Driving Heat (44 page)

Once Backhouse got clear of the tractor-trailer, rubber squawked once on the damp blacktop as he slammed the car into drive with too many rpm’s. Then he floored it, fishtailing from his
standstill, tearing toward the gate. The V8’s roar broke through the night fog like the cry of some beast from a Gothic horror film.

Lungs rasping, legs leaden, Heat poured on all she had, willing her knees to kick high, putting her oxygen debt out of her mind. She didn’t want to lose speed by turning to look, but she
could see from the flare of his headlights in her peripheral vision that Backhouse was gaining on her. Nikki stopped hearing her breath; stopped feeling like quitting; stopped doing anything but
becoming a machine herself.

When Heat got to the guardhouse, she was going so fast, she slammed against it. The car was now fifty yards away, and hauling. She drew a gulp of air and stepped out right into the driveway, her
Sig Sauer in one hand, the Smith & Wesson in the other. She made out Backhouse, in silhouette from the orange fog illuminating the parking lot behind him. He stopped and tried to bring up the
shotgun. But the length of the Mossberg prevented him from clearing the dashboard to point it at her. He dropped the gun, hit his brights, and punched it.

Heat aimed, took a steadying stance, and fired both pistols at once, spraying a hail of bullets into both front tires of the oncoming car. When they popped, the police-tuned suspension kept it
from going out of control, but the Interceptor shimmied and Backhouse had to wrestle with the wheel. Nikki jumped aside as he veered weakly past her. She put another round in the closest rear tire,
which put an end to his attempted getaway.

Nikki rushed to his side window with both guns on him before he could get any ideas about the Mossberg again. “Engine off! Hands on the wheel—now!” Backhouse complied, then
looked up at her, defeated.

She pulled him out and deposited him facedown on the roadside. Heat pressed her Sig to the base of his skull and said, “Now who’s the dummy?”

The first thing Rook saw was Nikki’s face when he came out of sedation
from his surgery at Bellevue that night. She gave his
hand a squeeze. He smiled and said, “Diamondback.”

“Hey, it’s me. You’re in Bellevue.”

“Diamondback.”

Heat’s eyes went to the nurse taking his temperature. “You’d be surprised some of the things they say when they’re out of it.”

“I can hear you, and I’m not out of it.” He squeezed Heat’s hand in return. “I was dreaming about our honeymoon. We were at a dude ranch I heard about in
Diamondback, Arizona. Nik, that would be so much fun.”

“Keep dreaming. You want me to go on a honeymoon in a place named after a poisonous snake?”

“Not a selling point, perhaps. But maybe it’s like Iceland. A lovely Nordic island so named to discourage Vikings from visiting and plundering.”

“And he’s back,” said Heat.

“You did great, Mr. Rook.” Nurse Seton finished taking his temp and updated his chart. “You were lucky. No blood vessels hit, no fragmentation or bone or nerve damage. The
doctor extracted a .22 bullet that, fortunately, stopped close to the surface.”

“That’s because before it hit me, it deflected off a hard surface.” He peered at Nikki and pointed at the gauze on her brow. “By the way, you’ve got a thing
there.”

She chuckled. “Yeah, his and hers scars. Oh, by the way, nice job with that Montblanc.”

He couldn’t disagree. “Hemingway would have been proud.”

When the nurse left, Heat told him she was planning to interrogate Backhouse first thing in the morning. “Looking like that? You should maybe wear a scarf or a veil or
something.”

“I’ll see if I have anything that matches Neosporin. Meanwhile, you rest here. I’ll fill you in after.”

“Oh, no.” He struggled to sit himself up higher. “You think I’m going to lie here and miss bringing the story home for my Pulitzer?”

“What was I thinking?” she said. “It’s the bullet. It must have addled my brain.”

At eight o’clock the next morning, Wilton Backhouse held the guest of
honor seat in Interrogation One at the Twentieth
Precinct. His attorney, a family friend who had more experience in patent law than criminal justice, sat at his side. Considering the multiple murders and the other serious charges he would be
facing, Heat had a feeling he would be upgrading his lawyer very soon. For now, she was happy he’d brought in a dabbler from suburban White Plains.

“My client is invoking his right not to self-incriminate. Therefore, he will have nothing to say at this meeting,” said Ethan Watts.

“Thank you, counselor. However”—Nikki indicated Rook beside her with his arm in a sling and her own bandaged forehead—“as may be evident to you, we’ve gone to
a lot of effort to bring your client to this meeting, and a meeting we shall have.”

She turned then to the client, who had exchanged his too-cool-for-engineering-school geekwear for inmate coveralls. After a long silence, Heat began quietly and methodically. “Lon King.
Fred Lobbrecht. Abigail Plunkitt. Nathan Levy. And now, Timothy Maloney.” Nikki let that sit there. Backhouse shifted. He was having a hard time with eye contact. “We know you did it.
What I’d like to hear from you—”

“My client is not admitting any responsibility for these unfortunate deaths.”

“Don’t make me laugh, counselor,” Heat said, tweaking the lawyer. “Unfortunate deaths are what happen when
E. coli
gets into the spinach. We’re talking
homicide. Multiple homicides. And just so you know? I don’t need him to admit responsibility. We have enough physical evidence to make the DA’s case.”

“Not to mention, our own experience as unfortunate victims,” added Rook.

“So getting back to my meeting,” Heat said. “I want to hear what your client has to say about why. Why did he need to kill these people?” She waited, knowing that the
silence was a pose. Nikki had determined she was dealing with a highly egotistical type, probably a narcissist. The Julian Assange posters spoke volumes about his fantasies and self-image. She
would lay it all out and see if that overwhelming jones for attention would get her what she needed.

“I have a theory, you know. Want to hear it? Why not, and you can tell me if I’m wrong.” When Nikki had their curiosity sufficiently aroused, she resumed. “People kill
for many reasons. Heat of passion—that’s usually a one-off. Same with robbery, burglary…violent criminal stuff. Revenge, now that can be either a singleton or a multi. This
doesn’t smell like revenge. But. If you’re stepping outside the world of serial killers or mass murderers, the motive my experience leads me to is…” Heat paused. Their heads
flicked her way, which was just what she wanted—a sign of their chasing the bait.

“Let’s do some show-and-tell,” she said. “This is what I believe these murders were all about.” Heat reached down and picked up a plain brown paper NYPD Forensics
bag from the floor and set it on the table. “Want to know what’s inside? I bet you do. First let’s talk about some recent history. Around here we call that the Timeline.

“You’ve been working over the past year with your Forenetics consulting team to investigate the cause of an unaccountable spike in one specific type of traffic fatalities. You and
your experts concluded that the cause of these deaths was a flaw in the SwiftRageous software for the stability-control system. Yet you ran into a stone wall when Tangier Swift and his battalion of
lawyers shut you down. But your Splinter Group was so outraged and passionate that you met at a cabin in Rhinebeck one weekend, where you all committed to blow the whistle about the auto safety
defect. Right so far?”

Backhouse just kept his eyes on the brown bag and said nothing.

“Continuing,” she said, “you told me the meeting ended with a lot of alcohol. Well, late the same night your summit ended, there was a fatal crash on a country road between
Rhinebeck and New York City. We’ve since learned that the car involved belonged to a member of your Splinter Group, Nathan Levy. And that there was a bribery cover-up by another Forenetics
associate, Fred Lobbrecht, who was then a state trooper. Levy left the accident scene to visit an ER in Cortlandt for a leg injury. We have his X-rays.” Wilton Backhouse remained passive, but
the narrative was animating his attorney, who had started jotting notes. “So much for hurting it in that fistfight you tried to sell me.”

Nikki moved the brown bag an inch just to tease them. Then she said, “Let me bring this home. The why—the elusive why all the murders?—is right in here.” Heat stood and
reached inside the bag. She withdrew a black rectangle, about the size of a small computer keyboard, sealed in a clear plastic envelope. She set it on the table and watched Backhouse try to hide
his discomfort. “As a forensics expert yourself, Wilton, you should really appreciate this.” The lawyer cast a wary glance at his client, then both stared at the plastic Ziploc.
“And I see you already do.”

Heat slid the evidence bag closer to Backhouse. He averted his gaze like a dog confronted by the turd it has just left on the rug.

“We know Nathan Levy had bodywork done on his BMW. We know his tires popped and his rims got bent that night. We also know he damaged the door to his glove compartment.” Nikki picked
up the plastic bag. “This is that glove compartment door. It bothered us when we couldn’t find it at first. The body shop didn’t have it. Our crime scene professionals
couldn’t locate it at his home. It wasn’t at his Forenetics office, either. Know where it finally turned up?” Heat set it back down, closer to Backhouse. “Of course you
know. Because our detectives found it last night when they searched your apartment.”

The sound of chains raking across plastic punctuated the silence as Backhouse stirred in his chair. His attorney’s voice cracked as he said, “This is circumstantial.”

“Yes,” agreed Heat. “And the circumstances are that your client, after he induced Levy to flee his house, probably scaring him with news about Abigail Plunkitt’s death,
went there and stole this glove box cover. And why?” Nikki turned to Backhouse. “You want to say it, or shall I?…All right, I will.” She pointed to the black cover inside the
plastic. “The damage you see here is an exact match for Nathan Levy’s leg injury.” She took a printout of the X-rays out of her file and shoved them across the table.
“Proving,” she said, “that Nathan Levy was a
passenger
in that car that night. I know you lied. There was never any fistfight with Fred Lobbrecht. During the crash,
Nathan’s leg slammed into the glove box. Abigail Plunkitt was in the backseat. How do I know? Because she had to die, too. Because these people knew your dirty little secret, Wilton. That you
were driving drunk. That you were at the wheel. That you killed that woman in the middle of the night on Cold Spring Turnpike.”

Nikki let him marinate in that, then continued. “The question is, why kill them? When we get our court order this morning to pull your bank records, we’re going to see that you
already bought their silence, aren’t we?” His lawyer rested a hand on Backhouse’s arm as a signal not to answer that. “I am betting your first payoff was to Fred Lobbrecht.
You knew him from CRU and your prior work with Forenetics, so New York state trooper Lobbrecht was the one you called that night to come to Cold Spring Turnpike and clean up your mess. And for
that, you paid off his mortgage and got him a big, fat job. Abigail Plunkitt quit working to save manatees. Thanks to your checkbook, no doubt. Same for Nathan Levy, who suddenly went from test
driver to blues sax man.

“It was all going to be just fine, except for one thing.” She gestured to the chair beside her. “Once this jackass, Jameson Rook, got an assignment to do a story on your auto
safety whistle-blowing, everything changed. Because Jameson Rook doesn’t fluff out press releases. Jameson Rook is your worst nightmare: a true investigative reporter. He started nosing
around outside the tidy pages of your safety study, and you panicked. Especially when Fred Lobbrecht got pangs of conscience and engaged Lon King to broker his confession to Rook. And Lobbrecht
almost talked. But you killed him first. Oh, but what about Lon King? Fred probably told his shrink, so King had to die, too. That left Plunkitt and Levy. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? But
you had to divert suspicion. And how does a smart guy like you turn this into a win-win? You set up Tangier Swift to look like the man with the motive to eliminate all the whistle-blowers. What a
great idea, too. Because ultimately, if all this had come out—your DWI and the woman you killed—not only would that have indicted you, it would also have undermined all your results.
You were willing to sacrifice your entire team for the massive ego stroke of being able to take Tangier Swift down. Which is what you consider your life’s work. Am I right, Wilton?”

Backhouse’s chin dropped to his chest. Then he raised it so he could stare at her.

Heat pointed to the bandage on her forehead. “Bet you wish you hadn’t missed me, huh?” Watts put a hand on his client. “Do not answer that. Do not say
anything.”

“Really? Because I’d like a statement.” Nikki took the yellow lined pad she had brought in and slid it in front of Backhouse with a ballpoint. “If you cooperate,
it’s all going to go a lot easier for you.”

The lawyer wagged his head no.

Heat tilted her head toward Rook. “Tell you what. Your version in your own words would make for a hell of an article.”

“Oh, sure,” said Rook sitting up straight. “I’ll still do the piece on the safety defect. You care about that, I know. But imagine how many more people it would reach,
I’m talking worldwide, if your story—this story—were part of it?”

Backhouse was teetering. His lawyer said, “Wilton—”

“Ethan, shut up, I’m trying to think. This is why Uncle Ray says you’re an asshole.” When the attorney slumped back with his arms crossed, Backhouse looked from the
evidence bag to Nikki, then to Rook, clearly at the tipping point.

Rook, who had also seen the Assange poster in his office, said, “I think there’s only one question to ask here, Wilton. WWJD?” As they all looked to him with puzzled faces, he
finished with, “What Would Julian Do?”