Driving Heat (42 page)

Backhouse pressed the button to close the garage door. As it lowered, Maloney scowled at him. “On my iPad screen you had a fucking gimme. How’d you miss the bitch?”

“I had her in the crosshairs until she started laughing and moved her head.”

Rook turned to Nikki. “Remember that next time you tell me to stop clowning around.”

She lowered her head gravely. “Next time…”

Their captors were still at it. “And don’t give me shit,” said Backhouse. “Some fucking cop. You got made.”

“Who chases a drone?”

“And catches it,” said Rook.

“Which means very soon there’s going to be a police presence.” Maloney turned to face Heat. “You called it in, didn’t you? Of course you did. Procedure.” He
gestured to the floor. “All right, kiss cement, both of you.”

“If it matters, I’ve already been shot once today,” said Rook. Maloney’s response came immediately and unexpectedly. He punched the wound in Rook’s shoulder,
bringing him down to one knee. Heat lunged at Maloney, who backhanded her injured brow with his gun hand, then straight-armed the 9mm in her face. She peered up from the ground at him through a
curtain of fresh blood.

“Don’t,” said Backhouse. “Not here.”

“Then we gotta go.”

Backhouse snapped, “Will you wait? Jeez, give me a second.” During a short pause to think, his eyes darted around, then he nodded to himself as if he had solved an equation.
“Maybe this is a good thing. Get them up. We’re going.”

The ex-detective used Heat’s bracelets and a pair of his own to handcuff
her and Rook. Then he shoved them both in the backseat
of her car. As Backhouse hopped in up front, Maloney elbowed out the remaining glass from the side window, punched the gas, and spun a hard U-turn, retracing the route they had taken to get there.
Seconds after crossing under the elevated tracks, they passed a pair of blue-and-whites speeding the opposite way. Cocky, grandiose, or just a chaos creator, Maloney gave a cop-to-cop four-finger
wave to the patrolmen going by. Nikki craned backward to put a desperate face in her rear window. The only response was from one of the unis, who returned Maloney’s gesture, and why not? To
anyone who didn’t know otherwise, Heat’s car looked like an undercover Police Interceptor with a detective at the wheel, transporting offenders in the rear. Prisoners in backseats
always looked desperate. Some felt it more than others, thought Nikki.

“If you’ll give me a chance to help you, I can make sure this goes a lot easier on you, especially if you stop now.” Heat knew their situation was beyond grim, but the only
hope she could see was to engage them on some human level, taking a page from the hostage handbook. Unfortunately, one of the men in the front seat had also read it.

“‘When engaging the hostage taker, speak calmly and do your best to establish rapport in a way that does not agitate the HT.’ Pretty good, huh? Know what? I should be a
cop.” He cackled, loving his own joke.

“Can we just…you know, drive?” said Backhouse.

As they rode from Long Island City south into the back streets of Greenpoint, Nikki switched her focus, trying to get a grasp on the pair’s relationship, which seemed more pragmatic than
truly friendly—as if Maloney was the professor’s hired gun and accomplice, but it ended there. Part of her evolving strategy concerned finding some way to come between them in order to
undermine their unity. Finding that wedge might save her life and Rook’s. She also wanted to prove a hunch that had been simmering ever since she had interrogated Joseph Barsotti.

Rook seemed to be pondering the same question. “Question, Professor?” Backhouse didn’t reply, so naturally Rook continued as if he had. “I’m playing my Six Degrees
game back here, wondering how a police detective meets a forensic engineering consultant. And the Kevin Bacon I come up with is Fred Lobbrecht, am I right?” He got silence in return but kept
on. “I mean, you knew Fred Lobbrecht professionally. But how would Detective Maloney meet him? You don’t travel in the same social circles, I’m guessing. Unless…”
Rook’s experience had brought him to the same conclusion Heat was sniffing: that Wilton Backhouse had been the unidentified visitor in the psychologist’s waiting room when Barsotti
walked in on Maloney’s tirade. And that was where the college professor had found his lethal TA.

Anger flared within Nikki. If she had gotten that damned administrative subpoena, she wouldn’t be sitting there handcuffed and shot, a captive in the back of her own car right now. She
pushed that thought aside and continued trying to engage her kidnappers. “Wilton, I’ll bet Fred Lobbrecht had you come in to talk with his shrink, same as he did with Rook, am I right?
You and Tim crossed paths in the waiting room. You saw opportunity to use him and struck up your little friendship.”

Backhouse held his tongue. Maloney was another story. He flared. “Hey, I’m not being used.” Then he calmed down a bit and chuckled. “I make friends very easily. I’m
handsome enough, I’m strong enough, and darn it, people like me.”

“Hey, Tim,” said the professor. He shook his head to say, Cool it.

“So you guys met up that day and what, Wilton, you saw a prime candidate to help you deal with some problems?” asked Heat. “Like Lon King?”

“Lon King was a fucked-up individual,” snapped the ex-cop.

Nikki kept her focus on Backhouse. “Because Lon King knew too much about something? Wilton, I can’t hear you.”

Maloney sighed. “I should have shot them back at the house.”

“Drive,” said Backhouse.

“But what did he know about? What did Fred Lobbrecht tell Lon King that meant they both had to die? And then the others. Abigail Plunkitt. Nathan Levy.” She watched the pair up front
exchange glances but hold their silence. “I have a theory,” she said, “but I’d love to hear it from you.”

“I have nothing to say.”

“That’s a switch for
you
, Backhouse.” Rook leaned forward as best he could to peer around the headrest. “I thought you were the marquee headliner. The mouthpiece
of the whistle-blowers. The next Assange or Snowden. That’s how you told me you saw yourself.”

“I never said that.”

“Want me to get my notes? The address is in Tribeca. I’ll direct you.”

“He’s right,” said Heat. “You’re quite the showman. Starting with that phony drone attack in Washington Square.”

Rook agreed. “All staged to make us see you as a victim like all the others and deflect suspicion. Like the last faked attack in your office. The envelope, please.”

“Hey, you swallowed it,” said Backhouse.

Nikki shrugged. “At first.”

“Bullshit.”

“No bullshit. Know what always bugged me?” Nikki asked. “That drone only went after you while Rook was also a perfectly good target. I mean, if that attack was supposed to make
me believe it was part of some plot to kill the exposé—literally—as the writer of the article, wasn’t Rook as good a target as you?”

Rook frowned. “You never told me that.”

“We had enough issues already.”

Calls started coming on the scanner asking One Lincoln Forty to check in. Someone in the front seat switched the radio off. “That’s not going to help,” said Heat.
“Maloney, you know what kind of radar is going to light up if someone does a cop. Why dig a deeper hole?”

“Not going to be a problem, trust me,” he said with an unsettling degree of certainty.

The last red sliver of the sun disappeared over the New Jersey hills as they started across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The pit in Heat’s stomach deepened. Rook whispered,
“We’re going to Staten Island.”

Nikki blurted, “I listed my apartment so we could live in yours.”

He took in that news calmly and said, “That’ll be nice.”

If it hadn’t been for the cuffs, she would have liked to hold his hand.

“We good?” asked Backhouse through his side window. They couldn’t see
Tim Maloney in the dark, but they could hear
his shoes crunching gravel on the shoulder of the road as he walked back to the car.

The driver’s door opened, and he got in. “It’s all ours.”

Backhouse was pulling on a pair of blue crime scene nitriles from Heat’s glove compartment. “Took you long enough. Guard give you trouble?”

Maloney gave Backhouse a condescending look and closed his door. The interior went back to total darkness. “Took me a while to find the server box to disable the security cams. But we are
done and done.” He turned the ignition and the tires crackled on the siding. Nikki swiveled as far as she was able for a view out the back window, hoping for an approaching car. A police car
would have been nice.

All Heat saw was blackness.

Of course, as an associate of Forenetics, LLC, Wilton Backhouse knew the
security code to unlock the access door, but since his
password was unique to him, rather than enter it on the keypad and leave a time stamp of his presence, he stepped over the unconscious security guard lying on the floor of the guardhouse and
overrode the system from there.

They drove across the empty parking lot under the bleak orange light of the overhead lamps. Ground fog had begun to curl in off the surrounding marshes, and the enormous hangar ahead of them
loomed like a castle jutting from a misty heath. Maloney parked the Taurus between the hangar wall and one of the eighteen-wheelers used to transport cars to and from the facility so it
wouldn’t be visible to the casual passerby on Gulf Avenue.

Backhouse got out first and jogged, cradling his shotgun, to the access door, which he opened with his gloved hand, and disappeared inside. Maloney got Rook out first, then Heat. Since their
hands were manacled behind them, the big man showed no concern about controlling them. Heat tried to take advantage of their captors’ separation to work on Maloney’s head.
“Backhouse is going to screw you over, you know that.”

“Inside, let’s go.”

Heat complied, but moved slowly so she could grind on Maloney’s weak spot, his clinical paranoia. “How do you deal with Backhouse? He doesn’t respect you. I hear how he talks
to you.”

Rook was right there with her. “Yeah, I picked that up, too. Ordering you around. Telling you to wait. Telling you to hurry. Telling you to shut up and drive. Asking what took so long,
like you’re his butt boy.”

“I’m not his butt boy.”

“He treats you like a flunky.”

“For sure. And you think he’s going to take this fall?” said Rook. “Believe me, there will be a fall.”

They were getting closer to the door, so Nikki piled on. “You’ll be lucky to be alive to take a fall. You’re a detective just like me, Tim. Use your training. Look at this
guy’s pattern. He kills his partners.”

“She’s right. You gotta know he’s already thinking about how and when to do you.”

“Turn it around while you have time. Preempt him.” Nikki stopped walking and faced Maloney. “You have my word, I’ll get you the best deal I can.”

“And you’ll live,” said Rook.

“Problem out here?” They turned. Wilton Backhouse stood there, holding the door open. “This more than you can handle, bro?”

Nikki listened for a hitch. Maybe there was a moment of hesitation. But Maloney replied, “No, I got it,” and jerked them forward.

Rook stepped into the enormous crash hall ahead of her and halted. Maloney gave him a shove but was savvy enough to respect Heat’s combat training, and kept a firm grip on her arm. But
when Rook moved and cleared her view, whatever strength Nikki had managed to hold on to following her day’s violent ordeal instantly leached out of her. At the far end of the hangar a pool of
light illuminated an American subcompact loaded on the launch catapult.

Its two front doors gaped open, waiting.

I
n unspoken unison, Heat and Rook slowly pivoted their heads, tracing the route along the test runway to the other end of the
crash hall a football field’s length away, where the impact barrier—a monstrous concrete block reinforced with steel—sat waiting, immovable as Gibraltar. That wall of the former
airplane hangar had been freshly painted over since their last visit nearly a week before. For anyone who had been there, no amount of white latex could erase the ghastly image of Fred
Lobbrecht’s blood-and-tissue splatter, least of all the pair slated to take the next ride.

Then, as only he could, Rook tried whatever it took to lighten Heat’s burden. “Shotgun,” he said.

Nikki choked back emotion, willing herself to command this moment. Weakness meant death; focus gave them a fighting chance. “Seriously?” she said, forcing herself to sound anything
but fearful. She went for indignant. “You have to be kidding. How is this a good idea?”

“Not really sure how good it is,” said Backhouse. “You caught me off balance when you showed up. I’m just making the most of this situation on the fly. I mean, this
isn’t some movie where the guy says, ‘I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Bond…’”

“There’s an understatement,” said Rook.

Backhouse flared. “Hey, you can fuck yourself.” Maloney threw an elbow into Rook’s wound again. Heat fought her instinct to fight. Since she was handcuffed and unarmed, a head
butt would only instigate something she couldn’t finish. Rook gave her a sign that he was cool, even though his lips had gone white from biting back the pain.