Frozen Heat nh-4

by Richard Castle

  The old professor smiled. “You tell me.” She swiveled her chair to the console behind her and switched on the TV monitor. “Lights, please,” she said. Rook got up to kill the overheads and rolled his chair beside Nikki’s in front of the screen. The image that appeared there, 16mm film dubbed to VHS years before, fluttered and resolved. They heard applause and young Professor Yuki Shimizu, with jet-black hair and a polyester pantsuit, stepped to a podium. The subtitle lettering read, “Keller Recital Hall, February 22, 1971.” Beside them, Yuki whispered, “Anyone can pound out Beethoven and hide in the spectacle. I chose this because of its simplicity, so you could see all her colors.”

  “Good evening,” said the professor on-screen. “Tonight, a rare treat. French composer Gabriel Faure’s Pavane, Opus Fifty, performed by two of our outstanding students, Leonard Frick, playing cello, and, at the piano, Cynthia Trope.” Upon hearing her mother’s maiden name, Nikki leaned closer as the camera panned to an impossibly skinny student with muttonchops and an explosion of kinky hair behind a cello. Then the TV screen included Cynthia in a sleeveless black formal with dark brown hair brushing her shoulders. Heat cleared her throat at the sight. Rook felt like he was seeing double.

  The piece began on the Steinway grand, slowly, softly, plaintively; Cynthia’s elegant arms and slender fingers rode the keyboard like gentle waves and then became joined by the cello in harmony and counterpoint. “One bit of color, and I’ll shut up,” Yuki said to them. “This is a choral work, but in this arrangement, the piano carries that part. It’s amazing what she does with it.”

  For six minutes they sat, mesmerized, watching and listening to Nikki’s mother-only twenty-weave under, inside, and through her partner’s plaintive cello line in graceful motion, playing fluid and sure, her swaying body connected to the music and the piano, a picture of natural poise on the bench. Then the velvety opening turned sharply dramatic, signaling distress, tragedy, and discord. Cynthia’s unruffled flow broke and she threw thundering, athletic stabs at the ivory. Her neck and arm muscles were sculpted into sharp definition with each of the concussions she delivered, etching the recital hall with crisp shocks of upheaval before returning seamlessly to the melodic, stately dance, with the whole effect of her contribution elevating the performance above melodrama to fully realize the composer’s intent, which was its sophisticated cousin, melancholy. At the end, her fingers gently shaped the notes into softness, not just heard but felt. Ending solo, her tender creation conjured a vision of puffy snowflakes gently lighting on frozen branches.

  During the applause, her mother and the cellist stood for humble bows. Rook turned to Nikki, expecting to see tears glistening on her cheeks in the reflection of the video. But no, that would be melodrama. Her response was in tune with her mother’s in the piece-melancholy. And longing.

  “Want to see one more?” asked the professor.

  “Please,” said Nikki.

  The video continued to roll as the duo quickly set up to became a trio and a classmate joined them on stage with her violin. Heat and Rook both reacted at the same time. Rook said, “Stop the tape.”

  Nikki shouted, “No, don’t stop it, freeze it. Can you freeze it?”

  Professor Shimizu punched the pause button and the image of the violinist froze as she brought her instrument and bow up, revealing a small scar on her outer wrist.

  “It’s her,” said Rook, voicing what Heat already knew. “That violinist is our Jane Doe from the suitcase.”

  FIVE

  As the Acela Express sped toward New York’s Penn Station, Rook stared out his window at a snowy egret fishing the bank of a salt marsh on the Connecticut shoreline. “God, I wish you’d say something,” said Heat.

  “What do you mean, ‘say something’?” His eyes rose to the archipelago dotting the horizon, where several hulking mansions jutted up, each stately home rooted fast to one of the tiny rock islands scattered offshore. Over a century ago, millionaires from New York and Philadelphia looking for isolation and privacy built what they whimsically called their summer cottages on those mounds of granite, appropriating Long Island Sound as a castle moat. Their perfect seclusion made Rook reflect on Petar’s comment the night before about Nikki’s defensive wall. He turned to face her across the table from him. “I think I’ve been a total chatterbox since Providence. Do you really want to hear more about my theory on why Ravel’s Bolero is such a surefire, panties on the floor, bedroom seducer?”

  “Rook.”

  “Hands down, the most hauntingly erotic piece of music ever. Except maybe ‘Don’t Mess with My Toot Toot.’”

  “You’re driving me crazy, so just say it. If you hadn’t pushed me to go to Boston, we never would have popped this lead.” Nikki’s cell phone vibrated and she took a call from Detective Ochoa. “That’s great,” she said and made a few notes. She hung up and said, “Case in point. In the time since we ID’d Nicole Bernardin as our Jane Doe this morning, Roach has located her apartment. It’s on Payson Avenue near Inwood Park. They’re rolling there now.”

  “No such thing as Sunday off for Roach.”

  “Or Malcolm and Reynolds. They volunteered to pick us up at Penn so we can Code Two up there.” She checked her watch for the tenth time in as many minutes. “We’ll still get there sooner than if we had waited for a flight.”

  Rook smiled. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something I like about Malcolm and Reynolds.”

  Heat went back to looking over the photocopies Professor Shimizu had made for her of the student file and 1971 yearbook photos of Nicole Aimee Bernardin. As Nikki studied the French violin student’s young face in one picture, snapped in a candid moment laughing with Nikki’s mother and Seiji Ozawa at Tanglewood, she felt Rook’s stare.

  “Know what I can’t wrap my brain around?” he said. “That your mom never mentioned her to you. Let’s look past the obvious stunner that the lady in your mom’s suitcase was a classmate of your mom’s. They weren’t just classmates. The professor said your mom and Nicole were inseparable back then. Friends, roommates-hell, they even formed their own chamber ensemble. Why do you think she never told you about her?”

  She turned the page to another yearbook shot of her mother and Nicole. This time they were at the 1970 French Cultural Festival at the Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade. The picture captured them eyeing each other peripherally as they played. The caption read, “Trope and Bernardin, Keeping Time,” but to Nikki the look carried more. If it were present day, the caption would simply say, “BFFs.”

  Rook asked, “Do you think they had some big falling out?”

  “How would I know if I didn’t even know about her?”

  “Hey, here’s a theory.”

  “I was waiting. Are you sure you don’t want to put on your foil cap?”

  “Nicole Bernardin killed your mother.”

  She just stared at him. “And?”

  “Hang on, I’m formulating thoughts… And that is how Nicole had your mom’s suitcase.”

  “And then, ten years later, someone else killed her, same MO, and just happened to stuff her in it?”

  “Oh,” he said, wiggling in his seat. “What if… What if Nicole’s husband was your mom’s killer? That’s how she ended up in his suitcase.”

  “You know, at least that has possibilities.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. So quit while you’re ahead.” She closed the file and stared at the passing marshes and woodlands, seeing none of it, really. Less than a minute passed, and Rook was back, as if he’d hit reset. “There must be some reason your own mother never mentioned such a good friend.”

  “Rook?” she said. “Don’t make me shoot you.”

  “Shut up?”

  “Thank you.”

  He concentrated on the view again, glimpsing the last of the solitary islands of rock just before the train entered an underpass and the concrete wall blocked it from sight.

  Even though they had to detour around a fro
zen zone set up on Dyckman due to a gas leak caused by the earthquake, they still made record time getting to Nicole Bernardin’s apartment in the northernmost section of Manhattan. Her building, a slender two-story town house facing Inwood Hill Park across the avenue, would be Realtor-listed as a charming Tudor. The neighborhood felt safe and looked well maintained, the sort of quiet street where people used canvas car covers and the half walls surrounding porches gleamed with fresh coats of paint. Heat and Rook entered the town house to find a different picture entirely.

  From the downstairs foyer, in every direction they looked, the disarray was alarming. Cabinets and closets stood ajar. Paintings and pictures ripped from hooks sat askew, with busted frames tipping against wainscoting and doorjambs. An antique china cabinet in the dining room lay split open on its side with shattered crystal glassware surrounding it like ice chips. Strewn decorative objects covered all the floors as if the whole place had been shaken. “Tell me this wasn’t from the earthquake,” said Rook.

  Detective Heat put on a pair of blue gloves. Raley handed him a pair and said, “Not unless the earthquake walked around crushing everything under size eleven work boots.”

  Touring the ransacked town house shrouded Nikki in yet another suffocating cloud of deja vu. Her own apartment-once the scene of her mother’s murder-had also been tossed back then, although not so thoroughly violated. Detective Damon had called that an interrupted search. This one clearly went on nonstop until the perp either found what he was looking for or was satisfied he never would.

  Ochoa met her in the doorway as she entered the upstairs master bedroom. As they stepped around the fingerprint technician who was dusting the cut glass knob, she asked her detective, “Any sign of blood anywhere?”

  He shook no and said, “No obvious sign of struggle, either. Although I don’t know how you’d ever be able to sort that out a hundred percent in all this mess.”

  “I can give you about ninety-nine-point-nine percent, if that’s helpful,” said the lead for the Evidence Collection Unit, Benigno DeJesus, as he rose up from kneeling on the rug behind a tossed mattress. Nikki’s shoulders immediately relaxed when she saw him. The crime scene was in excellent hands.

  “Detective DeJesus,” she said. “To what do we owe this honor on a Sunday?”

  He pulled down his surgical mask and smiled. “I don’t know. I had an uneventful day planned when Detective Ochoa called to tell me about this case of…,” he paused and then, in his typically understated fashion, continued, “some interest. So here I am.” She gave Ochoa a quick study, wondering what favor Miguel had traded for pulling in the best evidence man in the department on a day off, but Oach’s stoic face gave nothing away.

  DeJesus gave her and Rook an overview tour of the town house, with his preliminary assessment being that the disarray constituted a property search without an assault associated with it. He pointed to the second bedroom, which Nicole Bernardin had set up as a home office. That had received the brunt of the rummaging. He used a penlight to indicate four tiny circular marks where the rubber feet of her laptop had lived before it got taken. The charger cord as well as the USB cable to her missing external hard drive all remained where they had once connected to the computer. Desk drawers and files all sat open and empty, except for stationery odds and ends. “The level of meticulousness here tells me whoever searched the residence focused most of his attention and care in here,” he said.

  Back in the bedroom, the ECU detective said the owner of this place wasn’t sharing it with a spouse. All the toiletries, clothing, foods in the kitchen, and other tells suggested a mature woman living alone, although she had kept a supply of condoms in the nightstand and a new toothbrush, shaving cream, and a package of disposable razors in a bathroom cabinet. Hearing that, Nikki and Rook side-glanced each other, each tentatively ticking one unspoken thought off a mental list about Cynthia Trope Heat and Nicole Aimee Bernardin. The prescriptions in the medicine cabinet all matched Nicole’s name, and the few pictures in broken frames on the floor showed the victim in Europe at various ages with people resembling parents and siblings. Nikki crouched over, curious to see if her mother appeared in any of them, but she did not. She stood up and observed Rook doing the same thing in the next room.

  Roach had already briefed Detective DeJesus about the traces of lab solvent and the railroad grime found on her body, and he promised to be on the lookout, as well as to coordinate with Lauren Parry at OCME on Nicole Bernardin’s toxicology to match prescription use and any other findings she learned in her postmortem. Heat was content to leave it in the capable hands of ECU, but she indulged herself in a solitary, sense-of-the-house tour before she drove back to the Twentieth Precinct. One thing she wanted to see satisfied a big piece of curiosity for her when she found it. In the downstairs closet she discovered a complete set of luggage, including the exact size of her mother’s stolen piece. All were empty, and there was no space left in the closet for the suitcase the victim’s body had been found in. That was not definitive information, but it did lessen the likelihood that Nicole Bernardin had been in possession of that American Tourister, and therefore it moved her one step down the roster of her mother’s potential killers. A bittersweet thought for Heat since, ten years later, that roster was still empty.

  The silence that fell over the bull pen while Detective Heat updated the pair of Murder Boards was so complete the only sound was the squeak of her marker on the white surface as she printed in red block letters: “1. WHY KILL NICOLE BERNARDIN? 2. WHY KILL NICOLE BERNARDIN NOW?” As she wrote, she said, “As the connections between the old murder and this new one deepen, we need to be thinking about not just the why but the timing, the ten-year lag between the two.”

  She turned to the room, where Rook and her squad formed a semicircle around her. Even though she had called them in on a Sunday afternoon, the detectives had turned out without complaint. In fact, beyond just showing commitment, they seemed energized by the mission sense of working this one all-out for her. Some had even brought the group snacks that they had stopped for on the way in from their homes or from the town house up in Inwood. The take-out containers of bagels, cookies, and salads sat behind them on the desktop of the lone no-show, Sharon Hinesburg, who had her phone turned off, a violation of policy. Heat tapped the board with the marker cap. “Keep coming back to these, OK? When this falls together for us, it will be because, above all else, we found the answers to these two questions.”

  Their attention was on her, but their eyes were riveted on the new photos Nikki had posted, and the profound-literally graphic-story they told. On the left whiteboard, the familiar death pose of Jane Doe, now Nicole Bernardin. Inches away on the right-hand board, Nikki’s mom’s suitcase, bearing Nikki’s girlish initials, and the new addition, the blowup of Nicole and Cynthia in performance forty years ago at the Esplanade. Not only did the connection between the two victims drawn by the photo impact on the group, but the striking resemblance of young Cynthia Trope Heat to their squad leader dramatically underscored the stakes they already felt.

  “By now, you all know about the lead we picked up in Boston,” she began. “And that her apartment has been tossed and, most likely, scrubbed of evidence. That includes, paperwork, laptop, even her mail. Now, these two apartment searches-my mother’s and now Nicole Bernardin’s-tell us that this one,” she said pointing to her mom’s Murder Board, “was not likely a simple burglary gone bad. Someone was searching hard for something in both places.”

  Feller’s hand went up. “Do we assume it’s the same person?”

  “We don’t assume. And we sure don’t know. Yet. We also don’t know if the hunt was for the same object. All we have is the common MO. Just like the killings.”

  Rook said, “Here’s a notion. Nicole was French. What about international jewel thieves looking for two halves of a treasure map?”

  Malcolm kept his face deadpan and said, “Oh. Like The Pink Panther.”

  Rook was about to say yes, but
he felt their stares. “Well. One possibility.”

  Nikki continued, “Of note, all Nicole’s suitcases are apparently accounted for, as are all knives, which are in the wooden holder. I’ve assigned a group of uniforms to canvass neighbors and Parks PD for unusual activity or strange vehicles. We have some of our own work to do.”

  On the Nicole Murder Board, she began a list of new assignments, placing the initials of detectives beside each. “Detective Ochoa, I’d like you to look into her personal life. Hit all the usuals: boyfriends past and present; stalker complaints; restraining orders; family feuds. If you have trouble finding anything official, check with her hairdresser. You’d be amazed what you can learn.”

  “Like maybe doing something about that bald spot,” said Reynolds. “You’re blinding me, homes.”

  “Detective Reynolds, you’ll contact the local sports and running clubs again now that we have a name to go with the face. And also check out Internet dating services. See if she was registered and if she had any hookups that might have gone bad. Do the upscale matchmakers, too. A professional woman might have gone to them.”

  “And what do we know about the profession?” asked Detective Malcolm.

  “Letterhead and business cards that turned up at the town house indicate the victim worked as the owner of her own business as a corporate headhunter.” Heat read from one of the cards. “‘The NAB Group. Discreet and confidential executive searches for industry and institutions, worldwide.’ NAB being her initials.”

  Rhymer asked, “Address?”

  “Mail drop. No offices evident. Phone is an eight-eight-eight. I’ve put in for a check on that number and any other phone accounts she had. Landline, if she even had one, got taken. And, as you recall, she had no cell phone on her.”

  Rook said, “No cell phone? That’s like one step away from cave paintings and medicinal leeches.”

  Heat posted the business card. “She had a Web site, but it’s one page stating all of the above plus an added line, ‘References and testimonials on request.’”