“Right now, I’d be more surprised if he did die naturally,” I said.
“I called up the newspaper while you were on your way back. Said I’d met him at a TED talk I saw online that he’d been to and that he’d asked me to give him a ring when I was next in town. Anyway, long story short, the guy was a heart attack waiting to happen. Not exactly slim, never did any exercise beyond walking to the office and back from his apartment in Murray Hill and taking the elevator down not once but twice an hour to have a smoke-yep, like a chimney, since he was in high school. Also, beaucoup coffee. Throw deadlines and dwindling circulation and ad numbers all newspapers are facing these days…” She let her words trail off and gave me a knowing look.
“What about my partner?” I asked. “He lived on junk food, didn’t exactly have the most stress-free of jobs?”
“Possibly indulged in erectile assistive pills,” she interjected, half-asking. To my questioning look, she hastily added, defensively, “You said his libido was running amok since his divorce, and given his age-”
“I don’t know, maybe,” I said, cutting off the rest of her analysis. “I do know he was living healthily since his divorce. Eating better, hitting the gym most nights, cutting down on the alcohol.”
“Even worse.” Gigi stood up, crossed to the wall-mounted machine and started to make coffee. “You hear these stories all the time, people changing their lifestyle so fast their body can’t keep up.”
“So he’s a likely candidate if he’s living like a slob or if he’s cleaning up his act? You can’t have it both ways. Plus he had a buddy who was a trainer and who was overseeing his workouts. I remember Nick complaining about wanting to look better-there was some girl he liked and he wanted the weight to come off overnight-but the guy wouldn’t let him.”
Gigi and Kurt exchanged a quick glance-the subject was maybe too close to the bone, given the new and improved Kurt. Then Gigi turned to me and said, “Reilly. Read my lips. No es posible.”
“How do you know that?” I countered, getting frustrated. “You’re not a doctor.”
“I’m not, but-look, if you could kill someone by triggering a heart attack at will, don’t you think we’d have read about it by now? I mean, at some point, someone somewhere would have used it and got caught doing it and it would have made a lot of noise.” She waved her hands. “We’d know about it.”
Kurt lifted his eyes from the tablet. “You’re talking about doing it by, like, slipping someone some kind of drug? That would show up in an autopsy, surely?”
“What if it doesn’t? What if these bastards have developed something that doesn’t show up? Remember, this isn’t some two-bit outfit we’re talking about. This is spook central.”
That quieted them down for a moment. “You’d have one hell of a cool murder weapon,” Kurt said.
I couldn’t get that idea out of my mind.
But it was more than that. Camacho, the Portuguese reporter, dies in a climbing accident back in 1981. Rossetti, the investigative reporter, dies when his apartment goes up in flames. His editor then dies from a heart attack, as does my partner.
How many others have died to keep secret whatever it is these people don’t want uncovered? And what is it they don’t want us to know about? Was that the reason the CIA was protecting Corrigan and shielding him from me? What was he part of? And what’s the connection to Camacho that goes back more than thirty years?
The same year my dad died.
“OK,” I said. “We need to try and figure out what Rossetti and his editor might have known. What can you do?”
Kurt glanced at Gigi. “We can look at both their digital footprints,” he said. “Have a look at their emails, see what they might have searched for online. Phone records, too. Might get a movement trail from their phones too, see where they’ve been hanging out.”
I went silent for a second. What someone with the right skills could do nowadays, the amount of information they could dig up about our lives-it still boggled my mind. I don’t know that the guys at our Cyber Division could do any better.
“Great, let’s do it. I also need to talk to a heart guy. Someone at the top of his game. I need to know if this is possible.”
As he tapped his screen, Kurt said, “I kind of figured you would. There’s a whole bunch of major cardiologists in this city, but here’s a guy I thought looked interesting.” He flipped his tablet around to show me. “Waleed Alami. He’s at NewYork-Presbyterian-its Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute, to be exact.”
I perused his bio. Great credentials, to be sure. Looked gregarious, younger than I’d imagined, maybe in his late-forties, with a full head of swept-back hair and thin-framed spectacles. “Why him?” I asked.
“Well, he’s a top cardiothoracic surgeon but he’s also a big cheese in cardiac arrest research.”
There had to be more. “And…?”
Kurt gave it up with a slight grin. “He’s got this cool Frankenstein machine to revive people who get heart attacks. I figured being cutting edge, you know, having an open mind…”
I nodded. “OK. Sounds good.” I checked the big clock on the wall. It was four in the afternoon. I didn’t think Alami would be at the Hospital today. But I knew how I could get him to meet with me on a late Sunday afternoon. It was a small gamble, but I didn’t think he’d call the office to check if “Nat Lendowski” really was with the FBI-or still alive, for that matter.
Before I called him, I needed to make another call. I didn’t want to waste one of my throwaways, which I knew I’d need to discard if I used it now.
I turned to Kurt. “I need to make a call. Untraceable. Can you set me up?”
“Hai, mochiron,” he said with a little bow.
I gave him Deutsch’s number and he did his usual party trick of putting it through a VPN’d fake Skype account that was billed to the credit card of some random woman in Japan. Moments later, Deutsch picked up.
“Are you still outside the house?” I asked without an introduction.
“Reilly!” she exclaimed. “Where are you?”
“Is Tess all right?”
“Yeah, she’s-well, she’s OK right now. She’s in the house-I think. I mean, I can’t be sure any more, can I?”
I didn’t rise to the bait. “I need you to look into something. Are they doing an autopsy on Nick?”
She went quiet for a breath, then said, her tone soft, “ I don’t know, but… I’d expect so, given how he died, no? Why?”
“Tell the ME to look for anything that shouldn’t be there that might have caused it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Just get them to run a full tox on him. Make sure they look for anything unusual-anything that could bring on a heart attack.”
She paused again-clearly, she wasn’t expecting any of this. “You think he was murdered?”
“It’s a possibility.”
Her tone went low, muffled, like she was cupping the phone for privacy. “Shit. Who-and why?”
“I’m looking into it. In the meantime, do me a favor. Keep it to yourself. Just ask the ME yourself and get him to call you directly if he finds anything unusual. And Annie?”
“Yes?”
“Stay alert. Keep Tess and the kids safe. And keep yourself safe too. These guys don’t mess around.”
I could hear the tension reach her throat. “Reilly, we should tell Gallo. If you’re right, we need to-”
“No. If you say something, they’ll know we communicated and they’ll take you off the detail and I want you there. I want you looking after Tess. Plus I don’t want to put you at risk by having them think you might know something you don’t. OK?”
She thought for a beat, then, without sounding overly convinced, said, “OK.”
“Annie, you’re going to need to be super-vigilant. Don’t take anything for granted. Don’t trust anything-not a phone call, not a badge-without checking it through.”