Driving Heat (24 page)

“What the hell?” Finally some reaction. He put his hands in his lap and dried his palms on his thighs. “I am a licensed private investigator.”

“On record as being on retainer to SwiftRageous, LLC.”

“So? Just one of many clients. And what’s with ‘scumbag’? I have no problem with what I do.”

“Let’s talk about what you do.”

“Not going to happen.”

“We’ll see. What is your interest in Lon King?”

“Who?”

“Sampson Stallings?”

“Who?”

“Nathan Levy.”

“I’m lost here.”

“Nathan Levy. I just followed you on his street.”

Vreeland’s face was all innocence. “Did I even know that? I was going for a drive. Nice day, thought I’d check out that new Jack Nicklaus course The Donald is building. I saw
you following me—an obvious cop, come on—so I pulled over. Now, for reasons I don’t understand, here I am. Waiting for my very, very good lawyer.”

Conversation wasn’t going where she wanted it to, but at least he was talking. Heat kept pounding. “What did you do with the materials you stole from that apartment on Roosevelt
Island?”

“Whose apartment? What materials?”

Before she could press more, the door opened and Helen Miksit tromped in. She didn’t bother to sit. The blockily built lawyer had accessorized her tweed St. John with a matching frown, and
it was all Nikki’s. “Heat, I thought I trained you better than this. Hey, Eric. Don’t get too comfortable.” As a former hardball prosecutor and now as one of the
city’s top criminal defense attorneys, Miksit was a badger in court, and in Nikki’s unhappy personal experience, bare knuckles in the station house. “This interview is
over.”

“Not your call, counselor.” Heat remained seated facing Vreeland, signaling a delicate operation that could not be interrupted. Nobody told the lawyer.

“Bullshit. You have charges?”

“Not yet. But a man who encountered your client in his apartment is coming down to ID him.”

Miksit brought out her crass sarcasm. “Oh, so you’ve got him tried and convicted already. Why don’t we just hook him up to Old Sparky and fry him for the Lindbergh
kidnapping?”

This time, Heat rose and turned to face the hard-ass squarely. “He’s not going anywhere, Helen. Not until I place him in a lineup for my eyewitness.”

“That’s fine.” Miksit plunked her giant briefcase on the table and took a seat. “We’ll just wait out your little process so we can bail him.”

Heat sat back down. “I want to talk to him first.”

“You already did. Thank you for your interest.” The lawyer reclined in her seat with a smug grin that made Heat hate all lawyers. For now, this one would do.

Heat told Raley and Ochoa to set up a lineup to include Eric Vreeland, PI
for Sampson Stallings, then went to her office to put in a
call that begged to be made.

“Will Mr. Swift know what this call is about, Captain?” asked the assistant.

“You writing this down?”

“Go ahead.”

“Tell Mr. Swift I just arrested his private investigator for breaking into the home of a homicide victim and I want to know why he sent him there.” There was a gap of dead air and
Nikki thought she heard a click. “Hello, did you get that?” Heat assumed she’d been hung up on, but then there was a sudden rush of street bustle followed by the voice of Tangier
Swift.

“Nikki Heat, you should work for me in sales. You sure know how to get your foot in a door.”

“So does Eric Vreeland,” she said, neither flattered nor charmed. “And since he does work for you, we need to talk again. And soon.”

On Heat’s drive to Tribeca for her second meeting with Tangier Swift, she mulled the notion of Eric Vreeland as a possible killer. On one level, it felt so right. High-level men like Swift
relied on lowlife cockroaches like Vreelend to do the heavy lifting. So the PI—or operative, or fixer, or whatever the polite designation was for the scummy art of “making it
so”—had instantly become the shortest distance between the combative software magnate and the inconvenient whistle-blowers who were threatening to shut him down.

But what seemed initially such a good fit raised doubts on examination. Eric Vreeland was unarmed at his capture. His hands and clothing tested negative for gunshot residue. He claimed he knew
nothing about drones other than seeing on TV that they might be delivering pizza someday. Whether that was a lie or not, there was no drone or drone controller in his car. Plus, he was apprehended
heading to Levy’s home
after
the attack. Was Vreeland going back to finish the job, or was he simply planning surveillance or light break-in work on his boss’s behalf?

Heat couldn’t recall a case with so many moving parts, so many orbiting elements begging to connect without hinting at their apparent relationships. The whistle-blowers going after
Swift—the alleged auto-safety violator—was clear enough, of course. But why would a high-stratum billionaire bother killing his accusers when he employed lawyers to handle such problems
as a matter of course? And how did a mobster like Tomasso Nicolosi figure in? He was plenty lethal, for sure. But murder to collect a gambling debt could be ruled out by his own logic. Even if he
were brought in to arrange a contract killing by Swift or someone else, both the drone and the proving ground car crash seemed well above Fat Tommy’s beer-fart level of sophistication. What
Heat did know was that the only way to find the links she needed was to keep asking questions and continue observing. And keeping her head in the swirl of everything else going on during the first
week of her new job.

Which would break first, she wondered, the case or her?

Heat skipped the valet, slid her NYPD dash talker under the windshield,
and left her car curbside at The Greenwich. Robert
DeNiro’s upscale hotel was an easy walk from Rook’s loft and, over the past year, the two of them had eaten their weight in papardelle with lamb ragù at the embedded restaurant,
Locanda Verde.

The Drawing Room at The Greenwich lived up to its name: quiet, tastefully decorated, and for guests only. Tangier Swift must have had a room there, or just booked one for the day so he could
have the meeting where his whim took him. The concierge ushered Heat in, and she found the tycoon in the corner nook by the fireplace speed-swiping his iPad screen. He set it aside when she
approached. “Don’t mean to put it in your face. Unlike New York City’s, my technology still works. Let me know if I can Google anything for you.”

Nikki didn’t miss a beat. “Sure thing. Why don’t you run a search for private eyes who do B&E work for dot-com billionaires? See if you get any hits.”

“You won’t be deterred, will you?”

She sat down and looked at him with a level gaze. “Count on it.”

“I’m surprised you came alone. Is Jameson Rook out beating the bushes and/or cesspools for new targets of his ‘journalism’?” Swift actually made air quotes around
the word with his fingers. Heat didn’t need to spend her interview capital defending her fiancé, and stayed on point.

“The next time we meet, Mr. Swift, we may not be in such an agreeable setting. The way I see it going, you may not even be wearing a belt or shoelaces.”

“Oh, man, that’s hilarious. Are you really trying to intimidate me? Really?” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “What world do you live in, Captain?” He
didn’t form air quotes around her rank, but it sure sounded like it. “Do you even think this is
your
meeting? That I wanted to sit down and let you browbeat me with your
fantasy probes and conspiracy theories?”

That made Nikki wonder why he had agreed to meet. She turned to see if she had been set up for something. They had the room to themselves…and rough stuff at The Greenwich? Not likely.

“Here is how I will enlighten you. When you dare to walk the global stage as I do—And yes, I began as a dot-com billionaire, what can I do?—You build it, they come, they pay.
Oh, mama, do they pay. Anyhow, when you have a profile like mine you are a constant target for unrelenting bottom-feeders out to suck up a chunk of your hard-won fortune. It comes in many ways, and
it is nonstop. Patent trolls, intellectual-rights theft, class action lawsuits, and yes, spurious claims about wrongful injury and death caused by one of my myriad products. Key word here:
spurious
. So what do I do? I write a lot of checks. My lawyers call it go-away money, to make the bottom-feeders do what? Go away.

“But some claims are so egregious that I need to take extra steps to protect myself, and I do that in a number of ways, one of which is to engage the services of what is called a fixer.
You might say ‘an operative.’ You might say ‘private detective.’ I say, prudent. So let us leave it there with the understanding that I am not going to yield to
you—and certainly not to the litigation trolls—and apologize for taking prudent action against bogus attacks by employing an interventionist.”

“Are you saying that’s what you did? That you”—Heat made her own air quotes—“‘intervened’ to shut down inquiries into your faulty software
system?”

“That’s a lie. My system is not faulty.”

“It sounds like you’re admitting you set your fixer loose to fix the problem. Was Fred Lobbrecht a problem? Lon King?”

“You are not hearing me.”

“Wilton Backhouse?”

Swift cast an obvious glance to someone behind her. This time, when Nikki turned, someone was moving toward her. But it wasn’t muscle. At least not in the physical sense. The man with the
silver hair gripping his cane so firmly that his knuckles whitened with every labored step was United States Congressman Kent Duer.

Wary, but unable to fight her instincts, Heat stood out of respect as the septuagenarian representative joined them and, without more than a crisp nod to her, let himself drop with a heavy
exhalation into the red leather chair beside Tangier Swift. “Too pretty to be a cop,” said Duer as an aside to his host. The sly wink made it feel like anything but a compliment.

Heat had grown up in New York seeing the congressman in newspapers, on the TV news, and lately, on the Sunday talking-heads shows from inside the Beltway whenever the subject was military
budgets and the powerful head of the House Defense Subcommittee was the Big Get. Congressman Duer looked her in the eye for the first time and said, “I came a long way for what’s going
to be a very short meeting. Fine with me, as long as you get the message loud and clear. This ends now.” In the red leather chair beside him, Tangier Swift’s face was etched by a smile.
Suddenly finding herself outgunned, rather than cave, Heat did what she would have done in a street fight: buy time to assess the situation for optimal tactics.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, sir.”

“I believe you know exactly what I mean. Need I spell it out for you?”

Tangier Swift rested a hand on Duer’s knee. The easy familiarity wasn’t lost on Nikki. “Kent, you don’t have to.”

“No, it’s all right. I want to make sure the lady understands.” The representative cleared his throat and continued in a quiet but determined way. “Not only are you
misguided in following the road you are on but—for reasons you cannot know—you are also creating a potential threat to national security.” He let that rest, then added,
“That light up the marquee for you?”

“So I should just drop it.”

He chuckled and turned to Swift. “Smart, too.”

But Heat wasn’t done gauging what she was up against. The invocation of national security seemed like overkill in a double homicide and a probe into auto safety. “Congressman Duer,
I’m afraid I’m going to need more to go on than that.”

“Maybe you’re not as smart as you seem. So let me come at it another way. You think you know what you’re doing, but poking around blind like you are, all you’re going to
do is end up sticking your hand in a sack of rattlesnakes.” Satisfied with the picture he had painted and the clear warning he had delivered, Duer studied the burnished eagle’s head on
his cane, the one he had been given the day he was released from Bethesda Naval Hospital after losing a foot in the battle of Quang Tri. “That give you plenty to go on?”

Heat digested all this and said, “Congressman, I have the utmost respect for you, your office, and your committee.”

The lawmaker shook his head. “Here comes the
but
.”

“However, I don’t take orders on conducting homicide investigations from anyone other than NYPD. Surely, you can understand.”

“Unfortunately, I do. All I’m going to say is I suggest you think long and hard about this.” He turned to Swift, signaling that he was done, then back to her. “And now,
since I’m through explaining, why don’t you put those getaway sticks to use and move along.”

As she stepped onto Greenwich Street, Nikki was too busy pondering the ramifications of that conversation to feel objectified. Or to care. This was one of those moments that came in a case where
she wasn’t sure if she was walking out of a meeting with information or disinformation. One thing Heat knew for sure was that there was no such thing as a simple murder. Double that for two.
Now, one of Washington’s most powerful players trying to knock her off her investigation had added a new layer of complexity. But it had done something more: fueled her determination to dig
even harder for the truth.

The not-unexpected bad news in the Homicide Squad Room back at the
Two-Oh was that Tangier Swift’s fixer had gotten sprung.
“Eric Vreeland was not only released,” reported Ochoa. “No bail, no charges.”

“What happened with your lineup?” asked Heat. “Couldn’t Stallings ID Vreeland?”

Raley said, “Oh, he picked him out. Right away. But the PI’s bulldog of a lawyer gets to Stallings on the side and plants uncertainty in him about whether Vreeland was out in the
public hallway or inside the apartment itself.”

Nikki said, “But Stallings told us he ran into the guy inside, in his foyer.”

“You know how it goes,” said Ochoa. “Fog of war, heat of the moment, seeds of doubt. Take your pick.” In fact, Nikki had seen it often, as every cop had.
Otherwise-reliable eyewitnesses conflate or confuse details that seem indelible to those not caught up in the trauma of the incident. Criminal defense lawyers have seen it, too, and Helen Miksit
jumped at the opportunity she had created.