Naked Heat (28 page)

“Hang on, just reading this e-mail from Hinesburg. It’s a forward from Hard Line Security of the list of the Texan’s old freelance clients.” She continued to scan and then stopped.

“Whatcha got?” said Roach.

“One of his clients? Sistah Strife.”

“Should that mean something?” asked Raley.

“It sure does. It means Rance Eugene Wolf and Jess Ripton both worked together for Sistah Strife.”

As Raley and Ochoa departed, Heat called in to elevate the search status for Jess Ripton to an APB with an alert that his known associate was a professional killer. Spent and aching from the ordeal of her day, she got into her Crown Victoria and felt her body begin to melt into the driver’s seat from fatigue. Tired as she was, she felt bad for Rook that, in his journalistic diligence, he had to miss the Toby takedown. She tried his cell phone one more time to fill him in.

The iPhone sitting on Rook’s desk sounded with Nikki Heat’s ringtone, the theme from
Dragnet
. The writer sat and stared at it from his chair as it continued to loop its ominous “Dum-dah-dum-dum . . . Dum-dah-dum-dum . . .” The screen header he had entered for her flashed “The Heat,” and her ID badge photo filled the screen.

But Rook didn’t answer the call. When it finally stopped ringing, a melancholy swept over him as her image faded and the screen went blank. Then he shifted uncomfortably against the duct tape lashing his wrists to the armrests.

Chapter Nineteen

“
Y
ou’ve got to be one smart aleck putting something like that on your phone,” drawled the Texan.

“If you don’t like it, cut me loose and I’ll change it,” said Rook.

Jess Ripton turned from the bookcase he was searching. “Can you button it?”

“I can tape his trap if you want, Jess.”

“Then how’s he going to tell us where it is?”

“Yes, sir, I hear you,” said the Texan. “Just say the word, though.”

Jess Ripton and Rance Eugene Wolf continued tossing Rook’s loft in another search for the last chapter of Cassidy Towne’s manuscript. Across the room, The Firewall was on his knees looking through a built-in that housed DVDs and even some dinosaur VHS tapes that Rook no longer had a machine to play. Ripton clawed them all out of the cabinet onto the floor. When it was empty, he turned to Wolf. “You’re absolutely sure you saw him with it?”

“Yes, sir. Got out of the cab and came up with a manila envelope. Same one he brought out of the mail drop.”

“You were following me?” said Rook. “How long were you following me?”

Wolf smiled. “Long enough, I figure. Not hard to do. ’Specially if you don’t know you’re being tailed.” He stepped around behind the desk, moving without registering any discomfort, which Rook attributed to heavy painkillers, a high threshold of tolerance, or both. He was dressed in new blue jeans that were tight on his lean frame and a Western-style shirt that had pearl buttons. Wolf had accessorized with a sheathed knuckle knife on his belt and an arm sling that looked like it was from a hospital supply store. Rook also clocked a .25 caliber handgun, holstered on the small of his back, when he turned to clothesline everything but the laptop off of Rook’s desk with his good arm. Every item he and Nikki had so painstakingly replaced there—his pencil cup, framed photos, stapler, tape dispenser, copter controller, even his cell phone, hit the rug around his feet.

The Texan then spun the laptop to face him and leaned over to read the draft of Rook’s Cassidy Towne article.

Ripton got up off the floor. “Where is it, Rook? The envelope.”

“It was from Publishers Clearing House. You wouldn’t be interes—” The Texan smacked Rook’s mouth with the back of his hand, hard enough to whiplash his neck. Dazed, Rook squeezed his eyes closed a few times and saw kaleidoscoping pinpricks of light. He tasted his own blood and smelled Old Spice. As he came out of his haze, the most disturbing thing to Rook wasn’t just the surprise, the quick uncoiling of the violence. What chilled him to the core was that Wolf then went back to reading his computer screen as if nothing had happened.

For a time, Rook sat in silence while Jess Ripton continued ripping apart his office and the Texan scrolled through his article an arm’s length away. When Wolf finished, he said to Ripton, “None of the information that would be in that chapter is in here.”

“Information about what?” said Rook. When the Texan snapped down the lid of the computer, he flinched.

“You know perfectly well what,” said Ripton. He surveyed the mess on the floor and bent over, coming up with the unfinished Cassidy Towne manuscript her editor had supplied. “What’s written in the rest of this.” He tossed it on the desk in a discarding motion, and the fat rubber band holding it together broke, scattering pages.

“I never got it. Cassidy was holding it back from the publisher.”

“We know,” said Wolf casually. “She shared that with us a couple of nights back.”

Rook didn’t have to think hard to imagine the ghastly circumstances of that confession. He pictured the woman strapped to a chair, being tortured, giving only that much up to them before they killed her. He reflected on how her last act was so in character with her life—the power play of giving them the assurance that there was something valuable they wanted, and then denying it to them, taking its whereabouts to her grave.

Ripton signaled Wolf with a head nod. The Texan stepped out of the room and came back in with an old-fashioned black leather physician’s satchel. It was weathered and embossed with a caduceus stamped with a “V.” Rook remembered the FBI report on Wolf, whose father had been a veterinarian. And that the son liked to torture animals.

“I told you I don’t have it.”

Jess Ripton squinted at him like he was mulling which of two shirts to buy. “You have it.”

Wolf set the satchel on the desk. “A little help?” He couldn’t manage the buckle one-handed, and Ripton gave him an assist. “Obliged.”

“You just read my article. If I had it, wouldn’t the information you want—whatever it is—be in there? How do you prove a negative?”

“I’ll tell you how, Mr. Rook.” Ripton touched his forefinger to his lips as he chose his words, and then continued. “In fact, I can prove you have it by negatives. One, actually. Ready?”

Rook didn’t answer. He just made a fast check of the Texan, who was placing his dental picks in a tidy row on the desktop.

“The negative is as follows. In all the time since my associate and I got here, you never asked one simple question.” The Firewall paused for effect. “You never once asked what I was doing here.” A burning sensation grew in Rook’s gut as the handler continued. “I never got a ‘Hey, Jess Ripton, I know this cowboy is involved in all this, but you? You’re Toby Mills’s guy. What the hell does Toby Mills have to do with all this?’ Am I right? You not asking that is what I call negative proof.”

Rook’s head raced to cover his omission. “That? Well, that’s simple. We talked to you a couple of times on this case, of course I wasn’t surprised.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence, Rook. When you and your lady cop checked out Toby, you were fishing with no bait. He was just a name on your list. And you certainly never had anything to connect Toby, ergo me, with Slim here.” He waited, but Rook said nothing. “So by not asking, that tells me you know damn well why I am here and what happened that night with Toby and Reed Wakefield. And I want to know where the chapter is that told you that story.”

“I already said I don’t have it.”

“Now, see, you think you’re being smart,” said Jess. “You think the only thing keeping you alive is that if we kill you, you can’t tell us where that chapter is. But, see, here’s the thing. In a couple minutes, my friend here is going to get you to tell us anyway. And in between . . . ? You’re going to wish you were dead.” He turned to Wolf. “Do your thing. I’ll go check the bedroom.” He went to the doorway and stopped. “Nothing personal, Rook. Given the choice, I don’t need to see this.”

When he left, Rook struggled against his bonds, bucking in the chair.

“Not gonna help, buddy,” said the Texan as he picked up one of his dental tools.

Rook felt something tear near his ankle. He pushed harder and succeeded in ripping one of his legs free of the duct tape. He slammed his foot onto the floor under his desk and shoved off, trying to jam the chair into Wolf. But the man was quick and snatched him in a choke hold with his left arm, trapping Rook’s neck in a vise grip between his jaw and his armpit. Wolf still held the dental tool in his left hand, and slowly, trying to keep it steady against Rook’s struggling and kicking, he began to curve his wrist inward toward Rook’s head. Just as Rook began to feel a sharp graze on the outer rim of his ear canal, he tried another tactic. Instead of pushing back against his assailant, he quickly reversed and threw his torso forward with desperate force.

The dental pick skittered across the blotter, and for the moment, Rook’s move worked. The momentum tossed Wolf forward onto the edge of the desk. He landed on his wounded right shoulder and cried out in pain, clutching his collarbone.

The man sat down on the floor, panting like a dog in August. Rook tried to push himself away from between his desk and the wall, but the chair rollers were speed-bumped by debris on the floor. He had started kicking harder, in a futile attempt to get over a three-hole punch and his radio controller, when the Texan rose up to examine the quarter-sized circle of blood ghosting through the shoulder of his shirt. He looked from his reopened wound over to Rook and whispered a curse. Then he balled a fist hard enough to turn the knuckle skin white and drew back his arm to hit him.

“Freeze it there, Wolf.” Nikki Heat stood in the doorway, holding her Sig Sauer on the Texan.

Rook said, “Nikki, careful, Jess Ripton is—”

“Right here,” he said as his arm reached in from the hall and he placed the muzzle of his Glock against her temple. “Let it fall, Detective.”

Heat had no alternative. With a literal gun to her head, she saw no option but to comply. There was an easy chair between her and the fireplace, and she tossed her gun onto the cushion, hoping to keep it close by.

When Rook hadn’t answered his phone the second time, her suspicion had grown and she couldn’t shake it. She had never known him not to return a call, and Nikki couldn’t get past the concern that there was a disturbance in the Rook Force. Ribbing aside about showing up unannounced, she decided that was exactly what she would do. If it was awkward, let it be awkward. Nikki decided she would rather deal with that than light up the radar with a door buzz if her worries were founded.

After ringing the super downstairs and getting the key, Heat took the stairs rather than the elevator, mindful of the racket it made when it braked at Rook’s floor. When she got up there, she put her ear to his front door. That’s when she heard the scuffle in the distant reaches of the loft. Normally, she would have followed procedure and taken time to call for backup before she went in, but Nikki’s fears for Rook were already spiking and it sounded like time was of the essence. She used the key to let herself in.

And now, for the second time in a week, Heat found herself in Rook’s place, in crisis, looking for an opportunity to turn the situation around. As she watched the Texan reach behind to the small of his back and come up with a .25-caliber Beretta, she began reciting her mantra: Assess. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

“Move into the room,” said Ripton. He gave her a slight nudge away from the easy chair with the Glock. Heat made note that it was the soft push of an amateur. She wasn’t sure what to do with that impression other than to underscore her conclusion that between the two, if she ever got the chance, Wolf got her first bullet.

“I’ve got backup, you know. You’re not getting out of here.”

“Really?” Since Wolf had her covered with his gun, Ripton stepped to the door and shouted up the hall toward the front door, “Come on in, everybody!” Then he cupped an ear to listen. “Huh . . .”

Nikki’s heart sank when Ripton went to the easy chair and picked up her Sig. She watched the handler slip it into his waistband and then she turned to Rook. “How are you doing, OK?” He was staring down at the floor under his desk, fidgeting. “Rook?”

“Sorry, cramp. You’ll pardon me if I don’t get up.”

Wolf spoke. “You know, Jess, maybe now’s the time to pull the pin.”

Before Ripton could answer, Nikki went for a stall. “We’ve arrested Toby Mills, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.” He appraised her a beat. “What for?”

“You know.”

“You tell me.”

Now it was her turn to do some appraisal. Why was Ripton pushing her to answer first? It felt to her like poker games she had been in when it comes down to who’s going to be first to show the hand. Translation: He wanted her to reveal what she knew—because he was wondering how much she knew. So Nikki gave up as little as she could in order to keep conversation going and buy time. “Your client was booked for the confession he made about what happened the night Reed Wakefield OD’d at the Dragonfly.”

The Firewall nodded slightly to himself. “Interesting.”

“Interesting?” she said. “That’s all you’ve got to say about what you’ve done? ‘
I
nteresting’? Sooner or later it’s going to come out that Toby had you guys kill the story by killing everyone who knew it, and all of you are going to take the weight.”

The ballbuster in Jess Ripton kicked in. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t? I have his confession saying that he and Soleil Gray were there when Wakefield overdosed. Your client gave him the drugs. You snuck Toby out of there. And my take is that when the hush money wasn’t enough to keep a lid on this, Toby Mills had you kill the concierge and the limo driver because they were tipping off Cassidy Towne. Who he also had you kill. Tracks for me.”

“They’ll never make a connection for one simple reason,” said Ripton. “Toby Mills had nothing to do with those killings. He doesn’t even know I’m involved in all that.”

“Sounds like you’re making a confession,” said Heat.

He shrugged, and in it conveyed his certainty that whatever he said would never go beyond Rook’s office. “Truly. Toby doesn’t know. He still doesn’t even know about Cassidy Towne’s book. Or the leaks and the spying by that limo driver and the concierge. All Toby knows is he has a dirty little secret to keep about a party that got out of control.”

“Come on, Ripton, I don’t think this is the time to be doing your spin. Not after you’ve killed three people just to save your client’s precious endorsement deals.”

Wolf was getting anxious to go. “Jess? Ready?”

Rook blurted, “That’s not why they killed them.” He made a quick glance down at his foot and then looked up again at Nikki. “They didn’t kill those people to protect Toby Mills’s image. They killed them to cover up the fact that Reed Wakefield’s death was not accidental—it was murder.”

Heat was taken aback. She had no idea Rook could be so good with a bluff. But then she was floored again because his expression told Nikki he wasn’t bluffing. She turned to assess the reactions of Jess Ripton and Rance Wolf. They weren’t disagreeing with what he’d said.

“So you
do
have the last chapter,” said Ripton. He took a step closer to the desk. “You wouldn’t know about the murder unless you did.”

Rook shrugged. “I’ve read it.”

“Murder? How is it murder?” said Nikki. “In Toby’s confession he said it was an accidental overdose.”

“Because Toby still believes it was,” answered Rook. “Because Toby and Soleil didn’t know it, but Reed Wakefield was still alive when they left that hotel room.” Rook punctuated the point by glaring at Ripton. “Right Jess? Then you and Tex here killed him.”