Rook made a small nod to himself and began. “Just so you know, I have been holding back because I had a nervous source. I’ve gone through hell trying to secure his cooperation, and I didn’t want to jeopardize my access when it was in such a fragile state already.”
“Let me ask you, Rook. How many times have you sat in this very room and watched me conduct interrogations?”
“Lots.”
“Then you’ll understand when I say this. Get the hell to it.”
And so he did. “Maybe I can’t fit it into one-hundred-forty characters, but I’ll do my best. A few weeks ago, I got a tip on something big. I mean third Pulitzer big. A safety cover-up in the auto industry. Something that has cost lives. Many lives.”
As Nikki made a note on the top line of her pad, Rook’s visit to the auto safety proving ground snapped into place. She wanted to ask more but knew better than to interrupt, so she just wrote “Forenetics?” and let him continue.
“Over the past few years cars have been flipping or rolling over sporadically. Nik, imagine driving the open road—la, la, la—and, with no reason, the steering wheel jerks from your grip, the suspension on one side takes a huge bounce while the other side drops, and next thing you’re on the Tilt-a-Whirl. That’s what’s been happening. Causing accidents. Lots of injuries, lots of fatalities.”
“Why haven’t I heard this on the news?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Well, I am the news. And I am doing an exposé on it. Or trying to. And when I say it’s a huge story, here’s why: The defect is not limited to one automaker; it’s across car brands. But random. It’s Rollover Roulette for most makes, models, price ranges, foreign and domestic. My early research indicates it’s not the car itself and not the computer that’s the problem. The strong indicator is that it is the result of a mystery glitch in the software, in the app that tells the stability-control mechanism when and when not to fire. It’s a long story of who and how, but there is a very credible allegation from an industry safety expert that information about this defect is being suppressed. There is a cover-up afoot.” He paused to take a slug from his water bottle.
Heat so much wanted to ask what all this had to do with her shrink but again decided to leave it with a note to herself, a reminder to follow up. She printed the initials “LK” on the same line with “Forenetics” and drew a double arc between them, a rainbow over a question mark. She did, however, ask, “Was your expert the one we found today on Staten Island?”
“Getting to that,” he said. “The industry insider I’m talking about is the point man of an auto safety research team, and now that he has all the scientific evidence he needs, he is ready to blow the whistle on the cover-up. All very juicy. All the elements of a Jameson Rook First Press cover story that kicks off things like massive recalls and congressional hearings. But”—Rook flashed a smile—“in spite of your belief that I’ve never met a conspiracy theory I didn’t love—and oh, do I love them—as an investigative journalist it is my responsibility to fact-check all the angles. Not just the nuts and bolts of the story but the players. Stories like this are never about hardware or software; stories are about people. And motivations. So I have been performing my due diligence. And my research led me to one member of my whistle-blower’s safety team: Fred Lobbrecht.”
“The dead crash-reconstruction expert,” said Heat, drawing a circle around the company name, Forenetics.