Driving Heat by Richard Castle
“Nietzsche?” she asked.
“Screeching Weasel, Chicago punk band.”
Both had their heads on a swivel after the previous night’s incursion, and when they crossed the street toward her car, Rook noted the black SUV parked in front of it and said, “You’re starting to rate, Nikki Heat. It appears you not only got a car spotting you, it’s an undercover detail.”
But caution rose in Heat, and she slowed to a stop. “Something’s not right.” All four doors of the Ranger Rover HSE popped simultaneously. She turned to survey the area for cover and slid her free hand to her holster. “Stay close.”
Nikki directed Rook between the trunk of one car and the grill of another, figuring they could at least put some metal between themselves and the men in suits getting out of that SUV. But then she recognized one of them. So did Rook. “Kuzbari,” he muttered, ID’ing the security attaché of the Syrian Mission to the UN. Heat didn’t know whether to feel relieved or more concerned.
“Captain Heat, please wait,” Kuzbari called with a hand raised.
Just then the NYPD blue-and-white posted on her block roared up. The siren burped, the car screeched to a halt, and the officers bailed out and braced drawn weapons atop their open doors. “Freeze!” they shouted, and “Nobody move!” But the security beef protecting the security attaché took its role seriously, too: security. All three went for their weapons.
In the maelstrom of shouts and threats from both sides in different languages, Nikki tossed her uniform to Rook and waded into the mêlée. “Stand down!” she called first to the police officers. Then to the foreign protection detail, she added, “You, too. Everybody back off. Now.”
Fariq Kuzbari said a few quiet words in Arabic, and his men, albeit hesitantly, reholstered their weapons. Heat met the Syrian leader’s eyes and what she saw in them made her turn to her own crew. “Guys? Thank you, but this is an order. It’s all good.”
Minutes later Heat was sitting alone with Kuzbari in the tranquility of his HSE. Outside, his men stood in a line with hands at the ready, facing off against the blue unis, similarly ready to respond to trouble. Rook, excluded from the meeting, kept himself occupied with his iPhone camera so that he could capture the standoff tableau.
Fariq Kuzbari had changed very little since Nikki last encountered him. A few years before, when she learned her mom had once been a spy who infiltrated the homes of diplomats and foreign agents by giving piano lessons, one of her mother’s clients was Kuzbari’s family, so he had come onto Heat’s radar as a person of interest in her mother’s murder. In the end, he was not a suspect, but he and Nikki had formed a bond of mutual respect with an overlay of healthy suspicion.
“I didn’t intend to alarm you or to spark an international incident, Captain,” Kuzbari began. His English was excellent, just as she had remembered it, with a touch of a British accent that, along with his looks, reminded her of Sir Ben Kingsley. She also noted his use of her new rank in addressing her. Either he had spotted the pair of gold railroad tracks on the collars in her dry cleaning or he had serious access to intel. Heat would go with the latter.
“There’s a lot in play here you may not know about.”
“Something I don’t know about. Refreshing.” He sounded like he meant it. With everything in the news about the civil strife, including atrocities gone wild, in his country, Nikki could only imagine the information he had thrashing about in his head. She wondered how he felt about it all. Was he a partisan, a party to the abuses, or a man in a frightening position threading the needle until he could disappear from the nightmare with a set of Louis Vuitton full of gold bullion? Was this gentle side she was witnessing the real Fariq, or was he just another thug in a bespoke suit?
“I’ll make this brief then,” he continued, “as we both have a great deal to attend to. In the world of diplomacy, this is what’s called a back-channel outreach. As I know you must be keenly aware, there is an issue of tremendous import and great sensitivity between our governments.”
“The counterfeiter we busted.”
He paused as if he had a reply to that, but moved on. Apparently mixing it up with New York’s Finest over semantics wasn’t on his agenda. “The tension surrounding Mehmoud Algafari is what I am referring to, yes.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Kuzbari, but what does any of this have to do with me, aside from the fact that the safety of my city has been compromised by your Free Mehmoud cyber attack?”
“You cut right to it, don’t you?”
“As you said, we both have a great deal to attend to.”
“I am reaching out to you because of our unique relationship. Although our occasional dealings over the past few years had a degree of healthy friction, I have always found you to be forthright, trustworthy. Also, I confess I have am sentimental because of the kindness your mother displayed to my children when she was their music teacher.”
Nikki wanted to add, Even though Mom was spying on you, but kept the thought inside.
“So, my point—or shall I say, my message—is that I would like you to hear directly from me that the Syrian government has no official connection whatsoever to the disruption of the technology infrastructure of this city.”
“You’re telling me this, because…?”
“Because I know you will believe me and because I have faith that you will inform others in your metropolitan government, hopefully with some advocacy.”
“And if not officially the Syrian government, then who? Rebel insurgents? Dissenters? Human Rights Watch? Anonymous? Mehmoud’s counterfeiters?”
Fariq opened his car door. “You see? I may have reached out to just the right person.”
“The Syrian’s playing you, Captain.” Detective Ochoa pulled his bag of Earl Gray out of his chipped old friend of a mug and watched it twirl, waiting for the drips to subside. “He’s pulling your chain.”
“I told her the same thing.” Rook stepped on the pedal of the break-room garbage can. The lid yawned back to make a landing zone for Ochoa’s teabag. He turned to Nikki. “What were my exact words? Allow me to refresh your memory. ‘The Syrian security thug wants us to take his word for it that it’s not them but some prankster in a Guy Fawkes mask? I don’t think so.’”
“Settle down, fella,” she said. “I never saw anybody so needy about being right.”
“Aha, so I am right!”
“Only in the sense that I haven’t proven you wrong yet.” She flashed Rook a quick smile and picked up her coffee cup. “There’s time.”
Heat moved along to the bull pen to bring herself up to speed on the Murder Board. In the short time since she had gotten back to the precinct she had already called the bureau chief of intelligence down at One Police Plaza to report her encounter with Fariq Kuzbari and relay his message. The chief had seemed to be more intrigued by why Fariq had chosen a police captain as his lucky target than by the actual content of Heat’s encounter. She hung up feeling as if her call had been nothing but bureaucratic wheel spinning. A pair of incoming calls from the same building was more blatantly unsettling. In the first one, her district superintendent reprimanded her for blowing off the CompStat meeting. Heat’s defense that she was following a hot lead on two murders led only to a fresh rebuke for not balancing her duties. Of course when the chief of detectives phoned minutes later, the axe he had to grind was a demand for more results on the double homicides. And soon. While he filled her ear with not-so-veiled threats about stepping in himself, Nikki’s gaze drifted from her cluttered desktop to the coatrack holding her uniform shrouded in plastic. Staring at the gold captain’s bars on the collar, Heat thought that they perfectly summarized the job: heavy metal.
Raley joined her to stare at the board. It should have been a roadmap to the killer of Lon King and Fred Lobbrecht. Instead it was more like roads under construction. “Whoever is behind this Big Hack Attack, it’s killing us,” he said. “We’re spending man-hours on things that used to take seconds. Feller has been smelling his own BO al
“Tell him when he runs out of mug books to try it,” she said. “Whatever works.”
“Here’s what we should be doing with our manpower,” said the detective. “Putting some of us on you to make sure you don’t get your day spoiled by Maloney.”
“He’s an ex-cop, he’d spot the tail,” said Detective Aguinaldo from her desk.
Heat nodded in agreement. “Which is why I want to change things up. A BOLO is not going to turn him up, especially with our street cams all blacked out. And Inez is right, he’s too savvy to get caught following me.”
“And cocky,” added Rook. “I’m sure he followed us to Cocina last night, and when he saw us ordering a meal instead of just drinks, unhooked us from his leash, walked five minutes away to Nikki’s apartment to leave his surprise, then came back and made sure she saw him in the window just to mess with her head.”
“Now I want to mess with him,” Heat said. “No more passively waiting for a random sighting. Let’s do some digging of our own so we can take it to him. Roach, I want you guys to see what more we can find out about Maloney’s life that might start blazing a trail to where he is or hangs out. His habits, his likes, maybe some known associates—that would be good. Does he have cop buddies? Any pals from school, the military?”
“Military service in Nevada, according to this.” Ochoa, who had already opened up Maloney’s personnel file, put his finger on a page. “A posting at Creech Air Force Base.”
“I know Creech, it’s just outside Las Vegas. When I was an MP I did a training cycle there,” Inez Aguinaldo said, giving Heat a significant look. “Creech is where the Air Force flies its drones.”
Maloney and drones. It might have still been a Murder Board full of roads under construction, but the potentially tantalizing connection between the clinically paranoid ex-cop’s military background and the murderer’s apparent MO brought a sudden burst of energy to the bull pen. For Heat, who had still harbored a nagging voice that doubted Maloney’s viability as a suspect in Lon King’s murder, this fact now jacked him up the totem pole, as Rook described it. Her instinctive misgivings had been based on the murderer’s means more than his motive. Simply by adding “Drone?” under Maloney’s name on the whiteboard, the odds of his being the culprit seemed to rise. The discovery of this nexus also relieved Heat’s other hesitation, her fear that their pursuit of Maloney was motivated by her own personal vendetta and was siphoning minds and talent from the main event, the double murder. Even if this proved out to be a dry lead, the experienced cop in Heat knew that you have to play all the leads out until you find your hand on the right one.
Detective Aguinaldo set aside her prior assignment, screening license plates from the Roosevelt Island Bridge cam, and moved to making long distance calls to Nevada to find out what she could about Timothy Maloney’s service at the USAF’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab, where service personnel in high-tech warehouses used big screen TVs and sophisticated electronics to control American drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away. In addition to his service duties, the detective was to also gather as much information as she could about Maloney himself, especially friendships or romances that might lead from the desert years before to New York City today—an idea no more unlikely than that of firing a missile from an unmanned aircraft half a world away with, basically, a big-boy video game controller.
Raley and Ochoa, still not seeming as Roach-like as usual to Nikki, set about finding similar liaisons within Maloney’s prior precincts from their newly separated desks.
Ochoa interrupted his serial dialing around to NYPD station houses and Internal Affairs, his task chair rolling into the wall with a slam as he jumped up and hustled to Heat’s door. “Captain. Just got a call. Shots fired at the home of Nathan Levy. He’s one of the whistle-blowers from the Splinter Group.”
Rook came along in Heat’s car to where the Bronx meets the water’s edge on a tidy residential avenue of freestanding duplexes, single-family two-story Capes, one- and two-car garages, clean yards, no shortage of wrought iron fences painted white, American flags on display, and a portable basketball hoop parked in the gutter about every half block as if by city ordinance. “Here we go,” said Rook, as if Nikki could miss the three radio cars and the Crime Scene Unit van in front of the cream-and-beige clapboard surrounded by Do Not Cross tape.
They pulled into the space created by the departing ambulance, which left with no lights or siren on. A traffic officer gestured for clusters of looky-loo neighbors to clear the street to let it out. On the walk up to the door, Nikki drew in a chestful of clear air that tasted of the sea. On a warmer day, with fewer murders and less bureaucracy on her back, she might have gone sailboarding. As she exhaled, Nikki told herself the fact that she had not one second to consider that was probably the very reason she should just go do it. Someday, she thought. But not today.
When Heat and Rook had cleared the vinyl tape and approached the red brick driveway they found Nathan Levy seated with his legs dangling over the open tailgate of his silver F-450 swigging a bottle of Brooklyn Lager. He gave Rook a head dip of acknowledgment, which seemed to be as far as Levy wanted to go with him. Heat flashed tin and ID’d herself. Levy brought the bottle down and said, “Open container, but it’s my own property, so cool, right?”
“We’re not here to enforce Quality of Life on you, Mr. Levy.”
“Good, because I fucking need something to steady my nerves.”
On first meeting, it didn’t seem to Heat that he needed an excuse. She could see evidence of his drinking in the puffy eyelids and the meaty complexion that didn’t go with the cross-fit build. The Mardi Gras beads dangling from the pickup’s rearview mirror also suggested a party-hearty lifestyle. “Were you hit? I heard you weren’t hit.”
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.
&n
“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.