Feller tilted his head toward his Taurus twenty yards away, where Rook sat in the open passenger door with his head between his knees. “As you might have guessed, he found the vic. And even I won’t fault him for ralphing. One of the ME assistants almost barked up his bran muffin when he went in there.”
Rook tilted his gaze upward when he heard Nikki approaching, then let his head sag into his palms.
“You all right?” she asked, resting a hand on one of his shoulders to give it a gentle squeeze.
“Yup.” But when he got to his feet to prove it, his face blanched and his eyes drifted under half-closed lids. “I’m good. Really.”
Not entirely proud of herself for doing so, Nikki decided to exploit Rook’s moment of vulnerability. “So tell me how it came down. What were you doing all the way out here at this place? Foren”—she looked up at the sign—“Forenetics?”
But even with his defenses down, Rook’s instincts as an investigative journalist kept a toehold. “Nothing out of the ordinary, really. I sort of had an appointment.” He took the bottle of water Ochoa held out and cracked it open.
“With the victim?”
He took a sip and nodded. When Rook saw that he wasn’t going to get away with a mere head bobble, he allowed, “Yes. I had an appointment. With Fred Lobbrecht. He works here.” He blanched again at an inner vision and corrected himself. “Worked here.”
Unsure now whether Rook was obfuscating or traumatized, Nikki cut bait. She told him they would continue the conversation later. She logged into the crime scene and led her group past the empty coroner’s van and inside the building.
Heat had never before set foot inside a vehicle crash test facility, but the scene felt immediately familiar from so many all the 20/20 investigations and car commercials she had seen, as well as all the ghastly videos they had forced her class to watch back in Drivers Ed. To her right, inside the cavernous half acre of the impact laboratory, a two-tiered modular structure sat against one wall. The first floor of the glass booth appeared to be a command center full of electronic gear set into consoles and equipment bays. Up top, accessible from a steel staircase, a line of camera tripod mounts formed a picket fence along the outwardly slanting window of an observation deck. Both booths were empty of life, as was the rest of the facility, except for emergency responders.
Embedded in the concrete floor in front of the control room stood the firing mechanism for the vehicle propulsion system used to catapult cars and trucks the same way fighter jets got launched from aircraft carriers. At the fire command, compressed nitrogen would blast the test vehicle the length of the hangar at up to seventy-five miles per hour. To enhance the video image, the floor was painted snow white and punctuated at strategic intervals by yellow-and-black checked stripes and reference markers. To Heat’s left, at the far end of the track, almost the length of a football field away, a small Japanese import had smacked into three hundred thousand pounds of concrete and steel at full speed. Even from a hundred yards away, she could see where the rusty cloud of brain matter and now-dried blood had spattered the impact barrier like a Jackson Pollock. No wonder Rook was so shaken.
“Anybody bring a spatula?” asked the medical examiner, popping up from his kneeling position at the front end of the squashed car. Nikki had not seen Stu Linkletter—or heard his grating cackle—in the four years since he had transferred from the Manhattan ME’s office. She counted each year as a blessing.
Detectives Ochoa and Feller clearly shared the same sentiment and muttered the “Fu-u-u-uck” that Heat was only thinking when the ass-hat in the contamination suit popped up from his crouching position like a gopher.
“By the way, anybody up for lunch after? I don’t know why, but I’m thinking pizza.”
And with that, Nikki forgot all about her inside voice. “Fu-u-u-uck.”