“Allahu akbar,” the one on the right said.
“Now we make our next proclamation, and by the will of Allah, it will become just as true as our last,” the one on the left said. “The infidel journalist Jameson Rook has committed many sins, and he will now be punished for his transgressions. May it please Allah, Jameson Rook will die at the edge of our swords tonight at midnight.”
Upon seeing such a horrifying spectacle, there was any number of emotions that might have coursed through Nikki Heat—from rage to fear to despair.
Heat wasn’t allowing any of them. That was what the terrorists wanted: for her to be incapacitated by the horror of what she was witnessing. She wasn’t going to surrender to that impulse. As long as Rook was still alive—as long as there was some narrow chance they could rescue him—she would not allow any more time to be wasted on her feelings.
Especially when time was so precious. It was now 1:45 in the afternoon. Quarter of two had never felt so close to midnight.
So Heat did not hesitate. As soon as the video went black, she whirled around to face her detectives.
“When did this come in?” she asked.
“During the press conference,” Raley said. “Ten minutes ago. It was sent to the main precinct e-mail address.”
“And I assume it came from the same untraceable IP address?”
“Well, a different number, but they used the same process of covering their tracks,” Raley said. “I could try to—”
“Don’t bother,” Hamner interrupted. “We’ve got some whiz kids in the Computer Crimes Squad down at One PP who can get on that. They whiffed on the first one, but maybe a second sample will help them untangle it. Hang on.”
Hamner had already taken out his phone and was presumably making arrangements for Computer Crimes to drop everything and get to work on it.
“Okay, good,” Heat said. “In that case, Rales, I want you working that video just like you did the last one. Go through the audio again and see if you can isolate any background noises that might give us a clue where this was shot.”
“That won’t take too long,” Raley said.
“I know. So if you strike out there, I want you to check out the pattern on that corrugated steel. It looks pretty new to me. There’s no sign of the grime that you expect to see on older steel. It’s a long shot, but maybe we’ll get lucky and you can match it to a particular brand or a particular product type. Then call the manufacturer and see if they can help us get to a local supplier who might know something.”
“Got it.”
“Oach, Opie, Feller, how are we coming with the McMains list?”
“We’re going through it as fast as we can,” Ochoa said.
“Did Qawi recognize any of the names?”
“Recognize? Yes,” Ochoa said. “But he swore to us none of them were associated with Masjid al-Jannah. He said those kind of people would have probably found his messages of tolerance and peace unpalatable and sought religious guidance elsewhere.”
“Okay. Well, keep up the pressure. Maybe something will break.”
Just then, as if Heat’s words had put out a wish that the universe felt compelled to immediately fulfill, Ochoa’s desk phone rang.
“Ochoa,” he said.
His face squeezed with concentration as the person on the other end spoke.
“Excellent, thank you,” Ochoa said, then placed the phone back in its cradle.
“We might have a hit on the SUVs,” he said. “They were found abandoned at a Central Park Conservancy maintenance yard. You want me to check it out?”
Heat was already moving. Ochoa was already following. The only words she uttered were, “I’ll drive.”
When Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, he envisioned an 840-acre playground where New Yorkers could escape the pressures of city life and pretend they were in a sylvan sanctuary.
He did not envision the Central Park Conservancy maintenance yard.
As Heat and Ochoa pulled into the yard, having made a lights-and-sirens-blazing run from the Twentieth Precinct in something just under Mach speed, they saw what was essentially an overcrowded parking lot. It was surrounded by rusting chain-link fencing topped with razor wire, and it probably needed to be about four times larger in order to accommodate all the stuff that had been crammed into it.
There were trucks of varying sizes, double- and triple-parked. There were golf carts, ATVs, and small four-wheelers for hauling equipment. There were piles of dirt, piles of rock, and piles of who-knows-what hiding under tarps.
As if there wasn’t enough stuffed in there already, there were two shiny black SUVs with tall antennas and pinstripes, jammed in the far side. Heat knew instantly they were the same vehicles she had seen on 82nd Street.
One had half its wheels over a curb on a thin stretch of grass, hard against the fence. The other was in the corner, blocking in a tractor, its bumper actually touching the tractor’s front-end loader. Both were sufficiently covered by overhanging trees such that no helicopter would have been able to see them unless it had decided to land in the middle of the maintenance yard.
At the other end of the lot, outside an ancient brick garage with an open bay door, there was a man who looked like Danny DeVito—only a little taller and a lot less symmetrical—standing with a pair of Central Park police.
One of the officers stepped forward to greet Heat and Ochoa as they walked up.
“We were told to keep the witness here but not to ask any questions, so that’s what we did. He’s yours now.”
Heat thanked the officer, then introduced herself to the witness. She went to shake the man’s hand, but he held them up apologetically. They were covered in black grease. She moved on, taking down his name—not Danny DeVito, as it turned out—and job title, patiently withstanding a brief explanation of why it wasn’t loftier.
Then she finally got around to: “So tell me about these two SUVs.”
“Yeah, so probably around noon, maybe a little after, I got one of the F-150s up on the lift,” Not Danny DeVito said, jerking his thumb back toward a Ford F-150 pickup truck that was, in fact, several feet in the air. “One of the bearings was damn near about to fall out. It had to have been grinding something bad for weeks. But did any of the guys who drove it say anything? Fuhgeddaboutit. These guys, they—”
“Sir,” Heat said, with gentle firmness. “The SUVs?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. So I’m working under the truck and I hear two cars driving in. Now, I know engines, right? And I know what our engines sound like. A lot of them are diesel or electric, anyway. And even the gas ones, well…you probably don’t want me to get started on catalytic converters. Anyway, none of our engines sounded like what was rolling into the yard. So I’m like, ‘Huh.’ And I get out from under the truck.
“I walk out and I see those things,” he said, pointing at the SUVs. “And I’m like, ‘What the frig?’ I thought maybe it was some kind of unannounced inspection from the city or…Well, I don’t know. Anyhow, the next thing I know, these two huge guys in ski masks are getting out. And when I saw huge, I mean huge.”
He pronounced the word huge as if it began with a y.
“Now, you’d think I’d seen enough movies to know that guys like that wearing ski masks like that are bad news. And I’m thinking…Well, I don’t know what I’m thinking. But they were just walking away. And I’m like, ‘Hey, you can’t park there.’ And they just kept walking, like they didn’t give a frig. And I seriously don’t know what I was thinking, because I looked at the bigger one and said, ‘Hey, Muscles, I’m talking to you. You can’t park here.’”
Not Danny DeVito shook his head. “I don’t know what I woulda done if the guy came at me. He probably coulda rolled me up like a little ball and stuck me in his back pocket if he wanted to. But he didn’t look at me. It’s like I wasn’t even there. So I’m like, ‘Well, up yours, buddy. I’m calling Parking Enforcement and we’re getting your ass towed. And you know those towing companies
ding you extra for those big-ass SUVs. You’ll be looking at a grand, easy.’ And nothing. Nothing from either one of them. So I’m like, okay, whatever, and I called Parking Enforcement.
“Then I’m on my break, watching the little TV we got in back, and I see the captain here saying she wants to know about these two black SUVs, and I’m thinking, ‘Hey, wait a sec.’ And I just kinda put it together, you know? So. Is that them?”
There was no point in lying to Not Danny DeVito. “Yes, sir,” Heat said. “We think so.”
Not Danny DeVito made a profane observation about this revelation.
When he was done, Heat asked, “Did you touch the vehicles at all, sir? Either on the inside or the outside?”
“No, ma’am,” he said earnestly.
“What about anyone else? Has anyone else been near them?”
“No, ma’am,” he insisted.
“Okay, thank you,” she said, then snapped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves. Ochoa, without needing to be told, was doing the same.
“Let’s go have a look,” she told him.
As Ochoa limped toward the SUV up on the curb, Heat went to the one parked by the tractor.
She did a near 360-degree walk around it, stopping only when the front-end loader wouldn’t let her go any farther. She noted the lack of bullet holes in the bumper. That meant this was the one Rook had been taken in.
Up close, she could tell it was a Cadillac Escalade with an extended cab. The Cadillac insignia had been stripped off both the front and rear in an attempt to make it less recognizable. The owners had rightly figured the Cadillac crest was one most people would remember, even if they only saw it briefly.
She looked underneath—primarily to check if it had been booby-trapped, but also to see if there was anything else unusual about the undercarriage. But all seemed in order. Then she walked to the driver’s side door, from which vantage point she could read the VIN number. She wrote it down in a small notepad.
Next she looked inside, peering through the tinted windows. The interior was all black, from the leather seats to the carpeting. She noted the way the chrome near the shifter gleamed, the absence of dust on top of the dashboard, the lack of smudging on the instrument panel. The entire inside of the vehicle had been wiped down, probably right before the kidnapping. The only prints they would likely find inside would belong to Rook.
With little hope of success, Heat tried all the door handles. But, of course, the Cadillac had been locked. There was no reason Muscles and his colleague would want to make things easier for law enforcement, even if it would take a well-practiced New York City cop less than a minute to jimmy the lock.
Satisfied she had seen all the nothing there was to see, Heat began making arrangements for the Evidence Collection Team to give both SUVs a thorough workup. She was not optimistic about their chances of finding anything.
Ochoa seemed to be coming to the same conclusions at the same time, because as Heat began to make her way toward the other vehicle, he was already limping toward her.
“Get anything?” Heat asked.
“Nah. I assume those bullet holes were your handiwork?”
Heat nodded.
“Other than that, this thing is clean as a baby’s bottom. We could have the whole thing taken apart piece by piece and I doubt we’d find anything. Yours?”
“Same. You get the VIN number off yours?”
Ochoa’s response was to pull a notepad out of his pocket and open it to the last page on which there was writing. Heat already had her phone out and was calling a number in her contact list: the NYPD had an officer with an open line to the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.
“Hey, this is Captain Heat from the Twentieth Precinct,” she said when an officer answered. “Can you run these VIN numbers for me, tell me who owns these vehicles?”
She waited, hearing the clatter of a keyboard, before the officer’s answer came. “It’s registered to a Mayo Nouns LLC.”
“Mayo Nouns?” Heat said.
“Yes, Captain,” the officer said, then spelled it for her.
Heat wrote the name in her pad. As soon as she did, her eyes solved the riddle for her.
Mayo Nouns was an anagram for Anonymous.
“It has an address in Albany,” the officer said. “Would you like it?”
Heat said she would, even though she already had a sinking feeling about where this was heading. She had the officer check the registration on the other VIN number. It also came back as owned by Mayo Nouns, with the same address.
She thanked the officer, hung up, then Googled the address. Sure enough, the corporate address for Mayo Nouns LLC was a law firm near the state capital—a firm that had likely done the documentation for a limited liability corporation that did not exist on anything but paper. Mayo Nouns LLC was no doubt a wholly owned subsidiary of Nona Mousy Inc., or something similarly slippery, which would turn out to be a shell corporation in Delaware, which would lead nowhere at all.
When you have a nation whose laws were established by a bunch of wealthy landowners whose most vivid experience with authority was their dealings King George III—and who therefore trusted government about as far as they could throw their buckled shoes—this kind of legal evasiveness was remarkably easy to achieve.
“So what do we got?” Ochoa asked.
“A dead end as far as ownership goes,” Heat said. “Other than that, I’d say what we have is two Cadillac Escalades that were ditched here very soon after the abduction so the kidnappers could switch to a vehicle or vehicles that the entire New York Police Department wasn’t going to be looking for.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”
“Which really means unless ECT has a miracle and actually finds something useful once they get inside those things, this has been a waste of time,” Heat said, trying not to let the frustration overwhelm her.
She looked down at her watch, which told her it was quarter after two. Less than ten hours to go.
“And time,” she added, “is one thing we are definitely running short on.”
They waited until Benigno DeJesus and his crew showed up, then returned to the precinct, again with lights and sirens. Though, when they arrived, it quickly became clear they needn’t have hurried.
There was a great blur of activity being coordinated out of the bull pen at the Twentieth Precinct, which Hamner had reorganized into a kind of situation room. Doors were being kicked. Skulls were being knocked. Wheels were being spun.
None of it was accomplishing anything. The New York Police Department was the largest municipal crime-fighting force in America, very nearly by a factor of two, and yet even its accumulated might was impotent. As an hour ticked by, Heat could feel the dread rising in her like an unstoppable tide.
The fact was they could spend all the time looking they wanted to. But if they didn’t know what or who they were looking for—or where to look—they weren’t going to get anywhere.
Heat had twice heard from Margaret Rook, who was sick with worry about her son. She was looking for assurances from Heat, but Nikki had none to offer. As she hung up, she heard Jean Philippe, already attempting the impossible task of trying to comfort a distraught mother.
There was certainly no shortage of media coverage. Already, all three presidential candidates—folksy Legs Kline, friendly Lindsy Gardner, and even heartless Caleb Brown—had made mention of it.
Another hour passed. Heat was in her office, reading a brief dispatch on yet another fruitless raid on a suspected terrorist haven, when her phone rang.
“Heat,” she said, with more fatigue than she would have liked to admit. The words she heard next were among the last she expected.
“Hi. Nikki. It’s Helen Miksit.”
During their last interaction, Miksit had brushed her aside like so much dryer lint, in the process shutting the door on a major avenue of Heat’s investigation into Tam Svejda’s last story.
What is she doing now? Heat wondered. Cal
ling to gloat?
“Counselor,” Heat said guardedly.
“Are you recording this in any way?” Miksit asked.
“No.”
“Good. Because this is an off-the-record phone call. It’s either off the record or it ends right now. You absolutely cannot use what I’m about to tell you to get a warrant. I can’t run the risk this ever gets into open court. Are we clear?”
Heat sat up a little straighter, getting herself ready for a fight. “No, we’re not clear. I don’t even know what you’re calling about. How can I—”
“Damnit, Nikki, just shut up and listen for once,” Miksit growled in the same tone she used to object to hearsay at trial. And Heat—probably because of the fatigue—acquiesced.
“I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I said I wanted Tam’s killer to come to justice. I loved that kid,” Miksit continued. “So I went ahead and got the records from Tam’s work phone and cell phone and I went through them myself. Most of it was pretty prosaic. Police flaks. Politicians. Chinese takeout. The staples of a reporter’s life.
“There were a few numbers I couldn’t figure out on my own. But Steve Liebman—Tam’s editor, I believe you met him—was able to help me weed most of those out. By the time he was through, we were left with one number.”
Heat realized she had started leaning forward in her chair as Miksit spoke.
“Okay,” Heat said. “And who was that?”
“That’s the thing. Neither Liebman nor I could figure it out. It’s international, so the reverse look-up database Liebman had access to didn’t give us anything. All we know is she tried it multiple times. The first three calls were short—long enough to leave a message, no more. The fourth was five minutes fifty-eight seconds long, which didn’t strike either of us as long enough to conduct an interview.”
“But maybe it was long enough to set up a meeting?” Heat suggested.
“Or give a no comment,” Miksit said. “The way to figure out would be to make contact with whoever it was and ask. But we thought…Well, actually, it was Liebman’s idea. He said that was beyond the scope of what the newspaper should be doing in a murder investigation, and that we had reached the point where it really had become a potential police matter. He thought we ought to let you make the phone call.”