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

" 'K…"

"Can you think of anyone who wanted to kill Cassidy Towne?"

"You're kidding, right?" Cecily looked up at Rook. "She's kidding, right?"

"No, Detective Heat doesn't kid. Trust me."

Nikki leaned closer in her chair to draw Cecily's attention back. "Look, I know she was a lightning rod and all that. But over the past days or few weeks, were there any unusual incidents or threats she got?"

"Oh, every day, like literally. She didn't even see them. When I sort her mail at the Ledger, I just leave them there in a big sack. Some of them are pretty random."

"If we gave you a ride there, could we see them?"

"Uh, sure. You'd probably have to get the managing editor to sign off, but fine with me."

"Thanks, I'll do that."

"She got calls," said Rook, "her Ledger extension forwarded to here."

"Oh, right, right." Cecily looked around at the mess. "If you can find it, her answering machine has some nasty shit on it. She screened." Nikki made a note to locate it and have the messages gone through for leads.

"I know something else that's missing," said Rook. "No filing cabinets. She had big filing cabinets in the corner near the door."

The idea of a filing cabinet hadn't occurred to Nikki. Not yet, anyway. Score one for Rook.

"There should be two in there," affirmed the assistant. She leaned forward in her chair to venture a look into the study but decided against it.

Heat made a note about the AWOL filing cabinets. "Other things that might be helpful would be her appointments. I assume you have access to her Outlook calendar." Cecily and Rook shared a look of amusement. "Am I missing something?"

Rook said, "Cassidy Towne was a Luddite. Everything was on paper. Didn't use a computer. Didn't trust them. She said she liked their convenience, but it was too easy for someone to steal your material. E-mail forwards, hackers, what not."

"But I do have her planner." The assistant opened her backpack and handed Nikki the spiral-bound datebook. "I have old ones, too. Cassidy had me hang on to them for documenting business meals and for tax prep."

Nikki looked up from a recent page. "There are two sets of handwriting in here."

"Right," said the assistant. "Mine's the one you can read."

"No kidding," said Nikki as she turned pages. "I can't make out her handwriting at all."

"Nobody could," she said. "Just part of the joy of working for Cassidy Towne."

"She was tough?"

"She was impossible. Four years of J-school to be the next Ann Curry, and where do I end up? Nanny to that thankless bitch."

Nikki was going to ask later, but with that opening, it seemed the perfect time. "Cecily, this is a routine question I ask everyone. Can you tell me where you were overnight, say between eleven P.M. and three A.M.?"

"In my apartment with my BlackBerry turned off so my boyfriend and I could get some sleep and without getting called by Her Highness." On the short drive back to the precinct Nikki left voice mail for Don, her combat trainer, to rain check her busted morning jujitsu workout with him. The ex-Navy SEAL was probably in the showers by that time, no doubt having found another sparring partner. Don was a no strings, no worries guy. Same for their sex, when they had it. They both had no trouble finding other sparring partners there, either, and the no-strings relationship made for a mutually workable life design. If workable was your deal.

She had taken a hiatus from sleeping with Don during the time she was with Rook. Not a decision she made, it just worked out that way. Don never seemed bothered, nor did he ask about it when they resumed their occasional night sessions when summer ended and Jameson Rook was out of her life.

Now there he was again, Jameson Rook in her rearview mirror. Her ex-lover, riding shotgun with Raley, the two of them sitting wordlessly at the stoplight in the car behind her, looking out opposite windows of the unmarked like an old married couple with nothing more to say. Rook had asked to pool with Nikki back to the Twentieth, but when Ochoa said he wanted to accompany Cassidy Towne's body down to the OCME, Heat told Raley to play chauffeur for the writer. Nobody seemed thrilled with the arrangements but Nikki.

Her thoughts drifted to Ochoa. And Lauren. He fooled no one with his duty sense to stay close to the high-profile victim, calling it due diligence to see the delivery through from crime scene to morgue. Maybe she should butt out and leave Lauren to find her own way. When Ochoa had approached to suggest his plan, Nikki saw the masked smile on her friend's face as Lauren eavesdropped. As Nikki turned onto 82nd and double-parked in front of the precinct, she thought, hey, they were adults and she wasn't the den mother. Let them have whatever happiness there was to be found in this work. If a man is willing to ride with a corpse just to be with you, that's more effort than you get from most. The coroner's van took a nasty pothole on Second Avenue, and in the back, ME Parry and Detective Ochoa took some air and came down hard on the seats flanking Cassidy Towne's body bag. "Sorry," came the driver's voice from up front. "Blame last winter's blizzards. And the deficit."

"You OK?" Ochoa asked the ME.

"Fine, I'm used to it, believe me," she said. "Are you sure this doesn't weird you out?"

"This? Nah, fine. No sweat."

"You were telling me about your soccer league."

"I'm not boring you?"

"Please," Lauren said. And after the slightest hitch, she continued, "I'd like to come see you play sometime."

Ochoa beamed. "For real? Nah, you're just being polite to me because I'm a live person in your day."

"True…" And they both laughed. His eyes fell away from hers for a second or two, and when he looked up she was smiling at him.

He gathered his courage and said, "Listen, Lauren, I'm playing goalie this Saturday, and if you're-"

The tires squealed, glass shattered, and metal crunched. The van crashed so hard to a sudden stop that its rear tires lifted and slammed down, tossing Ochoa and Lauren. The back of her head smacked the side wall of the cargo bay as the van came to rest.

"What the hell…?" she said.

"You all right?" Ochoa unbuckled his belt to cross to her, but before he could get out of it, the rear doors flew open and three men in ski masks and gloves were filling it, holding guns on them. Two were Glocks, the third guy had a nasty-looking assault rifle.

"Hands!" shouted the one with the AR-15. Ochoa hesitated, and the shooter put a round in the rear tire underneath him. Lauren screamed, and even with all his range experience, the muzzle blast made Ochoa jump. "Hands, now!" Ochoa raised his high. Lauren's were already up. The other two masks belted their Glocks and went to work unlatching the hardware securing the gurney holding Cassidy Towne's body to the floor of the van. They made quick work of it, and as the rifleman adjusted his position to keep his aim on Ochoa, his crew rolled the gurney out of the cargo bay and wheeled it somewhere to the side of the vehicle where Ochoa had no view.

Behind them southbound traffic on Second was bunching up. The lane immediately behind the shooter was at a stop; the other lanes were crawling around the blockage. Ochoa tried to memorize all the details for later, if there was going to be a later. Not much to go on. He saw one passing driver on his cell phone and was hoping it was a call to Emergency when the crew returned to slam the cargo doors.

"Come out, and you're dead," called the AR-15 through the metal.

"Stay in here," said Lauren, but the detective had his weapon in his hand.

"Don't move," he told her and kicked the door open. He jumped out on the opposite side of where they had taken the gurney and did a cover roll behind the rear wheel. Underneath the van he could see broken glass, fluid streaming from the engine, and the wheels of the dump truck they had T-boned.

Tires burned rubber, and Ochoa booked it around the van in shooting position, but the big SUV-black, no plates-sped off. Its driver cut a sharp, evasive turn to put the dump truck between himself and Ochoa. In the seconds it took the detective to run up to the truck and brace, the SUV had turned off onto 38th Street for the FDR, the East River, or who knew where?

Behind Ochoa a driver called out, "Hey, buddy, can you move this?"

The detective turned. Sitting out there in the traffic lane was Cassidy Towne's gurney. It was empty. Detective Heat returned to the bull pen from dropping off Cassidy Towne's phone message cassettes and datebook for analysis by Forensics. Raley strode to her as soon as she walked in. "Got an update on Coyote Man."

"Do you have to do that?" Heat objected to giving victims nicknames. She understood the economy of it, the shorthand it created for a busy squad to quickly communicate, sort of like naming a Word file something that everyone could easily reference. But there was also a dark humor component to it she didn't like. Heat also understood that-the coping mechanism on a grim job was to depersonalize it by making light of the dark. But Nikki was a product of her own experience. Recalling her mother's murder, she didn't want to think the homicide crew on that case had had slang for her mom, and the best way to respect that was not to do it herself… And to discourage it in her squad, which she had always done, albeit with spotty success.

"Sorry, sorry," said Raley. "Re-set. I have some information on our deceased male Hispanic from this morning. The gentleman who you speculated may have been attacked by the coyote?"

"Better."

"Thank you. Traffic found an illegally parked produce truck a block from the body. Registered to…" Raley consulted his notes, "Esteban Padilla of East One Hundred and Fifteenth."

"Spanish Harlem. You sure it's his truck?"

Raley nodded. "Positive match to the vic in a family photo taped to his dashboard." Just the sort of detail that always made Nikki's stomach take an elevator plunge. "I'll do a follow-up."

"Good, keep me up on it." She gave him a nod and started to her desk.

"So you really think that was a coyote, huh?"

"Looked it to me," she said. "They do get into the city every now and again. But I have to go with the ME on this one. If it was a coyote, it came after the fact. I can't think of any coyote that would steal a man's wallet."

"Wile E. Coyote would have." Rook. Smart-assing from the old desk he used to sit at. "Of course, he would have gotten some ACME dynamite first and blown his nose and hair off. And then stood there blinking." He demonstrated. "I watched a lot of cartoons as a youngster. Part of my unsupervised upbringing."

Raley looped back to his desk and Heat stepped over to Rook. "I thought you were going to write a statement and go."

"I wrote it," he said. "Then I tried to make an espresso out of this machine I gave you guys and it's NG."

"We, um, haven't made a lot of espresso drinks since you left."

"Clearly." Rook stood and dragged the machine from the back of the desk toward him. "God, these things are always heavier than they look. See? It's not plugged in, the water reservoir is down… Let me set it up for you."

"We're good."

"OK, fine, but if you decide to use it, don't just put water in. It's a pump, Nikki. And like any pump it has to be primed."

"Fine."

"Do you want some help with that? There's a right way and a wrong way."

"I know how to-" She ended that thread of conversation right there. "Listen, let's forget all about…"

"Steamy deliciousness?"

"… coffee, and look at your statement. Deal?"

"Done." He handed her a single sheet of paper and sat on the edge of the desk, waiting.

She looked up from the page. "This is it?"

"I tried to be concise."

"This is one paragraph."

"You're a busy woman, Nikki Heat."

"All right, look." She paused to collect her thoughts before she continued. "I was left with the distinct impression that your weeks-weeks-in the company of our murdered gossip columnist would mean you had more knowledge than this." She dangled the page at its corner between her thumb and forefinger so that it sold flimsy. The air-conditioning kicked on and it even waved in the breeze, a nice touch.

"I do have more knowledge."

"But?"

"I'm bound by my journalistic ethics not to compromise my sources."

"Rook, your source is dead."

"And that would release me," he said.

"Then pony up."

"But there are others I talked to who might not want to be compromised. Or things I saw, or confidences I was given access to that I wouldn't want to write down and have taken out of context at someone's expense."

"Maybe some time to think about this is what you need."

"Hey, you could put me in the Zoo Lockup." He chuckled. "That was one of the great take-aways from my ride-along, seeing you break down the newbies in Interrogation with that hollow threat. Beautiful. And effective."

She assessed him a beat and said, "You're right. I'm a busy woman." She took a half step and he blocked her.

"Wait, I have a solution to this little dilemma." He paused long enough to let her complete a rather unsubtle watch check. "What would you say if I told you we could work this case together?"

"You don't want to hear what I'd say, Rook."

"Hear me out. I want to see through this critical new angle of my Cassidy Towne piece. And if we were a team, I could share my leads and insights about the victim with you. I want access, you want sources, it's win-win. No, it's better than win-win. It's me-you. Just like old times."

In spite of herself, Nikki felt a tug on a level she didn't control. But then she thought, maybe she couldn't control the feeling, but she could control herself. "Do you have any idea how transparent you are? All you want to do is dangle your sources and insight so you can spend time with me again. Nice try," she said and moved off to her desk.

Rook followed her. "I was kind of hoping you'd like this idea, for two reasons. First, beyond-yes-the pleasure of your company, it would give us a chance to clear the air about whatever happened between us."

"That's only one reason. What's the other?"

"Captain Montrose already approved it."

"No…"

"He's a great guy. Smart, too. And the pair of Knicks tickets didn't hurt." Rook extended his hand to shake. "Looks like it's you and me, partner."

While Nikki stared at his hand, her phone rang and she turned away to answer. "Hey, Ochoa." Then her face lost color and her exclamation of "What?!" made heads turned in the bull pen. "Are you all right?" She listened, nodding, and said, "All right. Get back here as soon as you can after you make your statement."

When she hung up, she had an audience of the bull pen around her desk. "That was Ochoa. Somebody stole Cassidy Towne's body."

A stunned silence followed, which was broken by Rook. "Looks like we're teaming up just at the right time."

Heat's look didn't match his enthusiasm.