Heat Wave

by Richard Castle

  Nikki rested a hand on his shoulder and spoke gently. “Henry, this is not your fault.”

  “How is it not my fault? It was my watch.”

  “You were overpowered, you’re not responsible, can you see that? You were the victim. You did everything you could.” She knew he was only half-buying it, knew he was replaying the night, wondering what else he could have done. “Henry?” And when she had his attention again, Nikki said, “We all try. And try as we might to control things, sometimes bad things get in and it’s not our fault.” He nodded and managed a smile. At least the words Nikki’s therapist had once used with her made someone feel better.

  She arranged for a patrol car to drive him home.

  Back in the precinct, Detective Heat drew a vertical red line on the whiteboard to create a separate but parallel case track for the burglary. Then she sketched in the timeline of events beginning with the departure of Kimberly Starr and her son, the time of the blackout, the phone call from the relief doorman, the arrival of the van and its crew, and their departure just before the end of the blackout.

  She then drew another red vertical to delineate a new space for the Jane Doe murder. “You’re starting to run out of whiteboard,” said Rook.

  “I hear you. The crimes are getting ahead of the solves.” Then she added, “For now, anyway.” Nikki taped up the lobby surveillance photo of the Doe. Beside it, she taped the impound lot death shot Lauren had taken of her an hour before. “But this one is leading us to something.”

  “Too weird she was in the lobby the same morning Starr got killed,” said Ochoa.

  Rook rolled a chair over and sat. “Quite a coincidence.”

  “Weird, yes. Coincidence, no,” said Detective Heat. “You still taking notes for your article about Homicide? Get this one down. Coincidences break cases. You know why? Because they don’t exist. Find the reason it’s not a coincidence, and you can pretty much get out your handcuffs, because you’re going to be slapping them on somebody damn soon.”

  “Any ID yet on the Doe?” said Ochoa.

  “Nope. All her personal effects were gone, car registration, license plates. A squad from the Three-Two is Dumpster diving for her purse in a radius around West 142nd and Lenox, where they towed her car from. When we break here, see how they’re doing on the VIN.”

  “Got it,” said Ochoa. “What’s keeping our fiber test?”

  “It’s the blackout. But I asked the captain to roll an M-80 under somebody’s lab stool at Forensics.” Nikki posted on the board a photo of the hexagonal ring Lauren found. She taped it beside the matching bruise pictures of Matthew Starr’s body and wondered if it was Pochenko’s. “I want those results like yesterday.”

  Raley joined the circle. “I made contact with Kimberly Starr on her cell phone up in Connecticut. She said the city was suffocating so she and her son spent the night at a friend’s summer cottage in Westport. Some place called Compo Beach.”

  “Alibi that, OK?” said Heat. “In fact, we’re going to split the list of everyone we’ve interviewed for the homicide and alibi-check all of them. And be sure to include that relief doorman who missed his shift last night.” Nikki crossed that item off her pad and turned back to Raley. “How did she react to the burglary?”

  “Freaked. I’m still waiting for the hearing to return to this ear. But like you told me, I didn’t say what got taken, just that there was a break-in during the blackout.” He said Mrs. Starr was hiring a car service to bring her to the Guilford and that she would call when she was near so they could meet her there.

  “Good going, Rales,” said Heat. “I want one of us to be there when she sees it.”

  “Whoever it is, take earplugs,” he said.

  “Maybe she won’t be so upset,” said Rook. “I assume the collection was insured.”

  “I have a call in to Noah Paxton right now,” said Nikki.

  “Well, assuming it was, she might be happy about this. Although, with all her face work, I don’t know how you’ll be able to tell.”

  Ochoa confirmed what they suspected, that there was no security video of the burglary because of the blackout. But, he said, Gunther, Francis, and their team from Burglary were still knocking on doors at the Guilford. “Hopefully, it won’t be an infringement on anybody’s privacy issues to ask a few questions, what with bodies flying by their windows and sixty million bucks’ worth of art getting hauled out of their building.”

  Detective Heat didn’t want to take a chance Kimberly Starr would get to her apartment before she did, so she and Rook went there to wait at the perennial crime scene. “You know,” said Rook as they entered the living room again, “she should just keep a supply of yellow tape on hand in the hall closet.”

  Nikki had another reason for arriving early. The detective wanted to have some face time with the Forensics geeks, who never seemed to mind conversation with actual people. Even if they always stared at her chest. She found the one she wanted to talk to on his knees, tweezing something usable off the living room rug. “Find your contact lens?” she said.

  He turned to look up at her. “I wear glasses.”

  “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.” He stood up and stared at her chest.

  “I noticed you worked the homicide here a few days ago.”

  “You did?”

  “I did…Tim.” The techie’s face pinked around his freckles. “And I’ve been wondering something maybe you can answer for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about access to the apartment. Specifically, could someone have gained entry by the fire escape?”

  “On that, I can answer empirically. No.”

  “You sound so certain.”

  “Because I am.” Tim led Nikki and Rook to the bedroom hall, where the fire escape met a pair of windows. “It’s standard to examine all possible points of entry. See here? It’s a code violation, but these windows are painted shut, and have been for years. I can tell you how many years if you want me to run it in the lab, but for our purposes, say during the past week, there’s no way these have been opened.”

  Nikki leaned in to the window frame, just to check for herself. “You’re right.”

  “I like to think science isn’t about right, it’s about thorough.”

  “Well said.” Nikki nodded. “And did you dust for prints?”

  “No, it seemed unproductive given that it couldn’t be opened.”

  “I mean on the outside. In case somebody trying to get in didn’t know that.”

  The technician’s jaw fell and he looked at the window glass. Whatever pink was in his cheeks bled out, and Tim, with his face of freckles, looked positively lunar.

  Nikki’s cell phone vibrated, and she stepped away to take the call. It was Noah Paxton. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  “I was beginning to wonder if I upset you. It’s been how long since we last spoke?”

  She laughed. “Yesterday when I interrupted your take-out lunch.” Rook must have heard her laughter, and he appeared from the hallway to hover. She turned and took a few steps away from him, not needing that layer of scrutiny, but she could see him hanging close by in her periphery.

  “See? Almost a full twenty-two hours. A guy could get paranoid. What’s the occasion this time?”

  Heat told him about the theft of the art collection. Her news was followed by a long, long silence. She said, “Are you still there?”

  “Yeah, I—You wouldn’t joke. I mean, not about something like this.”

  “Noah, I’m standing in the living room now. The walls are absolutely bare.”

  Another long silence and she heard him clear his throat. “Detective Heat, can I get personal?”

  “Go on.”

  “Did you ever get hit with a big shock, and then, when you think you can’t deal with it, you work through it, and then—ahem, excuse me.” She heard him sip something. “And so you man-up and work through it, and just when you do, out of nowhere comes another crushing blow,
and then another, and then you reach a point where you just say, What the hell am I doing? And then you fantasize about chucking it all. Not just the job but the life. Be one of those guys down on the Jersey Shore who make sub sandwiches in a hut or rent hula hoops and bikes. Just. Chuck. It.”

  “Do you?”

  “All the time. Especially this minute.” He sighed and swore under his breath. “So where are you with this? Do you have any leads?”

  “We’ll see,” she said, adhering to her policy of being the sole interrogator in an interview. “I assume you can account for your whereabouts last night?”

  “Jeez, you cut right to it, don’t you?”

  “And now I’d like you to.” Nikki waited, knowing his dance steps by now: resist then cave to pressure.

  “I shouldn’t be pissed, I know it’s your job, Detective, but come on.” She let her cold silence push him and he surrendered. “Last night I was teaching my weekly night course at Westchester Community College up in Valhalla.”

  “And that can be verified?”

  “I was lecturing twenty-five continuing ed students. If they run true to form, one or two may have noticed me.”

  “And after that?”

  “Home to Tarrytown for a big night of beer and Yankees-Angels at my local hang.”

  She asked the name of the bar and wrote it down. “One more question, and I’ll be out of your life.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Were the paintings insured?”

  “No. They had been, of course, but when the vultures started circling, Matthew canceled the policy. He said he didn’t want to keep shelling out a small fortune to protect something that would just go to the bankruptcy creditors.” Now it was Nikki’s turn to be silent. “Are you still there, Detective?”

  “Yes. I was just thinking Kimberly Starr is going to be here any minute. Did she know the insurance was canceled on the art collection?”

  “She did. Kimberly found out the same night Matthew told her he canceled his life insurance.” Then he added, “I don’t envy you the next few minutes. Good luck.”

  Raley wasn’t kidding about the earplugs. When Kimberly Starr came into the apartment, she flat-out screamed. She already looked ragged getting off the elevator and began a low moan when she saw the door hardware on the hallway rug. Nikki tried to take her arm when she entered her home, but she shook the detective off and her moan revved up into a full-blown 1950s horror film shriek.

  Nikki’s gut twisted for the woman as Kimberly dropped her purse and screamed again. She wanted no part of anybody’s help and held up a straight arm when Nikki tried to approach her. When her screaming subsided, she sat hard on the sofa moaning, “No, no, no.” Her head rose up and swiveled to take in the entire room, all two stories of it. “How much am I supposed to take? Will somebody tell me how much I am supposed to take? Who goes through this? Who?” Her voice raspy from screaming, she went on like that, moaning the rhetoricals that any sane or compassionate person in the room would have been foolish to answer. So they waited her out.

  Rook left the room and returned with a glass of water, which Kimberly took and gulped. She had gotten half of the water down when she started to choke on it and gagged it onto the rug, coughing and wheezing for air until her cough became weeping. Nikki sat with her but didn’t reach for her. After a moment, Kimberly pivoted away and buried her face in her hands, shaking with deep sobs.

  Ten long minutes later, without acknowledging them, Kimberly reached across the floor to her bag, took out a prescription bottle, and downed a pill with the remains of her water. She blew her nose to no effect and sat kneading the tissue as she had just days before when she was digesting the news of her husband’s murder.

  “Mrs. Starr?” Heat spoke just above a whisper, but Kimberly jumped. “At some point I’ll want to ask you some questions, but that can wait.”

  She nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “When you feel up to it, hopefully sometime today, would you mind looking around to see if anything else was taken?”

  Another nod. Another whisper. “I will.”

  In the car on their short drive back to the precinct, Rook said, “I was only half kidding this morning about taking you to brunch. What would you say if I asked you about having dinner?”

  “I’d say you’re pushing it.”

  “Come on, didn’t you have a good time last night?”

  “No, I didn’t. I had a great time.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “There is no problem. So let’s not create one by letting it creep into the job, OK? Or haven’t you noticed, I’m working not one, but two open homicides, and now a multimillion-dollar art theft.”

  Nikki double-parked the Crown Victoria between two double-parked blue-and-whites in front of the precinct on 82nd Street. They got out and Rook spoke to her over the hot metal roof. “How do you ever have a relationship in this job?”

  “I don’t. Pay attention.”

  Then they heard Ochoa call out, “Don’t lock it up, Detective.” Raley and Ochoa were hustling from the precinct lot to the street. Four uniforms were playing catch-up.

  “What have you got?” said Heat.

  Roach arrived at her open door. Ochoa said, “Burglary squad got a score on their door knock at the Guilford.”

  “Eyewitness coming in from a business trip saw a bunch of guys leaving the building about four this morning,” continued Raley. “He thought it was weird so he made a note of the plate on the truck.”

  “And he didn’t call it in?” said Rook.

  “Man, you are new at this, aren’t you?” said Ochoa. “Anyway, we ran it and the truck’s registered to an address over in Long Island City.” He held up the note and Heat plucked it from his hand.

  “Pile in,” she said. But Raley and Ochoa knew this was big and each already had a leg in a door. Nikki fired the ignition, lit the gum ball, and floored it. Rook was still closing his backseat door when she reached Columbus and hit the siren.

  TWELVE

  The three detectives and Rook maintained a tense silence as Nikki gas ’n’ gunned through crosstown traffic to the bridge at 59th Street. She had Ochoa radio ahead, and when they rolled up to the approach under the Roosevelt Island sky tram, Traffic Control had blocked feeder lanes for her and she roared onward. The bridge belonged to her and the two patrol cars running convoy with her.

  They killed their sirens to avoid advertisement after they blew out of Queensboro Plaza and turned off Northern Boulevard. The address was an auto body shop in an industrial section not far from the LIRR switching yard. Under the elevated subway line at Thirty-eighth Avenue, they located the small group of patrol cars from the Long Island City precinct that were already waiting a block south of the building.

  Nikki got out and greeted Lieutenant Marr from the 108th. Marr had a military bearing, precise and relaxed. He told Detective Heat this was her show, but he seemed eager to describe the logistics he had put in place for her. They gathered around the hood of his car and he spread out a plan of the neighborhood. The body shop was already circled in red marker, and the lieutenant marked blue Xs at intersections in the surrounding blocks to indicate where other patrol cars were staged, effectively choking off any exit the suspects might attempt from the location once they rolled.

  “Nobody’s getting out of there unless they sprout wings,” he said. “And even then I’ve got a couple of avid duck hunters on my team.”

  “What about the building itself?”

  “Standard issue for this neck of the woods.” He laid out an architect’s blueprint from the NYFD database. “Single-story, double-height brick box, basically. Office up front here. Machine shop and lavs in the back here. Storage here. Don’t need to tell you storage can be tricky, nooks and crannies, bad lighting, so we’ll just have to keep our heads on a swivel, right? Door here in front. Another off the machine shop. Three steel roll-downs, two jumbos off the car park, one leading to the yard in the back.�
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  “Fence?” she asked.

  “Chain-link with vinyl cover. Razor wire all around, including the roof.”

  Nikki ran her finger along a boundary line on his neighborhood plan. “What’s over this back fence?”

  The lieutenant smiled. “Duck hunters.”

  They fixed five minutes as the time for the raid, suited up in their body armor, and got back in their cars. Two minutes before go, Marr appeared at Heat’s window. “My spotter says the near rolling door is up. I assume you want in first?”

  “Thanks, yeah, I do.”

  “I’ll have your back then.” He checked his watch as casually as if he were waiting for a bus and added, “Spotter also tells me the truck with your plate is in the yard.”

  Nikki felt her heart pick up a few BPMs. “That’s a break.”

  “Those paintings pretty valuable?”

  “Probably enough to pay a day’s interest on the Wall Street bailout.”

  The lieutenant said, “Then let’s hope nobody puts any holes in them today,” and got in his car.

  Ochoa popped his knuckles in the seat beside her. “Don’t worry. If the Russian’s in there, we’ll get him.”

  “Not worried.” In her rearview mirror, Raley’s eyelids were half-closed, and she wondered, as she always did with Rales, if he was that relaxed or was, perhaps, praying. She turned around to Rook, who was sitting beside him back there. “Rook.”

  “I know, I know, stay in the car.”

  “Actually, no. Out of the car.”

  “Aw, come on, you want to leave me standing here?”

  “Don’t make me count three, mister, or you’re grounded.”

  Ochoa checked his watch. “Rolling in fifteen.”

  Heat gave Rook an insistent glare. He got out and slammed his door. Nikki glanced into the car beside her as Lieutenant Marr brought his microphone up. On her TAC frequency she heard his relaxed “All units green light.”