Driving Heat (39 page)

“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.

“He must have taken the stairs,” said Officer Tew when Heat arrived on
the scene.

Her partner, Officer Townsend, made a hooking gesture around an imaginary corner. “Or the service elevator.” A few days before, these cops had given Nikki a supportive fist clench
from the front seat of the radio car outside Hudson U. Now they were upstairs in Wilton Backhouse’s office feeling embarrassed that the man they had been tasked to protect had not only got
shot at but had slipped his surveillance on their watch. “To be honest, we were all about getting up here to disarm a perp.”

“I understand,” said Heat. “And meanwhile, your perp could have been a mile away.”

“And who knew a drone could fly down that air shaft, right?” Townsend searched Heat’s expression, a patrolman wanting to be let off the hook by a captain.

“Right,” Heat said and watched both unis relax. “I never would have figured it.”

Over at the window, the Forensics technician peered around the bullet hole and said, “There’s more clearance than you think between these buildings. No crosswinds? A straight-down
descent? Especially with video assist and if the operator has skills? Cake.”

Heat indicated toward the punctured glass. “Looks like small-caliber. You find the slug?”

“Just did.” He walked her over to the shelf above the professor’s desk. “It landed in this bookend.”

Rook groaned. “Ooh, shot in the TARDIS!” The tech gave him a blank stare. “Dr. Who? The seemingly innocent-looking police call box that disguises a vehicle that travels Time
and Relative Dimensions in Space? That bullet could have ended up anywhere from the first settlement of New Amsterdam to the next millennium.” The Forensics man reached into the miniature
phone booth, tweezed out a slug, and held it up to Rook. “Well. You got lucky today, my friend.”

While CSU did its job, Heat and the officers sought out witnesses. Two students and a custodian on the twenty-second floor said they had seen Backhouse on the move. “Like he was running
for his life,” said the maintenance man. “His backpack flew right off his shoulder, he was hauling it so fast to the stairwell.” None of the eyewits had seen any sign of injury.
That assuaged Nikki that he didn’t seem to have been hit. On the downside, it closed options for tracking him through ERs, which are legally required to report gunshot victims.

But Backhouse found her. No sooner had Heat and Rook stepped out onto Thompson than Nikki’s cell rang with no caller ID. “It’s me.”

“Wilton, where are you?” Out of habit, she three-sixtied the block, but without sighting him.

“On a pay phone, but not for long.”

“Where?”

“No chance. I’m thinking somebody did more than hack the NYPD. I think they’re listening in on your phone.”

Heat could hear the paranoia rising in his voice. She could also understand why. A second drone attack in the space of a week would do that to anyone. “Come to my precinct. I’ll
arrange more protection for you.”

“I don’t think you can. I trust you—personally, I mean—but I have nil faith in police protection. So I’m going to get as far away from needing you guys as possible
until you figure this whole thing out. Taking myself off the grid’s the only way I’m going to live.” Before she could protest, he hung up.

Weeks before, Rook had committed the two of them to dinner with his
literary agent at La Esquina but, given the volatility of the
case, he canceled. So instead of hip Mexican among the A-listers, they settled into his loft, where he cooked while she balanced CompStat reports with status checks on Wilton Backhouse.
“Still not picking up his calls.” Nikki lobbed her iPhone onto the sofa cushion beside her and ran a yellow highlighter across a line of figures comparing weekly Drunk and Disorderly
arrests during the past quarter.

“He’s not answering for me, either,” called Rook from the kitchen. “Although, truth be told, not the first college professor who stopped taking my calls.”

Nikki marked her place with a Post-it flag and crossed to the counter. “Did you have a particularly tough prof in school?”

“No, she was easy. It was when we stopped sleeping together that things got ugly.” He double-flicked his brows and picked up his whisk. “You ready for some of my famous
Morning-After Hotcakes? Or is this the night before? That’s the beauty of life, you never know.”

Nikki went to town on those pancakes. He had added bananas and macadamia nuts in the shape of a smiley face to his recipe and swapped out maple in favor of coconut syrup. The effect was a
comforting experience that tasted like vacation in Maui. For now, that was as close to a respite as she was going to get. She swallowed a bite and said, “So I got confirmation from Hudson
University that Backhouse no-showed his scheduled lecture this afternoon. Feller says he also blew off a mandatory staff meeting tonight at Forenetics without any notice, something he has never
done.” She pressed her Home button to check for text badges; there were none—same as her last check two minutes before. “Nobody answered at his apartment. Since we have probable
cause for concern about his safety, the super let detectives Rhymer and Aguinaldo in, and he’s not there. Opie said that in the hall closet there’s a gap among his suitcases, and all
his toiletries are cleared out of the bathroom.”

“What about checking with Backhouse’s friends, colleagues, associates?”

“One of whom ‘hit the wall’—literally—and the other two have bullets in their heads, which is what he is trying to avoid—in a very ill-advised
manner.”

“By going off the grid? I don’t know…If I thought I was on somebody’s list of inconvenient truth tellers, I might pull a Dick Cheney myself and hunker down in an undisclosed
location.” Something in what he said rekindled the latent thought she had been trying to access. It still teased her from afar. He studied her. “What?”

“Just thinking.”

“You’re beautiful when you do that. Even more so when you tell me what it is.” She picked up her phone again and touched Redial. “You’re not going to share, are
you?”

“Soon as I have something to. Unlike others, I don’t hide information in this relationship.” She put the phone to her ear, heard Wilton’s outgoing message again, and
ended the call. “This guy’d better hope we find him before they do.”

“‘They’ being who we think it is?”

And can’t prove, thought Nikki. At least not yet.

After too many hours of paperwork, they cleaned up the kitchen together to
Nightline
, which included a special report on the ongoing cyber attack on New York City. Rook, who said he was
tired of living it and didn’t need to see it on TV, too, wanted to switch to some Bourdain. Any Bourdain. But Heat’s sense of needing to know all she could won out, and they left it
on.

The piece did have a sense of churning instead of learning, as Rook liked to phrase it. “Speaking as someone who knows a bit about journalism, there comes a point in a news cycle where the
public appetite for the topic is hotter than the information flow. So you get recap and talking heads and very little that’s new.”

To underscore that, the network rolled archival footage of the Free Mehmoud pickets, blending with archive video of the Free Mehmoud hack message, and the press conference in which the Syrian
ambassador to the United Nations (with a circumspect Fariq Kuzbari stationed in the background) demanded that Mehmoud be returned from custody, all the while denying his nation’s involvement
in the unfortunate cyber event. In a jailhouse statement issued through his attorney, Mehmoud Algafari declared himself to be not a criminal but a prisoner of conscience. Nothing new in that,
either. A black hat expert on hacking, who was photographed in silhouette with his or her voice electronically altered, told Nikki something she didn’t know. The hacker said the MISD
vulnerability stemmed from the fact that New York City doesn’t employ developers, but mainly expert caretakers. Competent, but not elite code writers. Sounding a lot like Darth Vader because
of the vocal processing, he/she said, “Most of the applications the city’s MISD network uses come from a hodge-podge of third-party sources, and that’s why they haven’t been
able to execute a unified solution. It’s like herding cats.”

When the commercial came on, Nikki said, “You ready for bed?”

“Sure.” Rook furrowed his brow gravely. “But one can’t help but wonder. Is this the night before the morning after?”

Nikki swatted his ass with a dish towel and said, “One way to find out. I’ll be right in.”

“You’re only going to get his voicemail again. This is very OCD of you.”

“I’ll be right there. Don’t start without me.”

Rook made her laugh, performing an over-the-top sexy model’s runway walk up the hall, and calling over his shoulder, “Gait analyze this.”

Heat did redial Backhouse’s number, with the same result. Then she switched off the TV and stared at its blank screen a few seconds in contemplation. She picked up her cell again and
scrolled to Sean Raley’s number. “Hi, did I wake you?”

“Mmm, no.”

“Of course I did. I have an assignment. As King of All Surveillance Media, it may be the greatest challenge of your reign. You ever try herding cats?”

An administrative aide took Heat’s CompStat homework first thing upon
her arrival the next morning, bound the spreadsheets with
thick rubber bands, set them inside a cardboard box, and gave them to an officer for hand delivery downtown at One Police Plaza. “As long as you’re keeping stats,” observed Rook,
“the true crime is you having to do the bean counting by hand like that.”

“No intranet, no electronic data. We can’t risk emailing sensitive attachments like that on public domains.”

“Sure, but come on. What’s next, sleeve garters and a green eyeshade?”

Nikki gave him a side-glance. “Is that on your list of turn-ons now?”

“No.” He paused. “Yes.”

The homicide detectives started gathering in the bull pen. Heat quickly signed vacation authorizations for some patrol officers and staff, accepted an invitation to speak at a school assembly at
P.S. 199, and then hurried into the squad room to join the briefing.

She hadn’t missed much. Raley and Ochoa, back from the previous day’s field trip to Peekskill, were getting filled in by Detective Rhymer on the Wilton Backhouse incident and his
self-imposed exile. Rook added that both he and Heat had been dialing the professor’s cell phone compulsively, as well as emailing and texting. “No pickups, no call backs, no texts, and
the emails are now bouncing back with an I’m-out-of-the-office message.”

“Dude’s not careful, it’s going to be an I’ve-been-offed message,” said Feller.

Inez Aguinaldo took her seat. “Cranky Randy this morning.”

“It’s my default setting. You’ll get used to it.”

“Let’s get into Fred Lobbrecht,” said Heat. “Inez, you covered the accident report, right?”

“Yes. I made friends with a clerk at the DMV in Albany who overnighted a photocopy of the MV-104 and Trooper Lobbrecht’s notes, diagrams, and photo documentation of the scene.”
The detective moved to the side of the room and brought up front a bulletin board on which she had posted enlargements for the meeting. “I’ll walk you through a couple of items of note.
First, this accident scene didn’t fall in Trooper Lobbrecht’s jurisdiction, which was Troop NYC, posted in Richmond County which, as you know, is Staten Island, a long way from
Peekskill. When he called in the crash, he said he happened to be in transit on that road and observed the victim’s car smashed into the tree.”