Deadly Heat (13 page)

Heat and Rook pulled up behind the Roach Coach five blocks south, at 77th. As they came together on the sidewalk, Ochoa said to them, “Rales and I were just in this neighborhood running a check on that Rollerblade wheel.” He indicated the skate shop with a sign that read, “Central Park rentals by the hour or half day.”

Nikki’s attention went to Windsor’s Locks, the storefront next door. Something was definitely off. The window had an “Open” sign, but behind it the shop was dark.

“OK, now this is too weird,” said Rook, pointing. “Rats. Check it out. A pet store on one side with rats in the window and a roller skate store on the other?”

The pair of backup blue-and-whites Heat had called for pulled up behind her. Without taking her eyes from the store, she told the unis to cover the back. As the patrol officers deployed, she took the lead toward the glass door, flanked by Raley and Ochoa. They paused. Heat put one hand on the grip of her Sig Sauer. She reached for the door handle with the other.

“Wait,” said Ochoa. “You smell that?”

Heat sniffed. “Gas.”

“That smells stronger than just a tiny leak,” said Ochoa.

Detective Heat turned immediately to Raley. “Call it in.” Then she flashed back to the natural gas explosion she’d investigated in 2006, a suicide that completely leveled a three-story town house. “No sparks,” she told him. “Use your phone on the upwind corner. Also, tell those uniforms to come back and start clearing these buildings.” She waved a circle over her head to indicate the residences above the shops. “And tell everyone: no smokes, no light switches, no phones.”

Ochoa was already on the move, waving people off the sidewalk, when Rook turned to her from peeking in the locksmith’s window. “Nikki. Someone’s on the floor.”

She cupped her hands on the sides of her face to cut the glare and put her nose to the glass. In the back of the narrow store, a pair of man’s legs protruded from behind the counter, toes splayed out. Heat ran a quick calculation. The risk of setting off an explosion versus the chance that if that man was alive but suffocating on fumes, she might save him.

Decision time.

“Miguel!” Detective Ochoa turned to her from up the street, where he had corralled some pedestrians. “Man down. I’m going in.” Then she turned back and caught Rook reaching for the door handle. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” He froze. “If that door has an electric chime or alarm contact, you could blow us to Newark.”

Rook withdrew his hand. “What say we avoid that?”

A rapid sidewalk check. Nikki jogged to the corner and grabbed a city trash can. The steel barrel was heavy, and Ochoa met her to lift
the other side. “Careful not to scrape the concrete,” she said on their way up the sidewalk. “Don’t want any sparks.”

“On your three,” said Ochoa. Litter spilled onto the ground as the two detectives lifted the garbage can sideways with the metal bottom aimed at the glass. Nikki gave a count and they rammed the window. Instead of breaking, though, it spider veined. Heat made another three count, and they hit it again, much harder. This time they not only punched a hole, the entire window shattered, cascading jagged-edged chunks down from above, nearly guillotine-slicing them before crashing to bits on the sidewalk and the floor of the shop. Nikki kicked out the shards on the spiky ledge of the sill, swung one leg inside, then the other.

She ran to the end of the front counter and knelt beside the man, pressing her fingers to his neck. The carotid bumped against her touch. Ochoa joined her. Holding her breath in the toxic air, she nodded to Miguel to indicate the locksmith was still alive. Getting him out would be a challenge. He was short and slender, but unconsciousness had made him dead weight. Heat’s aching lungs burned for air, and in the strain of lifting him, she gasped in a breath she instantly regretted. The rotten eggs smell from the mercaptan in the gas made her throat clutch and her head go light. Nikki lost her grip and the man fell against her. She quickly jammed her thigh under him and stopped the fall. Fighting nausea, she got a better hold and clawed his work shirt. Together she and Ochoa managed to lug him to the window, where the new, sure hands of the arriving FDNY crew took him from them, lifting the victim over the ledge and onto to a gurney, where paramedics took over.

Heat and Ochoa stood bent over on the sidewalk, coughing and gasping. Both took hits off the oxygen they were offered. In the short minutes it took them to recover, New York’s Bravest had already killed electrical power to the building, shut off the gas main, and cranked up portable fans to vent the fumes.

Rook gave Heat and Ochoa each a bottle of water, and both chugged. “While you were in there, I went in the pet shop and got everyone out. Ever see
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
? I was this close to running out with two handfuls of snakes.”

The paramedics said they had rescued the locksmith just in time. Glen Windsor had stabilized on oxygen, and they were about to transport him to Roosevelt for observation. Heat said she wanted to ask him a few questions first. The paramedic didn’t like that, but Nikki promised to keep it brief.

“Thank you,” said Windsor looking up from the gurney at Heat and Ochoa. “They said I almost didn’t make it.” An EMT asked him to keep his oxygen mask on, but he said he was fine, took a hit, and held it resting on his chest.

Nikki saw the tremble in his hand. An ordeal like this would take its toll on anyone. The locksmith was young, maybe about thirty, but for a small guy built slim like a pro bowler, it must have been extra rough on his body. “Mr. Windsor, we won’t keep you, but I’m wondering if you can tell me what happened.”

“Shit, you and me both.” The pale guy on the stretcher had an affable soft-spokenness that reminded Nikki of Detective Rhymer, in whose mouth profanity sounded quaint instead of offensive. “Sorry,” he said. “Another quarter in the swear jar for me.” He took one more pull off the O2 mask and continued, “It was a slow day for business. I was sitting, just doing the Angry Birds at the counter. Next thing, I hear something behind me, and before I can turn, this hand comes around over my face. That’s all she wrote till I woke up out here.”

“Was there a rag in the hand?”

He shrugged. “Sorry, just don’t remember.”

“Did you smell anything? Something sweet, maybe?”

His face lit up and he nodded. “Now that you say, yeah. Sort of like cleaning fluid or something.” Heat whispered an aside to the EMT to have the ER check him for chloroform.

“What time did this happen?”

“Let’s see. I was waiting for lunchtime. About noon.” Nikki looked up the block at the bank clock. That would have been almost an hour ago. She felt a hot trail going cold by the minute.

“Sorry, Detective Heat,” said the paramedic. “You’re going to have to continue this later.” Heat thanked Glen Windsor for his time as they wheeled him to the back of the ambulance. Then she appointed
one of the uniforms to ride with him and stay by his side at the hospital until she got there.

“Got your gas source right here,” said the FDNY supervisor when Nikki came back inside Windsor’s Locks, using the door this time. He pointed to the open metal hatch on the heating unit embedded flush in the wall of the shop. He had to shout over the din of the ventilator fans. “See here? Pilot’s out, the combustion motor’s been disconnected, and somebody pulled the stopper plug out of the test feed joint. Nothing to stop the gas and nothing to burn it off, so it just streamed out and filled the room. I don’t want to think about what this could have done.”

Detectives Feller, Malcolm, and Reynolds arrived to assist them in the search for clues. “And by clues, you mean string, right?” asked Rook. “ ’Cause it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that string.”

“Let’s just strike a match and end this,” said Reynolds to Malcolm.

The first wave of the search yielded none of the earmarks of the prior crime scenes. As the fire crew declared the atmosphere safe enough to turn off their fans, Heat stared at the one positioned at the open back exit and asked the supervisor to find out if his men opened the door themselves or found it ajar.

“Found it that way,” said the uniform next to her. Officer Strazzullo had been among the patrolmen that Heat sent to cover the alley then called back for the evacuation. “When we accessed the alleyway, the back door to the shop stood open about yay.” He sectioned about eighteen inches of air with his hands.

“Dang,” said Detective Feller to Heat. “Bet you almost had him, and he booked.”

Raley asked her, “You think he could have been in here when we rolled up?”

Heat didn’t say anything. Instead, she stepped out the open door to the alley. The rest followed, and when they joined her, Nikki stood beside a Dumpster positioned under the fire escape ladder leading to the roof. “Officer Strazzullo, was this bin here when you arrived?”

“Sorry, I don’t recall.”

“Can I play out this scenario?” asked Feller. “Our killer’s inside when you approach, Detective Heat. You interrupt his job on the locksmith—‘Uh-oh!’—and flush him out the back door. He hides behind this Dumpster…” The detective acted it out, tracing steps from the back door and hiding behind the bin. “He’s here when Strazzullo arrives—this close to a collar—but then the cavalry gets called back out front and he gets away.”

“Looks like an escape setup to me,” said Ochoa, eyeballing the short distance from the Dumpster lid to the fire escape ladder. “Right after Strazzy got called away to work the evacuation, our boy climbed up on the bin, and poof.”

“Could be how he came and went, both,” agreed Raley.

Detective Heat boosted herself on top of the bin and ascended the fire escape ladder with teeth clenched. On each rung, she silently voiced anger and frustration at the killer being this close to capture—if he truly had been there.

If.

The others followed her up, and they all walked the roof in a line, searching the flat, grimy surface for anything that told them if.

They found it at the far end of the rooftop. Everyone saw it at the same time. And knew.

One end of a length of red string had been tied to the knob of the door to the access stairs and fluttered in the warm breeze. The string had many colors, following the pattern of the other homicides. Red was tied to yellow. Yellow was fastened to purple. And purple was knotted to a new piece of string, this one green.

Heat had already stationed officers to cover all exits of this building, including the stairwell. Silently, she drew her service piece and held it up at-ready beside the door. All but Rook, who was unarmed, did the same and took tactical positions. She nodded, and Detective Feller yanked the door open. Inside, at the top of the steps, stood Officer Strazzullo and his partner. Everyone holstered.

They looked down at the threshold at a broken piece of cinder block. Feller bent, and when he lifted it, a small piece of paper, slightly
larger than a postage stamp, that had been underneath it fluttered off in the wind. Raley chased the scrap across the roof so it wouldn’t blow away, and picked it up with his gloves.

Everyone stood around him in a huddle to see it. The paper, about an inch square, was blank on one side and had a color image on the other. It looked as if a small section from a photocopy of an oil painting had been cut with scissors. All it showed was someone’s fingers and knuckles.

Detective Raley used his cell phone and captured a decent close-up image of the hand on the little square of paper before they turned it over to Forensics to fingerprint and lab it. Heat tasked Roach with seeing what they could find out about the painting it had been clipped from. “What you found out about the key saved this guy’s life. Find out about the painting, maybe we’ll capture our killer.”

At Roosevelt Hospital, Heat had to hunt for parking because of all the news vans that had gathered outside the entrance to the Emergency Room. Reporters who were staking out positions for their stand-up pieces for that evening’s newscasts saw Nikki and called out to her by name, hollering for comment. She kept her eyes front and badged herself and Rook past the officer at the door.

They found Glen Windsor sitting up with his legs dangling over the side of a bed in one of the trauma bays. He sipped apple juice through a straw, and the color had come back to his face. “How are you feeling, Mr. Windsor?” asked Heat.