Authors: Richard Castle
Nikki made a note. “And what about the torture itself?”
“See the dried blood in the ear canal? There were numerous probes from sharp objects prior to expiration.”
Heat suppressed an involuntary shiver at the thought. “What kind of sharp objects?”
“Various needle-like probes. Like, maybe, dental picks. Nothing larger than that. Small wounds but painful as hell. I took some digitals for you with the cam on my otoscope. I’ll e-mail them to the precinct. But somebody definitely wanted this woman to be in pain before she died.”
“Or talk about something,” said Nikki. “Two distinct motives, depending on which.” Nikki quickly processed the significance of this torture along with the missing office papers and came down on the side of someone getting Cassidy Towne to talk. This felt more and more about whatever it was she had been working on.
“Other points of interest.” Lauren handed a lab report to Nikki. “That blood smear you spotted on the wallpaper? Negative match for the victim.”
Nikki showed surprise. “So maybe she injured her attacker before she was subdued?”
“Maybe. There are some defense wounds on her hands. Which brings me to the final piece of info I have for you. This woman’s hands were filthy. I don’t mean just a little. She’s got residual dirt in the creases of her palms, and look at the fingernails.” She gently lifted one of Cassidy Towne’s hands. “It was hidden by her nail polish, but here’s what I found under her fingernails.” Each finger had a crescent moon of dirt under the nail.
“I know what that’s from,” said Rook. “That’s from her gardening. She said it was her one escape from her work.”
“Some escape for a gossip columnist,” said Lauren. “Digging more dirt.”
Rook was a few strides ahead of Heat getting to the elevator. “Hang on,” Nikki said, but he had already pressed the button. The doors opened when she arrived at his side, and she rested a hand on his arm and said to the passengers inside, “We’ll get the next one.” As the doors curtained closed on their annoyed faces, she added, “Sorry.”
“Accepted,” said Rook. And they both laughed a little.
Damn, she thought, what was this knack he had to disarm her all the time? She drew him away from the elevators to the southwest windows, where the October sun cut blinding light across them as it got ready to set. “I was a little rough on you. I do apologize for that.”
“I’ll put some ice on it, I’ll be all right,” he said.
“Like I said, it’s not personal to you. It’s the article, which is only you sort of.”
“Nikki, you disappeared off the grid. That felt personal. I’m funny that way. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to be doing a profile of a murder victim, we might not be lucky enough to be arguing now.” She laughed, and he said, “That’s right, I killed Cassidy Towne just to get close to Nikki Heat. Hey, there’s my title!”
Nikki smiled again and hated it that he could be so cute. “Anyway, accept my apology?”
“Only if you accept an invitation to buy you a drink tonight. Let’s be grown-ups and clear the air so I don’t have to feel all weird when I see you on the street.”
“Or at a murder scene,” she added.
“Odds are,” said Rook.
Nikki wouldn’t be seeing Don until later that night, so she agreed. Rook caught a cab back to his loft to get some writing done, while she took the elevator to the garage to drive back to the precinct and wrap her day.
At her garage level, the elevator doors opened and Raley and Ochoa were there, about to get on. “We miss the autopsy?” asked Ochoa.
Nikki stepped out with them and the doors closed behind her. She held up the file. “Report’s right here.”
“Oh,” said Ochoa. “Good, then.” Heat wouldn’t have been much of a detective if she couldn’t read the disappointment in him. He was, no doubt, hoping for an excuse to see Lauren Parry.
“Got something for you, though, Detective,” said Raley. He held up a heavy-duty manila envelope bulging with something square inside.
“You’re kidding,” she said, daring to feel some energy in the case again. “The typewriter ribbons?”
“Some typewriter ribbons,” cautioned Raley. “Her nosy neighbor recycled a bunch of them before the garbage strike, so they’re long gone. These are strays he had in his bin. Four of them.”
“Nothing in her typewriter,” added Ochoa. “We’ll run them up to the precinct so Forensics can get on them.”
Nikki looked at her watch and then to Ochoa, feeling bad for the guy that his plan to see Lauren Parry had been thwarted by minutes of bad timing. “Tell you what would be a better plan,” she said. “As long as you’re here, I don’t want to have the Padilla case fall through the cracks. Would you go up and see where they are on his autopsy? They’re beyond swamped, but if you ask nicely, I bet Lauren Parry will do it as a favor.”
“I guess we could ask her,” said Ochoa.
Raley knuckle-tapped the manila envelope. “We’re going to lose a day with Forensics, though.”
“I’m heading uptown, anyway,” said Nikki. “I’ll drop them at Forensics.”
Getting no argument, she signed the chain of evidence form and took the envelope from them. “Let’s hear it for nosy neighbors,” she said.
Uptown traffic was impossible. Ten-ten WINS said there was a major crash under the UN on the FDR and the work-around traffic was clogging everything northbound on the island. Nikki cut across town, hoping the West Side Highway would at least be crawling. Then she did some calculation and wondered if she should call Rook to rain check. But her gut told her that would just revive the friction she was trying to cool. Another plan.
She was only minutes from his loft. She could stop by, pick him up, and he could come with her to the precinct. They could have a drink around there. The weather was still nice enough for a patio table at Isabella’s. “Hey, it’s me, change of plan,” she said to his voice mail. “We’re still on, but call me when you get this.” Nikki hung up and smiled, thinking of him writing to his remastered Beatles.
Heat parked in the same loading zone she had parked in once before, the night of the pounding rainstorm when she and Rook had kissed in the downpour and then run through it to his front steps, soaked to the skin and not caring. She put her police sign on her dash, locked the manila envelope in the trunk, and, a minute later, stood at the foot of his steps, pausing, feeling a bit of a flutter remembering that night and how they couldn’t get enough of each other.
A man with a chocolate Lab on a leash passed her and climbed the steps. She followed behind and petted the dog while the man got out his keys. “Name’s Buster,” he said. “The dog, not me.”
“Hello, Buster.” The Lab eyeballed his man for permission and got up to offer Nikki his chin for a scratch, which she was glad to oblige. If dogs could smile, this one was doing it. Buster looked at her in his bliss and Nikki flashed back on her encounter with the coyote and its defiant stare-down in the middle of West 83rd. She felt a sudden chill. When the man opened the front door, the dog moved by reflex to go with him. She was just reaching for Rook’s door buzzer when the man said, “You look trustworthy, come on.”
And she followed him in.
Rook had the penthouse loft. The man and his dog rode as far as three and got off. Nikki didn’t like the idea of surprising men in their apartments or hotel rooms, having had one poor experience resulting in a tearful flight home from Puerto Vallarta one spring break. Tearful for him, that is.
She reached for her phone to call Rook again, but by then the car was at the top of the shaft. She put her phone away, pulled the metal accordion doors open, and stepped into his vestibule.
Heat approached his door quietly and listened. Nothing to hear. She pressed the button and heard it buzz inside. She heard a footstep, but realized it wasn’t coming from inside the loft but from behind her. Someone had been waiting in the vestibule. Before she could turn, her head slammed into Rook’s door and she blacked out.
When Nikki came to, it was in the same blackness she had just left. Was she blind? Was she still unconscious?
Then she felt the fabric on her cheek. She was wearing some kind of sack or hood. Her arms and legs wouldn’t move. They were duct-taped to the chair she was sitting in. She attempted to speak, but her mouth was duct-taped, too.
She tried to calm herself, but her heart was pounding. Her head ached above her hairline where it had banged into the door.
Calm yourself, Nikki, she said to herself. Slow breaths. Assess the situation. Start by listening.
And when she listened, what she heard only made her heart pound louder.
She heard what sounded like dental instruments being set out on a tray.
T
o keep herself from getting swept away in a current of panic, Nikki Heat clung to her training. Fright wouldn’t get her out of this alive. But fight would. She needed to be opportunistic and aggressive. She pushed her fear away and focused on action. She repeated silently to herself: Assess. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.
Whoever was arranging the metalware was nearby. Maybe two yards away. Was her captor alone? She listened, and it seemed so. And whoever it was seemed very busy with the small-sounding tools.
She didn’t want to call attention, so, without making overt movements, Heat flexed her muscles, slowly tensing herself against her bonds, knowing she couldn’t rip free of them, but testing them, hoping for some sort of give, anything that would betray some area of weakness in the duct tape. All she wanted was a little slack somewhere, anywhere—at her wrist, at her ankle—just a quarter inch of play to give her something to work at.
No luck. She was bound efficiently to her chair at the upper forearms, wrists, and at each ankle. As she ticked off each point of restraint, she replayed her memory of Lauren Parry indicating each place on Cassidy Towne’s autopsy template. Her own were identical to that diagram.
So far, the assessment of give sucked.
Then the sorting stopped.
A foot scraped, and she heard two hollow heel strikes on uncarpeted floor as someone came near. The footfalls could have been the heels of a woman’s shoe, only they seemed more substantial. Nikki tried to remember the layout of Rook’s loft—if that was even where she was. He had rugs everywhere except the bathroom and kitchen, but that flooring was slate. This sounded like hardwood. Maybe this was the great room where he held his poker games.
Cloth rustled beside her, and she could smell Old Spice aftershave right before she heard the voice in her ear. It was a man, forties, she guessed, with a Texas drawl that would have been appealing in other circumstances. It was a crisp, simple voice that would make you feel comfortable about buying the man’s church raffle tickets or holding his horse. Gently, calmly, he asked, “Where is it?”
Nikki made a small mumble against her gag. She knew she wouldn’t be able to talk, but maybe if the Texan thought she had something to say, he would remove the gag along with her hood and shift the dynamic at least that much. Heat wanted to create an opportunity she could capitalize on.
Instead, he said in his smooth, relaxed tone, “Talking’s going to be an issue for you just this moment, isn’t it? So let’s do this. Just nod if you’ll tell me where it is.”
She had no idea what the man was talking about, but she nodded. The flat of his hand struck her immediately on the tender spot where her head had met the front door, and she whimpered more in surprise than pain. Heat detected motion and tensed for another blow, but instead she got a strong whiff of Old Spice. And then the voice. Quiet as before, and even more chilling because of its calm folksiness.
“Sorry, ma’am. But, see, you were fibbing, and even in New York City, that dog’s not gonna hunt.” This Dr. Phil act was all about dominance, and Nikki had a response. She shot her head in the direction of his voice and butted some part of his face. She braced again, but no blow came.
The man simply cleared his throat and took two steps away from her on the hardwood. The hollow-sounding heels made sense to her now. Cowboy boots. She heard a clank of something metal, and the boots approached her side. “Now, I believe you need a reminder about the reality of your situation,” he said. Then she felt something like the point of a pencil come to rest on the flesh of her left forearm. “This’ll help you along those lines.”
He didn’t break the skin, but with the needle-sharp point he scored a line along her skin until he reached the duct tape binding her wrist. He held it there, applying just enough pressure to cause pain without puncturing her. And then he removed it and stepped away, only to come back and stand close to her. Something clicked, and a small motor like a dental drill, or one of those cordless tools they sell on infomercials that cuts nails in half, revved in a high-pitched whine bedside her ear. Nikki jumped and instinctively jerked away from it, but he clamped her in a headlock with his muscular arm. He slowly brought the tool closer and closer to her ear. When it touched the cloth of her hood, vibrating, spinning, chewing fibers, he shut it off. Silence. He put his mouth close to her again.
“You think about that till I get back, now. And when I do, no lies, ya hear?”
She heard the bootfalls again, but this time they went in the opposite direction. When they hit rug, they softened but kept going until they faded away, disappearing into a back room, she guessed. Heat listened, wondering how far the man had gone. Then she bent as far forward at the waist as she could and flung herself upright, feeling her hood inch upward from the momentum of her rise. Before she attempted another flip, she stopped to listen. The boots were approaching again. They clomped when they reached the hardwood, and she felt her slacks rustle as he went by. He paused, and she wondered if he had seen the slight rearrangement of her hood.
Apparently not, because next came the jingle of keys, and then the hard soles crossed the stone of a kitchen floor. From that aural sequence she pictured herself definitely in the great room off Rook’s kitchen. She got confirmation when the front door in the entry off the kitchen was unbolted and closed and she heard the teeth of the key insert into the lock. As soon as the tongue of the deadbolt shot, Nikki went to work twisting her head to get the hood off.
It wasn’t moving. The cloth was loose but hung too far down onto her shoulders to work off without the use of her hands. She stopped, held her breath, and listened.
The elevator hummed distantly and whined with a slight squeal when it came to a stop. When she heard the metal accordion doors open and close, she went to work wildly shimmying her upper arms. Concentrating her efforts on her right side, she pinched a fold of cloth between her chin and her shoulder, then extended her neck to push upward with the top of her head, slipping the hood up an inch. It was only an inch, but it worked, and so she repeated it until an inch more moved up. After three reps, light started to show underneath the hem. Nikki wished she had access to her mouth to grab it with her teeth, but this would have to do.
She bent for one more flip, and that one succeeded in raising the hood above her eyes, as if she were wearing a hoodie. Nikki shook it off her head and rested while she looked around. Her chair was positioned in open space between the kitchen counter and the oriental rug and the dining table where Rook held his weekly poker nights.
Nikki’s heartbeat leveled off, and she went at the task of getting herself to the counter. Careful not to tip the chair over, which would only strand her turtled on the floor, she bucked her body side to side and created enough momentum to shift the chair across the floor a few inches. Heat started to worry she would run out of time before the Texan came back, and she threw more weight into her next motion and started to tip. She almost went over, but managed to get all four feet of the chair down with a slam. It was enough of a scare to settle her into more even movements. Think inch, not inches, she repeated, creating a rhythm. Inch, not inches.
When Nikki reached the counter, which was even with her jawline, seated as she was, she began to rubbing her cheek sideways along its edge. On one of her strokes, her face actually squeaked along the polished granite. The friction made her cheek burn. But it was also causing the ragged edge of the duct tape to catch where it met her skin and curl slightly with each pass. To shut out the pain of the abrasion she thought about the prize that waited on the countertop, inches away: the cordless drill and a half dozen picks and dental tools.
The tape started to give on the left side where she had been working it. Nikki used her tongue, her jaw, and her face muscles to work at it between strokes until she had created a small opening at the corner of her mouth. When she had freed enough tape to create a loose flap, she extended her neck and twisted until her cheek was just above the countertop. Angling slowly, carefully, Nikki lowered her cheek onto the counter and pressed. The tack on the sticky side of the fold of duct tape held to the granite. Keeping her face pressed down hard on the cold surface, Heat swiveled her head left to right, and when she came up, the entire strip of her gag had peeled off and was stuck to the counter.
Her arms and ankles were bound to the chair, but she was not belted down so she was able to rise up and chin her way across the cool granite to the tools. The nearest was a small pick. The drill was farther away, but that was the one she wanted. That was the time saver. She made a lunge for it and slammed her shoulder into the edge of the counter and bounced back into her seat. She torqued herself in the chair until it squared more to the counter and rose up again, not lunging this time but yoga-stretching herself over the smaller tools to the drill.
The handle was cylindrical but had small rubber feet so that the power button presented itself on top. Nikki rested the tip of her chin on the button and pressed once, twice, three times. On the fourth try the drill started to whirr. Her back muscles were crying out, protesting against the strain of holding herself up, contorted, over the counter, but she held steady, concentrating on the handle of the drill as she grabbed it in her lips and then clenched it between her molars.
Evenly distributing her weight between her elbows, she sat herself down gently so she wouldn’t knock the drill from her mouth and then leaned over to cut away at the tape that bound her right wrist to the wooden arm of the chair.
Nikki worked fast. By curling her wrist upward, she created tension on the cutting surface, and the fabric peeled apart where the bit of the drill met the tape. Once her right wrist was free, she transferred the drill from her mouth to that hand and was able to cut the bonds on her left wrist even faster. She wanted to get her ankles free so she could move if he came back, but with her upper arms still strapped to the armrests, she couldn’t reach down that far, so she began cutting at the right upper. When that came free, she heard something and turned the drill off.
The hum of the rising elevator.
Heat leaned over and, first, cut her right ankle loose, then went to her left. In her rush, she poked herself on the lower shin under her pant leg and winced. But she pushed the pain aside and did her job. She had less than a minute to get loose and had to keep cutting. Her left ankle came free and she stood up just as she heard the elevator’s muffled squeal, signaling its stop at Rook’s floor.
Nikki was still attached to the chair at her left elbow when the accordion gate opened. She made the decision to turn off the drill so the Texan couldn’t hear its whine through the door and be warned.
She couldn’t find the seam of the duct tape with her nails to peel it back and the dental tools were all precision points, no good for cutting. The front door key chunked into the lock. In the kitchen there would be knives. The deadbolt shot open. She picked up the chair and carried it with her around the counter. The wooden knife holder was too far to get to. But there. Beside the sink right in front of her: a bottle opener beside a bent bottle cap. Heat grabbed it as the knob turned and she heard the front door creak open around the corner in the foyer.
She backed herself and the chair into the great room, crouched down below the counter to buy a few seconds and some cover, and started to cut herself free with the sharp point of the opener. The boots stepped onto the slate kitchen floor and stopped.
Nikki was still cutting at the tape when the Texan bounded over the counter and landed on top of her.
The force of his tackle knocked Heat sideways under the dining table. His hands clutched her throat in a choke from behind and she couldn’t do anything about it. Her right arm was pinned under her side, trapping her hand and the bottle opener under her own weight, and her left was strapped to the chair, which had been dragged along like a slipped boat anchor.
She tipped her body backward and rolled on top of him, pinning him under her back. He responded by strengthening his choke grip on her throat, but with her right hand now free, she plunged the bottle opener down. He yelled when the point sunk into his upper thigh, and his grip loosened. Nikki rolled off him and sprung to her feet, frantically cutting away at the duct tape to free herself. He was on his feet quickly, out from under the table, lunging at her.
Heat used the damned chair to her advantage, swinging her left arm outward as he approached. He put up his arms to deflect, but the wood still smacked him enough to drive him off center. He shot past her, his near arm getting hooked in the stretcher bar between the chair legs, and as he flew by, the last strip of duct tape ripped, and the chair went with him. Nikki was free to move.
She didn’t wait for him to recover from his fall. Heat lunged for him, but his reflexes were quick. He spun, using the chair to deflect her. Nikki’s church key flew out of her hand and across the room, clanging into the radiator before it fell. She thought of going for it, but the Texan was already up and coming at her. Heat sidestepped a few inches, clamping his throat with her right hand as he arrived, jerking his chin up while she palmed the top of his forehead with her left to push down and backward. Her Krav Maga move buckled his knees, and he toppled onto his ass.
Nikki spotted her blazer on the floor under a window and, sticking out from under it, the butt of her gun. She turned to rush for the weapon, but the Texan had obviously also had personal combat training. He spun on his hips and scissored Heat at the knees, locking up her legs and flipping her down hard, face-first onto the floor. From her workouts with Don, she anticipated a grapple from him to tie her up, so she flailed an elbow at his approaching face, caught him in the cheek, and when he recoiled, she broke free, delivering a rib kick on her rise.
The Texan came to his feet, reaching into his sport coat and pulling out a knife. It was a scary piece of business, one of those military-issue combat blades with a knuckle guard and twin fullers, or blood grooves, running along each side. Nikki’s unhappy thought was how comfortable it looked in his hand. He looked at her and actually smiled. Like he knew something. Like he was holding The Game Changer.