Driving Heat (23 page)

He shook his head no. “Ambulance was just a precaution, I guess. Or what they do. Hell if I know. I don’t even know what I fucking know anymore.”

Nikki waited for him to tip back another swallow of beer. Even in his loose tee shirt, the solidness of his upper body was evident. It was hard to be sure, the way he was seated on the tailgate,
but she made him out to be on the short side, yet in the way that athletes such as divers, soccer players, and yes, race car drivers, are: compact, lean, agile. She imagined his hands on a steering
wheel testing tight turns on the proving track, flexing against G-forces and winning. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

He barked out a laugh barked, and she could smell hops. “Somebody fucking shot at me, that’s what happened.” Shock did funny things, so she waited him out. He set the bottle on
the truck-bed liner beside him and explained. “I was coming out to go meet my buds for a rehearsal. Out of fucking nowhere, I hear this—bang!—gunshot. Something zips past me. A
bullet. It smacks the garage behind me.”

Both Heat and Rook turned behind him. In the gap between his performance pickup and the white M3, a single bullet hole punctuated the frame of his garage door, right above his saxophone case,
which lay sideways on the bricks where CSU was setting up shop.

“Close,” said Rook. “You see where it came from?”

“I was a little busy trying not to piss my pants.” And once again dialing down the asshole factor, he went further. “I wasn’t paying much attention. I’ve been kind
of distracted since Fred Lobbrecht bought it. It really hit me.”

Rook, not hiding his annoyance at Levy’s snarkiness, said, “So much so that you were going to jam with your buds?”

Levy frowned at Rook. Then he took another swig and continued his account. “So I duck. And here’s the freaky part. I come up and see this flying saucer, you know, one of those drone
things at the end of my driveway, zipping off.”

“Which way?” said Heat and Rook in unison.

Levy pointed over the roof of his house.

“Can we look?” Nikki asked.

The houses in that neighborhood were narrow but deep, like shoeboxes. With a slight limp, Nathan Levy led them through the breezeway between his home and his neighbors’. When they reached
his backyard, they mounted the cedar deck that overlooked the bay formed by the mouth of the East River. “This is where it went. Where it flew to or from is anybody’s guess.”

Immediately to the left and right were more decks and more backyards, nothing special. Peering beyond, Heat and Rook could see, to the north, the Throggs Neck Bridge to Queens, crossing above
the SUNY Maritime College on its way over the water. To the south lay the new Trump golf course at Ferry Point and the Whitestone Bridge beyond that. Plenty of open land, lots of open water, and no
sign of a drone or its controller. Rook observed, “With the one-mile range, that thing could have gone anywhere.”

“And be long gone,” agreed Heat.

“Early in the season to have a boat in.” Rook had his eye on the red-and-white speedboat tied to Levy’s dock.

“Only if you’re too prissy for cold weather.”

Nikki was trying to figure out if his antagonism was a sign of test-driver testosterone, beer-fueled, trauma-induced, or a cover for something. “You sure you didn’t get injured this
morning?”

“No, why?”

“I see you’re favoring your right leg.”

The man stood a little straighter. “It’s nothing. Just racked it up. Playing handball. I’ve got a Saturday group at my gym and one of them got stupid.”

Oversell, though Nikki. Usually a hint that there’s a lie receiving compensatory cover. She filed that away and asked Levy if anyone had threatened him, even in an indirect way. He said
no. He also told her he hadn’t had any sightings of any strangers or unknown cars around. The block was low-crime, and with so many kids around, folks tended to beat the jungle drums when
there was any unusual stuff going on. Heat recalled the crowd behind the crime scene tape and got the idea.

“Just one more thing for now. Do you recognize any of these men?”

She showed him a headshot of Timothy Maloney. Levy shook his head no. Same for Joseph Barsotti. When she offered Sampson Stallings’s drawing of his apartment intruder, he said, “A
cartoon? What? The Syrians hack the memory out of your camera, too?”

“Just yes or no is fine. Does he look familiar?”

“No.”

To wrap it up, she flashed him a screen grab of Tangier Swift from his corporate website. “You’re kidding, right? That’s Swift, the fucker killing everyone with his shitty
software.” Levy fixed Rook with a glare, as if he should have known that, but said nothing more.

“Has he approached you, directly or indirectly, with any threat or intimidation?”

“The asshole breathes intimidation, that would be nothing.”

“What about threats then?” continued Nikki. “We know about your Forenetics Splinter Group.”

Levy’s head snapped toward Rook again. “I see. You interview me, then go to the police. Fuck you.”

“It’s a murder case now,” said Rook.

“Fuck you sideways.”

Heat tried to reel in Levy with questions. “Do you think today’s attack was linked to your whistle-blowing?”

Levy seemed about to go on, but turned aside dismissively. “I never should have gotten into this.”

“Why not?”

“I’m done talking about it, OK?”

Rook said, “Your hands are shaking.”

“Wouldn’t yours be? Look what the hell’s happening. Look what they did to Fred Lobbrecht. And I heard from Abigail they tried to get Backhouse, too.
With
a goddamn
drone.” He handed Heat’s cell phone back. “Today I got lucky. I know from driving cars, luck only gets you so far.”

“Mr. Levy,” said Heat, “you’re not being totally open with me about something, and if you’re really worried, I advise you to start sharing, so I can
help.”

Levy said nothing, only watched a dot over the water that turned out to be a seagull, not a drone. Heat wasn’t sure if this evasiveness was the man’s panic response to getting shot
at—completely understandable—or if there was something he was trying to keep hidden, something bigger that might have taken on a life of its own. For now, all she could do was wonder,
and keep pushing to get her own answers. Nikki handed Levy her card and said, “Whenever you’re ready to talk, here’s how to reach me.”

As they started to go, they caught a flash of white as Levy tossed her card on the ground. “Nice fella,” said Rook, which actually made Heat laugh.

The blue-and-whites had departed, the neighbors had gone back to call each other to gossip, and Heat pulled away, leaving the dour victim of a near miss watching her go from his driveway.
“I’m surprised you two aren’t tighter. Aren’t you a beer-for-breakfast dude?”

“Sure, if I wake up at five
P.M.
in the tropics. But in the tropics I’d have fresh oranges to squeeze, so I think the whole Jameson Rook–Nathan Levy
buddy film will never get ma—Turn around!”

She glanced over her shoulder.

“Not you,” he said. “The car. Stop the car. Turn it around, hurry.” Heat braked and, as she paused, waiting to make a U-turn in the middle of Tremont Avenue, Rook added,
“That car that passed us going the other way, toward Levy’s…The guy in the sketch was at the wheel.”

At that, Nikki made the U-ey, running one front tire over the curb before she sped off in pursuit.

E
ast Tremont is a nice, fat, wide, old-fashioned four-lane, which made quick work of putting pavement behind Heat. She wove at a
decent clip around a slowpoke who was texting and a plumber’s box truck, coming up in no time to Nathan Levy’s street at the T intersection. Unfortunately, a food service van idled at
the stop sign.

“What the hell’s he doing?” said Rook.

Nikki spotted the rolling gate begin to open at the catering business across the intersection. “He’s blocking the lane waiting here to get in that driveway there.
Simpleton.”

“You do realize we are one
Muppet Show
opera box from becoming Statler and Waldorf,” he said.

Heat lit up her LEDs and gave her siren a short, guttural burst. The driver’s arm emerged from the van’s front window and windmilled to tell her to go around him. She pulled up to a
fast stop beside him and made her turn toward Levy’s house.

Rook pointed to the Impala two blocks ahead. “Dark-blue Chevy.”

“Got him.” Heat keyed her microphone. “One Lincoln Forty, in pursuit of blue late-model Chevrolet sedan, southbound on Schurz Avenue, cross street, East Tremont.”
Dispatch came back and asked for the plate. She was close enough now see it and read it off. “Driver is wanted for possible ten-thirty-one, request backup.”

“Ten-four, One Lincoln Forty.”

She dropped the mic in her lap and said, “Watch for peeps. Don’t want to be on the
Eyewitness News
tonight for mowing down any citizens.” Then, something unusual
ahead. The Impala showed brake lights. It was Nikki’s turn to ask, “What the hell’s he doing?”

The car slowed, its right blinker came on, and their prey pulled over to the curb, parked, and shut off the engine.

Rook turned to her. “To state the obvious? Worst car chase ever.”

Heat’s attention was too focused on the job at hand to even hear what Rook had said. She called in her location and popped her door, approaching the vehicle from the driver’s blind
spot with her hand on her holster and alert for sudden moves. But the first thing she saw was both of his hands gripping the steering wheel at the classic ten and two o’clock
positions—keeping them right where she could see them. Nikki surveyed the backseat to make sure he was alone, also saw that there were no weapons around him. She didn’t notice any
drones, either. When Heat looked at his face, he was smiling. She was struck by how much he looked just like his sketch.

Eric Vreeland seemed quite at ease seated with his hands loosely clasped
on the table in Interrogation One. He wore a well-cut
off-the-rack suit and one of those French-blue shirts that you still saw around but which had been more standard issue for the MBAs who had been released to roam lower Manhattan about ten years
before. His hair was the shadow of another time as well, and the way Heat handicapped it, she figured he was about a year from either plugs or a shave, with a possible intermediate stop for Julius
Caesar bangs before a confrontation with denial forced the Big Decision.

“Are we just going to sit here like this?” he said at last. “I’m not getting any younger.”

It’s like your reading my mind, Nikki thought, noticing the horizontal line above his gut, a dent made by the male shapewear she had felt when she frisked him back in Throggs Neck.
“Ball’s in your court, Mr. Vreeland. All you have to do is start answering some of my questions, and we can move this right along.”

His response was to scope himself briefly in the magic mirror, then study his hands. Nikki made out the ghost of an absent wedding band, completing her midlife assessment of one Eric
Vreeland.

One the other side of the mirror, in the Observation Room, Rook stepped in to find Raley and Ochoa watching the interview through the glass. “Aw, hell, she started without me.”

“Snooze, you lose, homes,” said Ochoa.

“For your information, home-away-from-home skillet, I was anything but snoozing. I made a call to one of my contacts to see what I could scare up about Timothy Maloney.”

“Whadja get?” asked Raley.

“Time will tell. Just laying my groundwork.” The lull in Interrogation One matched the uncomfortable silence between the partners in the Ob room. Rook turreted his head back and
forth from Raley to Ochoa, who had mutually created a gulf between them by standing at opposite ends of the window. “Anything I can do to help you guys?”

Ochoa said, “Just keep turning over rocks with your contacts like you are. Maybe one will pay off.”

“I don’t mean help you with the case. I mean help you with this.” He held his hands apart as if to measure the distance between them. “You think nobody notices the
tension? Maybe you two need to go out and get drunk. Or go to a movie. Or get drunk
at
a movie, I’ve done that—although, it was at a porn theater, purely for research on an
article. I mean, why else would I pay money to see
Lord of the Cock Rings
? That’s not even subtle, is it?” He paused. “I seem to have lost you.”

“It’s not that you lost me,” said Raley. “I just don’t want to talk about it. Some things are not for open conversation. For instance, you don’t see us
commenting on whatever’s going on between you and Heat.”

That took Rook plenty aback. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Raley smirked. “There you go. That’s how you keep people from getting into your shit. Deny and clam up.”

Eric Vreeland’s voice came on the speakers, and they turned their attention back to the box. Rook, however, did so with his attention suddenly divided by Raley’s remark.

“My lawyer’s on the way. You think I’m going to say anything about anything without her here?”

In fact, as patient as she was playing it, hoping the man would feel uncomfortable with the silences, Heat was quite aware of the ticking clock, and of the need to move things forward before the
attorney showed. She transitioned to impatience. “That’s how it works for you scumbags. Do what you please, create your own morality, even break the law because you have something
bigger on your side: money and the lawyers it buys.”