Richard Castle: Heat Rises

“Give me the light, Crime Dog, think there’s more here.” Raley took the mini from his partner and squatted in front of the gap. A few seconds later he pulled out the mate to the other loafer then said, “Well, what do you know?”

“What?” Ochoa asked. “Don’t be a dick, what is it?”

“Hang on a sec. If you weren’t packing on the weight, you could have done this instead of me.” Raley twisted his shoulder to get a better angle for his reach into the narrow opening. “Here we go. Another collar.”

Nikki expected to see something in a leather gimp rig with sharp studs and stainless steel D-rings, but when Raley finally stood and held it up in his gloved hand, it wasn’t that kind of collar at all. It was a priest’s collar.

In 2005 New York City funded eleven million dollars to modernize the NYPD’s high-tech capability by building the Real Time Crime Center, a computer operations hub that, among numerous capabilities, provides crime reports and police data to officers in the field with startling immediacy. That is why in a city of eight and a half million people it only took Detective Heat less than three minutes to get a likely ID on the victim in the torture dungeon. The RTCC accessed records and spit out a missing persons report filed the night before by a parish rectory housekeeper for a Father Gerald Graf.

Nikki assigned Roach to stay and continue their canvass while she made the drive uptown to interview the woman who filed the MPR. Detectives Feller and Van Meter were off their shift, but Dutch offered to help Roach continue knocking on doors. Feller appeared at her car window and said if Heat didn’t mind the company, he’d be happy to ride shotgun with her. She hesitated, figuring this was about Feller engineering his opportunity to ask her to catch a drink or dinner later. But a veteran detective was reaching out to help with a case on his own time, and she couldn’t say no to that. If he tried to bend it into a date offer, she’d simply deal with it.

Our Lady of the Innocents was on the northern border of the precinct, mid-block on 85th between West End Avenue and Riverside. At this early side of the morning rush hour, a five-minute drive, if that. But as soon as Heat pulled onto Broadway, they caught a red in front of the Beacon Theater.

“Glad to finally have some time alone with you,” said Feller while they waited.

“For sure,” said Nikki, who then hurried to steer the topic away. “Appreciate the assist, Randy. Can always use another pair of eyes and ears.”

“Gives me a chance to ask you something without the whole world around.”

She looked up at the light and considered breaking out the gumball. “… Yeah?”

“Any idea how you did on your exam for lieutenant?” he asked. Not the question she expected. Nikki turned to look at him. “Green,” he said and she drove on.

“I don’t know, seemed like I did all right. Hard to know for sure,” she said. “Still waiting for the results to be posted.” When the department’s civil service test was offered recently, Heat had taken it, not so much out of a burning desire for the promotion, but because she wasn’t sure when it would be given again. Budget cuts from the economic crisis had hit New York as much as any other municipality, and one response the year before had been to cut back on raises by postponing the scheduled rank advancement tests.

Detective Feller cleared his throat. “What if I told you I hear you aced it?” She gave him a side glance and then concentrated on the driver of the bread delivery truck who had stopped to double-park in her lane without flashers. While she hit her blinker and waited for the passing lane to clear, he went on. “I know this to be a fact.”

“How?”

“From some inside sources. Downtown.” He reached for the dashboard. “Mind if I back off the temp? Starting to bake in here.”

“Help yourself.”

“I try to keep myself connected.” He turned down the knob one click, then decided on one more before he settled back in his seat again. “Not planning on riding in back of that cab forever, ya hear what I’m saying?”

“Sure, sure.” Nikki made her swing around the bread truck. “I, um, appreciate the info.”

“So when you get by your orals and all the other hoops they make you jump through-like teach you the secret handshake, or whatever-do me a fave? Don’t forget your friends on your way up.”

Whoomph, there it is, thought Nikki. She felt a little embarrassed. All this time thinking Feller wanted to date her when maybe what he really wanted was to network her. She replayed her mental picture of him at the cop bar clowning in his ass gasket lobster bib and wondered if the jester in him was all in fun, or if he was really just a skilled glad-hander. The more he talked, the more that picture emerged.

“When you get your gold bar, it’s going to be a piece of good news in your precinct for a change. And you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do,” she said. They hit another red at 79th, and unfortunately this was a long one.

“Not sure, that’s a laugh,” he said. “I mean Captain Montrose.”

Nikki knew full well what he meant. Her skipper, her mentor, Captain Montrose, was under increasing pressure from One Police Plaza over his performance as commander of the Twentieth Precinct. Whether it was the bad economy, increased unemployment, or a reset to the dark days of the pre-Giuliani disorder, crime statistics were edging up throughout all five boroughs. And worse, they were spiking in election season. Gravity rules, so in response, the shit roll was all downhill to the precinct commanders. But Heat could see her captain was taking an extra pounding. Montrose had been singled out, called down separately for extra meetings and ass chewings, spending as much time at HQ as he did in his office. His personality darkened under the pressure, and he had grown atypically remote-no, more than remote, secretive. It made Nikki wonder whether something else was going on with him beyond precinct perf stats. Now what bothered Heat was that her boss’s private humiliation was Out There as department gossip. If Feller knew about it, others did, too. Loyalty made her deflect it, back up her boss.

“Listen, Randy, who isn’t getting squeezed these days? I hear those weekly CompStat meetings at 1PP are brutal for all the skips, not just mine.”

“Seriously,” he said with a nod. “They should put a drain in the floor to let the blood run out. Green.”

“Jeez, it just turned.” Nikki pressed the accelerator.

“Sorry. Drives Dutch crazy, too. I tell ya, I’ve got to get my ass out of that cab.” He powered down his window and spat. When he closed it again, he said, “This isn’t just about the performance figs. I have a bud in Internal Affairs. Your man is on their radar.”

“Bull.”

“No bull.”

“For what?”

He made an exaggerated shrug. “It’s IA, what do you think?”

“No. I don’t buy it,” she said.

“Then don’t. Maybe he is clean, but I’m telling you he’s got his neck on the stump and they’re sharpening the ax.”

“Not maybe. Montrose is clean.” She made a left onto 85th. A block and a half ahead, she could see a cross on the church roof. In the distance, across the Hudson, the apartments and cliffs were pinking from the rising sun. Nikki switched off her headlights as she crossed West End Avenue.

“Who knows?” said Feller. “You get rank, maybe you’ll be in position to take over the precinct if he goes down.”

“He is not going down. Montrose is under pressure, but he’s straight as they come.”

“If you say.”

“I say. He’s unassailable.”

As Nikki got out in front of the rectory, she wished she had made the drive alone. No, what she wished was that Feller had just asked her for drinks, or bowling, or for sex. Any one of those, she would rather have dealt with.