Naked Heat (24 page)

Nikki kept it slow on the paved pathway that ran north along the river. Even though it was mid-afternoon on a chilly day, there were enough joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers to pop out of nowhere, and she felt as long as she could see the motorcycle ahead, she could bide her time and make her move farther upriver, where there was less access to the greenway.

Her break came after the Boat Basin and before the sewage treatment plant in Harlem that had been converted into a state park. The stretch of pathway between the two landmarks ran parallel to train tracks that were fenced in and therefore formed a barrier to pedestrian access. Nikki gunned it. The cycle ahead also took advantage of the open path, but Nikki had the faster machine and was gaining on them. Soleil, looking surreal in the distance, like an apparition in white sequins, kept back-checking and gesturing for her driver to go faster. He shouldn’t have.

Just before the state park, the path took a jog to the right, curving sharply away from the river. It was a turn engineered for pedestrians, not speeding motorcycles. Nikki knew the terrain from her weekend runs along this part of the Hudson and slowed before she got to the curve. When she came around it, Heat saw the bike on its side. The paparazzo was sliding his leg from underneath, his forearm bleeding from road rash. Soleil Gray was a short distance off trying to run away, hobbling on one of her legs.

Rook’s driver also took the blind curve too fast and Nikki had to goose her bike to avoid getting hit. The other rider careened past her and struggled against a wipeout. Just as it looked like they were going over, he managed to correct and brought the bike to a stop without falling.

“Take care of this one,” said Nikki, “he’s hurt.” And then she drove her motorcycle across the grass after Soleil, who was pulling herself up and over the chain-link fence separating the path from the train tracks.

The West Side Line was historically the conduit for Manhattan freight service with its tracks emerging from a tunnel at 122nd Street and running along the bank of the Hudson River from New York to Albany. Nineteen years before, the line had been taken over by Amtrak for northbound passenger service out of Penn, and as Detective Heat dismounted her motorcycle, the low rumble of a locomotive signaled one of those long passenger trains was coming. Soleil jumped down from the fence and ran across the siding in an attempt to make it onto the other side of the rails before Nikki got there, buying herself getaway time as the Empire Service rolled past and blocked the cop. But the locomotive got there first, and now Soleil was walled in by the long, lumbering train as Nikki also began to climb the fence.

“It stops here, Soleil,” she called over the groan of metal and the screech of steel wheels passing behind her suspect. “Get away from the track. Lie down and put your hands behind your head.”

“Come closer, I’ll jump.”

Nikki leaped down from the top of the fence, landing on both feet, and Soleil made a move closer to the track and leaned, canting her body toward the train, making as if she was going to throw herself under its passing wheels. “I’ll do it.”

Heat stopped. She was thirty feet away. Even though it was a flat surface, the gravel made poor footing and the singer was quick. Nikki couldn’t hope to cover that distance and stop her from hurling herself under a wheel. “Soleil, come on, step away from there.”

“You’re right. It does stop here.” She turned to look down at the track, metal rusted and coated with dust and carbon on the sides but gleaming brightly, like a fresh sheet of aluminum foil, on top, where the wheels churned by and friction carried away all grime. When Soleil looked up, Nikki was a few yards closer, and Soleil shouted, “Nuh!” and so she stopped.

“Just be still, then, Soleil. Take a minute, I’ll wait.” Nikki saw all the signs she didn’t like on her. The woman’s posture was deflating. Her body was turning in on itself, making her seem small and alien to the show wardrobe she had on. Every bit of arrogance and hardness was gone from the singer’s face. Her mouth trembled and Nikki could see red blotches surfacing through her stage makeup. And she kept staring down at those wheels grinding by two feet away from her. “Are you hearing me?” Nikki called over the noise, knowing she was but just trying to pull focus.

Soleil said, in a barely audible voice, “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Then don’t.”

“I mean go on anymore.”

“You’ll work it through.” Both of them knew she had to arrest her, but the detective was trying to get her to look past the immediate. Move her out of The Now.

“What happened to that guy? You know, from yesterday morning?”

“He’s fine. Be out of the hospital tomorrow.” Heat was guessing but told herself this was the time for positive thoughts. She flashed back to Interrogation 1 the day before and the cut on Soleil’s knuckle, the one she kept nibbling at. At the time she assumed it came from rehearsal, having seen how physical the routines were. The god of hindsight visited her, and she now saw it as the mugger’s battle scar.

“I had to get it. He wouldn’t let go, so I had to . . .”

“He’s going to be OK. Come on, get away from there.”

“I still have nightmares about it.” Soleil ignored Nikki; she was off in her own conversation. “I can deal with jail, maybe. But not the nightmares. About what happened to Reed, I mean. I want that night back. It was so stupid.” And then she shouted, “
I
was so stupid . . . And now I’ll never have him again.”

As Soleil broke down in sobs, Heat was torn between wanting her to go on and tell the story of what happened to Wakefield; an obligation to read her her rights so if this turned into a confession she could use it in court; and a human need to not lead Soleil into a place so dark she would take her own life. “Soleil, we can talk about this later. Come on, come to me, let’s get you some help, all right?”

“I don’t deserve to live. Do you hear me?” Her mood weather vaned from somber to angry. The biting tone Nikki was accustomed to receiving suddenly got turned inward. “I don’t deserve to be here. Not after Reed. Not after what I did to him. Fighting, killing our relationship. That was all me. I called off the marriage. I hurt him so bad. . . .” And then the anger gave way to more sobs.

Nikki glanced down the track, wishing to spot the end of the train, but the line of passenger cars extended as far south as she could see. It hadn’t gotten to speed yet and its slow roll made its length feel infinite to Heat.

“And then that night. Do you know the guilt I carry around about that night?”

Nikki assumed it was the night of Reed’s death, but again she didn’t want to tip Soleil over the edge by asking at a time of such vulnerability, so she said, “You won’t have to carry it alone anymore. Understand?”

Soleil pondered that, and Nikki began to have hope that at last something she said was reaching her. That’s when they both turned toward the noise. Three NYPD motorcycles rolled slowly with lights but no sirens down the path. Nikki turned the other way just as a Parks Department SUV was rolling up beside Rook from the other direction. Heat saw the change in Soleil and called out to Rook, “Tell them to stay back!”

Rook stepped to the driver’s window and spoke to the Parks officer, who Nikki watched grab his microphone. Seconds later, the NYPD motorcycles must have gotten his call, because they braked and waited in the near distance, idling, the purr of their engines mixing with the squeaking and moaning of the lumbering train.

“I can’t deal with it all, I can’t,” moaned Soleil. “It’s all too much.”

Nikki could finally see the end of the train about a hundred yards away and began calculating her rush.

“I just feel . . . hollow. I can’t turn off the pain.”

Fifty yards to go. “I’ll get you through this, Soleil.” Now only three more cars. “Will you let me help you?” Nikki extend her arms, hoping her gesture would be felt over the yards that separated them, across the crushed stone of the railroad siding. Soleil straightened her posture, looking like a dancer again. She raised her face to the sun with her eyes closed for a moment, then lowered it to look right at Nikki, smiling at her for the first time ever. And then she threw herself under the last car.

Chapter Sixteen

N
YPD cordoned off a wide area around the scene of Soleil Gray’s suicide to keep media and fans at a distance so the medical examiner, Forensics, and the chief’s squad from One Police Plaza that routinely investigated any officer-involved death could do their jobs with privacy and focus. Other investigative personnel, including Parks and Rec and representatives from the train company and its insurance carrier were present but would have to wait their turns. To maintain the dignity of the deceased and to give the technicians privacy, a line of portable vinyl screens had been erected on both sides of the train tracks where most of the singer’s remains were strewn. Twelfth Avenue had been closed off between West 138th and 135th Streets, but news photographers, paparazzi, and mobile TV newsrooms had staked out elevated vantage points both in Riverbank State Park and on the opposite side of the tracks, on Riverside Drive. OCME deployed a tent fly to mask the scene from the half dozen news choppers that had positioned themselves overhead.

Captain Montrose visited Detective Heat where she waited alone in one of the police personnel vans, still shaken, holding a cup of coffee that had grown cold resting in both her hands. He had just come from a huddle with the chief’s unit and told her that their initial interviews of Rook, the two paparazzi, the Parks officer, and the motorcycle cops all corroborated her story that the woman jumped of her own volition and that Heat had done everything she could to diffuse the situation and prevent the suicide.

The skipper offered to let her take a few days off to recover, even though she was not going to get put on leave or desked. Nikki gave it to him straight. She felt deeply upset but knew that this case wasn’t closed yet. The cop part of her—the part that could compartmentalize the human tragedy and stuff down the trauma she felt from what she had witnessed two hours before—that part viewed Soleil’s death objectively as a loose end. Vital information died with her. Heat knew she had cleared the mugging of the book editor, but many questions remained that she could no longer get answers for out of Soleil Gray. And the Texan, Rance Wolf, who was potentially her accomplice and the lead-pipe cinch to have been the killer of three people, was still at large. And as long as the last chapter of Cassidy Towne’s book was unaccounted for, there was every reason to believe he would kill again to get it. Unless the need to do so had also died with Soleil Gray.

“I’m feeling it, Captain, but that part will have to wait.” Detective Heat poured her cold coffee out the open door and onto the gravel. “So if that’s all, I need to get back to work.”

Back at the precinct, Heat and Rook had a moment alone for the first time since it had happened. Even though a police cruiser had brought them back to the Two-Oh together, she’d ridden up front in the partner seat in silence; he had the back to himself and spent most of the ride trying to shake the image of what he had seen. Not just the grisly death of Soleil Gray, but the anguish he’d observed in Nikki. Both of them had seen their share of human tragedy in their careers. But whether it was Chechnya or Chelsea, nothing prepared you for witnessing the instant life leaves a body. When he took her elbow and stopped her in the hall on the way to the bull pen, he said to her, “I see the brave front, and we both know why. But just know I’m here, OK?”

Nikki wanted right then to indulge herself in a brief squeeze of his hand, but not at work. And Heat also knew it wouldn’t be wise to open the door to her vulnerability just yet. So that was it for sentiment. She nodded and said, “Let’s bring this home,” and pushed on into her squad room.

Detective Heat kept herself in motion, not giving anyone an opening to ask her about how she was doing. She became instead all about doing. Nikki knew she would have to deal with what she had experienced at some point, but not yet. And she reminded herself that, by the way, it was not she but Soleil Gray who had experienced the worst of it.

Detective Hinesburg, ever sensitive and empathic, turned from her computer monitor to ask Heat if she wanted to see the online pics of Soleil’s death scene from the Web edition of the
Ledger
. She didn’t. Fortunately, the pictures taken by the two paparazzi at the scene hadn’t surfaced yet. They were still being reviewed by investigators as corroborative evidence of the sequence of events. No doubt the moment-of-death shot would go up for bidding and be purchased by some British or German webloid for six figures. People would shake their heads in disgust and then surf to see if they had to register to see it.

Heat looked at the board, staring at Soleil’s name, hearing the plaintive echo of her voice before her death, lamenting “that night.” She called Ochoa’s cell phone and caught him en route back to the precinct. “I’m revisiting every loose connection I have here,” she told him, “and I can’t get past the missing limo manifest for the night of Wakefield’s death.”

“I’m with you,” said Ochoa, “but it’s sort of like that last chapter. As long as it’s missing, we can only guess.”

“Tell Raley to turn that Roach Coach around. I want you guys to go back to Spanish Harlem. Talk to the family again, the coworkers again. Maybe if you ask more specifically about Reed Wakefield something will kick loose. See if Padilla was in service that night and if he confided anything about what he saw or heard, even from the other drivers.”

Ochoa paused, and Nikki was afraid he was about to offer her some sort of condolence for her ordeal by the tracks. But he sighed and said, “We’ll do it, but I have to tell you, me and my partner have had a bitch of a day today. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

Yep. A gal could get misty.

It was not quite six, and Rook was sliding the strap of his messenger bag over his shoulder. “Knocking off early?” said Nikki.

“Got a text from my editor at
First Press
. Now that this Soleil business has kicked the story up to an international scale, they want me to file by tomorrow so they can get a rush edition into production.”

“So you’re going to go finish up the article?”

He laughed. “Hell no. I’m going to go start the article.”

“I thought that’s what you had been doing.”

“Shh.” He looked around conspiratorially and lowered his voice to a whisper. “So does my editor.” Then he added, “Call me later. If you want, you can come over for a beer or something.”

“You have a full night ahead of you, mister. You’ll be busy . . . with your toy helicopter and all. Besides, the sooner the new edition is on the newsstands, the sooner mine is off, so don’t let me slow you down.” He started to go, and as he went she said, “Hey, Rook?” He stopped. “I need to tell you how foolish you were following me like that today. First on the carrier and then with that paparazzo on the motorcycle. So first of all, never pull a stunt like that again. And second? Thanks for having my back.”

“Sorry and you’re welcome,” he said as he turned and left.

Roach waited before they got out of the car. They had cruised the block for a space, and when they passed Esteban Padilla’s old address, his cousin was just stepping out the front door. “Shall we reach out?” said Raley.

“Know what?” said his partner. “That dude’s just a buzz killer. Let’s hang back until he’s gone and see if the kid’s home. We’ll start with him.”

Twenty minutes later, Esteban Padilla’s buzz-killing cousin unlocked his front door and, as he stepped in, called out in Spanish, “Yo, Pablo, I’m back. You ready to roll?” Then he stopped short when he saw that the detectives were once again in his living room with Esteban’s teenage nephew.

“You taking some kind of trip, Victor?” asked Ochoa.

Victor gave Pablo a WTF look and the boy looked away.

“This is some nice luggage, man. Quality stuff, all brand-new. This is real Tumi, huh, not that knockoff crap.”

“Yeah, well, we’re taking some vacation time. Need to chill after the funeral and all,” said the cousin, not sounding very convincing, even to Raley, who didn’t speak the language.

“That’s a lot of luggage for just a vacation. How long you plan to be gone?” When the cousin just stood there with his door keys in one hand and a CVS bag in the other, Ochoa rose from his chair and walked the line of suitcases. “Let’s see, you’ve got two jumbo sizes here. A garment bag—I guess that’s for those new clothes we saw hanging on the door the other day. Another large suitcase. Three carry-ons . . . Homes, you are going to get so hit with baggage fees. And tips. You’re going to need to tip that skycap a ton to help with all this. That’s going to cost you, my friend. But you can handle that, I guess, right?”

Victor said nothing, just stared at a dead spot in the air somewhere between himself and Ochoa.

“Well, I think you can swing it no sweat. Tips, baggage fees . . . I bet you could even get a limo from your cousin’s old boss to drive you to the airport and it still wouldn’t make a dent. Not in this.” The detective nudged a small sport duffel with the toe of his shoe. The skin on Victor’s forehead tightened and his gaze slowly descended to the bag. The top zipper was wide open and the stacks of cash were visible.

“I told you to zip it,” Victor said to the boy.

Ochoa wanted to ask whether he meant his mouth or the duffel, but he didn’t want to ice the conversation. They had a lot to talk about.

Back at the precinct, Heat took a call from Raley, who told her about the carry-on of cash and that they were bringing Victor and Pablo in for questioning. She agreed that since the bag was open and in plain view, spotting the money likely obviated the need for a search warrant, but that he should consult the DA in case any charges came out of this. “How much cash was it?”

“Ninety-one thou.” Raley paused before he added, “In twenties.”

“Interesting number.”

“Yeah, and we ran a check, the cousin’s straight. No drug busts, no gambling or gang affiliations. That chunk of change smells like some sort of payoff that’s light by about nine thousand. My guess is it went to plane tickets, wardrobe, and luggage.”

“A hundred grand just doesn’t go as far as it used to, does it, Rales?”

He laughed. “Like I would know.”

When Heat hung up, she turned to find Sharon Hinesburg hovering around her desk. “We’ve got a customer coming.”

“Who?” Nikki figured it was too much to hope it would be the Texan, and she was correct.

“Morris Granville. The Toby Mills stalker? They picked him up in Chinatown trying to get on a Fung Wah bus to Boston. He’ll be here in thirty minutes. Or you don’t pay.” Hinesburg handed her Granville’s file.

“They’re bringing him here?” asked Heat. “Why not the Nineteenth Precinct or CPK? Central Park claimed turf on him, we’re just cooperating.”

“Except the arresting officers say the guy mentioned you specifically by name. He says he saw you in yesterday’s ‘Buzz Rush’ and has something he wants to talk to you about.”

“Know if he said what?”

Detective Hinesburg shook her head. “Maybe it’s a desperate attempt to bargain.” And then she chuckled. “Hey, I know. Now that you’re a big celebrity, maybe he wants to stalk you.”

“Hilarious,” said Nikki mirthlessly.

Oblivious as ever, Hinesburg said, “Thanks,” and moved on.

Nikki wondered if she should call Toby Mills’s manager, Jess Ripton, to notify him. Ripton had cooperated by providing photos and details about Granville, but the stalker’s specific request to see her was unusual enough to make Heat decide to see what that was about before inviting the brutish distraction of The Firewall into the mix. And to be truthful, she had to admit she was annoyed at the manager for being such a ballbuster every time they encountered each other. Making him wait an hour brought an undeniable passive-aggressive satisfaction she wasn’t proud of but could live with. Cops are human, too.

While she reviewed Morris Granville’s jacket to prepare for the interview, her phone rang. It was Petar.

“I heard that was you with Soleil Gray today and wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Holding up,” she said. The mental replay of the singer’s dive under the train spooled again in the sickening slow motion unique to traumas. Nikki tried to switch it off before the part with the blood on the white leotard but couldn’t. Then she realized Petar was asking her something. “I’m sorry, I missed that. What did you say?”

“I was asking if you wanted to get together on my dinner break.”

“Petar, you know, this may not be the best night.”

“I probably shouldn’t have called,” he said.

“No, it’s thoughtful of you, thanks. I’m just preoccupied. You can imagine.”

“OK then. I know you better than to push.”

“Smart boy.”

“Hey, if I were that smart, I would have learned that years ago. Anyway, I’m sorry you had to go through what you did today, Nikki. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“I did. But it was in her head to do this. Soleil had something she couldn’t live with and found her way to end the pain.”

“Did she say what?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Heat made it a practice never to discuss details of a case with anyone outside the squad, so she slid by it. “All I do know is there was nothing I could have done.” Saying it made her feel a little better, though she knew that if she really believed it, she’d stop the replay and the search for what she could have done differently.

“Nikki,” he said, “I know right now isn’t the time . . . but I want to . . . see you again.” The weight of that notion and the complication it brought was off the charts for her to even consider, especially after her day.

“Petar, listen—”

“Bad timing, sorry. See? I pushed it anyway. When will I learn?” He paused. “What about a coffee or something tomorrow?”

Across the room, Detective Hinesburg appeared in the doorway and gave her a beckoning nod. Nikki picked up Granville’s file. “Tomorrow . . . Yeah, maybe we could do that.”

“I’ll call you in the morning. In the meantime, please know that if you want to talk, I’m here for you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that.” After she hung up, she stared at her phone, feeling a little strange about his call and his pushing. Then Detective Heat cleared her head and strode off to Interrogation.