Frozen Heat (2012) (25 page)

“Right before, I can’t say. I had been away at college. But she had meetings at unusual hours a lot. It became kind of a sore subject in our home.”

“Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.” He looked thoughtful and asked, “Did you see her try to hide something, or did you come across a key that didn’t fit anything, did she get a new storage locker, anything like that?”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t notice.”

Rook joined in. “When you say someone burned her, do you mean one of her patrons, a family she was spying on, or another spy who wanted what she had?”

“All of the above. When things turn, anyone can come at you from any direction.”

The potential connection Heat had been brooding over could wait no longer. “You mentioned Nicole Bernardin. Is it possible she turned on her and did this?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No. Absolutely out of the question. Nicole loved Cindy. They were like sisters. Nicole Bernardin would die for your mother. Talk to her yourself, you’ll see.” And then he read something on their faces. “What?”

“Tyler, I am sorry to have to tell you this,” said Nikki. “Nicole is dead.”

His eyes flashed wide and his jaw fell. “Nicole …? Dead?”

“She was also murdered.”

“No.”

Heat grew alarmed at his growing distress. “Maybe we should discuss this later.” She started from her chair.

“No, tell me, tell me now.” He struggled to get himself up on an elbow. “Don’t go, tell me. I need to know.”

“All right, but please, settle back.”

He didn’t. Wynn’s shock and disbelief got swept away in rage. “Who killed her? How? When?”

“Tyler, please,” said Nikki. She moved closer to rest a hand on him, and Rook came around the other side of the bed to ease him back onto his pillows. He complied and seemed outwardly more calm, although his breathing remained labored.

“Just tell me. I’m fine. See?” He smiled a disconnected smile and dropped it. “Fair trade. I opened up for you.”

Heat said, “Nicole was stabbed to death last week in New York City. The day after your attack.”

Tyler Wynn squeezed both eyes shut in a full-face wince. “No …” he rasped and wagged his head deliriously on the pillow. Then his eyes shot open and he coughed. Between coughs he said, “No … They’re … still … after it.”

“You have to keep yourself calm now,” said Rook. And then to Nikki, “Which one’s the nurse call button?”

“No, not Nicole, too!” hollered Wynn, bolting up on his elbow again, gasping, the whites of his eyes visible around frantically darting pupils. The cadence of the heart rate monitor began to increase.

“I’m getting the guard,” said Nikki, but when she turned, the drape billowed as the door opened and a nurse entered.

Upon seeing the patient, she hurried to him. Heat and Rook stepped back, letting her go to work, but even as the nurse attended him, Wynn moaned hoarsely and drifted backward, holding his chest. The audio alarm screeched on the monitor and the green electronic display of his heart rate spiked and fell erratically even as it gained tempo. The nurse pushed a call button.
“Code bleu, salle deux-zero-trois, rapidement. Code bleu, salle deux-zero-trois.”

Urgent voices and the sound of small rubber wheels skittering on linoleum drew closer. An arm reached out to claw the privacy drape aside. The cardiac team rushed in, a doctor and a nurse pushing the crash cart. The arriving nurse gestured an arm sweep at Heat and Rook indicating they should stay back where they stood against the window.
“Reculez vous, s’eloignier.”

The two of them stayed there, hugging the wall as the medical staff responded to the emergency. The doctor checked vitals. “
Vingt cent joules
,” he said. The cardiac nurse threw switches and twisted a dial on the cart. They heard an ascending, barely audible tone signaling the charging of the defibrillator paddles. In a measured voice, the doctor said, “
Au loin
.” All stood clear of the patient as the jolt was delivered to his chest. Tyler’s entire body bounced on the mattress.

Rook kept a fixed grimace, the proximity of this event to his own mortality episode hitting home. Beside him Nikki whispered, “Come on,” and then, when the screen flatlined and the signature monotone of no heart activity filled the room, she urged him again. “Come on, Tyler, come on.”

But the flatline tone continued stubbornly. The doctor ordered more joules of electricity.
“Au loin.”
The team cleared. Tyler jerked on the mattress again. Nikki watched the tiny screen for any spike in the green line. Nothing.

Another shock was administered to his chest. The medical team didn’t talk, but their eyes spoke of diminishing hope. Heat realized her fingernails were digging into her palms and unballed her fists. The doctor increased the joules again, but the next shot did nothing. As did the one after that.

Heat and Rook looked on sadly and helplessly as the man they had just met and were growing to like remained unresponsive, with the key answers to Heat’s most significant questions locked inside the head he had so playfully finger-tapped just minutes before.

Following multiple attempts, first the doctor, then his team, glanced up at the wall clock. The doc wrote down the exact time. One nurse switched off the defibrillator and wound the cords of the paddles. The other reached out for the heart monitor and flipped down a toggle.

The piercing tone ceased and the flatline disappeared, leaving behind a green, horizontal ghost fading from the screen. The nurse regarded Heat and Rook sympathetically, no translation needed. Then she turned to cover the corpse of Tyler Wynn.

Slowly, delicately, the nurse drew the sheet over him. For Nikki, it felt like the steel door to a vault slamming in her face.

“It seems that Paris is also the City of Lights Out,” said Rook as they got into their taxi outside the hospital.

“Nice. Mr. Sensitivity strikes again.”

“What? I didn’t kill him. You did. You killed him.”

“Would you please stop saying that?”

“But you did. You killed Uncle Tyler.” He arched a brow at her. “I hope you’re happy now.”

Heat turned away and stared out her window at the grove of blooming horse chestnuts across the highway in Bois de Boulogne. The smooth acceleration of the Mercedes pulling onto the A-13 back to Paris created the illusion that it was not the car that was in motion but the flowering orchard of trees with their sunlit white blossoms seeming to roll past her like radiant spring clouds.

Of course she hadn’t killed Tyler Wynn.

Of course part of her thought she had. The nag of responsibility tugged at her. She envisioned some Notre Dame gargoyle coming to life, and could hear its devilish voice rasping, “He died because of your visit. It was too much for him. You should have ignored the old man when he begged for more.” The plainclothes detective who had arrived at Hopital Canard to interview her in the aftermath had dismissed that notion. Naturally, he asked her what had transpired before the cardiac arrest, and Heat, avoiding specifics about her mother, shared the detective-to-detective version: Tyler Wynn knew the victims of two murders she was investigating. He engaged voluntarily, which the uniform on post had corroborated. When Wynn started showing agitation, she had tried to break it off, but that made him even more upset, so she thought the better course was to give him the information he pleaded for and then end the interview, ASAP.

“Who knew?” the French inspector said with a shrug, and handed back her credentials. “I have already spoken to the doctor, who says it was not your visit but three bullets and something called aortic valve stenosis that killed Tyler Wynn.”

But Rook picked on her. Why? Because he knew Nikki well enough to short-circuit her guilt reflex with false scorn. One of the first things he had picked up on his ride-along the summer before was how cops deal with emotion by going against it with sarcasm. The first thing he had said to her after he came out of his recent coma was how pissed he was for not catching the bullet in his teeth, like the superhero he was, and spitting it back at the bad guy. Now, in the back seat of the E-320, Rook was lightening her up by accusing her with his tongue firmly in his cheek.

On the Avenue de New York they passed by the Alma Tunnel, and as Heat gazed at the perennial scattering of bouquets and melted candles offered in memory of the princess who met her fate there, she ruminated on secrets—especially the ones that died with those who were privy to them. Her reflection brought her to remind herself that in her world, every event had a cause, and coincidence was simply cause and effect, in hiding.

Until she exposed it.

The death of Tyler Wynn was, foremost, a tragedy for him and, for her, one too many deaths to witness in one week. Beyond that, its acutely untimely nature sealed a door that had only half opened to Nikki. Fulfilling the cruelest—and truest—definition of the word “tantalizing,” Heat had learned just enough to torment her about everything else that remained out of reach.

Rook said, “I guess my wack job conspiracy theories aren’t so wack, after all.”

“Listen, pal, before you spike the ball and do your end zone salsa dance, may I remind you of what they say about broken clocks?”

“You mean that they’re not only right? But beautifully right twice a day?”

“Oh, please.”

“Riiight. That’s such a refreshing word, isn’t it? Come on, Detective, admit it. I called it. Uncle Tyler was a spy.” The driver’s eyes suddenly appeared in his rearview. Rook leaned forward, playing with him just like he goofed with cabbies in New York. “Tell her to admit it.” The driver averted his gaze and quickly adjusted his mirror so all they could see was the widow’s peak of his jet-black hair.

Rook slid back and shifted in the seat to face her. “I don’t get the gloom, Nikki. Especially now. This is definitely a glass-half-full moment—unless, of course, you’re Tyler Wynn.” He observed a brief pause to acknowledge him but then got right back to it. “Look at all the answers you got this morning. I’d think you’d be ecstatic to learn that not only wasn’t your mom’s double life just your imagination, but it wasn’t because she was having an affair. And—how cool is this?—she was a spy in the family like Arnold in
True Lies
. No, even better: Cindy Heat was like Julia Child in World War Two when she spied for the OSS.”

“I agree, that is something.”

“Damn right. The way I see it, we did Dickens one better. Paris gave us a tale of two Cindys.”

This time it was Nikki who scooted up to the driver. “You want to put him out right here?”

Across the Atlantic, New York had awakened for its day by the time they got back to their hotel, and Nikki worked her phone while Rook hit the streets to forage for lunch. Detective Ochoa took her call solo. His partner Raley was tied up checking on one of the dozens of anonymous tips the squad had received since Hinesburg’s leak to the
Ledger
. “It sucks, I gotta tell you,” he said. “We have enough legitimate stuff to check out on our own, but since this hit the media, we’re choking on tip pollution. That article slowed the whole case down.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Miguel.”

“I know, but you’re in Paris with Rook and I want to do what I can to screw with your good time. Hey, maybe I can get Irons to bench me, then Lauren and I can go somewhere fun. There’s an Elvis convention in Atlantic City. I could rock my whole Elvez gig.”

“Well, before you put on your gold lame jumpsuit, I need you to check something out for me.” She swore him to silence, then gave him the short version of Tyler Wynn’s connection to her mother and Nicole. After Ochoa muttered his third “Fuuuck …,” she said, “Wynn’s shooting came the night before Nicole’s murder. I want you to get on Customs and the airlines for names of passengers arriving from the Paris airports to JFK or Newark last Wednesday. Don’t forget connections through London and Frankfurt, and wherever. Run the manifests through the database for any names that are on the watch list or show priors for assault or weapons busts. Do the same with Interpol.”

“You think it could be the same killer?”

“I don’t know what I think, but if there’s any chance it was a hit by one person, it’s worth clearing. I don’t love the different MO, but he may have used a knife on Nicole because he couldn’t travel with a gun.”

“Yeah, and a gun is so hard to find in New York,” said Detective Ochoa. “But I’ll get rolling on it.” He cleared his throat and said, “Now I guess it’s on me to tell you some not so good news.”

“Let’s have it.”

“It’s the glove.”

“No fingerprints?”

“Worse. No glove.”

“What?”

“Captain Irons just called in from the lab. He went there this morning to bang on doors for results, and somehow, it got lost.” The vacuum of silence on her end was so complete he said, “Detective Heat, you still there?”

All she said was “Somehow?”

Rook said, “Somehow?” with the same shading of disbelief when he got back to the room and she told him about it. “I don’t think somehow is the reason. I think it’s more like someone.”

“And he’s off.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because I knew this would propel you into Area Fifty-one. Rook, for once, can you try doing what I do for a living and deal in hard facts instead of indulging in wild speculation?”