"Naked heat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Castle Richard)

Chapter Two

As the detectives holstered up, Rook breathed a sigh. "Man, I think you took ten years off my life there."

Raley came back with, "You're lucky you still have a life. Why didn't you answer us?"

Ochoa piled on. "We called out to see if anyone was here."

Rook simply held up his iPhone. "Remastered Beatles. Had to get my mind off the b-o-d-y." He made a wince face and pointed into the next room. "But I found that 'A Day in the Life' wasn't the most uplifting diversion. You guys crashed in on me at the end, just on that big piano bong. For real." He turned to Nikki and smiled meaningfully. "Let's hear it for timing, huh?"

Heat tried to ignore the undercurrent, which to her ear wasn't very much under anything. Or maybe she was more sensitive to it. As she scanned Roach for reactions and didn't see any, she wondered if things were more raw for her than she'd thought, or if it was just the shock of seeing him there, of all places. Nikki had crossed paths with old lovers before, who didn't? But usually it was in a Starbucks, or a chance glimpse across the aisle at the movies-not at a murder scene. One thing she was sure of. This was an unwelcome distraction from her job, something to be pushed aside. "Roach," she said, all business, "you two clear the rest of the premises."

"Oh, there's nobody here, I checked." Rook raised both his palms up. "But I didn't touch anything, I swear."

"Check anyway" was Nikki's answer to that, and Roach left to sweep the remaining rooms.

When they were alone, he said, "Nice to see you again, Nikki." And then that damn smile again. "Oh, and thanks for not shooting me."

"What are you doing here, Rook?" She tried to remove any hint of the playfulness that she used to hang on his last name. This guy needed a message.

"Like I said, waiting for you. I was the one who called in the body."

"Not what I'm trying to get at. So let me ask the same question another way. Why are you at this crime scene to begin with?"

"I know the victim."

"Who is she?" All the years on the job, Nikki still found it hard to go to the past tense when referring to a victim. At least not at the hour of discovery.

"Cassidy Towne."

Heat couldn't help herself. She half turned to look into the study, but from where she was standing, she couldn't see the victim, only the post-tornado effect of office supplies scattered around the room. "The gossip columnist?"

He nodded, affirming. "The buzz saw herself."

She immediately started calculating how the apparent murder of the New York Ledger's powerful icon, whose "Buzz Rush" column was the ritual first read for most New Yorkers, was going to ratchet up the stakes on this case. As Raley and Ochoa returned and deemed the apartment clear, she said, "Ochoa, better reach out to the MEs. Give them a courtesy heads-up that we have a high-profiler waiting for them. Raley, you call Captain Montrose so he knows we're working Cassidy Towne from the Ledger and he doesn't get blindsided. And see if he can put a hustle on CSU and also get some extra uniforms here, like, now." The detective could already project that the quiet, golden block she had enjoyed a few minutes ago would soon be transformed into a media street fair.

As soon as Roach left the kitchen again, Rook stood and took a step toward Nikki. "Seriously. I've missed you."

If his step closer was meant as body English, she had some nonverbal cues of her own. Detective Heat turned her back to him, got out her reporter's-cut notebook and a pen, and put her face to a new page. But she knew herself well enough to know the chill message she wanted to send was as much to herself as to him. "What time did you discover the body?"

"About six-thirty. Listen, Nikki…"

"How close to six-thirty? Do you have a more accurate idea of the time?"

"I got here exactly at six-thirty. Did you get any of my e-mails?"

"Got here, as in 'in the room to discover her,' or got here, as in 'outside'?"

"Outside."

"And how did you get in?"

"The door was open. Just as you found it."

"So you walked right in?"

"No. I knocked. Then called out. I saw the mess up the hall and went in to see if she was all right. I thought maybe a burglar had been here."

"Did you ever think someone else could have been in here?"

"It was quiet. So I went in."

"That was brave."

"I have my moments, you may recall."

Nikki looked as if she was focused on a notation but really she was replaying the night in the hallway of the Guilford last summer when Noah Paxton used Rook as a human shield, and how, even though he had a gun in his back, he still put a body slam on Paxton that gave Heat a clean shot. She looked up and said, "Where was she when you found her?"

"Right where she is now."

"You didn't move her in any way?"

"No."

"Did you touch her?"

"No."

"How did you know she was dead?"

"I…" He hesitated and continued. "I knew."

"How did you know she was dead?"

"I… I clapped."

Nikki couldn't help herself. The laugh shot out of her with a mind all its own. She was angry at herself for it, but the thing about a laugh like that was you couldn't take it back. You could only work to suppress the next one. "You… you clapped?"

"Uh huh. Loud, you know… to see. Hey, don't laugh, maybe she was asleep, or drunk, I didn't know." He waited while Heat composed herself. And then a chuckle of his own fought its way out. "It wasn't like applause. Just…"

"A clap." She watched the way the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and she started to thaw in a way she didn't like, so she threw the switch. "How did you know the victim?" she said to her notepad.

"I've been working with her the past few weeks."

"You're becoming a gossip columnist now?"

"Oh, hell, no. I sold First Press on the idea of doing my next piece for them on Cassidy Towne. Not so much the titillating gossip thing but profiling a powerful woman in a historically male-dominated business, our love-hate relationship with secrets, you get the idea. Anyway, I've been shadowing Cassidy for the past few weeks."

"Shadowing. You mean like…" She let it fall off. This took Nikki down an all-too-uncomfortable road.

"Like the ride-along you and I had, yes. Exactly. Without the sex." He paused to read her reaction, and Nikki did her best not to let it show. "The editors got such a good response to my piece on you, they wanted to follow up with another like it, maybe turn it into an occasional series on kick-ass women." He studied her again, got nothing, then added, "It was a nice article, Nik, wasn't it?"

She tapped the tip of the ballpoint twice on the pad. "Were you here to do that today? Shadow her?"

"Yeah, she got an early start every day, or maybe just continued from the night before, I could never tell. Some mornings I'd show up and she'd be at her desk in the same clothes as the day before, like she'd been working there all night. She'd want to stretch her legs so we'd walk up to H amp;H for some bagels and then next door to Zabar's for the salmon and cream cheese, and then come back here."

"So you did spend a fair amount of time with Cassidy Towne over the last few weeks."

"Yep."

"Then, if I need to ask you for cooperation, you may have some information about who she saw, what she did, and so forth."

"You don't need to ask, and yes, I know tons."

"Can you think of anyone who would want to kill her?

Rook scoffed. "Let's dig around this mess and find a New York phone book. We can start with the letter A."

"Don't be smart."

"Shark's gotta swim." He grinned, then continued. "Come on, she was a mud-slinging gossip columnist, of course she had lots of enemies. It was in the job description."

Nikki could hear footfalls and voices entering the front and put away her notes. "I'll have you give a statement later, but I don't have any more questions for you now."

"Good."

"Except one. You didn't kill her, did you?" Rook laughed, then saw her expression and stopped. "Well?"

He folded his arms across his chest. "I want a lawyer." She turned and left the room and he called after her, "Kidding. Mark me down as a 'no.' " Rook didn't leave. He told Heat he wanted to stick around in case he could be helpful with anything. She had the push-pull thing going: wanting him away from her in the worst way because he was such an emotional disruption; but then seeing the benefit of his potential insights as they went over the wreckage of Cassidy Towne's apartment. The writer had been to plenty of crime scenes with her during his ride-along last summer, so she knew he was scene-friendly, at least trained enough not to pick up a piece of evidence in his bare hands and say, "What's this?" He was also a first-person witness to the most profound element of his magazine story, the death of his subject. Mixed feelings or not, she wasn't going to begrudge Jameson Rook that professional courtesy.

When they went into Cassidy Towne's office, he returned her unspoken favor in kind, keeping out of her way by standing over near the French doors that led out to the courtyard garden. For Detective Heat it always began by slowing down and studying the body. The dead didn't talk, but if you paid attention, sometimes they did tell you things.

In getting a feel for Cassidy Towne, Nikki read the power Rook was talking about. Her suit, a tasteful, navy pinstripe over a French-blue blouse with starched white collar, would work for a talent agency meeting or premiere party. And it was expertly tailored to her, accenting a body that had seen regular gym time. Heat hoped that when she reached fiftysomething that she'd keep it that together. Nikki saw some tasteful David Yurman on Towne's ears and neck, potentially ruling out robbery. There was no wedding ring, so unless that had been stolen, Heat could also rule out marriage. Potentially. Towne's face was slack in death, but angular and attractive, what most would call handsome-not always the highest compliment to a woman, but according to George Orwell, she had had about ten years since forty to earn that face. Not making a judgment, but letting instinct talk to her, Nikki regarded her impression of Cassidy Towne, and the picture that emerged was of someone suited for battle. A hard body whose hardness seemed to run deeper than just muscle tone. A snapshot formed of a woman who was, at that moment, something she probably never was in life. A victim.

Soon CSU was there, dusting the usual touch points for prints, taking photos of the body and the roomscatter. Detective Heat and her team worked in tandem, but more big-picture than close-up. Wearing their blue latex gloves, they walked here and then there and then back again in appraisal of the office, the way golfers read a green before a long putt.

"All right, fellas, I've got my first odd sock." The detective's approach to a crime scene, even one in this much disarray, was to simplify her field of view. She pared everything down to getting inside the logic of the life that was lived in that space and using that empathy to spot inconsistencies, the small thing that didn't fit the pattern. The odd sock.

Raley and Ochoa came across the room to join her. Rook adjusted his position at the perimeter to follow quietly from a distance. "Whatcha got?" asked Ochoa.

"Work space. Busy work space, right? Big newspaper columnist. Pens everywhere, pencils, custom notepads and stationery. Box of Kleenex. Look at this beside her here." She stepped carefully around the body, still cast backward in the office chair. "A typewriter, for God's sake. Magazines and newspapers with clippings snipped out of them, right? All that stuff makes lots of what?"

"Work," said Raley.

"Trash," said Rook, and Heat's two detectives turned slightly his way and then back to Heat, unwilling to acknowledge him as part of this exchange. Like his season pass had expired.

"Correct," she continued, more focused on where she was going than on Rook now. "What's with the wastebasket?"

Raley shrugged. "It's right there. Tipped, but there it is."

"It's empty," said Ochoa.

"Right. And with all the tossing this room took, you'd think, OK, maybe it spilled out." She crouched near it and they went with her. "No clips, snips, Kleenex, or crumpled paper anywhere around it."

"Maybe she emptied it," said Ochoa.

"Maybe she did. But look over there." She side-nodded to the armoire that the columnist had used as a supply closet. It had been rifled, too. And among the contents scattered on the floor was, "A box of waste-can liners. Simplehuman, sized for this can."

"No liner in this can," said Raley. "And no liner on the floor. An odd sock."

"An odd sock, indeed," said Heat. "On the way in, I saw a wooden bin for trash cans in the little patio."

"On it," said Raley. He and Ochoa headed toward the front hall. Lauren Parry from the medical examiner's was making her way in the door as they went out. In the tight space between the tipped furniture, she and Ochoa ended up doing an impromptu dance step getting around each other. In her quick glance over, Nikki caught Ochoa lingering to check Lauren out as he left. She made a mental note to warn her girlfriend later about rebounding men.

Detective Ochoa was still fresh from a marital separation. He had hidden the breakup from the squad for about a month, but those kinds of secrets don't keep in such a tight working family. The laundry sitch alone gave him away when he started showing up in dress shirts with telltale "Boxed for Your Convenience" creases on their torsos. Over an after-work beer the week before, Nikki and Ochoa were the stragglers at the table, so she took the opportunity to ask him how it was going. A gloom settled over him and he said, "You know. It's a process." She was happy to leave it at that, but he finished his Dos Equis and half smiled. "You know, it's kind of like those car ads. What happened to the relationship, I mean. I saw one on TV in my new apartment the other night and it said, 'Zero interest for two years.' And I went, yep, that was us, all right." Then a sheepishness came over him about opening up like that. He left some money under his empty glass and called it a night. He didn't bring it up again, and neither did she.

"Sorry not to be here sooner, Nikki," Lauren Parry said as she set her plastic examination cases on the floor. "I've been working a double fatal on the FDR since four a…" The ME's voice trailed off when she spotted Rook leaning a shoulder against the connecting door leading to the kitchen. He pulled one of his hands out of his pocket and gave her a wave. She nodded and smiled at him, then turned to Heat and finished her sentence. "… four A.M." With her back to Rook, she was able to sneak a what-the-hell? face to Nikki.

Nikki lowered her voice and muttered to her friend, "Tell you later." Then, at full volume, she moved on. "Rook found the victim."

"I see…"

While her BFF from the ME's office set up to perform her exam, Heat filled her in on the discovery details the writer had provided in their kitchen interview. "Also, when you get a moment, I noticed a blood smear over there." ME Parry followed Heat's gesture to the same doorway she had just entered. Beside the jamb, the floral Victorian wallpaper showed a dark discoloration. "Looks like she might have tried to get out before she collapsed in the chair."

"Could be. I'll swab it. Maybe Forensics can cut a patch so we can lab it; that would be better."

Ochoa returned to report that both trash barrels in the patio hutch were empty. "During a garbage strike?" said Nikki. "Find the super. See if he disposed of it. Or if she had private pickup, which I doubt. But check anyway, and if she had it, find the truck before they barge it to Rhode Island or wherever it goes these days."

"Oh, and get ready for your close-up," said Ochoa at the door. "The news vans and shooters are lining up in front. Raley's working with the uniforms to move them back. Word is out on the scanners. Ding-dong the witch is dead."

Lauren Parry rose up from Cassidy Towne's body and made a note on her chart. "Body temp indicates a prelim TOD window of midnight to 3 A.M. I can do better after I run the lividity and the rest of the course."

"Thanks," said Nikki. "And cause?"

"Well, as always, it's preliminary, but, I think, obvious." She gently moved the office chair so that the body leaned forward, revealing the wound. "Your gossip columnist was stabbed in the back."

"No symbolism there," said Rook. When Cassidy Towne's assistant, Cecily, reported for work at eight she broke down in sobs. Forensics gave Nikki Heat the OK, and she righted two of the chairs in the living room and sat with her, resting a palm on the young woman's back as Cecily leaned forward with her face in her hands. CSU had closed off the kitchen, so Rook gave her the bottle of water he had in his messenger bag.

"Hope you don't mind room temperature," he said, and then shot an oops look at Heat. But if Cecily made the connection to her boss's state in the next room, she didn't let on.

"Cecily," Nikki said, when she finished a sip of water, "I know this must be very traumatic for you."

"You have no idea." The assistant's lips began to tremble, but she kept it together. "Do you realize this means I have to find a new job?"

Nikki's gaze slowly rose to Rook, who stood facing her. She knew him well enough to know he wanted his water back. "How long had you been with Ms. Towne?"

"Four years. Since I graduated Mizzou."

"University of Missouri has an intern program with the Ledger," Rook injected. "Cecily transitioned from it to Cassidy's column."

"That must have been quite an opportunity," said Nikki.

"I guess. Am I going to have to, like, clean all this up?"

"I think our crime scene unit is going to be busy here for most of the day. My guess is the paper will probably let you take some time off while we do our thing." That seemed to mollify her for the moment, so Nikki pressed on. "I need to ask you to think about something, Cecily. It may be difficult at this moment, but it's important."