Driving Heat by Richard Castle
Stallings escorted them to the second bedroom, which was King’s office on one side and Stallings’s painting studio on the other, and which smelled pleasantly of resin and oil paint. At the desk, he reached to open a wooden Levenger box, but Heat stopped him and gestured to the RIPSD detective, who was already wearing gloves. He lifted the lid. The box was empty.
“He kept a dozen or more thumb drives in there,” Stallings said. He surveyed the desktop. “His iPad Mini’s missing, too, now that I really look.”
“Our lab will dust soon as they get here,” said the detective. “And ask Mr. Stallings to write up a methodical inventory.”
Stallings drew his brow low, trying to digest the concept. “Why would someone be watching this place, our routine, coming in here? He was the man who killed Lonnie, wasn’t he?”
“Mr. Stallings, is this the man who was in your apartment?” Heat brought up Maloney’s pic on her BlackBerry and held it out for him to study. The RIPSD detective moved closer to shoulder-surf it.
“No, definitely not him.” But when Nikki started to take her phone away, he said, “Wait, wait.” He examined the picture again and handed it back. “I have seen him, though. Lonnie and I went out for duck last week at Le Colonial, you know, on East Fifty-Seventh? We had a window table, and I saw a guy walk by—this one—and start staring in from the sidewalk. When Lon spotted him, the guy just made that double finger point thing to his eyes, and left.”
“Did Lon say who he was?” asked Heat.
“All he said was ‘ex-client.’” He snickered. “Paging Dr. Taciturn. I used to tell him that if he was any more chill, I could use his face as a canvas.”
“His name’s Timothy Maloney. Did Dr. King ever mention that name?”
“Not that I recall.”
Heat turned to the Roosevelt Island detective. “He’s ex-NYPD. I’ll email you this pic and his sheet. Meanwhile, we should get out a description of the intruder.”
“Going to need some NYPD co-op, Captain, if you don’t mind. The building’s cams are down for upgrade and we don’t have a sketch artist.”
Nikki turned to Sampson Stallings. “Actually, I believe you do.”
Smiling his first true smile in a day, one fueled by purpose, the renowned portraitist sat at his drafting table, opened his Strathmore pad to a fresh page, and began work on what could be his greatest work of all: the one that could lead to his partner’s killer.
Sampson Stallings worked with silent intensity in flowing, sure-handed strokes. Heat had to fight the same urge she battled whenever she walked by the row of souvenir street caricaturists on the east side of Central Park; the overwhelming desire to stand behind him and stare over his shoulder. But she respected the artist’s solitude and, in mere minutes, he had finished. Stallings carefully tore the sheet off his gummed pad and presented it to the detectives. As Rook came up behind Heat for a glimpse, both reacted immediately. “It’s him,” said Rook. “The dude we surprised in the basement on York Avenue.”
When they got back to the lobby, Rook admired on his iPhone the photo Heat had just broadcast of Stallings’s intruder sketch. “You know,” he said, “if it weren’t for the grief part, I would have asked Sampson to give me the original. With a signature, of course.”
“Nice. The day after his partner is murdered.”
“I did respect the grief part, remember? I distinctly said that. Why are you being so crispy with me?”
“Because you’re being so—obstructive.”
“How? What did I do?”
Nikki clenched her teeth, then thought, No, out with it. “Your question about King getting offered a bribe.”
“That was a perfectly proper question.”
“You’re not working with me, Rook. No, worse. You’re working against me. If you know something, share. What’s more important, your article or finding the killer?”
As he pondered his answer—hesitating in a way that further pissed Nikki off—his phone chimed. He checked the screen and grinned. “My Hitch! is arriving.” They turned toward the street, where a giant plastic thumb could be seen approaching, floating above the trellises in the community garden. “I push a button, and a car comes. This could be what the Internet is all about.”
“So you’re not going to help? Not going to answer?”
“Nikki, this is all going to work out for both of us, you watch. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some legwork to do.” And then he was gone. Without a hitch.
“What do we know, Miguel?” called Heat from the doorway as she strode into the homicide bull pen. Detective Ochoa snagged a deli coffee from his desk and met with her at the Murder Board, which she scanned for fresh ink.
“All right, as you can see we have the sketch you just got from Sampson Stallings out to all units, plus media.”
“I knew that when I sent it out,” she said, making a mental note not to send her anger at Rook sideways to others. Especially not Ochoa. A little more softly, she asked if he agreed that this was the runner they had encountered the day before charging out of Lon King’s medical tower.
“Most definitely. Oh, and since you wanted to hear something you didn’t know…” His cheeks dimpled—obviously he was slightly amused by his little bit of pushback—then he continued, “An eyewit on York Ave gave us a partial plate on that MKZ he fled in. Crunched it down and traced it to a gypsy cab reported stolen from East Harlem yesterday morning. Traffic Division spotted it, abandoned, blocking a hydrant down in the Alphabets.”
“Any chance for prints?”
“Forensics is dusting now. It’s going to take some time to isolate all the prints. They said it was like Hands on a Hardbody down there.”
“Well, we now have a face to go with those hands. Maybe we’ll get a positive. What about Tim Maloney?”
“Still no handle on him, Cap,” he said, addressing her by rank for the first time. “We’ve still got units watching his place, but no activity. I even sent a bogus mail carrier to knock on the door. Nothing. He could be in there, just trying to jerk our chains, but we can’t go for a warrant.”
“No, not without probable,” she agreed. “What’s your deployment?”
“We’re down an asset, as you know, with my most able street detective on Rook’s tail. That means spreading things a little thinner.” He pointed to Rhymer’s initials in a circle beside the Spuyten Duyvil–Harlem River notation on the board. “Raley sent Opie out with Harbor Unit to troll for eyewits or any sightings of King’s kayak, night of his murder.”
Heat read something dark in Ochoa’s expression. “Something wrong, Detective?”
“It’s nothing. Just a little disagreement with my pard.”
“For putting Rhymer on river watch?”
“For not talking to me first. Sean made the assignment before I got in, and didn’t consult. I get here, Opie’s gone, and my so-called squad co-leader has also assigned Detective Aguinaldo to run license plate checks from the Roosevelt Island Bridge cam.” Ochoa shook his head mildly to himself and said, “Glad you asked?”
Nikki felt the heft of one more rock getting piled on her shoulders to go with the burden of the others: problems with Rook; pressure from the chief of detectives; hassles with IA; a nut-job ex-cop who might have killed her shrink and seemed to have slipped off the grid; and now a turf battle between her squad co-leaders. Day two was shaping up to be an extension of day one. “Is this an issue I need to step in on?”
He shook his head no. “We’ll work it out. You just caught me while it was still up my ass. Pretend you didn’t hear it.”
“Where’s your partner now?”
“In his kingly realm.” The detective tilted his head to indicate the closet Raley used to screen video. “He’s scrubbing this morning’s F train and tram cams for the dude in the sketch.”
“How about you? Free for a detail?” Heat couldn’t let go of Rook’s question to Stallings about whether Lon King had been offered a bribe in exchange for information about a patie
He nodded with some uncertainty, but opened his notebook. “Sure. What am I looking for?”
“What else, the Odd Sock. Something out of pattern. Especially big infusions of cash. He would, I imagine, be running low because of his gambling losses. A spike is going to tell us something.” And because nothing and no one could be ruled out, she added, “And do a check of his partner, Sampson Stallings. He’s an artist, so his income pattern may be more erratic, but give it an X-ray, anyhow.”
Randall Feller checked in later on from the field, and he wasn’t happy. “Captain Heat, I’ll let you guess where my tail-and-surveil of Jameson Rook has taken me.”
“I don’t know, Detective. Has he bought you a Mister Softee cone because he made you again?” Nikki played it as a joke, but only as cover for her genuine concern and curiosity about what Rook was up to.
“No, I have not been detected. My subject is too focused on his mission.”
“Out with it. Where is he?”
“On Warren Street down near City Hall.” While Nikki mentally street-viewed the area, trying to conjure up a notion of what that mission could be, Feller filled in the blank. “He’s in a pen store.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am outside the shop window now.”
“The Fountain Pen Hospital,” she said. Heat could picture Feller’s view because she had been there so many times before to Rook’s Mecca for vintage and collectible fountain pens. “He’s at the repair counter, right?”
“You don’t need me. You have, what, psychic powers?”
“I wish. Last week he was cleaning his limited edition Hemingway Montblanc, and it rolled off his desk and landed point first on the floor. Rook is dropping off his prize pen to get a new nib.”
After a long pause filled with the doop-doop-doop of a truck backing up, the detective said, “I don’t wanna second-guess, but is this really the best use of my time while we’re working a homicide? I mean, your boyfriend’s getting—a nib replacement?”
“First of all, you are second-guessing. And also, he’s not my boyfriend, he’s my fiancé. Stay on him.”
“You got it.” He didn’t sound thrilled.
“And Randy? Keep out of that window. Wouldn’t want you getting made or anything.”
About an hour later, a call from downtown pulled Heat out of a visit to the Burglary Squad room, where the new captain was getting her update on their activity. She strode into her office and waited with a gnawing in her gut for the operator to transfer. As it finally rang, Nikki rested her hand on the receiver and cycled through the ramifications of blowing off the senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for legal matters. It had been he who had championed her through the system to become a captain and precinct commander. Maybe he was just phoning to wish her well now that the placement was official. One ring before the voicemail dump, she lifted the horn. “Captain Heat.”
“I understand you’re off to a shaky start,” said Zach Hamner. No Hello. No Good afternoon. No Did I interrupt anything? None of that. Zach, the Hammer, was living up to his blunt-instrument nickname from his opening volley. Heat imagined sex with him must be very much about getting it done. She couldn’t believe she was wondering about sex with what amounted to a reptile in a suit.
“Thank you, Zachary. Nothing more bolstering than a call from you.”
“If you want touchy-feely, try Media Relations. Here in Legal it’s all tough love.” She could picture him at his desk down at One PP, smugly enjoying his self-defined status as department ball-buster—the guy they send when they just want it done. Never destined to be the front man, Hamner would always be Merlin, one of those pasty slicks with passive faces and thick briefcases who lean forward to whisper strategic answers in the ears of the top-liners. “I’m getting some negative reports and, since I feel a personal responsibility for getting you appointed, I’m doing a little intervention.”
“Lucky me.”
“Where do I start? Dissing Internal Affairs? No, how about embarrassing the chief of detectives?”
Nikki realized that she should have let the call go to voicemail. “The chief and I hashed that out yesterday, Zach. Old news.”
“More like a close call. Think. Be proactive. On this level accountability goes up the chain and information is the currency.”
“You should stitch that on a sampler.”
“Heat. Do I sound like I’m looking for entertainment?” Heat rocked back in her executive chair while he delivered his department-line reprimand for mixing it up with Detective Lovell at IA. It was useless to argue, so Nikki signed papers while he rambled on. “And what were you doing being seen in uniform, consorting with a known mobster?”
She stopped signing and stood up. “I was not consorting, I was interviewing him as a potential suspect in the murder of Lon King.”
“You couldn’t haul his ass into the box? You were seen going into his illegal gambling parlor in broad daylight.”
“That’s where he was.”
“Heat, you’re a precinct commander. PCs can’t mingle with mobsters. It’s not PC.” As with so many administrators and gray bureaucrats, The Hammer had no idea what police work was all about. She thought of giving him a lecture about that when Ochoa showed up in her doorway with an urgent look.
“Zach, listen, something just came up on a case, I’ve got to go.” And, having a second thought, she added, “Thanks for the good advice,” just before she hung up.
“We have a new vic,” said Detective Ochoa.
Nikki came around the desk, sliding an arm through a sleeve of her blazer. “Where?”
“Staten Island.”
That slowed Heat down. “Not our precinct, why’s it our victim?”
“Because Feller called it in.”
Heat’s face lost some color as she processed the connection, not liking anywhere it was leading. “Feller…?”
“He was tailing Rook. Rook found the body.”
Heat let Ochoa drive, which bought her valuable time to pound out administrative emails and work her phone during the otherwise dead hour getting from Manhattan to Staten. “Two-minute warning,” said the detective as he steered off the SIE into the bleak terrain surrounding the Goethals Bridge. Nikki set aside her multitasking, surveyed the patchwork of scrubby marshland and the hard-core industrial zone lining the banks of the Elizabeth River, and wondered what the hell Rook had been doing out there.
If Staten Island was a bedroom community, this was its mud porch. On her right sprawled a massive containerized cargo depot. To her left, the corroded cylinders of a gas tank farm rose at the edge of tidal wetlands marked by acres of cord grass and cattails, hardy survivors of the chemical age. Across the river, a refinery plus even more and even bigger tank farms girdled the New Jersey Turnpike. “If you lived here, you’d be home now,” Heat said.
True to Ochoa’s estimate, about two minutes later the Roach Coach drew up to the gate of an isolated, cyclone-fenced industrial site between the swamp and a graveyard for old school buses. Back in the 1920s this property had been an airstrip. Flat, and with plenty of land remote from residences, Edda Field became a favorite of private pilots and hobbyists until it closed in World War Two, when civilian flying over the East Coast was forbidden. By the time the ban was lifted, newer airfields, closer to town, with blacktop runways instead of gravel and turf, had opened. Within a few years, the strip was defunct. It was eventually sold to a movie company that used its giant hangar to shoot noir detective films, until the studio head
Once they had passed the guard shack, Ochoa was able to cut across painted rows of empty parking spaces, making a beeline for the half-dozen NYPD blue-and-whites and plain wraps rimming the hangar. Detective Feller stood inside the semicircle of police cars, clowning with a homicide team from the 121st Precinct. He glimpsed Nikki when she got out of the Roach Coach, quickly broke away from the group, and crossed to meet her, adopting a more sober tone with every stride closer to his captain.
“Help me, Detective,” she said when the gap between them closed enough so that only he could hear. “I want to learn what’s funny about a dead body. Day I’m having, I could use a laugh.”
Sheepish, Feller tried to minimize his lack of decorum at a murder scene, something Heat had cautioned him about so many times in the past. “This? This was nothing. Just fostering relations with the homeys, you know, since we’re visiting their turf.”
“I see. Professional interaction,” she said. But he heard her don’t-bullshit-me subtext loud and clear. Point made, she let the matter drop, especially since Ochoa was joining them. “What are we looking at?”
“Body’s in the hangar.” He indicated the triple-wide garage door cut into the side of the hulking gray warehouse. The van from Staten Island’s Medical Examiner’s office sat to the side right underneath the Forenetics, LLC company logo.
“Now there’s a picture,” said Ochoa. “Definitely not one you want on your corporate homepage.”
“What about Rook? Where’s he?” Nikki asked, feeling one part concern, one part annoyance, not necessarily in that order.
Feller tilted his head toward his Taurus twenty yards away, where Rook sat in the open passenger door with his head between his knees. “As you might have guessed, he found the vic. And even I won’t fault him for ralphing. One of the ME assistants almost barked up his bran muffin when he went in there.”