Having absorbed that, Nikki closed her eyes just long enough to envision a complete erasure of the board living in her mind. She opened them and wandered the panorama before her without design or predetermined sequence, simply letting impressions come to her without chasing them. Instinct drew her back to the first entry, not because it was the starting point, but because Lon King’s murder intersected with so much of what lay before her: the death of his patient, Lobbrecht; the single-shot MO the psychologist shared with two other victims who had also consulted with Forenetics; the drone that had apparently attacked them all except Lobbrecht (an Odd Sock, or just an easier means utilized in the moment?) and had also targeted Wilton Backhouse.
In spite of herself, Heat started to fixate on Rook’s duplicity in seeing her shrink without telling her. Nikki thought of batting that one away as being motivated purely by emotion, but stopped herself. In this meditative mode, any thought that drifted in might not be an accident. So she went back to it. There was, of course, that Lon King connection from Lobbrecht to Rook, and, by extension, the article Rook was researching on the cadre of forensic experts preparing to blow the whistle on the cover-up of an auto safety defect.
That nexus drew her gaze to the name Tangier Swift, the billionaire software magnate and target of the whistle-blowers, who was using his money and influence to quash all legal efforts to bring the alleged defect to light and so cowed the normally unassailable Forenetics consultants that their management had ordered all work to cease on the SwiftRageous investigation. Tangier Swift had a lot of skin in this game.
So did the whistle-blowers, who were so passionate, so outraged by the Forenetics shutdown, that they had formed a subcommittee—the Splinter Group, they had called themselves—to continue their research and build their case on their own, which was when Rook was brought into the picture.
And when whistle-blowers started dying.
The Forenetics dissidents had held a self-proclaimed Splinter Summit upstate to vote on whether to go all in on their explosive report. Heat scanned the board for the date and won a bet with herself. It was the weekend adjacent to Nathan Levy’s accident on Cold Spring Turnpike. He was probably driving back to the city from Rhinebeck. Irony, she thought, a traffic death and a cover-up on the way home from a meeting to expose an auto safety cover-up. But Nikki was far from amused. A drunk driver had wasted an innocent life and a cop had pulled a rug over it for money.
“The timeline is your friend.” That axiom, which Heat had drilled into her detectives over the years, had proved its worth again. Yet she had not yet established the links that transformed the churning water’s surface into a graceful flow. Still unresolved were big pieces like Rook’s kidnapping. Why had it happened, and who was Black Knight? Could he be the mystery voice in the parking garage? Tangier Swift? Even Congressman Duer? The fact that she was grasping at those straws only told her how far she was from seeing all the disparate events and players line themselves up in something that felt like an order. But at the heart of this a narrative was trying to emerge. It pointed to someone with enough at stake to kill in order to keep a secret. To her and everyone else on the squad, the answer was a no-brainer. But convictions didn’t come without brains. Now Heat did smile. Because she just might have coined another freaking axiom.
Nikki burst through the door at a jog from her mandated health-and-safety inspection of the holding cells, then slowed to a speed-walk so she wouldn’t be out of breath when she took the call. The switchboard had transferred it to the empty observation room in Interrogation One, and after a settling breath, Heat punched up the call. “Mr. Swift, this is a coincidence. I was just thinking about you.”
“Well, I’m going to give you a helluva lot more to think about if you don’t back off.”
“Excuse me.” She flipped the switch to a more sober tone. “You do realize I am a police officer and that sounded an awful lot like a threat.”
He snorted. “Good, you’re not as stupid as you seem. You sicced a fucking forensic accountant on me? What happened to our agreement?”
“You’re going to have to refresh my memory, and I need to go on the record and inform you that I am going to begin recording this conversation.”
“You are fucking toast.”
She found the Record button on the wall phone and engaged it. A beep accompanied the flashing red mini-lamp, then there was a click. That was Tangier Swift hanging up.