except for two red lights shining back at her in warning. She couldn’t see the Ghost Station, but its platform was probably only a block and a half away from where she stood. She listened and, hearing no rumble, wondered if she could make it on foot before a train came.

  And then Heat stopped wondering and jumped.

  She kept to the center of the two main tracks, giving wide berth to the third rail on the outside right that powered the trains with six hundred fifty deadly volts. The ambient light from the station behind her faded with each stride she took away from it, and soon Nikki faced total darkness. Farther from the platform there would be less litter and fewer broken bottles to step on, but she still needed to see. Especially to watch out for uneven footing or unexpected obstacles to trip her. This was not the place to fall, or worse, break an ankle or get a foot stuck. The idea made her shudder. Reason told her to give it up and go back; to go through channels and get the MTA to arrange a special stop and shuttle her to the station the next morning. To Nikki, the next morning seemed forever away. She got out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight application. She smiled to herself because she could almost hear Rook smart-assing, “Subway spelunking? There’s an app for that.” Rook. She should call him and let him know where she was. But she’d wait until she got there. If there was any signal underground.

  Her phone threw decent enough light for her to continue, but as soon as she switched it on, she heard voices behind her at the platform. She quickly turned it off and pressed herself against the tunnel wall and listened, hoping some well-intended Samaritan wouldn’t risk his life trying to rescue her.

  Nikki felt a draft of air on her neck and craned upward to see if there was a ventilation grate overhead, but there wasn’t. Then she realized the movement on her neck wasn’t air but fur. She swept her hand and felt the rat fill her
entire palm as she brushed it off. When it thudded onto the ground, she couldn’t see it, but she could hear it skitter off. She stepped away from the wall, switched the flashlight app back on, and got hustling toward 91st.

  Moving as quickly as she dared, Nikki hopped puddles and stepped up and over crossties, which seemed to get higher because the dirt bed between rails in that section had become deeper. From the faint light ahead, she thought she might be getting closer to the Ghost Station and that, perhaps, it had a few service bulbs going. But to her alarm, the light grew swiftly brighter and the ground began to tremble lightly. Then a headlight pierced the blackness in the tunnel far ahead and made the rail tops shiny as they traced twin lines right toward her. Nikki was in the worst place: between platforms with a train coming.

  She got ready to jump the third rail to the center track, but just as the thought came to her, a downtown express raced along those, closing off her escape. Nikki didn’t know how far ahead the platform was, but behind her felt like a long way, so she started running toward the oncoming train, vaulting crossties as if on an obstacle course at an NFL training camp. The headlight grew larger and more piercing. The low, distant tremble became a thundering rumble. Air, displaced by the forward motion of the subway, gusted into her face.

  The headlight also lit up the Ghost Station that she neared on her left. But was it close enough to beat the oncoming train?

  While she was distracted calculating her distance to the platform, the toe of her shoe snagged under a crosstie she’d misjudged and Nikki began to tumble forward. She wondered if the soil depression under the tracks was deep enough to let the train ride over her if she fell.

  Nikki never had to find out. She righted herself. Gasping, she lurched for the edge of the platform. But it was too tall for her to jump up on. The train was seconds away. Its blazing headlight turned the tunnel into day. That’s when Nikki saw the metal service ladder recessed into the concrete. She pitched herself at it and grabbed the railing.

  Heat rolled onto the deck of the platform just as the Uptown One roared by, kicking up a swirl of wind and a clatter more deafening than she’d experienced in all her years in New York. She was lucky to be alive to hear it.