Driving Heat

by Richard Castle

  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 hal
ted cross traffic, waving her through.

  “Your theory fits,” Heat said, giving a smile and a wave to the cop, “but it fits only up to a point. That only covers King and Lobbrecht. Who killed Nathan then? And why? And why is someone still trying to kill Wilton Backhouse?”

  “I’ll admit my theories are at the nascent stage, but getting there, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Further ahead than I am,” she said. And wasn’t so happy to admit that.

  The address was off Northern Boulevard, about a mile from the bridge in a mixed neighborhood of row houses, auto-body repair shops, an ice cream factory, and the new nightclubs, steakhouses, and Starbucks franchises that were the area’s hint of gentrification to come. Out of habit, Heat parked halfway down the block—close enough to get to the car in a hurry, far enough not to be made at the curb.

  The street was quiet at that time of day. Soon the cafés and pizza joints would be pulling in lunch trade, but aside from an old man hunched over his walker, Heat and Rook had the sidewalk to themselves. The building was a beige one-story warehouse in the same basic size and configuration as the body shops and one-story warehouses they had passed on the way there. The front had a rolling steel garage door with the requisite amount of tagging. The main door turned out to be double dead-bolted and locked when Heat tried it. The chain-link fence on either side had no gate, and sharp razor wire was coiled along the top to further discourage would-be thieves. Heat pressed her face against the windows, but they had been painted over from the inside.

  Rook took a step back from the building and shielded his eyes against the sun. “No sign. No phone number. No nothing.”

  “They’ve got security cams, though,” she said, indicating the three lipsticks covering the building.

  “Show-offs,” said Rook. “How come they get security cams and the NYPD doesn’t?”

  Heat tried the bell and tried knocking again. They waited. Both pressed their ears to the door, but heard nothing. “Want me to bust a window?” he asked.

  “Let’s do something crazier. Let’s get a search warrant.”

  They got back in the car and Heat phoned the District Attorney’s office to request her paper. The assistant DA who took her call was a friendly, which was to say that Nikki wasn’t going to get any obstruction from him, as she had with the administrative subpoena she wanted for Lon King’s receptionist. After she hung up, she said, “All good. But it’s going to take an hour by the time the judge signs and they can get it over here to us.” They sat in silence for a moment.

  “Wanna get some lunch?” she asked.

  “Wanna make out?”

  Nikki said, “Oh, yes, nothing would be better than getting all hot on a public street during a stakeout in broad daylight.”

  “Just asking.”

  “Just saying.”

  A few seconds passed, then he muttered, “So you wanna?”

  Heat was laughing when the bullet ripped through her side window. The close-range report temporarily deafened her left ear. Fragments of glass pelted her cheek and shoulder. Rook cried out, “Oof!”

  Heat could no longer see through the cascade of red pouring down over her eyes.

  “Drone!” yelled Heat. “Down, down!”

  “I see it. You OK?”

  “I’m hit.”

  “Me too.” Nikki swiped a wet smear of blood from her eyes and turned. Through the haze she saw the right shoulder of Rook’s shirt blossoming crimson.

  “Pressure,” she said. “Do it.”

  He pushed a palm to his wound. “Your forehead…”

  “Drone’s on the move.” Heat cranked the ignition. “Buckle up. Stay down.” Then she mashed the gas pedal, sending her Taurus Police Interceptor tearing out into the street.

  “How bad are you hurt?” Rook asked.

  Nikki ignored him and squinted through the damp stickiness of her own blood, watching the cars, watching the peds, watching the drone—which was four car lengths ahead, humming away from her up the block. Rook scoped out the drone, then came back to her. “Are you seriously going to try to catch it?”

  “How much do you know about these things? How fast can they go?”

  “Let’s see,” he said. “Amateur UAVs? A horizontal airspeed of thirty feet per second, or…let’s call it twenty miles per hour.”

  “Then I am seriously going to try to catch it.” She braked to quickly check the intersection side to side. The movement made her head ache and the skin above her brow line started to sting. She gunned the V8 and snatched up her two-way. “One Lincoln Forty, ten-thirteen. Request assistance on a ten-ten, shot fired. One-L-forty and passenger wounded. In pursuit of drone, repeat: drone. Caution, UAV is armed and dangerous.”

  The innately unfazed dispatcher came back, “Copy, One Lincoln Forty. State location.”

  “Astoria. Northbound Thirty-Seventh Street, crossing Thirty-sixth Avenue.”

  “Watch it, watch it,” called Rook.

  Heat swerved barely in time but missed the first in a caravan of halal food carts being pushed from a driveway into the street. “Thanks, got it.” She lit up her flashing LEDs but decided against the siren in case the drone was wired for sound. There was a chance the operator hadn’t realize she was crazy enough to pursue.

  They caught a green light at 35th Ave., but Nikki brought her speed way down because a bus was unloading a group of middle schoolers on a field trip at the Museum of the Moving Image. “I got the kids, you stay with the drone,” she said. Once clear, she squeezed by a double-parked oil truck, then accelerated up the block past a body-waxing studio, an awning manufacturer, and indoor batting cages.

  “Uh-oh, getting some altitude,” he reported. “Cutting a left at this corner, I’ll bet.” He winced when Nikki gassed it to beat the red for her left turn.

  “Sorry.” She caught the rusty flavor of blood that had started to congeal on her lips and fought nausea. “You stop bleeding?”

  “Some.” He lifted his palm and amended that. “No.”

  The quadcopter had gained enough height to clear the two-story townhouse and descended again as it moved west after its turn. But then it goosed its speed and arced a sweeping left at 36th Street. “Don’t turn left,” he warned her.

  “But that’s where it went.”

  “You’ll get dead-ended. Kaufman Studios just put up a permanent gate.” Rook was right. The street was barricaded by a dark-blue fence. “I saw it when I did my guest spot on Alpha House.” Heat watched the drone move south, having flown right over the barrier. “We tried,” he said.

  But Nikki wasn’t giving up. She drove to the next corner and started to make a left. “You do know you’re about to go the wrong way down a one-way street,” said Rook.

  “No, I’m not.” Then she pulled the car into the driveway of the studio loading dock. “I’m going to drive down the sidewalk beside the one-way street.” The entire block was taken up by the massive wall of a movie soundstage, which meant no doors, no shops, no foot traffic in and out. The concrete ahead was clear. Still, Heat drove slowly, just in case someone suddenly emerged from among the fleet of white production trucks lined up along the curb. When she reached the corner at the other end, they both craned their necks to the left.

  “There!” He pointed, and she just caught a glimpse of the drone as it zipped down 36th Street, disappearing behind the far side of the Frank Sinatra School of the Arts.

  She double-chirped her siren and drove off the curb with a hard thump that pained them both. She chirped it once again as she cut across lanes of traffic, then made a right down 36th, chasing the tiny dot at the end of the block. Heat’s vision had fuzzed. She swiped at the blood, but it didn’t help. “Lost it. What’s it doing?”

  “You all right?”

  “What’s it doing?”

  “It’s slowing down. And descending.”

  Nikki blinked rapidly to clear the blood coating her lashes. “Got it. Two o’clock, beside the parking structure.” The thing had been easier to
spot in the open sky. Now that it had decreased altitude, the speck became more challenging to track against the confusing background of buildings, windows, and signage.

  “Still descending,” he said. “Looks like it’s going to land.”

  An ambulette shuttle full of seniors lurched out from the curb, and Nikki had to brake hard not to hit it. Rook moaned lowly and pursed his lips in pain at the sudden stop. Gray heads all in a row like a roll of postage stamps scowled out the van windows at them. Heat made a mirror check and shot around the front of the ambulette just in time to see the drone, now descended to street level, slowly drift inside the yawning back hatch of a small SUV, soundlessly, elegantly, as if in a scene from the future. The hatch automatically closed and the SUV drove on, turning the corner, heading west.

  Heat palmed her mic. “Read me the plate, I can’t see it.”

  “That’s not your vision. It’s got one of those tinted plastic covers.”

  She called in a description of the crossover and her twenty. They had just passed under the elevated tracks of the N and Q trains when Rook said, “Blinker.”

  “Good. Then he doesn’t know he’s being followed.”

  The SUV signaled a right, then eased down the sloping driveway of a brick duplex and pulled inside the open garage under the house.

  There were no street spaces, so Heat double-parked. “Stay in the car,” she said, and started up the sidewalk. Her legs felt weak from trauma and blood loss. She blinked to clear her vision and, when that didn’t work, she wiped her eyes with her sleeve. The cloth came away wet with fresh blood, and her brow felt as if it were on fire. Without turning, she said, “Does ‘Stay in the car’ mean anything to you?”

  “Pretty much no,” said Rook, who was hurrying up behind her. “You should really catch on.”

  “Go back. You’ve been shot.”

  “So have you.”