Richard Castle: Raging Heat

“Are they all hundreds?” asked Detective Feller over her shoulder.

“Looks to be,” she said, leaving the money inside. “If so, there are thousands in here.” Nikki riffled the stack and stopped when she came upon a lump that created a bookmark in the middle of the cash. Feller extracted the tweezers from his Swiss Army knife, and with them, Heat drew out of the money a small piece of scratch paper with an address and a phone number written in ballpoint. And underneath, a word scrawled in pencil. “Can you read this?” She held it out to the other detective who squinted and tilted his head, trying to make it out.

“Conscience,” whispered Rook in her ear. Startled and blushing, Nikki turned to him. But he was only deciphering the scrawl. “It says, ‘conscience.’”

The crime scene unit tagged-in and Detective Heat left them to scour Fabian Beauvais’s rental for more clues. She had not turned up a cell phone and asked them to alert her if one surfaced. Meantime, she, Rook, and Feller left to work the new leads. Once more the homicide squad leader felt hamstrung by her personnel shortage. Nikki’s preference would have been to leave a detective to canvass the building and neighborhood, but with Roach and Rhymer deployed on the home invasion, she brought Randall Feller back to the Two-Oh with her to get the envelope labbed for a potential fingerprint and blood match with the dead Haitian’s and to run serial numbers on the ten grand that turned out to be inside it. She would track the phone number and the address herself.

Of course, the pair of goons that bowled them over in the stairwell deserved some scrutiny, also. Heat called ahead to book a police-sketch artist to meet at the precinct so they could generate some pictures to follow up the Be On The Lookout notice she had transmitted. When she hung up, Rook asked them why they thought the two men had been there.

“Could be the money,” said Feller. “Whatever they were up to, we surprised them.”

“Actually,” said Heat, “I believe we were the ones who got surprised.” She made a note that when Raley got free, she’d have the King of All Surveillance Media scrub traffic cams in Flatbush for hits on the two getaway cars, although she didn’t hold much hope there. Their escape setup smelled like a pro execution. Combining that with ten grand and a mysterious note hidden in the floor of a closet told Heat something more was going on than a guy falling out of an airplane. She pressed the gas pedal, as if that would help her find out sooner what it was.

Back in the bull pen, Nikki hung up her phone and crossed over to the Murder Board. “Bingo.” Rook and Feller joined her there and she pointed to the eight-by-tens of the bloody envelope and the note she had posted there. “As you know, there wasn’t any area code with this phone number, but a telecom records crunch scored a match with the address written there, which turns out to be in the Hamptons. I had them run it twice, and the phone listing is definitely to the same residence.”

“Show-off,” said Rook.

Feller tried to peek at her spiral notepad. “You get a name?” Without answering, she uncapped a red dry-erase marker with her teeth and printed it in big block letters. When she finished, Randall said, “Whoa.…” Rook simply had two brows arched in surprise.

“What about Keith Gilbert?” asked Wally Irons from the doorway of the bull pen. The precinct commander’s fishbowl office looked out upon the Homicide Squad Room, and the VIP name had attracted his immediate attention, even from behind the glass. As a rule — and a sound one — Heat kept the captain out of the loop on most investigations until they closed. The Iron Man had too great a knack for gumming the works, at best; monkey-wrenching the whole deal, at worst. Trapped now, she sketched out the case in its leanest bullet points and explained how she came to identify a rich and powerful Port Authority commissioner as someone she wanted to interview in a suspicious death inquiry.

“You sure that’s a smart play?”

“I’m taking it you don’t, sir.”

Irons peered over his gut to check the shine on his shoes. “I am not going on the record telling you not to follow a lead, Detective. But.” He raised his face to hers. “Keith Gilbert is golf buddies with the fucking mayor. You watch the news, you read the papers. Every night he’s in a tux making rounds at cocktail parties with the biggest political donors in this city, getting greased up to run for senator. Like he needs their Goddamn money.”

His face clouded and he turned to Rook, as if just realizing he was there. “All this is off the record, right?”

The journalist winked and mimed a lock and key to his lips.

Heat had to acknowledge that, for once, her captain’s aversion to stirring trouble was more than his default stance of self-preservation and sycophancy. Keith Gilbert was a force of nature not to be taken lightly. Scion of a wealthy shipping magnate who had let his cargo business go to rust in his old age, young Keith had dropped out of his Harvard MBA program to grab the reins of the family business from his father. Against odds, advice, and common sense, he not only held on to the broke company, he doubled down by committing a fortune to expansion, gambling his own inheritance on a dream.

Gilbert spent and spent, first renovating the outmoded cargo fleet. Then he spent more, buying up cruise ships from weak players to create a new income stream in tourism, which paid off richly. Through a series of canny moves, luck, and legendary toughness, he boldly saved the broke company and made it flourish.

He also did it with style. Over the past decade Gilbert’s winning face commonly stared out from multiple covers at newsstands: paragliding the western mountains of Norway; skippering a yacht in the America’s Cup; holding hands with his society bride at their storybook wedding on the Amalfi Coast; or, more recently, laughing as the charismatic guest at dinner parties inside the Beltway with the DC power elite. As if resurrecting a decaying business wasn’t enough of a challenge, the shipping millionaire had set his compass heading for Washington.

But charming as he was known to be publicly, the once and future knight of the next Camelot also had a reputation as a bullyboy. Behind his back — always with a look over the shoulder — critics knew he took no prisoners. One joke making the rounds speculated that the environmental affront floating in the middle of the Pacific known as the Great Garbage Patch was really just the remnants of anyone who ever said no to Keith Gilbert or got in his way.

Heat knew all that. But she also knew doing her job meant not being afraid of uncomfortable places and the powerful that inhabit them. “Sir, I appreciate your caution. And I hope you recognize that I would never approach anyone disrespectfully, whether they were wealthy and connected like Keith Gilbert or poor and marginalized like Fabian Beauvais.”

“Who?”

Rook pointed to his name on the Murder Board and mouthed, “Victim.”

“You’re gonna do this aren’t you, Heat.”

“The address and phone number of his summer mansion was written on an envelope containing ten thousand dollars hidden in the floor of a dead man’s apartment. I think it’s good police work to at least ask Commissioner Gilbert a few questions.”

At a loss, Irons said, “Keep me looped in,” and retreated toward his fishbowl.

“As always, Captain,” said Heat. Detective Feller smirked and returned to his desk.

Rook seemed lost in the ozone. “Weirdest thing. All this talk made me flash on this vivid dream I keep having. You are a senator.” He shook it off. “Senator Heat. Where’d that come from?”

By late morning, the police artist finished his sketches of the two men who fled the Flatbush SRO, and Heat, Rook, and Feller unanimously agreed they were good likenesses. Heat tasked Detective Feller to get them transmitted, then to return to Avenue D in Brooklyn to canvass the building and neighborhood for anyone who might have known Fabian Beauvais.