Deadly Heat by Richard Castle
To KB:
May the dance never end and the music never stop.
ONE
NYPD Homicide detective Nikki Heat double-parked her gray Crown Victoria behind the
coroner van and strode toward the pizza joint where a body waited. A uniform in
short sleeves finger-looped the caution tape for her to duck under, and when she
straightened up on the other side, Heat stopped, letting her gaze fall down
Broadway. At that moment, twenty blocks south, her boyfriend, Jameson Rook, was
taking bows at a Times Square press event to celebrate publication of his big new
article. An article so big the publisher had made it the cover story to launch the
magazine’s Web site. Heat should have been happy. Instead she felt gut-ripped.
Because his big article was about her.
She took one step to go inside, but only one. That corpse wasn’t going anywhere,
and Heat needed a moment to curse herself for helping Rook write it.
A few weeks before, when she gave him her blessing to chronicle her investigation
into the murder of her mom, it had seemed like a good idea. Well, maybe not a good
idea, just a prudent one. Heat’s dramatic capture of the surprise killer after more
than a decade became hot news, and Rook put it bluntly: Somebody would write this
story. Would she prefer a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist or some tabloid hack?
Rook’s interviews were intense and took both days of a weekend. With his digital
recorder as sentry, Heat started with Thanksgiving eve, 1999. She and her mom were
about to bake pies, and Nikki called her from the spice aisle of the supermarket,
only to hear her mother get stabbed to death over the phone while she ran home,
frantic and helpless. She told Rook about changing her college major from theater to
criminal justice so she could become a cop instead of the actress she’d dreamed of
becoming. “Murder,” she said, “changes everything.”
Heat shared with him her frustration in the quest for justice during the decade that
followed. And her shock a month ago when a break came and a suitcase that had been
stolen from her mother’s apartment the night of her murder turned up at one of
Nikki’s crime scenes—with a woman’s body inside it. The path to solve the fresh
homicide of the lady in the luggage put Heat on an unexpected journey into her
mother’s hidden past. The trail led to Paris, where Nikki was stunned to learn that
Cynthia Heat had been a spy for the CIA. Instead of the piano tutor she pretended to
be, her mom had used music instruction as a cover to gain access to spy on the homes
of diplomats and industrialists.
Nikki learned all this at the deathbed of her mother’s old CIA controller, Tyler
Wynn. But, spies being spies, the old man had only faked his death to throw her off.
Nikki discovered this the hard way when her mom’s mentor showed up, gun in hand, to
relieve her of the secret, incriminating documents Cynthia Heat had died over. Why?
Because Cynthia Heat had discovered that her trusted friend, Tyler Wynn, was a
traitor.
During the interview, Nikki confessed she didn’t have to imagine her mother’s
sense of betrayal. She had felt it herself when her college boyfriend, Petar,
stepped out of the shadows beside Wynn, holding his own gun on her. And, more
deeply, as the old spy slipped away with the pouch of damning evidence and a final
instruction to Nikki’s ex, to kill her—just as Petar had killed her mother.