Raging Heat

Perfect. There was that word again. Kind of like the elements of a storm.

The mansion was too large for Heat to search by herself, and her call to Captain Irons was met with a belly laugh. “You want me to commit resources out of town during the ramp-up to a hurricane?” he said. “Maybe next week, Detective. After the big blow.” Nikki hung up wondering if his big blow referred to the storm or what he was doing to her case.

She turned and took in Cosmo, not just the sprawling house but also its vast acreage and numerous outbuildings full of potential hiding places. Heat didn’t know where that missing gun was. But one thing she did know: The why was just as important as the where.

There are two different police departments in Southampton. A confusing bit of municipal legality that separates jurisdictions of the Town of Southampton from the Village of Southampton. Officer Matthews of the Southampton Town—not Village—Police Department shook Heat’s hand and met her gaze with the innate cheerfulness she had seen in more firefighters than cops. One of those aged-to-perfection veterans, Woody Matthews gave off the vibe of the guy who would fix your flat in the Kmart lot on his day off, or be found in a tent flipping pancakes at the town fair. He looked at the mug shot he had already been shown by Detective Aguinaldo, but it was the additional picture Nikki showed him that Roach had found on the floor in Jeanne Capois’s room that got him nodding. “Yes, I can now say that’s definitely the man I saw.”

The patrolman also confirmed the date he encountered him. It had been earlier the same night Beauvais asked Ivan Gogol to stitch him up—if the Russian doctor’s original story held true, which Heat believed it did. “Detective Aguinaldo said that he might have been shot?”

“That’s possible. Did you see any evidence of blood on him?”

“Negative. I can say for sure, I would have responded to that. Now he was sort of hunched-up, though, with his arms crossed like yay.” The officer bent to demonstrate, his leather belt creaking like a saddle. “The guy said he was sick, and I’m not out to bust chops, you know? I just wanted to make sure he was all right. I even offered him a ride to the train, but he declined. I got a drunk and disorderly call at one of the taverns on the highway, so I let it go and rolled to the D&D.” Catch and release, thought Nikki.

“Did he seem scared, like he was being followed?”

Officer Matthews brushed his fingers through his short-cropped, salt and pepper hair. “Again, that is definitely something I would have keyed into.” Heat believed him. He was one of those local types who put on the uniform every day to help, not hassle.

Heat asked to show where he found Beauvais. He spread a map on the hood of his car and tapped North Sea Road near the cemetery. “That’s literally on the other side of the tracks from here,” she observed.

“Correct. His direction of travel to the train station was coming from the north.”

Which was odd. Odd enough, thought Heat, to qualify as an odd sock. If Fabian Beauvais had been coming from either Keith Gilbert’s or Alicia Delamater’s, he would have been walking from south to north, not the other way around. “What’s up North Sea Road?”

“It’s a lot of residential,” said Detective Aguinaldo.

“Right,” continued the officer. “Some nice homes up that way. Not like all this, but middle to upper-middle class. Wooded lots and two-car garages. Let’s see, a liquor store, which is where I first thought he might have been coming from. But he could also have been a kitchen worker from the seafood place. Everything else up there would have been closed that time of night. The tree service, Conscience Point, the general store.…”