Richard Castle - Naked heat

A quarter hour into his search, Rook brought his light to rest on a chrysanthemum. In his beam its flowers were rich-colored and fall-ish but somehow seemed ordinary for what Cassidy had grown around them… Somewhat of an odd sock. He stepped closer and also noticed that unlike the other flowers and plants, this one was buried in the soil but still in its flowerpot. He clamped the flashlight in his armpit and used the trowel to dig out the pot. He removed it from the soil, tapped the pot on the planter to loosen the packed dirt and roots, and then dumped it all onto the bricks of the patio. It was a large enough pot to hold the curve of a chapter of manuscript, but there was none such inside. To be thorough Rook went back to the cavity left by the pot and poked the bottom of it with the point of the trowel blade, to feel for any stack of buried paper, and found none. But he hit something that felt through the wooden handle like a small rock, which would be unusual given Cassidy's clean, floury soil.

He shined the flashlight into the hole and caught the reflection of a plastic sandwich bag. Rook reached in, pulled it out, and held it in front of his beam. Inside it was a key.

Ten minutes later, after walking every room and closet and examining every cabinet in Cassidy Towne's apartment, he had found no lock that the key fit. Rook sat down at the kitchen table and studied it. It was a small key, not the kind that fits a door lock but the kind that is more suited for padlocks or lockers. It was fairly new, with a crisp edge on its teeth, and embossed into it was a three-digit number: 417.

He took out his iPhone and called Nikki's cell and got voice mail. "Hi, it's Rook. Got a question for you, call me when you can." Then he tried her at the precinct. The desk sergeant picked up. "Detective Heat's busy in interrogation and forwarded her phone. Do you want her voice mail?" Rook said yes and left a similar message.

Cassidy belonged to a gym but he had seen her with her gym bag and noticed the hot pink combination lock clamped on the strap, so scratch that off. The key could belong to a public locker like in a bus station, and Rook thought of how many bus and train terminals with lockers there were in New York City. It was also possible it fit some cubby at the New York Ledger offices, but tonight anyway, he wasn't about to visit there and introduce himself. "Hi, Jameson Rook. I have a key. May I…?"

Then he realized he had seen a key like this before. In 2005 Rook had been on assignment for two months in New Orleans after Katrina and lived in a rented RV. Since he moved around the area so much, he had rented a mailbox at a UPS store, and this was the kind of key they had issued him. Wonderful, he thought, now all I have to do is go to every mail drop in New York and hope to get lucky.

Rook rapped the key on the kitchen table and tried to recall if he had seen Cassidy go to or near a mail drop. He couldn't come up with one and wasn't sure if there was one in this neighborhood. And then he remembered her daughter, Holly. Holly Flanders had said she found out where Rook lived by looking on the waybills for the messenger service her mother used to send him material. He couldn't remember the name of the service, and there was no way to find that needle in the haystack of Cassidy Towne's office.

After he locked up, Rook walked to Columbus to hail a cab down to Tribeca, to see if he still had any of the shipping envelopes he had received from Cassidy. As the cab passed West 55th, he had a brain tug that the place was located somewhere in Hell's Kitchen. He did a Google search of messenger services on his phone, and five minutes later the taxi dropped him outside Efficient Mail and Messenger on Tenth Avenue, a storefront squeezed between an Ethiopian restaurant and a small grocer with hot tables and pizza by the slice. The garbage pileup had gobbled the sidewalk outside, and under Efficient's dingy awning some of the letters were sputtering in the neon window sign, which read, "Checks Cashed — Copies — Fax." A little run down, he thought as he went inside, but if the key fits, paradise.

The place smelled of old library and pine disinfectant. A small man in a turban sat on a high stool behind a counter. "You wish to make copy?" Before Rook could say no, the man spoke rapidly in a foreign language to a woman using the sole copy machine. She answered back in a short, angry tone and the man said to Rook, "Be five minute."

"Thanks," said Rook, not wanting to engage or explain. He was already at the wall where the bank of brass mail cubbies ran its length from knee to eyebrow. He scanned them and found number 417.

"You rent mailbox? Monthly special."

"All set." Rook held up the key and inserted it. It went in cleanly, but the lock didn't budge. He waggled it with some force, remembering that the teeth of the key had a freshly cut edge and might need some coaxing. Still nothing. He looked and realized that when the counterman had distracted him he had put the key in 416.

The teeth of the key snagged in 417, then it opened. He got down on one knee to look inside and his heart kicked.

Two minutes later, in another cab to Tribeca, he tried Nikki again. She was still in interrogation. This time Rook didn't leave a message. He slouched back between the seat and back door of the taxi and took the stack of double-spaced, typewritten pages from the envelope. They were curled from having been half-rolled to fit inside the mail cubby, so he flattened them on his thigh and held the paper-clipped packet to the window light to read the chapter title again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

FADE OUT

Nikki Heat was big on hands. Sitting in an interrogation room, what she could observe physically about the person across the table was as important as what that person was saying-or not saying. Facial expressions, of course, were key. So were posture, demeanor (restless, fidgety, calm, checked out, and so forth), state of hygiene, and attire. But hands told her a lot. Soleil Gray's hands had been lean and strong from the rigors of her athletic stage dancing. Strong enough, as it turned out, to overpower Mitchell Perkins with such force that people assumed his assailant had been a man. One of the tells Nikki had misjudged when the singer had been sitting at the table with her lawyer just the day before was the cut on her knuckle which the detective had taken to be from the rehearsal hall, not the street mugging.

Now, self-reproach was trying to creep in on Heat, pestering her with the virulent notion that if she had only looked at that hand with a more open view to causes she might have averted a tragedy. She told that idea to have a seat, she'd deal with it later.

Morris Granville's hands were soft and pallid, as if he soaked them daily in bleachy water. He was also a nail biter, although he wasn't doing it in front of her. Swollen domes of irritated skin enveloped the nail stubs at the tip of every finger, and the cuticles that weren't scabbing were raw. She considered those hands and his loner lifestyle and decided to let her projection end right there.

His mind was on Soleil Gray as well, and it wasn't lost on Nikki that her despised moment of fame was the very thing that had brought Morris Granville to her. He had sought out Detective Heat because of her public connection to the now-dead singer, so he could share his moment of special bonding: the night he saw Soleil argue on the sidewalk outside a club with her ex-fiance, Reed Wakefield.

"And you are certain this was the night Reed Wakefield died?" asked Heat. She had been through this with him and asked that same question in different ways over the last half hour, looking for the slipup. Morris Granville was a bona fide celebrity stalker. For this reason the detective was exercising a high degree of caution. His experience could provide an important missing piece of the puzzle, but Heat didn't want to jump for that candy in a weak moment of wishful thinking.