The officers in the blue-and-white detailed to Wilton Backhouse confirmed to Heat that the professor was inside the Practical Science and Engineering Annex. Before she stepped away, the driver raised a clenched fist and said, “You hang in, Captain.”
She returned the gesture and said, “Always.”
Crossing Thompson Street, Nikki was amazed at how word spread, even when the department’s intranet was down. The small gesture also gave her greater hope that more eyes in that city were alert for Rook than she had imagined.
Heat startled Backhouse, who was in his office with the door open to the hallway while he collected materials for a morning lab. “Embarrassing,” he said when he had recovered his composure. “I’ve been jumping at everything. Noises, even freakin’ door slams get me.”
Heat understood why his nerves would be frayed and tried to assuage him. “It’s all good.”
“Are you shitting me? Are you serious? You don’t think I know about Nate Levy? He calls and tells me about the goddamn drone taking a shot at him, and you’re saying it’s all good? You people can’t even keep your computers running, and I’m supposed to feel safe and snug because there’s two cops playing Sudoku in a police car out front?”
“We’re doing everything we can to bring this to a close.” This guy needed to be calmed down, so she tried enlisting him. “Help me do that. Do you have time for a quick chat?”
He flicked a glance at the Pebble on his wrist. “Ten minutes, anyway. I’ve got a session on impact elasticity and coefficients of restitution.” He seemed put off when Heat took it upon herself to close his door, but set down his laptop and files and settled onto the yoga ball he used for a desk chair.
The rest of his office looked lived-in, but more utilitarian than homey. The window behind him looked out to a dark air shaft between buildings through bent venetian blinds. The overhead fluorescents gave light that was good but too bright for Nikki’s headache. Technical books stuffed with papers filled gray metal shelves on two walls; the rack above his desk held DVD collections of Bladerunner, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and Firefly bookended by a pair of miniature blue British phone booths, which she recognized from Rook’s obsessive viewing as being from Dr. Who. That jibed with his tee shirt, which read, “Daleks Do It with Directed Energy.” She took in the unframed wall art behind him. Side-by-side posters of Benedict Cumberbatch: one as Kahn from Star Trek Into Darkness; the other as Julian Assange, the famous whistle-blower, a role Cumberbatch had played in The Fifth Estate.
The whistle-blower across from Heat said, “Where’s your pal, Jameson Rook?” The question hit her like a jolt of electricity. “He hasn’t been scared off my story, has he? This needs to get out. Lives are at stake, do you get that?”
Heat kept it together while listening to Backhouse whine, thinking, who was more keenly aware of lives being at stake at that moment than she was? Rook was out there somewhere, and she didn’t even know if he was alive. But after witnessing the prof’s jumpiness, she thought better of agitating him with the real reason the journalist wasn’t there, and answered with truth by omission. “No, trust me, Rook is still completely immersed in this story.” Heat wanted to get Backhouse’s impressions of Fred Lobbrecht’s sudden wealth, but decided to hold off on that topic and switch first to Backhouse’s own area of focus. “Can you help me drill down more on Tangier Swift?”
“You kidding? Let’s do some fracking.”