Richard Castle: Deadly Heat

“I still want an answer to my question. Vaja Nikoladze.”

“OK,” said Callan, “I’ll give you this one as a gesture of good faith. The Georgian is an informant. We’d like to keep it that way.” He cast a buffalo eye at Rook. “I’d go on, but I don’t want to be quoted in the media.”

Rook said, “Hey, you carjack a journalist and an NYPD detective on the LIE, you’re going to buy a paragraph in my article.”

Callan didn’t respond. He asked Nikki to think it over, then released the door for his descent.

First thing back in the car, Heat said, “OK, spit it out. Who is Yardley Bell?”

“She is a force, isn’t she?”

“Rook, she kissed you. Start talking.”

“We met in the Caucasus five years ago,” he began. “That was when my early reporting on the Chechen rebels began making noise.”

“Stick to Yardley Bell, Rook,” she said. “I know all about your reporting.”

“OK, so I’m in-country, sitting in the café next door to my hostel, tapping a dispatch into my laptop, when this woman sits across from me and introduces herself as a field producer for public radio. She said she’d been reading my stuff and wanted to tag along to do advance work for a documentary. I thought about it and figured, why not?”

“Because she was hot?”

“Because I’m a sucker for All Things Considered . And because someone who spoke English-let alone was an American-was something I hadn’t encountered in six weeks riding with the rebels.” Then he shrugged, admitting, “All right, and she was hot.”

“How long until you figured out she was CIA?”

“That night. I woke up and caught her going through my laptop and Moleskines.”

“In the middle of the night,” said Nikki.

“Yes.”

“The first night.”

“Let’s review. Six weeks, American, hot.”

“Got it.”

“I had my journalistic ethics, though. I wouldn’t travel as cover for a spy. And I sure wasn’t going to burn the cred I’d established with the warlords. So I sent her off the next morning-OK, next night-and that was that.”

Heat made a turn north along the Hudson and said, “No it’s not. Rook, I interrogate liars for a living, don’t snow me. Not about this.”

“Let me finish. I thought that was that-until six months later when I got kidnapped on a mountain trail by a splinter group that accused me of working for the Russians. They beat the shit out of me for a week in their caves. And guess who found me and led the rescue mission?”

“Susan Stamberg.”

“Next best thing. Yardley hung out with me while I recuperated in Athens, and eventually, I moved some of my stuff into a flat she kept in London. You can do the math; it was great fun but it was complicated. She had a job that she couldn’t talk about, and I had one that I wouldn’t. We shared a place but both traveled.” They stopped at a light in Columbus Circle, just a few blocks from the precinct. “I won’t lie to you, it was good while it lasted. But it didn’t last.”

“Conflict of interest?”

“The biggest. I met you.” Nikki turned to him, and they stared at each other until a horn honked behind her on the green light. She drove on, and he continued, “That’s when I stopped seeing her.”

Nikki thought about the intimacy of Yardley’s greeting, and her undisguised physicality with Rook, and thought maybe she had a new understanding of Agent Yardley Bell’s interest in her case. But the DHS meeting had told her something else more important. If Homeland was pinging Salena Kaye’s cell phone calls deep in a Situation Room bunker, something big was definitely going on with Tyler Wynn and his band of conspirators.

Heat double-parked her Crown Vic along with the other police vehicles in front of the precinct on West 82nd. “Wouldn’t lock it up,” called Ochoa. He and Raley stepped out of the walled parking lot on their way to the Roach Coach. “Got a fresh homicide.”

Nikki knew these guys and could read the signs: their impatient eyes, the pace of their strides. Heat’s gut told her things were about to get jerked into a new dimension. “What?” was all she said.

“There’s string,” said Raley.

His partner added, “Looks like we have ourselves a serial killer.”

Against the dimming of the day, the crime scene floods could have been lights from one of Manhattan’s ubiquitous movie shoots. But as Heat and Rook rolled south on Riverside Drive, approaching 72nd, there were no box trucks, no RV dressing rooms, no port-a-potties with doors marked “Lucy” and “Desi.” When they pulled up, she parked behind the van from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. None of this would be make-believe.

Nikki got out and paused in the street before she closed her door. Rook asked her if everything was OK. Detective Heat nodded. This time she took her private interval for the deceased and felt ready. Raley and Ochoa joined up from the Roach Coach, and the four moved on to work.

The first thing Heat did when she recognized the victim was to call for the ranking scene supervisor. Nikki never broke stride, just told the sergeant to order up crowd control immediately. “Press, paparazzi, gawkers-nobody gets near.”

“Whoa,” said Rook. “It’s Maxine Berkowitz.”

“None other,” said Raley. “Your Channel 3 Doorbuster.”

“Gentlemen” was all Heat needed to say. They quieted, stopping in place. She moved forward, using her palm to shield her face from the powerful CSU lights while she made her Beginner’s Eyes tour around the victim. The body of the Channel 3 consumer advocate sat upright on a city bench facing the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in the pedestrian entrance to Riverside Park. Maxine Berkowitz wore a nicer-quality, tan, off-the-rack business suit. Her hair, although heavily sprayed, spiked out at the back where it had been disturbed. Her makeup bore smudges around her lower face and mouth. Both hands rested gently in her lap. To the casual passerby, she could have been any thirtysomething Manhattan professional taking a break to contemplate the memorial to the First Lady of the World. Except this woman had been murdered.

“Asphyxia through strangulation,” said Lauren Parry over her clipboard. “That’s my prelim, with the usual caveats about letting me run my tests, and yadda, yadda.”

Nikki bent forward to examine the pronounced bruise line around the victim’s neck. “Not manual.”

“I’m betting electrical cord. That contusion is sharply defined. And I see no abrasion or strand pattern like with rope.” Heat drew closer and got a sick-sweet whiff. “Chloroform?” The ME nodded. Nikki studied the smear of makeup around the victim’s nose and mouth and felt a pang of sadness for the reporter, recalling her own abduction a few months before. She rose up and said, “Show me the string.”

The CSU technician’s camera flashed one last shot. He picked up the six-inch aluminum ruler he had placed beside the string to illustrate scale and said, “All yours.”

It sat atop the victim’s purse at the other end of the park bench. Red string, similar to the one left with Conklin’s body, had been tied to an equal length of yellow string, then coiled as one and placed on the purse in a figure-eight loop. The gesture, the care, the quietness of the message-whatever it meant-brought a chill to Nikki. Then Rook moved close by and she felt his warmth against her.

“What do you know,” he said. “A lemniscate.”

“A what?” asked Ochoa.

“Lemniscate. The word for infinity sign.”

Raley weighed in. “I thought infinity sign was the word for infinity sign.”

“Ah, except that’s two words.”

Nikki looked at Roach and shook her head. “Writer.” Then, she said to Rook, “Where’d you learn that, interviewing Stephen Hawking?”