Driving Heat (5 page)

Detective Ochoa saw them enter and handed off the sobbing receptionist to the uniformed policewoman he’d requested from the Nineteenth. As he crossed over to her, the sight of the young
woman smacked her with a sudden rush of dread. Heat had been there for an appointment just two weeks before. How awkward would it be if the receptionist, Josie, recognized her and said something?
Nikki positioned herself with her back to the lobby desk and drew Ochoa and Rook into the adjoining room. She knew it was only a stall. Heat would somehow have to try to deflect the
receptionist’s familiarity, but later. Her immediate concern was what Ochoa could tell her about the burglary, in hopes it would give up a clue to finding Lon King’s killer.

“So here’s how it came down,” began the detective. “I got here at ten of nine and waited in the hall for King’s receptionist…Josie,” he said after
consulting his notes. “I ID’d myself, told her I needed a moment of her time, she unlocked the door, we came in, and, as you saw, the news hit her hard.”

“The break-in wasn’t apparent right away?” asked Heat.

“It was and it wasn’t. The girl was distracted—obviously—by the ton of bricks I dropped on her. So it wasn’t until a few minutes into my interview, after she
started to recover, that she noticed some of the things in the place were out of whack. We did some room-to-room checking, and that’s when we knew there’d been a B&E
overnight.”

Nikki surveyed the room they were standing in, the one King used for counseling sessions. She’d been in there fewer than ten times over the last three years, yet it appeared as tranquil
and welcoming as ever. “Doesn’t appear tossed to me.” Then she added, “Going from memory.”

“You’d have to know what to look for.” Ochoa walked them past the psychologist’s overstuffed chair to the small desk off to the side. “Josie said there was a laptop
there that’s gone.”

“Any chance the doctor could have taken it with him or come back for it?” asked Rook.

“I wondered the same. She says no. The MacBook stayed there all the time. He didn’t like lugging them and always used the cloud or thumb drives. To that point, the rest of the room
is neat, no hacked-open pillows or tossed books off the shelves, right? But check it out…” Ochoa carefully slid open the single desk drawer by its edges instead of the handle, using the
fingertips of his gloved hands. The slim drawer was a mess: spilled paperclips ripped from a box, a tangle of pencils and pens upended out of a teak tray, a torn deck of gold Kem playing cards,
even a matchbox from The Dutch had been poked open and shaken empty.

Heat said, “A search for thumb drives?”

“A safe bet,” said Ochoa. “Josie says he kept them in this drawer, but in one of those leather zip pouches from that froufrou stationery-geek catalog.”

“Levenger?” said Rook, a little too quickly.

Ochoa shook his head and groaned, “Oh, man. So busted.” Then the detective led the way out of the room. “Let’s see if Josie’s up for showing you the rest.”
Since the encounter would come sooner or later, Nikki followed behind to get it over with. She had a homicide investigation to conduct and couldn’t do the job if she hid from witnesses for
personal reasons. It might have been better, though, she thought, if only Rook hadn’t been along today.

“Josie,” said Detective Ochoa, “this is my precinct commander, Captain Heat.”

Lon King’s receptionist looked up from a deep-trauma stare at Nikki. The two women made eye contact and, in it, Heat saw clear recognition. But then came something unexpected. The young
woman extended a hand to shake and said only, “Hello.” While she watched Josie give Rook a similarly polite, neutral greeting, Heat wondered, was it training or common sense not to out
the client of a psychologist? Whether it was due to professionalism or courtesy, Nikki was grateful for the discretion and embarked on the rest of the tour undistracted.

As with the counseling room, the other areas of the office suite had been disturbed, not ransacked. Whoever did it wanted something specific. This was a surgical strike. “Josie, did Dr.
King keep any drugs here? Prescription meds, I mean?” asked Nikki.

“No, he counseled only and didn’t prescribe. Not even any samples.”

The spilled playing cards in the desk made Heat think about the jumbo debt to Fat Tommy. “What about money? Did he keep any cash here, perhaps in a safe or locked drawer?”

“There’s a metal box in the file room, but that’s petty cash.” When she took them into the back room and put on gloves to open the file drawer, the petty cash box indeed
turned out to have been pried open, however the variety of small bills and receipts was still inside, albeit stirred. Then Josie’s face lost color. “This is too creepy,” she said.
“This drawer was completely full of files. Patient files.” Heat, Rook, and Ochoa drew around her as she pulled the drawer out. It hit the end of its runners with a hollow bonk.
Empty.

After the four of them had pulled open every drawer of all the filing cabinets, they determined that exactly half the files were gone, encompassing patients with last names beginning A through
M. The N-to-Z cabinets seemed full and undisturbed, at least at a glance. Heat’s gaze came to rest on the yawning Hastings-to-Henderson drawer, the one where her file would have
resided—and felt a gnaw.

Rook’s eyes lifted to hers, and when they met, they both looked away.

Back out in reception, the lead CSU tech, an Australian transplant named Murphy, gave Heat and the others his prelim. “All right, then, here’s your quick-and-dirty, just to get us
started, mind you. Your intruder, or intruders, were pro or semi-. Door lock shows no signs of forced entry. Inside, not much of a pillage, is it? More of an incursion, really. Here’s the
tally: A-to-M surname files stolen; laptop missing, as noted; the hard drives have been expertly removed from the two desktops; and lastly, the Dragon speech recognition app, probably used for
postsession notes dictation, has been removed from both computers, as well. All up, I’d call this a fairly neat operation, with whoever pulled it off taking his sweet time after closing
yesterday with loads extra to fill the shopping trolley before dimming the switch and fucking off.”

“Do they have a security camera?” asked Ochoa.

“Sure enough, mate.” Murphy pointed up to a lipstick cam. Its lens had been blacked over with spray paint.

“Maybe it caught something before they disabled it,” said Heat. “Josie, did you guys record your video on-site or at a security company?”

“The building management handles that. I’ve never really needed to know where.”

The building’s super met them in the lobby, holding open an elevator at the south end of the banks. They got on without much conversation other than to hear his grim, “I hope you fry
that bastard who killed the doc,” on the one-floor descent to the basement. He led them through a labyrinth of stored office furniture and medical equipment, some of it swaddled in plastic,
to a large shed that had been constructed in the corner. “We use this for storage,” he explained as he ran through a chunky ring of keys at the end of a belt chain.

The super flipped on the lights once he had got the shed door open, revealing a space about as large as a two-car garage. He led them toward a closet door at the far end of the room, past
aluminum racks whose shelves were filled with desk lamps, out-of-date telephone equipment, bulky old-tech TVs, stacks of medical-office-appropriate framed art, empty aquariums, and potted
artificial plants.

“Hannibal Lecter hasn’t sent anyone here looking for severed heads, has he?” said Rook.

The super laughed but stopped abruptly. “What the hell is this?”

The hasp on the closet door hung open. The padlock sat on the bench beside it.

Heat and Ochoa put their hands on their sidearms. Rook took a step back and brought the super with him out of the way. The two cops took positions near the closet. Nikki nodded to the detective
and began her silent three-count. Then the lights went out and the door slammed behind them.

“The door, the door,” called Ochoa. In the absolute blackness of the shed, they scrambled hopelessly, bumping into each other and the racks until the super lit the flashlight on his
belt and they oriented themselves to the exit.

By the time they raced out into the basement, the elevator was purring toward the first floor. Rook asked where the stairs were, but by the time he got an answer, Nikki and Miguel were already
taking them two at a time.

The passenger door was slamming on a waiting MKZ when the two cops pushed through the lobby congestion and bolted down the six granite steps to the sidewalk. They both yelled, “NYPD,
freeze!” but the Lincoln burned rubber—in reverse—on York Avenue, backing up through its own tire smoke at high speed against traffic, barely missing a northbound ambulette.

Heat and Ochoa gave chase, and a block away, the car lurched to a stop, but only long enough for a gear shift followed by another piercing squeal as it right-turned onto the ramp to the FDR
south and was long gone.

Since it fell within their precinct, detectives from the Nineteenth tagged
in to continue the B&E investigation at Lon
King’s office. Heat, however, carved out one piece of turf for her team. They had lucked out and got to the digital recording closet just before the intruder could gain access, so the
security video from the York Avenue medical tower would travel crosstown to the West Side with her.

With Roach taking co-lead, and Nikki feeling pressure to dive into the administrative tasks that were piling up in her absence, she rode back to the Two-Oh without Rook, who said he had plenty
to keep him occupied anyway. As he waved from the back window of his cab, she hoped at least some of his attention would shift to wedding logistics.

Captain Heat went about her new duties with a spirit of enthusiasm, even though answering compliance emails from One PP, booking meetings with community leaders, and ignoring station-house
nicotine enthusiasts pestering for an e-cig policy felt very little like policing. Nikki was glad that two of the four walls of her new office were all glass so she could at least peer out into her
old familiar space, the homicide bull pen, and keep tabs on the case. From inside her goldfish bowl, she liked what she saw. Rook might have been right, that punting a key leadership appointment
amounted to a stagger out of the starting gate, but watching Raley and Ochoa in action gave her confidence that her stumble might pay off.

“Knock-knock,” said Roach in unison at her door.

“Did you guys rehearse that, or are you just that joined at the hip?”

“Totally ad-libbed,” said Ochoa.

Raley shivered. “Kinda creeps you out, don’t it?”

The pair didn’t make a move when she gestured to her guest chairs. “Thanks, we’re on the fly,” Miguel said. “Just wanted you to sign off on something. The security
video just arrived from Lon King’s medical building and I wanted to pull Sean off screening river cams and put him on that.”

“It’s the hot lead,” added Raley, selling Heat with another one of her own detective’s edicts: In any investigation, always follow the hot lead.

“Go for it.” Then, as they started off, she stopped them. “What do we hear about Lon King’s family?”

“Detective Aguinaldo just got off the phone with his partner,” said Ochoa. “He is a portrait artist who does official likenesses of governmental leaders. You know, those stiff
oil paintings you see in state houses and courtrooms? She tracked him down in Vermont, where he’s doing Senator Leahy, and said he would be returning to the city on the next jetBlue.
She’s going to meet his plane at JFK.”

“Keep me looped,” Heat said. Then she added, “By the way. What’s the freshness date on the recordings from the medical building?” Heat tried to sound nonchalant,
asking a mundane procedural question to camouflage her concern that her own face might appear on Raley’s monitor and spark some personal awkwardness.

“I talked to the private contractor who set up the building’s system,” said Raley. “It’s not high-risk retail or a bank, so they went economy. There’s only
ten days’ worth of room on the drive before it resets and records over itself. So it shouldn’t take me too long to scrub through, if that answers your question.”

“It does.” The date of her last appointment fell outside the window. She relaxed. “Thanks, Rales.”

But Nikki’s sense of relief did not last. Later that afternoon, Detective Raley returned while she paced her office on a phone call, executing an order from the deputy commissioner to lend
fifteen of her patrol officers to the Critical Response Unit, to monitor the protests that had broken out after the arrest of a Syrian college student engaged in counterfeiting. The detective
hand-signaled that he’d come back, but she didn’t like the tension she read on him and pointed to a chair. Sean sat and waited out her call.

When she at last put down the phone, two more lines rang. Nikki ignored them and gave Raley her attention. He rose and said, “I think you should see something.”

Heat followed him to the former storage closet Raley had converted into his makeshift screening facility and closed the door. After he had taken a seat at his worktable, she stood behind him to
surf the image frozen on his monitor. It was of an empty hallway; the date and time stamp in the lower left corner showed it to be from 9:14
A.M.
, six days prior.
“What floor are we on?”

“Twelve. Lon King’s hallway. Ready?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but double-clicked the trackpad. The video unfroze. There was no sound, but time code started to roll,
counting seconds and video frames. The elevator arrived and a man walked out, advancing with full face in clear view of the camera. He entered the psychologist’s office without hesitation and
closed the door.

“Roll it back,” said Heat, unable to keep the rasp of sudden dryness out of her voice. The detective rewound four seconds and froze the image on the screen. Even with the graininess
of the security video there was no doubt that Lon King’s visitor was Jameson Rook.