Deadly Heat

FOUR

Nikki fought the urge to hang up on Rook and instead listened to him squirm. He hemmed. He hawed. He backed. He filled. And then had the nerve at the end of her silence to ask, “Is everything OK?” She told him she had to get to work and left him to hold a dead phone in his stupid hotel room overlooking the stupid Mediterranean. Then she cranked the shower as hot as she could stand it and stood under the jet. “Fucking Nice,” she said to the steam. “Fucking stupid.”

Shouldering the glass door of the bodega open, Heat burst out onto the sidewalk on Pearl Street ripping at the orange Reese’s wrapper with extreme prejudice. She stood by a trash can near the curb, shook one of the two peanut butter cups out, tore away the brown paper enfolding it, and popped the entire disk into her mouth. She closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sky while she chewed, feeling the tiny sharp ridges of the chocolate coating scrape the roof of her mouth while the salty, grainy succulence of the peanut butter center mixed with the melting sugars on her tongue. Bastard, she thought. Stupid boy. Her breath whistled through her nostrils as she munched, eating not for pleasure but as an act of aggression. That part done, she swallowed, feeling the delicious indulgence tamp out the fires of her rage.

She looked at the package. Still one peanut butter cup left. Nikki decided to save it and shoved it in the side pocket of her blazer. She might need it later, if the idiot called again.

Heat elbowed aside her anger at Rook for going to France with his ex-girlfriend and walked on. She had better things to dwell on. For the first time in weeks Nikki felt like she found a real trail that could lead her to Tyler Wynn, and as she strode along, she started rolling everything she knew. If Fariq Kuzbari’s version of events were true, was it possible that her mother used the Syrian as cover to get into that symposium in the Berkshires to spy on Ari Weiss? Following that premise, could that be the same reason her mom got herself a tutoring gig later in the home of the brewing magnate Carey Maggs-to keep tabs on Weiss while he stayed with his former Oxford classmate and his family? She hoped to find out in a few minutes when she met with Maggs.

The last time she’d seen the beer tycoon and social activist, Heat was thrashing around looking for clues in her mother’s murder. Now she hoped for another crumb-any connection, however slight-that could link Weiss to the fugitive Tyler Wynn and warm up the trail to his capture.

When she reached the cobblestones of the South Street Seaport, Nikki stopped. Survival instinct took over and she made a survey of the area. The pedestrian walks and courtyards were empty. It was way too early for the tourists who would pack the place later. She saw only a soda delivery truck and a solitary cleaner hosing off a café patio. Feeling suddenly alone and exposed, Heat made a back check behind her then scanned the rooftops of the old buildings. Somewhere a killer waited for her. Despite that fact, she pressed on toward the nineteenth-century brick warehouse that housed Brewery Boz. Nikki knew she was a target. She also knew this could be the next stop on the road to staying alive.

At the loading dock behind the microbrewery, Nikki climbed four concrete steps off the alley and heard a high-pitched whine on the other side of a metal door. Carey Maggs had told her to knock loudly so he could hear her over the power tools. She rapped with a key and the whirring stopped. Hinges squeaked, and a filthy man who looked more like a day laborer than a multimillionaire stood grinning. “You still look just like yer mum.” That’s what he’d told Nikki on her visit three weeks before. He would know. Cynthia Heat had also been his piano tutor in London back in 1976, when Maggs was just a boy.

“I’d say pardon the mess, but you didn’t give me much notice, and I’m in the middle of a restoration. Behold, an authentic relic of the London Metropolitan Fire Brigade, circa 1870.” Behind him, surrounded by giant stainless steel vats filled with Durdles’ Finest lager, stout, and pale ale, stood a vintage fire wagon-a carriage that once got pulled by horses and probably was why London burned.

“Looks new.”

“Bloody better. Been slaving on it morning and night to get it ready in time for the march.” She gave him a puzzled look and he explained, “The Walk Against Global Oppression. I committed Brewery Boz as corporate sponsor. What can I say? Bleeding heart, bleeding checkbook.” He set aside his electric buffer and followed Heat around as she admired the wagon. Its red paint gleamed from the wax he’d applied, and the copper chimney of the steam pump’s giant boiler shined like a mirror. “But I get promo out of it, too.” She noticed the gold leaf stencil on the side. “ ‘Boz Brigade,’ ” he said, reading with her. “I mean, what better mascot for a Charles Dickens-themed beer than a Victorian artifact like this?”

Niceties having been observed, Detective Heat said, “Let’s talk.”

The gastropub adjacent to the brewery wouldn’t open for hours, but Maggs led her inside to the bar and made them each a latte.

“Delicious,” she said. “But latte in a pub?”

“I know, scandalous.” Maggs’s British accent had a playfully challenging tone that reminded her of someone she couldn’t quite place. “But we can be true to our Dickens leitmotif without confining ourselves to blood pudding and spotted dick, right?” Then she put her finger on it. Christopher Hitchens. “Yeah, I get that a lot. He’s Portsmouth, not London, but it’s the Oxonian thing. We’re a bunch of know-it-alls, petrified that we don’t.”

Since he’d brought up his college, Nikki snagged it. “Oxford is kind of why I’m here,” she said. “I need to ask you about your old classmate.”

“Ari.” He grew serious and slid his coffee aside.

“When we talked a few weeks ago, you said Dr. Weiss was a houseguest of yours around Thanksgiving 1999.” Nikki didn’t need to, but she glanced at her notes from the prior interview, a technique that kept interviewees honest. “You said his stay overlapped the week my mother was tutoring your son.”

He paused to reflect. “Yes, but as I told you before, I can’t believe Ari had anything to do with your mother’s murder.”

“And-as I told you before, Mr. Maggs-this works better if you simply answer the questions.” He nodded. “Can you tell me any of the activities Dr. Weiss was involved in during his visit?”

“Let me think. We’re going back over a decade.” He wagged his head slightly. “Sorry. I guess mostly sightseeing and clubs, maybe a Broadway show.”

“Did he have any diplomatic or foreign service acquaintances in New York?”

Maggs furrowed his brow. “Ari? Doubt it. Ari was a science geek, pretty much just a lab rat. Rarely left the maze, if you know what I mean.” That didn’t square with what Fariq Kuzbari had said about his attendance at the symposium on WMDs. She made a note and went at it another way. “Was he political? I mean, you donate significant profits from your company to radical organizations like,” she referred to notes, “Mercator Watch. What was your nickname for it?”

“GreedPeace,” he chuckled, but his eyes flashed with a sudden and visceral anger. “The world is fucked up by top-down greed, Detective. It’s why we have so much war. The wealthy use their power against the powerless. It’s got to stop. It will stop.” He gestured through the showcase window to the copper and stainless vats hulking in his production area. “This beer business is just my springboard. I plan to rival Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in their philanthropy-but in my own way. These days I spend more time with my broker than my brewmeister for one reason: I am completely committed to using my business and investments to create a war chest for peace.” He laughed and finger-combed his hair back. “And, yes, I hear the irony. I went to Oxford, you know.”

“Didn’t any of your political passion rub off on Ari Weiss?”

Maggs came off his mini-tirade and relaxed again. “For Ari, rest his soul, if it wasn’t under a microscope, it didn’t exist. The only thing radical he gave a rat’s arse about was free radicals with unpaired electrons.”

“Did Ari ever mention the name Tyler Wynn?”

He thought and said, “Mm, no.”

“Does this help?” She tapped her iPhone and brought up Wynn’s picture. He shook no. Then she showed Maggs Joe Flynn’s old surveillance shot of the two men in the front seat of the parked car. The driver was the French doctor; she didn’t know the other. “Do you recognize either of these two men?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Maggs pointed to the man on the passenger side. “That’s my friend. That’s Ari Weiss.”

There it was. Carey Maggs had made a connection between Tyler Wynn and Ari Weiss, and the link was the French doctor who helped the CIA man fake his heart attack. But what did it all mean? On the subway uptown, while she scrutinized the lethal potential of everyone who got on and off her car, Nikki tried to do the math and couldn’t get there. What she needed was to bounce it off Rook, whose nutty speculation both annoyed her and freed her from linear thinking at the same time.

Rook.

A butterfly rose, stirring dark sediment. She pushed it down and concentrated on the case.

Before she even got to her desk, Detective Heat called across the squad room for Roach to start digging on Weiss. At her computer, she opened the Web page Rook had bookmarked weeks before and reread the obit of Ari Weiss, MD. The brief article said the medical researcher had been a graduate of the Yale School of Medicine and a Rhodes Scholar, which was how he would have met his friend Carey Maggs at Oxford. He had died in 2000 of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. Heat clicked that hyperlink and the Wikipedia page described babesiosis as a malaria-like parasitic disorder. Like Lyme disease, it was generally tick-borne, but it could also come from a contaminated transfusion.

Loose thoughts started to ping, but Heat didn’t like hunches. Facts were her friend, and she could have used some. She thought a long moment. Then she steeled herself and picked up the phone.

When Bart Callan answered, he seemed surprisingly cool to her. At prior meetings, including the visit she’d just made to the Department of Homeland Security, the agent had not only pressed her-relentlessly-to join his investigation team, he’d wrapped his outreach in something more. The vibe Heat got was personal. She believed Special Agent Callan wouldn’t have minded getting intimate. So when he said he was kind of busy, Nikki felt taken aback. And what else? Maybe a little disappointed? But then he fell into form. “I’m in the swamp and up to my ass in alligators, but I could meet you later. Want to hook up for a cocktail?”

She said yes. And then felt guilty. And then wondered why.

Heat wanted to meet someplace packed and noisy, but Callan had an interview on the Upper East Side and chose Bemelmans in the Carlyle, to her chagrin, a softly quiet bar with leather upholstery, dreamy lighting, and worst of all, intimacy. She gave him the long arm when they shook and let him take the banquette. Normally she liked a view of the door, but a chair made her feel less trapped. She ordered a wine spritzer, a drink Nikki despised, but she needed a clear head and didn’t want to send a false cue with a gateway cocktail. He surprised her, going for a mineral water. His second surprise was getting right to business.

“You’ll be happy to know we scored some surveillance pics of Salena Kaye following her escape from that chopper.”

“That was quick,” she said, remembering the check-in she’d made on her way out of the precinct house, of poor Raley still poring over miles of security video.

“Facial recognition software. I’ll zap you copies.”

“Great. Where did you pick her up?”

“Coming off the Q train in Coney Island. Speculation is she either operates out of there or had a meet. We’re checking car services and other resources we have. If I told you more, I’d have to, well, you know the rest.” He smiled and she felt uneasy. After the waiter came with the drinks and left, he said, “Kaye must have put up quite a fight to get away from you.”

“Please, I feel guilty enough. My combat skills have gotten a little rusty lately.”

“The Navy SEAL?” he asked. “Tragic. His name was Don, right?” God, this guy did his homework. Callan knew her murdered friend Don had been her close-combat sparring partner. Nikki studied the DHS agent, wondering if he also knew that she and Don once had a no-strings sexual relationship. The ex-SEAL used to call himself her trainer with benefits. If Bart Callan knew about that part, he didn’t let on. So she couldn’t tell if there was deeper meaning when he said, “Listen, if you want a new partner, I love a good workout.”

Her gaze left his to dwell on the walls of the bar, which she recognized had been illustrated by the same artist who’d drawn the Madeline books. “I called because I want to hear again about your contact with my mother,” she said, glancing back his way, glad now to be on her ground. “A few weeks ago you said something about an informant.”

“There’s not much more I can tell you.”

“Then tell me again.”

“I’m not holding back, Detective. Data is sparse.” She arched a brow at him, and he said, “But I’ll happily go over it again. I was FBI then and was made point liaison with your mother when she reached out to the Bureau to say she knew of a threat to security within our borders. She told me she had been developing an informant within a terror group, and we funded her two hundred grand to bribe her insider in exchange for proof and details of the plot. We gave your mother the money for the transaction the day she was murdered.”

Heat had already known that much. But she now wanted to ask some new questions. “Did you know who her informant was?” When the agent shook no, she said, “I believe it was a man name Ari Weiss. Deceased now, so no help. But he was college friends with a Brit living here named Carey Maggs.” She searched his face for recognition of either name and got none. “Would it be a pain to ask you to run a check on Maggs for me?”

“You think he might be involved?”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be. But I like both belt and suspenders, you know?” Callan twisted open his gold Cross ballpoint and wrote the name down. When he’d finished, she asked, “What about the two hundred thou? Did it ever surface? I know you guys had to mark the bills.”

He wagged his head again. “End of our intel, end of story.” Then he added, “Well, it was the end of the trail until you exposed Tyler Wynn. Which is why I am renewing my pitch to you. The memos out of DC call it cooperative interface. Join me, Nikki. I have resources. We’d make a great team.” He started to reach a hand across the table, but she casually slid hers onto her lap.

“Thanks, but I do better independently.”

He waved his hands back and forth between the two of them. “Then what do you call this?”

“Cooperative interface. And your NYPD appreciates it.”

Out on Madison Avenue, she declined his offer of a ride, even though it would have afforded her a measure of security with Salena Kaye on the hunt for her. The agent said fine, but reminded her that if she ever wanted a sparring partner, he’d be game. From her taxi, Nikki glimpsed him getting into a black Suburban with US government plates, and figured Bart Callan could give her quite a workout.

Detective Heat closed her eyes and ran her math. The equation began with Callan’s intel that her mom had been cultivating an informant. He couldn’t name the insider, but with the new connection Nikki had drawn from her mother to Ari Weiss as a member of Tyler Wynn’s circle, she didn’t have to be at a blackboard in Good Will Hunting to surmise that Cynthia Heat had not been spying on Dr. Weiss-she was cultivating him as a snitch.

She pulled up his obituary on her iPhone. The date of his passing from a tick-borne illness was January 2, 2000. Only six weeks after her mother’s death.

As soon as she locked her apartment door behind her, Heat speed-dialed the home of a judge she’d met at one of Rook’s weekly poker games. After Judge Simpson razzed her about giving him a chance to win his money back, Nikki asked him a favor: to write a court order for the exhumation of Ari Weiss.

Röyksopp startled her from the computer screen. After Rook’s call that morning from Nice, his ringtone, a song from a caveman commercial, seemed newly appropriate to Nikki.

“It’s late there. I was afraid you’d be in bed,” said Rook.

“I’m going over squad reports on my serial killer.”

“I’m in London. Heathrow, actually. Workin’ my way back to you, babe.” The joker, trying to laugh it off, she thought during the long silence she fed him. “Should be there by sunup, your time. I’m flying Virgin.”

“I doubt that.” Another dose of awkward pause.

“Nikki, I guess I can see why you got all bent about Yardley, but you’re reading way too much into this.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.” They listened to each other breathe. Then he said, “They’re calling my flight.”

“How long is it?”

“Let’s see, uh… a little over seven hours.”

“Good,” she said. “Use it to work on your empathy.”

Detective Heat brought her crew in for another early roll call the next morning. This time, they were joined by Detectives Malcolm and Reynolds, on loan from the major case squad. They were quick studies, so Nikki only needed to use the first ten minutes to recap the two murders and get them up to speed. As she wrapped it up, Sharon Hinesburg slid into the back of the bull pen, the only detective to be tardy.

Traces on the physical evidence from each homicide scene had brought no results after a day and a half of calling and canvassing. The red and yellow string was so common and widely available that screening recent purchases could take weeks, plus it could have been bought months or years ago. Same, too, with the skate wheel.

Malcolm raised a hand. “Let me tell you something.” He slouched back in his usual pose and planted one of his work boots on the back of a chair. “Coming in cold?… Whenever I come across props like this in a case, it’s one of two things. Either there’s some sort of personal crap the guy’s working out…”

“You mean like fetishes?” asked Heat.

“Yeah, or some fucked-up, brain-fried, thumb-sucking obsession like his mommy wouldn’t let him have pets or ride a skateboard.”

“… While carrying scissors,” added his partner, Reynolds.

“Or second, he’s just seeding chaff to mess with our heads.” Malcolm brought his cup up to sip. “Who knows?”

“Only the killer,” said Heat. “Let’s keep on tracing those items, especially the string, which is common to both, but keep digging on the victims. People in their lives, how they spent their last day, and especially-are they somehow connected to each other beyond their job types?”

Detective Raley reported that only one neighborhood camera was pointed at the Maxine Berkowitz crime scene. “It’s outside a neighborhood Islamic center on Riverside Drive,” he said. “And it’s out of order.”

Heat logged that in marker on the Berkowitz whiteboard, then tapped the identical notation for the pizza joint cam in the other murder. “Coincidence?” she said. “I would say strange enough to be considered…”

“Wait for it,” called Feller.

“… an odd sock,” said Nikki, and the room erupted in a chorus of “Yessss!” at the first invocation of Heat’s pet investigative phrase on this case. But the rowdiness was quelled when one of the administrative aides brought in the morning papers and held one of the tabloids up to the room. The bold headline screamed: DEAD TIE! Underneath, against a white background, blared a giant photo of two coils of string: one red, one yellow.

Heat dismissed the meeting, and the rest of the squad did exactly what she did: They dove into the New York Ledger. “Exclusive,” read the subhead, and the byline was Tam Svejda, Senior Metro Reporter for the Ledger-whom Heat knew, among other things, to be a lazy journalist prone to easy handouts from “insiders.” Detective Hinesburg had whispered confidential material to her before, acting as Captain Irons’s mouthpiece-an apt term, considering her sexual relationship with the skipper. To Nikki the article felt warmed over, derivative of old reports already made public. But then there was the leak of the big hold-back: that the two homicides were literally bound together by string, which pointed to a serial killer operating in Manhattan.

“Now, calm down, Detective,” said Wally Irons. Heat appeared in his office before he could set down his briefcase. “We were going to release that today anyway.”

“But we didn’t. Someone leaked it. And whoever it was put our MO hold-back on page one,” she said, brandishing the picture of the string.

“First things first,” he said, seeming to enjoy this. “Tam Svejda called me for comment, and you can see for yourself, I downplayed the serial killer angle. Here it is.” He ran a finger down the column and quoted, “Precinct Commander Captain Wallace Irons cautioned against leaping to conclusions. ‘We cannot rule out the possibility that these killings could be the work of separate individuals.’ ”

“Nobody’s going to buy that,” said Heat.

“Ah, but it’s on the record. I did my part.”

Nikki slapped her thigh with the tabloid, wondering how she had gotten so lucky to work under the Iron Man. Detective Ochoa stuck his head in the door.

“Excuse me, Detective? Got a call on your line from a guy who says he’s the serial killer.”

“See?” Nikki shook the newspaper at Irons. “The bogus calls are starting already.”

But then Ochoa said, “Detective Heat? He asked if you liked to roller blade.”

Heat tossed the tabloid on a guest chair and rushed out to her desk.