Deadly Heat

“Gentlemen” was all Heat needed to say. They quieted, stopping in place. She

moved forward, using her palm to shield her face from the powerful CSU lights while

she made her Beginner’s Eyes tour around the victim. The body of the Channel 3

consumer advocate sat upright on a city bench facing the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in

the pedestrian entrance to Riverside Park. Maxine Berkowitz wore a nicer-quality,

tan, off-the-rack business suit. Her hair, although heavily sprayed, spiked out at

the back where it had been disturbed. Her makeup bore smudges around her lower face

and mouth. Both hands rested gently in her lap. To the casual passerby, she could

have been any thirtysomething Manhattan professional taking a break to contemplate

the memorial to the First Lady of the World. Except this woman had been murdered.

“Asphyxia through strangulation,” said Lauren Parry over her clipboard. “That’s

my prelim, with the usual caveats about letting me run my tests, and yadda, yadda.”

Nikki bent forward to examine the pronounced bruise line around the victim’s neck.

“Not manual.”

“I’m betting electrical cord. That contusion is sharply defined. And I see no

abrasion or strand pattern like with rope.” Heat drew closer and got a sick-sweet

whiff. “Chloroform?” The ME nodded. Nikki studied the smear of makeup around the

victim’s nose and mouth and felt a pang of sadness for the reporter, recalling her

own abduction a few months before. She rose up and said, “Show me the string.”

The CSU technician’s camera flashed one last shot. He picked up the six-inch

aluminum ruler he had placed beside the string to illustrate scale and said, “All

yours.”

It sat atop the victim’s purse at the other end of the park bench. Red string,

similar to the one left with Conklin’s body, had been tied to an equal length of

yellow string, then coiled as one and placed on the purse in a figure-eight loop.

The gesture, the care, the quietness of the message—whatever it meant—brought a

chill to Nikki. Then Rook moved close by and she felt his warmth against her.

“What do you know,” he said. “A lemniscate.”

“A what?” asked Ochoa.

“Lemniscate. The word for infinity sign.”

Raley weighed in. “I thought infinity sign was the word for infinity sign.”

“Ah, except that’s two words.”

Nikki looked at Roach and shook her head. “Writer.” Then, she said to Rook,

“Where’d you learn that, interviewing Stephen Hawking?”

Rook shrugged. “The truth? Snapple cap.”

They worked the scene for over an hour, interviewing the teenage boy who had

discovered the corpse while he was walking his neighbor’s pug and had asked the

deceased for an autograph. He’d seen nobody else around; in fact, the only reason

he paid Maxine Berkowitz any attention was that she was the only one there. The

canvass of the nearby dog park yielded nothing to go on but did give Dr. Parry time

to set up the OCME privacy screens and run a preliminary temperature and lividity

field test. She fixed the time of death as noon to 4 P.M. that day.

Forensics called Heat over to the bench. “Found something when we picked up the

victim’s purse to bag it.” With gloved hands, the technician lifted the purse and

revealed, underneath it, a small disc. Nikki crouched down beside it for closer

examination, to makes sure it was what she thought it was. She frowned and looked up

at the tech. “Weird, huh?” he said. “Rollerblade wheel.”

Heat tasked her squad to run the usual checks of facing apartment buildings for

eyewitnesses—especially anyone who might have registered a Rollerblader—and to

scan for security cams. Then she and Rook set out for Channel 3.




WHNY News occupied the bottom two floors of a media complex wedged between Lincoln

Center and the West Side Highway. As she waited for security to clear them, Nikki

stared across the courtyard at the neighboring studios where her ex-boyfriend, her

mother’s killer, had worked as a talent booker for a late night talk show. The wave

of betrayal washed over her anew and refreshed her anxiety about Tyler Wynn’s

whereabouts. Heat sealed it off and focused. One murderer at a time, she thought.