THREE

“Well, anything?” Finnegan said into his iPhone. He pressed his foot against the brake and the Crown Victoria eased to a stop at a red light.

“Nothing interesting so far,” Peebles’s voice crackled through the phone. Then came a big, dramatic sigh. Finnegan smiled"he had purposely dropped him off at the precinct before he headed for an interview with Kate Vissicchio. He instructed him to run some background checks on Heat, as well as checking the Kyra Curtis’s alibi. “Right now, just a bunch of articles Heat wrote. Nothing interesting, nothing that really has anything to do with the case. But you know the snarky lady from The Times? Her alibi checked out pretty easily.”

“Alright, keep searching. I’ll call you back after.”

“You couldn’t just let me tag along?”

“After that neutering comment? ’Course not.”

 

 

“Miss Vissicchio?”

“Yes?” she said, peering out from behind the door.

He held up his badge. “I’m Detective James Finnegan. I’d like to ask you a few questions about Renee Heat.”

“Renee?” her brows furrowed. “What’s happened?”

“We have reasons to believe she might have been murdered.”

“Murdered!” Vissicchio cried, flinging the door open widely. She stood in the door way, her hand still on the knob, gaping at the detective.

“Yes, I understand you were her roommate and friend? Could I ask you a few questions about Renee Heat?”

“Murdered?” she muttered, no longer looking at the detective. She didn’t seem to have registered his question. “Murdered. How could she be murdered? What happened?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. But we need your help. Could I come in and ask you a few questions about Miss Heat?”

Vissicchio nodded stiffly. She stepped aside to let him in and closed the door behind the detective. Her brows were still furrowed, clearly racking her mind trying to figure out the mystery herself. She led the detective to the living room and they sat down facing each other across a coffee table. “What can I help you with?”

“Well, first of all…” he started, but his eyes drifted and landed on a beautiful, slender box sitting on a bookcase. Something about it caught his eye. It was almost as if it was calling his name… “Miss Vissicchio, could I ask what that is?”

She twisted around to look at what he meant. She definitely recognised it, but the reaction that appeared on her face for just a second was hard to read, even for the top-notch detective. “That is… an antique,” she answered slowly, hesitantly.

“And that emblem,” he noted the gold insignia on the front, “is that a… kiwi bird?” He was surprised that he recognised it, although the rare bird’s silhouette was unique enough. The kiwi was a silent night hunter in the forests of New Zealand, where it poked its long beak underground, trying to find a suitable meal. Flightless and small, the kiwi was an unusual bird. Even more so as an insignia on an antique box. Perhaps Vissicchio went on a vacation to New Zealand, though on a journalist’s pinch, that was unlikely. So how did it end up here, why did she seem to protective of it, and the way it called to him…

“It is,” she replied curtly. Her tart voice brought the detective back from his thoughts. “Now, can we get onto the interview?”

 

 

“Find out anything?”

“Nope. Nothing more than what we learned with Kyra Curtis,” Finnegan spoke to his phone, back in his Crown Vic. “I’m heading over to the precinct now. What did you learn?”

“Nothing interesting, really. But uniforms found her closest living relative in New Jersey. A brother named Allen. They’re bringing him in to the precinct now.”

“Good. No one seems to know her at all. There’s something we’re missing. Maybe he knows the part of Heat’s life that we’re missing.”

“Oh God, I hate when you get optimistic. It’s scary.”

 

 

“I really haven’t had any contact with her in a while.”

Allen Heat took a sip from his glass. They were in the middle of the interview, trying to extract something they haven’t heard already. So far, they relearned that she was intelligent, kind but quiet, lonely, and without many friends. Not that Allen wasn’t cooperating, of course. He was more than willing to help out. After a moment of shock and a glass of alcohol, he settled down enough to talk. Just like Vissicchio, he was shocked to find his sister dead. Strangely enough, there were no tears. Just surprise.

“I mean, she moved to the City, like, years ago. I’ve only talked to her once after she left, and that was months ago.”

“What did you guys talk about?”

“Oh you know, just the usual catching up with each other’s lives and all that. Though there was something I didn’t understand. She… asked for some money. She said she’ll pay it back and she did, fairly quick too. But what’s weird about it is, she brings in quite a buck as I understand it… I can’t imagine why she’d need to borrow money from me.”

Finnegan glanced over at Peebles to check if he caught that too. His puzzlement showed clearly through his concentration. Finnegan smiled; perhaps his partner wasn’t as dim-witted as he thought. A journalist making “quite a buck” was not unheard of, but certainly wasn’t Heat’s position at the time. So where was the money coming from and why did she need some from Allen? Finnegan’s cop side jumped straight to drugs, a possibility, but an unlikely one at that. There was no evidence to show for it. However, the money was still an odd sock not to be looked over.

“We’ll be sure to check her financials,” Finnegan said, turning his attention back to the interview.

There was a moment of silence as the detectives sat formulating their next question. Allen was the first to break it: “Have you guys been to her apartment?”

“Yes.”

“Have you?” Peebles asked in return.

“I haven’t. What’s it like there?”

“Totally trashed. Paper and pictures everywhere.”

Heat laughed. “Oh no, that’s not trashed. That’s just how she works. She does that with every place she’s lived in. But anything unusual? She always liked to be mysterious.”

Finnegan thought of the empty desk, the oddball kitchen, and the secret room. All part of an active investigation. Sharing information with a man whose alibi hasn’t been checked yet? Strictly unprofessional.

“No,” Finnegan replied.

“Yes,” Peebles blurted. He failed to catch the death glare, so he stumbled on stupidly, “There was a one desk that was completely empty and cleaned to perfection.”

“Oh. Well, like I said, she had a thing for the mysterious. When we were little, she would build secret hideaways in the house, find a secret shortcut to school, cut out old books to hide her stuff. She loved her secrets, and she kept it close. It thrilled her to know something no one else did. She watched as others groped in the dark while she knew exactly what to do. She often guided them, of course, towards figuring a secret out. Always sort of a teacher in that sort. But you’re not interested in that, but this you will be: everywhere she went, she would always keep a secret under the stairs. A hatch, a secret letter, a key, anything, but always under the stairs.”

“Under the stairs?” Finnegan bit his lip. “There’s just one problem: there are no stairs in her apartment.”

“Oh.” He sat back in his chair, looking genuinely confused. “Weird.”

 

 

Back in the Crown Vic. Peebles called driving. Finnegan pushed him to shotgun.

“What was that all about? How d’you get under the stairs?” Peebles asked, reading over his notes.

“I don’t know, but what’s more concerning to me is the financials. How is Renee Heat, not even close to Pulitzer-winning reporter, bringing in what Allen sees as a lot of money?”

“Uh… writer by day and big buck stripper by night?”

Finnegan shot him a look. Peebles feigned innocence, “What? She was definitely attractive enough.”

He rolled his eyes. “No, no. There’s something we’re missing. Something important…” He immediately thought of the box. Weird how strongly his instincts felt about it… He shook his head, clearing his head of it. Later.

“I think,” Detective Finnegan said slowly, “it’s time to give the apartment another visit. Let’s see if CSU found anything by now. Better yet, let’s see if we can find anything.”

 

 

“We have filed and looked through everything we have found,” a uniform briefed the detectives at the door. Most of the paper stacks that once formed the walls of a tight labyrinth in the living room had been pushed to the side to provide more room for movement. “Pictures, documents, you name it. Everything seems to be connected to her job. She was very thorough in her investigations. However, nothing really out of the ordinary. Nothing that threw up any red flags. Except one thing.”

“What?” Finnegan inquired. The elastic of his glove snapped into place.

“In the kitchen, we found a cabinet that’s locked. Our best locksmith couldn’t pry it open.”

“What about stairs?” Peebles asked. “Are there any stairs here?”

“Stairs?” The uniform looked at him doubtfully. Surprised to see that the detective was being serious, he replied unsurely, “No stairs but the fire escapes.”

Peebles mumbled inaudibly.

“Thank you,” Finnegan smiled, dismissing him.

They took the uniform’s tip and went straight for the kitchen. A knife was sitting by the sink and the wall stood open, revealing the secret room inside. Finnegan first went for the secret room, to take another look. People didn’t hide things unless they were worth hiding. Peebles, meanwhile, walked to the kitchen counter and grabbed a cabinet door, trying each one until he found the oddball. All of them swung open easily. None of them had anything other than what you would expect from a normal kitchen. Except for one; the cabinet door right next to the refrigerator refused to open. After a moment of angry shaking and prying, out of impulse, Peebles drew his Glock and aimed it at the locked door. The gunshot rang painfully in his ear.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Finnegan shouted. He marched angrily towards Peebles and whisked the gun away from him. Peebles opened his mouth but Finnegan kept yelling, “Shooting a gun inside? Do you realise, you could’ve been hit by the ricochet. What were you thinking?”

“No, seriously,” Peebles interrupted loudly, cutting Finnegan’s rant off. “Look. Really.” Peebles pointed at the door.

“What? What about the door? Nothing changed. Wait, what?” Finnegan ran a finger over the wood. Perfect. Simply perfect. Not even a dent.

“How is that possible?” Peebles whimpered.

“The bullet, it should’ve punched straight through,” Finnegan muttered. With a crazy idea forming in his head, he grabbed the knife on the counter and stabbed at the cabinet. The metal clanged against the wood and bounced off harmlessly, as if the door was made out of pure diamond. The vibration from the impact forced open his hands and the knife slid off. It dived blade-down into the tiled floor and impaled itself there, quivering madly. When the Detective tugged it out of the tiled floor, a piece of a tile chipped off along with it.

“What is this?” he thought aloud. “Let’s see if we can…” He stopped. He let out a frustrated groan. “We can’t get it to a lab because it’s impossible to pick out a sample of this when a gun won’t even leave a dent. We have no way of testing to find out what it is.”

“Then what are we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’re just going to have to live without knowing what the hell this is. For now.” He rapped the wood with his knuckles. It sounded perfectly normal.

“Detectives,” a uniform called from the doorway. “You should check this out.”

They followed him to the bedroom closet. It was a large walk-in and it was crammed to the top with boxes of clothing. CSU has cleared out a lot of it to reveal the back wall.

“Listen to this.” He knocked on the wall. It sounded hollow. “There shouldn’t be anything there but a brick wall. So what’s that?”

Finnegan stepped forward and felt around the wall. He couldn’t feel anything. It just felt like a simple wall. After a minute of vain effort, he stepped back to let Peebles try. He tapped different places for a little while before he reached up to a corner. He grabbed a loose corner of the wallpaper and pulled. It peeled off quite easily and nicely, revealing a simple wooden door without a knob framed by a brick wall.

He pushed the door open. It swung inwards without resistance. It was dark, but the detectives clicked on their flashlight from their belt, and they could see a short flight of stairs leading up to another wooden door.

“Stairs!” Peebles shouted excitedly. “This must be what Allen Heat talked about.”

Finnegan test each stair with a good, hard stomp and listened. He rocked back and worth, again listening carefully. One sounded particularly loose. Finnegan and Peebles braced their fingers around it and pushed up as hard as they could.

“You know, this would be easier with a crowbar,” Peebles said as he strained against the nails that held the plank of wood in place.

“Shut up and push.”

Eventually, their efforts proved worthwhile. They had pried the stair open and the result yielded a small compartment in which lay a small, brass key.

Immediately, Finnegan knew what it would open. He slid the key into the door at the top of the stairs. It was a perfect fit. After half a rotation, it clicked open. Heart pounding with anticipation, he pushed the door open. Upon doing so, however, he found nothing but a dead end. A cement wall greeted the detective only few feet from the door. Everyone let out the breath they were holding.

“Wait!”

They all jumped. Finnegan heard a small metallic clink. Looking around, he found nothing, but upon lifted his foot, he found another key. He scooped it up and examined it closely.

“Huh, why would she go through the trouble of hiding this little thing?” Finnegan muttered, looking hard at the number 3632 engraved on the metal. He found the key, but he was missing the lock. They were out of doors to try. But this was a solid lead. People didn’t hide and lock things without a good reason.

 

 

A simple test showed that the key they found at Heat’s apartment opened heavy-duty locks. With a little inquiry and tracing, Finnegan learned that Heat had rented a storage unit downtown, one that employed heavy-duty locks, precisely the ones the key was designed to open. It was not hard put the two together.

Finnegan and Peebles made their way down to the warehouse. With a flash of their badges, they easily gained access. Finnegan spotted the number 3632 painted on a unit door, and crouched down and put on his gloves before extracting the key from his coat pocket.

“Whoa, whoa,” Peebles said as his partner fitted the key into the lock.

“What?”

“We don’t know what’s in there. We gotta be really careful.”

“Oh yes, we wouldn’t want a psychopath in a storage unit to jump out in the nude with some mouldy chair. I mean, I keep my psychopaths in a storage unit all the time.”

“You wound me with your bland sarcasm.”

When Finnegan simply rolled his eyes and returned to opening the lock again, Peebles shouted something that sounded like, “Huhnngggh.”

“What, Peebles?” he sighed in exasperation.

“It’s just…”

“What, do you want to point your gun at the storage door? Would that make you feel better?”

“Yes, please.” He unholstered his gun and held it tightly in an isosceles stance. The familiar weight in his hand seemed to calm him down a little.

Finnegan, for the last time, returned to the lock. He turned the key and it sprang open. Jeez, five minutes to open a simple lock. Thanks Peebles.

He let the door slide up. He threw on the light switch as they walked in.

The contents of the storage unit weren’t boxes and crates of precious jewels. They weren’t dangerous files on mobster bosses she investigated. They weren’t confidential personal files. And they weren’t certainly a nude psychopath with a piece of deteriorating furniture. Only one thing stood in the middle of the large, metal room. A huge steel container, similar to ones he’s seen in laboratories containing large quantities of liquid nitrogen.

During his time at college, before joining the Academy, he had taken high-level chemistry courses and participated in multiple laboratory research programs. He had worked with chemicals before. He had worked with giant metal containers before. However, he had never seen one running on its own battery, unconnected to any power sources. The energy required to keep things below extreme temperatures was more than a couple of AA batteries could supply.

And he had never seen one standing in middle of a white star painted on the floor, inscribed in a circle whose circumference was made up of intricate symbols. But he had seen enough of hieroglyphics to know that the symbols were definitely not Egyptian, or any other language he’s seen.

“What is all this?” Peebles asked, lowering his Glock and forgetting that he was still holding onto it. He walked around the circle, trying to catch every bit of this bizarre scene.

“Looks like a freezer, doesn’t it?” Finnegan speculated.

“Hey,” Peebles said. He waved Finnegan over to the other side of the containment unit. “There’s a sort of window here. All fogged up though. D’you think we can see what’s inside?”

“Don’t touch anything,” Finnegan warned him.

“Oh don’t be such a buzz kill.” Peebles stepped over the white circle and made his way to the metal container, careful not to step on any of the paint on the floor. He shook a sleeve over his palm and he wiped the condensation over the window.

And a pair of eyes stared out at him.

Peebles screamed. A jolt went through him and he stepped back in surprise, his muscles driven by reflex. “What the hell!”

Finnegan joined his partner at thick, glass window on the side of the container. He leaned in for a peek. He had to blink to make sure he wasn’t imagining it. A pair of blue eyes stared blankly at him through the window. Finnegan wiped off rest of the condensation, clearing the window as much as possible. It was a woman inside the unit. Her lips were blue, her eyes blank and lifeless, her face and blonde hair frosted. Cryogenics, he thought.

Then he took a second look at the face. Those blue eyes and sharp features seemed eerily familiar…

Realisation dawning upon him, he scrambled around his coat pocket. Once he located his iPhone, he tapped the photos app. He knew he wasn’t supposed to carry around active case files, but he had snapped a picture of Renee Heat from the files that Dr. Patricks had sent him. He found the picture in camera rolls and held it up next to the cold, dead face in the window.

It was a perfect match.

 

 

“This is really creepy.”

Dr. Patricks, who arrived at the scene first, squinted at the face. She walked around the containment unit, almost as if sizing it up. She turned to the detectives. “This is really, really creepy.”

Finnegan agreed. “But you know what this means? This explains why she borrowed the money. I bet she used it for the cryogenics. I imagine it’s pretty expensive. And hey, we have the body now.”

“But it doesn’t explain how she was attacked in an alley and ended up a hundred blocks away in a giant freezer,” Peebles said.

“No, it doesn’t. We’re still missing something here. Why cryogenics? Why was she attacked? How did she get here?”

“While you figure that out, I’m going to take the body back to the morgue and start cutting it up,” the ME said cheerfully. “Things are looking up now, right? Leads showing up here and there. You’ll have the answers soon enough. I’ll call you down once the autopsy’s done.”

They closed the door but they left it unlocked. The CSU should be arriving soon with an expert to open the cryogenic container and free the body for autopsy. The detectives and the ME had nothing to do but wait so they decided to go outside and wait there instead of inside the warehouse, which smelled too much like bleach.

The sun was high in the sky, blazing brightly, but the winter air was still as cold as ever. Everyone gathered their coats tightly around them and shielded their eyes from the sun. “Looks like they’re not here yet,” Peebles said, just for the heck of saying something. “I thought they’d be quicker.”

“Peebles…” Finnegan began with a sigh.

BLAM.

Out of nowhere, a bullet lodged itself in Erin’s shoulder. She screamed. Her knees buckled, her feet slipped, she was falling…

Finnegan felt his body go numb at the sight of her blood, soaking through her clothes. All his insides turned to ice. He could barely register Peebles’s shouts.

He remembered. His mind flashed back in time to a particular case. The Latin Kings had grown to a powerful empire, dangerous drug lords getting their money and power from extortion, violence, and a good amount of fear of the public. Narcotics and homicide teamed up to stop them, to finally put behind bars the king of this empire. The homicide investigation of Richard Brown, an accountant killed for his intellectual feat of finding well-covered up trace of stolen money from private and corporate accounts, quickly became a pursuit of justice, a thrilling chase that involved the entire team of detectives for the newly promoted Detective Finnegan. But that soon escalated into a war between the cops and the Latin Kings.

In middle of the violence, the gun fights, the late nights in the office, Erin Patricks had come to him. With the number of wounded rising, she was needed as an on-field medic. This wasn’t the job for a medical examiner. She was to take care of the dead, not the living. In the morgue, she was safe. Out there, she was in danger.

“Shush now,” Finnegan had told her. “Everything’s going to be okay. As long as you’re a medical examiner, Dr. Patricks, you will never be hurt. I promise. They have no reason to hurt you.”

But that was the past. This was the present. And she was falling, wounded in battle with a faceless, bodiless shadow.

Time slowed down.

“No, Erin!” Finnegan screamed. He didn’t know what he was doing. His felt his muscles move, but he wasn’t telling them to. They took him where he needed to go, to her. She collapsed into his arms.

Detective Peebles drew his Glock and aimed straight ahead, his eyes scanning carefully, but quickly, trying to identify a target. He moved sideways with Finnegan. They crouched behind their Crown Vic as another bullet lodged itself in a brick over their head. Finnegan propped Erin up against the side of the car before drawing his own weapon. The two detectives aimed their guns over the hood, but there were no more bullets fired. No more muzzle flash to follow. There was nothing, only the quiet building across the empty parking lot.

Silence fell. Hiding behind the Crown Vic just in case, Peebles phoned the precinct. Soon, the police blue-whites arrived with the ambulance. They took Patricks with them to the hospital, leaving the detectives with police to take their statements.

They were both reasonably distressed. Finnegan paced up and down, biting his nails. All they could hope for was that the injury wasn’t serious. But he saw the wound. He saw the bullet burn through her clothes and into her shoulder. He saw her blood soak her clothes, her hand. He saw her face pale. He saw her in pain.

He couldn’t help but feel angry when uniforms’ canvas of the area turned up nothing. The shooter had gotten away. He was angry and frustrated that he lost his chance at vengeance.

“See if there’s a surveillance camera nearby and get the tape. While you’re doing that, also get the surveillance videos from the alley,” Finnegan instructed a couple uniforms. “And, oh, don’t let CSU move the body. There’s something else going on here than a simple murder. I don’t want to risk anything else by moving the body from where it’s been safe and hidden. I’m not about to lose the body to a killer.” They nodded obediently and walked off.

“I’m not sure if I understand everything that just happened,” Peebles muttered, shivering slightly as the night fell.

“Me neither.”