Heat Rises (3 page)

“So when you get by your orals and all the other hoops they make you jump through—like teach you the secret handshake, or whatever—do me a fave? Don’t forget your friends on your way up.”

Whoomph
, there it is, thought Nikki. She felt a little embarrassed. All this time thinking Feller wanted to date her when maybe what he really wanted was to network her. She replayed her mental picture of him at the cop bar clowning in his ass gasket lobster bib and wondered if the jester in him was all in fun, or if he was really just a skilled glad-hander. The more he talked, the more that picture emerged.

“When you get your gold bar, it’s going to be a piece of good news in your precinct for a change. And you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” she said. They hit another red at 79th, and unfortunately this was a long one.

“Not sure, that’s a laugh,” he said. “I mean Captain Montrose.”

Nikki knew full well what he meant. Her skipper, her mentor, Captain Montrose, was under increasing pressure from One Police Plaza over his performance as commander of the Twentieth Precinct. Whether it was the bad economy, increased unemployment, or a reset to the dark days of the pre-Giuliani disorder, crime statistics were edging up throughout all five boroughs. And worse, they were spiking in election season. Gravity rules, so in response, the shit roll was all downhill to the precinct commanders. But Heat could see her captain was taking an extra pounding. Montrose had been singled out, called down separately for extra meetings and ass chewings, spending as much time at HQ as he did in his office. His personality darkened under the pressure, and he had grown atypically remote—no, more than remote, secretive. It made Nikki wonder whether something else was going on with him beyond precinct perf stats. Now what bothered Heat was that her boss’s private humiliation was Out There as department gossip. If Feller knew about it, others did, too. Loyalty made her deflect it, back up her boss.

“Listen, Randy, who isn’t getting squeezed these days? I hear those weekly CompStat meetings at 1PP are brutal for all the skips, not just mine.”

“Seriously,” he said with a nod. “They should put a drain in the floor to let the blood run out. Green.”

“Jeez, it just turned.” Nikki pressed the accelerator.

“Sorry. Drives Dutch crazy, too. I tell ya, I’ve got to get my ass out of that cab.” He powered down his window and spat. When he closed it again, he said, “This isn’t just about the performance figs. I have a bud in Internal Affairs. Your man is on their radar.”

“Bull.”

“No bull.”

“For what?”

He made an exaggerated shrug. “It’s IA, what do you think?”

“No. I don’t buy it,” she said.

“Then don’t. Maybe he is clean, but I’m telling you he’s got his neck on the stump and they’re sharpening the ax.”

“Not maybe. Montrose is clean.” She made a left onto 85th. A block and a half ahead, she could see a cross on the church roof. In the distance, across the Hudson, the apartments and cliffs were pinking from the rising sun. Nikki switched off her headlights as she crossed West End Avenue.

“Who knows?” said Feller. “You get rank, maybe you’ll be in position to take over the precinct if he goes down.”

“He is not going down. Montrose is under pressure, but he’s straight as they come.”

“If you say.”

“I say. He’s unassailable.”

As Nikki got out in front of the rectory, she wished she had made the drive alone. No, what she wished was that Feller had just asked her for drinks, or bowling, or for sex. Any one of those, she would rather have dealt with.

She reached for the bell, but before she could press it, she saw a small head through the stained glass window in the door and it opened, revealing a minute woman in her late sixties.

Nikki referred to her notes from the
RTCC
message. “Good morning, are you Lydia Borelli?”

“Yes, and you’re with the police, I can tell.”

After they showed ID and introduced themselves, Nikki said, “And it was you who called about Father Graf?”

“Oh, I’ve been worried sick. Come in, please.” The housekeeper’s lips were quaking and her hands fluttered nervously. She missed the doorknob on her first attempt to pull the door closed. “Did you find him? Is he all right?”

“Mrs. Borelli, do you have a recent photo I could look at?”

“Of Father? Well, I’m sure somewhere . . . I know.”

She led them over thick rugs that muted their footfalls through the living room and into the pastor’s adjoining study. On the shelves of the built-in above the desk several photos in glass frames were perched between books and knickknacks. The housekeeper took one down, swiping her finger along the top of the frame to dust it before she handed it over. “This is from last summer.”

Heat and Detective Feller stood beside each other to examine it. The shot was taken at some sort of protest rally and showed a priest and three Hispanic protesters, with arms linked, leading a march behind a banner. Father Graf’s face, frozen in mid-recitation of a chant, was definitely the same as the one on the corpse at Pleasure Bound.

The housekeeper took the news stoically, blessing herself with the sign of the cross and then lowering her head in silent prayer. When she was done, blood vessels showed through her temples and tears streamed down her cheeks. There were tissues on the end table near the couch. Nikki offered her the box and she took some.

“How did it happen?” she asked, staring down at the tissues in her hands.

Fragile as the woman appeared, Heat thought better of giving her the details at that moment about the priest’s death in a
BDSM
torture and humiliation dungeon. “We’re still investigating that.”

Then she looked up. “Did he suffer?”

Detective Feller squinted at Nikki and turned away to hide his face, suddenly making himself busy replacing the photo on the shelf.

“We’ll have more details after the coroner’s report,” answered Nikki, hoping her dodge was artful enough to be bought. “We know this is a loss for you, but in a while, not just now, we’re going to need to ask you a few questions to help us.”

“Certainly, anything you need.”

“What would be helpful now, Mrs. Borelli, is if we could look through the rectory. You know, search through his papers, his bedroom.”

“His closet,” said Feller.

Nikki moved forward. “We want to look for anything that would help us find out who did this.”

The housekeeper gave her a puzzled look. “Again?”

“I said, we’d like to search the—”

“I heard what you said. I mean, you need to search again?”

Heat leaned closer to the woman. “Are you saying someone searched here already?”

“Yes. Last night, another policeman. He said he was following up on my missing person report.”

“Oh, of course, sometimes we cross signals,” said Nikki. That could well be the case, but her uneasiness was growing. She caught a look from Feller that said his antenna was up, too. “May I ask who this policeman was?”

“I forgot his name. He said it, but I was so upset. Senior moment.” She chuckled and then stifled a sob. “He did show me a badge like yours, so I let him roam free. I watched television while he looked around.”

“Well, I’m sure he filed a report.” Nikki flipped open her spiral reporter’s notebook. “Maybe I could cut through some red tape if you described him.”

“Sure. Tall. Black, or do I say Afro-American these days? Very pleasant, had a kind face. Bald. Oh, and a little birthmark or mole or something right here.” She tapped her cheek.

Heat stopped writing and capped her stick pen. She had all she needed. The housekeeper had just described Captain Montrose.

Detective Heat wasn’t sure which she would prefer, to come into the station house and find Captain Montrose in his office so she could ask him about his visit to the rectory the night before or to find his executive chair empty and be spared the meeting for a while. As it happened, that morning, like so many others, she was the one to flick the lights on in the Homicide bull pen. The skipper’s office was locked and dark behind the glass wall that gave him a view of the squad room. Her feelings upon seeing his office empty answered her question about preference; it disappointed her. Nikki wasn’t a procrastinator, and especially when a subject was uncomfortable, her instinct was to get the noise out early and then deal.

She told herself this was all about nothing, and all that was needed was to clear the air. On its face, the captain’s stop at Our Lady of the Innocents was not inappropriate. A missing persons report for a resident of the precinct gave legitimate cause to speak to the woman who filed it. That was standard police procedure.

What was not standard was for the commander of the precinct to handle a call that usually fell to a Detective-3, or even an experienced uniform. And to conduct a search—alone—was, again, not unheard of but still unusual.

An hour before, Heat and Detective Feller had gloved up and made their own walk through the premises and found no signs of struggle, breakage, bloodstains, threat mail, or anything out of the ordinary to their eyes. The Evidence Collection Unit would be more thorough, and, as they waited for
ECU
to arrive, Nikki was relieved that Feller had the discretion not to say anything, even though it was all over his face. She knew what he was thinking. Montrose, taking heavy fire from his bosses and under potential investigation by Internal Affairs for allegations unknown, had deviated from standard procedure and solo snooped the home of a torture vic the night he died. When she dropped Feller off at the 86th Street subway stop all he said to her was “Good luck . . .
Lieutenant
Heat.”

Especially since she was the first one in the bull pen that morning, Nikki would have preferred to have been able to catch Montrose early and get him alone. In the break room she speed-dialed him from her cell phone while she poured milk on her cereal. “Cap, it’s Heat. 7:29,” she said to his voice mail. “Give me a callback when you can.” Short and uncluttered. He’d know she would only call if it was important.

She carried her cardboard bowl of Mini-Wheats back to her desk, and while she ate in silence. Nikki felt the weight of the month of mornings she had faced without Rook. She looked at her watch again. The hands had advanced, but that damned calendar hadn’t budged.

She wondered what he was doing at that moment. Nikki envisioned Rook sitting on an ammo crate in the shade of a Quonset hut at a remote jungle airstrip. Colombia or Mexico, by the itinerary he had sketched out before he kissed her good-bye at her apartment door. After she locked up, she raced to her bay window and waited there, watching vapor trail from the tailpipe of his waiting town car, wanting one last glimpse of him before he dissolved. She felt a glow inside at the memory of him stopping just before he got in the backseat. Rook had turned and blown a kiss up her way. Now that picture had faded to a feeling. The vision was replaced by her imagined one of Rook in rough country, swatting mosquitoes, jotting names of shadowy gun runners in his Moleskine. He was no doubt unshowered, beardy with sweat moons. She wanted him.

Heat’s phone buzzed with a text from Captain Montrose. “@1PP. In touch when I get sprung.” True to form, he was stuck downtown at headquarters for his ritual precinct commander accountability meeting. It made Nikki reflect on the downside of her impending promotion. One rung too many and your head shows over the parapet and becomes a big, fat target.

Thirty minutes later, just after 8 a.m., the Homicide bull pen was stand ing room only as Detective Nikki Heat walked her squad, plus a few extra attendees she had pulled in from Burglary and patrol, through the few details she had on the case so far. She stood in front of the big Murder Board and used magnets to slap two pictures of Father Graf at top center of the white enamel. The first, a death photo taken by
CSU
, was of much better quality than the cell phone snap she had taken herself. Beside it, she posted his protest march photo, cropped and enlarged to show only his face. “This is our victim, Father Gerald Graf, pastor of Our Lady of the Innocents.” She recapped the circumstances of his death and used a dry-erase marker to circle the times of his disappearance, estimated death, and discovery on the timeline she had already drawn across the board. “Copies of these photos are being duped for you. As usual, they’ll also be up on the computer server, along with other details, for access from your cells and laptops.”

Ochoa turned to Detective Rhymer, a Burglary cop on loan, who was sitting on a filing cabinet in the back. “Hey, Opie, in case you wondered, that’s the typewriter with all the blinky lights.”

Dan Rhymer, an ex-MP from the Carolinas who had stayed in New York after his army hitch, was accustomed to the needling. Even back home they had nicknamed him Opie. He put some butter on his Southern accent. “Laptop computer, huh? Goll-lly. No wonder I couldn’t toast my possum samwich on that thing.”

During the chorus of “whoa”s Nikki said, “Excuse me? Anyone mind if I talk a little about the investigation?”

“Oo, frosty,” said Detective Sharon Hinesburg. Nikki chuckled along until she added, “Trying out your new command mode for lieutenant?” The barb didn’t surprise Heat, it was the realization that her pending rise was out of the house rumor mill and in the air. Naturally, it came from Hinesburg, an only modestly gifted detective whose main talent was for annoying Heat. Someone must have once told Hinesburg her outspokenness was refreshing. Nikki thought that person had done the detective a disservice.

“What do we have on cause of death?” said Raley, snapping things back to business for Heat and falling on the grenade Hinesburg had lobbed.

“Prelim puts us in a gray area.” She made eye contact with Rales, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod that spoke volumes about camaraderie. “In fact, we can’t even officially class this as a homicide until after the autopsy. Nature of the death left open lots of doors for accidental. You’ve got potential health issues of the vic, intent of the practitioner . . .”

“Or killer,” said Ochoa.