“You mean Freddyshopped,” scoffed Detective Feller. His tone conveyed the disdain clean cops have for dirty cops, which was shared by everyone in that semicircle.
As they found their seats again, Heat addressed Roach. “Your eyes-on up there was worth the trip. Good work.” They nodded in unison and even half smiled. Progress, she thought. “What did you learn at the ER?”
“About Levy’s leg injury? Pretty much as described,” reported Raley.
“But,” said Ochoa, “talking one on one with the ER nurse and the doctor, this dude was out of it. Drunk, sloppy drunk. Belligerent…They had to put a pair of orderlies on him just to keep him in line.”
“From the twenty minutes I spent with him, I can imagine the aggression,” said Heat. Then one of those tiny detail questions arose. So small, she almost didn’t mention it. But Nikki gave it voice anyway. “Kind of granular here, but if Nathan Levy was so plastered, how did he get to the ER? Too far to walk, drunk and on a bad leg. Not an ambulance—that would bust him for sure. And clearly Trooper Lobbrecht had damage control to do at the accident scene, so he wasn’t going to leave. Did this tow driver, Dooley, run him down to the hospital?”
Ochoa looked to Raley. “Didn’t occur to us.”
“Find out. Never know, it could be something. And let’s run down all the auto-body parts from Levy’s M3 repair. Spoiler, rims, glove compartment cover…Whatever we can locate, rush it to Forensics for a go-over.”
One secondary consequence of the NYPD’s hamstrung tech infrastructure was that more transactions were getting done personally. For the commander of the Twentieth Precinct that meant increased phone calls, more face-time appointments and, worst of all, a spike in drop-in visitors. Maybe that human touch was all for the better. But it had scattered Heat’s focus, no matter how hard she tried to maintain it. Now, with a sense of critical elements being suddenly in play while new revelations were breaking at a fast clip, Nikki selfishly (or, maybe it was more out of enlightened self-interest) isolated herself from her workaday distractions as Captain Heat to do the one small thing she had been neglecting: quieting her detective’s mind to contemplate the fragmented pieces on the Murder Board.
The exercise of sitting alone in the silent Homicide Squad Room in front of the whiteboard had served Heat well in past investigations, especially when the volume of facts was creating chaos instead of narrative. All those names, dates, places, events, color-coded markings, photos, arrows, and encircled questions were hailstones in a rain barrel when what she needed was to see a stream.
That morning some new data had been squeezed into one of the few open spaces up there. Randall Feller’s inquiry with Human Resources at Forenetics, LLC, indicated that Fred Lobbrecht had been hired there as an automotive safety assessor merely one week after the phantom car accident he had investigated on the Cold Spring Turnpike. His new job came with a 46 percent bump over his former pay as a New York state trooper.