Deadly Heat Read online

  “Not even for a working trip?”

  She smoothed his collar then left her hand draped on his chest. “May I point out I have plenty of loose ends I’m working right here, including a fresh trail to Salena Kaye? Not to mention a little thing that’s come up called a serial homicide.”

  “It’s always something,” he said, kidding, but only sort of.

  Nikki nodded to herself, reaching a decision. “You go. But answer this: Are you trying to help me solve the case, or gather more material for your next article?”

  Rook said, “That hurts.” He stared out the window into the New York night, then said, “But I’ll forgive you if we can have make-up sex.”

  Nikki Heat called her team in for an early start. When the detectives rolled in at 6 A.M., she positioned her computer screen so she could peek at their reactions as each discovered a coffee waiting on his or her desk labeled “Nikki” in grease pencil. “You’d better laugh,” she said over their chuckles. “This prank cost me twenty dollars.”

  Her cell phone vibed. Rook, texting that he was about to go through TSA screening for his flight to Paris, and before he jetted off, he wanted to let her know how much he enjoyed his wake-up service. Heat had slept deeply after their make-up sex, descending into sweet oblivion folded into his arms. She awoke because of the morning-after soreness from her jujitsu round with Salena Kaye. Since he’d planned to get up at four to make his plane, she decided to be his alarm clock and slid under the sheets. Nikki texted back that she looked forward to his next layover and walked to the front of the squad room, but slowly enough to lose the smirk.

  She’d rolled two Murder Boards side by side: one for Roy Conklin and a new one, for Maxine Berkowitz. She briefed the detectives who hadn’t been on-scene at Riverside Park on the bullet points of the TV reporter’s death. When Ochoa asked about boyfriend troubles, Nikki shared about the bad breakup with the news director and assigned him to check out George Putnam’s alibi. “Check his wife’s whereabouts, too,” said Heat, just in case there was a volatile side of that triangle. “But tread lightly. Let’s not rule anything out, but this feels like more than a jealous payback.”

  That brought her to the connection between the two murders. “We have a unique telltale that indicates a serial killer.” She posted blowups of CSU photos of the string found at each crime scene and then picked up her notes. “Forensics burned some midnight oil to get us some data this morning. Both the red and the yellow string are made from a braided polyester widely used for everything from hobbies and crafts, to jewelry making, to yo-yo strings and something called kendama.”

  Randall Feller raised a finger for attention and said, “That’s a Japanese game that uses a wooden spindle with a cup at one end that you use to catch a wooden ball attached to it by a string.” He paused only briefly and added, “Don’t ask.”

  “Nice to know when Rook’s not here there’s somebody to pick up the know-it-all slack,” observed Raley.

  Since Detective Feller had demonstrated a special interest, Heat assigned him to make checks of area hobby, craft, hardware, and toy stores to see if they had any customers worth checking out. “Detective Rhymer, you assist. I’m sure this string is also available on the Internet. Find out who sells it and contact those sites for customer records.”

  A civilian aide came in from the front office and handed a message to Heat, who digested it and addressed her crew. “A foot patrol making checks of trash cans discovered a three-foot coaxial cable not far from the Eleanor Roosevelt statue. Forensics has it now. It’s only prelim, but there appear to be traces of makeup in the center of the cord.” Heat reflected on the tissues she saw protecting Greer Baxter’s collar from her TV makeup and said, “That would be consistent with our strangulation.”

  “What about the Rollerblade wheel?” asked Rhymer.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” said Heat. “The strings are plenty creepy, but the Rollerblade is weird, too. Forensics says it’s a brand-new, standard polyurethane inline skate wheel, no prints, no wear. It’s straight from the package.” She reflected a moment and said, “Sharon?” Detective Hinesburg sat up like she’d been poked with a stick. “I’d like you to team with Raley and Ochoa and run the skate wheel.”

  That evening, when the shift had ended and Heat had the bull pen to herself, she embraced the stillness to contemplate the Murder Boards and let her instincts talk. The case work had not yielded any new clues, and her cop sense told her that the elimination of the few leads they had was not a negative but a means to an end. For instance, both George Putnam and his wife’s alibis had been confirmed. Similarly, Roy Conklin continued to check out as a man who was easy to love but difficult to investigate for that very reason.

  Nikki sat on her desktop, letting her eyes drift from board to board, letting the known elements speak the mind of a serial killer over the low hum of fluorescent tubes. String. String was the literal common thread. What else? Oddball props. A dead rat. An inline skate wheel. How were they connected? Or were they at all?

  Geography. The obvious. Both victims had been found on the Upper West Side, in particular, the Twentieth Precinct—a self-canceling clue because it meant the killer lived or worked there, or else traveled there to kill away from his home base.

  Minutes passed, maybe even an hour. When Nikki got into this flow, she not only lost time, she hid from it. She reached for her notebook and wrote one word: “Jobs.”

  What came to her was more than just that both victims had been either mutilated or killed by an instrument related to their work: the restaurant inspector by an oven; the TV reporter by a coaxial cord, the kind used to connect cable TV. Those similarities were already top-lining the squad conversation. This was something not as obvious, but close enough. She called Roach, Feller, and Rhymer back to the precinct.

  Far from being annoyed at getting boomeranged in, the four detectives gave off the edgy vibe of anticipation, and when Heat began, “It’s right in front of us. Both vics were in the business of consumer protection,” she saw their eyes come alight. “I want to find out if they knew each other or if they knew someone in common.” From there on, the meeting was short. She put Roach on contacting Olivia Conklin, Feller back on his beat at the Health Department, and Rhymer on Maxine Berkowitz’s coworkers and friends. “Check e-mails, texts, phone records, everything that leaves a trail,” she said, and watched them cancel their evenings and hit the phones with renewed purpose.

  Back early the next morning, with little to go on yet much to cover, the day for all of them became the essence of good detective work: drudgery. The hours of phone calls and computer checks got broken up only by meeting up to compare notes after pounding the pavement for face time with shop owners, park nannies, and doormen who’d seen nothing out of the ordinary. The true chore of Nikki’s day came when Captain Irons arrived in the late morning, camera-ready with a fresh white uniform shirt in dry cleaner plastic, just in case someone needed a statement. After satisfying himself nobody had tried to kill his lead homicide detective in the last twenty-four hours, he asked for a briefing of both active cases. Wally was more an administrator than a cop, and his eyes glazed over as she filled him in on the details. When she finished, his first question was his go-to: “How much overtime is this gonna drain from my budget?”

  Always prepared for that resistance, Nikki managed to sell the precinct commander on the long-term savings of bringing in more manpower, and came out of his glass office with an OK to bring in one of her favorite detective teams, Malcolm and Reynolds.

  Rook checked in from a taxi heading from Charles de Gaulle Airport to his hotel in Paris. It was night there, New York plus six, and he said he’d left word with Anatoly Kijé, his old Russian spy friend, hoping they could meet for a late dinner-slash-debrief.

  “You mean the same Anatoly Kijé whose henchmen kidnapped us from Place des Vosges just so he could be sure we weren’t being followed?”

  “Ah, memories,” said Rook. “Don’t you wish you’d come
?”

  “So you know, Rook, I don’t consider it a Michelin Tour just because my nose is pushed against one of their radials in the trunk of a car.”

  They hopped off the line with the promise to catch up later that night so Heat could grab a call from OCME. Lauren Parry’s prelim on Maxine Berkowitz bore out the COD as asphyxia by strangulation. “The killer took her from behind with a cord. And Forensics is committing to that coaxial cable found in the park. The makeup residue on the insulation is an exact match to the victim’s.”

  “Save me a call to geekland, Lauren. Any prints on the cable?”

  “None,” said the ME. “And no sign of struggle. He chloroformed her and strangled her when she was out.”

  Nikki jotted that down then riffled pages in her spiral until she came to notes on her other case. “OK to switch gears?”

  “Detective Heat, you have got more corpses to ask about than anyone I know.”

  “You should give me a rewards card.”

  “Cold, girl.”

  “As ice. What about my poison vic from the Starbucks?”

  “Same as what Salena Kaye used to kill Petar. A fast-acting cocktail of strychnine and cyanide, plus a few additives, including a lab-modified derivative of bismuth subsalicylate, which is what turned the tongue black. It’s not a poison, it’s mainly for show.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t applaud.”

  “Nikki,” said Dr. Parry, “this is potent stuff. She knows her chemistry. You watch yourself.”

  Heat awoke with a start on her couch at six-fifteen the next morning to the Norwegian duo Röyksopp singing “Remind Me”—the ringtone Rook had installed to ID him on her cell. It took Nikki so long to orient herself and find the phone, she was afraid he’d dump to voice mail, but she caught it in time. “You were going to call me last night,” she said.

  “And bonjour to you, too. Things got very busy over here. You won’t be sorry.” Rook’s voice sounded clear, next-room clear. And there was something in it. Exhilaration, maybe.

  She moved aside the sheet music she had fallen asleep studying, another futile attempt to break her mother’s code. “Tell me.” Wired to be a note taker, Heat reached for the pen and spiral pad she kept on her coffee table, clearing the night from her throat.

  “I made contact with Anatoly Kijé.”

  “Did his goons slip a bag over your head and drop you at Deux Magots?”

  “Even better. He met me alone on the banks of the Seine. Just me and an old KGB warhorse. Isn’t that cool? Like walking into a le Carré novel.”

  Nikki drew the picture in her mind and smiled. “I’m warming up to this.”

  “Just wait. First off, Anatoly ID’d the doctor in Joe Flynn’s old photos. François Sisson. Turns out Sisson was a real doctor over here until he became one of the operatives in Tyler Wynn’s old CIA network. Ready for this? François Sisson turned up on a slab in a Paris morgue the day after helping Wynn play his death scene for us.”

  “Poison?”

  “Let’s call it lead poisoning. One slug behind his ear.”

  “I’m still waiting for the good news,” she said. “Sounds to me like you got your George Smiley jollies then hit a dead end.”

  “In Paris, yes. But things are a bit different down here in Nice.”

  Heat looked at her watch; it would be just past noon in France. “What the hell are you doing in Nice?”

  “Talking to you from my room at the Hotel Negresco. Want to know why? Because I just came from a meeting at a beach club called Castel Plage. It’s up the Promenade des Anglais between here and Le Château. By the way, that’s French for—”

  “Rook, I know what château is French for. Spit it out.”

  “OK, you ready for this? I just had brunch with none other than your elusive Syrian security attaché, Fariq Kuzbari.”

  Nikki set her pen down and just listened. Rook explained that, after his meeting by the Seine, he hopped the overnight high-speed train to Nice, where the Syrian security man had agreed to meet him. He dropped his bag at the Negresco and then walked the promenade along the bay to the Castel Plage, where Kuzbari waited for him at a secluded table on the beachside patio. “You know, Fariq’s a lot nicer guy when his men aren’t holding guns on you.”

  “Rook.”

  “Sorry.” He paused and, in the background, she heard the outdoor sounds of Nice: seabirds; motor bikes; a cruise ship’s horn. She wished she were there. “Kuzbari told me that your mother was not spying on him while she was tutoring his kids.”

  “And you just believe that?”

  “I’m only telling you what the man said, and the man said if anyone would know he was being spied on, it would be he. But Kuzbari did tell me something, and it’s big. Remember that week the PI said your mom spent at that conference center in the Berkshires with Kuzbari and his family?”

  Nikki remembered it very well from Joe Flynn’s 1999 surveillance report. And recently, when the Syrian and his security goons accosted her on the street in SoHo, she made sure to ask him about it. “I remember Kuzbari was more concerned about denying any hanky-panky. What did he tell you?”

  “He said he went to the Berkshires for a symposium on limiting weapons of mass destruction, and that when your mom wasn’t giving his kids piano lessons, she was spending an inordinate amount of time with another attendee.”

  Heat picked up her pen again. “Who?”

  “Dr. Ari Weiss.”

  A jolt of adrenaline shot through Heat. Wide awake now, she paced her living room floor. “Remember that name?” asked Rook. She did. Of course it lived in her notes from a few weeks ago, but like most things she took down, the facts were burnished in her memory, and the movement of pen across paper only helped her memorialize them.

  Right before her murder, Ari Weiss had been the houseguest of another prominent family her mother tutored. Nikki had assumed her mom was spying on them, but Rook’s information cast things in an entirely different light. It’s possible her mother had worked her way into that home so she could snoop on the houseguest, Ari. “This is big,” she said.

  “Yeah. Just too bad you can’t talk to him.”

  When his name came up three weeks ago, Heat and Rook had discovered that Dr. Ari Weiss had died of a blood disorder. But Nikki felt energized now and wasn’t giving up. There still might be a way to get more information about the dead doctor. Even while she paced, she was looking through her notes for the number of the person whose family Ari had stayed with. Maybe he would know if Weiss had any connection to Tyler Wynn or his accomplices. Then, to make sure the sound of her gratitude for the new lead carried across the Atlantic, she repeated, “Hey, Rook? This is very big.”

  “Thanks. It’s kind of a whirlwind. I haven’t even been to bed since I left New York, but I feel so pumped.”

  “Well ya done good. This Kuzbari stuff is a coup. He’s so hard to pin down, how did you manage to make contact?”

  “Professional courtesy, I guess. You know, the spy quid pro quo. Like most Mideast governments, Syria’s heading for the rocks, and I think he’s trying to make nice with our intelligence in case he needs an escape hatch.”

  Nikki stopped pacing. “Don’t you mean Russian intelligence? I thought Kijé set this up.” Sounds of traffic and a distinctly European siren rose up and filled Rook’s long pause. “Who set this up for you?… You there?”

  During his hesitation she heard a female voice she recognized in the background. “Rook, come out here and see, it’s a car fire.”

  Heat said, “Really? She’s there with you?—in Nice?”

  FOUR

  Nikki fought the urge to hang up on Rook and instead listened to him squirm. He hemmed. He hawed. He backed. He filled. And then had the nerve at the end of her silence to ask, “Is everything OK?” She told him she had to get to work and left him to hold a dead phone in his stupid hotel room overlooking the stupid Mediterranean. Then she cranked the shower as hot as she could stand it and stood under the jet. �
��Fucking Nice,” she said to the steam. “Fucking stupid.”

  Shouldering the glass door of the bodega open, Heat burst out onto the sidewalk on Pearl Street ripping at the orange Reese’s wrapper with extreme prejudice. She stood by a trash can near the curb, shook one of the two peanut butter cups out, tore away the brown paper enfolding it, and popped the entire disk into her mouth. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sky while she chewed, feeling the tiny sharp ridges of the chocolate coating scrape the roof of her mouth while the salty, grainy succulence of the peanut butter center mixed with the melting sugars on her tongue. Bastard, she thought. Stupid boy. Her breath whistled through her nostrils as she munched, eating not for pleasure but as an act of aggression. That part done, she swallowed, feeling the delicious indulgence tamp out the fires of her rage.

  She looked at the package. Still one peanut butter cup left. Nikki decided to save it and shoved it in the side pocket of her blazer. She might need it later, if the idiot called again.

  Heat elbowed aside her anger at Rook for going to France with his ex-girlfriend and walked on. She had better things to dwell on. For the first time in weeks Nikki felt like she found a real trail that could lead her to Tyler Wynn, and as she strode along, she started rolling everything she knew. If Fariq Kuzbari’s version of events were true, was it possible that her mother used the Syrian as cover to get into that symposium in the Berkshires to spy on Ari Weiss? Following that premise, could that be the same reason her mom got herself a tutoring gig later in the home of the brewing magnate Carey Maggs—to keep tabs on Weiss while he stayed with his former Oxford classmate and his family? She hoped to find out in a few minutes when she met with Maggs.

  The last time she’d seen the beer tycoon and social activist, Heat was thrashing around looking for clues in her mother’s murder. Now she hoped for another crumb—any connection, however slight—that could link Weiss to the fugitive Tyler Wynn and warm up the trail to his capture.