Frozen Heat (2012) (35 page)

She didn’t know which.

Somewhere behind her, Heat heard her name being called. She ran.

She didn’t know where.

Rubber squealed and a truck horn blasted. Defensively, Nikki put out her palms and touched the hot grill of a semi as it skidded to a stop. She stayed on her feet, but the jolt fractured the veneer of ice she was looking through enough for her to see how close she had come to getting hit by a truck.

Nikki turned and bolted through traffic on Columbus Avenue, running somewhere, anywhere.

Away.

A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback fronts the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History across from Central Park. Surrounding the famous bronze, a dozen titles listing the achievements of the great president are carved into the stone wall of the parapet: Ranchman, Scholar, Explorer, Scientist, Conservationist, Naturalist, Statesman, Author, Historian, Humanitarian, Soldier, and Patriot. Before these words sits a line of granite benches arranged for contemplation.

When Rook caught up with Heat, she was on the Statesman bench, doubled over, hyperventilating.

Nikki saw his shoes and pant legs before he spoke, and without raising her head, she just whispered, “Go.” He ignored that idea and sat on the bench beside her. Neither said anything for a time. She kept her face to the ground; he rested his palm on her back. It rose and fell with her breathing.

He reflected how, just a few short nights before, the two of them had held each other on the Pont Neuf in Paris while he’d contemplated the thick stone walls channeling the Seine. And Rook recalled wondering what would happen if one of them ever cracked.

Now he knew.

And he set about shoring up the damage.

“It’s not conclusive, you know,” he said as soon as her breathing leveled off. “It’s just a bank deposit. You can project the bad thing if you want, but sounds to me like you’d be breaking one of your own rules if you jumped to a conclusion without hard evidence. That’s my job.”

Not a chuckle from her, not even a scoff. Instead, she folded her arms across her knees and rested her forehead on them. Finally, she spoke. “I wonder if it’s worth it. Seriously, Rook, maybe I should just shut it down. The whole investigation. Leave the past in the past, keep all the bad stuff, I dunno … frozen in time.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“It’s not unthinkable, and that’s a first.” Nikki sighed and her breath hitched. Then in a small, plaintive voice, she said, “But then I keep telling myself I’m doing this for her.”

“Are you?”

“Why else?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’re doing it for yourself because you need to find out the part of her then that’s part of you now. That’s the best reason I can think of to keep going.” He paused and added, “Or you could just throw in the towel because it got difficult, like Carter Damon did.” Heat sat up and glowered at him. “Hey,” he said, “I’m pulling out all the stops here.”

“No kidding. Comparing me to that washout? Not too manipulative.”

“I have my moments.” He looked past her to the Teddy Roosevelt equestrian statue that loomed over Central Park West. “He was a force of nature, wasn’t he? Did you know he was once NYPD commissioner? They told him the department was hopelessly corrupt and lazy. TR turned it around in two years. You remind me of him. Although you’d have to work on the mustache.”

Nikki laughed. Then she grew pensive and stared deeply into him, seeing something there precious and infinite. Finally she stood. “Time to get back to work?”

“If you insist. And if you’re crazy enough to keep going, I’m crazy enough to follow.”

Algernon Barrett was the next name on the list of wealthy tutoring clients Nikki had gotten from the PI who’d tracked her mother, and when Heat pulled up to the gate of his business, she asked Rook if they had the wrong address. Located on a dead-end street of cement factories and auto scrap yards in the Bronx, Barrett’s Jamaican catering company, Do The Jerk, appeared anything but prosperous. “Know how they say not to judge a book by its cover?” asked Rook, stepping around weeds on their walk up the fractured walkway to the front entrance. “Do judge a caterer by his cockroaches.”

However, as they waited in the small lobby that seemed suited more to a car wash, Rook drifted to the windowed double doors giving onto the food preparation plant and said, “I take it back. You could eat off the floor in there and not be a rodent.”

They paced twenty long minutes before the receptionist answered a phone buzz and led them down a dingy, Masonite-paneled hall to the owner’s office. Algernon Barrett, a whip-skinny Jamaican with an impressive set of Manny Ramirez dreds cascading from under his knit cap, didn’t get up. He remained seated behind his massive desk, peering around an accumulation of spice bottles, unopened UPS cartons, and horse racing magazines scattered there, making no effort even to acknowledge them. In fact, with his designer sunglasses on, it was hard to tell if he was even awake. But his attorney certainly was. Helen Miksit, a former star prosecutor who had quit for private practice and carved an equally strong reputation on the opposite side of the aisle, sat in a folding chair beside her client. The Bulldog, as she was known, didn’t extend any courtesies, either.

“I wouldn’t bother sitting,” she said.

“Nice to see you again, too, Helen.” Nikki extended her hand, which the lawyer shook but without rising.

“Your first lie of the morning. Trying to remember the last time we crossed paths, Heat. Oh, right, the interrogation room. You were putting the pins to my client Soleil Gray. Right before you badgered her so much she killed herself.” That was untrue; they both knew the famous singer had jumped under that train in spite of Nikki’s words, not because of them. But the Bulldog was all about living up to the nickname, so to argue the point would only feed the beast.

In his own form of defiance, Rook grabbed two folding chairs that faced the big screen showing a cable poker tournament and swung them around for him and Nikki. “Whatever,” said Miksit.

“Mr. Barrett, I’m here to ask you some questions about the time that my mother, Cynthia Heat, was your daughter’s music tutor.”

The Bulldog crossed her legs and sat back. “Ask away, Detective. I’ve advised my client not to answer anything.”

“Why not, Mr. Barrett? Do you have something to hide?” Heat decided to press. With this attorney in the mix, niceties would be ignored and/or crushed.

He sat up in his chair. “No!”

“Algernon,” said Miksit. When he turned to her, she just shook her head. He sat back again. “Detective, if you want to know about Mr. Barrett’s top shelf line of Caribbean-inspired jerk rubs and marinades, great. If you want to inquire about franchising one of his Do The Jerk gourmet trucks, I can see you get an application.”

“That’s right,” he said. “See, I operate a profitable company and mind my own business, yeah.”

“Then why the expensive lawyer?” asked Heat. “You need protection for some reason?”

“Yes, he does. My client is a new citizen and wants the protection afforded every American from undue pressure by zealous police. We ‘bout done here?”

“My questions,” said Nikki, “are part of a homicide investigation. Would your client prefer to conduct this interview down at the precinct?”

“Your call, Heat. My meter runs the same wherever I am.”

Nikki sensed Barrett was hiding behind counsel because he had a volatile emotional side, and she tried to get a rise. “Mr. Barrett. I see you’ve been arrested for domestic violence.”

Barrett whipped off his glasses and sat bolt upright. “That was long ago.”

“Algernon,” said the Bulldog.

Heat pressed on. “You assaulted your live-in girlfriend.”

“That’s all been cleared up!” He tossed his glasses on the desk.

“Detective, do not harass my—”

“With a knife,” said Heat. “A kitchen knife.”

“Don’t say anything, Mr. Barrett.”

But he didn’t back down. “I did my anger management. I paid for her doctor. Got that bitch a new car.”

“Algernon, please,” said the lawyer.

“My mother was stabbed with a knife.”

“Come on. Things get crazy in the kitchen!”

“My mother was stabbed in her kitchen.”

Helen Miksit stood, towering over her client. “Shut your fucking mouth.”

Algernon Barrett froze with his jaw gaping and sat back in the chair, pulling on his shades. The Bulldog sat, too, and crossed her arms. “Unless you want to charge my client formally, this interview has concluded.”

Back in the car, they had to wait out the long convoy of Barrett’s gourmet trucks clearing the lot as they deployed for the streets of New York. Rook said, “Damn lawyer. That guy was going to be a talker.”

“Which is exactly why the lawyer. The too-bad part is that I wanted to try to pull some information out of him before I got to the knife, but she made me change it up.” With only one name remaining on the list of her mother’s clients, the elation Nikki had felt at scoring these leads began to feel like an unfulfilled promise.

“Well, it wasn’t a total loss,” said Rook. “During all the drama, I pocketed this jar of Do The Jerk Chicken Rub.” He pulled out the spice bottle and showed it off.

“That’s theft, you know.”

“Which will only make the chicken taste better.”

A half hour later, they’d just pulled off the Saw Mill Parkway on their way to Hastings-on-Hudson to visit the last person on the list when Heat got an excited call from Detective Rhymer. “It may not be anything, but it’s at least something.” He said it with just enough of his Southern roots coming through to make him indeed sound like Opie. “Remember sending me to IT to chase down whether Nicole Bernardin used Internet cloud storage?”

“Are you seriously asking if I’d forget having to autograph my magazine cover photo to, um … inspire them?”

“Well, it worked. They haven’t found a storage server yet, but one of my geeks had the idea of using the electronic fingerprint of her cell phone to track her mobile Internet searches through location services. Even though we never found her physical phone, they were able to backtrack her billing and dig out the address of her account. Don’t ask me how they do all this, but I’m sure it’s why they enjoy sitting alone in rooms day and night, touching themselves.”

“Rhymer.”

“Sorry. They managed to score one hit for a HopStop search she made.”

“What’s HopStop?”

“A website that gives you directions when you tell it where you want to go. It gives you subway, bus, taxi, and walking info, including distances and times. Am I making sense?”

“You could star on
Big Bang Theory
. What was she searching?”

“Directions to a restaurant on the Upper West Side.”

“When?”

“The night she was murdered.”

“Drop whatever you’re doing, Opie. Go now to that restaurant. Go right now and show her picture, learn everything you can.”

“Feller and I are en route as we speak.”

“If this pans out, I suppose I’ll owe IT, big time.”

Rhymer said, “Maybe a lipstick smooch to go under the autograph.”

“OK, now you’re creeping me out,” she said, then hung up.

As Heat turned off the rural two-lane, her tires crunched the long pebble drive leading to Vaja Nikoladze’s Victorian country house, and the sound of barking dogs rose from a kennel behind a stand of rhododendrons in the side pasture. She parked beside the blue hybrid, nosing up to the split-rail fence that separated the driveway from the back field. When they got out, Heat and Rook paused to admire the green sweep of meadow leading down toward the line of hardwoods whose foliage shimmered under the midday sun. They couldn’t see it, but between those trees and the cliffs of the Palisades just beyond, the Hudson River flowed.

Rook said, “Look out there where the field ends. Is that the most realistic scarecrow you’ve ever seen, or what?”

“I’m going with ‘or what?’ That’s no scarecrow. That’s a man.”

And, just as she said it, the stock-still figure in the distance began walking toward them. He moved steadily through the meadow, with a dancer’s grace and economy, in spite of his trail boots and heavy Carhartt jeans. The man never looked behind him or to the side. But they never had a sense he was looking at them, either, even though a broad smile cut across his face when he drew near. His hands, which he had been holding cupped in front of his belt buckle, as if in casual prayer, rose up to his chin and a single forefinger extended. He was signaling them to remain quiet.

When he was one yard away, Vaja Nikoladze stopped and whispered in an accent that sounded Russian to their ears. “One moment, if you please. I have her on a sit-stay.” Then he rotated. Turning his back to them to face the meadow, he raised one arm straight out to the side, held it there for five seconds, and then swung his palm swiftly to his chest.

The instant he did, a very large dog began bounding across the pasture to him at full speed. He held his place as the Georgian Shepherd, about the size and color of a small bear, charged at him. At the last moment, and without so much as a hand signal to command it, the dog stopped and dropped to an alert sit, her front paws aligned with the toes of his boots. “Good girl, Duda.” He bent to pet her broad face and scratch under her ears as her tail wagged. “Now, go to place.” Duda stood, turned, and trotted, cutting a straight line for the kennel, and went inside.