Deadly Heat Read online

  “No, we’ve sort of buried that hatchet. But still, I am not too crazy about her hanging out, surfing our board, looking over our shoulders, you know.”

  “You still hate her.”

  “Not at all—Much—A little. She’s just sort of an uncomfortable presence. In here. Right now. Think you could—?”

  “Done.” He took a few steps and circled back. “You sure you don’t mind that I—?”

  “Go.”

  With mixed feelings, Nikki went to her desk, watching Rook chat up his ex: Why, Agent Bell, can I interest you in a hearty breakfast? I can zap one of these for you. Mm. Now, instant oatmeal may not be as memorable as pain perdu at Charbon Rouge, but it’s a damn sight better than those mutton-fat pies we gagged down in Chechnya.

  As they walked out, chuckling, Yardley asked, “So how’s it going with the new article? I saw on your Twitter page you’re getting offers from Hollywood…”

  Heat made a survey of the Murder Board to see if anything was up there she hadn’t shared with DHS, so she wouldn’t be accused of withholding. Satisfied, she decided to check in with Ochoa. Earlier she’d instructed him to call the bank that held the credit card Salena Kaye tried to use at Surety Rent-a-car. Ever since, he had been studying Kaye’s account, tracking her spending for tips to her whereabouts or anything else that would shake loose a much needed clue as the terror deadline closed in.

  Detective Ochoa handed Heat a printout he had made of Salena Kaye’s credit card history. “I heard Rook and that DHS babe. Man, what’s wrong with my life? Eight years of dog hours, a joke paycheck, deadheads either barfing on my shoes or shooting at me… Writer dips his toe in for a couple months, and George Clooney’s sending him fruit baskets.”

  “You realize you are talking about my boyfriend.”

  “Awkward. Sorry. Just thinking out loud.”

  Heat started to open the file and then closed it. “George Clooney sent Rook a fruit basket?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  Nikki dove into the file again, changing the subject. “What did you hear from Salena Kaye’s bank?”

  “She opened the credit card account two months ago under her alias with a cash wire transfer to fund it as a pay-as-you-go. Banker told me, in this economy a lot of lenders are offering those for new cardholders or folks rebuilding damaged credit. You can see that the only charge on it was for the attempted truck rental. I checked out the Virginia billing address for the card. It’s for an accountant. I use the term loosely. It’s basically a skeevy mail drop.”

  “Dead end?” said Heat, closing the file.

  “On to the next,” he said as he moved back to Roach Central.

  Pushing forward was all a detective could do. Especially when confronted by brick walls, you kept moving until you broke through. In that spirit Heat picked up her phone and called Benigno DeJesus. “Detective,” he said cheerfully, “how are you this morning?”

  “I am in a forensics state of mind.” Nikki asked him to summarize the work he had done on Salena Kaye’s hideout. She had to force herself to recall that all that had happened less than twenty-four hours before. Such was the toll of a blended day after a lost night in Hastings.

  The ECU detective said, “I just now got my confirmation from the laboratory. We have positive matches on the bomb materials that took out Tyler Wynn in his Sutton Place apartment. And I guess you’ve heard by now that there was no bioagent evidence in her room.”

  “Yeah, I got that from DHS. The reason I’m calling is I have my fingers crossed you found something that might put me on her trail again.”

  He chuckled. “You mean like a bus ticket with an address written on it in lipstick? Maybe a USPS mail-forwarding request?”

  “No, huh?”

  “Sorry to disappoint, Detective. She lived monastically and left no paper trail. Not even a receipt for a diner. From her garbage, it looks like she survived on microwave meals and power shakes from the gym. And you know me, I checked. We even Dumpster dived to locate her trash bags in the alley bins.”

  “Yes, Benigno, I know you,” she said, unable to mask her disappointment. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “No problem. Say, did you find your iPad? I left it on your kitchen counter.”

  “My iPad?”

  “Right. When my crew investigated your apartment yesterday, I found the tablet under your bed. Forgot to mention I left it on your counter so you’d see it.”

  “I haven’t been home yet,” Nikki said. She spotted Rook coming back into the bull pen and asked DeJesus to hold. “Rook, did you leave your iPad at my place?” He opened his courier bag and fished his out. Heat uncovered the mouthpiece. “Benigno, I don’t own an iPad, and it’s not Rook’s.”

  Less than an hour later it arrived at Heat’s desk, delivered in a sealed pouch by a runner from ECU, after Nikki’s super had let Benigno into her apartment to retrieve it. Detective DeJesus told her he had already dusted the iPad, so she didn’t need to worry about gloves. When she powered it up, the lock screen opened to a wallpaper photo of Joe Flynn smiling at the helm of his sailboat, with the Statue of Liberty in the background. Rook and the squad gathered around her let out a collective sigh at the chilling notion that Rainbow had also left this behind on his nocturnal visit to Gramercy Park.

  “Well,” said Randall Feller, “that’s some progress. We found Flynn’s missing iPad.”

  Heat managed her uneasiness by remaining analytical, her cop sense telling her this piece of intimidation could be turned into a lead if she kept her head and followed it through. “Why? What do you suppose the message is of this?” She turned to her crew as they drew seats around for an impromptu meeting. Or maybe to form a circle around her. “The string on the pillowcase made his point about my vulnerability and his power. No joke intended, but isn’t leaving this sort of overkill?”

  “A control freak’s a control freak,” said Malcolm. “Simple as that.”

  His partner, Reynolds, chafed at that. “Is that kind of thinking moving us forward? I don’t think so. Let’s stay curious.”

  “I know what makes me curious,” said Raley. “I’m always wondering what somebody’s into. What they’ve been surfing. May I?” Heat handed him the iPad. He opened the Google app and found a string of searches for Jameson Rook.

  Ochoa turned to him and said, “This Joe Flynn guy a fan, or just stalking you?”

  Raley tapped the glass a few times and said, “Neither. All these searches were made after Flynn disappeared and/or died.”

  “What’s the search history?” asked Rook.

  “Mostly to FirstPress, your Twitter account, and… let’s see the most recent. Your Facebook page.” A few taps later, he brought up a photo. “Recognize this?”

  The group leaned in for a look followed by a mix of moans, wolf whistles, and cat calls. Heat said, “I do. That is our own celebrity writer posing for selfies with the hot messes he insists on calling his fan base.”

  “Don’t hate me because I’m popular, all right?” said Rook, pretending to be hurt.

  Nikki smirked at the woman with her heaving leopard print vest strategically thrust against Rook’s upper arm. “I was there for that shot. That was taken outside the pizza place where we worked Roy Conklin’s crime scene.”

  “AKA Rainbow victim number one,” Malcolm observed. Then, with some friendly push-back on his partner, he added, “In the interest of staying curious, if Rainbow had this iPad, why would he search that picture?”

  Detective Ochoa saw something and pulled the tablet away from Raley for a closer look. “Whoa, whoa, check this out.” Ochoa zoomed in, resized the photo, then held the screen up to Heat. He had blown up the shot and centered it on a face in the crowd. The one any analyst would say belonged to a moody loner. The only person not cheering or waving for the picture. Instead, Glen Windsor stared right at the lens, boring into it with a look of amused contempt. Heat felt like the locksmith was looking right at her.

  Because he was.


  The busy squad room kicked up to a new level of activity. Heat sent Malcolm and Reynolds to round up some patrol officers and stake out Windsor’s Locks, a surveillance task that did double duty since Glen Windsor also lived in an apartment above his shop. Their orders were to keep him under a lid until Heat got a warrant.

  She wondered how this had slipped through the cracks. It was standard procedure in a homicide investigation for the police to take crowd photos and then study them for suspicious persons or known faces. Before Nikki berated herself too much for not spotting Windsor—whom she certainly would have recognized as Rainbow’s sole survivor—she told Rhymer and Feller to pull up the CSU crowd pics from the four Rainbow victims: Roy Conklin, Maxine Berkowitz, Douglas Sandmann, and Joe Flynn. Heat and Rook joined in with the squad, divvying up the CSU shots and poring over them again on their monitors.

  After careful scrutiny of all four crime scene crowds, face by face, the squad reached the same conclusion: Glen Windsor was nowhere to be seen in any of those photos.

  “I don’t get it,” said Rook. “Why is he in my picture and none of the others?”

  “Because the dude’s savvy,” said Feller. “He knew when to duck the official police photographer.”

  “You’re right,” said Heat. “We didn’t spot him when we looked before because he didn’t want us to.” She held up the iPad with the picture taken by Rook, with Glen Windsor’s photo bomb. “He didn’t want us to find this until he wanted us to find this.”

  Detective Rhymer studied the Rainbow shot again and declared it freaky. “It’s like arsonists who stand in the crowd because they get off sexually watching the blaze.”

  “Except he doesn’t look turned on,” said Ochoa. “He looks…”

  “Defiant,” said Heat.

  “Windsor is definitely taunting you with this,” agreed Raley.

  Rook said, “Just like he taunted you at Joe Flynn’s boat.”

  “With the orange string leading to my picture? Yuh, I kinda got that.”

  “No, I mean the odd sock.” Rook paced off his nervous energy. “Remember we all said Rainbow was mocking you for your quote in my article by putting odd socks on Joe Flynn? This guy wasn’t just mocking you, Nikki, he was handing you a clue.”

  “Holy crap, of course,” said Raley. “Of all Rainbow’s victims, what’s the odd sock?”

  Heat kicked herself for not seeing it herself, and sooner. “The odd sock—is the only one who didn’t die.”

  “Dude set us up,” said Ochoa. “He turned on just enough gas in that building to make it look like Rainbow attacked him. Probably left the back door open so he wouldn’t suffocate. And to make it look like Rainbow got away.”

  Rhymer asked, “How do you account for the string and the clue on the rooftop. Pre-plant?”

  “Count on it,” said Heat, rising and adjusting her holster. “We probably can’t get a warrant based on the fact that we saw him standing in a crowd, but let’s bring Glen Windsor in. Maybe he’ll let us take a picture with him.”

  Malcolm and Reynolds had the neighborhood around 77th and Amsterdam buttoned down by the time Detective Heat and the others arrived. Surveillance teams and extra manpower for pursuit covered all front and back access, including both ends of the alley. They had alerted School Police, who put nearby PS 87 on precautionary lockdown and cleared Tecumseh Park on the corner of nannies and their charges, as well as a few day sleepers and one pair of trysters. Uniformed officers patrolled the rooftop of Windsor’s building; others waited in the stairwell near his second-floor apartment and on the fire escape outside his bedroom window. For good measure, an NYPD sharpshooter had taken position atop the Equinox gym building across the avenue.

  An ESU truck pulled up at 78th, behind Heat and her group, dispersing a black-suited SWAT unit. Nikki reflected that she had been seeing a lot of those brave folks lately.

  A surveillance team with high-powered scopes, hidden across Amsterdam, reported no movement or activity in the locksmith shop. The plywood sheeting over one of the storefront windows Heat and Ochoa had busted out in their faux rescue of Windsor limited the field of view, but after thirty minutes, nothing had moved and nobody had gone in or out. The apartment building super, territorial and nosy, said he had seen Windsor leave his place first thing that morning and he had not come back. Just for drill, Heat asked Rhymer to dial the number of the shop. It rang out and dumped to voice mail.

  “What’s the play, Coach?” asked Malcolm.

  Heat put on her bulletproof vest. “Roach, take Rhymer and Feller upstairs with you and hit the apartment on my green. The rest of you follow me. We’re taking the store.”

  They took ready positions and when Heat radioed the green light, they moved on the double to the front door. Flanked by a pair of ESU tactical officers, Nikki took the lead. With about five critical seconds of window exposure, she raced to the glass door and pulled it open.

  And her heart stopped.

  A hand grenade dropped from the inside door handle and rolled on the linoleum at her feet.

  Heat shouted, “Grenade!” and dove backward onto the sidewalk, where her two armored SWAT companions threw themselves over her body. In the eternity she waited for the blast, Heat replayed the heavy metal clonk on the floor and pictured the green thatched oval spinning before her in slow motion. While it spun, Nikki processed the deaths of Rainbow’s prior detective victims, all of whom had been lured and ambushed. The iPad suddenly made sense.

  Time started moving again without a detonation.

  The emergency services unit quickly deployed handheld blast shields, and Heat and the others retreated behind them.

  Still no explosion.

  The bomb squad arrived with men in heavy suits and an armored disposal truck. They sent in a robot to retrieve the grenade. After much examination it was deemed a souvenir prop, the kind you’d see in a joke shop or on a type-A manager’s desk as a paperweight.

  The Roach team had cleared Glen Windsor’s apartment with no drama and no Glen Windsor. After the bomb squad had swept the locksmith shop with dogs and sensors, Heat and her crew went in, with the obvious knowledge that they’d not find Rainbow in there, either.

  Heat did find something left for her on the glass display counter beside the cash register: the hard drive to her apartment’s disabled lipstick cam. It was tied in a bow of string with all the colors of the rainbow.

  Of all the pictures Heat had looked at that day, the one she would have loved to have taken was of Captain Irons when she told him that she had put out an APB on Rainbow. Wally’s elation at the news of a break in the case made a hairpin turn when he learned that the prime suspect was Glen Windsor—the same Glen Windsor whom the precinct commander had photo-opped himself with at his Roosevelt Hospital news conference. The New York Ledger’s full-page photo of the grinning Iron Man with his arm around the rescued victim’s shoulder still sat faceup on his desk, accidentally-strategically placed for the stray office visitor to notice and inquire about.

  The tabloid hit the captain’s trash can with a shunk that was audible in the bull pen as Heat left the briefing.

  Rook stopped by her desk. “Congratulations,” he said. “You broke it. You ID’d Rainbow.”

  “Congratulations? Rook, I only ID’d him because he wanted me to. And let’s not forget he’s still out there somewhere and he still wants to kill me. Personally? I’d hold off on the champagne until we catch him.”

  Rook said, “On the plus side, you just saved me three hundred bucks on a bottle of Cristal.”

  “Maybe to bathe in. I was thinking more along the lines of a magnum of the 2005. That’s going to set you back fifteen hundred.”

  “Where does a cop learn about luxuries like that?”

  “Hey, I’ve been doing a ride-along, too, you know.”

  “Do I ever.” He grinned his dopey grin then noticed on her desk the hard copy of Glen Windsor’s picture from the iPad. “I’ve been thinking about this guy. Perfect job for access,
huh? A locksmith—I’ll bet that’s how he really got into your place. That jimmied window was just to throw you off. Plus he installs security systems. Which is probably why none of the surveillance cams were operating anywhere he struck.”

  “Yeah, trust me, I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

  “It makes perfect sense, in hindsight.”

  “Hindsight.” Nikki dropped her head and moaned. “The shoe every detective kicks herself with.”

  “Hey, I didn’t see it, either. But then, I’m just a writer boy, not a trained homicide investigator.”

  “Ass.” She poked the Coach bag hanging from his shoulder and made it swivel. “Where you headed?”

  “Magazine stuff. OK, a lunch about another option offer. I’m trying not to put it in your face.” He reacted to her sniffing the air. “What.”

  “Is that pineapple I smell? And chocolate-dipped strawberries? Tell me, Rook, does George Clooney’s fruit basket taste more vibrant than the ones I get from Whole Foods?”

  “In fact,” he said, “it not only tastes more vibrant, there’s something about a Clooney kiwi. One bite, and I feel like I can make a difference in this world. And look damn fine doing it.” He flicked his eyebrows at her and left.

  Detective Feller swiveled his chair toward her and said, “Glen Windsor update. Traffic Department just located his locksmith truck parked a block from his shop. Forensics is going to scrub it.”

  “Good, thanks.” Then, remembering Rainbow’s history, she said, “Randall, run a check for other vehicles registered to him, out of state. Check Connecticut and Rhode Island first.”

  “This is your King of All Surveillance Media calling,” said Detective Raley.