Read Heat Rises for Free Online Page B

the results.”
    “Um, sure,” she said and then had a thought. “That’s at Personnel. You’re not from Personnel, though, are you?”
    “Oh, hell, no. I’m upstairs with the Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters. Trust me, it all goes through my desk, anyway,” he said with an air of self-importance. “When can I expect to see you?”
    “Well, I’m at the ME’s now. I’m on a case.”
    “Right,” he said, “the priest.” The way he said it pinged Nikki with the strong impression Zach Hamner liked to show off his knowledge of everything. The guy with all the answers. The quintessential Essential Man. What did he want from her?
    She mentally rolled through her schedule. Autopsy . . . Montrose, hopefully . . . squad meeting . . . the rectory . . . “How’s tomorrow?”
    “I was hoping for today.” He paused, and when she didn’t reply to that, he continued, “I’ve got a full load tomorrow. Let’s meet early. Breakfast. You can sign docs after.” Feeling more than a little steamrolled, Heat agreed. He gave her the name of a deli on Lafayette, said he’d meet her at seven, and hung up after one more congrats.
----
    “Any word from the world traveler?” asked Lauren Parry. She looked up at her friend from her computer in the dictation office adjacent to the autopsy room. The ME wore the regulation protective moon suit, and, as usual, it was decorated with flecks of blood and fluid. She read Nikki’s reaction and picked up her plexi-shield mask off the chair beside her. “Sit?”
    “I’m good.” Heat, who had just put on the clean coveralls issued to visitors, leaned against the back wall of the narrow anteroom and stared through the glass at the tables lined up in front of her. The near one, Mat #8, held the sheeted body of Father Gerald Graf.
    “Liar,” said her BFF . “If that’s what good looks like, never show me bad.”
    Nikki returned her gaze to Lauren. “OK, let me amend that to say, I will be good. I guess.”
    “You’re scaring me, Nikki.”
    “All right, all right, then . . .” Heat filled Lauren in on her morning surprise: Rook’s triumphant return to Gotham to celebrate the completion of his assignment—a celebration that he had not included her in—and to add insult to injury, he still hadn’t even called to say he was back.
    “Ouch.” Lauren’s brow furrowed. “What do you think that’s about? You don’t think he . . .” She stopped herself and shook her head.
    “What?” said Nikki. “Hooked up with someone else? You can say it. Don’t you think I’ve already wondered that?” Nikki cleared away some dark thoughts. “Left long enough, you imagine all sorts of things, Laur. And then a month later you open the newspaper and see them come true.” She came off the wall and stood straight. “Enough. He’s back. We’ll sort it all out.” Her doubt was unspoken but loud. “Happy for you and Ochoa, though.”
    That brought Lauren up short. And then she smiled. Of course there was no hiding her romance from Nikki. “Yeah, it’s good with me and Miguel.”
    As they both walked to the door, Nikki said, “I could learn to hate you, you know.”
----
    Two other medical examiners had customers on the first and third tables and, as Nikki entered the autopsy room, she silently repeated the mantra she had learned from Lauren on her rookie visit years ago. “Breathe through your mouth, it’ll trick your brain.” And, as always, Heat thought, almost . . . but not quite.
    “A few hard-and-fast findings and then a few anomalies to show you,” said ME Parry as they approached Graf’s body.
    “Time of death window turns out to be as thought. Eight to ten. I’d call it closer to the late end of that.”
    “ TOD could be nine-thirty?”
    “Ish.” She curled the page around the top of her clipboard, exposing supine and prone templates of a human body on which she had made notations. “Marks and indicators. Already covered the eyeballs, the neck, here and