Driving Heat (31 page)

Heat’s stomach hit the spin cycle. Oh, shit, she thought, is Rook dead? Is he here to tell me Rook’s dead? Nikki fought the urge to bolt out into the open ramp and try for a look at
this guy. Or to take him. If he knew something about Rook, she wanted it—now. “What about Rook? Tell me!” In contrast to his measured tone, her blurt sounded eager and needy.
Because she was.

“I thought you’d be interested, and I can hear that I have your attention. Which is good, because what I am about to say to you is very important.” He paused again. Taking his
time, running the table his way, and only making it harder on Nikki, who was coping with a turbo pulse and wondering what the fuck was going on. “I need to issue you a caution to stop
overreaching in your homicide case. Not only are you trying to go places you shouldn’t go but doing so would be harmful to Mr. Rook.”

His words smacked Heat with alarm and hope. “Oh, my God…” she muttered. “He’s alive…” She couldn’t help herself and shot to her feet, calling,
“He’s alive?” She got no reply and this time shouted it loud enough to hear her own voice ring back at her in the concrete cavern. “Don’t screw with me, is Rook
alive?”

Another pause, and the voice came from farther away, as the unflappable baritone with a hint of accent—maybe Oklahoma?—resumed. “I urge you to listen. I know this is very
difficult because it runs against all your training and, to be certain, your emotional investment.”

“Damnit, tell me. Is. He. Alive?”

In that same soft-spoken tone, he said, “Yes…so far.”

Her cop wheels started turning. If this guy was telling the truth—if Rook wasn’t dead in a gutter somewhere with a bullet in his head—this guy might be able to lead her to him.
She stepped from between the cars and shouted again. “Who are you?” Nikki got her iPhone out and texted her location and a 10-13.

He chuckled. “What do you like? How about ‘Mr. Jones,’ does that work for you?”

The moment she had completed her message and hit Send, Mr. Jones said, “I see we only have a few more moments to spare here, so let me make this as clear as I can. If you continue to press
the issue and follow the path you are on, you will be putting Mr. Rook’s life in jeopardy.”

“If he’s alive, prove it. Let me talk to him. Let me see him! Take me to him!”

“You’re not listening. And you’re assuming I have control of the situation. I am trying to share a clear warning. Unless you want to bring him harm, or worse: Stand
down.”

Heat’s heart raced. He sounded like he was wrapping up, and she needed to do whatever she could to keep this man engaged—for information and to stall him until backup arrived.
“If you don’t have control of him, who does?” She waited and got no reply. Nikki strained to listen carefully, assuming he was, once again, repositioning. “And where is he?
Talk to me!” Still no response. “And who do you work for…Mr. Jones?”

Her only reply was the echo of a slamming door, on the far side of the garage and a floor below. The sound was the theft of hope.

When the cavalry arrived, it was too late. Heat gave a report to the First
Precinct lead, but they both knew that a neighborhood
search without a physical description would be a waste of manpower. And unfortunately, since Heat had parked in a municipal garage, the security cams were blacked out along with the other services
compromised by the Free Mehmoud cyber attack.

Heat put her head together with Raley and Ochoa back uptown in the bull pen. “Whoever it was,” she said, “it was the second no-fly warning I’ve gotten. First from
Congressman Duer, and now from this ‘Mr. Jones.’”

“So do you think this mystery voice guy is with Duer?” asked Raley.

Nikki shrugged. “Hard to say. But—going purely by gut? He had a fed vibe. If he’s not Homeland or a spook, he could be former.”

“And, therefore, contracted out to anyone from Duer, to Swift, to the Syrians, for all we know,” reflected Ochoa.

“One thing, for sure. He was pro. And tapped in. Literally. As soon as I texted my ten-thirteen, he put a clock on our conversation. Which tells me he had access to my phone.”

Raley folded his arms and fixed her with a look. “So. Does this guy in the garage seriously think you would stand down?”

“Or that we would?” said Ochoa.

“If he does,” she said, “he doesn’t know me—or us.”

Annette appeared in the doorway. “Zachary Hamner is calling. Shall I transfer here or your office?”

Heat bolted up. Zach had promised to call her the instant anything broke about Rook. “Mine,” she said and hurried to the door. On her way out she called to her squad leaders to hang
tight.

“Heat.” Hamner said it the way people tell Siri to look up a contact: as a fact. Like everything else about the man, his tone was joyless and impersonal. “This isn’t an
easy call to make.”

“Oh, God…”

“You might want to close your door.”

“Zach, don’t torture me. Is it Rook? Just tell me.”

“No, it’s not Rook.”

Gathering herself again from another shot to the ribs, she heard him cover the phone and tell someone that he would call back in three minutes, that he had a thing he had to do. Nikki was too
relieved to feel insulted to learn that she was a check-off on someone’s to-do list.

He uncovered the mouthpiece and got back to her. “Here’s where we are. I am calling to feel you out on stepping down from your command.” Nikki stretched the phone cord across
her desk so she could close the door. “Are you still there?” he asked.

“Step down?”

“I told you it wasn’t an easy call.”

“Less so for me,” she said. “I’ve only been in the job a week. Not even.”

“Yes, and the push I’m getting is that are there are some issues. Telltales. Shall I enumerate?” He barely paused; the question was rhetorical. “Not informing chain of
command about high-profile cases. Upsetting community leaders by brooming meetings. Flouting the CompStat process—the
CompStat
process, for chrissakes—by blowing off the weekly
meeting. In your own shop there is leadership unrest due to your perceived lack of commitment to naming your successor as homicide squad leader. And you are spending too much time in the field
doing casework instead of sending your people to wear down their shoe leather and report back, like a good administrator should. You still with me?”

“Listening, yes. With you, no.” Reeling as she was from hearing that the same guy who had gone out of his way to offer his condolences and full support was now caving to pressure and
squeezing her, Heat still managed to keep her head. When she had taken the job, she knew it meant facing down the machine at various intervals, so she saw this as an early test. One she could have
done without, but there it was. If Nikki came back at him whiny or defensive, she’d be finished. So she gave professional resistance, aka tossing the ball back in his lap. “You and your
downtown buddies are sending me mixed messages. One chief says, Stay on the case so he can brief the commissioner, but then you say I’m not delegating enough. You want leadership? I made a
leadership decision to skip those meetings to follow events in the double homicide that the chief of detectives personally ordered me to stay on top of. Which I am trying to do right now. But
here’s the thing, Zachary. I am not only running my precinct to the best of my ability, I am also working my damndest to save a man’s life, and I am going to see that through. If
somebody wants me out, I am not quitting. You can fire me and then see where the blowback lands when the press jumps on that, and you know it will.”

In the brief interval that followed, Heat was pleased to hear some throat clearing on the other end. Maybe Zach Hamner, senior administrative aide to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for
legal matters, wasn’t accustomed to pushback from lowly precinct commanders. “Well,” he finally said, sounding less like the shark running the table. “This has to be
explored further, I see.”

“This is a load of horse crap, and you know it.” She decided to get something out of this annoying call by asking the question begging to be asked. “Who sent you to see if
I’d resign my command? Where is this coming from? Who’s trying to get me off this case?”

“That’s absurd.”

“Not how I read it, Zach.
Who?
”

“Hear this clearly: There is no effort to hinder your speedy closure of this case.”

“‘Speedy.’ Sounds a lot like Swift, doesn’t it?”

He ignored that. “There was merely some concern here at the Plaza that you might be having a difficult time keeping pace with your duties, given the distraction.”

“The distraction?” Her foot nearly slipped off the brake, but she kept her cool, even as she seethed. “If you are characterizing my efforts to resolve the kidnapping of a
citizen off the streets of New York—regardless of my relationship to him—as a distraction instead of the very definition of my job as a sworn police officer, you need to take a walk out
of that administrative dreamworld and breathe some real-world air. And you can start by taking your head out of your ass.”

Nikki hung up.

Then she threw her typewriter at the wall, causing faces in the bull pen to whip her way. While she had everyone’s attention, she marched to the doorway and said, “Raley. Ochoa.
Murder Board update.
Now.
” If ever there was any ambiguity about her resolve, this third attempt to get her off the case had only stiffened it. Her only hope was that her dogged
perseverance wasn’t sealing her fiancé’s doom.

It may have been the first time ever in the history of New York City that a
plumbing contractor got whisked through Manhattan in a
police motorcade. But Alvin Speyer, the “pipe fitter,” as the stud had been nicknamed in the squad room, interrupted an extramarital tryst to get picked up by Captain Heat in the
carriage turnaround of his Times Square hotel and Code Three’d behind a pair of motorcycles to the curb between Patience and Fortitude, the famous marble lions of the NYPL’s main
branch.

The first thing Heat noticed when they met Carolyn Jay in her office on the second floor was that she was wearing the same clothes as the day before. “Not my first all-nighter,” said
the librarian with a mock-salacious wink. “Thank goodness I’m on good terms with security and the coffee pot in the break room got fixed.”

“But you did make progress, right?” asked Nikki, trying to get to it without appearing disrespectful to the woman who had burned midnight oil to help her.

“It’s a process, right? Catalog interpretation isn’t like the Map Room, where the answer to every question is a map. But enough headway to ask you to bring…Mr. Speyer, is it?
Come in, let me show you why I needed to borrow you.”

It was early enough that Mrs. Jay had the bull pen to herself, so she rolled two chairs from other work stations beside hers. “Let me walk you through my journey. Succinctly, I promise.
Time is critical, I can see it that, Nikki. That’s why I bore down. Not so easy with the digital system down, I don’t need to tell you.”

“And I thank you so much for your efforts, Mrs. Jay.”

“Well, hold your applause until we see if it paid off.” She swapped her glasses for the readers on the chain around her neck and picked up a yellow lined tablet full of
abbreviations, acronyms, and code numbers in her Palmer Method script. “The key to the whole thing, thanks to Mr. Speyer’s good citizenship, was to focus on the provenance of that boat.
From the description, a wooden eighteen-footer, isn’t that right? Please say that’s right.”

“Yes,” said Alvin Speyer.

“Thank God.” She went back to her notes. “A search needs a premise. Mine was that wooden boats are so retro, so high-maintenance that, much like a hot rod enthusiast, any owner
would be proud of his craft and consort with like-minded devotees. That led me across the hall to room 217 to explore the
Directory of Associations
and appropriate newsletter catalogues
shelved there. Here’s where I’ll skim for you. I spent hours thumbing through the
Oxbridge Directory
,
Benn’s Media
, and others, searching for association
newsletters, filtered for this region, of clubs catering to the small-wooden-boat owner. I made my short list and moved downstairs to Microforms, where I pulled the annual newsletters of each
organization from the last five years—an arbitrary limit, but it seemed a reasonable time frame given the circumstances. Going on and on, that led me to learn of the Great Upstate Boat Show,
held annually up in Queensbury, New York.”

Nikki opened her own notebook. “And you found a contact we can talk to?”

“That was my intent. Instead, I found these.” Mrs. Jay took two color photocopies from a manila file and held them against her chest. “These are prints I made from the boat
show’s newsletters from 2010 and 2012. Remember what I said about wooden boats being high-maintenance? There are numerous ads placed by repair and restoration companies. And they like to
print brag pictures of their work.” She then placed both ads faceup on her desk for them to examine. “Mr. Speyer, could either one of these be the boat you saw the other
night?”

Heat would have been amused by how much the form of the librarian’s question was identical to that of a detective showing a mug shot array to a victim, if she weren’t so focused on
the pair of advertisements. One was for a wooden-boat restorer in Glen Cove on Long Island, whose display showed a Brady Bunch–style grid featuring grainy shots of a 1962 Penn Yan, an
Electri-craft inboard, and a light-blue eighteen-foot skiff rigged for an outboard. The other craftsman was located near Paterson, New Jersey, and his ad featured only one boat, in a hero shot of
an immaculately restored sixteen-footer, also in light blue, also with an outboard-motor mount.

Alvin Speyer leaned over the pages and said, “Hmm.”

While he picked up each page for a closer examination, the research librarian said to Heat, “Of course, I could have phoned these places myself, but given what’s at stake here, I
didn’t want to take the risk. I’m no detective.”

“Could have fooled me,” said Nikki.