Heart of a Killer

by David Rosenfelt

  Her fear turned to full-fledged panic when she started to detect a burning smell. The incredible power of the engine had long caused the car to overheat, and had burned up the available oil. She started screaming, as loud as she could, but with the window closed and the car’s engine so loud, there was little chance that Novack could hear her.

  But he heard the car. Just slightly at first, barely piercing the oncoming sleep, but finally enough to rouse himself to look outside. He saw the car still sitting there when he opened the window and heard the noise. And saw the flames.

  He ran downstairs and out the door toward the car. He took in the situation: Cindy screaming in the front seat, the flames by now engulfing the engine, soon to reach the driver.

  He tried to open the door, and called to her to unlock it. She finally realized he was there, turning and making what seemed like a silent scream. The flames were reaching for her.

  Novack had nothing to use to knock through the window. He was trained in the martial arts, but never had bothered to master things like breaking bricks.

  Or car windows.

  Letting out a scream of his own, he smashed in the driver’s side window with the side of his hand. It did not create nearly enough room for her to get out, so he kept hitting it, again and again, clearing away all the glass.

  He reached in to grab her, his bloody hand brushing against the steering wheel, and getting burned by the searing heat. If she had her seat belt on he never could have gotten her out, but she hadn’t put it on yet, and with another scream he pulled her through the window and out.

  They landed together on the grass adjacent to the sidewalk. He quickly got up and dragged her away as the car became completely engulfed in flames, and exploded when it reached the gas tank.

  She looked at him and held on to his neck, sobbing, and he held her until she slowly calmed down. All this as her neighbors, with a car on fire on their street, watched as if mesmerized.

  Finally, when she was quiet but still holding him, he said, “We can do without coffee; I think I saw some tea in the cabinet.”

  It was one of those weird coincidences that happen in life. I was home going over my written replies to some follow-up questions that the court had given me when I decided to take a break and watch some TV. Skimming through the stations, I hit upon the local news, and my friend Mitch Allen.

  Mitch and I went to high school together, and we still played tennis with each other at least once a month. He was an attorney with a small firm in Newark, but liked it even less than I did. The difference was that he wouldn’t quit and walk away, at least not until he found another job. I was still sticking to my decision to leave when the case was over, and the way I threatened Timmerman would ensure my demise at the firm even if I changed my mind.

  Mitch was being interviewed, but it had nothing to do with his profession. He was on a suburban street in what looked like the neighborhood where he lived. Behind him, over his right shoulder as if the shot were framed to be that way, was a car that appeared to be totally burned. Firefighters were still hosing it down, though it appeared that while they won the battle against the flames, they lost the war. The car was a smoldering shell.

  “I ran out when I heard this noise; it sounded like an airplane engine or something,” Mitch said. “I saw this car with the whole front end on fire. At first I couldn’t tell if there was anybody inside, but this guy was standing by the driver’s side door, yelling like crazy.”

  “That was Detective Novack,” the interviewer pointed out.

  “Right. I’ve seen him around a lot. Anyway, he does like a karate chop, and smashes the window. Then he does it a few more times, and reaches in and pulls Cindy … she’s my neighbor … out of the driver’s seat and away from the car, just before it explodes. It was unbelievable.”

  They then cut back to the studio, where they had Novack’s picture on the screen and they were talking about him. I don’t know what they said, because within ten seconds I was out the door and on the way to New Jersey.

  It was past ten o’clock, so there was very little traffic in or out of the city. I knew the way because I had picked Mitch up a few times to go play tennis, and I was at the street in Fair Lawn in a half hour.

  The problem was that I was late for the party. The car shell had been removed, the spectators and media trucks were gone, and all that was left to indicate that something might have happened was a single police car parked in the driveway of one of the houses.

  I approached the car, which had two officers inside. They saw me and came out to meet me. They did not look terribly friendly.

  “I’m looking for Detective Novack,” I said.

  “What about?”

  “I’d rather not say. We’re working together on something.”

  “He’s not here. Call the precinct in the morning.”

  “Is there any way to reach him? I really want—”

  I was interrupted by a woman’s voice that said, “It’s all right, Officer.” I turned and saw her, standing on the porch.

  “I’m Jamie Wagner,” I said to her.

  “I know who you are. Come in.”

  I followed her into the house, where she introduced herself and poured me a cup of tea. We sat in the den as she told me what happened, crying frequently through what was likely the first time she had verbalized it.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” she said. “Someone tried to kill me. It was as if the car had a mind of its own, and it was intent on killing me.”

  “It was your car?”

  It seemed as if the question jolted her, as if she had just realized what should have been obvious. “No … it was his. It was John they were trying to kill.”

  She said that Novack was wherever they took the car; he had insisted that it be examined immediately, to determine how it happened. “When John demands something, it’s tough to refuse.”

  “I picked up on that,” I said.

  She invited me to wait for Novack to come back. I got the feeling that she didn’t want to be alone, not even with two police officers standing guard in front of the house. If she thought my being there made her safer, her terrifying experience had rendered her temporarily delusional.

  We moved from coffee to wine, and she seemed to get more comfortable in the process. It was almost two hours until Novack got back, which made it past one o’clock.

  He opened the front door, came in, and saw Cindy and me sitting in the den. He walked over to her, kissed her on the head, and said, “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she said, “thanks to you.”

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” I said, to Novack.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  I nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “I need to talk to the lawyer,” he said to Cindy.

  “Anything I can’t hear?” she asked.

  He thought for a moment and said, “Of course not.” Then, to me, “I talked to the top auto guy in the department; he looked at what was left of the car.”

  “Could he tell what happened?” I asked.

  “Not from looking at it; there was basically nothing left. But he had no doubt how it went down. It was the computer in the car.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Cindy said. “There was a computer in the car?”

  Novack nodded. “Most people don’t realize it, but for a while now, cars have been run by computers. They’re fairly sophisticated.”

  “Could someone have hacked into it?” I asked.

  “Apparently so. They would have had to have access at first, but then could have operated it remotely. It’s like those commercials you see on television, where people are opening their cars, or starting them, using their cell phone. So it could have been done.”

  “By people who really knew what they were doing,” I said. “I don’t know that much about computers, but they really must be good.”

  He nodded. “Good enough to turn a car into a killer. And good enough to create people that don’t e
xist.”

  “And bad enough to be willing to burn someone alive in a car,” I said. “Sheryl Harrison isn’t a killer. These are the people she’s afraid of.”

  We were back at the prison at 9:00 A.M. When Sheryl saw it was both Novack and I, she said, “I think I’ve seen this movie already.”

  “Not this one,” I said. “This one ends differently.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someone tried to kill me last night,” Novack said. Sheryl of course had no idea what had happened, so Novack told her. I think I heard his voice crack when he talked about how Cindy was seconds from burning alive, but he covered it quickly, and he’d certainly never admit to it.

  When he was finished, Sheryl looked stunned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, surprised at how protective of her I felt.

  “Yes, it is,” said Novack. “It’s your fault because you haven’t told us the truth. But what you don’t understand is that it’s not going to matter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because if they’re trying to kill me, then it’s because they know I’m after them. And they know I’m talking to you; they probably followed me here today. So whatever you’re afraid might happen if you talk is going to happen anyway, because they think you’re talking. And if we don’t know what it is, we can’t stop it.”

  “Sheryl, Charlie was involved in a conspiracy,” I said. “The fake IDs in the safe-deposit box were of people that profited from someone’s death, and those people had died of apparent malfunctions of some type of computer. The same thing would have been done with the ID in his wallet, had Charlie lived.”

  “I’m not sure why this matters,” Sheryl said.

  “I’ll tell you why,” I said. “All of this had to be the most important thing in his life for at least the last six months. From what I’ve learned about him, he was not the shy, retiring type. He must have talked about it.”

  “You’re double-teaming me, Harvard? You’re playing bad cop, bad lawyer?”

  “We’re not playing games, Sheryl, no strategy, no manipulations. I wouldn’t do that to you. But the time to tell us what you know is now. For a lot of reasons, later may be too late.”

  She was silent for a few moments, which became a full minute. Her lower lip was quivering, and I thought she was going to cry. But she was not any more likely to do that than Novack; she was one tough lady.

  “Will you protect Karen?” she asked. It struck me that it was the same concern she had six years earlier, when Novack came to the house to find Charlie and arrest her. She had made sure that Karen was met at school, and taken to Terry’s.

  “Absolutely,” Novack said, without any hesitation at all.

  She nodded. “I didn’t kill Charlie. I wanted to many times, but I didn’t kill him.”

  I wanted to ask, “Who did?” but a look from Novack silenced me. I figured he had considerably more experience than me in getting witnesses to talk, so I took his lead and kept my mouth shut.

  “Those last few months, Charlie would brag about these new people he was working with. He was really proud of it, like he was on the inside of something, and how it was going to make him rich.

  “One night, when he was drunk and hit me, he told me that he could have me killed, that he could tell his people, that’s how he put it, ‘tell my people,’ and he could have anyone killed.”

  As I listened to her say this, it made me want to resurrect Charlie and slit his throat myself. But Novack just nodded encouragement; there was no way he was going to say anything and interrupt the flow.

  “Then it seemed to change. A couple of times he referred to them as stupid, and if he was in charge things would be better all around. It was typical Charlie, thinking he was more than he was, and everybody else was less. Well, these people were more than he could handle.

  “There’s a man … his name is Hennessey … he doesn’t know I know his name. He came to our house that day, to talk to Charlie. He was much bigger than Charlie; I could tell that Charlie was afraid of him.

  “I left them alone and was upstairs in the bedroom when Hennessey came in. He raped me, and then he brought me downstairs to the den. Charlie was lying on the couch, and there was blood everywhere. Then he picked up the knife and put it in my hand, so my fingerprints would be on it.

  “He told me that with my history, and with me being in the room with Charlie, and my prints on the knife, the police would know that I did it. That nothing I could say could ever convince anyone otherwise. But if I denied it, or told anyone about him…”

  She took a few moments to compose herself, then took a deep breath and continued. “… then he would do to Karen what he did to me, and then he would do to her what he did to Charlie. But that if I did what I was told, he wouldn’t hurt her, and she would have plenty of money to live.”

  I couldn’t resist jumping in. “He gave you money?”

  She nodded. “My mother gets money every month. It’s the only way she and Karen have survived.”

  “We’re going to have to talk to your mother,” Novack said. “And we’re going to need your help identifying Hennessey.”

  “You said you’d protect Karen.”

  Novack nodded. “And we will. It will be the first call I make when I leave here.”

  “Then leave here now,” she said.

  He did, and I stayed behind to talk to her. “I know, Harvard, I should have told you earlier.”

  “It took a lot of courage to tell us now.”

  She smiled. “You know, I think I might double your fee.”

  “I’m worth it.”

  One hand was handcuffed to the table, but she grabbed my arm with the other. To my recollection, it was the first time she had ever touched me, or I her. “I’m scared, Harvard,” she said. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I’m trying to die, and I’m scared.”

  I put my arm around her to comfort her, and I have no idea how this happened, but I kissed her. Or she kissed me; I’m still not sure. It was brief, but it wasn’t a kiss of understanding, or friendship, or compassion, or pity.

  We broke it off quickly, and just looked at each other, not knowing what to say. She thought of something first, which was just as well, since it would have taken me years to come up with something.

  “You going to invite me to the senior prom?” she asked.

  The call came in to Agent Charlie Ammerman in the Charlotte Bureau office. Ammerman was assigned to the task force, working under Mike Janssen on the plane crash investigation. On the line was the receptionist, Judy Clifford.

  “Charlie, I’ve got a bit of a weird call on the line. It’s a little girl, asking to speak to Mike Janssen.”

  Ammerman literally jumped out of his chair, walking with the cordless phone toward Janssen’s office as he continued to talk. “What’s her name?”

  “Tammy. She said she has to talk to Janssen, or people will die. Then she said, ‘Just like on that plane.’”

  So closely guarded was the Tammy secret that there was no way that even a receptionist in the Bureau office would be aware of it, but Ammerman knew it all too well. “Tell her you’re trying to find Agent Janssen, but that he’ll be right with her.”

  “She’s pretty insistent,” Clifford said. “She’s getting upset.”

  “Just don’t lose her. If you think she might hang up, tell her you’re putting it through, and do so.”

  Ammerman went past Janssen’s assistant’s desk without pausing, opened the door, and entered the office. Janssen was in a meeting with four other agents, and they looked up, surprised at the unusual interruption.

  “Tammy’s on the phone,” Ammerman said, and the group sprung into action, going to their respective work areas, from where they would each monitor the call. A trace was put on the call, though based on their last experience with Tammy, no one had any real hope it would yield useful information.

  Before Ammerman could tell the recept
ionist to put the call through, she did so. That likely meant that she thought Tammy was getting upset to the point that she might hang up.

  “This is Janssen,” he said as he picked up the phone.

  “This is Tammy. Hi.” Nolan Murray sat in his office, his two colleagues watching and listening, and loving every minute of it. One of them, Peter Lampley, sat in front of his computer, ready to execute the plan.

  Even though Janssen knew exactly what the voice would sound like from listening to the air controller’s conversation, it was still jarring and incongruous to hear it.

  “What can I do for you, Tammy?”

  “Give me two million dollars.”

  “Only if you stop hurting people.”

  She laughed a little girl’s laugh. “They were more than hurt.”

  “Let’s meet and talk about it,” he said.

  “Can I have my money?”

  “If we meet.”

  “I think you’re trying to fool me,” she said. “So I’ll just crash a train instead.” Nolan Murray was having a great time with this; the feeling of power at being able to humiliate so powerful an entity as the FBI, as the U.S. government, was intoxicating.

  “There’s no reason for you to do that. We can get you the money.”

  “You’re trying to fool me. My mommy was right.”

  Janssen was growing more and more furious, but kept himself under control. “How can we get you the money?” He had neither the intention nor the authority to pay any money. He just wanted to keep the conversation going, trying to find an opening or goad Tammy into a verbal mistake.

  “Never mind, I’m going to crash a train. Good-bye.”

  “Wait!” Janssen yelled. “Where is the train?”

  “Oops.” Tammy giggled. “Los Angeles.”

  The agents came back into Janssen’s office the moment that Tammy hung up the phone. There had been plenty of time to trace the call, and it showed that it had originated in Omaha, Nebraska. Agents were quickly sent to the location, but Janssen knew there was no possibility of it paying off.