Naked Heat (23 page)

Both Heat and Rook had made a note to discuss that with each other, and both agreed that, even though the touchy-feely costar ended up divorced, it provided no motive for killing Cassidy Towne, since he had been the one to tell her the story.

The bulk was an anecdotal chronicle of a talented, sensitive actor’s hard partying, boozing, snorting, popping, and shooting lifestyle. The conclusion Heat and Rook independently drew from reading the book was that if the final, missing chapter fulfilled the hype, the book would be a blockbuster, but from the material they had read, nothing in these pages seemed explosive enough to warrant the murder of the author to cover it up.

But then again, in the second to last chapter, where the manuscript left off, Reed Wakefield was still alive.

Detective Raley, who often cursed his designation as the squad’s go-to screener of surveillance video, sealed his fate that morning. While she and Rook followed Ochoa, who had summoned them to Raley’s desk, Nikki Heat could see from Raley’s expression across the bull pen that he had a righteous freeze on his screen. “What do you have, Rales?” she said as they formed a semicircle around his desk.

“My last video to screen and I hit it, Detective. Parking garage only gave me legs and feet on the perp. Assailant seemed to run east after the attack, and so I worked that block and the one after. Small electronics retailer on the corner of Ninety-sixth and Broadway had this from a sidewalk pass-by, time coded six minutes after the mugging. Matches the description plus our subject is carrying a thick stack of papers, like the manuscript.”

“Are you going to let me take a look?” asked Heat.

“By all means.” Raley got up from his chair, knocking over one of the three coffee empties on his desk. Nikki came around to look at the freeze frame on his monitor. Rook joined her.

The freeze caught the mugger on a full-face turn to the camera, probably reacting to showing up live on the LED TV screen in the electronics shop window. In spite of the dark hoodie and the aviator sunglasses, there was no mistaking who it was. And further, even in grainy, surveillance-grade black-and-white, the mugger was caught red-handed carrying a stolen half ream of double-spaced manuscript.

“That’s bringing it home, Raley.” The detective didn’t say anything, just beamed through some bleary eyes. “I’ll give you the pleasure of cutting the warrant. Ochoa?”

“Ready the Roach Coach?”

“Now would be good,” she said. And then when the two left on their assignments, she turned to Rook, unable to suppress a smile. “Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Chapter Fifteen

D
etective Heat knew Soleil Gray had a music video shoot that day because her lawyer had mentioned it the afternoon before when she accused Heat of harassing her client at her places of business. Well, she thought, add one to the list. Nikki looked up the number in her interview notes for Allie over at Rad Dog Records and found out where the video was being shot. The record company assistant said it wasn’t on a soundstage but on location and gave Heat all the particulars, including where to park.

Fifteen minutes later, after a short drive south on Twelfth Avenue, Heat and Rook pulled up through the chain-link gate and passed a half dozen paparazzi lurking outside, some leaning on their motorcycles. Nikki flashed her shield at the security rent-a-cop and drove into the parking lot of the USS
Intrepid
at Pier 86. On the way there, Rook had asked if Heat was afraid Allie might call and tip off Soleil they were coming. “That would surprise me. I cautioned her not to and told her that this was going to be a felony arrest. I made it clear that if Soleil got tipped off by someone, that person could face charges as an accessory. Allie said not to worry, that she was going to head out for a long lunch and leave her cell phone at her desk. Turned off. She sounded like she’d even cancel her cellular contract.”

Heat had caravanned with the Roach Coach behind her and, behind them, a van carrying a half dozen uniforms in case crowd control became an issue. Nikki had learned early on when she worked the organized crime unit that few planned arrests were routine and that it always paid off to take a quiet moment to stop and visualize what you were walking into and not just posse up and ride. On the outside chance there were any Soleil fans hanging out at this event, the last thing she wanted was to try to stuff a handcuffed double-platinum Grammy nominee into the backseat of her Crown Vic while warding off a swarm of zealous disciples.

They all parked nose-out, poised for a rapid exit. When they got out of their vehicles, each and every one, including Nikki, did the same thing: tilted his or her head far back to look up at the retired navy aircraft carrier looming over them. “Makes you feel small,” said Raley.

Ochoa, still craning up at the floating museum, asked, “How tall is that thing, anyway?”

“About six stories,” said Rook. “And that’s just from the wharf height we’re on. From the waterline, add another story or two.”

“What’s it going to be,” said Heat, “tour or arrest?”

They filed past the temporary base camp cordoned off for crew parking, portable dressing rooms, and meals. A caterer cooked split chickens on a huge grill, and the autumn air was filled with a mix of generator exhaust and grill smoke. At the top of the main gangway they were greeted by a young woman in a T-shirt and cargo pants, whose laminated ID said she was an assistant director. When Heat identified herself and asked where the shoot was, the AD pointed up toward the flight deck. She raised her walkie-talkie and said, “I’ll tell them you’re on your way.”

“Don’t,” said Heat. She left a uniform behind just to make sure and to watch the exit.

After they ascended in the elevator, Heat and Rook stepped out onto the flight deck and were met by the playback track of “Navy Brats” carrying on the breeze from the stern of the flattop. The two of them walked toward the music, and as they came around an A-12 Blackbird, a Cold War spook plane and one of the thirty or so aircraft parked there, they found themselves behind a small army of video crew and its ordnance of props, lighting, miles of cable, and three HD cameras: one on a pedestal; a Steadicam harnessed onto a muscleman with ballet skills; and a boom for getting sweeping overhead shots.

They got there in the middle of a take, and Soleil Gray danced the steps Heat and Rook had seen her rehearse once in Chelsea and again at
Later On
. In her white sequined leotard, she cartwheeled across the set between an F-14 Tomcat and a Chickasaw helicopter, only this time something was different. There was a show intensity to her performance, a crispness and excitement that she had been saving for the cameras, and she unleashed it with abandon as the Steadicam operator backpedaled to track beside her and she flipped end-over-end the width of the deck, until she landed perfectly in the waiting arms of the sailor-suited male dancers.

Rook whispered to Nikki, “I predict one helluva prison talent show up in Taconic.”

The director, who had been viewing it all on split screen at a hooded monitor, shouted for a cut, looked to his camera ops, and when he got nods in return, called a reset.

When the fill lights dimmed and the grips started hauling pieces of the set to the next mark, Heat made her move. With Rook following, she strode toward the canvas director chair where, in spite of the brisk fifty-degree air, Soleil Gray dabbed perspiration off her face. Ten feet from reaching her, a jumbo guy with a shaved head and wearing a yellow security windbreaker blocked the path. “Sorry, folks, this is a closed set. Tours resume tomorrow.” He wasn’t unpleasant, just a guy fulfilling the job description on the back of his jacket.

Nikki kept her voice low, showed her badge, and smiled. “Official police business.”

But the singer, alert to everything happening on her set—or perhaps on the alert for something like this—lowered the towel from her face and stared at Nikki with wide eyes. Her makeup artist stepped in to repair the damage from the towel, but Soleil waved her off, keeping her attention on the visitors as she slid out of her chair.

Heat cleared the security man and, on her way to her, said, “Soleil Gray, NYPD. I have a warrant for your—”

And then Soleil turned and ran. Slightly behind her, to the port side of the ship, sat a small changing tent for the extras and, beyond it, a passage leading to a flight of metal stairs. Halfway there, Raley and Ochoa came around from behind the changing tent, followed by three uniformed officers. Soleil turned to make a break the opposite way, toward the hatch where Heat and Rook had come on deck, but another pair of officers was posted at that door. Rook ran into her path and she turned sharply again. Distracted by his move, she didn’t notice that Nikki was a half step away. Heat made a lunge for her, but Soleil heard her footfall and spun clear. Heat’s momentum carried her into a wardrobe rack, and in the instant it took her to regain her balance, her suspect was bolting across the almost football field–wide deck to the starboard side of the aircraft carrier. Soleil’s shooting company—grips, electricians, dancers, the director—all looked on in a stunned zone of inertia and disbelief.

Her training kicked in and Heat drew her gun. A gasp rose from the crew, sharp enough and full of sufficient horror to let Soleil guess what had just happened behind her back. She slowed to a stop at the edge of the flight deck and turned to see Heat approaching, gun up, aimed at her. And then, without hesitation, Soleil Gray turned, and leaped over the edge.

Amid a clamor behind her from the frozen onlookers, Nikki rushed toward the side where the woman had gone over, trying to recall what lay six stories directly below her jump. Parking lot? Pier? The Hudson? And in those quick seconds, she also wondered, could someone survive a fall from that height even into water?

But when she got to the edge and peered over the side, Nikki saw something completely unexpected: Soleil Gray tucking and rolling her way out of a safety net suspended from the deck below. “Soleil, stop!” she called, and took aim again. But it was all for show. Heat certainly wasn’t going to open fire on her under these circumstances, and the singer bet on that. Nikki reholstered about the same time she saw two men, stunt coordinators she would learn later, reaching for her suspect and pulling her out of sight onto the deck below, oblivious to what had just taken place above and unwittingly helping her escape.

Heat calculated options, thought of all the places to hide on a ship built to carry over 2,500 sailors, including all the mazes belowdecks. Then she thought of how slow the elevator or the stairs would be. “Roach,” she said, “call down and have them seal the exit.”

And then Detective Heat holstered her Sig and jumped over the side.

The pair of stunt coordinators helped her out of the net but then tried to subdue her. “What are you doing? I’m a cop.”

One of them said, “She told us you were a crazed fan trying to kill her.”

“Which way did she go?”

They sized up Nikki and pointed to a hatch. Nikki ran for it, taking the door cautiously in case Soleil was waiting on the other side, but she wasn’t. Ahead of Nikki stood a long passageway and she went down it at a run. It terminated at a T, and Nikki paused briefly there, imagining, if she were Soleil, the direction she would choose in her scramble to escape. Her instincts made her turn left, rushing toward a stream of daylight and what felt like the direction of the wharf side of the ship.

Heat arrived at an open hatch, the source of all the sunlight. She paused long enough to bob her head through the opening and return it, once again cautious of an ambush. When she got through the hatch, she saw a metal staircase, probably the lower level of the same one Soleil had tried for topside before Roach appeared. She hoisted herself over the rail and descended the steps another level, to where they ended at a small deck near the stern, a semicircular balcony that hung out over the wharf and one of the carrier’s power supply or warehouse sheds.

Then she spun, hearing shoes on the steps above her. “Rook?”

“God, you’re fast. How do you do it? I’m still dizzy from the jump.”

But Nikki wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She’d caught a flash of white and sequins in the sunlight on the pier below. Heat calculated the four-foot leap the singer had made across from the railing to the roof of the support shed and jumped it easily herself. While she ran across the shed’s flat top to a metal spiral staircase leading down to the parking lot, she could hear Rook keeping pace behind.

The sole uniform they had left below had sealed off only the gangway, not anticipating a bold rooftop escape like the one Soleil had made, so there was no one to stop her when she came around the far side of the crew parking area, sprinting for the exit on Twelfth Avenue. Fifty yards behind her and gaining, Detective Heat called out to the security guard to stop her, but he was geared to protecting the singer and, instead, looked around for some unseen female assailant to stop, not Soleil herself.

She got out through the gate.

The pop star’s curse quickly turned into a blessing when she saw the paparazzi loitering outside the fence, three of them with motorcycles. By now they were snapping her as she ran toward them. Soleil called to one of them by name. “Chuck! I need a ride, fast.”

Chuck was already peeling out onto Twelfth with Soleil clinging to his back when Nikki got there. The other two paps with bikes were starting to saddle up to follow, but Heat showed her badge and pointed to the rider on the fastest bike. “You. Off. I need your bike for official police business.” The paparazzo hesitated, weighing the legal penalty versus the loss of photo op, but he soon felt Heat’s hand clutching his jacket. “Now.”

Heat took off in pursuit and the other pap started to follow, but Rook arrived waving his arms, blocking him. He hit the brakes. “Rook?” said the photographer.

“Leonard?” said Rook.

Heat had to work to maintain her tail on Soleil and her paparazzo driver. He was reckless and ballsy, threading the needle between cars and zigzagging across lanes without a care about his series of near misses. As a cop in Manhattan, Nikki had seen how the celebrity shooters had increasingly begun to hunt in packs, often on motorcycles, and the image that always came to her was the pursuit of Diana in that tunnel in Paris. Now she was pursuing one of them and decided to exercise skill over daring so she didn’t kill herself or a bystander.

But she was still able to keep up, if not overtake. It was evident that Soleil didn’t have a destination; this was purely about evasive maneuvers, losing the tail. The path they took was a pattern of up one street, down another, through Midtown West. At one point, heading east on 50th, Soleil must have tired of the game, because Nikki saw her cast a look back, register Heat was still on their tail, and then shout something in the paparazzo’s ear.

At the next corner her paparazzo, with the exclusive he could only have dreamed of, faked a right turn but instead cut a U, not only traveling the wrong direction on the one-way street but bearing down head-on at Nikki. Heat evaded, cutting to her right, and side skidded, nearly setting the bike down in the middle of traffic. But gearing down and steering into the skid, she made a U-turn herself, although almost clipping a parked FedEx truck as she swung her one-eighty.

Going the wrong way herself now, Heat flashed her headlight and used her horn. Fortunately the only close call she had was with a motorcycle driven by one of the other paps, with, she realized in disbelief, Jameson Rook on the back of the saddle, also in pursuit.

When they came to the end of the block, Soleil’s driver cut a right and opened it up, racing north on Eleventh Avenue. Nikki kept pace, although she lost time slowing and creeping through the red lights instead of just busting them with impunity like the lead bike did. This was the time Heat wished she had her two-way so she could call in roadblocks or intercepts. But she didn’t, so she kept her focus and grabbed speed where she could.

Eleventh Avenue became West End Avenue and shortly thereafter Soleil made another back glance that told Nikki to expect another stunt. It came at 72nd Street. Her driver carved a diagonal across the intersection, nearly getting popped by a bus, and then gunned it toward the Henry Hudson on-ramp. Heat followed cautiously through the intersection and had to lurch to a stop for an elderly woman on a walker, who shuffled into the crosswalk against the light and almost became Nikki’s hood ornament. She waited until the yellow tennis balls slid by and then sped onward, but stopped at Riverside Drive and cursed.

She had lost them.

Heat almost got on the northbound Hudson but something stopped her. The traffic was thick, at a crawl. Even with the advantage of a motorcycle to squeeze through, that wouldn’t be the escape route she would take. She heard a backfire and turned toward the sound. Behind the Eleanor Roosevelt statue at the opposite corner, a streak of white zoomed down the pedestrian path of the park that ran along the river. Nikki waited for an SUV to pass and then steered herself on a diagonal across the intersection, rode the handicap ramp up onto the sidewalk, and followed them into Riverside Park. Riding past the neighborhood dog run, she got yelled at by some of the pet owners. One of them threatened to call the police and she hoped they would. She sensed movement in her side mirror and knew without looking that Rook was following.