Raging Heat

“Now for the strange. Want to talk odd socks?” asked Raley, employing the term she had coined to instruct her squad always to look for things at a crime scene that don’t match or feel right. “We’ve spent the day here combing through everything with CSU and the inventory specialist from the victim’s insurance company. Nothing valuable got taken. And there’s plenty here. Jewelry, collector paintings, sculptures. Even some gold Krugerrands in a cigar humidor.”

“Anyway,” continued Ochoa, “drawers have been emptied, bookcases pawed, closets ransacked, you get the picture. But all this valuable stuff around, and nothing seems to have gotten boosted.”

Raley added, “Oh, and even the maid’s room got tossed. Which is odd. It’s pretty spare. Just some clothes and makeup. And no wall safe in there.”

“Somebody was looking for something,” she said.

“And we can’t tell if they found it.”

“What about the maid?” asked Heat.

“Nowhere to be found,” said Ochoa. “Missing as missing can be.”

“And here’s reason we called. The maid’s not only Haitian, but in her room we found a picture of a guy who could be a boyfriend.” Raley paused. “He’s got a tatt on his shoulder.” In butchered pronunciation he said, “‘L’Union Fait La Force.’ Pardon my French.”

FIVE

hey surrendered their fireside table, checked out of the room — unused — and drove west, pausing only for a pit stop in Sagapanack for takeout at Townline BBQ. “So much for our romantic dinner,” she said.

“I don’t think of it so much as a romantic dinner as an incursion. But that’s fine. Rain check tomorrow night,” said Rook as they joined the red ribbon of taillights on 495. “How do you feel about an intimate rooftop supper for two? I’m sure Alton Brown has something in his Good Eats repertoire. I’ll look in the index under ‘Fussy, and Travels Well Up a Fire Escape.’”

“Or you could just consult Alicia Delamater. I’ll bet she’s carried more than one covered dish across the lane to Casa Cosmo.”

“I’d say a hot dish. Sure explains why Keith Gilbert said his wife never goes there.”

“Come on, Rook, it’s obviously the other way around. The wife never goes there, so it’s the perfect place to stash his mistress.”

“Not so stashed, as it happens. That’s the way it is with secrets; we both know that. Sooner or later, it all comes out.”

There it was, served up like a big softball: Nikki’s opening to come clean about the task force and relieve the pangs that had troubled her all day. She almost seized it, but held back, telling herself it was too speculative, to wait and see. In truth she knew it wasn’t the job’s hypothetical nature, but its disruptive one. Her emotions were swirling enough about his potential marriage proposal, why open the touchy subject of a new gig involving lots of absences for international travel?

“Wonder if it’s possible Fabian Beauvais sniffed out Gilbert’s illicit relationship and that’s what bought him a skydive without a parachute,” he said. “Like, could that money be a blackmail payoff?”

“What is that, theory number ten?” Even though Heat teased him, she had already added that notion to her growing list of maybes. But Nikki kept that list stowed away. She had seen too many detectives fall in love with one theory too soon and shut the door to all the other possibilities.

“An observation?” she said. “Keith Gilbert has to know by now that we were nosing around out there. If his caretaker didn’t tell him, Alicia certainly did. That was almost three hours ago, and yet, no reaction. No call, no text, no thunder from the department’s brass mountain.”

“You know, Detective, it gets curiouser and curiouser. I had no idea when I pitched this case as a story to First Press it would end up being so juicy. An alien crashing to earth from the heavens now could herald the fall of a rising political star. Writes itself, doesn’t it?” And then he quickly added, “They don’t, just so you know. They never do.”

If Detectives Raley and Ochoa felt tired, it didn’t show on them when Heat and Rook ducked under the caution tape and entered the apartment on West End Avenue later that night. The exhilaration of piloting their own case had made the day timeless for Roach, who were on opposite sides of the living room, each conferring with a different CSU tech near bright portable work lights that made it feel more like noon than midnight.

“Oh, sure, you guys flit off to the Hamptons on a mini-vacation and leave the heavy lifting to us,” said Ochoa as the four of them gathered near the bloodstain.

Heat wanted to get right to the potential tattoo connection, but engaged in the ritual cop game of playing against emotion in response to the masked thanks he’d just offered for the opportunity. “Yeah, well, until you rudely interrupted, we were hobnobbing with J-Lo and Jerry Seinfeld and Martha Stewart. We only came back to laugh at all the evidence you two overlooked.”