Driving Heat (14 page)

“Can I have a snack?” he said.

“No.” She continued in a more measured, even tone. “Rook. Let’s put a Tweet-size summary on what we’re staring at here: In a twenty-four-hour period, we have
discovered one homicide victim and one highly suspicious death with one common denominator. You.”

“Should I ask for an attorney?” He chuckled, then dropped it when he saw the pair of lasers she leveled at him.

“Let’s be clear,” she said. “At this point nobody assumes you had anything to do with these deaths. But let’s walk it through. Yesterday morning we find a body with
a bullet hole in his forehead. And it’s my shrink. Who works for the police department. You say nothing. We visit the practice of the victim and you’re there all through our
investigation. You say nothing. You show up on video surveillance as having recently been to that very place—the practice of my shrink, the gunshot victim. You said nothing. Today, we track
you to the auto safety proving ground all the way out in Staten Island. There, we come upon the suspicious death of the person you had an appointment with. You said nothing. Two deaths in two days.
Rook, it’s time for you to say something.”

He paused to reflect, then shrugged. “Do I need to repeat myself? I am a working journalist, an investigative reporter. Yes, I am working on a story. And yes, I have been acquainted with
both victims. But, Nikki, don’t you hold things back when you’re working a case? Well, I am working a story. I still don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle put together yet.
It’s still a jigsaw scattered all over the rec room. I’ve seen bits and shapes, but they haven’t taken form yet. I need to continue my investigation—my way—and to do
that, I need to be independent.”

“How can you say you need to be independent when you’re benefitting from all the information my squad and I are digging up? And you are sharing nothing.”

“Well, that’s a little harsh. I did lead you to the second victim. Wasn’t that helpful?”

“No, that wasn’t helpful!” she shouted in the voice she had promised herself she wouldn’t raise. “All it gave me was another body. And less to go on, not
more.”

“Hey, know what I just thought of? What if I became a private detective? Jameson Rook, PI.” Then he dismissed the notion with a “Nah” and rose to go. “Well, keep me
posted if you start to make more progress. And if anything lights up on my end—that I can share—I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Sit down.” Heat let him settle back in his seat, then broke the silence. “I think you had better get a lawyer.”

“Why? A minute ago you said you were ruling me out as a suspect.”

And then the penny dropped for her. Nikki Heat had found her point of leverage. Something that would really go to the heart of Jameson Rook, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative
reporter. “Maybe I’m not so sure of that now.”

He laughed. “Nikki, come on. Let’s not do theater here. What are you going to pull? Threaten me with the Zoo Lock-up?” Rook asked, referring to her technique of scaring naive
and newbie interrogation suspects inexperienced with the criminal justice system into thinking that, if they didn’t cooperate, they would be locked into some subterranean Devil’s Island
cage with society’s most violent, barbaric, and unclean criminals.

“Oh, I know the Zoo Lock-up wouldn’t bother you, Rook. In fact, you’d probably find it very colorful, make a lot of friends…perhaps even develop new articles to write for
your magazine.” Heat cocked an eyebrow and smiled at him. “No, I think I would give you your own cell. A very quiet place. Far from others. Far from conversation. Far from your cell
phone. Far from the Internet. Far from your ability to get out and interview subjects.” She could see his eyes widen.

“You wouldn’t.”

She smiled again. “Let me ask you a question. How’s your investigative report going to proceed when I hold you off the street for seventy-two hours, isolated from what’s going
on, sequestered from information?”

She could see his wheels turning. It looked like she had him. But then he said, “That’s a nice bluff.”

“You willing to try me?”

“My lawyer would spring me.”

“If he could find you. You like to play games? I’ll play Hide the Client. It’s been done. The New York jail system is one massive bureaucracy.”

They held a mini stare-down. Before either could blink, Detective Raley pulled the door open and stood half in the sound lock. He wore his excited face and gave Heat a beckoning nod. When she
joined him, he spoke in a low tone. “Thought you’d want to know right away. Got a hit on the gait analysis we did on that dude on security video at Lon King’s medical
building.”

Behind her, Heat could hear a chair scrape the floor tile. When she flashed a quick glance to the magic mirror she caught Rook leaning over the table, straining to hear what they were saying.
Not only, it seemed, was Raley her King of All Surveillance Media but his timing couldn’t have been better if his interruption had been planned. “Who’s our dude?” she said,
then she made an obvious turn to shoulder-check Rook. “Wait. Let’s step out so we can have some privacy.”

Inside the Ob room, Raley showed Nikki the prison mug shot of the man matching the result of the gait analysis. Her first thought, a disappointing one, was that Joseph Barsotti was not the same
man who had broken into Lon King’s and Sampson Stallings’s apartment that morning. But at least she had a name for one of the two unnameds circling this case. “Is this
high-confidence?” she asked.

“Very. They had him banked in numerous surveillance videos—both RICO and NYPD Organized Crime Unit—walking the walk at meet-ups in Howard Beach, Belmont Park racetrack, even at
a mob funeral. He pinged multiple matches for the swing phase of his stride and a telltale…let me get this right…” Sean paused to look at his notes. “Here it is: a ‘telltale
circumduction of his right leg.’ That means he rolls it out slightly with each step.”

“You have an address?”

The detective shook his head. “Last residence is now vacant. We’re running down other leads. Including known associates. You ready for one of them? Tomasso Nicolosi.”

“Fat Tommy?” Heat raised her eyes to the glass and caught Rook, fidgeting, eyeing the door. “Good work, Rales. Let me know right away when you have a line on him.”

Heat strode back into the box and found Rook trying to act nonchalant but not pulling it off.

“Who was the dude with the telltale gait? My money’s still on John Cleese,” he said with that grin that usually melted her from half a block away.

But this was about as far from usual as they could get. Nikki remained circumspect. She gathered up the pad and pen she had left behind and said, “The booking sergeant will be in to
process you in a few minutes.”

“Wait. You’re serious?”

“If it helps, there’ll be some good sex waiting for you when you get out. I still loves me a bad boy.”

Heat’s hand was six inches from the doorknob when he called out, “Wait.” His head was bobbing when she turned back. “OK,” he said.

Nikki sat across from him again. “I think your cooperation with my investigation will be noted as a timely show of good faith.”

“You’re twisting the knife.”

“I know.” She uncapped her ballpoint. “You want to be in the game, you can’t sub on the other team.”

Rook made a small nod to himself and began. “Just so you know, I have been holding back because I had a nervous source. I’ve gone through hell trying to secure his cooperation, and I
didn’t want to jeopardize my access when it was in such a fragile state already.”

“Let me ask you, Rook. How many times have you sat in this very room and watched me conduct interrogations?”

“Lots.”

“Then you’ll understand when I say this. Get the hell to it.”

And so he did. “Maybe I can’t fit it into one-hundred-forty characters, but I’ll do my best. A few weeks ago, I got a tip on something big. I mean third Pulitzer big. A safety
cover-up in the auto industry. Something that has cost lives. Many lives.”

As Nikki made a note on the top line of her pad, Rook’s visit to the auto safety proving ground snapped into place. She wanted to ask more but knew better than to interrupt, so she just
wrote “Forenetics?” and let him continue.

“Over the past few years cars have been flipping or rolling over sporadically. Nik, imagine driving the open road—la, la, la—and, with no reason, the steering wheel jerks from
your grip, the suspension on one side takes a huge bounce while the other side drops, and next thing you’re on the Tilt-a-Whirl. That’s what’s been happening. Causing accidents.
Lots of injuries, lots of fatalities.”

“Why haven’t I heard this on the news?”

“Exactly,” he said. “Well, I am the news. And I am doing an exposé on it. Or trying to. And when I say it’s a huge story, here’s why: The defect is not
limited to one automaker; it’s across car brands. But random. It’s Rollover Roulette for most makes, models, price ranges, foreign and domestic. My early research indicates it’s
not the car itself and not the computer that’s the problem. The strong indicator is that it is the result of a mystery glitch in the software, in the app that tells the stability-control
mechanism when and when not to fire. It’s a long story of who and how, but there is a very credible allegation from an industry safety expert that information about this defect is being
suppressed. There is a cover-up afoot.” He paused to take a slug from his water bottle.

Heat so much wanted to ask what all this had to do with her shrink but again decided to leave it with a note to herself, a reminder to follow up. She printed the initials “LK” on the
same line with “Forenetics” and drew a double arc between them, a rainbow over a question mark. She did, however, ask, “Was your expert the one we found today on Staten
Island?”

“Getting to that,” he said. “The industry insider I’m talking about is the point man of an auto safety research team, and now that he has all the scientific evidence he
needs, he is ready to blow the whistle on the cover-up. All very juicy. All the elements of a Jameson Rook
First Press
cover story that kicks off things like massive recalls and
congressional hearings. But”—Rook flashed a smile—“in spite of your belief that I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t love—and oh, do I love
them—as an investigative journalist it is my responsibility to fact-check all the angles. Not just the nuts and bolts of the story but the players. Stories like this are never about hardware
or software; stories are about people. And motivations. So I have been performing my due diligence. And my research led me to one member of my whistle-blower’s safety team: Fred
Lobbrecht.”

“The dead crash-reconstruction expert,” said Heat, drawing a circle around the company name, Forenetics.

“Fred was a tough nut to crack. He was extremely reluctant to talk with me. Even off the record. As a reporter, I’m used to that, but he was skittish and high-strung, lots of
insecurities—said he’d talk, then would cancel, that sort of thing. Week before last, he calls me up with a proposal. Would I consent to sit down with his shrink and let him sort of
couples-counsel us through the process of making him feel OK about spilling secrets to a journalist?”

As one stunning piece of the puzzle fell into place, the connection between Rook and the two victims, Nikki felt a tiny spark of exhilaration. This was the first moment on this case when she had
felt a sense of traction, even if she was still far from closure. Then came a second thought. “I just hit my first bump. Why was an auto-safety expert seeing a police shrink?”

“Because,” said Rook, “Fred Lobbrecht was an ex-cop. He retired a couple months ago from NY State Police, where he was on the force’s top Collision Reconstruction
Unit—you know, the CRU, the Forensics squad that investigates accidents. And, I guess you didn’t know—why should you?—Lon King had contracts to provide counseling services
to the NYPD, Port Authority PD, and to NY State, plus Westchester and Nassau counties.

“At first, I worried that Lobbrecht was just a neurotic flake and that this would be the unraveling of my story. But when I got into sessions with him and Lon King, it was clear he was
solid and knew his shit. He was jumpy because he was a man with a code. And spilling secrets to me would be a violation of that code.”

“I understand that,” she said. “Even for the greater good. It’s a tough call.”

“Agreed,” said Rook.

But, thought Heat, it was clear that Rook only understood that code in the way all non-cops do.

“By our second session,” Rook continued, “I had gained his trust, just about come to a breakthrough. Then Lon King washed up in his kayak.”

“And his files were stolen, A through M, which includes—”

“Lobbrecht,” said Rook. “Notes and transcripts of our sessions, plus whatever else he told Lon King before I came into the picture.” He grimaced. “Day before
yesterday, he told me to come to the proving ground on Staten Island and bring my digital recorder.”

Nikki thought about the timeline, since it was possible, given the TOD window, that Lobbrecht could have been killed before her shrink. “Did you call Fred to confirm your meeting after we
found Lon King’s body?”

“Thought about it. Then I decided, no, it might give him a chance to cancel. So I just showed up.” He gave her a conciliatory look. “And now you know.”

Heat amended that. “And now we’ve
started
. I want to meet your whistle-blower. Now.”

“Hey, come on, he’s my secret source.”

“Whose life may be in danger, did you think of that?” She stood, preparing to go. “Besides, I want to question him myself. And because you’ve had the good sense to
cooperate, Rook, you can come along.”

They drove to meet the whistle-blower in the new vehicle the motor pool
had issued Nikki. After she adjusted the mirrors and the
seat, Rook said, “So you get, what, a new car every day for life? Is this like winning the lottery?”

“Oh, yeah. And the department is very pleased I’m eating up the transpo budget.” When she had signed for it, the motor sergeant had told her that replacing flat tires was no
sweat, but that they couldn’t have a captain driving the city in a vehicle with “Snitch Bitch” etched into all four doors.