Driving Heat (40 page)

“Already hinky,” said Rhymer.

“Agreed. It was the middle of the night, just after three
A.M.
, and he told dispatch at Troop K that, as long as he was there, he’d run point on the
investigation, and they agreed. Why not?” She moved from the Westchester County map to a one-sheet printout of a report. “I pulled this page from the Forensic Science Lab findings. Most
cars these days have sophisticated computer systems.”

“No kidding,” said Heat, leading to a burst of laughter.

When it settled, Inez continued, “Among the things onboard this victim’s car was the black box, which records a loop of twenty-five seconds of data for steering, acceleration, and
braking. It lets Forensics examine the pre-impact actions of the driver. Like, was the driver slamming on the brakes or swerving to avoid something?” She tapped the page. “Forensics
found that the black box was clean.”

“Clean how?” asked Rook.

“Simple trick. Ask anyone in the motor pool or traffic detail,” said Detective Feller. “All somebody would have to do—and by somebody, I’m thinking Trooper
Fred—all he had to do is go up to the victim’s car, reach in, turn the key off, then turn it back on, count to twenty-five, and you have now recorded over whatever was on the EPROM chip
and replaced it with a bunch of
nada
. So the data weren’t erased, just replaced by nothing. It’s a crude but effective way to create erroneous data after an
accident.”

“That’s why it’s procedure to pull all keys after a fatal, to prevent that from happening,” said Aguinaldo.

“It’s also procedure when there’s a decedent to canvass all body shops and tow services in the vicinity for the phantom vehicle.” Opie shook his head in scorn. “I
guess our friendly trooper who was in charge of the investigation made sure that one got overlooked, too.”

Nikki, who had been making her own notes, set her pen down. “Let me get a picture of this. If the victim swerved or braked to, say, avoid Nathan Levy coming the other way in his Bimmer,
that would leave skid marks.”

Ochoa raised a hand. “It did. Even now, Raley and I could see scuff patches on the road. We haven’t had much snow since then, so they didn’t get totally plowed off.”

“Not according to this.” Detective Aguinaldo indicated some photo blowups of the crash scene. Everyone rose and gathered around for a better look. The pictures showed the familiar
Forensics spray-paint markings on the victim’s tires and on the ground beneath each one. But the official photo documentation of the roadway itself was devoid of any skid marks.

Raley took out his cell phone. “Compare that with the shots I took yesterday.” He had shot an angle of the road similar to one on Inez’s board and held it up side by side. Same
road, two conflicting images: tire scuff marks on Raley’s; none on Trooper Lobbrecht’s.

Ochoa rapped a knuckle on the Forensics print. “This sucker’s been Photoshopped.”

“You mean Freddyshopped,” scoffed Detective Feller. His tone conveyed the disdain clean cops have for dirty cops, which was shared by everyone in that semicircle.

As they found their seats again, Heat addressed Roach. “Your eyes-on up there was worth the trip. Good work.” They nodded in unison and even half smiled. Progress, she thought.
“What did you learn at the ER?”

“About Levy’s leg injury? Pretty much as described,” reported Raley.

“But,” said Ochoa, “talking one on one with the ER nurse and the doctor, this dude was out of it. Drunk, sloppy drunk. Belligerent…They had to put a pair of orderlies on him
just to keep him in line.”

“From the twenty minutes I spent with him, I can imagine the aggression,” said Heat. Then one of those tiny detail questions arose. So small, she almost didn’t mention it. But
Nikki gave it voice anyway. “Kind of granular here, but if Nathan Levy was so plastered, how did he get to the ER? Too far to walk, drunk and on a bad leg. Not an ambulance—that would
bust him for sure. And clearly Trooper Lobbrecht had damage control to do at the accident scene, so he wasn’t going to leave. Did this tow driver, Dooley, run him down to the
hospital?”

Ochoa looked to Raley. “Didn’t occur to us.”

“Find out. Never know, it could be something. And let’s run down all the auto-body parts from Levy’s M3 repair. Spoiler, rims, glove compartment cover…Whatever we can locate,
rush it to Forensics for a go-over.”

One secondary consequence of the NYPD’s hamstrung tech infrastructure
was that more transactions were getting done personally.
For the commander of the Twentieth Precinct that meant increased phone calls, more face-time appointments and, worst of all, a spike in drop-in visitors. Maybe that human touch was all for the
better. But it had scattered Heat’s focus, no matter how hard she tried to maintain it. Now, with a sense of critical elements being suddenly in play while new revelations were breaking at a
fast clip, Nikki selfishly (or, maybe it was more out of enlightened self-interest) isolated herself from her workaday distractions as Captain Heat to do the one small thing she had been
neglecting: quieting her detective’s mind to contemplate the fragmented pieces on the Murder Board.

The exercise of sitting alone in the silent Homicide Squad Room in front of the whiteboard had served Heat well in past investigations, especially when the volume of facts was creating chaos
instead of narrative. All those names, dates, places, events, color-coded markings, photos, arrows, and encircled questions were hailstones in a rain barrel when what she needed was to see a
stream.

That morning some new data had been squeezed into one of the few open spaces up there. Randall Feller’s inquiry with Human Resources at Forenetics, LLC, indicated that Fred Lobbrecht had
been hired there as an automotive safety assessor merely one week after the phantom car accident he had investigated on the Cold Spring Turnpike. His new job came with a 46 percent bump over his
former pay as a New York state trooper.

Having absorbed that, Nikki closed her eyes just long enough to envision a complete erasure of the board living in her mind. She opened them and wandered the panorama before her without design
or predetermined sequence, simply letting impressions come to her without chasing them. Instinct drew her back to the first entry, not because it was the starting point, but because Lon
King’s murder intersected with so much of what lay before her: the death of his patient, Lobbrecht; the single-shot MO the psychologist shared with two other victims who had also consulted
with Forenetics; the drone that had apparently attacked them all except Lobbrecht (an Odd Sock, or just an easier means utilized in the moment?) and had also targeted Wilton Backhouse.

In spite of herself, Heat started to fixate on Rook’s duplicity in seeing her shrink without telling her. Nikki thought of batting that one away as being motivated purely by emotion, but
stopped herself. In this meditative mode, any thought that drifted in might not be an accident. So she went back to it. There was, of course, that Lon King connection from Lobbrecht to Rook, and,
by extension, the article Rook was researching on the cadre of forensic experts preparing to blow the whistle on the cover-up of an auto safety defect.

That nexus drew her gaze to the name Tangier Swift, the billionaire software magnate and target of the whistle-blowers, who was using his money and influence to quash all legal efforts to bring
the alleged defect to light and so cowed the normally unassailable Forenetics consultants that their management had ordered all work to cease on the SwiftRageous investigation. Tangier Swift had a
lot of skin in this game.

So did the whistle-blowers, who were so passionate, so outraged by the Forenetics shutdown, that they had formed a subcommittee—the Splinter Group, they had called themselves—to
continue their research and build their case on their own, which was when Rook was brought into the picture.

And when whistle-blowers started dying.

The Forenetics dissidents had held a self-proclaimed Splinter Summit upstate to vote on whether to go all in on their explosive report. Heat scanned the board for the date and won a bet with
herself. It was the weekend adjacent to Nathan Levy’s accident on Cold Spring Turnpike. He was probably driving back to the city from Rhinebeck. Irony, she thought, a traffic death and a
cover-up on the way home from a meeting to expose an auto safety cover-up. But Nikki was far from amused. A drunk driver had wasted an innocent life and a cop had pulled a rug over it for
money.

“The timeline is your friend.” That axiom, which Heat had drilled into her detectives over the years, had proved its worth again. Yet she had not yet established the links that
transformed the churning water’s surface into a graceful flow. Still unresolved were big pieces like Rook’s kidnapping. Why had it happened, and who was Black Knight? Could he be the
mystery voice in the parking garage? Tangier Swift? Even Congressman Duer? The fact that she was grasping at those straws only told her how far she was from seeing all the disparate events and
players line themselves up in something that felt like an order. But at the heart of this a narrative was trying to emerge. It pointed to someone with enough at stake to kill in order to keep a
secret. To her and everyone else on the squad, the answer was a no-brainer. But convictions didn’t come without brains. Now Heat did smile. Because she just might have coined another freaking
axiom.

Nikki burst through the door at a jog from her mandated health-and-safety
inspection of the holding cells, then slowed to a
speed-walk so she wouldn’t be out of breath when she took the call. The switchboard had transferred it to the empty observation room in Interrogation One, and after a settling breath, Heat
punched up the call. “Mr. Swift, this is a coincidence. I was just thinking about you.”

“Well, I’m going to give you a helluva lot more to think about if you don’t back off.”

“Excuse me.” She flipped the switch to a more sober tone. “You do realize I am a police officer and that sounded an awful lot like a threat.”

He snorted. “Good, you’re not as stupid as you seem. You sicced a fucking forensic accountant on me? What happened to our agreement?”

“You’re going to have to refresh my memory, and I need to go on the record and inform you that I am going to begin recording this conversation.”

“You are fucking toast.”

She found the Record button on the wall phone and engaged it. A beep accompanied the flashing red mini-lamp, then there was a click. That was Tangier Swift hanging up.

“Aw, you scared him off?” said Rook. “Too bad. I wanted to get on the line
and thank him for the swell barge
ride.”

Detective Feller, hearing the conversation, ambled over to Rook’s desk. “Do you think it was a real threat? Like an actual death threat?”

“Mmm—no. It wasn’t specific. Legally, he could defend it as just being a pissed-off dude expressing frustration,” said Heat. “I didn’t realize the forensic
accountants had started work yet. A heads-up would have been nice.”

Randall was a dog with a bone. “Screw
legally
. If he threatened you, we should do something about that. I dunno, maybe send Rook over to give him a Dutch rub, or
something.”

“Highly amusing, as always, Detective.” Then Rook turned to Nikki. “Couldn’t we at least use that to bring him in and…”

“And what?” she said. “Tangier Swift would just come sit here with his hot bench of attorneys and say nothing. It would feel good but only create friction.”

“You do realize you are talking about two of my favorite things. Feeling good and friction.”

“Outta here,” said Feller, walking out with both hands raised. Ochoa, clearly on a mission, brushed by him on his way to Heat.

“OK, got something here on how Nathan Levy got to the ER, etcetera.”

“You guys talk to your guy in Peekskill?” she asked.

“Dooley. I did. Raley’s off on that special assignment you gave him.”

“Yes, herding cats.” Heat noted Rook’s confusion. “I’ll explain later.”

“The flatbed driver says he hooked Levy up with a car service in Peekskill.” Detective Ochoa held up his yellow lined pad for reference. “Triplex Limo.”

Rook furrowed his brow. “There’s a Triplex in Peekskill?”

Miguel chuckled. “I asked the same thing. It’s Peekskill, Croton, and Haverstraw. I called the limo service and they checked the records. The driver took him to the ER and waited,
then dropped him at an address in Astoria. I looked it up the old-fashioned way, in the reverse directory. It’s a commercial space leased to Forenetics, LLC.”

Rook got out his cell phone. “We should call Forenetics and see what it is.”

Heat shook her head. “No, let’s not light up the radar.”

“Absolutely, let’s
not
call Forenetics and see what it is,” said Rook, pocketing his phone.

Ochoa asked, “Want me to go over there and check it out?”

“I need you here to hold the fort,” said Heat. “I think I’ll—”

“Shotgun,” said Rook.

“I mean
we’ll
—pay a visit to Queens.”

On the drive over, Rook used the time to listen to himself spinning the
various ins and outs of the case. He had stayed pretty much
on the rails lately, not veering into his comfort zone of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories. Nikki took it all in stride as his version of meditating at the Murder Board and, therefore, listened
carefully to what he threw out there. “OK, so here’s where I land. Hiding that fatal car accident is a perfect motive for Nathan Levy to kill Lobbrecht and Lon King in order to hush it
up. With me so far?”

“So far. But let me riddle you this, Batman. Why go after Abigail Plunkitt and Wilton Backhouse?”

“All right,” he said. “Fair enough. Because…Because maybe Fred Lobbrecht told them about the accident. Or else, maybe Levy confided it to his Splinter Summiteers, then
regretted it after. That fits.”

There was always a gridlock situation on the way out of Queensboro Plaza, but when the officer stationed there picked out Heat’s car as undercover, she halted cross traffic, waving her
through.