Rook tried to take the brittleness out of the air. “Noon, huh? Well, maybe we should use Nikki’s since it was drawn ten minutes ago, so it’s more current.”
They took their positions on the road, behind bushes at the end of the driveway, and at key locations in the woods flanking the land to the north and south. Another contingent of State and Hastings police covered the railroad tracks behind the grove of hardwoods, to close the back door. Detective Heat’s plan had been to approach on foot in a platoon, using silence to provide surprise, with vehicles as backup to create a tight perimeter. She got overruled. But before that, she got undermined.
“First thing, Detective,” said Bell, “too much exposure on foot. You may sadly discover the surprise is yours.”
Callan became swayed. “Kinda ducks in a barrel, if he’s got a rifle.”
Before Heat could show where the cover would be and identify the house’s blind spots she had located, Yardley rolled over her. “Shock and Awe. Ever hear of that? There’s a reason… It works. Flip the plan, Detective. Roar in with the vehicles first, deploy the foot soldiers. Shock and Awe.”
Much as Heat had seen all week, Callan let his subordinate steamroll him. “Shock and Awe it is,” he said.
On Heat’s go signal they swarmed the place. SUVs and Crown Victorias with hell’s roaring fire under the hood thundered up the driveway, kicking up pea gravel and chewing lawn to the front door of the Victorian. Car doors flew open. Agents and cops rolled out. Using the vehicles for cover, Heat, Roach, Callan, and the others leapfrogged to the side of the house, squatting low as they moved along the latticework of the gallery porch.
Agent Bell executed the same tactic across the lawn. An SUV and two cars scrambled across the meadow to the kennel, depositing Bell and her team to hug the walls there. That’s when things unraveled.
As soon as all the vehicles were in, the double doors to the kennel burst open and ten Georgian shepherds ran out, barking and dashing in circles all over the compound. In the instant of surprise and distraction, an engine howled to life and an all-terrain vehicle screamed out of the building behind the cars and agents and headed for the woods. Bell and the others raised their weapons, but by then Heat had run across the grass from the house shouting, “Hold fire! Hold fire!” They had discussed it going in: They needed Vaja alive.
Yardley Bell peeled herself off the kennel wall and ran for one of the cars as she holstered her weapon. “I got him,” she yelled to Heat.
Still closing in at twenty yards, Nikki called, “We’re sealed off, he won’t get far.” Just as Heat made it beside the Crown Vic, the DHS agent slammed the door and fishtailed off, leaving Nikki to watch helplessly as she gunned it up the driveway to the road.
Rook saw the whole thing. Relegated to the rear flank, relaxing on a gurney in the back of a waiting ambulance, he first heard the dogs, then Nikki’s distant shouts. That got him out and upright on the pavement in time to hear the high-pitched engine of the ATV snapping twigs on its way through the woods to his left and the growl of the Police Interceptor flying up the road behind him.
Vaja’s four-wheeler broke out of the thicket and onto Warburton. Rook’s first impression was how small the Georgian seemed, looking like a kid joy-riding his dad’s quad. Nikoladze whipped his head Rook’s way, but was really looking past him at the oncoming car. He might have done better to keep crossing and try his chances in the woods across the lane. Instead, he gunned it and tried to make a run for it on the pavement.
In a swirl of wind and grit, the Crown Victoria blew past Rook and pulled beside Nikoladze, slowing slightly to pace him. Before reaching the curve where a hidden roadblock waited, Agent Bell brought the right quarter of her car to touch the rear of his quad and jerked the wheel, executing what every law enforcement officer and anyone who’s seen a freeway chase knows as a PIT maneuver. If it had been a car instead of an ATV, it would have spun, lost control, and stopped, facing the opposite direction. But it was an ATV.
It rocked wildly, nearly flipping over sideways. Nikoladze frantically worked the handlebars, steering madly to compensate and balance. The quad corrected, then set down hard with a bounce on its fat tires that sent the front end up in a wheelie. But the front end never came back down. It continued its rise up and over the head of the driver-until the rear wheels came up, too, and the entire vehicle went airborne-upside-down, backward. Unable to hold on with his knees, Vaja Nikoladze lost his grip and fell to the pavement on his back.
The ATV not only landed on top of him, it continued to rev and spin at a crazy high speed, churning the wheels and grinding axles all over his face and body, shredding his clothes and skin until it thumped over him like he was some meaty speed bump, crashed in the woods, and left him bleeding, lacerated, and dying on the road from a split skull.
Nikki Heat shifted in the front seat of her car, stirred from her nap by a rhythmic plunking of dew drops from a tree branch onto her windshield.
It sounded like a ticking clock.
Not quite awake, and determined to stay adrift just a few more minutes, she squinted to orient herself. Three flashlights moving in a line away from Nikoladze’s dog kennel swept the woods, forming shafts of light stabbing at the wooly fog that had woven through Hastings-on-Hudson after midnight. A forensic technician’s camera strobe flared out of the Victorian country house’s upstairs window. Amplified by the hanging mist, the flash took on the intensity of lightning without thunder.
In a few moments, Heat would resume her search of Vaja’s property with the DHS team. She tapped the Home button of her phone to check the time. Nikki had budgeted forty minutes of sleep and still had twenty precious more left to recharge.
Out there in the middle of a dark Hudson Valley pasture, she felt an odd sense of relief from the Rainbow case. Normally, the hunt for a serial killer constituted a race against time to prevent the murder of his next victim. Ironically, since Heat was his next victim, she’d bought herself a time-out. Also, what better way to feel safe than being surrounded by law enforcement at a crime scene? Nikki couldn’t do this every night, but for now, not going home and adhering to her usual patterns offered her a measure of safety.
She closed her eyes and replayed the fight she’d had with Yardley Bell after the collision, and cursed herself for losing her cool. Heat could have chalked it up to fatigue; the hours, the stress, and the intense pull of two major cases certainly gave her license to be on the raw side. But no, Nikki blamed herself for not controlling her temper. Simply put, she slipped her chain when the paramedics gave up on Vaja and Yardley’s response was to turn to Callan-and shrug.
People talked about seeing red. Heat saw a blaze of white, the way an electric spark touched off the magnesium powder in an old-time photographer’s flash lamp. The anger and frustration that had been building up during the week since she met Yardley Bell exploded. Nikki’s first words could have been more inspired, but shouting “How dare you?” right in the woman’s face got her off to a pretty good start at releasing her caged fury. Hours later, Heat still could see Bell’s expression and enjoyed the fact that she had brought her own dose of shock and awe to the day.
Rook and Roach must have feared Heat would hit her because they took hold of her shoulders and dragged her back a few feet from the agent, even as she continued to unload. It all came out: Bell’s smug intervention; forbidding Nikki to return and talk to Vaja when he was a legitimate person of interest; wasting critical time busting Algernon Barrett when the real suspect-“a freaking biochemist”-sat right there, untouched. “And then,” Nikki added, scolding her, “if that’s not enough, you not only spiked my plan for the raid-”