Deadly Heat Read online

“From his TV ads?” asked Heat.

  “Yeah. But I also did some work for him. About six months ago I upgraded all the locks and alarm keypads at his office over in Queens.”

  Heat and Rook traded glances, each registering a sudden rush of excitement at the break. Nikki tried to remain casual, masking her hope that the victim she saved could shed light on how an active serial killer was choosing his targets. “Glen, did you spend any time personally with Mr. Sandmann?”

  “Most definitely. Doug approved the bid and cut the check when I finished.”

  “May I ask what you talked about?”

  “Prices and my time frame. Pretty much what every prospect talks about.”

  “Anything else? Take a moment to think.”

  The locksmith took a sip of his juice and stared into the middle distance, then said, “No, sorry. I pretty much just walked him through the job. Nothing memorable. Nice guy, though. Let me pet his dog.”

  Rook chimed in. “Did you and Bedbug Doug have any friends in common?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did anyone arrange the job for you?” asked Heat, following Rook’s thread. “Maybe a referral from another customer?”

  “I wish. Got that account the usual way. Just me making cold calls. Opening the Yellow Pages and smiling ’n’ dialing.”

  With Nikki’s breakthrough hopes dimming, she asked him to keep thinking during the next few days. Heat gave him her business card so he could reach her if any detail, however insignificant, came to him.

  Detective Feller called to alert her that he was in an undercover taxi he’d borrowed from his old NYPD unit and was standing by at the hospital’s side door. The first thing Heat had done when she saw the media setting up was to arrange a discreet exit for Glen Windsor. But before she and Rook could sneak him out of the ER, Nikki got an unwelcome surprise.

  “Here’s our man!” called Captain Irons across the triage area. She turned as Wally breezed in along with Detective Hinesburg. As her precinct commander approached, Heat could see he not only had on a freshly pressed uniform shirt but wore a dusting of makeup on his porcine face. Like a moth to light, Irons had found the media and arrived ready for his close-up.

  After a round of handshakes, back-claps, and a rousing “Glen, way to stay alive,” the Iron Man asked Windsor if he would mind stepping out along with him to meet the press. The locksmith cast an anxious look at Heat, but the captain said, “Don’t be nervous. You don’t have to say anything, just stand with me, I’ll do all the talking.”

  Heat drew her boss aside. “Cap, I really think this is a bad idea. We don’t want to spike the ball in the killer’s face, do we? And I think the less that’s public, the better.”

  “That’s what you always think,” said Sharon Hinesburg, inviting herself into the conversation. “Our skipper’s taking a lot of shit. I say give him a chance to have a moment of victory.”

  “What victory, Captain?” said Heat, putting her back to Hinesburg. “He’s still out there.”

  “Appreciate your input, Detective. But I am going to step up and let New Yorkers know the Twentieth Precinct is on top of this and saved a life. Excuse us.” He left for the main entrance and the news cameras, his arm on the shoulder of Glen Windsor. As they stepped out the sliding glass doors, Detective Hinesburg turned to look back at Heat and winked.

  Rook asked Nikki if she was ready to go. But she paused, struck by the recollection that, in this very emergency room, John Lennon had been declared DOA. Heat moved on, busy making other plans.

  She came home that night to find Rook sound asleep on her couch and No Reservations blasting on the Travel Channel. He startled awake when she muted Anthony Bourdain’s tetchy pub crawl through Ireland’s politically charged saloons. Rook sat up and massaged his eye sockets with the heels of his hands. The jet lag, he explained, had crept up and walloped him. And with that, he served a natural segue to his French adventure. Nikki didn’t seize it.

  The awkwardness of dancing around the subject seemed less daunting—and less work—to her than confronting it. Besides, why dance when you can distract? She began a monologue about work. “Randall Feller texted from the locksmith’s shop,” she said, putting her backup piece, a Beretta 950 Jetfire, in its cubby on the living room desk. “They located the matching lock for the mystery key in his storeroom, so that’s that, as far as some potential vic being caged in a room somewhere.” She moved to the kitchen and called from behind the open fridge door, “Forensics came up zip, no usable prints. Nothing in the store, or on the doorknob on the roof, or on the little piece of paper. And get this. In addition to locks, Glen also installs security systems. You think he had even one security cam in his own place? God. He’s like the cobbler whose kids go shoeless. I’m having a beer, you want a beer?” She didn’t get an answer, so she closed the refrigerator. And found him standing on the other side of the door. Waiting.

  “This isn’t going to go away,” he said.

  Nikki considered that a moment. She opened the fridge and got him a Widmer’s to go with hers, then they headed back to the couch.

  “Answer me this,” she said when they sat down. Each tucked a leg under so they could face each other.

  “What have I started here?” He chuckled. “Am I going to get interrogated by The Great Interrogator?”

  “Your meeting, Rook. What were you hoping for?”

  “To clear the air. So I can allay this irrational—totally irrational—jealous vibe I’m getting from you about Yardley Bell. Jesus, I went to France to help you. Why do I feel like I did something wrong?”

  “My question—if I may ask it now—is how did Yardley Bell know you were there? And don’t tell me it was coincidence. Did using your passport light up her Homeland Security grid, and she followed you across the Atlantic?”

  “She suggested we go.”

  Nikki rocked backward in astonishment. “Oh. Right. Air cleared. Jealousy allayed. Boy, how irrational could I be?”

  “See? That’s why I didn’t tell you. I knew you’d go to the bad place.”

  “And this doesn’t do it?”

  “In hindsight, I’ll admit I may not have exercised my best judgment.”

  “What did you exercise?”

  “Come on, you know me better than that.”

  “You, I know. She’s another story.”

  “I told you, Yardley and I are past history.”

  “To you. But I know her type.”

  “And what type is that?”

  “Obsessive old girlfriends who can’t let go. You know what I’m talking about. The ones who drive across the country wearing NASA diapers and have tasers and duct tape in the trunk. Or who write thirty thousand e-mails with veiled threats to rival lovers.”

  “Yardley sent you an e-mail?”

  “No! She doesn’t have to. She can hop on a federal Gulfstream to France and rendezvous with you in fucking Nice.”

  “Where she provided invaluable support setting me up with Fariq Kuzbari. You should be delighted by that.”

  “Yeah, look at me. Couldn’t be happier.”

  “You were happy when I told you. Until you found out she was there.”

  “That’s the other thing. Rook, I have been on a mission to keep the feds away from me and out of my case. I’ve dealt with them a hundred times on a hundred other cases. Their so-called resources come with a price tag. I refuse to let them screw it up with their departmental politics or sell me out in the name of diplomatic expediency. I’ve kept DHS at arm’s length,” she said, deciding not to bring up Bart Callan. “Now Agent Heartthrob is sticking her nose in it—and using you to do it. Or vice versa, what’s the diff?”

  Rook tried to slow things. “Hey? Nikki?” He brought his pitch down and rested a hand on her knee. “This is so not you.”

  All of it, not just the past few days, but eleven years of it boiled over. She despised it whenever her emotions spilled out, but it was too late to stem this tide. In spite of herself, taciturn, compar
tmentalized, stoic Nikki Heat blurted her raw vulnerability to him. “I feel alone on this. Everything’s coming at me at once. I can’t do it by myself.”

  “Then why don’t you want help?”

  “I do. Just not from everyone. I can’t trust everyone.”

  “What about me? The idiot who jumped in front of a bullet for you. Do you still trust me?”

  There it was. The kind of moment an entire life pivots on as surely as the needle of a compass.

  Nikki didn’t answer yes or no. She did something else. Something bigger than she could ever speak. She showed it. Without a word, she rose from the couch and walked to her mother’s piano bench to get the codes.

  Rook listened intently as Heat told him everything. About the night three weeks ago when she had finally been able to bring herself to play her mother’s piano for the first time since the murder. How she opened the music bench after eleven years and took out the music book, the one she had been taught from as a girl. And how, while playing it, she saw something unusual. Small pencil notations between the notes of the songs. He leaned over the book to examine them, squinting, turning his head, trying to make sense of the marks, and she told him what she believed, and, in doing that, answered his question about trust.

  Nikki told Rook she believed that these markings were a secret code left by her mother. And that whatever information the symbols hid was the reason she had been killed. “And because all the signs say whatever conspiracy Tyler Wynn is involved in is heating up, I also believe if the wrong person found out we had this code, we’d both be killed, too.”

  “Swell,” he said with a deadpan. “Thanks a lot for dragging me into this.” And then they fell into each other’s arms and held tight.

  A few seconds passed. With her face still buried into him, Nikki said, “You’re dying to get at that, aren’t you?”

  “It’s killing me.”

  She pulled away and smiled. “All yours.”

  Rook didn’t hesitate. He swung around to face the coffee table and opened the music book, bending closer, turning his head side to side, squinting some more at the pencil marks. While she let the man she trusted with her life study in peace, her gaze went to the silent TV, where a bartender at the Crown Salon in Belfast pulled Tony Bourdain a perfectly murky pint of Guinness. Nikki had made her leap of faith. At least for the moment, she, too, had no reservations.

  They sat up most of the night, working together, banging their heads, trying to figure out the code. They switched from hefeweizen to French Roast, but the coffee only made them more alert, not any more enlightened. Heat answered all of Rook’s questions but tried to avoid sharing too much of her path; his fertile imagination would do its best work unconstrained.

  Even when he signed on the Internet, covering the same ground she had again and again, Nikki didn’t warn him off or try to stop him. With his Beginner’s Eyes Rook might find something she hadn’t, and she didn’t want to pollute his fresh thinking.

  His quest went beyond her searches of the Egyptians, Mayans, and urban taggers, to the Phoenicians and Druids. Rook even investigated a site devoted to the mutt languages of some TV series called Firefly. That was when they knew it had come time to call it a night and start fresh at sunup. “You mean in about forty-five minutes?” she asked.

  Immune to the caffeine, Heat fell into the deepest sleep she had enjoyed in ages. Call it the power of sharing her burden. When she awoke, the sheets on Rook’s empty side of the bed felt cold to her touch. She pulled on her robe and found him sitting on the bench seat of the bay window, staring down at Gramercy Park, although Nikki couldn’t be certain he was actually seeing anything at all except pencil marks on sheet music.

  “Now you know where my head’s been all these weeks,” she said, resting her palms on his shoulders.

  “My brain itches.” He tilted backward and she kissed the top of his forehead. “You’re going to hate me.”

  “You’re giving up?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t believe it is a code?”

  “I do.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Always a source of concern.”

  “We’re not going to crack this on our own. At least not soon enough to do any good. We need an assist.” Nikki tensed and withdrew her hands. He turned from the window to face her. “Relax, I’m not talking about going to Yardley Bell. Or Agent Callan.”

  Old doubts about sharing with Rook began their noxious trickle. “Who then?”

  It was only eight in the morning, but when Eugene Summers opened the door to his Chelsea loft, he greeted them looking radiant, groomed, and polished. The professional butler turned reality TV star bowed his silver head and smartly kissed the back of Nikki’s extended hand, dismissing her apology about coming by so early and on short notice. “Nonsense. I’m delighted to see you. Plus it got me out of my robe.”

  “No kidding,” said Rook. “You’ll have to show me how you get a perfect dimple like that in a necktie.”

  “Will I?” said Summers. In spite of the fact that Rook was an unabashed fan of the reality star (or maybe because of that), his idol seemed less than thrilled to see him again. But the Maven of Manners, as the network promos and billboards advertised him, shook pleasantly nonetheless and gestured them to the living room, where he had set out warm croissants and jam beside a porcelain coffee service.

  Back in the mid-1970s, then-twentysomethings Eugene Summers and Cynthia Heat had operated as spies for Tyler Wynn’s CIA operation in Europe. They both had been part of his team, nicknamed the Nanny Network because Wynn’s moles gained access to the homes of intelligence targets by working in domestic service. Heat’s mom worked undercover as a piano tutor; Eugene, as a butler. That connection was why Rook had proposed that morning’s visit to Nikki: to find out if the Nanny Network had a secret code.

  Initially she was opposed. Sharing the existence of the code with Rook had been a giant step. Widening the circle of awareness—especially to someone once handled by Tyler Wynn—represented great risk. But Rook’s calling out of the truth, that they were stuck, led her to agree. As long as they agreed to back-door the subject and not reveal they were personally in possession of the coded message.

  “What brings you here so urgently, Detective?” asked the butler, politely waiting until after he’d poured their coffees and sat. His posture was perfect, and when Rook got appraised by the star’s TV trademark Summers Stare, he rose up out of his slouch. And smiled.

  She began her lie with “Just routine, really. As you must have heard, Tyler Wynn is still at large. We’re just doing our diligence, following up with everyone who knew him.”

  “I had heard.” Summers placed a palm against his top vest button and continued, “And I read the account of your horrible ordeal in Mr. Rook’s Web article. Terrifying and heartbreaking.” He paused, and she nodded to acknowledge his sympathetic look. “But I honestly don’t know if I can be of use. The man certainly hasn’t been in contact with me.”

  “Naturally that’s one of my questions,” said Heat. “Thank you.”

  “Good java.” Rook set his cup down, sounding as offhanded as possible. “Some of Tyler Wynn’s other acquaintances may have received communications from him.”

  “May have?” Eugene had smarts. They could see the granules of each sentence getting sieved and sorted behind his frameless glasses. “You aren’t sure?”

  “We’re wondering, that’s all,” said Heat. “As we go through some of the effects of Tyler’s accomplices, it occurs to me that there might be messages in code that we would never recognize as such.”

  “You want to know what you’re looking at,” said the butler. “For clues.”

  “Precisely,” said Rook.

  “Did you ever use a code in Wynn’s network?” asked Heat.

  Summers shook his head. “The closest we came were the drop boxes I told you about last time. We only put plain messages in them. Handw
ritten, and certainly not in any code.” He grinned. “We were all a bit too rowdy and undisciplined to learn codes, let alone use them.”

  “What about Tyler Wynn?” she asked. “Did he use a code?”

  “That I don’t know. You could ask me anything else about Tyler Wynn. I could tell you his favorite wine, where he got his shoes custom made, the shop where he bought his Brie de Meaux. But as far as his means of encrypted communication, I’m sorry.”

  Nikki stared down at the coffee she’d let grow cold. Just as she put away her notebook, lamenting the trip and the exposure that had come with it, Rook spoke. “Eugene,” he began, “something you said just gave me an idea. Tyler Wynn is a man of specific tastes, right?”

  “Oh, please, you have no idea how particular.”

  “If you would indulge me some time, could I take a few hours to pick your brain about some of his habits, his likes and dislikes? It would really help me color my next article about him. You know, the American James Bond with his custom shoes and his personal fromage.”

  “A couple of hours… I have an interview with Lara Spencer this morning.”

  “Great,” said Rook. “Then lunch after?” Boxed into the obligation, the famous butler gave Rook his trademark Summers Stare, then said yes.

  On the elevator down from his loft, Heat said, “Tell me something, Rook, is everything in my life all about helping you write your next article?”

  “That? That’s not for any article. Here’s what I’m thinking. If I can get a line on a few of Tyler Wynn’s personal tastes and buying habits, we might be able to track him down through his purchases.”

  The doors opened in the lobby and Nikki said, “That’s a horrible idea.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t think of it.” Then she stepped out ahead of him, hiding her grin.

  The bull pen sounded like a telemarketing boiler room when Heat came in from her meeting with Eugene Summers. All the detectives were either working their phones or at the Murder Boards conferring on leads they’d checked out. Except, of course, for Sharon Hinesburg, whom Nikki glimpsed shoe shopping on Zappos before she boss-buttoned the screen to an NYPD internal site.