“And cocky,” added Rook. “I’m sure he followed us to Cocina last night, and when he saw us ordering a meal instead of just drinks, unhooked us from his leash, walked five minutes away to Nikki’s apartment to leave his surprise, then came back and made sure she saw him in the window just to mess with her head.”
“Now I want to mess with him,” Heat said. “No more passively waiting for a random sighting. Let’s do some digging of our own so we can take it to him. Roach, I want you guys to see what more we can find out about Maloney’s life that might start blazing a trail to where he is or hangs out. His habits, his likes, maybe some known associates—that would be good. Does he have cop buddies? Any pals from school, the military?”
“Military service in Nevada, according to this.” Ochoa, who had already opened up Maloney’s personnel file, put his finger on a page. “A posting at Creech Air Force Base.”
“I know Creech, it’s just outside Las Vegas. When I was an MP I did a training cycle there,” Inez Aguinaldo said, giving Heat a significant look. “Creech is where the Air Force flies its drones.”
Maloney and drones. It might have still been a Murder Board full of roads under construction, but the potentially tantalizing connection between the clinically paranoid ex-cop’s military background and the murderer’s apparent MO brought a sudden burst of energy to the bull pen. For Heat, who had still harbored a nagging voice that doubted Maloney’s viability as a suspect in Lon King’s murder, this fact now jacked him up the totem pole, as Rook described it. Her instinctive misgivings had been based on the murderer’s means more than his motive. Simply by adding “Drone?” under Maloney’s name on the whiteboard, the odds of his being the culprit seemed to rise. The discovery of this nexus also relieved Heat’s other hesitation, her fear that their pursuit of Maloney was motivated by her own personal vendetta and was siphoning minds and talent from the main event, the double murder. Even if this proved out to be a dry lead, the experienced cop in Heat knew that you have to play all the leads out until you find your hand on the right one.
Detective Aguinaldo set aside her prior assignment, screening license plates from the Roosevelt Island Bridge cam, and moved to making long distance calls to Nevada to find out what she could about Timothy Maloney’s service at the USAF’s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab, where service personnel in high-tech warehouses used big screen TVs and sophisticated electronics to control American drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,500 miles away. In addition to his service duties, the detective was to also gather as much information as she could about Maloney himself, especially friendships or romances that might lead from the desert years before to New York City today—an idea no more unlikely than that of firing a missile from an unmanned aircraft half a world away with, basically, a big-boy video game controller.
Raley and Ochoa, still not seeming as Roach-like as usual to Nikki, set about finding similar liaisons within Maloney’s prior precincts from their newly separated desks.
Ochoa interrupted his serial dialing around to NYPD station houses and Internal Affairs, his task chair rolling into the wall with a slam as he jumped up and hustled to Heat’s door. “Captain. Just got a call. Shots fired at the home of Nathan Levy. He’s one of the whistle-blowers from the Splinter Group.”