Heat Rises (17 page)

Across the courtyard, one of the other hunters double-timed into view and hunkered down behind a rock. Nikki took the rifle and scrambled back inside the pavilion. She was still outnumbered, but at least she had a weapon.

Sirens approached. They weren’t close yet, but they were coming.

Just as she positioned herself, resting the rifle on the top of the wall, almost braced for her holding action, a blur of two figures moved into the woods, fleeing.

Nikki’s body began to tremble but she kept close watch. Only when the sirens grew loud and she could see flashing lights did she let down. Still clutching her weapon, Heat leaned back against the wall, looking upward at the castle that had been her salvation.

Time had first slowed down and then stood still for Nikki. The ensuing minutes had no definition. And strangely, no sequence. A psychologist might say she didn’t shut down, she surrendered. After the tense ordeal of being hunted, shot at, evading, and then doing some hunting and killing of her own, Heat released control. For her it was the greatest luxury of survival.

Events lost their connective tissue and for Nikki Heat they kaleidoscoped. One moment, a face swam into view, reassuring her. Next, latex-gloved hands pried the rifle from her grip and slid it into plastic. Her own leather gloves came off, revealing palms wet with ice melt and blood. She found herself sitting in the back of an ambulance without recalling the journey. Did she walk there? Bushes parted in slow motion as her two assailants fled. Wait, that was before . . . She hallucinated Elmer Fudd standing there. Elmer Fudd with earflaps and jumbo binoculars hanging from his neck and snowflakes collecting on his eyebrows. Coffee in a cup rippled from her quaking hands. An
EMT
shined her penlight across her eyes and nodded, pleased. She pulled the blanket snug around her shoulders. Where did the blanket come from?

When the two shooting investigators from downtown joined her in the rear of the ambulance, Heat tossed back the rest of her coffee to spike her sharpness. She willed herself into the moment and walked them through the whole damn deal. They took notes and asked questions. Questions for clarification at first, and then the same questions asked a different way to see if her answers matched. She had been through this waltz before and so had they. Her answers were clear; they danced politely. But their goal was different than hers. They wanted to determine if she had killed according to policy. She wanted to capture the bastards, and this interview was something to get through so she could get back to work and do just that.

Elmer Fudd wasn’t a hallucination, after all—although he had a different name. The old man wearing the binoculars and the L.L.Bean hunter’s cap was actually Theodore Hobart. A birder who had spent the morning in the castle tower waiting for an eastern screech owl to return to its cavity in a tree near the Turtle Pond, Hobart witnessed the siege below and called 911 on his cell phone. Heat thanked him for saving her. He blushed and plucked the feather of a red-tailed hawk from the breast pocket of his Barbour coat and gave it to her. To Nikki it felt like a rose.

Zach Hamner pulled up in a black Crown Vic and strode to the suits from downtown. Heat watched them confer briefly, one of the detectives gesturing toward the pavilion and the other to the woods where a K-9 dog was leading his partner into the brush. On The Hammer’s walk to the rear of the ambulance he stared over at the body under the tarp. “Nice to see you made it, Detective,” he said, standing on the bricks and looking up to her.

“Feeling good about it myself.” Nikki folded her arms tightly inside the blanket, not much up for a handshake with the lawyer.

“The boys say it’s going to go down as a righteous kill. Your story checks out with the bird-watcher, too.”

Heat tried to like him but wasn’t having much success. She said, “So you can relax. No liability for the department?”

“None so far,” he replied, not reading any of her subtext. Nikki wondered where all the men with a sense of irony had gone in this city. “Sounds like you were quite the hero. That’s not going to hurt things for your promotion.”

“Given the choice, I’d rather do it the old-fashioned way,” said Heat.

He said, “I hear ya,” but he was looking away as he did, more interested in the form under the tarp.

“Who was he?”

“Male Hispanic, twenty-eight to thirty. No ID. We’ll run prints.”

“You see any of them?” Nikki shook her head. “Any idea who they were?”

“Not yet.”

He studied Nikki and could not miss seeing her resolve. “They say the
SUV
down in the Transverse is gone. No sign of the other guy, the driver you say you shot.” Then he said, “These guys were pros.”

It always annoyed her to have office functionaries roll up after the action and play cop. All she said was “Tell me.”

He looked at his watch and then around the crime scene. “By the way. Where the hell’s your boss? Where the fuck is Montrose?”

The Hammer irritated her, but he wasn’t wrong. Precinct commanders always showed at every major incident involving their people. Captain Montrose didn’t make Belvedere Castle. He wasn’t in his office when she got back to the Two-oh, either.

Everyone knew of her ordeal, and all eyes fell on her as she entered the bull pen. In any other profession Nikki would have been forced to spend the rest of the day being pestered by sympathetic coworkers milking every detail of her story out of her and pushing her to share her feelings. Not in Copland. Ochoa set the tone when she reached her desk and he sidled over, checking the wall clock. “About time you rolled in,” he said. “Some of us have been working this case.”

Raley pivoted on his office chair to face them. “I hope you have a good reason for keeping us waiting.”

Heat thought a moment and said, “I made the mistake of taking the park. The Transverse was a killer.”

Detective Ochoa had a ball of kite string in his hand. He set it on her blotter. “What’s this?” she asked.

“Old trick. Tie one end of it to your gun.” He winked and clucked his tongue.

Then the three paused five seconds, letting the silence express the friendship. Marking the end of the interval, Raley stood. “Ready to hear what we’ve got?”

“Am I ever,” said Heat. She wasn’t just seeking solace in work, Nikki now had highly personal stakes in jamming this case even harder.

Lancer Standard, the
CIA
contractor, had finally called Raley back to set an appointment with Lawrence Hays, who was due back tomorrow from his desert training facility in Nevada. “Weird,” he said. “His secretary said that he would only meet with you. By name, he specifically mentioned Detective Heat. I never brought you up.”

“Pushy, but it just means he’s done his homework,” said Nikki. “He’s a military type and probably wants to deal with the leader of the squad.”

Ochoa said to his partner, “Man’s busy. Can’t waste time on a loser like you.”

“Loser?” said Raley. “Partner, you are talking about the King of All Surveillance Media, now including hard drives.”

“Whatcha got, sire?” asked Nikki.

“I took another look through Father Graf’s computer and found a link to a second e-mail account that didn’t forward to his Outlook. I accessed it and found only one folder. It’s labeled ‘
EMMA
.’ There were no saved e-mails in it, nothing in the inbox. Either it was inactive,” Raley speculated, “or it’s been purged.”

“Call Mrs. Borelli at the rectory,” said Heat. “See if that name means anything to her.” She cast another glance at the dark office across the pen. “Any Montrose sightings?”

“
Nada
,” said Hinesburg, joining in as she crossed over. “And his cell is dumping to voice mail. What do you think it means?”

“Cap’s been off the charts lately, but I have to say this has me shaking my head.” Nikki recalled his warning an hour before her ambush to watch her back, and wondered if it was more than sage advice. The salacious hunger in Hinesburg’s eyes alerted Nikki that this was not the forum for thinking out loud about her boss, and she moved on. “Anything on the money in the cookie tins yet?”

“Oh, yes, and get this,” she said. “The serial numbers trace to cash used in a
DEA
sting years ago.”

Ochoa asked, “How does a stash from a fed drug deal end up in a priest’s attic?”

“Do we know who the
DEA
deal was with?” said Heat.

“Yeah, an Alejandro Martinez.” Hinesburg consulted her notes. “He cut a plea bargain for a deuce in Ossining and he’s out. Clean jacket since his release in ’07.”

Nikki crossed over to the board and started to write his name next to the notation for the found money. “Let’s see how clean this Alejandro Martinez is. Bring him in for a chat.”

They had just scattered to work their assignments when a familiar voice called from the door to the bull pen. “Delivery for Nikki Heat?”

Jameson Rook stepped in toting dry cleaning on hangers looped over his hand. “You know, I can’t just drop everything and keep coming here every time you get all bloody.”

Heat looked at the clothes from her closet, then at Rook, and then to Roach, arching a brow at them. Ochoa said, “We figured, you know, that he’d want to know how your day was going.”

Rook asked, “Did you really stab him with an icicle?” When she nodded, he said, “Please, tell me you said ‘Freeze,’ because that would be only perfect.” Rook was grinning, but there was worry behind it. He put his free arm around her waist. “Detective, you doing OK?”

“Fine, I’m just fine. I can’t believe you did this.” She took the clothes from him.

“Think they match. . . . You seem to have this sort of practical monochromatic thing going in your closet, not that I judge. All right, I judge. We need to take you shopping.”

She laughed and pulled a couple of items from the selection he’d brought. “These will do just fine.” She kissed his cheek, forgetting herself in a rare office display. “Thanks.”

“I thought you had protection. What happened to your Discourager?”

“Poor Harvey, you should have seen him. Mortified. In all his years he never got blocked like that.”

“How . . . discouraging. Whatever’s going on, you need better. When I went by your apartment, there was a car sitting up the block watching, I know the look.”

Nikki got a fresh chill and draped the clothes across the back of her chair. “How do you know it was watching?”

“Because when I walked up to it, he sped off. I yelled stop, but he kept going.”

“The yelling stop, that never works,” said Raley.

“Did you see him, get a description?” Ochoa had his pad open. Then he said, “You didn’t get a description, did you?”

“No,” said Rook. And then he took out his Moleskine notebook. “But would a license plate help?”

“Got it,” said Raley, hanging up the phone. “Vehicle you saw was regis tered to Firewall Security, Inc., a domestic protection division of . . . are you ready? . . . Lancer Standard.”

“We should get on them. Get over there right now,” said Rook. “These have got to be the guys who ambushed you. It adds up, the surveillance, the military tactics, let’s go.”

Nikki finished putting on her clean blazer and said, “First of all, there is no ‘we’ or ‘let’s,’ Rook. Your ride-along days are through. And second, there’s nothing to go on. Third, if they are up to something, I don’t want to let on that I know. . . .”

Rook sat down. “When you get to the fifteenth reason, let me know. I believe this is like Little League; isn’t there a mercy rule?”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re not totally wrong. Of course this guy Hays and Lancer Standard have my attention, but let’s go about this the right way.”

“Did you say ‘let’s’? Because I heard ‘let’s.’ ”

She laughed, shoving him so he spun a rotation in the chair. Then Nikki felt Ochoa’s presence, standing in the middle of the bull pen, ashen. The smile left her face. “Miguel?”

The detective spoke in a voice so low it would not have been audible if the room hadn’t gone completely silent. “Captain Montrose. . . . He’s dead.”

Special Investigations owned that city block and would control it for as long as they pleased. Rook, who liked Montrose and knew how much the captain meant to Nikki, had wanted to come along for support, but she said no. She knew what it would be like. Immediates only. And she was right. Even Heat and Roach had to park outside the yellow tape and walk; that’s how tight that crime scene was. The press called Nikki’s name as she passed, but she kept her eyes front, ignoring them—especially Tam Svejda, who hopped sideways along the no-go line, shouldering her way between reporters and making desperate pleas for a comment.

There was a lull in the precipitation, but the afternoon sky hung low and sullen. The three detectives strode wordlessly, crunching over pellets of sidewalk salt toward the middle of 85th, where strobes were flashing in front of the rectory of Our Lady of the Innocents.

Nikki recognized the shooting suits from the castle. The pair clocked her as she approached, gave a nod, then went back to their business. Heat had never seen these two before in her life, and now here they were again, crossing paths the second time that same day.

Montrose’s Crown Victoria sat parked in front of a fire hydrant and was ringed by portable isolation barriers of white plastic sheeting stretched on aluminum frames. Nikki stopped on the sidewalk a car length away, not knowing if she had it in her to proceed. Cameras inside the barrier flashed like lightning punching against the gloom. “We can do this, if you’d rather,” said Ochoa. She turned and saw the sadness behind his cop mask. Beside him, the skin around his partner Raley’s lips was white from pressing them together so hard.

Nikki did what she had done so often on this job. She put on her armor. There was a switch inside her, the one that sealed off her vulnerability, like triggering a fire door in the Met. For the space of one long breath, which was all it took, she made the silent acknowledgment she always made to honor the victim she was about to meet, threw the switch, and she was ready. Detective Heat said, “Let’s go,” and entered the crime scene.