Richard Castle - Naked heat

"Take it all," said Rook. "There are kids starving in Beverly Hills, you know. Of course, that's by choice."

When she'd finished the rest of it, he asked, "What did you want to talk to me about? By the way, that's one of my great qualities as a reporter. Asking the inobvious question."

"Riiight." She chuckled politely and nodded. " 'K, well, I felt like I could do this because you were nice to me when I got busted the other day. And could relate to the no-parent thing."

"Right," he said and then waited, wondering where this was going.

"I know you're going to write this article about my mother, right? And…" Holly paused, and he saw light shimmer off the pools forming in her eyes. "… And I know everybody is probably telling you how bad she was. And I'm here to tell you, damn, she was all that." Rook drew the mental image of Holly standing over her mother's bed while she slept, holding a handgun on her, a millimeter of finger movement from blowing her away. "But I came to tell you, since you're going to write her story, don't make her all about being a monster."

Holly's lips quaked, taking on lives of their own, and a tear streamed down each cheek. Rook handed her his napkin and she dabbed her cheeks and blew her nose. "I have a lot of anger at her. Maybe more now that she's gone, because I can't work any of this shit out with her now. That's part of why I didn't kill her; we weren't done, you know?"

Rook didn't know, so he just nodded and listened.

She sipped her beer and, when she had settled enough to continue, said, "All of the bad things about her were true. But in the middle of it is one thing. About eight years ago my mother made contact with me. She had some way of tracking me to my foster home and got permission from my family to take me to dinner. We went to this Jackson Hole burger place I liked in my neighborhood, and it was bizarre. She has the waitress take a picture of us like it was my birthday party or something. She doesn't eat, just sits there telling me all this stuff about how tough it was when she found out she was pregnant, and that she thought she would keep me at first, so she didn't have an abortion and then she changed her mind the first month because it wasn't going to work in her life-'it' she said, like I was an 'it.'

"Anyway she goes through this whole blah-blah about why she did it and then she says she had been thinking long and hard about it and feeling so bad-agony, I remember that was what she said she felt, like she was always in agony-and asked what I thought, if maybe we could talk about getting together."

"You mean, like…"

"Well, yuh. Like she thought she could just show up and change her mind about abandoning me and I would just get in the frickin' Acura with her and live happily ever after."

Rook let a healthy silence pass before he asked, "What did you say to her?"

"I threw my ice water in her face and walked out." Part of Holly Flanders showed proud defiance. Rook imagined she had told that story before to friends or barflies over the years and reveled in her heroic act of maternal repudiation, poetic in its balancing of scales. But he also saw in her the other part of Holly Flanders, the part that had brought her to his doorstep to wait in the dark, the woman who felt the weight of emotions that nest uncomfortably in any soul with a conscience that has to bear the unhealable wound of banishing another person. With ice water, no less.

"Holly, you were what, early teens, then?"

"I didn't come here to be let off the hook, OK? I came because once you found out she had put me out to foster care, I didn't want you to think that was all there was to her. I look back now, older and all, and realize she didn't just wash her hands and walk away, you know?" She finished her beer in a long gulp and set the glass down slowly. "Bad enough I have to deal with this the rest of my life. I didn't want to make it worse by letting you write her story without telling you there was more to her than giving me away."

At the door on her way out she got on her toes to give Rook a kiss. She went for his lips and he turned to present his cheek. "Is that because of what I do?" she asked. "Because I sell it sometimes?"

"That's because I'm sort of with someone else now." And then he smiled. "Well, I'm working on it."

She gave him her cell number, in case he wanted to talk about the article, and left. As Rook went back to the kitchen to clean up the dishes, he lifted her plate. Underneath he found a four-by-six color photo that looked like it had spent some time folded. It was Cassidy Towne and her teenage daughter in their booth at a Jackson Hole. Cassidy was smiling, Holly was enduring. All Rook could look at was the glass of ice water. The next morning, Heat and Rook sat down at her desk to compare notes on the Cassidy Towne manuscript. First, though, he asked her if she'd had any fallout from the item in "Buzz Rush," and she said, "Not yet but the day is young."

"You do know The Bulldog is all over that," he said.

"I doubt she's the author, whoever The Stinger is, but I'm sure Soleil's lawyer worked her contacts to send me a message."

He filled her in on his visit from Holly Flanders and Nikki said, "That's sweet, Rook. Sort of reinforces the faith I keep investing in humanity."

He said, "Good, then, because I almost didn't tell you."

"Why not tell me?"

"You know. I was afraid you might take it funny. A young woman coming to my place at night when I told you I'd be home alone, reading."

"That is so sweet that you'd think that I'd care." Nikki turned and left him there to sort that out while she got her manuscript.

Heat used paper clips and Rook used Post-it flags, but both had marked only a few passages in the book as pertinent to the case. And none pointed to direct suspicion of anyone as an agent of the gossip columnist's death. And, importantly, there was no concrete indication of anything untoward in Reed's passing. That was all deftly crafted as sly questions and hints of a bombshell payoff buildup by Cassidy Towne.

The passages they had marked were the same. Mostly they were name mentions of Soleil Gray and episodes in their drunken, druggy courtship. Tales from the movie set told of a sometimes morose Reed Wakefield who, after their romantic breakup, immersed himself deeper into the role of Ben Franklin's bastard child. His passion to escape his own life into the character's, many felt, would lead to an Oscar, even posthumously.

Much of the book was material the public had all known about Wakefield, but with insider detail that only Cassidy could have sourced. She didn't spare the actor any blemishes. One of the more damning, albeit minor, stories was attributed to a former costar of three of his films. The ex-costar and now ex-friend said that, after Reed became convinced he had lobbied the director of Sand Maidens, a sword-and-sandals CGI epic, to re-edit their battle scene for more close-ups of him than Reed, Wakefield not only wrote him off as a friend but took revenge. Photos captured on a cell phone arrived at the costar's wife's office. They were candids of the costar with his hand up the skirt of one of the hot extras at the wrap party. The message written on the back of one of the photos said, "Don't worry. It ain't love, it's location."

Both Heat and Rook had made a note to discuss that with each other, and both agreed that, even though the touchy-feely costar ended up divorced, it provided no motive for killing Cassidy Towne, since he had been the one to tell her the story.

The bulk was an anecdotal chronicle of a talented, sensitive actor's hard partying, boozing, snorting, popping, and shooting lifestyle. The conclusion Heat and Rook independently drew from reading the book was that if the final, missing chapter fulfilled the hype, the book would be a blockbuster, but from the material they had read, nothing in these pages seemed explosive enough to warrant the murder of the author to cover it up.