Naked Heat by Richard Castle

  Nikki checked the crime scene. Uniforms had started their canvass, the remaining stores wouldn't open for a couple of hours, and CSU was busy running a sweep. There was nothing more for them to do there at the moment.

  "Got another one, fellas." She tore a page off her notebook and handed the address to Raley. "Follow me. Seventy-eighth, between Columbus and Amsterdam."

  Nikki got herself ready to meet a new corpse.

  The first thing Detective Heat noticed when she pulled off Amsterdam onto 78th was the quiet. It was just past seven, and the first rays of sun had cleared the turrets of the Museum of Natural History and were beaming golden light that turned the residential block into a placid cityscape begging to be captured in a photo. But the serenity was also odd to her.

  Where were the blue-and-whites? Where was the ambulance, the yellow tape, and the knot of gawkers? As an investigator, she had grown accustomed to arriving on scene after the first responders.

  Raley and Ochoa reacted, too. She could tell by the way they cleared their coats from their sidearms as they got out of the Roach Coach and then clocked the surroundings on their walk over to meet her. "This is the right address?" Ochoa said without really asking.

  Raley turned a swivel to scope out the homeless guy picking through the uncollected trash for recyclables up at the Columbus end of the street. Other than that, West 78th was still. "Kind of like being the first one to a party."

  "Like you get invited to parties," came the jab from his partner as they approached the brownstone.

  Raley didn't come back at him. The act of stepping onto the curb put an end to the chatter, as if an invisible and unspoken line had been crossed. They single-filed between a gap somebody had forged in the row of trash bags and refuse, and the two men flanked Detective Heat when she paused in front of the next-door brownstone. "The address is the A-unit, so it's that one there," she said in a hushed tone, indicating the garden apartment a half story below street level. Five granite steps led down from the sidewalk to a small brick patio enclosed by a metal railing trimmed by wooden flower boxes. Heavy drapes were drawn behind the ornate wrought-iron bars covering the windows. Intricate stone-carved decorative panels were set into the facade above them. Under the archway created by the stoop stairs leading to the apartment above, the front door stood wide open.

  Nikki hand-signaled and led the way to the front door. Her detectives followed in cover mode. Raley watched the rear flank, and Ochoa was an extra set of eyes for Heat as she put her hand on her Sig and took the opposite side of the doorway. When she was sure they were in position and set, she called into the apartment. "NYPD, if there's anyone in there, let's hear it."

  They waited and listened. Nothing.

  Training and working so long together as a team had made this part routine. Raley and Ochoa fixed eye contact on her. They counted her head nods to three, drew weapons, and followed her inside in Weaver stances.

  Heat moved quickly through the small foyer and into the hallway, followed by Ochoa. The idea was to move fast and clear each room, covering each other but being careful not to bunch up. Raley lagged slightly to watch their backs.

  The first door on their right gave on to a formal dining room. Heat rolled into it with Ochoa in tandem, each sweeping an opposite side of the room. The dining room was all clear, but a mess. Drawers and antique hutches gaped open above tossed silverware and china that had been raked out and smashed on the hardwood floor.

  Across the hall they found the living room in the same state of disarray. Upended chairs rested on shredded coffee-table books. A snow of pillow feathers coated broken vases and pottery. Canvas flags drooped out of frames where someone had torn or slashed the oil paintings. A pile of ashes from the fireplace blanketed the hearth and the oriental rug in front of it, as if a critter had tried to burrow out through there.

  Unlike in the front of the apartment, a light was on in the adjoining room toward the back, which, from where she stood, Heat made out to be a study. Nikki hand-cued Raley to hold his place and spot them as she and Ochoa once again took position on opposite sides of the door frame. On her nod, they rolled into the study.

  The dead woman looked to be about fifty and was seated at the desk in an office chair, with her head tilted way back as if frozen in the windup to a huge sneeze. Heat signed a circle in the air with her left hand to tell her partners to keep alert while she navigated her way through the office debris scattered on the floor and went to the desk to check for any pulse or breathing. She released her touch from the corpse's cold flesh, looked up, and gave them a head shake.

  A sound from across the hall.

  They all spun at once when they heard it. Like a foot crunching broken glass. The door to the room where it came from was closed, but light was shining on the polished linoleum under the crack. Heat worked out the likely floor plan in her head. If that was the kitchen, then the door she'd seen at the back end of the dining room would also lead to it. She pointed at Raley and signed for him to go around to that door and wait for her move. She pointed to her watch and then made a chop on it to indicate half a minute. He checked his wrist, nodded, and went.

  Detective Ochoa was already spotted at one side of the door. She took the opposite and held up her watch. On her third nod, they burst in large and loud. "NYPD! Freeze, now!"

  The man sitting at the kitchen table saw three guns coming at him from two doors and shrieked as he thrust both hands high in the air.

  As the flash of recognition hit her, Nikki Heat called out, "What the hell is this?"

  The man slowly lowered one of his hands and pulled the Sennheiser buds out of his ears. He swallowed hard and said, "What?"

  "I said, what the hell are you doing here?"

  "Waiting for you," said Jameson Rook. He read something he didn't like on their faces and said, "Well, you didn't expect me to wait in there with her, did you?"

  Chapter Two

  As the detectives holstered up, Rook breathed a sigh. "Man, I think you took ten years off my life there."

  Raley came back with, "You're lucky you still have a life. Why didn't you answer us?"

  Ochoa piled on. "We called out to see if anyone was here."

  Rook simply held up his iPhone. "Remastered Beatles. Had to get my mind off the b-o-d-y." He made a wince face and pointed into the next room. "But I found that 'A Day in the Life' wasn't the most uplifting diversion. You guys crashed in on me at the end, just on that big piano bong. For real." He turned to Nikki and smiled meaningfully. "Let's hear it for timing, huh?"

  Heat tried to ignore the undercurrent, which to her ear wasn't very much under anything. Or maybe she was more sensitive to it. As she scanned Roach for reactions and didn't see any, she wondered if things were more raw for her than she'd thought, or if it was just the shock of seeing him there, of all places. Nikki had crossed paths with old lovers before, who didn't? But usually it was in a Starbucks, or a chance glimpse across the aisle at the movies--not at a murder scene. One thing she was sure of. This was an unwelcome distraction from her job, something to be pushed aside. "Roach," she said, all business, "you two clear the rest of the premises."

  "Oh, there's nobody here, I checked." Rook raised both his palms up. "But I didn't touch anything, I swear."

  "Check anyway" was Nikki's answer to that, and Roach left to sweep the remaining rooms.

  When they were alone, he said, "Nice to see you again, Nikki." And then that damn smile again. "Oh, and thanks for not shooting me."

  "What are you doing here, Rook?" She tried to remove any hint of the playfulness that she used to hang on his last name. This guy needed a message.

  "Like I said, waiting for you. I was the one who called in the body."

  "Not what I'm trying to get at. So let me ask the same question another way. Why are you at this crime scene to begin with?"

  "I know the victim."

  "Who is she?" All the years on the job, Nikki still found it hard to go to the past tense when referring to a victi
m. At least not at the hour of discovery.

  "Cassidy Towne."

  Heat couldn't help herself. She half turned to look into the study, but from where she was standing, she couldn't see the victim, only the post-tornado effect of office supplies scattered around the room. "The gossip columnist?"

  He nodded, affirming. "The buzz saw herself."

  She immediately started calculating how the apparent murder of the New York Ledger's powerful icon, whose "Buzz Rush" column was the ritual first read for most New Yorkers, was going to ratchet up the stakes on this case. As Raley and Ochoa returned and deemed the apartment clear, she said, "Ochoa, better reach out to the MEs. Give them a courtesy heads-up that we have a high-profiler waiting for them. Raley, you call Captain Montrose so he knows we're working Cassidy Towne from the Ledger and he doesn't get blindsided. And see if he can put a hustle on CSU and also get some extra uniforms here, like, now." The detective could already project that the quiet, golden block she had enjoyed a few minutes ago would soon be transformed into a media street fair.

  As soon as Roach left the kitchen again, Rook stood and took a step toward Nikki. "Seriously. I've missed you."

  If his step closer was meant as body English, she had some nonverbal cues of her own. Detective Heat turned her back to him, got out her reporter's-cut notebook and a pen, and put her face to a new page. But she knew herself well enough to know the chill message she wanted to send was as much to herself as to him. "What time did you discover the body?"

  "About six-thirty. Listen, Nikki . . ."

  "How close to six-thirty? Do you have a more accurate idea of the time?"

  "I got here exactly at six-thirty. Did you get any of my e-mails?"

  "Got here, as in 'in the room to discover her,' or got here, as in 'outside'?"

  "Outside."

  "And how did you get in?"

  "The door was open. Just as you found it."

  "So you walked right in?"

  "No. I knocked. Then called out. I saw the mess up the hall and went in to see if she was all right. I thought maybe a burglar had been here."

  "Did you ever think someone else could have been in here?"

  "It was quiet. So I went in."

  "That was brave."

  "I have my moments, you may recall."

  Nikki looked as if she was focused on a notation but really she was replaying the night in the hallway of the Guilford last summer when Noah Paxton used Rook as a human shield, and how, even though he had a gun in his back, he still put a body slam on Paxton that gave Heat a clean shot. She looked up and said, "Where was she when you found her?"

  "Right where she is now."

  "You didn't move her in any way?"

  "No."

  "Did you touch her?"

  "No."

  "How did you know she was dead?"

  "I . . ." He hesitated and continued. "I knew."

  "How did you know she was dead?"

  "I . . . I clapped."

  Nikki couldn't help herself. The laugh shot out of her with a mind all its own. She was angry at herself for it, but the thing about a laugh like that was you couldn't take it back. You could only work to suppress the next one. "You . . . you clapped?"

  "Uh huh. Loud, you know . . . to see. Hey, don't laugh, maybe she was asleep, or drunk, I didn't know." He waited while Heat composed herself. And then a chuckle of his own fought its way out. "It wasn't like applause. Just . . ."

  "A clap." She watched the way the corners of his eyes crinkled when he smiled, and she started to thaw in a way she didn't like, so she threw the switch. "How did you know the victim?" she said to her notepad.

  "I've been working with her the past few weeks."

  "You're becoming a gossip columnist now?"

  "Oh, hell, no. I sold First Press on the idea of doing my next piece for them on Cassidy Towne. Not so much the titillating gossip thing but profiling a powerful woman in a historically male-dominated business, our love-hate relationship with secrets, you get the idea. Anyway, I've been shadowing Cassidy for the past few weeks."

  "Shadowing. You mean like . . ." She let it fall off. This took Nikki down an all-too-uncomfortable road.

  "Like the ride-along you and I had, yes. Exactly. Without the sex." He paused to read her reaction, and Nikki did her best not to let it show. "The editors got such a good response to my piece on you, they wanted to follow up with another like it, maybe turn it into an occasional series on kick-ass women." He studied her again, got nothing, then added, "It was a nice article, Nik, wasn't it?"

  She tapped the tip of the ballpoint twice on the pad. "Were you here to do that today? Shadow her?"

  "Yeah, she got an early start every day, or maybe just continued from the night before, I could never tell. Some mornings I'd show up and she'd be at her desk in the same clothes as the day before, like she'd been working there all night. She'd want to stretch her legs so we'd walk up to H&H for some bagels and then next door to Zabar's for the salmon and cream cheese, and then come back here."

  "So you did spend a fair amount of time with Cassidy Towne over the last few weeks."

  "Yep."

  "Then, if I need to ask you for cooperation, you may have some information about who she saw, what she did, and so forth."

  "You don't need to ask, and yes, I know tons."

  "Can you think of anyone who would want to kill her?

  Rook scoffed. "Let's dig around this mess and find a New York phone book. We can start with the letter A."

  "Don't be smart."

  "Shark's gotta swim." He grinned, then continued. "Come on, she was a mud-slinging gossip columnist, of course she had lots of enemies. It was in the job description."

  Nikki could hear footfalls and voices entering the front and put away her notes. "I'll have you give a statement later, but I don't have any more questions for you now."

  "Good."

  "Except one. You didn't kill her, did you?" Rook laughed, then saw her expression and stopped. "Well?"

  He folded his arms across his chest. "I want a lawyer." She turned and left the room and he called after her, "Kidding. Mark me down as a 'no.' "

  Rook didn't leave. He told Heat he wanted to stick around in case he could be helpful with anything. She had the push-pull thing going: wanting him away from her in the worst way because he was such an emotional disruption; but then seeing the benefit of his potential insights as they went over the wreckage of Cassidy Towne's apartment. The writer had been to plenty of crime scenes with her during his ride-along last summer, so she knew he was scene-friendly, at least trained enough not to pick up a piece of evidence in his bare hands and say, "What's this?" He was also a first-person witness to the most profound element of his magazine story, the death of his subject. Mixed feelings or not, she wasn't going to begrudge Jameson Rook that professional courtesy.

  When they went into Cassidy Towne's office, he returned her unspoken favor in kind, keeping out of her way by standing over near the French doors that led out to the courtyard garden. For Detective Heat it always began by slowing down and studying the body. The dead didn't talk, but if you paid attention, sometimes they did tell you things.

  In getting a feel for Cassidy Towne, Nikki read the power Rook was talking about. Her suit, a tasteful, navy pinstripe over a French-blue blouse with starched white collar, would work for a talent agency meeting or premiere party. And it was expertly tailored to her, accenting a body that had seen regular gym time. Heat hoped that when she reached fiftysomething that she'd keep it that together. Nikki saw some tasteful David Yurman on Towne's ears and neck, potentially ruling out robbery. There was no wedding ring, so unless that had been stolen, Heat could also rule out marriage. Potentially. Towne's face was slack in death, but angular and attractive, what most would call handsome--not always the highest compliment to a woman, but according to George Orwell, she had had about ten years since forty to earn that face. Not making a judgment, but letting instinct talk to her, Nikki regarded her impressi
on of Cassidy Towne, and the picture that emerged was of someone suited for battle. A hard body whose hardness seemed to run deeper than just muscle tone. A snapshot formed of a woman who was, at that moment, something she probably never was in life. A victim.

  Soon CSU was there, dusting the usual touch points for prints, taking photos of the body and the roomscatter. Detective Heat and her team worked in tandem, but more big-picture than close-up. Wearing their blue latex gloves, they walked here and then there and then back again in appraisal of the office, the way golfers read a green before a long putt.

  "All right, fellas, I've got my first odd sock." The detective's approach to a crime scene, even one in this much disarray, was to simplify her field of view. She pared everything down to getting inside the logic of the life that was lived in that space and using that empathy to spot inconsistencies, the small thing that didn't fit the pattern. The odd sock.

  Raley and Ochoa came across the room to join her. Rook adjusted his position at the perimeter to follow quietly from a distance. "Whatcha got?" asked Ochoa.

  "Work space. Busy work space, right? Big newspaper columnist. Pens everywhere, pencils, custom notepads and stationery. Box of Kleenex. Look at this beside her here." She stepped carefully around the body, still cast backward in the office chair. "A typewriter, for God's sake. Magazines and newspapers with clippings snipped out of them, right? All that stuff makes lots of what?"

  "Work," said Raley.

  "Trash," said Rook, and Heat's two detectives turned slightly his way and then back to Heat, unwilling to acknowledge him as part of this exchange. Like his season pass had expired.

  "Correct," she continued, more focused on where she was going than on Rook now. "What's with the wastebasket?"

  Raley shrugged. "It's right there. Tipped, but there it is."

  "It's empty," said Ochoa.

  "Right. And with all the tossing this room took, you'd think, OK, maybe it spilled out." She crouched near it and they went with her. "No clips, snips, Kleenex, or crumpled paper anywhere around it."