Frozen Heat nh-4

by Richard Castle

  “Useful?” she asked. “Hard to know what’s useful. Interesting? Absolutely. Check out this one. She was so cute.” Nikki held up a shot of her mom, striking a ditzy, laughing pose while she squeezed the bicep of a gondolier under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. “Turn it over, she wrote on the back.”

  Rook flipped the snapshot and read it aloud. “Dear Lysette, Sigh!”

  “My mom was a babe, wasn’t she?”

  He handed it back. “I’m too smart to answer a question like that about your mother. At least until we appear on Jerry Springer.”

  “I think you did just answer.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to upset her sorting. “What’s your take from all this?”

  “Mostly that she had one hell of a good time. You know how in Vanity Fair and First Press you see all those photo layouts of the European rich and privileged and wonder what it must be like to live like that? My mom lived like that. At least she did one job at a time. Look at some of these.” Nikki dealt out the photos like playing cards, one after another, each showing young Cynthia in a posh surrounding: on the sweeping lawn of a country estate out of Downton Abbey; at a lacquered grand piano with the rocky coast of the Mediterranean out the picture window behind her; on the private terrace of a hilltop manor overlooking Florence; in Paris with an Asian family under the marquee for the visiting Bolshoi Ballet; and on and on. “Apparently, for her, tutor-in-residence was like a fairy tale dream you had to wake up from, but when you did, the butler came and got your bags.”

  There were also pictures of Nicole and other young friends her mom’s age, plus a bunch of snapshots of her mom and her pals standing individually in various locales around Europe, grinning and gesturing grandly like Price Is Right spokesmodels, obviously their shared joke. But Nikki remained fixated on her mom and the frozen record of her bopping around in France, Italy, Austria, and Germany. In a number of photographs she appeared posed with her host families. Most of Cindy’s patrons had that look of old money, standing pompously in a circular drive or in private gardens, but mostly in predictable small-to-tall groupings of moms, dads, and impatient young musicians in bow ties or ruffled dresses in front of a Steinway grand. There was one other person in all those group pictures. A tall, handsome man, and in most of them, her mother stood close beside him.

  “Who’s the William Holden knockoff?” asked Rook, tapping a shot of just the man and Cynthia together outside the Louvre. He was older than Nikki’s mother by twenty years and did give off the former leading man’s gritty attractiveness.

  “I’m not sure. There is something familiar about him I can’t place.” She snatched the picture from him and put it back in the proper pile.

  “Whoa, not so fast.” He picked it right back up. “Maybe it’s the William Holden thing you recognize… Or is it something else?”

  “Like what?” Nikki tried to grab it away again, but he dodged her. She said, “I don’t see William Holden.”

  “I do. I see William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. They’re both straight off the movie poster for Paris When It Sizzles.” He held the photo up to her nose. “Check it out. His weathered good looks paired with her refined innocence masking the sexy tigress inside. You know, that could be us.”

  Nikki looked away. “There is no sizzle in those pictures. He’s too old for her.”

  “Know who I bet this is?” he said. “He’s that Oncle Tyler who set up her tutoring clients. Yeah, this is Tyler Wynn. Am I right?”

  Ignoring him, she plucked another shot from the stack and held it up. “Hey, here’s one of just Mom taken right here in Paris.” The developer’s time stamp on the reverse read “May 1975.” The photo was of her mother balanced on one foot with a hand shading her eyes, comically peering into the future. It was snapped in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. “I want to go there,” said Nikki. “Right now.”

  They left the keepsake box with the hotel manager to lock in the safe and took a taxi to Ile de la Cite. Darkness had fallen and the gray stoneworks of the edifice were bathed in white light, which also cast a spooky glow upon the gargoyles observing from above.

  Rook knew what this was all about; she didn’t have to say it. They left the taxi and hurried along silently, walking around the back of a tour group that encircled nighttime street performers who juggled flaming batons. They made their way to their destination: the center of the square that faced the front entrance of the massive cathedral. They paused, patiently waiting for a high school field trip to clear away and then approached a small piece of metal embedded in the paving stones, a shiny octagon of brass rubbed smooth by years of wear. This was the exact location in the photo of Nikki’s mom. She took the picture out of her pocket to prepare herself and did what she’d come to do. A month shy of thirty-five years later, Nikki Heat stood in her mother’s footsteps. Then, raising one foot off the ground, she shielded her eyes in the identical hammy pose, which Rook captured with the flash of his iPhone.

  This spot of her reenactment was the famous Point Zero, the Paris milestone outward from which all distances are measured in France. This, the saying went, was where all roads began. Nikki hoped so. She just didn’t know where it would lead yet.

  They ate at Mon Vieil Ami, a ten-minute stroll to Ile Saint-Louis. Over dinner they talked some more about their visit with Nicole’s parents, which gave Rook a chance to say he didn’t buy Lysette and Emile’s whole theory about Cindy’s taking a break from the rigors of pursuing her passion as the explanation for why she quit her dream. “You have a better theory?” Heat asked. “And does it involve UFOs, cranial needle probes, or memory-erasing light flashes from men in dark suits?”

  “You know you hurt me when you mock my outside-the-box approach to case solving. Chide me if you must, but chide me gently. I’m as tender as a fawn.”

  “OK, Bambi,” she said, “but don’t look at the chalkboard, venison is the special.”

  After they placed their orders, Rook came right back to it. “It’s still the odd sock,” he said. “If someone’s going to prepare her whole life like your mother did for a concert career, she doesn’t just drop it. It’s like an athlete training for the Olympics only to walk away from the starting blocks to become a personal trainer. Great gig, but after all that sacrifice and training?”

  “I hear you, but what about what Emile said about changing passions?”

  “Uh, with all due respect? Merde. I refer you back to my Olympics versus personal trainer theory. One’s a passion, the other is a J-O-B job.”

  Heat said, “All right, maybe it wasn’t necessarily a passion, but you saw her face in those pictures. My mom was having a ball. And probably earning just enough money to make it hard to quit. Maybe the work got to become golden handcuffs.”

  “Not that the subject of handcuffs doesn’t titillate me, but that’s also a hard sell. Responsible young woman turns into Paris Hilton in one summer? Doubtful.” His salad and her soup arrived. He took a bite of tender lentils and then continued, “Do you think she had something going with this Tyler Wynn?”

  Heat put her fork down and leaned over her plate toward him. “You are talking about my mother.”

  “I’m trying to help us-correction, help you-get an understanding of what happened over here to change everything back then.”

  “By going to some pretty seedy places.” Her quiet tone was what unnerved him. And the steely gaze.

  “Let’s put a pin in it.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Besides,” he said, “we already hit pay dirt with a suspect. I hope you told Raley and Ochoa to put out an APB on Ryan Seacrest.”

  She laughed and said, “Roach had the same response when I called them. Obviously a bogus name, but they’re going to run phone records to see where that call originated last Sunday.”

  “It tells us one thing, for sure. Someone definitely wants to get his hands on something. And since the timing of that call came after Nicole’s town house got tossed, we know he didn’t fi
nd it.”

  “Assuming that it’s the same person looking,” she said.

  “Well fine,” he said, teasing her. “If you want to be all ‘objective’ in this investigation instead of leaping to conclusions, go ahead.”

  “Objective’s kinda what I do,” she said.

  “Kinda,” he said with a tentative edge. Her look told him Nikki knew exactly what he meant by that jab, but she let it go and concentrated on her soup.

  A subtle breeze had given the night a soft spring warmth, and when they left the restaurant, Heat and Rook decided to bypass the taxis and walk back to their hotel. They strolled arm in arm over the footbridge to Ile de la Cite, skirting the cathedral and the Palais de Justice until they came to Pont Neuf and stood in one of the bridge’s semicircular bastions to stop the world and enjoy the spectacle of Paris at night reflected in the Seine.

  “There it is, Nikki Heat, the City of Light.” She turned to him and they kissed. A dinner bateau passed underneath them, and a happy couple on the top deck called out “ Bon soir ” and raised champagne flutes to them in a toast.

  They mimed a toast back to the couple, and Nikki said, “Amazing. No, magical. What is it about this place? The air smells better, the food tastes like nothing I’ve ever had…”

  “And the sex. Did I mention the sex?”

  She laughed. “Only constantly.”

  “Who knows what it is?” he said. “Maybe it’s Paris. Maybe it’s us.”

  Nikki didn’t answer that, only nestled against him. Rook stood holding her, feeling her breath against the soft of his neck, but at the same time he felt drawn to silently watch the hypnotic flow of the Seine. Its dark waters streamed underneath them, a powerful force channeled between thick walls of stone revetment engineered to be impenetrable and to keep nature itself within controlled, reliable boundaries. He wondered what would happen if one of the walls ever cracked.

  They didn’t set an alarm. Instead Heat and Rook awoke at daybreak to pink light filtered under a thin canopy of gray clouds. Turning to each other, they smiled and said their good mornings. Rook began to slide under the sheet, but Nikki mumbled, “No, stay up here with me this time,” and drew him to face her. The two made love again to the peal of morning church bells and the scent of heaven’s own bakery across the street at Au Grand Richelieu. “All in all, not a bad way to start another day of homicide work,” said Heat on her way to the shower.

  As he had calculated, their warm pastries lasted from the bakery door to the espresso bar he had discovered the afternoon before. They found one pair of open stools at the high top counter in the window, and each drank a blood orange juice and a cafe au lait as they watched a businessman standing on the sidewalk turn his back to the wind and expertly roll his own cigarette.

  Nikki checked her voice and e-mails. Roach, ever keen about keeping her in the loop, had closed their workday reporting that the request was in process on the phone records search for the Seacrest call to the Bernardins. The wheels of international bureaucracy turned slowly, but Detective Raley said Interpol was helping, so that was something positive anyway. Forensics had promised fingerprint test results on the found glove by morning, and Irons had told Ochoa he would check with the lab personally on his way in. Heat pocketed her phone then took it out again to double-check the time in New York, and determined it was too early to call.

  Rook said, “I’ve been doing some further reflection.” He paused, knowing this remained a touchy area. “And I think you got more than a shoe box of memories yesterday. My gut tells me we got a new lead, and it’s Tyler Wynn,”

  “Why am I not surprised to hear this?”

  “Relax, I’m speculating in a totally new direction, seeing him in a whole other light.”

  “Let me guess. He’s no longer William Holden, he’s Jason Bateman.”

  “He’s not a lover, he’s a spy.” Heat laughed. “Hear me out, Detective.” He waited until she stopped chuckling and then he leaned closer to her, trying his best not to have madman eyes. “International banker has sort of a phony ring to it. Kind of like ‘embassy attache’ or ‘government contractor.’ It sounds to me like a cover.”

  “OK… And what is the possible connection to my mother?”

  “I don’t know.” She scoffed and took a sip of her coffee. He repeated, “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “I don’t know!” he hissed. “Isn’t this great?!!” This time his eyes had indeed widened madly. Nikki looked around self-consciously, but nobody in the cafe had noticed. Even the man on the sidewalk smoking the roll-your-own had turned the back of his blue suit to them. Rook startled her, grabbing Nikki by the elbow. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “Tyler Wynn-air quotes-international investment banker-was using your mother just like his fake job. As a cover. Pretending to be her lover.” He paused. “Notice I said, ‘pretending.’ Which is why Cindy quit and moved back to the U.S. when she married your dad.”

  Heat finished her coffee and slid a euro under the saucer. “Rook, you need to know. There’s out of the box and there’s out of your mind.”

  He worked on her the whole way back to the hotel, and one point of his logic she found hard to refute. That they came to Paris to look into the change in her mother’s life, and since Tyler Wynn had been such a factor-spy or not-they’d be remiss not to see if Uncle Tyler was still around to talk to. “Or is that too sensitive an area for you?” he asked. A crafty move on Rook’s part because, even if it were, the challenge aspect of his question made it impossible for her to back down.

  Up in their hotel room Rook paced, spitballing how best to approach checking out Tyler Wynn. “I still have some viable clandestine contacts over here from the days I worked my Russia-Chechnya article. Also, there are a few favors I could call in at CIA and NSA. No, wait… Maybe we should start incrementally and make a vanilla sort of inquiry through the U.S. embassy… Or possibly, Interpol. On the other hand,” he rambled, going back and forth, “this is potentially important enough that we could step it up to the DCRI-that’s the French equivalent of the CIA, if you didn’t know.” He noticed Nikki getting on her cell phone. “Who are you calling?”

  She held up a finger for silence. “ Bonjour, Mme. Bernardin? C’est Nikki Heat. First of all, thank you for your hospitality and for those wonderful photographs. I am so grateful to have them.” She nodded and said, “You, as well. I was hoping I could ask a favor. Do you have phone number for Tyler Wynn?” Heat smiled at Rook and began writing it down.

  When she hung up, he said, “Well, there’s the lazy way, if you go for that sort of thing. I don’t. Feels kind of like cheating.”

  Nikki held up the pad with Wynn’s phone number. “Should I not call it, then?”

  He said, “Do you want to play games or get serious about this case for once?”

  Her call began in French, but whoever answered spoke English. When Rook saw her shocked reaction when she asked to speak to Tyler Wynn, he scooted from his spot standing at the window to sit on the edge of the bed beside her. “That’s terrible,” she said. Rook waved for her attention, mouthing “What?”s like a pestering adolescent, and she turned away to concentrate, muttered a series of “Uh-huhs,” asked for an address, which she wrote down, then said her thanks and hung up.

  “Come on, out with it. What’s terrible?”

  “Tyler Wynn is in the hospital,” said Nikki. “Somebody tried to kill him.”

  Rook leaped to his feet and spun in a circle. “That. Is the coolest. Lead. Ever.”

  TEN

  The taxi driver knew the place, the Hopital Canard, in the western suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, one of the wealthiest districts in Paris. The cabbie glanced at the couple in the backseat and asked if it was an emergency. They both answered at the same time. She said no, he said yes. Rook asked her, “And exactly what was it you told me Wynn’s housekeeper said his condition was?” He cupped his ear.

  “Critical gunshot.”
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  “And that’s not an emergency?”

  She took his point and told the driver, “Just get there as quickly as you can.”

  The traffic had another idea. Along with its romance and charm, Paris also came with a morning rush hour. The driver kept surfing his radio dial in ADHD fashion, mostly to French hip-hop and electronic dance stations. The oonce-oonce-oonce rhythm track didn’t match their cadence along the Seine. He turned down the music as the car crept by a traffic marker that read, “Bois de Boulogne, 10 km,” and asked, “You have been yet to Bois de Boulogne? Very pretty for romantic walks. Like Central Park in New York.” Then he pumped up the oonce-oonce again.

  Rook said to her, “Love that name. In fact, I’m entitling my new Victoria St. Clair romance novel, Le Chateau du Bois de Boulogne. Which-correct me here-loosely translated means ‘castle of wood in the baloney.’ I predict overseas sales will skyrocket.”

  The hospital was just off the A-13 in a quiet neighborhood of medical and dental offices. A surprisingly small four-story modern facility, Hopital Canard appeared more like an upscale private clinic than a big city hospital. “This is what money gets you,” said Rook as they strolled past the manicured hedges and potted palms on the way to the entrance. “Trust me, you won’t see a lot of hobos expiring on the ER floor in this establishment. I’ll bet they even warm the bedpans.”

  Nikki pointed out that flowers seemed to have gotten things off on the right foot the day before with the Bernardins, so they stopped at the small shop off the lobby. Minutes later, armed with some peonies in cellophane, they bypassed the front desk and rode the elevator to the second floor. On the way up, she said, “Not that I’m complaining, but I’m surprised they didn’t ask us to sign in.”

  “It’s the peonies. In my experience as an investigative journalist, I’ve learned you can get by almost any security situation unchallenged by carrying something. Flowers, clipboard… And it’s a breeze if you’re eating something, especially off a paper plate.”