Naked Heat (16 page)

On the walk back to the car, Rook laughed and said, “Or we can talk to you in a . . . ‘more official setting.’ That goes on my list of Heatisms, along with Zoo Lockup and blast matrix.”

“I was showing some refinement. After all, it was the Dragonfly.”

Rook said, “So the question for me remains, why was Derek calling Soleil Gray the night of Cassidy’s murder?”

“Right there with you,” said Heat. “And the freak-out reaction from her.”

“I don’t suppose that’s because the concierge couldn’t get her the table she wanted at Per Se.”

“Not being a fan of coincidences, I’d say a call with that timing, two bodies with stab wounds, duct-taped to chairs . . . Derek Snow has to be related to Cassidy Towne, but how? And if Soleil wasn’t complicit in her murder, is she feeling in some kind of danger herself?”

“Here’s a nutty idea. Ask her.”

“Yeah, and she’ll be straight with me, too.” And then she said, “But you know I will.”

As Nikki headed north on First Avenue toward the OCME, Rook said, “With or without the lobby gunplay, I’m still going with the premise that Derek was a Cassidy tipster.”

“Well, we’re pulling his phone records, let’s see if you’re right.” She blew air out between her teeth. “Sordid, isn’t it? Thinking people are spying on you for cash. What you ate, what you drank, who you’re sleeping with, all so Cassidy Towne can put it out to people in the
Ledger
.”

“Most of it was true, though. She told me she got something wrong early on, right after she started her column, about Woody Allen having an affair with Meryl Streep. Her source said he was obsessed with her ever since
Manhattan
. Not true, totally blew it. The other papers pounced on it and called her the Towne Liar. From then on, she said if it wasn’t true and verifiable—from two sources—she’d rather let someone else scoop her.”

“Noble. For a scumbag.”

“Yes, and none of us ever read those columns, do we? Come on, Nikki, the problem is if you take them seriously. They’re like the sports section for peeping Toms, which is just about everybody.”

“Not I,” she said.

“Look, I agree with you that it’s scummy. And not just because I am intimidated by your impeccable command of grammar. But, at the same time, she was only covering what people were doing. Nobody made Spitzer mount a call girl in over-the-calf socks. Or Russell Crowe toss a telephone at a hotel night manager. Or Soleil Gray blow a hole in a concierge’s pants with a handgun.”

“Right. But who says we have to know all that?”

“Then don’t read it. But it doesn’t make the secrets go away. You know, my mom’s been putting together a night of Chekhov readings at the Westport Playhouse. She was rehearsing one last weekend, ‘The Lady with the Little Dog.’ There’s a passage about this guy Gurov that I’m going to excerpt in my article about Cassidy. It goes something like ‘He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all . . . full of relative truth . . . and another life running its course in secret.’ ”

“And your point?”

“My point, Detective, is that everybody’s got a secret, and if you’re in the public eye, you’re fair game.”

They stopped at the light and Nikki turned to him. He could see that for her this was more than just an abstract topic. “But what if you’re not used to being in the public eye, or didn’t choose to be there? I ended up with the world reading about my mother’s murder. That’s not a scandal, but it was private. You write stories about Bono, and Sarkozy, and Sir Richard Branson, right? They’re equipped for all this intrusion, but does it make it any better that they need to be? Shouldn’t some things be allowed to be kept private?”

He nodded. “I agree.” And then he couldn’t resist. “Which is why I will never again even write the word ‘pineapples.’ ”

“Going to give you plenty to reflect on here today, Detective Heat.” Lauren Parry’s formality with Nikki was only invoked when Heat’s BFF was pulling her leg or prepping her for news beyond her workaday coroner reports. Heat could tell from her friend’s face that there was no joke coming after that setup.

“What are we dealing with, ME Parry?” she said in matching attitude.

The medical examiner led Heat and Rook to Derek Snow’s body on the table and picked up his chart. “As usual, the tox disclaimer notwithstanding, we have a cause of death from a single thoracic knife wound in the intercostal tissue between ribs, causing perforation of the left ventricle.”

“Stabbed in the heart,” said Rook. When Lauren gave him an eye roll, he shrugged. “You want layman’s terms, or disclaimers about calling your physician after four hours, who’s your guy?”

Nikki asked, “Did he also have signs of torture?”

Nodding, Lauren beckoned her closer to indicate the victim’s left ear. “See the little blood flecks? Same as on Cassidy Towne. I took some ear canal shots for you.”

“Dental picks?” said Heat.

“Don’t need to explain it to you, do I?” The memory of being harassed herself by the Texan made Nikki wince involuntarily. Lauren said nothing, but put a hand on her shoulder in comfort. Then she took it off and said, “There’s more.” She flipped back the top page of the chart to indicate the matching adhesive remnants found on both Cassidy Towne and Derek Snow.

Rook said, “Little doubt we’re dealing with the same killer, is there?”

“It gets more interesting.”

“Wow.” Rook rubbed his palms together. “This is like the late-night infomercials. ‘But wait, there’s more.’ ”

“You have no idea,” said Lauren.

Nikki lifted the sheet to verify the scar on Derek’s thigh. When she found it, she joined Rook and Lauren at the ME’s lab bench, a stainless-steel surface laden with an array of macabre instruments that were part of dissecting and analyzing the dead. In the center of the long counter, a small white towel covered a tray. The ME set her chart down and folded back the towel halfway, exposing the blade of a plastic knife the color of dried Elmer’s glue. “This is a polymer mold I made from Cassidy Towne’s stab wound. The killer worked clean, an expert plunge and withdrawal, so I was able to make an excellent cast from her puncture.”

Heat recognized it immediately, the arc of the edges coming together dead center at the tip, which was sharpened to a point, and, most distinctive, the fullers, those twin grooves running parallel the full length of the flat. “This was his knife. The Texan’s,” she said.

“A Robbins and Dudley Knuckle Knife, according to the catalog on the server,” said Lauren Parry. “Exactly like”—she peeled back the remaining half of the towel—“this one here.” Beside the first cast on the tray rested a mold of the identical blade.

“Get out,” said Rook. “If this were a TV show, this is where they’d go to a commercial.”

A slight smile showed at the corners of the ME’s mouth. It wasn’t often that she had the occasion to be a little theatrical, and she was obviously enjoying her moment. The dead ones didn’t appreciate her work. “Well, if they ran a commercial now, you’d miss the biggest part.”

“I don’t know what could be bigger,” said Nikki, looking over her shoulder at Derek Snow’s corpse. “You just linked Cassidy Towne’s exact murder weapon to Derek Snow.”

“But I didn’t.” Lauren waited until both their faces clouded, puzzling. She pointed to the first blade replica. “This knife cast here? Taken from Cassidy Towne.” Then she picked up the second one. “This knife cast here? I took from Esteban Padilla.”

“No way!” Rook turned a circle and stomped a foot. “Coyote Man?”

All Nikki said was “Lauren . . .”

“Yup.”

“The Texan stabbed Coyote Man, too?”

“Well,” said Lauren, “his knife did, anyway.”

Heat was still processing all this through the haze of her astonishment. “Whatever made you think to take a mold from Padilla?”

“The puncture on both victims had a lot of material displaced at the center, or what we call the neutral axis of the blade. It’s negligible, but visible if you’re looking. Soon as I saw the similarity, I ran the molds.”

“You’re a jock,” said Nikki.

“Not done yet. When the molds matched, I ran one more test. Know that bloodstain you pointed out to me on the wallpaper at Cassidy Towne’s brownstone? It wasn’t hers. It was Esteban Padilla’s. A perfect match.”

“Best autopsy ever,” said Rook. “I think I just peed myself a little. Seriously, I did.”

Chapter Ten

N
ikki was not about to let this wait for a meeting back in the bull pen. Momentum on this case was picking up, and even though she wasn’t sure where her new clues would lead, she was going to ride it, and hard. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was only a few blocks north of the Derek Snow crime scene, so Heat got on her cell phone and called Ochoa to tell him she’d meet him and Raley in the East Village in five minutes for a briefing.

“You sound pumped. Did you get a confirm that Snow had the same killer as our gossip lady?” Ochoa asked.

She looked over at Rook, riding shotgun with her down Second Avenue and said, in her best infomercial announcer voice, “But wait, there’s more.”

The two detectives were out canvassing Derek Snow’s neighborhood when she reached Ochoa, so instead of going to his apartment, they made a plan to meet up at Mud Coffee just off Second. Traffic flow on East 9th was one way the wrong way for her, so Heat bypassed it, pulled into a loading zone on St. Mark’s Place, tossed her placard on the dash, and walked it. Rook was a marathon and 10-K runner, but he had to work to keep pace with Nikki.

Mud Coffee was a storefront on a block that had one foot in the old New York City of custom tailor shops, one-of-a-kind dress boutiques, and a Ukrainian soul food restaurant. The other foot was in the newer, more gentrified Manhattan of upscale skin spas, sake bars, and an Eileen Fisher. Raley and Ochoa were waiting at the outside bench with four coffees when they arrived.

“Usually, it’s too crowded to score any outdoor seating here,” said Raley. “Might have something to do with people’s aversion to smelling Le Gar-bahge.” Talks between the city and the union had broken off the night before, and a fresh layer of trash had been added to every sidewalk in the borough.

Rook side-glanced to the hedgerow of trash bags lining the curb six feet away. “Getting so I don’t even smell it anymore.”

“Maybe from spending too much time with your gossip queen,” said Ochoa. Instead of a comeback, he got a maybe nod from Rook.

Detective Heat was unable to resist employing Lauren Parry’s flair for the dramatic as she stepped out the information she had just gotten at OCME: the Derek Snow cause of death; the cast of the knife used on Cassidy Towne matching the one the Texan attacked her with; and then the kicker—Cassidy Towne’s blade cast matching the one that gave Esteban Padilla his mortal wound.

Even cops who thought they had seen and heard it all could be surprised once in a while. This was the second time this case had managed to bring the vets up short. When Heat finished her story, the air was full of whispered holy craps and f-bombs.

“So,” Nikki said when it seemed they had taken it in, “setting aside the fireworks, the significance of this forensic news is that we still have a professional killer but we’ve added a third vic.”

“Man, Coyote Man.” Ochoa shook his head, still on it, still absorbing the scope of it all. “OK, so if that was Padilla’s blood on her wallpaper, what was his deal? Was he with the killer, maybe one of the crew tearing the place up? Something went wrong with the posse?”

Raley picked it right up. “Or was Padilla a Good Samaritan, passing by, heard her scream, and got into something over his head?”

“Or,” said Rook, “was he a part of this in a way we can’t even see yet? He was a produce driver, right? Did he service Richmond Vergennes’s restaurants, perhaps delivering fresh fruits and vegetables and some sweet lovin’ on the side? Maybe this was some sort of romantic triangle revenge thing.”

Detective Heat turned to Roach. “I need you all over this, guys. That’s why I’m pulling you two off this detail and sending you to get aggressive on Esteban Padilla.”

“Cool,” said Ochoa.

Raley nodded. “On it, Detective.”

“Obviously, push the usuals: friends, family, lovers, his job,” she said, “but what we need is the connection. That’s where daylight’s going to come. Find out what the hell the connection was between Cassidy Towne and a produce truck driver.”

“And The Texan, and Derek Snow,” added Raley.

“And Soleil Gray. She’s still in the thick of this somehow. Make sure you flash all four of the pictures I put in your files—you never know.” Nikki kicked herself for waiting this long to let the Padilla investigation shift into this mode. Unfortunately, the reality of the job was such that as much as she tried to invest in each case to the eyeballs, at a certain point, it did become a matter of triage. It had to. Cassidy Towne was the high-profile victim, and meanwhile the Esteban Padillas of the world got nicknames like Coyote Man or, worse, slipped through the cracks anonymously. The saving grace, she thought, if there was one, was that Cassidy’s murder might be a step to solving his. That kind of justice was better than none. At least that’s how, if you were a detective with a conscience like Nikki Heat, you lived with it.

“Lauren give you a TOD for the concierge?” said Ochoa.

“Yes, one more wrinkle.”

Raley clutched his heart melodramatically. “I don’t know how many shocks I can take, Detective.”

“Do your best. Derek Snow’s murder was the same night as Cassidy Towne’s. Lauren’s best window is midnight to three
A.M.
”

“In other words . . . ,” said Raley.

“Right,” Heat answered. “Roughly an hour or two before Cassidy’s.”

“And just after his call to Soleil,” said Rook.

She stood and swirled the last of her coffee in the cup. “Tell you what I’m going to do. While you get to work on Mr. Padilla, I’m going to go have another chat with Soleil Gray and challenge her on her lack of candor.”

“Yes,” said Rook, “she has given us quite a song and dance.”

The others didn’t even bother to groan. They just got up and left him sitting on the bench, alone. A Jack Russell tied to a bike rack, waiting for its owner, looked over at him. Rook said, “Cats, huh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t seem to catch ’em.”

Just minutes later, Heat and Rook approached Soleil Gray’s apartment in a slightly more Village-y block of the East Village. To get there, they walked, passing head shops, tattoo parlors, and a vinyl music walk-down. It was that time of evening when there was just enough light left to see the pink jet contrails overhead in the teal of the gloaming. Dozens of small birds chirped as they found roosts for the night in the canopies of trees set in the sidewalk. In the morning the trees would make excellent platforms for garbage swoops. Threading through a crowd waiting on the sidewalk outside La Palapa, Rook spied some mighty inviting margaritas at the window tables and, for one, brief, impulsive flash, wished he could just lace his arm through Nikki’s and steer her inside for some serious downtime.

He knew better. More to the point, he knew her better.

A housekeeper answered on the squawk box in the vestibule. “Miss Soleil no here. You come back.” Her voice was old, and she sounded sweet and small. Rook imagined that she might even actually be inside the little aluminum panel.

Back down on the sidewalk, Nikki flipped through her notes, found a number, and called Allie, the assistant at Rad Dog Records. After a short conversation, she closed her phone and said as she started walking, “Soleil is at a TV studio rehearsing a set for a guest appearance tonight. Let’s surprise her and see what shakes loose.”

As they strode by, Rook looked longingly at a deuce that had just opened up in La Palapa. Downtime would have to wait. He hurried to catch up with Nikki, who was already at the corner getting out her car keys.

His brake lights turned the weeds red as Raley backed the Roach Coach into the driveway that went nowhere but a small vacant lot between a taqueria and a three-story row house that was listed as Esteban Padilla’s address. “Careful, man, don’t hit that shopping cart,” from Ochoa.

Raley gophered his neck for a better view in the mirror. “I see it.”

When the bumper tapped the cart, his partner laughed. “See, this is why we can’t have a nice car.”

All the parking spaces on East 115th Street were taken, and there was a beer delivery truck double-parked across the loading zone. The truck couldn’t unload in the space because it was occupied by a small beater with a fender made of Bond-O and a windshield full of tickets. So Raley improvised, parking nose out, bridging the sidewalk, front tires on the street, the back ones where the dirt and sparse clumps of grass met concrete.

East Harlem,
El Barrio
, had the highest crime rate in the borough, but that rate also had experienced a huge drop in recent years, roughly 65 to 68 percent, depending on whose figures you liked. Raley and Ochoa felt obvious, looking every inch like cops, even in plainclothes. They also felt safe. Crime rate notwithstanding, this was a community of families. They were experienced enough to know that low income didn’t spell danger. Ask people with experience in both places, and you’d be surprised how many felt a lost wallet had a better chance on Marin Boulevard than on Wall Street.

The pleasant warmth of the fall day was siphoning off and the evening was cooling fast. A clank of bottles made them turn. In front of Padilla’s place a man his age, about thirty-five, was stacking full black plastic garbage bags on the mound that ran along the street. He clocked the two detectives as they approached, but stayed with his work, keeping an eye on them peripherally as he went.

“
Buenos noches
,” said Ochoa. When the man bent to pick up his next garbage bag without acknowledging him, the detective continued in Spanish, asking him if he lived there.

The man flung the trash bag in a V he had created between his two other bags, and waited to make sure they would stay put. When he was satisfied, he turned to face them. He asked the two cops if there was some sort of trouble.

Ochoa continued in Spanish and told him no, that he was investigating the murder of Esteban Padilla. The man told him Esteban was his cousin and he had no idea who killed him or why. He said it loudly, gesturing with a large double wave of his palms to them. Raley and Ochoa had seen this many times before. Padilla’s cousin was signaling that he was not a snitch, to them and, more importantly, to anyone who was watching.

He knew it was probably futile, but Detective Ochoa told him there was a killer loose who had murdered his cousin, asking if they could just talk about it, inside, in private. The cousin said there was no point; he didn’t know anything and neither did anyone else in the family.

Under the harshness of the orange streetlight that hummed above them, Ochoa tried to read the man’s face. What he saw there wasn’t a dodge, it was theater masking fear. And not necessarily fear of the killer. This was about the eyes and ears that could be taking all this in at that moment on a street in Spanish Harlem. The Stop Snitching code was a more powerful law than any Raley and Ochoa could bring. As the man turned and walked in through the front door of Padilla’s house, Ochoa knew it was even stronger than wanting justice for the death of a relative.

Later On with Kirby MacAlister
, a talk show in a wrestling match with Craig Ferguson and the Jimmies, Kimmel and Fallon, for the late-night after-crowd, was broadcast live out of a leased studio on West End Avenue. Its first five years on the air, the syndicated show had taped out of a former strip club in Times Square, a spit take from Letterman’s shop in the Ed Sullivan Theater. But when one of the daytime dramas moved west to LA,
Later On
jumped at the chance to show off its success by grabbing the soap’s stage and modern production offices.

In the lobby window, looking out on West End, Nikki finished her cell phone call and stepped over to join Rook by the security counter. “What’s our status?” she asked.

Rook said, “They’re sending a production assistant down to take us upstairs to the studio. What was the call?”

“Forensics. They were able to pull a couple of decent fingerprints off the cartridge of that typewriter ribbon I found in the subway.”

“Score another one for us. Although, with all the people who must have handled it, how will they know whose is whose?”

“I have a feeling these were the Texan’s,” she said. “Seeing how they were the only ones with blood on them.”

“Hey. You’re the detective . . .”

Heat could tell by Soleil Gray’s reaction when she and Rook entered the back of the studio that Allie had not called to tip her off they were coming. The performer was running the same routine with the male dancers they had seen her working at the rehearsal hall, only this time she was singing live to the track. The song was a hard-driving rocker called “Navy Brat,” Nikki guessed, judging by the repeat of the phrase in the chorus. It would also explain why the boys were in white sailor suits. Soleil’s wardrobe was a one-piece sequined white bathing suit with admiral’s epaulettes. Hardly regulation, but it had the advantage of showing off her stunning gym-rat figure.

She spun two cartwheels across the stage into the waiting arms of three sailors, but made a sloppy landing. Soleil waved her arms to stop the track, and when it chopped to a halt, she blamed the sailors. Nikki knew it had happened because she was distracted by her.

The stage manager called a crew break. As the camera operators and stagehands left for the exits, Heat and Rook approached Soleil on stage. “I don’t have time for this. I’m on live TV at midnight, and in case you didn’t notice, this sucks ass.”

“I don’t know,” said Rook. “You’ve got me counting the days to Fleet Week.”

The singer pulled a robe on. “Do we have to do this right now? Here?”

“No, not at all,” said Nikki. “If you’d like, we can do this in about a half hour at my precinct.”

“In a more official setting,” said Rook with a wink to Nikki.

“Might cut into your rehearsal a bit, Soleil. And you’re right. You can use it.” Heat had decided on the drive over that this was going to be about intimidation and shaking the tree.

“You don’t have to be a bitch.”

“Then make it so I don’t have to be. This is a homicide investigation and I had to come back to you because you lied to me. Starting with saying you were with Allie when in fact you left her early in the night.”