Frozen Heat (2012) (34 page)

“These are all true facts, as I recollect them. Yet, if you are trying to assign some motive to me by implying I had some sort of relationship with your mother, you would be wasting your time as well as mine.” Nikki wasn’t suggesting anything like that, since Joe Flynn had pretty much ruled out an affair, but her experience as an interviewer told her not to say anything, to see where Kuzbari would go. “As for that week in the Berkshires—Lenox, as I recall—it was hardly a romantic getaway. I was there in my capacity of providing security to the ambassador at a symposium, and I stayed with him. Your mother roomed in a separate bungalow with my wife and children and another family attending the conference.”

“May I ask who they were?”

“Why, so you can harass them for no reason, as well? Detective Heat, I sympathize with your interest in settling this score, but I am confident I will be of no service. So, unless you have anything else, let us adjourn to continue our lives.”

Before she could reply, he turned and disappeared between the parked mail trucks. They heard a car door slam, then the rest of his group vanished, leaving Heat and Rook alone on the sidewalk.

Rook said, “At least no bags over our heads this time.”

The next morning Heat and Rook walked down Fulton toward the South Street Seaport to visit another one of her mother’s tutoring clients. This time, barring surprise ambushes, they had an appointment. As Rook paused to read the plaque on the Titanic Memorial, Nikki said, “I’ve been thinking about our encounter with Fariq Kuzbari. If it made me feel like I’m swimming into deeper waters on this case, imagine how Carter Damon felt.”

They moved on and Rook said, “You’re not excusing that loser, are you?”

“Never. I just understand why, being the mediocre lead he was, he probably felt overwhelmed and checked out.”

“And what about Kuzbari? After a pushback like he gave us, do you just cross him off your list?”

“No. And I make that call, not he. But I have a gut feeling that says Kuzbari’s not worth the focus, so I am going to concentrate on the other names on Flynn’s list, for now. I can always brace him again later, if I need to.”

“Did you just say you had a gut feeling? Detective Heat, are you starting to pick up someone’s bad habits? Are you thinking like a writer?”

“Lord, take my gun and shoot me now. No, forget gut. You want to hear my rationale? Fine. Even if Kuzbari were implicated, it’s not likely he would have done the killing personally. He has a crew of suited goons to do that, so I’m certain he’d alibi out. Also, he’d be tough to investigate because of his diplomatic protection. Not impossible, but it would draw time and energy. Meanwhile, I have three others to interview, and we both know the clock is ticking before Captain Irons works his magic again. No, Rook, this is triage. So let’s not call this my gut. Let’s say I am … accessing instincts born of experience.”

“Spoken just like a writer.”

A custodian in rubber boots hosing cobblestones on the mall shut off the nozzle to let them pass as they arrived at the main entrance to Brewery Boz. The landmark brick mercantile building not only had been restored to serve as the British company’s U.S. flagship brewery, it catered to tourists with a Dickens-themed pub. The owner and chief brewmaster, Carey Maggs, met them in the lobby, and the legendary English reserve went right out the window when he saw Nikki. “Bloody hell,” he said in his Mayfair accent. “You look just like your mum.”

Maggs had good reason to do a double-take at the sight of her. In London back in 1976, when Carey was eight years old, Nikki’s mother had been employed by his beer magnate father as his piano tutor. After he’d emigrated to America in 1999, Carey Maggs had passed the torch by hiring his childhood piano teacher to tutor his own son. “That’s the circle. The circle of life,” said Rook.

“Don’t need to tell me about history repeating. Here I am making suds just like my father did back in the UK,” Maggs said as he led them on a tour of his brewery. The humid air in the massive facility was tinged with enough yeast and malt to taste them; equal parts inviting and off-putting at that early hour. As they passed giant vats and containers with their sprouts of coiled tubing and pipes, Carey Maggs described the process in brief, and how they performed all processes on-site, from malting, to mashing, to lautering, fermenting, conditioning, and filtering.

Rook said, “I don’t know why, but I thought these would all be copper.”

“Stainless steel. Doesn’t impart taste to the brew and it’s easy to clean and sterilize, which is critical. Those vats over there are copper-plated on the outside, but that’s just for aesthetics because they face the showcase window of the pub.”

“Impressive. Your father must be proud of you for continuing the legacy,” said Nikki.

“Not so much. We part company on the business model. Dad named his signature beer after the town drunk in a Dickens novel,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
.”

“Durdles,” said Heat, recalling her own dad’s longing for it.

“Right. Well, my dear father seemed to forget that Charles Dickens was all about exposing social injustice and corporate greed. So now that I run the company, I’ve not only expanded our Dickens brand to pubs and beer gardens, I donate half our profits to Mercator Watch. That’s a foundation that monitors international child labor abuse. I call them GreedPeace. You heard of it?”

“No,” said Rook, loving the nickname, “but now that you gave me a title, I have an article to pitch
Rolling Stone
.”

“The way I see it, how many million is enough when half the world is starving or doesn’t have water to drink? Of course, that’s all too radical and socialistic for the old man, but he’s just a big Scrooge. Now, how’s that for irony?” Carey laughed and finger combed the unruly curtain of brown hair that had fallen over one side of his forehead. “Sorry about prattling on. You didn’t make the trip here this morning to listen to this.”

The three of them took seats on red leather bar stools in the empty pub, and Nikki said, “Actually, I do have some serious business to discuss. I’m investigating my mother’s murder, and since you knew her so long, maybe you can help provide some information.”

“Of course. Now I feel even worse for blathering on. Whatever I can do.” Then his eyes widened. “I’m not a suspect, am I? Because that would pretty much suck, especially considering how I felt about her. I mean, Cynthia was wonderful.”

She didn’t tell him whether he was a suspect or not because she hadn’t decided. Instead, Nikki moved forward with her questions. She’d prepped carefully, knowing an interview like this would be tricky because she faced the challenge of not revealing that her mother had been a spy. So Heat decided to proceed as she would with any other interrogation of an eyewitness or person of interest and see what shook out: nervous behavior, inconsistencies, lies, or even new clues. “Think back, if you can, to the month leading up to her killing,” she began. “November of ‘99. Did you see any changes in my mom’s behavior?”

He thought it over and said, “No, not that I recall.”

“Did she confide any worries? Seem agitated? Mention anybody who was bothering her, threatening her?”

“No.”

“Or say that she felt like she was being followed?”

He thought and wagged his head. “Mm, nothing of that sort, either.”

And then Heat tried to ascertain if her mother had been snooping his home. “During that last month she worked for you, did you or your wife ever get a feeling that things in your house were disturbed?”

His brow was puzzled. “Disturbed in what way?”

“Any way. Items in disarray. Items out of place. Items missing.”

He shifted on his bar stool. “I’m trying to makes sense of this, Detective.”

“You don’t have to, just think back. Did you ever come into a room and find something was moved? Or gone?”

“Why would that be? You asked me if she was agitated. Are saying your mother had developed some mental problem and gone klepto?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m just asking if things were disturbed. Do you need to think about it?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“Let me ask about other people who may have been in your home back then.”

“You do realize that was ten years ago plus.”

“I do. So I’m not talking about plumbers or deliverymen. Houseguests. Did you have anyone staying with you?”

“Hello. You think somebody we knew might have killed her?”

“Mr. Maggs, it would be helpful for you not to keep guessing what I’m trying to learn and just focus on the question.”

“Brilliant. Carry on.”

“I just want to know if you had any houseguests. Overnight, weekends?” Heat had circled a notation in Joe Flynn’s surveillance log that a man, about thirty, had been at the Maggs residence that week just before the PI got pulled from his stakeout by her dad. “Anyone stay in your apartment with you while my mom was there giving lessons?”

He shook his head slowly as he thought. “No, I don’t think so.”

Rook said, “That was right around Thanksgiving. No friends or relatives came to stay with you the week before Thanksgiving?”

“Of course, that is not one of our traditional UK holidays, so let me give it a fair bit.” He made a steeple of his fingers and pressed them to his lips. “Well, now that I think it over, it comes to me that a college mate of mine did arrive and stayed with us that week. Your mentioning Thanksgiving jogs my memory because the kids were going to be off school. We were planning to leave that weekend for London and he was going to mind our flat while we were chocks away.” Maggs recognized the implications and grew unsettled. “But if you’re thinking he had anything to do with it, no. I couldn’t believe that, not him.”

She turned her spiral to a fresh page. “May I have the name of this friend?” Carey closed his eyes slowly and his face went slack. “Mr. Maggs, I am going to ask you again to give me the name.”

In a voice that had gone strangely toneless, he said, “Ari. Ari Weiss.” Then he opened his eyes. He looked as if the admission had hollowed something out of him.

Nikki spoke quietly, but persistently. “Can you tell me how I could get in touch with Ari Weiss?”

“You can’t,” he said.

“I have to.”

“But you can’t. Ari Weiss is dead.”

“Confirmed,” said Rook, hunched toward the screen at his desk back in the precinct. Heat crossed over to him as he referred to it. “Obituary for Ari Weiss, MD, says the graduate of Yale School of Medicine and Rhodes Scholar—which is probably how he met up with Carey Maggs, up at Oxford—died of a rare blood disease called babesiosis. It says here, that is a malaria-like parasitic disorder which, like Lyme disease, is usually tick-borne, although it can come from transfusion, blah, blah.”

“Rook, a man’s dead, and all you can say is, ‘blah blah’?”

“Nothing against him. It’s just I’m one of those people who hears about rare diseases delivered by ticks and I start scratching and checking my temperature every five minutes.”

“You’re a prize package, Rook. Lucky me.” She hitched a thumb at the obit on his screen. “Meanwhile, a potential lead hits another dead end. When did he pass?”

“2000.” Rook closed the webpage. “That eliminates him as a suspect for Nicole Bernardin’s murder, anyway.”

Nikki tried to stay upbeat in the face of yet another lead coming to an apparent dead end. She was making a mental note to do some of her own research later on Ari Weiss, when Roach startled her.

“Detective Heat?” Nikki turned to see the partners standing before her, looking grim.

“Tell me,” she said.

“We’d better show you,” said Ochoa.

As she and Rook followed Roach across the bull pen, Raley said, “I scored this a few minutes ago, but I waited for Sharon Hinesburg to clear out for her two-hour lunch.” He sat at his desk and keyed some strokes on his computer keyboard.

Ochoa said, “It’s the statement for November 1999 on your mother’s separate account at New Amsterdam Bank and Trust.” The monitor filled with a financial PDF. Raley rolled his chair back so Nikki could lean in to read it.

Rook bent over beside her to look and let out a low moan. Heat turned away, her face drained of color.

As if to confirm the reality she feared, Detective Raley said in a hushed voice, “According to this, your mom received a two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit the day before she was killed.”

“Detective, do you have some idea what this means?” asked Ochoa.

Nikki didn’t reply. Because she would have had to say that it meant it looked like her mother had sold out her country.

Her head became light. Heat turned back to see the document again, hoping she had been mistaken, but the image clouded before her eyes. Small trembles made her hands start to shake, and when she crossed her arms on her chest to hide them her whole body began quaking from the inside, radiating out to her joints. As her legs grew weak, she heard Rook’s voice, sounding like it came from the end of a tunnel, asking if she was all right. Nikki turned away to cross to her desk but changed her mind when she got halfway across the room and wove unsteadily out of the bull pen, smacking her thigh into a chair or maybe a desk on the way out.

When she got to the street, fresh air didn’t help. Nikki’s head still cycloned in a whirl of panic. Even in the bright morning light her vision remained fogged by a deep blue haze, the way condensation forms on a shower door. She rubbed her eyes, but when she opened them again the mist had crystallized, making her view a solid sheet of blue ice. Behind it, shadowy figures moved, seeming familiar to her, but unrecognizable. A face looked back at her through the frost. It looked like her own, through a clouded mirror. But it might have been her mother’s.