Driving Heat (13 page)

Unsure now whether Rook was obfuscating or traumatized, Nikki cut bait. She told him they would continue the conversation later. She logged into the crime scene and led her group past the empty
coroner’s van and inside the building.

Heat had never before set foot inside a vehicle crash test facility, but the scene felt immediately familiar from so many all the
20/20
investigations and car commercials she had seen,
as well as all the ghastly videos they had forced her class to watch back in Drivers Ed. To her right, inside the cavernous half acre of the impact laboratory, a two-tiered modular structure sat
against one wall. The first floor of the glass booth appeared to be a command center full of electronic gear set into consoles and equipment bays. Up top, accessible from a steel staircase, a line
of camera tripod mounts formed a picket fence along the outwardly slanting window of an observation deck. Both booths were empty of life, as was the rest of the facility, except for emergency
responders.

Embedded in the concrete floor in front of the control room stood the firing mechanism for the vehicle propulsion system used to catapult cars and trucks the same way fighter jets got launched
from aircraft carriers. At the fire command, compressed nitrogen would blast the test vehicle the length of the hangar at up to seventy-five miles per hour. To enhance the video image, the floor
was painted snow white and punctuated at strategic intervals by yellow-and-black checked stripes and reference markers. To Heat’s left, at the far end of the track, almost the length of a
football field away, a small Japanese import had smacked into three hundred thousand pounds of concrete and steel at full speed. Even from a hundred yards away, she could see where the rusty cloud
of brain matter and now-dried blood had spattered the impact barrier like a Jackson Pollock. No wonder Rook was so shaken.

“Anybody bring a spatula?” asked the medical examiner, popping up from his kneeling position at the front end of the squashed car. Nikki had not seen Stu Linkletter—or heard
his grating cackle—in the four years since he had transferred from the Manhattan ME’s office. She counted each year as a blessing.

Detectives Ochoa and Feller clearly shared the same sentiment and muttered the “Fu-u-u-uck” that Heat was only thinking when the ass-hat in the contamination suit popped up from his
crouching position like a gopher.

“By the way, anybody up for lunch after? I don’t know why, but I’m thinking pizza.”

And with that, Nikki forgot all about her inside voice. “Fu-u-u-uck.”

“Oh, I hear ya,” said Linkletter, oblivious. “It’s not like a Road Runner cartoon, is it? You don’t go straight through the wall leaving a perfect cutout of your
body. Not even at seventy-five miles per hour.” He turned to the splotched wall, then back to his colleagues with a grin. “Am I right?”

“How about just giving us a briefing,” said Heat.

“What’s the fun in that?”

Even Randall Feller, Mr. Gallows Humor, had had enough. “Linkletter. Save it for open-mic night at Governor’s.”

It took the sober glowers of three cops and one investigative journalist to get Linkletter down to business. “Victim was not wearing a restraint and became a projectile, ejected from the
front driver’s seat of the vehicle upon high-speed impact with the fortified concrete barrier. Preliminary cause of death: blunt impact injuries of head and torso. Temp, lividity, plus the
degree of congealing and dryness at the edge of the blood spatters all lead me to estimate the postmortem interval at twenty-four to twenty-eight hours.”

“This happened yesterday?” asked Heat.

“Twenty-four to twenty-eight hours. Am I not being clear?”

“Do you have positive ID of the victim?” asked Ochoa.

“We are unable to confirm anything other than race and gender.” The ME indicated the bloodstained gnarl of clothing and flesh fused with the crumpled hood. “Lower body is still
largely discernable, therefore, male.”

“What about driver’s license, wallet?” asked Heat.

He let out a petulant sigh. “First you reject my pleasantries and press for my report. Now you interrupt by pestering me with questions.” A photographer from his team flashed a
picture of the victim. Linkletter whirled to face him. “Mr. Roe. Cease photography.”

“Proceed,” Heat said, politely, but vowing never to work a death scene in his jurisdiction again.

“In his wallet, a New York State driver’s license for: Lobbrecht, Frederick van; male; cauc; brown over hazel; age thirty-eight. DL photo and name matches the Forenetics laminated ID
retrieved from the victim’s tissue, identifying him as a ‘crash reconstruction expert.’ Am I the only one thinking, ‘No shit?’” Linkletter cackled his
strangled-goose laugh again, but when he saw the stone faces of Easter Island staring back at him, the medical examiner continued, “Given the catastrophic trauma to the head and upper body,
positive ID will involve fingerprints. Failing any record of those, we’ll go for dental records or a chest X-ray, assuming he has one in his medical files. Of course there’s DNA, but
you’re looking at time and taxpayer moola.”

“I’m good for now,” said Heat, eager to put space between herself and the annoying ME.

“Oh, sure,” he called out as they walked away, “now that you’re a captain, you’re too big to slum with the grunts in the field.”

“E-mail me your report,” was all she said in reply and without even turning to him as she moved off.

“What an asshole,” said Feller.

Ochoa added, “Dealing with dead people’s the perfect job for that guy.”

“Not even,” said Rook. “No corpse-side manner.”

“You’re back.” Heat smiled warmly and gave his forearm a squeeze. “Welcome.”

“I told you I was fine.”

“Yeah, and you looked it,” said Ochoa. “Get any on your shoes?”

Heat and her crew met at the other end of the hangar with their counterparts
from the One-Two-One to piece together what they could
about the crash. “A couple of things I don’t understand already,” she said, kicking things off, “besides wondering how something like this could happen in the first place.
First, how could it go unnoticed for a full day?” Nikki scanned the cavernous space and added, “I mean, where is everyone?”

One of the Staten Island detectives said, “This facility is sort of like a football stadium. Nobody’s really around unless there’s a game.”

“Kind of an expensive piece of property to sit idle,” said Ochoa.

“Oh, they make their money, believe me,” said the SI cop’s partner. “Car makers and insurance companies pay big for these tests. And it’s plenty busy here when they
do one, about forty of them a year. We come by sometimes to watch—I mean, wouldn’t you? Lot’s empty now, but on test days, you can hardly find a parking place.”

“I called the Forenetics company headquarters in Stamford while I was waiting for you and Ochoa to get out here,” said Feller. “Their president told me they were scheduled for
an impact test on that import tomorrow. Lobbrecht was the project manager and came in yesterday on a scheduled rig of the sensor cables in the vehicle for Rickles.”

“Rickles?”

Feller pointed to the corner beside the catapult where a crash test dummy stood strapped into a dolly. “Irony. Rickles is the dummy.”

“It’s all part of the timeline they follow. Sort of like a NASA launch.”

Heat said, “They have a security guard in the shack at the gate. Didn’t he think it was odd that Mr. Lobbrecht came in but didn’t leave?”

The lead detective from the 121st shook his head. “The guard says just the opposite. That Lobbrecht only started coming here six weeks ago, but, in that time, was a 24/7 guy whenever there
was a launch. Worked all hours, brought his lunch, always pulled all-nighters. It was not out of pattern for him to show up and not clock out for two days. And this place is soundproofed, so
they’d have no clue out there across the lot, especially with a radio or TV going.”

They all looked downrange at the crash site, where Linkletter and his team were gathering what teeth they could find. “So what do you think, misfire?” asked Ochoa. “Or this guy
Lobbrecht pushed the wrong button or plugged the wrong cable in the wrong socket while he was setting up?”

“Could be,” said Feller. “Systems fail.”

But Nikki had her attention on Rook and could see that he wasn’t buying an accident. Neither was she. There are coincidences in life, but in Heat’s experience, very few in murder
investigations. His connection to two corpses in as many days flashed some mighty big strobes in her brain. “Are you ready to tell me what you were out here to see Lobbrecht about?”

Rook turned slowly away from staring at the crash, but he couldn’t meet her eyes. He stared at the bright-white floor and said nothing. Nikki considered a moment. But it didn’t take
her long to make a decision, painful as it was. In truth, she had made it already the evening before when she ordered the tail on him. This would just be the extension of that call.
“Detective Feller?” she said. “I want you to drive Mr. Rook back to the Twentieth.”

“Can’t I ride with you?” Rook asked. “Tell you what. I won’t even call shotgun.”

But Heat wasn’t smiling. “You’re not riding back to the precinct. You are being taken there.” She turned to Feller. “He travels in the back. And when you get there,
put him in Interrogation One.” Nikki gave Rook her all-business glare and walked out with Ochoa, leaving her fiancé behind.

Heat felt the familiar tug on her eardrums as the air seal broke when she
pushed open the door of the sound lock that separated the
Observation Room and Interrogation One. Completely foreign to her, however, was to see Jameson Rook waiting for her in the interviewee’s seat, elbows on the metal tabletop, anticipating his
promised third degree. She dropped a blank notepad and a stick pen at her place and sat down across from him at her customary spot for examining suspects, conspirators, and persons of interest. He
kicked things off, but not with any information, only to state the obvious. “This is nutty.”

“You think?”

“Usually, when we’re sitting across a table, there’s far less fluorescent lighting and usually a better class of beverage.” He knuckle-tapped the water bottle before him,
making the water inside ripple.

“We are in here because this is not a game, Rook, and I chose a more formal setting to make sure that you know that.”

“Oh, trust me, I know it,” he said. “How could I miss it? Hell, my fiancée had me tailed by an undercover detective. By the way, how cool is that? I’m definitely
going to have to work that into the toast at our wedding reception. By the way, speaking of: I talked to my buddy Alton Brown of the Food Network. For the event, he is sending me his secret recipe
for Jameson Irish Whiskey Punch. He says it follows the classical paradigm of one of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak. Which I think also describes the Knicks this
season.”

“Rook, will you stop? Just. Fucking. Stop.” While Nikki watched his face grow more sober as he left off his posturing, she chastised herself. On her walk down the hall to I One, her
self-talk had been all about not letting this turn emotional; about not buying in. About using this setting as a wake-up call to get him to see what was going on. To give him an opportunity to say,
This is real. I need to lay off with the high-and-mighty stance. And here, thirty seconds into the interview, she had risen to the emotional bait and even cursed aloud for the second time that day.
Nikki vowed to get it together and to stay up on the moral high ground. If there was any hope of getting Rook to open up and not damage her relationship with him, she had to be the grown-up.