Deadly Heat by Castle Richard

Author:Castle, Richard [Castle, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781401305925
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2013-09-16T21:00:00+00:00

When she turned from the board, Captain Irons spoke from where he stood at the back of the room. “Heat? A moment?”

The precinct commander closed the door when she stepped into his office, but he didn’t bother to waddle around behind his desk, so neither of them sat, which suited Nikki’s preference for a drive-by meeting. “Good briefing,” he said. “I was a fly on the wall for most of it.”

“Yes, sir, I noticed.”

“Be nice to get a heads-up next time, so I don’t have to be lucky.”

“Absolutely,” she lied.

Thinking that was that, she took a step to go, but he said, “Tough going on Tyler Wynn. You got your man, but he still left a bucket of worms to claw through. However, on the sunny side, now that that’s closed, I can have you full-time on Rainbow.”

“That’s far from closed, Captain. You were at my debrief. It’s a bioterror case now.”

“Which DHS is running. Got to tell you, Detective, if Rainbow was tying colored strings to my picture, I’d be all over it.”

“Sir, let me reassure you, I am capable of handling both.”

His ears reddened and plum blotches mottled his cheeks. “I am anything but reassured. Now, you may have all the big magazines and primo TV interview shows courting you, but this is still my precinct. And my order is, you got Wynn, this now goes to the feds. If not, well, I suspended you once before. Do we need to revisit?”

Heat flopped at her desk, barely containing her temper. Strictly speaking, Wally Irons stood on solid ground. The scale of her case had escalated beyond a murder. The skipper’s demand that she attend to the police work of his precinct—of the homicide squad she led—made sense. But Nikki didn’t want to make sense; she wanted to see it through. Thousands of lives in New York City were at stake. Heat asked herself which motivated her more, her obligation to stop the terrorists or the responsibility she felt to finish her mother’s work?

She decided they were one and the same, then went to her desk to make the call she didn’t want to make.

“Nikki Heat, I couldn’t be more pleased,” said Bart Callan. “On behalf of DHS, I am so glad you decided to join us after all.”

“Well, you sure put the home in Homeland, Special Agent Callan.” Nikki hoped using his title would quell the effusiveness before things got out of hand.

“Whatever I can do,” he said. And then Heat told him what that was.

Soon Nikki heard the muted phone ring across the bull pen and watched through the glass of the precinct commander’s office as the federal card got played. Wally Irons nodded like a dashboard doggy to his caller, but he didn’t appear happy. That was all right by her. She’d try to be happy enough for both of them.

An hour later, Detective Heat stood before a joint Bioterrorism Task Force in the basement bunker of the United States Department of Homeland Security, six reinforced floors under Varick Street in Lower Manhattan.

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