Driving Heat Read online

  “Congratulations, Captain Heat,” said Randall Feller. “Hip-hip!”

  Heat held up two palms toward him. “Do. Not.”

  The detective’s brow knotted. “What? It’s a big deal.”

  “It’s a crime scene.”

  Feller was a born cop, but he frequently brought too much street to the job. Correctness was not Randy’s forte, and he provided an example by pointing toward the river and saying, “It’s not like he can hear me.”

  “I can,” was all Heat needed to say, and he lowered his gaze to the ground. He would apologize back at the precinct, and she would let it go. The dance was the dance.

  “Here’s what we’ve got,” said Ochoa. “The cyclist—”

  “Who I interviewed,” Detective Rhymer injected for no reason other than to be heard—a move quite out of character for the soft-spoken Virginia transplant. Feeling their eyes on him and losing his nerve, he pinked up and mumbled, “More later.”

  Miguel Ochoa continued, with an undisguised eye roll toward his partner. “The cyclist was riding north on the path at approx five-oh-five A.M., when he saw a kayak bobbing against a busted piling from the old pier that used to live out there.”

  “The near one,” added Raley, indicating the closest of the three rotting posts jutting up out of the Hudson like the remnants of a giant prehistoric beast’s ribcage.

  “He saw it in the dark?” asked Rook.

  “He caught the kayak in silhouette,” said Rhymer, who now had cause to jump in and spoke with his usual relaxed authority. “The river picks up a lot of light from those buildings and the terminal at Jacob’s Ferry. Plus you got the reflection from the George.” They all pivoted north, where the sparkle from the George Washington Bridge’s lights cast a silver sheen on the Hudson even in the early moments after sunrise.

  Raley got back to the timeline. “He sees a guy who’s immobile inside, and no paddle, so he makes his 911 call at five-oh-seven. He stops on the bank, calling out to the guy in the kayak—no answer—and keeps tabs on the boat until the EMT and radio cars get here.”

  “While he’s waiting,” added Detective Feller, “the wind and the current push the kayak off the piling. It starts drifting to shore. Bicycle boy hears my eyewit pinging softballs and calls her over to help him grab hold as it comes ashore. They’re afraid to touch him, he’s a goner. GSW to the head, unresponsive, and as pale as—” Lesson learned, Feller checked himself. “Pale.”

  Heat took two pairs of nitrile gloves from her pocket, handing one pair to Rook as the group deployed past the coroner’s van and down the grassy incline toward the water. “Watch your step,” said Ochoa. “Lance Armstrong lost his breakfast here…and here.”

  “Good morning, Captain Heat,” said Lauren Parry, who was crouched over the victim with her back to her colleagues. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t salute.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Lots of people say that right before I see them,” said the medical examiner. In spite of the lightness of their banter, Heat knew better than to be impatient with her friend and waited her turn to see the corpse while the ME performed her prelim on the body, which was still seated upright in the cockpit. The kayak wasn’t going anywhere. First-on-scene had roped the carry handles and staked it, bow and stern, to the bank.

  “Who’s got the rundown on the vic?” asked Heat, eager for something to do other than pretend to be patient.

  “Moi,” said Ochoa. “Black male, forty-six. We had to open about six zippers in his life vest to find ID. Turns out he’s kinda family.”

  “Cop?” asked Heat, wishing Lauren would hurry the hell up.

  “Not in the strict sense. He’s got PD credentials as a contractor.”

  “Consultant, actually.” Rhymer held up a plastic evidence bag and read the laminated card zipped inside it. “Here it is, ‘Consulting Psychologist to the NYPD.’”

  The flutter in Nikki’s chest accelerated so much that her heart skipped a beat as her head whipped toward the kayak. She wondered if anyone else had noticed her startle, but only Rook was watching, intrigued by her reaction. Protocol be damned, she stepped up beside Dr. Parry and stared at the corpse.

  “His name,” said Raley, “was—”

  “Lon King,” finished Heat. Beyond that she couldn’t summon breath for more words. Nikki looked down at the corpse in the boat, wondering who the hell would put a bullet in the forehead of her shrink.

  Heat felt more than saw all the heads of the homicide squad slowly rotate to face her. But with the vortex of disbelief swirling within Nikki all she could manage was to keep her eyes fixed on the body beneath her as she groped for an emotional handle. Still more disquieting, the psychologist’s face looked not much different in death than it had in their sessions: neutral, dispassionate, amenable. How many times had she stared at the blank canvas he so studiously presented and seen him with his eyes relaxed and his mouth slightly open just as they were now, betraying no judgment or pleasure—or, in this case, no life itself.

  Lauren Parry whispered a soft, “Nikki?” and slipped a gloved hand into hers. “Do you need to sit down?” Heat gave her a no-look head wag and made an instinctive, albeit pointless, visual survey of the area for the killer. An al-Qaeda sniper on the fishing pier to the left? It was unoccupied. A drug cartel’s menacing cigarette boat speeding away? There was none. A PTSD cop scrambling upslope into the thicket above the Greenway? Nothing but robins on worm patrol in the grass.

  At last her gaze came back to the squad, every one of them still attending her, patiently waiting for Heat to speak. Then she sought Rook, who stood with the others but was staring down at the shrink’s body with an expression of distress that appeared out of scale for someone who didn’t know the victim. Could it be, she thought, that their relationship had reached some point of emotional fusion and that Rook had taken on her upset as his own? Under other circumstances that would have made Nikki feel very happy. But not these.

  “Guess you’ve all figured out that I knew the victim,” she said, trying to dig herself out of the moment she had created. Rook’s eyes came up to meet hers, and she took a pause, rummaging in the uncomfortable instant for the version she dared to tell about the extent of her counseling with the shrink. Nikki, usually one for transparency, opted for the smallest truth she could tell, instinctively protecting herself from personal disclosure—to the detectives, to her fiancé. “You remember back a couple of years when Captain Irons tried to get me off a case by ordering an evaluation from a department psychologist?” She tilted her head toward the victim but didn’t look at him, responding to some irrational expectation that Lon King might sit up and urge her not to withhold.

  That much seemed just enough for the detectives. Rook still came off a little pinched to her, but Heat judged it better to get off the thin ice so she wouldn’t fall through, and switched gears to logistics. “All right, this is complicated. Let’s huddle up and see where to take this,” she began.

  But then Detective Raley chimed in ahead of everyone else. “First place we need to start is a time of death guesstimate,” he said, taking it on himself to address the group, but speaking for the ears of Lauren Parry, too.

  And did she ever hear him. The ME stood up from her crouch and regarded him with the same cool stare the others were giving him.

  “Hoo-boy,” said Rook. “I’ve seen that look. I’ve gotten that look. It’s all yours, buddy.”

  “What? Well we do, don’t we?” Rather than cowering, Raley was doubling down on taking point on the investigation himself. “We need a window so we know where to start, based on when.” He scanned the squad, but they offered no encouragement and mostly looked away.

  “Detective,” said Dr. Parry quietly, evenly. “Are you suggesting I take direction from you on this case?”

  Her measured response set Raley back on his heels. “No, I’m just…Taking some initiative, that’s all.”

  “Dynamic, homes,” said his partner, with some unmistakable st
ink on the remark.

  Raley pushed back against Ochoa with a fake smile. “’Tude’s not helping.”

  If there had been any doubt in Heat’s mind that the true jockeying for squad leader had begun, Roach’s trading elbows like that erased it. “Glad we’re all eager to jump in,” she said. “So let’s.” She turned to Lauren Parry, very much wanting a TOD window, but loathe to ask after what had just occurred. “Doctor, do what you do, and we’ll check in.” Parry gave her a you-got-it nod and crouched again beside the kayak to run her tests. Nikki continued, “Since what we have here is a scene of discovery more than an actual crime scene, we need to gather information about where the murder could have taken place.”

  “And when,” said Rook. He turned to the ME. “Can’t help it, Doc. I see pigtails, I gotta pull ’em.”

  “Nikki?” said Parry.

  “Lauren?”

  “Prelim, twelve to fourteen hours based on temp and lividity. Rook?”

  “Lauren?”

  “Suck it.”

  Unfazed, he turned to the other detectives. “It’s a small price to pay to get you boys critical information on a timely basis. Your unspoken thanks is all I need.”

  Nikki ran the math and peered across the wide expanse of waterway at the New Jersey bluffs. The windows of the high-rise apartments over in West New York and Union City were just starting to kick back glints of the sun’s first rays that in turn reflected off the water. There, where a cool-headed aviator had once miraculously set down an airliner, Nikki tried to envision the situation just before sunset the night before and to trace the path of an adrift twelve-foot Perception Tribute.

  “Getting a fix on his point of origin’s going to be a bear,” said Rhymer. “I did a lot of kayaking in Roanoke, growing up. A boat like this with a shallow draft, in windy conditions, nobody steering…Criminy, who knows?”

  Heat continued her survey anyway, following potential courses from upriver near Harlem and the Bronx. Rook moved close beside her and said, “Mahicantuck. That’s the name Manhattan’s indigenous tribe gave the Hudson. Translated, it means ‘the river that flows two ways.’ Which is to say it’s an estuary. Which is to say he could have just as easily come from the opposite direction, up from the Battery. To calculate the drift pattern, you’re going to have to check tide charts to find out the ebb and flood over two cycles.” He saw the frustration this observation provoked and said, “Hey, facts are my business. You get in a relationship with a journalist, it’s not always going to be good news.”

  With no other useful information likely to pop up at a secondary crime scene, Heat left Dr. Parry and her crew to finish the prelim on the body, assigned a foot patrol to keep an eye out for fishermen in case any of them had spotted unusual activity the night before, and set out for the Twentieth to convene the squad and get a Murder Board started.

  Eager to get the investigation rolling, Heat blew right past her newly assigned precinct commander’s office and, on her first day in charge, sat at her old desk in the homicide bull pen while the other detectives, plus Rook, found their way in with coffees and what passed for breakfast scrounged from the station house break room. While they gathered, Nikki opened her department email for a habitual spot check. She thought there must have been a server error. Her monitor filled, buffered, then filled again with a cascade of messages, more than she ever received in a week, let alone in one morning. A few were slugged “Congratulations” and “Well done” from commanders at other precincts. One marked “Urgent” came from the precinct’s union rep, who said he needed to have a meeting with the new PC immediately on her arrival. A second email came from Personnel downtown, directing her not to meet with the Police Benevolent Association rep yet. Another, with the intriguing subject “Time Sensitive,” included a petition from five of the precinct’s administrative aides asking what the policy would be on e-cigarettes in the building. Heat closed her email and strode to the blank whiteboard to do some real police work. By the time she had block-printed Lon King’s name atop the shiny blank surface, Raley, Ochoa, Feller, and Rhymer had rolled chairs in a semicircle around her. The squad’s newest addition, Detective Inez Aguinaldo, whom Nikki had recruited a month before from the Southampton PD as a replacement, ended a phone call at her desk and unfolded a chair off to one side.

  It never took much to bring this roomful of pros to order, but as Nikki turned to face them, something in their silent attention felt more like scrutiny—as if she were naked. But it was quite the opposite. Captain Heat stood before them today in a uniform of all-regulation white shirt, dark-blue trousers, and gleaming metal instead of the jeans and untucked oxford she had worn to work the last time the bull pen had convened. She made a mental note to check regs for loopholes and see how strict they were about the starch and brass. The things you never think about before you take a job…

  “Lon King,” she began. “Psychologist with a private practice but also under contract with the NYPD to provide counseling within the department.” Without making a conscious color choice she used her blue dry erase to write “NYPD SHRINK” on the board. “What else do we know?”

  “Kayaker,” said Detective Rhymer.

  Feller shook his head. “Why, just ’cause he died in one? Last month we found some dude buried in wet cement near that restaurant they’re building near Lincoln Center. That sure didn’t make him a construction worker. Or a restauraunteur.”

  “Actually, it’s restaur-a-teur,” said Rook as he entered, ending a call and slipping his cell phone into his blazer pocket. “Common mistake. Like laundrymat. Or libary.” He rolled a chair over from his borrowed, unofficial desk. One caster squeaked the whole way.

  “Nonetheless.” Heat paused, studying a tightness in Rook’s face as he took a seat, then she turned and wrote “kayaker?” on the board. “Since the victim was discovered in a kayak, we can at least post that and make it part of our investigation to see if it was a one-time activity or a hobby.”

  Sean Raley called out, “Family,” and Nikki made that a heading, too, then felt everyone’s gaze again. This time, it wasn’t about the uniform.

  “If you’re wondering if I know, I don’t. Anybody here been to counseling? You don’t learn too much about the shrink; they kinda make it all about you.” Feeling herself moving into an uncomfortable neighborhood, she turned the page with another heading: “COD.” “Cause of Death is prelim, but obvious.”

  “No-brainer,” said Feller, who immediately held up surrender hands. “I fucking swear, I wasn’t goofing on him. Come on.”

  Nikki gave him a pass and continued, “Single GSW to the forehead. Small caliber, no exit wound. Ballistics will get a slug to analyze by this afternoon.”

  Ochoa scrawled that in his notebook. “Small bore kind of rules out sniper.”

  “So does this.” Nikki held up a printout one of the administrative aides had come in with and placed on her podium. “Follow-up from ME Parry says there were trace metals and gunpowder residue surrounding the entrance wound.” The significance of that hung in the room while the investigators pondered.

  “Takes away a passing boat, too,” observed Raley. “Unless it was mighty close.”

  Rhymer raised his hand. “Like another kayaker?”

  “Or somebody on his dock. Or a boat that launched him,” said his partner.

  “Or suicide.” Detective Feller tucked his boots under his chair and leaned toward Heat. “It’s tough, but it’s got to be in the mix. Shrinks off themselves, too. I’m just sayin’.”

  Nikki, who had always drilled it into her squad to approach every case with beginner’s eyes—not to be complacent, not to work by rote—nodded in agreement. “Everything’s on the table.” She added “suicide” as a subheading along with the other options and, like the others on the list, put a question mark beside it. “When we left the Greenway, I saw Dr. Parry bagging the victim’s hands. Detective Ochoa, as soon as we break here, I’d like you to put in a call to Lauren and let us know immediately if sh
e found any residue on them.”

  “Done.”

  “Mind one from left field?” asked Rook.

  Nikki, glad to see him finally engaging in the process, said, “Well, left field is sort of your area.”

  “That, and Area Fifty-one,” added Feller, who was about as much a fan of Rook’s passion for spitballing conspiracy theories as he was of having his pronunciation tweaked.

  Undaunted, or perhaps merely oblivious to his fellow cop’s disdain, Rook said, “What if he wasn’t killed in the boat? The shooter murders King somewhere else, puts him in the kayak, and either gives it a push or a tow just to confuse us and keep us from knowing where the crime scene was.” By the time he had finished, other brains were chewing that very real possibility—even Randall Feller’s.

  Detective Aguinaldo raised a tentative hand and spoke for the first time in the meeting. “Not sure whether this is too half-baked for group discussion…”

  “No such thing,” Rook said, chuckling. “Didn’t you hear my theory? Let ’er rip.”

  “It’s not so much a theory.”

  The new detective’s transition had been a slow one. Heat, who had liaised with Aguinaldo in the Hamptons on a case around the time of Hurricane Sandy, knew her potential and constantly prodded her not to feel intimidated by the squad of veterans in a big-city department. “Inez, if you’re holding, don’t be shy, let’s hear it.”

  “OK. Since I was on duty here this morning instead of down by the river, I called Forensics to touch base with whoever was assigned to this case.”

  “Benigno DeJesus,” said Heat. “I pushed for him to catch this one, because he’s simply the best there is.”

  Aguinaldo nodded. “So I’ve heard. And we had a nice chat while you were en route here.”

  “You already talked to him?”