Heart Break: An Isabel Swift Novel (The Isabel Swift Detective Series Book 1)

by MF Moskwik

  Jameson’s eyes widen, and before he speaks, he walks away from her. When he turns, his nostrils flare and his eyes glitter with barely restrained anger. “It is my detachment, Officer Swift, which allows me to uncover patterns through unbiased analysis. It is my detachment, Officer Swift, which allowed me to uncover the unusual pattern of medical device failure. And it is my detachment, Izzy, which helped us to learn that the lab was destroyed by an explosion.”

  “That may be, but you know what? While you were finding these patterns, people died. Cops died. My partner died. Maybe you didn’t make the device, but you didn’t tell us what was going on either. So in my eyes, you’ve contributed to these deaths.”

  Jameson gasps, and the look of shame that crumples his face is unmistakable. “A mistake that I am trying to correct, Officer Swift, by using every resource at my disposal to find our perpetrator.”

  “Then come with me. Now. And bring your messenger bag,” says Izzy as she sets off across the parking lot.

  “Where are we going?” asks Jameson. “Officer Swift?”

  His only response is the click-clack of her boots on the shiny black pavement.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A pair of amber eyes watches Izzy and Jameson as they argue in the Sheriff’s station parking lot.

  A lifetime of nameless, faceless anonymity has granted the small, slender man immunity from scrutiny. No one notices him or makes note of his comings and goings. But his . . . activities of late have attracted the attention of law enforcement, and it was only a matter of time before someone showed up to find him.

  To stop him.

  In just a few more days, his mission will be complete. A few more days of working. And hiding. He will not be stopped. He will seek justice. He will find peace.

  In just a few more days, death will come to Westchester County, and he will be its prophet.

  And with that thought, the man casts his amber eyes downward and becomes invisible once more.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “We got a situation.”

  “You better, Rook. I’ve got night shift for the next four days, and your visit here is costing me my beauty sleep.” Rodriguez pulls back the door to his home and ushers in Izzy and Jameson.

  “’Fraid you’ll need more than sleep, if that’s what you’re going for,” quips Izzy.

  Rodriguez grins at Jameson and points at the young female cop. “Can you believe the mouth on her?” he asks. The affectionate smile on the middle-aged man’s face belies the harshness of his critique. “Good thing she’s got the aim and the spine to back up that mouth of hers.”

  “As I’ve learned,” agrees Jameson.

  “I learned from the best,” she replies with a small smile. “Look, Rodriguez. There’s been a break in the tech case linking it with your robbery and a string of deaths.”

  Rodriguez whistles. “Really?”

  “Maybe. But we need your help.”

  “Anything, Rook.” Rodriguez gestures to his couch and takes a seat across from the two.

  “We have a list of people who have died of chronic diseases in the last two months. I need to know from you whether you recognize any of the names.” Izzy turns and looks pointedly at Jameson.

  Jameson retrieves his tablet from his messenger bag, wakes up the device, and hands it to the older police officer.

  Rodriguez retrieves his bifocals from his pocket, views the list, and whistles again. “Where’d you get this list?”

  Izzy looks at Jameson, giving him permission to speak. “It was assembled from news reports near and within the area around Westchester County.”

  “Why do you ask?” prompts Izzy.

  Rodriguez hands the tablet back to Jameson and pockets his bifocals. “Class of ’89. Police Academy. Carter. Hinojosa. Bates. Matthews. Smith. Johnson. I don’t recognize all the names, but the ones I do, and there are a lot of them, they’re from my year at the Police Academy.”

  “Tell me about your class. Did anyone in your class have any enemies? Did one of you put someone away that could do them harm?” asks Izzy.

  “No, we were a good bunch, every one of us. Graduated, started out at the bottom, moved up the ladder. We put some bad guys away, sure, but we made our communities safer. And our DAs made sure they stayed that way.” He looks back down the list and points to the names on the list. “After twenty-five years, most of us are still in the force. Me. Carter. Some retired, some got injured, and some made it to the big brass, like Hinojosa.”

  “Was there anyone in your class that didn’t do well? Anyone who would be angry or resentful?” asks Izzy.

  “No, we were a good bunch.” Rodriguez pauses. “But we did have one kid—Aaron Lennox. Sad story. Died during a training run. Come to find out, he had a heart condition—kid had a bad ticker.”

  Izzy and Jameson look at one another. “Did he have family or friends with whom he was close?” asks Jameson.

  “Yeah, lived with his parents out in the Bronx. Had a baby with his girlfriend—wife?—who lived with them too. Real sad.”

  Izzy pauses. “Do you think that anyone in his family or circle of friends would want to do your class harm?” she asks.

  “That’s the second time you asked me that, Swift,” observes Rodriguez. He gives her a hard stare. “There something you want to tell me?”

  Izzy and Jameson look at one another. “We have reason to believe that their deaths—” begins Jameson.

  “We think someone may be using tech stolen from the universities to kill cops. Specifically from your class,” cuts off Izzy.

  Rodriguez breathes heavily and his face colors a startling shade of bright red. “Carter too?”

  Izzy nods.

  “Goddamnit,” Rodriguez swears softly under his breath. “What’s your angle? How do we stop this guy?”

  “We have reason to believe our person of interest will target a large number of people at one time, seeking to do widespread damage to as a large a number of people as possible in one stroke,” explains Jameson.

  Izzy nods. “Is there some social event or large gathering soon when many of your class will be gathered in one place at one time?” she asks.

  Rodriguez puts his glasses on again and gestures for the tablet with the list of names. “Academy reunion this Thursday. Most of us will be there.”

  “Then we need to cancel the reunion, Rodriguez. Make sure our guy can’t hurt anyone. Use the physical evidence from the two crime scenes to ID and catch the guy,” suggests Izzy.

  “We cancel the reunion? Our perp will know we’re onto him. What’s to keep him from heading for the border?” Rodriguez shakes his head. “I say we keep the reunion, and use it to flush him out. We know he’ll be there, so we staff the place full of cops in civvies and lock the place down,” counters Rodriguez.

  “Too risky. I will not risk your life or the lives of your classmates,” counters Izzy.

  “It’s our lives to risk, Rook. And to find the guy who may have killed Carter? Marisol?” Rodriguez hands back the tablet to Jameson. “Mad scientist,” he says as he gives Jameson a piercing stare.

  Jameson balks. “Excuse me?”

  Rodriguez turns to address Izzy. “Your mad scientist evil death ray, Swift. You want to tell me what the stolen tech has to do with these deaths?”

  Izzy opens her mouth to reply, but catches herself and gives Jameson a glance. With a look comprised of equal parts defeat and defiance, he gives her a nod.

  “I can’t, Rodriguez. Except to say that those with wireless medical devices—pacemakers, insulin pumps, implanted medical pumps—are at risk,” she says. She checks with Jameson and finds him giving her a grateful nod.

  Rodriguez nods. “I’ll let our group know, Swift. Give everyone a choice about whether to show up or not. Let ’em know what’s at stake. Something tells me we’ll all have your back.” He stands and extends a hand to first Izzy and then Jameson. “Thanks for taking care of ours.”

  Izzy nods. “If you’ll work with
state to make sure extra guards in civvies are posted at the reunion, we’ll follow up with the leads and gather evidence. Hopefully we can catch the guy before the reunion. That only gives us two days.”

  “You do what you gotta do.” Rodriguez ushers them out of the apartment. “Give ’em hell, Rook.”

  “Every day, Boss,” she returns. With a nod to Rodriguez, she turns and gestures for Jameson to follow her back to the car.

  Within the car, Jameson turns to Izzy. “Officer Swift, thank you—”

  “Shut it. I did not do that for you, I am doing my job,” retorts Izzy as she throws the car into gear.

  “Where are we going?” asks Jameson.

  “To follow up our new lead.” Izzy looks over at Rodriguez, who is still watching them from his porch. With a wave to him, she pulls away from the curb.

  “What new lead?” asks Jameson.

  “You heard Rodriguez, didn’t you?” At his look of bewilderment, Izzy explains. “We’re going to find Aaron’s girlfriend.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Susan? Susan Lennox?” Izzy knocks on the frame of the open door and peeks her head into the room.

  A quick glance around the windowless room shows that it is filled with laboratory benches covered end to end with notebooks, equipment, and samples. The room is dotted with young adults engaged in various duties with varying amounts of attention.

  “Susan?” calls Izzy again.

  A young African-American woman raises her head from her work. “Are you looking for Professor Lennox?”

  “Professor Susan Lennox?” Izzy tries to keep the surprise from her voice.

  The young woman shakes her head. “No. I’m one of her grad students, Rochelle Hill. I can take you to Dr. Lennox’s office.” The woman looks at the clock, puts down the device she’s holding, and removes her gloves. “She’ll just be out of her 1 p.m. class. Please follow me.”

  Izzy and Jameson follow the young woman down the hallway. “Pardon me. I obtained a degree in molecular biology, and the work in your laboratory interests me. If I may ask, the experiment you’re working on—what is it?” asks Jameson collegially.

  “Oh that? Just doing some cloning—putting a gene into a plasmid so we can move it into a target cell or organism.”

  “And for what purpose?” Jameson continues.

  Rochelle shrugs. “Overexpression, in this case. But overall, our lab works on molecular cardiology—we figure out how ion channels control the contractility of heart muscle.”

  “Sounds . . . fun?” offers Izzy encouragingly.

  Rochelle nods. “It is. And we’re the only lab at Pace that does it, so I kind of feel like a rock star, you know?”

  “Then you are definitely in the right field for you,” says Izzy with a smile.

  Rochelle returns Izzy’s expression with a grin. Pausing in front of a door with frosted glass, Rochelle knocks on it.

  “Come in,” calls a woman behind the door.

  Rochelle opens the door and peeks her head inside. “Dr. Lennox? There are two people to see you.”

  “Send them in, please.”

  “She’ll see you now,” Rochelle says with a gesture to usher them inside the room.

  “Dr. Lennox?” asks Jameson.

  A thin, middle-aged woman with blond hair and green eyes sits at a heavy, dark walnut desk. “Yes, I’m she. You are?”

  “I’m Officer Isabel Swift, Westchester County Sheriff’s Department. This is Mark Jameson, consultant for the New York State Police.” Izzy flashes her badge.

  “Police? How can I help you?” asks Dr. Lennox as she gestures to the chairs in front of her desk.

  Izzy looks at Jameson.

  “We have reason to believe that thefts of technological devices from nearby universities are related to someone you may have known,” begins Jameson. “Do you know an Aaron Lennox?”

  “Oh my God.” The professor’s eyes fly open in shock, and her right hand covers her mouth. “He . . . died a long time ago. What do you want with Aaron?” she asks.

  “We wanted to learn more about his death, Dr. Lennox, and find out if there’s anyone who has strong feelings about what happened to him,” explains Izzy.

  The professor stands, walks to the door, and closes it. When she resumes her seat, pain is etched in the set of her mouth and the fine wrinkles around her eyes. “It happened during a training run. Aaron wanted to be a cop, so after college, he entered the academy. We were having a terrible heat wave at the time, and the cadets—they had these training runs. All terrain. Uphill, downhill, all weather. They were required for the fitness exam. Aaron used to complain about them—said he had a hard time with them. He was always more tired than the other cadets, always came in last . . .” Dr. Lennox trails off. With a faraway look, she continues. “One day, he didn’t make it back. The academy said it was heart failure, and the doctor confirmed it—hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.”

  “I am sorry for your loss, Dr. Lennox,” states Izzy. “After your husband’s death, was there anyone who was upset? Maybe angry at the police or blamed them for his death?”

  “I don’t know. We all were sad, of course. But Aaron’s father?” The professor shakes her head “It wasn’t until after the funeral, and after my widow’s pension was denied by the state, that his father became extremely angry. We were told that because Aaron was still a cadet, and because he hadn’t yet passed his exam, he wasn’t a police officer and that our claim would be denied. After that, Aaron’s father began blaming the police for Aaron’s death and for our situation.”

  “And when was that, Dr. Lennox?” asks Izzy.

  “Robert was two, and it was three years after we left college—’89, I think,” replies the professor.

  Izzy and Jameson look at one another.

  “If I may ask, what did you do after your husband . . . after the funeral?” asks Jameson.

  “What any young woman with a child would do. I worked hard and put myself through school.” Dr. Lennox shakes her head. “His parents helped so much during that time. When they found out that we had eloped right after college, they were so mad. But after his death, they let me and the baby, Robert, stay with them while I was in grad school. When I was a postdoc, even though I moved out and got a place of my own, they would babysit Robert so I could stay in the lab. And when I became faculty, they shuttled him to and from all his school events—math club, computer science club, AV club. He quite loved it, high school.” She paused. “It was my in-laws’ love for Robert, and their strength of feeling about what happened to Aaron, that got us all through that terrible time.”

  Jameson and Izzy look at one another. “Thank you, Dr. Lennox,” says Jameson.

  “Yes, thank you, Dr. Lennox.” Izzy leans toward the professor, her posture conveying the sense of a shared intimacy. “I was wondering, though, do you happen to have the address for your in-laws? We may need to also ask them questions about what happened.”

  Dr. Lennox leans forward in her chair and looks at them over the piles of paper on her desk. “Sure. My mother-in-law passed a few years ago, but my father-in-law is still at the cabin. But what do my in-laws have to do with university theft?” she asks as she writes the address on a piece of paper.

  “By the way, where were you on the evening of the twelfth?” Izzy asks as she receives the address from Dr. Lennox and tucks it into her pocket.

  “That was Sunday night, right? I was probably here, at school. It’s grant season, and I’m up to my neck in applications.”

  “Can anyone confirm your presence here, Dr. Lennox?” asks Jameson.

  Susan grins. “My grad students. They’re a good bunch, and most of them make it in on the weekends, even evenings. They’re better than me, when I was at their stage.”

  Izzy and Jameson look at one another, and as one, they stand to go. “Thanks, Dr. Lennox. We’ll be in touch.”

  As they exit the office, Izzy and Jameson speak quietly about the interview. “Tape shows white male, so she’s
not our guy.”

  “But maybe her father-in-law? Perhaps still holding a grudge over what happened to his son?” suggests Jameson.

  “Yeah, but why wait to do something about it till now?”

  “And what is his connection with the stolen tech?” asks Jameson.

  Izzy shrugs, pulls the address out of her pocket, and hands it to Jameson. “Let’s go find out.”

  ***

  As Izzy and Jameson get into her cruiser, her cell phone trills.

  “Swift. Yeah. Interesting. Uh-huh. You did? That’s great. No, really great. Keep me posted, and thanks.” Izzy hangs up the phone. “That was Jenkins. State just called. Said that mass spec ID’d the residue as mercury fulminate, same as the stuff that was used a month ago in Rodriguez’s case.”

  “So the two cases are connected?” asks Jameson.

  “Yes. And they found blood on some of the shards of glass with the highest concentration of residue, so probably nearest the explosion. Said they could run the DNA analysis tonight if we want.”

  “Excellent. All we would need is a suspect’s sample to determine whether their DNA matches that of the blood sample found at the scene.”

  Izzy turns on the ignition and puts her car into gear. “Come on, Jameson. We gotta go see a guy about a cheek swab.”

  ***

  Izzy drives her cruiser down a long, winding, private road on the outskirts of Westchester County.

  Night is beginning to fall, and the encroaching dark and the thick canopy of trees force Izzy to turn on her headlights. A few minutes into their journey down the country road, Izzy’s hands begin to strangle the steering wheel of her car.

  “Officer Swift?” asks Jameson.

  “Yes?”

  He looks pointedly at her hands.

  She sighs and tries to relax. “Sorry. Bad dream. Didn’t sleep well. The forest . . . creeps me out.”