Naked Heat (9 page)

They sparred again and again. He tried the blindside attack once more, but Nikki Heat didn’t have to be shown twice. She raised her leg in an air kick as he swung around at the back of her knee, and with no leg there to stop him, his momentum carried him off balance. She topped him when he went down, and it was Don’s turn to tap out.

Heat wanted to finish the session with a series of disarms. She had made it a regular part of her regime since the night the Russian held her own gun on her in her living room. That disarm worked like a page from the manual, but Nikki believed in rehearsal, the goal to avoid a closing night. Don drilled her on handguns and rifles, then finished off with knives, in their own way trickier than guns, which, once you slipped inside the muzzle line, offered cover with proximity, just the opposite of what happened with a shank. Fifteen minutes and twice that many drills later, they bowed and left each other to hit the showers. Don called to her as she was about to enter her locker room. They walked to meet each other again mid-mat and he asked if she felt like company that night. For reasons she couldn’t figure, or at least didn’t sanction, she thought about Rook and almost declined. Instead she blew it off and said, “Sure, why not?”

Jameson Rook came out of the locker room at the Equinox in Tribeca and saw that he had two messages from Nikki Heat. The morning was brisk. Autumn was coming in earnest, and when he stepped out onto Murray Street and put his cell phone to his ear to return her call, he saw steam rising off his damp hair in the glass of the front door.

“There you are,” she said. “For a minute I was starting to think you’d changed your mind about our ride-along arrangement.”

“Not a bit. I’m just one of the few who actually observes the sign about no cell phones in the locker room at my gym. What’s going on? Heat, if you found the body and didn’t take me, I’m going to be so pissed.”

“I’m a step closer.”

“Get out.”

“Yep. Fat Tommy called. He gave up the crew that jacked the coroner van yesterday. Be in front of your place in twenty minutes and I’ll pick you up. If you behave, you can come to the party.”

“Two of them are inside,” said Nikki Heat into her walkie-talkie. “All we need is for Bachelor Number Three to show up and we can make our move.”

“Standing by,” said Detective Hinesburg in reply.

Heat, Rook, Raley, and Ochoa were Trojan horsed inside the cargo bay of a uniform supply truck parked on East 19th, across from a cell phone store. Fat Tommy had told Nikki the store was a front for the trio’s real business, which was fast-jacking parked delivery trucks while the driver was dollying in his first load. They turned over the merchandise to fences and ditched the vehicles, which were of no interest to them.

“So I guess my Fat Tommy thing paid off,” Rook said.

“Neediness is so unflattering, Rook,” she said. Behind him, he could hear Roach sniffing in laughter.

“But it is what got us here, right?” Rook was trying, without success, to make that sound not needy.

“Why did he give this up to you, Detective Heat?” asked Raley, all too happy to twist Rook’s jock like this. Ochoa was enjoying it, too.

“I don’t want to say it,” answered Heat.

“Say it,” from Ochoa in a low growl.

She paused. “Fat Tommy said it was because I had the balls to get up in his face yesterday morning. He also said not to make it a habit.”

“Was that a threat?” asked Raley.

She smiled and shrugged. “More like the start of a relationship.”

“On your side rear,” came the walkie report from Hinesburg, who was in the vestibule of a coin-op laundry two doors down the block. As soon as she finished the call, a motorcycle thundered by.

“Check him out, Ochoa,” said Nikki. She moved aside, and through the ob port he saw a big man in a leather vest hanging from the ape bars.

“Could be my AR-15. He was covered up, but that’s definitely the build.” He sat back on one of the canvas laundry bags to let Heat have a look as the biker parked on the sidewalk in front of the store and went in.

“All right,” said Detective Heat into the mic. “Let’s hit them before they decide to take a ride. We’ll go on mine in sixty seconds.” She looked at her watch and said, “Woof,” to sync with the others. “Ochoa, you go last,” she said. “I don’t want them making you in the middle of the street.”

“Got it,” he said.

“And Rook?”

“I know, I know, please remain comfortably seated until the captain turns off the seat belt sign.” He shifted to let them by and sat on Ochoa’s canvas bag. “Ooh, still nice and warm.”

“In three, two, go,” said Nikki, who was first out the back door, followed by Raley. Ochoa hung in the open doorway, as directed. Rook could see Detective Hinesburg approaching the store on the opposite side of the street.

There was a brief lull, and Ochoa turned to Rook and said, “I wonder if I should—”

And then came the gunfire. First a heavy round, the AR-15, and then a volley of small arms. Rook moved to the observation port, and Ochoa pulled him back. “Stay down. You trying to get killed?” He shoved Rook down into the middle of the laundry sacks and then bailed out the back with his gun drawn, moving around the protected side of the truck.

There was another volley of fire, repeated rounds from the assault rifle, and Rook looked through the passenger-side window of the van in time to see Ochoa dive for cover in a discount smoke shop. More covering shots and next, the motorcycle fired up.

The biker revved and popped a wheelie off the curb and onto 19th. Heat and Hinesburg jammed it out of the store, bracing for shots, but were blocked by a passing taxi. The biker looked over his shoulder at them, and when he turned back, he was smirking. That was the expression Rook would always remember, right before he swung the laundry bag into the dude and knocked him clean off that hog and right onto the pavement.

A half hour later, the biker was in the jail ward of Bellevue Hospital, nursing a concussion. He was a true badass, not just the AR man but probably the leader, and wouldn’t break so easily. His two accomplices faced Nikki Heat in her Twentieth Precinct Interrogation Room. From the looks on them, she figured they were going to take some work. She sat across from both of them, taking her time looking over their arrest jackets. Both had done prison stretches for everything from petty theft to violent robberies and drug sales.

Detective Heat knew she would end up separating these two. But she’d first have to find a weakness in one of them; he’d be the one she cut from the herd. To do that, she had a strategy, and that required that they be together for now while she made her choice. She closed their rap sheets and began calmly. “OK, let’s have it. Who hired you for that gig yesterday?”

Both men stared with dead eyes that saw nothing and betrayed nothing. Prison eyes.

“Boyd, let’s start with you.” The big one, the one with the salt-and-pepper beard, let his eyes fall on her, but said nothing. He acted bored and looked away. She addressed the other one, a ginger redhead with a spiderweb tat on his neck. “Shawn, what about you?”

“You got nothing,” he said. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“Don’t insult me, OK?” she said. “Less than twenty-four hours ago you and your biker friend jacked a city vehicle, stole a corpse, brandished firearms at a police officer and a medical examiner, put a city driver in the hospital, and yet here you sit, busted and destined for long stretches in Ossining. Is that because I don’t know what I’m doing, or is it, maybe, because you don’t?”

Inside the Observation Room, Rook turned to Ochoa. “Harsh.”

“These guys need more than harsh, you ask me,” said the cop.

Nikki folded her hands on the table and leaned forward toward the two men. She had made her choice, decided which of the two was the bitch. You can always break the bitch. She half turned to the glass behind her chair and nodded. The door opened and Ochoa came into the room. She studied their faces as the detective stood behind her. Boyd, the iron beard, acted like he didn’t even see him, finding that no-place place to stare at again. Shawn flicked his eyes over and darted them away.

“You good, Detective?” she asked.

“Let me see the necks, left side of both.”

Heat asked the pair to turn their heads to the right, and Ochoa leaned across the table, looking at one then the other. “Yeah,” he said when he was done. “I’m good.” And then he left the room.

“What was that?” said Shawn, who had the spiderweb.

All Nikki said was “Be right back,” and she left. But she kept it short, returning in less than a minute with two uniforms. “That one there,” she said, indicating Shawn. “Take him to Interrogation 2 and hold him until the DA guy gets here.”

“Hey, what are you doing?” said Shawn as they led him out. “You don’t have anything on me. Nothing.”

The officers held him at the door and Nikki smiled. “Interrogation 2,” she said, and they left. Nikki let the quiet do its talking. At last she said, “Your pal always this jumpy?”

He remained stoic, disconnected.

“It doesn’t take much to see he’s not as together as you, Boyd. But see, here’s what you need to be thinking about. Your friend with the neck tat? He’s boned. And he knows it. And know what’s too bad for you? We want this. We want the name of whoever hired you. And we are in a dealing mood. And you know and I know that Shawn is going to take it. Because the deal will be sweet. And he’s . . . well, he’s Shawn, isn’t he?”

Boyd sat there, a statue breathing.

“And where does that leave you, Boyd?” She flipped open his file. “Pedigree like yours, you’re looking at some long time in Ossining. But you know that can be done. Time passes. And besides, your pal Shawn will be able to visit you. Because he’ll be out.”

Nikki waited. She had to be stoic herself because she was starting to think she’d cut the wrong one from the herd. She worried he was too smart to see Ochoa’s tattoo ID as anything but what it was, a ruse. She worried that Boyd might just be a sociopath, and she was, therefore, the boned one in this transaction. Nikki thought about scrapping her strategy and offering him a deal. But it would mean she’d blinked. Her heart fluttered, feeling like a bird against her neck. She was so close, she hated to let it slip away. So she went the other way. Heat got tough and decided to push her game to the brink.

Without another word, she rose and closed the file. Then squared the pages by tapping it on the tabletop. She turned and took measured steps to the door, hoping to hear something on each footfall. She put her hand on the knob, paused as long as she could get away with, and pulled the door open.

Damn, nothing.

Feeling the awful sensation of her strength leeching out of her, she let the door close behind her.

In the Observation Room, she breathed a sigh and met the disappointed gazes of Rook, Raley, and Ochoa. And then she heard, “Hey!” All four of them turned to the window. Inside, Boyd was standing at a crouch at the table, restrained by his manacles.

“Hey!” he shouted again. “What kind of deal?”

Chapter Six

D
etective Heat stood on the sidewalk getting her squad ready for their second raid of the day, hoping upon hope that her streak would extend and that, in the next few minutes, she’d claim possession of Cassidy Towne’s stolen corpse.

According to Rook, it didn’t seem like their suspect had much of a motive. Cassidy Towne had dragged him to Richmond Vergennes’s new restaurant the week before for its soft opening. Rook said it felt at the time like it was a payback stroke, like she was getting a freebie meal from a TV celebrity chef in exchange for some mentions in her column. Rook said that while he was there he heard the two of them in a shouting match in Vergennes’s office. She came out a few minutes later and told Rook to catch up with her the next day. “It didn’t stick with me,” he told Nikki, “because she argued with everybody, so it didn’t seem like a major deal.”

Now, just feet from the front door of that very Upper East Side restaurant, a small army of NYPD was deployed. Translation: It did seem like a major deal.

Heat brought up her two-way. “Roach, you in position yet?”

“Good to go,” came back Raley’s voice over the radio.

Nikki did her customary last-minute detail check. The small detachment of uniforms was doing its job holding pedestrian traffic back on both ends of the sidewalk on Lex. Detective Hinesburg stood behind her and gave her the nod as she adjusted her shield on the lanyard around her neck. Rook took two steps back to position himself, as agreed, behind the two plainclothes from Burglary who were joining the party.

The squad followed Detective Heat, streaming through the front doors of the empty restaurant in a brisk walk. Nikki had waited, timing this to come down right after the lunch service so there wouldn’t be customers to deal with. Rook had sketched her the layout of the restaurant, fresh in his mind from his visit the previous week, and Nikki found Richmond Vergennes exactly where Rook said he would be at that time, presiding over the staff meeting at the big table near the showcase kitchen.

One of the busboys, an illegal, saw her first and made a fast exit to the men’s room, and his flight made everyone else turn from their staff meal. Heat flashed tin as she strode toward the head of the table and said, “NYPD. Everyone remain seated. Richmond Vergennes, I have a warrant for—”

The celebrity chef’s chair tipped back onto the hardwood floor when he bolted. Nikki peripherally registered a few gasps and clangs of dropped silverware from the staff as she took off into the kitchen after him.

Vergennes tried to slow the cops down by sweeping a stack of oval plates onto the floor behind him as he rounded the break in the counter leading to the kitchen, but Nikki didn’t even go that way. The stainless serving station was waist-high, designed to allow diners a view of the superstar chef and his crew at work. Heat slapped a palm on it, kicked her legs to the side, and vaulted into the kitchen, dropping just three steps behind Vergennes.

He heard Nikki stick her landing and knocked a tub of ice chips onto the drainage mats. She slipped but didn’t fall, yet it gave him some steps on her. But even though the chef was a weekend triathlete, nobody moves fast in Bistro Crocs. Speed wasn’t his issue at that point, however. Raley and Ochoa came through the back delivery entrance from the alley and blocked his exit.

Chef Vergennes stopped and made a desperate claw at the set of Wüsthofs nested in their rack. He came up brandishing an eight-inch cook’s knife and the guns came out. In the chorus of “drop its,” he let go of the knife as if the handle were on fire. As soon as it left his hand, Heat came from his blind side and scissor-kicked his legs from under him—the same takedown she had practiced just that morning.

Nikki pulled herself up off the deck and read Vergennes his rights as Ochoa cuffed him. They put him in a chair in the middle of his prep area, and she said, “I’m Detective Heat, Mr. Vergennes. Let’s make this easy and you just tell us. Where’s the body?”

The ruggedly handsome face seen by millions on TV over the years bled a trickle from a small scrape on his eyebrow from the takedown. Behind Nikki, Chef Vergennes saw his entire staff at the counter, staring in at him. He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Nikki Heat turned to the squad. “Toss it.”

An hour later, after searching his restaurant and finding nothing, Heat, Rook, and Roach brought Richmond Vergennes in handcuffs to his SoHo loft off Prince Street. In police custody, he did not look anything at all like a perennial Zagat favorite and
Iron Chef
candidate. His starched white tunic was soiled, embossed with the grid pattern of the grimy floor mats from his Upper East Side restaurant. A bloodstain the size and shape of a monarch butterfly had dried on the knee of his black-and-white checked chef’s pants, another battle prize from Heat’s takedown, to complement the cut on his eyebrow, which paramedics had cleaned and Band-Aided.

“You want to save us some trouble here, Chef Richmond?” asked Heat. It was like he didn’t hear her. He lowered his gaze and just studied his blue Crocs. “Suit yourself.” She turned to her detectives. “Have at it, guys.” As they moved off, opening closets, cabinets, anywhere large enough to hide a body, she warned him, “And when we finish searching your loft, we’re going to your other restaurant in Washington Square. How much will you lose if we close down
T
he Verge for all your seatings tonight?” He kept his silence, giving nothing.

After they had searched the armoires and closets and a steamer-trunk coffee table in the living room, they put him in a chair in his custom kitchen, a kitchen so large and well appointed, one of the lifestyle cable networks had used it to shoot his series,
Cook Like a Vergennes
. “You’re wasting your time.” The chef was trying to sound affronted and wasn’t pulling it off. A ball of perspiration hung on the tip of his nose, and when he rocked his head to shake it off, his dark hair, long and parted in the middle, fanned in the air. “There’s nothing here you’d be interested in.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Rook. “I wouldn’t mind finding the recipe for these jalapeño corn sticks.” He was helping himself to a sample from the cast-iron corncob forms on the counter.

“Rook?” said Heat.

“What? They’re crunchy outside, moist on the inside, and the kick from the pepper . . . Mm, the way it melds with the butter . . . Man.”

Ochoa returned from the pantry. “Nothing,” he said to Heat.

“Same in the office, and bedrooms,” reported Raley as he came in the other doorway. “What’s he doing?”

Nikki turned to see Rook’s face, contorted into a wince. “Being a nuisance. You know, Rook, this is why we don’t let you come along.”

“Sorry. I got a little spice issue here. Know what I wish I had? Some sweet tea.”

Raley gave Rook a foul look and joined his partner, who was trying to open a locked door at the back of the kitchen. “What’s in here?” said Ochoa.

“My wine closet,” said the chef. “I have some rare bottles in there worth thousands. And it’s temp controlled.”

That got Heat very interested. “Where’s the key?”

“There is no key, it takes a code.”

“OK,” she said, “I’ll ask nicely. Once. What is the code?” When he said nothing, she added, “I have a warrant.”

He seemed amused. “Why don’t you use it to jimmy the door?”

“Ochoa, call Demolitions and tell them we need a team with a blast matrix. And evacuate the building.”

“Hold on, hold on. Blast matrix? I have a 1945 Château Haut-Brion in there.” Nikki cupped a hand behind her ear. He sighed and said, “It’s 41319.”

Ochoa entered the code on the keypad, and a servo motor whirred inside the lock. He flipped on the light switch and stepped into the large closet. After a short moment, he stepped out and shook his head to Heat.

“Why are you hassling me, anyway?” said the chef. The attempt at peeved bravado had returned.

Nikki stood over him, close enough to make him have to strain his neck to look up at her. “I told you. I want you to give up the body of Cassidy Towne.”

“What would I know about Cassidy Towne? I didn’t even know the bitch.”

“Yes, you did, I heard you fighting,” said Rook. “Whoo,” he blew air out of his mouth in a huff, “must have gotten a seed.”

Vergennes acted as if a distant memory had been jogged free. “Oh, that. We argued, OK? What the hell, you think I killed her because she was pissed I wouldn’t comp her a party of twelve at my opening?”

“We have a witness that says you hired them to steal her body.”

He scoffed. “I’m done. This is getting crazy. I want my lawyer.”

“All right. You can call him after we take you to the precinct,” said Heat.

Taking opposite sides of the kitchen, Raley and Ochoa moved in a line, systematically opening and closing custom cabinets, all full of either cookbooks, imported dinnerware, or a Williams-Sonoma’s worth of kitchen gadgets.

“For real, my mouth is seriously on fire.” Rook stepped to the big Sub-Zero. “Wow, this is some fridge. Gorgeous.”

Vergennes called out, “No, don’t, that’s broken.”

But Rook had already pulled the handle. And then he got knocked backward when the body of Cassidy Towne bumped open the refrigerator door as it toppled out and landed on the Spanish tiles at his feet.

The uniformed officer posted at the front door ran in when he heard Rook scream.

Richmond Vergennes was a different man when confronted by the harsh reality of the Interrogation Room. The cockiness was gone. Nikki watched his hands, callused and scarred by years on the cook line. They were quaking. From the chair beside him, Vergennes’s lawyer gave him the nod to begin. “First of all, I didn’t kill her, I swear.”

“Mr. Vergennes, think of how many times in your career you’ve heard a waiter bring a dish back to the kitchen and tell you the customer says it’s cold. That’s about half as many times as I’ve sat here and heard the guy in cuffs on your side of the table say, ‘I didn’t do it, I swear.’ ”

The lawyer chimed in. “Detective, we are hoping to be cooperative here. I don’t think there’s any call to make this difficult.” The suit was Wynn Zanderhoof, a partner in one of the big Park Avenue firms that specialized in entertainment law. He was their criminal face, and Heat had seen plenty of him over the years.

“Sure, Counselor. Especially after your client made our lives such a breeze. Resisting arrest, brandishing a weapon at a police officer, obstructing an investigation. And all that comes after the murder of Cassidy Towne. Plus the conspiracy to hijack her body. Plus the numerous charges related to that. I think difficulty is the word of the day for Mr. Vergennes.”

“Granted,” said the attorney. “Which is why we were hoping to strike some sort of arrangement to mitigate the unnecessary tensions surrounding all this.”

“You want a deal?” asked the detective. “Your client is facing a murder charge, and we have a confession from a man in the crew he paid to steal the damn body. What are you going to bargain with, a complimentary dessert?”

“I didn’t kill her. I was home with my wife that night. She’ll vouch.”

“We’ll check.” There was something that crossed his face when she said that. His dark Cajun looks lost their cockiness. Like the alibi wouldn’t hold or maybe something else. What was it? She decided to pick at that and see where it led. “When you say you were with your wife, when was that?”

“All night. We watched some TV, went to bed, woke up. Like that.”

She made a show of opening her notebook and poising her pen. “Tell me the exact time you and your wife went to bed.”

“I dunno. We watched some
Nightline,
then hit the hay.”

“So,” said Nikki as she wrote, “you’re saying it was twelve o’clock? Midnight?”

“Yeah, or a few minutes after. Those late-night shows are all like five minutes late getting started.”

“And what time did you get home?”

“Mm, about eleven-fifteen, I guess.”

Something seemed off to Heat, so she pressed. “Chef, I hear all the stories about the restaurant business. Especially for a new restaurant, isn’t quarter after eleven kind of early for you to be home?”

She could see she was getting at something. Vergennes was showing nerves, working his mouth like he was looking for a strand of hair with his tongue. “Business was light, so I, ah, knocked off early.”

“Oh, I see. What time did you knock off?”

His eyes roamed the ceiling. “Don’t remember, exactly.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll be checking with your staff, anyway. They’ll tell me what time you left.”

“Nine o’clock,” he blurted.

Nikki wrote it down. “Does it typically take you two and a quarter hours to get to SoHo at that hour from Sixty-third and Lex?” When she looked up from her pad, he was coming unglued. His lawyer leaned over to show him a note he’d scrawled, but Vergennes pushed it away.

“All right, I didn’t go straight home.” The attorney tried again by putting a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off and said, “I’ll tell you exactly where I was. I . . . was at Cassidy Towne’s.”

Heat wished Lauren Parry had had that body sooner so she could have a more accurate time of death. It was entirely possible that the TOD was before midnight. She followed her instinct to seize Vergennes’s moment of weakness and take the leap. “Are you saying you went to Cassidy Towne’s and stabbed her?”

“No. I’m saying I went to Cassidy Towne’s and . . .” He trailed off, lowering both his head and his voice, mumbling something she couldn’t make out.

“Excuse me, I don’t hear that. You went to Cassidy Towne’s and what?”

Vergennes’s face was sallow when he looked up, his eyes unable to hide the misery of his shame. “I went there . . . and . . . I fucked her.”

Nikki watched him bend down to dry wash his face with the palms of his hands. When he rose up from his manacles, some of his color had returned. She tried to look at this heartthrob master chef who had conquered Manhattan and put him together with Cassidy Towne, the unofficial arbiter of public scandal. Something in her didn’t see them as a couple, although, after years on the job, Nikki could believe just about anything. “So you and Cassidy Towne were having an affair?”