No voice mail this time. The engineering professor answered her call on the second ring. “Hi, it’s Nikki Heat.” She kept her tone light and casual. Nikki had some bad news to give him about finding Nathan Levy dead in his pickup, but since Backhouse had proven so jittery, she wanted to ask him first what he had known about one colleague’s apparent acceptance of a bribe to hide another colleague’s probable involvement in a fatal auto crash. Things like that had a tendency to derail even the most grounded interview subjects.
However, it was a more strident Wilton Backhouse who greeted her. Or, to be accurate, did not greet her, but jumped right to his own hot topic instead. “I’m only taking this call because I want to know why the fuck your boyfriend is dragging his feet on my whistle-blowing article.”
“Whoa, Wilton. First off, hello. Let’s not get off on this foot, OK? Whatever issue you have with Rook about his article is separate from why I’m calling you.” Even as she said it, Nikki stood and waved a signal arm through the glass into the bull pen. Rook was immersed in his laptop screen at his rear desk, but caught her in his peripheral vision and hurried in.
“Your dude was all over me to get access to my research—my smoking gun that buries Tangier Swift. Honeymoon’s over. Now where is he?”
“Hang on,” said Heat, switching the call to the speakerphone as Rook took a seat across from her. “You there? I’ve got Jameson Rook here with me.”
“Hey, Wilton.”
“Hey, Jameson,” Backhouse echoed his cadence back mockingly. “Know what? Since we last talked, there has been one more highway death and two critical injuries caused by Swift’s defective system. If you’re going to just sit there stroking me with one hand and parking your thumb up your ass with the other, I’ll just post this motherfucker on the Web myself. Do I have your attention?”
“Absolutely. But you don’t want to do that.”
“I think I do.”
“I understand your eagerness, but you need cred. My cred. And I have that because I am thorough.”
“Somebody thinks this has cred. They keep offing everyone involved.”
Rook raised his eyebrows and shrugged to Nikki, who hand-signaled him to keep it rolling. So Rook did. “Wilton, if you rush this out—dump it on some, what? blog?—you’re running a risk of a major fail. Either you’re going to come off as some wacko ax-grinder, or get lumped in with the likes of Dateline when they took on GM about exploding gas tanks. The only thing that blew up was the story, in Dateline’s face. Or, worst-case scenario: It’s not going to get any traction. Let me keep doing what I do: gathering all the facts so I can write a comprehensive exposé that will do the job.” He finished convincingly and waited for Backhouse’s response. When none came, he said, “Wilton, did you hear me?”
A shot—it had to be a gunshot—rang out. Every cop knew the sound. It turned heads in the bull pen when it came over the speaker. Heat and Rook heard the sound of Backhouse’s phone receiver hitting the floor. Nikki jumped up. “Wilton! Wilton, what’s happening?”
His voice was quiet. A gasp. “Holy shit…”
“What just happened?” Nikki said.
Noise, furniture scraping, came over the speakerphone. Then Backhouse’s voice, weak and bewildered. “The drone. It was in my office window.”
The scanner behind Heat came alive: “Shot fired, Hudson University Annex, Thompson Street north of Bleecker.”
“Stay down. Get under your desk. Have you been hit?” said Heat. While she listened, she keyed her walkie-talkie. “One Lincoln Forty. Units responding to the ten-ten at Hudson University. Possible victim is on floor twenty-two, room three-A.”
Backhouse’s phone clanged around as he snatched up the receiver. The professor’s breathing came heavily, rasping across the mouthpiece. “Is this what you call keeping me safe? Telling me to sit under my desk? Seriously?”
“Help’s coming. Stay down.”
“I am not fucking sitting here like a dumb shit. And I’m done trusting incompetents.” He slammed down the receiver and the call went dead.