Richard Castle - Naked heat

Nikki Heat pondered red lights and why they seemed to last so much longer when there was no traffic. The one she waited for at Amsterdam and 83rd was taking forever to change. The detective was rolling on her first call of the morning and probably could have lit up her gumball to make her left turn, but the crime was long since done, the medical examiner was on scene, and the body wasn't going anywhere. She used the interlude to peel back the lid of her coffee to see if it was drinking temp yet. The cheap white plastic cracked, and she ended up holding half the lid with the other half still seated on the cup. Heat cursed aloud and chucked the useless half on the passenger-side floor mat. Just as she was about to take a sip, desperately needing a caffeine jolt to lift her morning fog, a horn honked behind her. The light had finally gone green. Of course.

With an experienced hand tilting the cup so the momentum of her turn wouldn't slop coffee over the rim and onto her fingers, Nikki steered left onto 83rd. She had just straightened the wheel passing Cafe Lalo when a dog darted out in front of her. Heat slammed the brakes. Coffee sloshed onto her lap. It was all over her skirt, but she was more concerned about the dog.

Thankfully, she didn't hit it. She didn't even scare it. The dog, a small German shepherd or husky mix, boldly stood there in the street right in front of her, not moving, just staring at her over its shoulder. Nikki smiled at it and waved. And still, it just stood there. That stare unnerved her. It was challenging and intrusive. The eyes were sinister, piercing under dark brows and a permanent frown. As she examined it, something else seemed off about the dog. Like it wasn't a dog at all. Too small for a shepherd or husky, and the coloring of its rough coat was tan mottled by gray. And the muzzle was too thin and pointed. It was more foxlike. No.

It was a coyote.

The same impatient driver behind her gave another horn blast and the animal left. Not in a panic run, but a trot, displaying wild elegance, potential speed, and something else. Arrogance. She watched it reach the other curb, where it stopped, gave her a backward glance, complete with brazen eye contact, and then dashed off toward Amsterdam.

For Nikki, an unsettling way to start her morning: first the scare of almost hitting an animal; then the creepy look. She drove on, blotting herself with napkins from the glove box, wishing she had chosen a black skirt this morning and not gone with the khaki. It never got any easier for Nikki to meet a corpse. As she sat behind the steering wheel at 86th and Broadway, parked behind the OCME van, observing the silent movie of a coroner at work, she once again reflected that maybe that was a good thing.

The medical examiner was crouched on the sidewalk in front of the shared storefront of a lingerie shop and the newest gourmet cupcake bakery. A duo of mixed messages, if there ever was one. She couldn't see the victim he was working. Thanks to a citywide garbage strike, a waist-high mound of refuse started in the gutter and encroached on a good bit of the sidewalk, obscuring the body from Heat's view. She could whiff the two days of trash rot even in the morning chill. At least the mound formed a handy barrier to keep the looky-loos back. There were already a dozen early risers up the block and an equal number behind the yellow tape down at the corner near the subway entrance.

She looked at the digital clock flashing time and temperature on the bank up the street. Only 6:18. More and more of her shifts were starting like this. The downturn in the economy had hit everyone, and in her personal observation, whether it was the city cutbacks in policing or merely the sort of economy that fueled crime-or both-Detective Heat was meeting more corpses these days. She didn't need Diane Sawyer to break out the crime stats for her to know that if the body count wasn't up, the rate was at least quickening its pace.

But no matter what the statistics, the victims meant something to her, one at a time. Nikki Heat had promised herself never to become a volume dealer in homicides. It wasn't in her makeup and it wasn't in her experience.

Her own loss almost ten years ago had shredded her insides, yet in between the scar tissue that formed there after her mother's murder, there still sprung shoots of empathy. Her precinct skipper, Captain Montrose, told her once that that was what made her his best detective. All things considered, she'd rather have gotten there without the pain, but someone else dealt those cards, and there she was, early on an otherwise beautiful October morning, to feel the raw nerve again.

Nikki observed her personal ritual, a brief reflection for the victim, forging her own connection to the case in light of her own victimhood and, especially, to honor her mom. It took her all of five seconds. But it made her feel ready.

She got out of the car and went to work.

Detective Heat ducked under the yellow tape at an opening in the trash heap and stopped short, startled to see herself staring up from the cover of a discarded issue of a First Press magazine poking out of a garbage bag, between an egg carton and a stained pillow. God, she hated that pose, one foot up on her chair in the precinct bull pen, arms folded, her Sig Sauer holstered on her hip beside her shield. And that awful headline:

Crime wave meets heat wave

At least someone had the good sense to trash it, she thought, and moved on to join her two detectives, Raley and Ochoa, inside the perimeter.

The partners, affectionately team-nicknamed "Roach," had already been working the scene and greeted her. "Morning, Detective," they said almost in unison.

"Morning, Detectives."

Raley looked at her and said, "I'd offer you a coffee, but I see you've already worn yours."

"Hilarious. You should host your own morning show," she said. "What do we have here?" Heat made her own visual survey as Ochoa filled her in on the vic. He was a male Hispanic, thirty to thirty-five, dressed in worker's clothes, lying faceup in a pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk. He had ghastly flesh tearing and bite marks on the soft underside of his neck. More on his gut where his T-shirt was ripped away.

Nikki flashed on her coyote and turned to the ME. "What are all these bite marks?"

"Postmortem is my guess," said the medical examiner. "See the wounds on the hands and forearms?" He indicated the victim's open palms draped at his sides. "Those weren't caused by animal bites. Those are defense wounds from an edge weapon. I say knife or box cutter. But if he'd been alive when the dog got to him, he'd have bites on his hands, which he doesn't. And take a look at this." He knelt beside the body, and Heat dropped to a squat beside him as he used a gloved finger to indicate a piercing of the man's shirt.

"Stab wound," Nikki said.

"We'll know for sure after the autopsy, but I bet that's our COD. The dog was probably just a scavenger working the trash." He paused. "Oh, and Detective Heat?"

"Yes?" She studied him, wondering what other information he had for her.

"I enjoyed your article in this month's First Press immensely. Kudos."

A knot formed in Nikki's stomach, but she said thanks and rose up, moving quickly away to stand with Raley and Ochoa. "Any ID?"

Ochoa said, "Negative. No wallet, no ID."

"Uniforms are canvassing the block," said Detective Raley.

"Good. Any eyewitnesses?"

Raley said, "Not yet."

Heat tilted her head to scan the high-rise apartments lining both sides of Broadway. Ochoa anticipated her. "We've set up a check of facing residences to see if anybody saw or heard anything."

She dropped her gaze to him and smiled slightly. "Good. Also see if any of these businesses spotted anything. The bakery is a good bet to have staff around in the early-early. And don't forget security cams. That jewelry store across the way might have picked up something, if we're lucky." She side-nodded up the block to the man holding five leashed dogs on a sit command. "Who's he?"