Driving Heat by Richard Castle Page B

very discreet. Oh, once in a while, he’d share a story—a doozer, he’d call them, usually funny—but never a name. It
wouldn’t have meant anything to me, anyway.”
    “He never mentioned them, even if they threatened him?”
    “Lon kept it all locked down, you understand?” He made a tamping gesture with his slender artist’s hands.
    Rook joined in with a question that seemed to Heat more than just something out of left field. “Sampson, did Lon ever mention someone offering him money to talk about his clients or
cases?”
    “Well, he had some serious debt issues, we know that. From his gambling. But he would never, never cross an ethical line and sell out his patients.”
    “I believe that,” said Rook. “But my question is, did anyone ever try to induce him to?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    Rook nodded to Heat, signaling that was all he wanted to ask. His question gave her pause. Why the hell was he sniffing around a potential bribe? Was this related to some critical piece of
information he was holding back on? Her anger started to rekindle, but she set it aside. Something to deal with later. Nikki brought the conversation back to her own agenda.” Do you mind
going over what happened this morning again?” Stallings shook his head no and sipped some water from a CamelBak bottle. Heat gestured to the RIPSD man sitting on the bar-stool near the
kitchen. “I know you already told the detective.”
    “That’s fine, I understand.”
    “The report I got was that you confronted an intruder here?”
    Stallings nodded and gestured to the running clothes he was wearing. “This morning, I got up and laced up my New Balances.” As if to excuse this self-indulgence, he explained,
“We all handle our shit differently. When he got stressed, Lonnie paddled. Me, I pound pavement. He used to call it my cleansing run. So I went out, did my route—well, as much as I
could.” His lip trembled again. He diverted their attention by gesturing across the river. “I do a circuit from here to the tram to warm up, then along the East River Walk over there
just past Gracie Mansion, and back. It all came crashing down on me on the tram and I couldn’t stop weeping. I got off and hopped on the next one back. When I went to put my key in the door,
it was ajar.” He measured a quarter inch with his thumb and forefinger. “I thought, maybe I got distracted from the trauma and all, and got careless, but when I pushed the door, some
guy’s right there. He trips me and shoves me to the floor and books it down the stairwell. I’m pretty fast, but by the time I got it together to chase him, he was gone.”
    “And nothing’s missing?” she asked.
    Stallings shook his head no. “Before you arrived, the detective and I did a walk-through of the whole place. I don’t see anything disturbed, and the burglar didn’t have
anything in his hands.”
    Nikki asked him for the beginning and end times of his run and, after she made a note, asked, “You called it your circuit. Was it your routine every day?”
    “Yeah, five days a week. I’m sort of compulsive about it.”
    “So, it’s possible,” said Rook, “that someone was watching this place to get to know your routines and thought he had time to get in and out. But you surprised him by
cutting it short, and he didn’t have time to get what he wanted.”
    “Or he got it, and it was in his pocket,” added Heat. “Do you know where Lon kept his flash drives?”
    Stallings escorted them to the second bedroom, which was King’s office on one side and Stallings’s painting studio on the other, and which smelled pleasantly of resin and oil paint.
At the desk, he reached to open a wooden Levenger box, but Heat stopped him and gestured to the RIPSD detective, who was already wearing gloves. He lifted the lid. The box was empty.
    “He kept a dozen or more thumb drives in there,” Stallings said. He surveyed the desktop. “His iPad Mini’s missing, too, now that