Naked Heat (10 page)

Nikki tried not to paint the picture before she got his answer. The one she saw was a married man trying to break it off, an argument got too heated, and so on. Once again, she went to training and listened instead of projecting.

“We weren’t having an affair.” His voice was weak and hollow. Nikki had to strain to hear him even in the quiet room.

“So that was your first . . . liaison?”

The chef seemed amused by a private thought. He said, “Sadly, no. It was not our first ‘liaison.’ ”

“You’re going to have to explain to me why you don’t call this an affair.”

The dead quiet that followed was broken by his lawyer. “Rich, I have to advise you not to—”

“No, I’m going to get this out now so they’ll see I didn’t kill her.” He settled down and then came out with it. “I was doing Cassidy Towne for one reason. I had to. I bought this new place right before the economy cratered. I had zero budget for advertising, suddenly people weren’t dining out, and if they were, they were skittish about new restaurants. I was desperate. So Cassidy . . . made a deal with me.” He paused again and muttered his pitiful, defining words. “Sex for ink.”

Heat reflected back on her Sardi’s experience with Rook’s mother. Apparently, Cassidy didn’t restrict herself to actors.

“You have to understand, I love my wife.” Nikki just listened. No sense telling him the hundreds of times she’s heard that, too, from husbands in that chair. “This wasn’t something I came up with. She caught me at a vulnerable time. I said no at first, and she just made it harder to refuse. Said if I loved my wife, I’d . . . sleep with her so we didn’t lose our investment. It was stupid. But I did it. I hated myself for it, and you know what’s crazy? She didn’t even seem into me. It was like she just wanted to prove she could make me do it.”

He paused and his face drained again, turning the color of an oyster. “Can’t you see? That’s why I had those guys steal the body. I woke up yesterday morning and my wife has the TV on and says, ‘Hey, somebody killed that gossip bitch.’ I thought, Holy Mother . . . I screwed her the night before, now she’s dead, and whose DNA are they going to find in her? Mine. So my wife will know I’ve been banging her? I panic, I’m trying to think, what can I do?

“This food supplier I work with has some connections to some wiseguys for hire, so I call him up and tell him he’s got to get me out of a jam. It cost me large, but I got the goddam body.”

“Wait, you did this because you were afraid your wife would find out about your relationship?” asked Nikki.

“People knew I was hanging around Cassidy. Your writer pal, for one. Only a matter of time till it came back and bit me, I thought. And Monique’s got all the money. I signed a prenup. I’m losing my ass in this economy, the new place is going down; if she cuts me off, next week I’m slinging sauce on ribs at Applebee’s.”

“So why have the body delivered to where you and your wife live?”

“My wife left yesterday for Philly to work publicity for the Food and Wine Festival. It was all I could think of until I could think of something better.” He grew somber after his outburst, the way people did when they’d unloaded their guilt. “Those dudes came by and shook me down for another fifty grand to dispose of her. I don’t have that, so they left her with me and told me to think fast.”

Nikki flipped to a fresh page of her notebook. “And what time do you claim you last saw Cassidy Towne alive?”

“I did see her alive. It was about ten-thirty. That’s when I left her apartment.”

Raley and Ochoa were off hunting for Cassidy Towne’s typewriter ribbons so when Heat wrapped Vergennes’s interrogation and he was led off to be processed for Riker’s, she assigned Detective Hinesburg to check out his alibi. The chef said he had paid for the cab home with a credit card around ten-thirty, so there would be a record with the card company and the taxi.

“Blast matrix?” said Rook from his old desk, which he had reclaimed across the bull pen.

Heat welcomed the half smile he was putting on her face, especially in the wake of her disappointment about Vergennes apparently alibi-ing out. She had the body but probably not the killer. “What, you’ve never heard of a blast matrix?”

“No,” he said, “but it didn’t take me long to figure out that was just a Heatism. Sort of like the Zoo Lockup, am I right? Some BS term you make up and sling out there to scare the ignorant into thinking there’s big trouble coming if they don’t comply.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Her desk phone rang and she picked it up.

He laughed. “The Heatisms always do.”

Nikki finished her call and asked Rook if he felt like a ride. Lauren Parry was ready with Cassidy Towne’s autopsy.

As they came into the precinct lobby on their way to the car, Richmond Vergennes’s lawyer was signing out. “Detective Heat?” Wynn Zanderhoof hurried to intercept her, toting his Zero Haliburton attaché, one of those aluminum cases you saw slick hit men and power-suited drug dealers using to carry bundles of cash in every eighties cop movie. “A word, please?”

They stopped at the glass door, and when the attorney just stood there, Nikki got the hint and asked Rook to wait for her at the car. When they were alone, the lawyer said, “You know a murder charge is going to get laughed out of the DA’s office.”

Heat didn’t believe Richmond Vergennes killed Cassidy Towne, but she couldn’t entirely rule it out yet and so was not about to let the pressure off. “Even if his alibi checks, that doesn’t mean he didn’t hire somebody to do it, just like he outsourced stealing the body.”

“True. And that’s good diligence on your part, Detective.” Zanderhoof smiled the kind of empty smile that made her want to check to make sure she still had her watch and her wallet. “But I’m sure your tenacity will also lead you, at some point, to ask yourself why, if my client had someone else kill her, he didn’t have them dispose of her remains then and there rather than suffer all the risk and attention caused by the incident on Second Avenue yesterday.”

He said “incident” in a downplaying way, already jockeying to have charges reduced. Fine, that was his job. Hers was to catch a killer. And as much as she didn’t like being jawboned, she had to concede his point. She had as much as arrived at that conclusion herself staring at the time line on the whiteboard not three minutes before. “We’ll follow this investigation wherever it leads, Mr. Zanderhoof,” she said, giving no ground. No reason to until the chef was entirely ruled out. “The fact remains, your client is up to his neck in this, starting with his affair with my murder victim.”

The lawyer chuckled. “Affair? This was no affair.”

“Then what was it?”

“A business arrangement, simple as that.” He looked through the glass at Rook, leaning on the fender of the Crown Vic, and when he was sure Nikki registered that, his eyes narrowed into a smile she didn’t like and he said, “Cassidy Towne was trading sex for print. She certainly wouldn’t be the first woman to do that, now, would she, Nikki Heat?”

“You’re being awfully quiet.” Rook twisted himself sideways in his seat to face her as best he could, given the seat belt and the radio gear between their knees. It was never an easy trip from the Upper West Side to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner down near Bellevue, and since they had hit the meat of rush hour, it was taking forever. It probably seemed longer than forever to Rook because Heat seemed far away in her thoughts. No, more than that, her vibe was brittle.

“Sometimes I like the quiet, OK?”

“Sure, no problem.” He let exactly three seconds pass before he broke the silence. “If you’re bumming about Chef Vergennes not being the killer, look at the glass-half-full part, Nikki. We got the body back. Did Montrose say anything?”

“Oh, yeah, Cap’s plenty happy. At least the tabloids won’t be putting pictures of magicians and disappearing bodies on their covers tomorrow.”

“Guess we can thank Fat Tommy for that, can’t we?” He searched her for a reaction, but she steadied her focus on traffic, seeming especially interested in anything that was going on out the opposite window from him. “And I’m not trying to claim credit because he was my source. I’m just saying.”

Nikki nodded imperceptibly and went back to studying her side mirror like she was somewhere else. Somewhere that didn’t feel so comfortable if you were Jameson Rook.

He tried another approach to connect with her. “Hey, I liked that line you hit them with back there in Interrogation. You know, the one about what did they have to offer except a complimentary dessert?” Rook chuckled. “Pure Heat. That’s going in the article, for sure. That and blast matrix.”

Nikki did engage, but not how he’d expected. “No,” she added sharply, “no.” Then she checked the side mirror and jerked the wheel, bringing the car to a lurching stop that made everything on the backseat slide off onto the floor. She didn’t care. “What the hell do I have to do to get through to you?” She poked her finger in the air, punctuating her words with a stab. “I do not, do
not
, want to be in your article. I do not want to be named, quoted, pictured, or so much as alluded to in your next or any other article. And further, since we seem to have hit a dead end in terms of your so-called secret journalistic sources and insights, I’m thinking this is our last ride. Call the Captain, call the mayor if you want to, I have had it.
No más
. Now do you understand?”

He studied her a beat and grew quiet.

Before he could say anything more, Heat pulled back onto the road and punched Lauren Parry on her speed dial. “Hi, we’re two blocks away. . . . Good, see you then.”

Between the stoplight and the OCME garage Nikki had second thoughts. Not about her feelings regarding the article and the myriad ways it was screwing with her life. But she worried she’d blistered Rook too much. She could rationalize it, just chalk it up to being pissed after the cheap shot from the slimebag Wynn Zanderhoof, but still, she could have handled Rook a little more deftly and at the same time made her point. She snuck a look at him as he watched the road in wounded silence. A picture memory came to her of Rook sitting right there in that very seat on so many rides, making her laugh the way he did—and then another glimpse of him, sitting there that night in the rainstorm when they couldn’t get enough of each other so they spent the night trying. Heat grappled with an overwhelming twinge of regret for losing it with him.

Nikki had no problem being tough. She couldn’t abide being mean.

They had the elevator to themselves on the ride up from the second basement parking level, and it was there that she tried to soften her message to him. “This isn’t anything about you, Rook, just so you know. It’s the whole publicity thing, of having my name and face out there. I kind of have had it with that.”

“I think I got your message loud and clear in the car.”

Before she could respond, the doors parted and the elevator filled with lab coats and the moment was lost.

“Hey, there, I’m all set for you,” said Lauren Parry as they entered the Autopsy Room. As usual, even behind a surgical mask, you could see her smile. “We did some shuffling to get this workup for you STAT, knowing it’s a priority and all.”

Heat and Rook finished gloving up and came around to the stainless-steel table that held Cassidy Towne’s remains. “I appreciate that, Lauren,” said Nikki. “I know how every detective wants it like yesterday, so thanks.”

“No problem. I have a bit of a personal interest in this one, too, you know.”

“Oh, right,” said Heat. “How’s the noggin?”

“Hey, I’m hardheaded, everybody knows that. How else does a girl get from the St. Louis projects to all this?” She said it without irony. Lauren Parry lived for her job and it showed. “Nikki, you e-mailed that you wanted a best-earliest TOD, right?”

“Yeah, we have a potential suspect. We just confirmed his taxi ride, so he alibis out at ten-forty-five.”

“No way,” said the ME. She picked up a chart. “Now, you have to understand this was made a more challenging task because the body had been through a lot. Movement, handling . . .”
S
he looked at Rook and added, “refrigeration. All that made it harder to establish our TOD, but I did it. This was more like the three
A.M.
range, so cross your ten-forty-five off. Is this the chef who had us jacked?” When her friend nodded, Lauren said, “Well, too bad, but cross him off anyway.”

Nikki turned to share a we-figured shrug with Rook, but he wasn’t paying attention. She studied him for a few gloomy seconds in the chilly room, felt the after-pain of her outburst, and had to be drawn back by Lauren. “Hello?”

“Oh, sorry. So, three
A.M.,
right.”

“Or later, could be a two-hour window after then. Now I’ll give you the usual disclaimer that we’re still running toxicology, and blah, blah.” She paused and turned to Rook. “Isn’t this where you usually say if erections last over four hours, call your doctor?”

“Right,” he said flatly.

For a medical examiner, Lauren Parry was a people person. She turned from Rook to give Nikki a what’s-up? look. She gave nothing back to Lauren, so the ME continued on. “Tox report notwithstanding, I’m still going with the stab wound as COD. But check it out, I have a few things to show you.” Lauren beckoned, and Heat followed her around to the other side of the body. “Our deceased was tortured before she died.”

Rook came out of his haze and strode to join the other two for a look. “See here on the forearm?” Lauren drew aside the sheet to expose one of Cassidy Towne’s arms. “Discoloration from contusion and uniform loss of hair along two matching strips at the forearm and wrist.”

“Duct tape,” guessed Rook.

“That’s right. I didn’t catch it at the scene because of the long sleeves she was wearing. The killer not only removed the tape when he was done, but pulled the cuffs down. Thorough job, detail-oriented. As for the tape itself, adhesive residue is at the lab now. Over the counter everywhere, so good luck matching it, but you never know.” The ME used a stick pen to indicate points along the body template on her chart. “Taping was on both arms and both ankles. I already called Forensics. Sure enough, the chair tested positive for residue as well.”