Richard Castle: Frozen Heat

“Everything.”

Heat didn’t wait to use the lockbox. She just handed her Sig to the guard as she raced into Holding. Sprinting past cells of drunks, burglars, and public urinators, she arrived at the back where the isolation cell door stood open and three officers in blue gloves knelt over Petar.

He had pitched forward off his bunk and lay sprawled on his back with a fresh, open gash in his forehead where his head had smacked the concrete. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and his skin was deep purple with crimson webs of capillaries coloring it. His tongue looked blue enough to be called black and protruded from his open mouth from a pool of froth that capped a trail of pungent, bloody vomit that ran down his neck and onto the floor. The crotch of his orange coveralls was drenched with his urine and his bowels had released in death.

The officers rose up from him. One ran out, clutching his mouth. Nikki found herself taking an unconscious step back and bumped into Rook. One of the uniforms said, “We tried to CPR him, but he was gone by the time we got the cage unlocked.”

“Did anyone see what happened?” she asked.

She was speaking to the officers, but one of the other prisoners said, “He just got his dinner and started retching something fierce.” The prisoner added a demonstration, but Nikki turned away to survey the cell.

A food tray sat on the floor with an empty plastic juice bottle tipped on its side. Nothing else had been touched. “Nobody gets near him until the ME,” said Heat. “And nobody in here eats or drinks anything until we know what poisoned him.”

“And who,” said Rook.

Nikki splashed more cold water on her face and rose up to see herself in the mirror above the women’s room sink. Her lips began to turn downward and tremble, and she looked away, only to force herself to go back for a brave stare, but the trembling only grew and grew and her eyes were rimmed with tears. Before they could roll down her cheeks, she bent to the faucet again and scooped more water onto herself.

Unlike with his handler’s faked death in Paris, Detective Heat had the means and cause to verify that Petar Matic had indeed expired. A call to her friend, Lauren Parry, brought the medical examiner from a sound sleep to the holding cell in less than forty-five minutes. Dr. Parry’s prelim squared with the eyeball evidence. Poison, introduced through an innocuous, half-pint plastic bottle of apple juice. Strong stuff, too. In all her years, Lauren had never seen such a ferocious attack by an outside toxin. “This dose-of whatever the hell it turns out to be when we lab it-was designed to put him down fast and hard. Full organ shutdown with no chance of resuscitation. Better believe I’ll be double-checking the seals on my moon suit when I do his postmortem.”

Petar’s postmortem.

Heat dried her face with some paper towels and held them to her closed eyes. Behind the lids she was thirteen, on a school ski trip to Vermont where she had lost her way on the trail and skied onto a steep incline that had iced over. When she fell that day, she had lost her gloves and a ski that had spun sideways down the ice and clattered off a precipice into a gulch she couldn’t see. The gloves had stopped yards below, but to go for them she would risk following the ski.

Alone and in peril, Nikki had clawed her fingernails into the ice, trying to pull herself to safety. All she had to do was make it ten feet up the incline and grab hold of a rock. Halfway there, her fingertips lost purchase and she slid back to where she had begun. Sobbing, and with skin raw from ice burn, she found the strength to draw herself up the slope again. Almost there, reaching out for the chunk of stone which sat just inches from her grasp, she lost her grip again. The slide took her farther down, all the way to her gloves, which fell over the cliff when she skidded into them.

Heat opened her eyes. She was in the precinct restroom. But she was still on that frozen slope.

“Got something for you on our poisoned food,” said Detective Feller when she came back into the bull pen. “The delivery kid from the deli where Holding places our orders got spiffed a twenty at his bike rack by someone who said they’d handle this one.”

“Excellent. Did he give you a good description?” she asked.

“Yes, and when I heard it, I showed him this.” Feller held up the APB pic of Salena Kaye on his cell phone. “Positive ID.”

“I’ll see that and raise you one,” said Raley, coming through the door clutching a photo print. “Just pulled this still from my surveillance screening of the OCME cams. Check out who dropped off the bad gas at the loading dock.” He held up the shot for them all to see: Salena Kaye in a delivery uniform and baseball cap.

Rook joined them from his desk and said, “That is one naughty nurse.”

“Yeah,” said Raley. “Too bad this surveillance tape has been sitting around unscreened for a couple of days. If we’d only seen this day before yesterday, we might have gotten her before she rabbitted.”

“Or got Petar,” added Feller.

“Refresh my memory,” said Rook. “Who was it who said he wanted to take point on the gas truck, personally? Then delegated it to his secret weapon?”

Nikki took the still from Raley and walked it into Irons’s office and shut the door. Less than three minutes later, the captain must have decided not to summon the press, after all. He grabbed his coat and left in a hurry.

Exhausted, but unwilling to go home with things in such flux, Heat spent the night at the precinct. Rook came in at daybreak with a latte and fresh change of clothes for her. “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

“Ish,” she said. “Tried to grab a few winks in one of the interrogation rooms, but, you know.” She took a sip of her coffee. “My dad’s an early riser, so I called him a little while ago to fill him in, so he wouldn’t hear it on the news first.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Closed, as ever. But at least he didn’t screen me out when he saw the caller ID, so that’s a start.”

Rook thought back to the brittle exit from her father’s condo after she had asked him for the bank statements. “You’re either stronger than I thought you were or a glutton for punishment.”

“Aside from all the personal crap? I really thought I had this case locked down.” She led him to the twin Murder Boards. Both were brimming with new notes she had made on them in the predawn hours. “I thought once I nailed the killer, I’d be done. But Petar ended up-well, he ended up just the consolation prize.”

“You know, Nikki, that’s the tragedy of all this. I was feeling that your old boyfriend and I were just starting to bond.” He looked at her innocently. “What, too soon?”

“A little,” she said, but smiled in appreciation of his usual effort to try to make her laugh, in spite of. “This nerve’s still a bit exposed. But don’t give up, OK?”

“Deal.”

She contemplated one of the boards with a bleak sigh. “This one…” Nikki tapped Tyler Wynn’s name, now featured prominently. “He called the orders. Because of him, my mother died, Nicole died, Don died.”

“Carter Damon, also.”

“Right. And why?” She shook her head. “Damn, I really thought I’d be done.”

Most of the squad gathered early. Clearly, sleep was not anybody’s priority. Roach came in a little later, but only because they had paid a visit to the MTA headquarters on the way in to check surveillance video from the 96th Street station. “They’re making dubs for us now,” said Detective Raley, “but we logged Nicole Bernardin going over the platform toward the Ghost Station with the leather pouch and then coming back without it the same night she died.”