“Lucky me.” Nikki ruminated a bit before adding, “Otherwise, I never would have learned you were hiding all this from me.”
“Hey, now. I came clean. Don’t I get a good-citizen’s pass?” He gave her that damned charm face, which made her fix her eyes on southbound traffic so he wouldn’t be able to see how vulnerable she felt right then. She concentrated instead on processing the updates she had gotten at the Murder Board right before leaving the precinct.
Randall Feller had arrived, fresh from the proving ground on Staten Island, where the president of Forenetics and his operations staff had briefed him on the likely scenario that led to Fred Lobbrecht’s death. The vehicle prep was a ritual he always insisted on performing himself. Lobbrecht would arrive on the day before each test to ensure that the car was in the correct position to be engaged by the catapult and would set up the driver’s side of the car to receive the dummy, which he loaded in as the final checklist item. “Everyone agreed it’s pretty much a solo task,” explained Feller. “Mainly plugging in a gang of harnessed cables that snake through the backseat from the black boxes in the trunk and then connecting those color-coded leads into the matching colored sockets. Blue, to the dashboard; red, to the interior cameras; finally, yellow, to the dummy itself. Obviously, he never got to yellow.”
“Man…What a way to go,” said Ochoa, feeling the dread that was clawing at everyone else’s gut, too.
“Randy, did they say why the launch mechanism fired?” asked Heat.
“They have no idea. And our CSU is on scene and not letting anyone from Forenetics touch anything, for the obvious reason that one of them could be responsible, either by accident, or…whatever.” As the team digested that, he added, “Kind of ironic: a forensics consulting firm getting investigated by NYPD Forensics.”
Since everyone else on the squad had past experience with Stu Linkletter, it had fallen to the newest detective to liase with the Staten Island medical examiner. “Kind of a dick,” Inez Aguinaldo began. “Am I allowed to say that?” After unanimous agreement, she relayed the salient parts of the ME’s report. “Skimming past the abrasions, contusions, and fractures to the mandible, maxilla, and nose, as well as lacerations to the scalp and multiple skull fractures, the COD story is that the victim suffered fatal injuries to the brain, subgaleal, subdural, and subarachnoid hemorrhages, injuries to cerebral blood vessels at the base of the brain, and dislocation of the C-one and C-two vertebrae, with injury to the underlying spinal cord.”
“You hardly looked at your notes,” said Raley, impressed.
“I had medic training when I was an MP,” said Aguinaldo. “Dr. Linkletter wanted me to stress that this finding is still preliminary, since he hasn’t run blood and tox yet. He also wants to check the victim’s records to see if he had signs of depression that would indicate possible suicide.”
“Did you tell him those records were stolen from his murdered shrink?” asked Rhymer.
Detective Aguinaldo nodded and said, “I also told him suicide didn’t seem likely, because of one of his other findings.” She now had the attention of the entire bull pen, including Nikki, who felt pretty smart right then for having recruited Inez from a suburban police force in the Hamptons. “Mr. Lobbrecht had open compound fractures of his right distal tibia and fibula: his ankle bones.”
“Indicating he was trying to brake,” said Rook. “Like mad.” A silence fell over the squad as they all imagined that moment of launch followed by the poor man’s final seconds—all panic and futile action—rocketing closer to the wall of death…