Heat Rises (27 page)

“Steam failure, water hammer, act of God, I am above nothing.”

It was already feeling cool in the lobby of Nikki’s apartment building as they came in. The elevator doors opened and several of her neighbors got off with suitcases and overnighters. Some said they were bound for Upper West Side hotels; others were off to couch surf with relatives in Westchester County. When Heat and Rook were about to get on for the ride up, a hand parted the doors. It was Nikki’s building super, a cheerful Pole named Jerzy. “Hello, Miss Nikki, and hello, you, sir.”

“Going to get cold tonight, Jerzy,” she said.

“Oh, very cold. Be glad you not have goldfish,” he said. “Mrs. Nathan, she have to move her goldfish to Flushing.”

Rook said, “Is it me or is there something sad about hearing goldfish and Flushing in the same breath?” When Jerzy just stared at him blankly, he said, “It’s probably a translation thing.”

“Anyway, Miss Nikki, I stop to tell you is all taken care of. I let the man from cable company in to fix cable TV.”

By reflex, she almost said thank you, but stopped herself. Nikki had not booked any service call from a cable TV repairman. “Is he up there now?”

The super said, “I don’t know. He went up an hour ago.”

Heat stepped off the elevator back into the lobby and Rook followed. “Let’s take the stairs, shall we?” As she led him on their climb to her floor, Nikki opened her coat and reached once again for the gun that wasn’t there.

Heat and Rook reached the landing at her floor and stopped to scope out the hallway, which was quiet. Rook whispered, “Shouldn’t we call the police?” Nikki thought it over and knew deep down she should. But there was also a pride thing that kept her, an experienced cop, from pulling resources from actual crime responses in the middle of a city emergency for a suspicion that could be nothing.

“I am the police,” she whispered back. “Kind of.” Sorting through her door keys, she slipped the one for her deadbolt off the split ring. That way, she could both avoid jangle at the door and be able to insert a key simultaneously in each of her locks to make her entry quick and surprising.

Treading lightly up the hallway, staying close to the wall the whole way, they reached her door and stopped. Nikki hand signaled for Rook to stay where he was, then made a fluid dancer’s move, crouching low under the surveillance hole, to the opposite side of the door and landed without a sound. She stayed low and listened at the jamb, then gave him a head shake. Rising up slightly and balancing on the balls of her feet so her leg muscles were coiled, Heat readied each key at the opening of its lock. She mouthed a silent three count, nodding her head to mark cadence for him, then ran the keys home, twisted the locks open, and threw herself low into her apartment calling out, “
NYPD
, don’t move!”

Rook flew in right behind her, following the procedures he had observed back on his ride-along—keeping close but not in a line that made for an easy target, then fanning himself to the side so he could be her eyes there and protect her flank from a surprise.

There was no one in the foyer, the dining room, or the living room. As Rook followed her past the kitchen and down the hall to clear the two bedrooms, baths, and closets, he noticed that somewhere along the way she had grabbed her backup Sig Sauer. After they cleared the apartment, she returned the Sig to its hiding place in the cubby on the living room desk and said, “Hey, nice entry.”

“Thanks.” And then he gave her an impish grin. “If you like, I can demonstrate a few variations.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh yes, teach me, Rook. Teach me all the ways.”

Jameson Rook was mighty pleased with himself about his trip to the spy store when the wireless monitor came out of the pantry and he played back the video from his NannyCam. He scrolled backward through the ghosty images, not having to go far, just about an hour, until he came to movement. A man in a cable company logo cap entered with a large toolbox, then left the frame as he roamed off into the hallway. “Great coverage,” said Nikki. “You could work for
C-SPAN
.”

But a moment later the man returned and moved to the living room, where he knelt and opened his toolbox in front of the TV. “Look at that,” said Rook. “Dead center in the frame. I’m better than
C-SPAN
. I could work for C-SPAN2.”

They zapped through the next fifteen minutes as the visitor worked at the cable box. When he was done, he fastened the snaps on his toolbox and left the apartment in the quadruple speed of video time-lapse. Rook hit stop and wandered from the counter over to the living room. “What do you know. It’s like Freud said. Sometimes a cable guy is just a cable guy.” He picked up the remote and said, “Unless it’s Jim Carrey, and then—”

Nikki threw a tackle on Rook, on the way down running her hand up his arm and stripping the remote from his grasp. When they both hit the floor, he said, “What the hell was that for?”

Nikki walked back to the counter, cradling the remote, and said, “This.”

Rook picked himself up and joined her as she rolled back the NannyCam video and froze it on the face of the cable guy as he passed under the camera on his exit. The freeze was of the man Heat and her squad had been trying to ID and locate from the Pleasure Bound security video.

The man with the coiled snake tattoo.

An hour later, after the bomb squad had cleared her building and those in the surrounding area, a hero in an eighty-pound blast suit emerged with the cable box and placed it in the Mobile Containment Unit on the trailer in the center of the street. When he was clear of the opening, his sergeant pressed a remote control button and the hydraulic actuator whirred, gently closing the armor-plated hatch and sealing the cable box inside.

Heat made her way to the cop who was being helped out of his protective suit by a detail from Emergency Services. As soon as he had his right hand free of his heavy glove, she shook it and thanked him. In spite of his nonchalant “Hey, you’re welcome,” his hair was sweat-matted to his forehead. The look in his eyes was enough to tell her that handling the real deal was never taken casually by those guys, no matter how much they brushed it off. As he described the bomb to her, Rook joined the circle, as did Raley and Ochoa, who had heard the call go out and dropped everything to get down there.

After his K-9 had sniffed the apartment and confirmed the cable box as a hit, he did his X-ray. The trigger device was a simple mercury switch poised to be detonated by battery when someone pressed the power button of the TV remote control. “What kind of explosive?” asked Nikki.

“Evaporation sample of the taggant was positive for C4.”

Ochoa whistled. “Plastic explosive.”

“Yeah, it most definitely would have spoiled somebody’s night,” said the man from the bomb squad as he took a long drink of water from a bottle. “They’ll lab it, but, by my calc, it’s going to test out as military grade. Not so easy to come by.”

Rook turned to Heat. “Not from what I’ve learned over the last month. Especially if you have connections to the military—however unofficial.”

Cementing his status as King of All Surveillance Media, Detective Raley took the NannyCam drive so he could pull the still frame of the cable guy and circulate it. Before they left, Heat cautioned him and Ochoa not to get themselves in trouble with Captain Irons. The two partners shared a look and scoffed. Rales said, “Hm, let’s see . . . Iron Man or Detective Heat . . . Iron Man or Detective Heat . . .”

“Just be careful,” she said.

“You, too,” said Ochoa. “You’re the one working with Rook.”

It was after hours, and Heat figured Lancer Standard would be closed for the night, so she looked up Lawrence Hays’s home address from the information Mrs. Borelli had given her out of the parish roster. “You really think you’re going to get anything out of him?” said Rook after she gave their taxi driver the street number on West End Avenue.

“If you mean a straight answer to any of my questions, no. But I want to jam this guy. Keep the pressure on him. An over-the-top ego like his, you never know what’ll shake out.”

Heat had just finished pressing the intercom at the top of the stone steps of the town house near 78th when the voice behind them said, “Help you?” It was Lawrence Hays. He wasn’t wearing a coat, so she figured he must have seen them approach on his security cams and come out a side door to surprise them. “I have an office, you know, you don’t need to harass me at my home.”

“Good evening to you, too, Mr. Hays. This is Jameson Rook.”

“Yeah, I know, the writer. Doctor says I have an allergy to the press, so you’ll pardon me if I don’t shake hands.”

“And I have one to blood, so it all works out,” said Rook.

Before the macho sideshow escalated, Nikki thrust out the surveillance still she had of the cable guy from Pleasure Bound. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“This again?” said Hays. He angled the photo to the light, gave it a quick eyeball, and handed it back. “Nope. What’s he? Some Craigslist stud who stuck you with the motel bill, Miss Heat?”

She ignored the distraction. “He tried to blow up my apartment.”

“And a new HD flat screen,” added Rook. “Using military grade C4. Mean anything to you?”

Hays smiled mirthlessly at Nikki. “Tell you something you don’t seem to get. If I wanted to blow you up, you wouldn’t be standing here. Right now there’d be pieces of you coming back down on Gramercy Park like confetti.”

Heat said, “So you’re saying you do know where I live, that’s interesting.”

“Tell you what I don’t know. Is why you’re on a holy crusade for some priest who not only protected that scumbag who messed with my kid—my kid!—but who was also aiding and abetting homegrown terrorists.”

“Why,” said Rook, “just because he was a social activist?”

“Wake up. Graf was neck-deep with those Colombian
revolutionarios
.”

Nikki kept him going so he wouldn’t lose his steam. “
Justicia a Garda
? Gimme a break, they’re no terrorists.”

“No? Have you seen them in action? How many of your men have these cowards killed and blown up? Use your head. If they’ll attack their own government prisons just to break out their brainwashing socialist writers, how long do you think it is before that gig gets imported here?”

“Mr. Hays,” said Heat, “are you saying some of your contractors were killed in Colombia by members of the organization Father Graf supported?”

“I’m not saying anything.” Too late. He realized he had slipped and voiced an additional motive for Graf’s murder and started walking it back. “For reasons of national security, I cannot confirm or deny the actions of my government consulting firm.”

“I think you just did,” said Nikki.

“Know what I think? I think you’d better get lost. Because something else I know about you, Nikki Heat, besides your address. You’re not even a cop anymore. That’s right.” He started to chuckle, and said, “So get off my property. Before I call the police—the real police!”

They could still hear him laughing when he turned and slipped off into the night.

Heat woke up the next morning with Rook’s face in hers. Kneeling be side the bed in his T-shirt and boxer briefs, all he needed was a leash in his teeth to look like a retriever waiting for his trip to the park. “What time is it?”

“Almost seven.”

She sat up. “I slept that late?”

“I’ve been up for two hours,” he said. “Phoning some of the noble characters I consorted with on my journey through the shadowy world of arms trafficking.”

“Why?”

“It struck me in our afterglow last night. Oh, yes, it was an afterglow. . . . I got thinking about military grade C4. And then I started thinking, I bet I already know people—outside the military, I mean—who might supply it.”

The sleep was slowly lifting from her. “You mean to Lancer Standard?”

“No, Hays would have his own source and wouldn’t need to go black market. I inquired about another organization we posted on Murder Board South.”

“
Justicia a Garda.
”

“Correct. And what I just learned from a guy we shall call only T-Rex—hailing from the smuggler’s port of choice, Buenaventura—is that a shipment of an unspecified nature left Colombia and was delivered three weeks ago, off the books, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to one Pascual Guzman.” He held up his hand. “Come on, up top for the Rookster.”

Instead of fiving him, Nikki sat cross-legged and frisked the fingers of both hands through her hair to wake up. “Did this T-Rex say it was C4?”

“Mm, no. T’s exact words were, some kind of shipment, he didn’t know what.”

“Then we don’t know squat. Unless we confirm it was C4.”

“Shouldn’t we at least talk to Guzman?”

Heat shook no. “First rule I learned from Captain Montrose about interrogations was, don’t initiate a meeting blindly. Know what you want or are likely to get. What I know about Pascual Guzman is that he’s a circumspect stone wall who will answer nothing at best, and at worst, light me up on the radar to Zach Hamner when he files another harassment complaint. We’ll have to go at him another way.”

Rook was unfazed. “I think this guy hacked my computer. Plus he admitted he had a smack-down with Graf the day he died. I think we should shake down Pascual Guzman and ask him about the secret shipment. He’s smelling to me like our killer.”

“Last night you were sure it was Lawrence Hays.”

“I know. I get excited. Hays was the bright, shiny object of the moment.”

Nikki said, “And what is Guzman?”

He hung his head. “Again, you chasten me with your need for reason.”

Two hours later, Nikki had a cab drop them between Tenth Avenue and 41st, just blocks off Times Square. The forecast promised it would be slightly warmer that day, but at 9 &A.M.& it was still under five degrees and the shadows of the low sun ran long and chilly on the West Side of Manhattan. While Roach worked the photo of the cable guy, Heat’s plan was to try to find him by locating the woman who appeared in the Pleasure Bound surveillance photo with him. According to the missing woman’s landlord, Shayne Watson worked as a prostitute in Hell’s Kitchen. The former roommate of the dominatrix was still off the radar, and Heat’s agenda for the day was to hit the streets and show her photo to other prostitutes, hoping to get a line on her.