Driving Heat (16 page)

But when Heat and Rook ran right, he tried to go left, some primal instinct telling him to beat it back to his cave—in this case, his university office. “Wilton, don’t!”
she called. “Too open.” He halted, assessed the clear air space between him and Thompson Street, heard the buzz of the quadcopter coming back for another pass, and followed Nikki.

“There’s cover under those trees,” said Rook, not waiting, quickly cutting a turn east, away from the fountain. The other two fell in with him, racing along the walkway, all of
them stealing panicked glances back over their shoulders at the drone, which continued to follow them, locked in with unnerving menace.

“Zigzag,” said Heat. “Be a moving target.”

They wove from side to side, scrambling around an undergrad—probably an NYU music major—in a tux jacket, jeans, and Chuck Taylors, pounding out Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto
no. 2 on an upright he had parked in the center of the walkway. The kid was so lost in the music, he never noticed the downdraft from the aircraft rustling the dollar bills in his tip jar as it
relentlessly followed its prey.

Rook had been right; the overhanging sycamore limbs challenged the drone’s navigational ability and, by the time they reached Garibaldi’s statue, the drone had slowed as it
tentatively sought a lower altitude—at least for the moment.

Heat still felt too exposed. She pointed to a nearby food cart offering stainless steel for protection and a wide green-and-white umbrella for camouflage. “The vendor,” she said.

They ducked down, crouching on the far side of the cart, pulling the NY Dosas vendor down with them. “NYPD,” said Heat. The mustachioed old man nodded with the equanimity of a
seasoned immigrant who takes the New York streets in stride. “Will this be long?” was all he asked in a thick accent.

Heat’s attention was on Backhouse. He was only, maybe, thirty-five, but didn’t strike her as a man who got much exercise. He was drawing audible breaths. Plus those sweat half-moons
had grown from gibbous to full. “You OK, Wilton?” He didn’t answer, only shot her a glare halfway between annoyance and the verge of tears.

In a caricature of a rural twang Rook said, “‘Funny, that plane’s dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.’” But he got only blank stares from Nikki and
Backhouse.

Then the food vendor grinned. “
North by Northwest
.”

“My man,” said Rook. He turned to Heat. “By the way, I get to be Cary Grant. Obviously.”

Backhouse had gathered himself enough to speak. “Is it gone?”

Nikki cocked an ear to listen for the buzz. “I can’t hear over the piano.” She raised her head to chance a peek over the steaming masala potatoes and lentils. “Looks
clear.”

Cautiously, they all rose and scanned the sky above the square. “Is clear,” said Rook. They began to retrace their steps warily, relieved to see no trace of the drone and to hear
only the adagio of Rach 2 and the disappearing chants of the protesters as they headed uptown toward the UN, lofting placards and Syrian flags.

A gentle voice asked, “Excuse me. Is that yours?”

They turned around. The NY Dosas vendor pointed to the growing dot bearing down on them from behind. Still half a block east, the drone was coming in fast and at a low level—head
level.

“This way!” hollered Rook. He seemed to know what he was doing, and Heat and Backhouse followed him, weaving again as they ran, trying to make themselves harder to draw a bead
on.

Heat protested when Rook brought them to the fountain and turned north. “What are you doing? You’re taking us into the open.”

“Trust me. Just keep up.”

But the whistle-blower’s sandal snagged on an uneven paver, and he fell. As he hit the ground the drone fired again. The slug hit one of the hexagonal bricks about a yard ahead of him with
a small explosion of stone chips and dust. After its flyby, the quad banked to make another run. Nikki hauled Backhouse to his feet and charged off, following Rook toward 5th Avenue, hoping he had
something more than one of his theoretical notions in mind.

The whir of the four rotors grew louder. “Don’t stop to look.” Heat nudged Backhouse. “Just keep going.” He did as he was told, and soon they had joined Rook at the
west leg of the marble arch. “Rook, what are you doing?”

“Oh, if I had a nickel.” Then he beckoned her closer. “Bet you didn’t know there was a secret door to get inside the arch. I saw it on PBS.”

“Thanks for the trivia lesson, but it’s locked.”

Backhouse shouted, “Here it comes!”

Heat shepherded him and Rook around to the other side of the arch’s leg as the quadcopter whizzed by. As soon as it passed, Rook returned to the door. When Nikki joined him he said,
“Shoot the lock.”

“I can’t just go firing a gun in a park.”

“Why not? That thing sure can.”

“Rook, there are people around here.” She indicated a nanny parking her stroller and sitting down on a bench with a pizza box.

“Coming around again,” said Backhouse. The drone, lethal though it was, made a graceful turn just above the jets of the fountain and aligned itself to attack again. Rook took three
steps back and kicked at the lock, a strong deadbolt set in a steel box. It made a sensational noise but did not give one bit. Rook cursed.

Backhouse continued his color commentary. “Thirty yards, I’d say.”

Rook dashed over to the nanny. “Pardon me, I’ll reimburse you, promise.” He snatched the pizza box from her and took out the personal-size pizza within. As the drone closed in,
slowing to hover near Backhouse, who retreated until he bumped into the arch’s façade, Rook Frisbee’d the pizza right at the aircraft, grazing one side of it, causing it to
shudder and veer away before recovering. As Rook celebrated inwardly, watching the thrumming copter fly off to regroup, a loud cracking sound made him turn.

Heat was kicking in the door to the arch. Well, not the door itself. There was a square louvered ventilation screen set into the thick wood, which disintegrated under three expertly placed blows
from the sole of Heat’s shoe, creating a hatch for them to crawl inside. “Hey, it’s like a doggie door,” said Rook in admiration.

As Heat guided Backhouse through the opening on his hands and knees, she said to Rook, “Rule one: Never attack the strongest part of your target.” And before Rook climbed in behind
him, she added, “Bet they didn’t teach you that on PBS.”

Fifteen minutes later, Heat climbed inside the police van safely parked
outside the privacy gate of Washington Mews and slid in
beside Rook. She hooked an elbow over the seat back and addressed Wilton Backhouse where he sat on the middle bench. “No sign of the drone anywhere, so you can relax a little.”

“Yeah, that makes me feel fucking great.” He craned his neck to look out the rear window, past the pair of unis posted beside the van, and into the park, where other officers from
the Sixth canvassed the square for eyewitnesses. “What happens when the blue crew leaves for Donut Planet?”

“We’ll provide you police protection, if you want it. I suggest you want it.”

“What do you call what I just had?”

Rook said, “Hey, Wilton. You’re alive, right?”

Since Nikki wanted to finish the interview that the attack had interrupted, she worked to engage Backhouse. She knew it wouldn’t be easy. He wasn’t so much uncooperative as asocial,
enough to make her wonder if the engineering professor wasn’t on the autistic spectrum somewhere—Asperger’s, possibly. “For the record, the cop-donut thing? So done.
It’s Cronuts now, grampa,” she said. That elicited a hint of a smile that came and went as fast as a wince. “One eyewitness—the nanny whose pizza I replaced, which Rook owes
me fifteen bucks for—says she saw the drone gain altitude and rapidly exit the park to the west.”

“That fucker was all over me.”

Rook said, “I know a thing or two about those things. I’ve been thinking about buying one.” He said that as news for Nikki to digest. She did, and rolled her eyes. “The
range of the controllers on the latest versions is up to a mile.”

“But it was so precise,” said Heat. “I was thinking it must have been controlled by someone on one of these tall buildings around the park. Either the NYU law school or those
apartments bordering the square.”

Rook wagged his head. “Wouldn’t be necessary. That thing was rigged with a high-def camera. That’s all the real-time visual feedback a controller would need. Draw a one-mile
radius around the fountain, it could have been someone with an iPad in a parked car, a storefront on Canal Street, even at a picnic table outside Shake Shack.”

“Not making me feel any better here,” said Backhouse. “Especially after Fred. Man…” He hung his head, and his face fell behind a curtain of long hair. Just when Heat
thought she had been premature with her Asperger’s diagnosis, she realized he wasn’t mourning, but texting. “Canceling a class. Not happening today.”

“Wilton,” Nikki asked, “can you tell me how Fred Lobbrecht was connected to you?”

“You already know that.” He nodded toward Rook. “He told you, so why ask?”

“Because I want to hear it from you.”

“I’ll have to backtrack.”

“I have time.”

He sighed. “I’m a gearhead, surprise, surprise,” he began, as if reciting a memorized text. “Did engineering, got my BS. Did even more engineering, got my PhD. But please
do not call me Dr. Backhouse. Ever. I’m a professor at Hudson, laboring in the long shadow of NYU, teaching undateables in Comic Con souvenir wear about automobile and truck systems forensics
plus a Saturday seminar on metallurgical failure analysis. Yes, it rocks. My university contract allows me to moonlight, and I have a lucrative parallel life as a forensic consultant in accident
causation factor analysis (read: expert witness) in all performance-related vehicular matters, principally accident litigation.”

“So you consult for Forenetics?”

He gave her a thumbs-up. “Ding-ding. I’m a loathsome consulting expert, in and out, mail me my check. Fred Lobbrecht, ex–Collision Reconstruction Unit state trooper—you
know all that—was on salaried staff of Forenetics. Started back in February. Good man.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. Truly,” said Heat. After a decent interval, she moved on. “Fill me in on this whistle-blow issue.”

The professor’s eyes flared at Rook. “You said this was going to be in confidence until publication. Who else knows—besides her?”

Rook pushed back. “You tell me.”

Nikki intervened. “Mr. Backhouse, this is a police matter. Two people have been killed.”

“Two?” He reared back like a horse that just caught a whiff of smoke in the stall. “What the fuck is happening?” Then he scanned the windows of the van, looking for fresh
danger.

Although Heat hadn’t intended to probe him yet for what he might know about the first murder, now that it was on the table, she followed that thread. “There was a suspicious death
that may, or may not, be related to Fred Lobbrecht’s. Have you ever heard the name Lon King?” She watched him process the name blandly but saw the corners of his mouth turn up slightly.
“What?”

“L-O-N K-I-N-G. It’s an anagram of
Klingon
. Sorry, it’s a thing I do, I can’t help it. Word scrambles.” He tapped his temple. “It’s busy in
here.”

“Did you ever hear of him?”

“No.”

“Did Fred Lobbrecht ever mention him?”

“If he had, I would have heard of him; ergo, no.”

Heat decided to leave the matter for now. “I want you to tell me about the whistle-blow.”

“There was a team of us who were tasked to investigate an alleged wrongful death due to a defect in an automobile’s stability-control system. The company I consult for, Forenetics,
got hired by the lawyer representing the family of the victim. Just when we started to make some progress—even doing our own autopsy on the car—the family settled out of court. End of
case, end of investigation.” Backhouse sat up tall, becoming animated. “But see, it got under my skin. So I had my team keep digging. We saw two patterns. First, a little bulge on the
scale of accidents reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration involving spontaneous vehicle rollovers. And second, a matching pattern of out-of-court settlements.”

Nikki finally felt a connection with Wilton Backhouse. His investigative process consisting of observing patterns and breaks in those patterns was what she was all about. “So, lots of cars
flipping for no reason, lots of money going out.”

“That’s only part of it,” said Rook. “I’ve looked into this in my research. When there are settlements like these, the parties sign nondisclosure agreements.
Let’s call them what they are, gag orders. So the companies, by paying cash settlements, are essentially buying silence. It hides the defect under a lid.”

“That’s it, totally,” agreed the whistle-blower. “What happens with this rollover protection system is this: The vehicle’s onboard computer is programmed with
software that senses when it is about to tip over going around a curve and basically knocks the car back down to prevent the roll. But when these stability-control systems don’t
work—for instance, when the antiroll sensors spontaneously engage a vehicle’s suspension and steering at highway speeds when it’s
not
in a curve, bad things happen.
People have died. Lots of people.

“So my group of consulting experts studied other accidents nationwide for a year and presented our test data to our bosses, Forenetics management. We showed them incident by incident how
there was a massive public safety hazard due to a defect in the software of the stability systems.”

“In which cars?” asked Heat.

“Only about three-quarters of newer cars, trucks, and high-profile SUVs, that’s all.”

The scope and gravity of that sunk in. “And Forenetics didn’t respond?” Heat asked.

“Oh, they responded,” he said. “They told us it wasn’t their responsibility. There was no commission for the study, no client. Therefore, it wasn’t
sanctioned.”

Rook asked, “Is that policy, or do you think they were paid off?”

“There’s plenty of money, no doubt about that. So we said to each other, let’s be bold, and we had an off-the-record meeting with the NHTSA. They’re no longer seen as
Detroit’s lackeys, yet we got nowhere. They’re concrete thinkers. They wanted more evidence. But all those lawsuit records were sealed because of the settlement gag orders. Am I a
quitter? No. I took it to the next level. Right to the company responsible for the defect. Their engineering and software developers watched our presentation, asked questions, accepted copies of
our findings, and told us they’d get back to us.” He paused for effect, then continued. “The next day my entire team was called into the Forenetics boardroom. The president of our
company told us the developer of the defective software was threatening a major lawsuit. My boss called us an ‘unauthorized splinter group’ and warned that if we didn’t drop this,
we’d be fired. So we let it go. For almost a day.