Tuesday, October 9
His face wet with sweat and with tears, the man runs for freedom, he runs for his life.
“There! There he goes!”
The former slave does not know exactly where the voice comes from. Behind him? To the right or left? From atop one of the decrepit tenements lining the filthy cobblestoned streets here?
Amid July air hot and thick as liquid paraffin, the lean man leaps over a pile of horse dung. The street sweepers don’t come here, to this part of the city. Charles Singleton pauses beside a pallet stacked high with barrels, trying to catch his breath.
A crack of a pistol. The bullet goes wide. The sharp report of the gun takes him back instantly to the war: the impossible, mad hours as he stood his ground in a dusty blue uniform, steadying a heavy musket, facing men wearing dusty gray, aiming their own weapons his way.
Running faster now. The men fire again. These bullets also miss.
“Somebody stop him! Five dollars’ gold if you catch him.”
But the few people out on the streets this early – mostly Irish ragpickers and laborers trooping to work with hods or picks on their shoulders – have no inclination to stop the Negro, who has fierce eyes and large muscles and such frightening determination. As for the reward, the shouted offer came from a city constable, which means there’s no coin behind the promise.
At the Twenty-third Street paintworks, Charles veers west. He slips on the slick cobblestones and falls hard. A mounted policeman rounds the corner and, raising his nightstick, bears down on the fallen man. And then -
And? the girl thought.
And?
What happened to him?
Sixteen-year-old Geneva Settle twisted the knob on the microfiche reader again but it would move no farther; she’d come to the last page on this carriage. She lifted out the metal rectangle containing the lead article in the July 23, 1868, edition of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. Riffling through the other frames in the dusty box, she worried that the remaining pages of the article were missing and she’d never find out what happened to her ancestor Charles Singleton. She’d learned that historical archives regarding black history were often incomplete, if not forever misplaced.
Where was the rest of the story?
Ah…Finally she found it and mounted the carriage carefully into the battered gray reader, moving the knob impatiently to locate the continuation of the story of Charles’s flight.
Geneva ’s lush imagination – and years of immersing herself in books – had given her the wherewithal to embellish the bare-bones magazine account of the former slave’s pursuit through the hot, foul streets of nineteenth-century New York. She almost felt she was back there, rather than where she really was at the moment: nearly 140 years later in the deserted fifth-floor library of the Museum of African-American Culture and History on Fifty-fifth Street in Midtown Manhattan.
As she twisted the dial, the pages streamed past on the grainy screen. Geneva found the rest of the article, which was headlined:
SHAME
THE ACCOUNT OF A FREEDMAN’S CRIME
CHARLES SINGLETON, A VETERAN OF THE WAR
BETWEEN THE STATES, BETRAYS THE CAUSE
OF OUR PEOPLE IN A NOTORIOUS INCIDENT
A picture accompanying the article showed twenty-eight-year-old Charles Singleton in his Civil War uniform. He was tall, his hands were large and the tight fit of the uniform on his chest and arms suggested powerful muscles. Lips broad, cheekbones high, head round, skin quite dark.
Staring at the unsmiling face, the calm, piercing eyes, the girl believed there was a resemblance between them – she had the head and face of her ancestor, the roundness of his features, the rich shade of his skin. Not a bit of the Singleton physique, though. Geneva Settle was skinny as a grade-school boy, as the Delano Project girls loved to point out.
She began to read once more, but a noise intruded.
A click in the room. A door latch? Then she heard footsteps. They paused. Another step. Finally silence. She glanced behind her, saw nobody.
She felt a chill, but told herself not to be freaked. It was just bad memories that put her on edge: the Delano girls whaling on her in the school yard behind Langston Hughes High, and that time Tonya Brown and her crew from the St. Nicholas Houses dragged her into an alley then pounded her so bad that she lost a back tooth. Boys groped, boys dissed, boys put you down. But it was the girls who made you bleed.
Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…
More footsteps. Another pause.
Silence.
The nature of this place didn’t help. Dim, musty, quiet. And there was no one else here, not at eight-fifteen on a Tuesday morning. The museum wasn’t open yet – tourists were still asleep or having their breakfasts – but the library opened at eight. Geneva had been waiting here when they unlocked the doors, she’d been so eager to read the article. She now sat in a cubicle at the end of a large exhibit hall, where faceless mannequins wore nineteenth-century costumes and the walls were filled with paintings of men in bizarre hats, women in bonnets and horses with weak, skinny legs.
Another footstep. Then another pause.
Should she leave? Go hang with Dr. Barry, the librarian, until this creepy dude left?
And then the other visitor laughed.
Not a weird laugh, a fun laugh.
And he said, “Okay. I’ll call you later.”
A snap of a cell phone folding up. That’s why he’d been pausing, just listening to the person on the other end of the line.
Told you not to worry, girl. People aren’t dangerous when they laugh. They aren’t dangerous when they say friendly things on cell phones. He’d been walking slowly because that’s what people do when they’re talking – even though what kind of rude claimer’d make a phone call in a library? Geneva turned back to the microfiche screen, wondering, You get away, Charles? Man, I hope so.
Yet he regained his footing and, rather than own up to his mischief, as a courageous man would do, continued his cowardly flight.
So much for objective reporting, she thought angrily.
For a time he evaded his pursuers. But escape was merely temporary. A Negro tradesman on a porch saw the freedman and implored him to stop, in the name of justice, asserting that he had heard of Mr. Singleton’s crime and reproaching him for bringing dishonor upon all colored people throughout the nation. The citizen, one Walker Loakes, thereupon flung a brick at Mr. Singleton with the intent of knocking him down. However,
Charles dodges the heavy stone and turns to the man, shouting, “I am innocent. I did not do what the police say!”
Geneva ’s imagination had taken over and, inspired by the text, was writing the story once again.
But Loakes ignores the freedman’s protests and runs into the street, calling to the police that the fugitive is headed for the docks.
His heart torn, his thoughts clinging to the image of Violet and their son, Joshua, the former slave continues his desperate run for freedom.
Sprinting, sprinting…
Behind him comes the gallop of mounted police. Ahead of him, other horsemen appear, led by a helmeted police officer brandishing a pistol. “Halt, halt where you are, Charles Singleton! I am Detective Captain William Simms. I’ve been searching for you for two days.”
The freedman does as ordered. His broad shoulders slump, strong arms at his sides, chest heaving as he sucks in the humid, rancid air beside the Hudson River. Nearby is the tow boat office, and up and down the river he sees the spindles of sailing ship masts, hundreds of them, taunting him with their promise of freedom. He leans, gasping, against the large Swiftsure Express Company sign. Charles stares at the approaching officer as the clop, clop, clop of his horse’s hooves resonate loudly on the cobblestones.
“Charles Singleton, you are under arrest for burglary. You will surrender to us or we will subdue you. Either way you will end up in shackles. Pick the first and you will suffer no pain. Pick the second, you will end up bloody. The choice is yours.”
“I have been accused of a crime I did not commit!”
“I repeat: Surrender or die. Those are your only choices.”
“No, sir, I have one other,” Charles shouts. He resumes his flight – toward the dock.
“Stop or we will shoot!” Detective Simms calls.
But the freedman bounds over the railing of the pier like a horse taking a picket in a charge. He seems to hang in the air for a moment then cartwheels thirty feet into the murky waters of the Hudson River, muttering some words, perhaps a plea to Jesus, perhaps a declaration of love for his wife and child, though whatever they might be none of his pursuers can hear.
Fifty feet from the microfiche reader forty-one-year-old Thompson Boyd moved closer to the girl.
He pulled the stocking cap over his face, adjusted the eyeholes and opened the cylinder of his pistol to make sure it wasn’t jammed. He’d checked it earlier but, in this job, you could never be too certain. He put the gun into his pocket and pulled the billy club out of a slit cut into his dark raincoat.
He was in the stacks of books in the costume exhibit hall, which separated him from the microfiche-reader tables. His latex-gloved fingers pressed his eyes, which had been stinging particularly sharply this morning. He blinked from the pain.
He looked around again, making sure the room was in fact deserted.
No guards were here, none downstairs either. No security cameras or sign-in sheets. All good. But there were some logistical problems. The big room was deathly quiet, and Thompson couldn’t hide his approach to the girl. She’d know someone was in the room with her and might become edgy and alert.
So after he’d stepped inside this wing of the library and locked the door behind him, he’d laughed, a chuckle. Thompson Boyd had stopped laughing years ago. But he was also a craftsman who understood the power of humor – and how to use it to your advantage in this line of work. A laugh – coupled with a farewell pleasantry and a closing cell phone – would put her at ease, he reckoned.
This ploy seemed to work. He looked quickly around the long row of shelves and saw the girl, staring at the microfiche screen. Her hands, at her sides, seemed to clench and unclench nervously at what she was reading.
He started forward.
Then stopped. The girl was pushing away from the table. He heard her chair slide on the linoleum. She was walking somewhere. Leaving? No. He heard the sound of the drinking fountain and her gulping some water. Then he heard her pulling books off the shelf and stacking them up on the microfiche table. Another pause and she returned to the stacks once again, gathering more books. The thud as she set them down. Finally he heard the screech of her chair as she sat once more. Then silence.
Thompson looked again. She was back in her chair, reading one of the dozen books piled in front of her.
With the bag containing the condoms, razor knife and duct tape in his left hand, the club in his right, he started toward her again.
Coming up behind her now, twenty feet, fifteen, holding his breath.
Ten feet. Even if she bolted now, he could lunge forward and get her – break a knee or stun her with a blow to the head.
Eight feet, five…
He paused and silently set the rape pack on a shelf. He took the club in both hands. He stepped closer, lifting the varnished oak rod.
Still absorbed in the words, she read intently, oblivious to the fact that her attacker was an arm’s length behind her. Thompson swung the club downward with all his strength toward the top of the girl’s stocking cap.
Crack…
A painful vibration stung his hands as the baton struck her head with a hollow snap.
But something was wrong. The sound, the feel were off. What was going on?
Thompson Boyd leapt back as the body fell to the floor.
And tumbled into pieces.
The torso of the mannequin fell one way. The head another. Thompson stared for a moment. He glanced to his side and saw a ball gown draped over the bottom half of the same mannequin – part of a display on women’s clothing in Reconstruction America.
No…
Somehow, she’d tipped to the fact that he was a threat. She’d then collected some books from the shelves as a cover for standing up and taking apart a mannequin. She’d dressed the upper part of it in her own sweatshirt and stocking cap then propped it on the chair.
But where was she?
The slap of racing feet answered the question. Thompson Boyd heard her sprinting for the fire door. The man slipped the billy club into his coat, pulled out his gun and started after her.
Geneva Settle was running.
Running to escape. Like her ancestor Charles Singleton.
Gasping. Like Charles.
But she was sure she had none of the dignity her ancestor displayed in his flight from the police 140 years ago. Geneva sobbed and screamed for help and stumbled hard into a wall in the frenzy of panic, scraping the back of her hand.
There she go, there she go, the skinny little boy-girl…Get her!
The thought of the elevator terrified her, being trapped. So she chose the fire stairs. Slamming into the door at full speed, she stunned herself, a burst of yellow light in her vision, but the girl kept right on going. She leapt from the landing down to the fourth floor, tugging on the knob. But these were security doors and didn’t open from the stairwell. She’d have to use the door on the ground floor.
She continued down the stairs, gasping for breath. Why? What was he after? she wondered.
Skinny little Oreo bitch got no time fo’ girls like us…
The gun…That’s what’d made her suspicious. Geneva Settle was no gangsta girl, but you couldn’t be a student at Langston Hughes High School in the heart of Harlem without having seen at least a few guns in your life. When she’d heard a distinctive click – very different from the cell phone closing – she wondered if the laughing man was just fronting, here for trouble. So she’d stood casually, gotten a drink of water, ready to bolt. But she’d peeked through the stacks and spotted the ski mask. She realized there was no way to get past him to the door unless she kept him focused on the microfiche table. She’d stacked up some books noisily then stripped a nearby mannequin, dressed it in her hat and sweatshirt and rested it on the chair in front of the microfiche machine. Then she’d waited until he approached and, when he had, she’d slipped around him.
Bust her up, bust the bitch up…
Geneva now stumbled down another flight.
The tap of footsteps above her. Jesus Lord, he was following! He’d slipped into the stairwell after her and was now only one landing away. Half running, half stumbling, cradling her scraped hand, she raced down the stairs as his footsteps grew closer.
Near the ground floor she leapt four steps to the concrete. Her legs went out from underneath her and she slammed into the rough wall. Wincing at the pain, the teenager climbed to her feet, hearing his footsteps, seeing his shadow on the walls.
Geneva looked at the fire door. She gasped at the chain wrapped around the bar.
No, no, no…The chain was illegal, sure. But that didn’t mean the people who ran the museum wouldn’t use one to keep thieves out. Or maybe this man had wrapped it around the bar himself, thinking she might escape this way. Here she was, trapped in a dim concrete pit. But did it actually seal the door?
Only one way to find out. Go, girl!
Geneva pushed off and crashed into the bar.
The door swung open.
Oh, thank -
Suddenly a huge noise filled her ears, pain searing her soul. She screamed. Had she been shot in the head? But she realized it was the door alarm, wailing as shrilly as Keesh’s infant cousins. Then she was in the alley, slamming the door behind her, looking for the best way to go, right, left…
Get her down, cut her, cut the bitch…
She opted for right and staggered into Fifty-fifth Street, slipping into a crowd of people on their way to work, drawing glances of concern from some, wariness from others. Most ignored the girl with the troubled face. Then, from behind her, she heard the howl of the fire alarm grow louder as her attacker shoved the door open. Would he flee, or come after her?
Geneva ran up the street toward Keesh, who stood on the curb, holding a Greek deli coffee carton and trying to light a cigarette in the wind. Her mocha-skinned classmate – with precise purple makeup and a cascade of blonde extensions – was the same age as Geneva, but a head taller and round and taut as a drum, round where she ought to be, with her big boobs and ghetto hips, and then some. The girl had waited on the street, not having any interest in a museum – or any building, for that matter, with a no-smoking policy.
“Gen!” Her friend tossed the coffee cup into the street and ran forward. “S’up, girl? You all buggin’.”
“This man…” Geneva gasped, felt the nausea churn through her. “This guy inside, he attacked me.”
“Shit, no!” Lakeesha looked around. “Where he at?”
“I don’t know. He was behind me.”
“Chill, girl. You gonna be okay. Let’s get outa here. Come on, run!” The big girl – who cut every other P.E. class and had smoked for two years – started to jog as best she could, gasping, arms bouncing at her sides.
But they got only half a block away before Geneva slowed. Then she stopped. “Hold up, girl.”
“Whatchu doing, Gen?”
The panic was gone. It’d been replaced by another feeling.
“Come on, girl,” Keesh said, breathless. “Move yo’ ass.”
Geneva Settle, though, had made up her mind. Anger was what had taken the place of her fear. She thought: He’s goddamn not getting away with it. She turned around, glanced up and down the street. Finally she saw what she was looking for, near the mouth of the alley she’d just escaped from. She started back in that direction.
A block away from the African-American museum Thompson Boyd stopped trotting through the crowd of rush-hour commuters. Thompson was a medium man. In every sense. Medium-shade brown hair, medium weight, medium height, mediumly handsome, mediumly strong. (In prison he’d been known as “Average Joe.”) People tended to see right through him.
But a man running through Midtown draws attention unless he’s heading for a bus, cab or train station. And so he slowed to a casual pace. Soon, he was lost in the crowd, nobody paying him any mind.
While the light at Sixth Avenue and Fifty-third remained red, he debated. Thompson made his decision. He slipped off his raincoat and slung it over his arm, making sure, though, that his weapons were accessible. He turned around and started back toward the museum.
Thompson Boyd was a craftsman who did everything by the book, and it might seem that what he was doing now – returning to the scene of an attack that had just gone bad – was not a wise idea, since undoubtedly the police would be there soon.
But he’d learned that it was times like this, with cops everywhere, that people were lulled into carelessness. You could often get much closer to them than you otherwise might. The medium man now strolled casually through the crowds in the direction of the museum, just another commuter, an Average Joe on his way to work.
It’s nothing less than a miracle.
Somewhere in the brain or the body a stimulus, either mental or physical, occurs – I want to pick up the glass, I have to drop the pan that’s burning my fingers. The stimulus creates a nerve impulse, flowing along the membranes of neurons throughout the body. The impulse isn’t, as most people think, electricity itself; it’s a wave created when the surface of the neurons shifts briefly from a positive charge to a negative. The strength of this impulse never varies – it either exists or it doesn’t – and it’s fast, 250 m.p.h.
This impulse arrives at its destination – muscles, glands and organs, which then respond, keeping our hearts beating, our lungs pumping, our bodies dancing, our hands planting flowers and writing love letters and piloting spacecraft.
A miracle.
Unless something goes wrong. Unless you’re, say, the head of a crime scene unit, searching a murder scene in a subway construction site, and a beam tumbles onto your neck and shatters it at the fourth cervical vertebra – four bones down from the base of the skull. As happened to Lincoln Rhyme some years ago.
When something like that occurs, then all bets are off.
Even if the blow doesn’t sever the spinal cord outright, blood floods the area and pressure builds and crushes or starves the neurons. Compounding the destruction, as the neurons die they release – for some unknown reason – a toxic amino acid, which kills even more. Ultimately, if the patient survives, scar tissue fills the space around the nerves like dirt in a grave – an appropriate metaphor because, unlike neurons in the rest of the body, those in the brain and spinal cord do not regenerate. Once dead, they’re numb forever.
After such a “catastrophic incident,” as the men and women of medicine so delicately put it, some patients – the lucky ones – find that the neurons controlling vital organs like lungs and heart continue to function, and they survive.
Or maybe they’re the unlucky ones.
Because some would rather their heart stopped cold early on, saving them from the infections and bedsores and contractures and spasms. Saving them too from attacks of autonomic dysreflexia, which can lead to a stroke. Saving them from the eerie, wandering phantom pain, which feels just the same as the genuine article but whose searing aches can’t be numbed by aspirin or morphine.
Not to mention an utterly changed life: the physical therapists and the aides and the ventilator and the catheters and the adult diapers, the dependency…and the depression, of course.
Some people in these circumstances just give up and seek out death. Suicide is always an option, though not an easy one. (Try killing yourself if all you can move is your head.)
But others fight back.
“Had enough?” the slim young man in slacks, white shirt and a burgundy floral tie asked Rhyme.
“No,” responded his boss in a voice breathless from the exercise. “I want to keep going.” Rhyme was strapped atop a complicated stationary bicycle, in one of the spare bedrooms on the second floor of his Central Park West town house.
“I think you’ve done enough,” Thom, his aide, said. “It’s been over an hour. Your heart rate’s pretty high.”
“This is like bicycling up the Matterhorn,” Rhyme gasped. “I’m Lance Armstrong.”
“The Matterhorn ’s not part of the Tour de France. It’s a mountain. You can climb it, but you can’t bike it.”
“Thank you for the ESPN trivia, Thom. I wasn’t being literal. How far have I gone?”
“Twenty-two miles.”
“Let’s do another eighteen.”
“I don’t think so. Five.”
“Eight,” Rhyme bargained.
The handsome young aide lifted an acquiescing eyebrow. “Okay.”
Rhyme had wanted eight anyway. He was elated. He lived to win.
The cycling continued. His muscles powered the bicycle, yes, but there was one huge difference between this activity and how you’d pedal a stationary bike at Gold’s Gym. The stimulus that sent the impulse along the neurons came not from Rhyme’s brain but from a computer, via electrodes connected to his leg muscles. The device was known as an FES ergometer bike. Functional electrical stimulation uses a computer, wires and electrodes to mimic the nervous system and send tiny jolts of electricity into muscles, making them behave exactly the same as if the brain were in charge.
FES isn’t much used for day-to-day activity, like walking or using utensils. Its real benefit is in therapy, improving the health of badly disabled patients.
Rhyme had been inspired to start the exercises because of a man he much admired, the late actor Christopher Reeve, who’d suffered an even more severe trauma than Rhyme’s in a horseback-riding accident. Through willpower and unflagging physical effort – and surprising much of the traditional medical community – Reeve had recovered some motor ability and sensation in places where he’d had none. After years of debating whether or not to have risky experimental surgery on his spinal cord, Rhyme had finally opted for an exercise regimen similar to Reeve’s.
The actor’s untimely death had inspired Rhyme to put even more energy than before into an exercise plan, and Thom had tracked down one of the East Coast’s best spinal cord injury doctors, Robert Sherman. The M.D. had put together a program for him, which included the ergometer, aquatherapy and the locomotor treadmill – a large contraption, fitted with robotic legs, also under computer control. This system, in effect, “walked” Rhyme.
All this therapy had produced results. His heart and lungs were stronger. His bone density was that of a nondisabled man of his age. Muscle mass had increased. He was nearly in the same shape as when he’d run Investigation Resources at the NYPD, which oversaw the Crime Scene Unit. Back then he’d walk miles every day, sometimes even running scenes himself – a rarity for a captain – and prowl the streets of the city to collect samples of rocks or dirt or concrete or soot to catalog in his forensic databases.
Because of Sherman ’s exercises Rhyme had fewer pressure sores from the hours and hours his body remained in contact with the chair or bed. His bowel and bladder functions were improved and he’d had far fewer urinary tract infections. And he’d had only one episode of autonomic dysreflexia since he’d started the regimen.
Of course another question remained: Would the months of grueling exercise do something to actually fix his condition, not just beef up the muscles and bone? A simple test of motor and sensory functions would tell him instantly. But that required a visit to a hospital and Rhyme never seemed to find the time to do it.
“You can’t take an hour off?” Thom would ask.
“An hour? An hour? When in recent memory does a trip to the hospital take an hour? Where would that particular hospital be, Thom? Neverland? Oz?”
But Dr. Sherman had finally pestered Rhyme into agreeing to undergo the test. In half an hour he and Thom would be leaving for New York Hospital to get the final word on his progress.
At the moment, though, Lincoln Rhyme was thinking not of that, but of the bicycle race he was presently engaged in – which was on the Matterhorn, thank you very much. And he happened to be beating Lance Armstrong.
When he was finished Thom removed him from the bicycle, bathed then dressed him in a white shirt and dark slacks. A sitting transfer into his wheelchair and Rhyme drove to the tiny elevator. He went downstairs, where red-haired Amelia Sachs sat in the lab, a former living room, marking evidence from one of the NYPD cases that Rhyme was consulting on.
With his one working digit – the left ring finger – on the touch-pad controller, Rhyme deftly maneuvered the bright red Storm Arrow wheelchair through the lab to a spot next to her. She leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back, pressing his lips against hers hard. They remained like this for a moment, Rhyme enjoying the heat of her proximity, the sweet, floral smell of soap, the tease of her hair against his cheek.
“How far’d you get today?” she asked.
“I could be in northern Westchester by now – if I hadn’t been pulled over.” A dark glance at Thom. The aide winked at Sachs. Water off a duck.
Tall, willowy Sachs was wearing a navy blue pantsuit with one of the black or navy blouses that she usually wore since she’d been promoted to detective. (A tactical handbook for officers warned: Wearing a contrasting shirt or blouse presents a clearer target at the chest area.) The outfit was functional and frumpy, a far cry from what she’d worn on the job before she became a cop; Sachs had been a fashion model for a few years. The jacket bulged slightly at the hip, where her Glock automatic pistol rode, and the slacks were men’s; she needed a rear wallet pocket – the only place she felt comfortable stashing her illegal, but often useful, switchblade knife. And, as always, she was wearing sensible, padded-sole shoes. Walking was painful for Amelia Sachs, thanks to arthritis.
“When do we leave?” she asked Rhyme.
“For the hospital? Oh, you don’t have to come. Better to stay here and get the evidence logged in.”
“It’s almost logged. Anyway, it’s not a question of having to come. I want to.”
He muttered, “Circus. It’s becoming a circus. I knew it would.” He tried to lob a blameful look at Thom but the aide was elsewhere.
The doorbell rang. Thom stepped into the hall and returned a moment later, trailed by Lon Sellitto. “Hey, everybody.” The lieutenant, squat and wearing his typically rumpled suit, nodded cheerfully. Rhyme wondered what his good mood was due to. Maybe something to do with a recent arrest or the NYPD budget for new officers or maybe only that he’d lost a few pounds. The detective’s weight was a yo-yo and he complained about it regularly. Given his own situation, Lincoln Rhyme didn’t have any patience when somebody groused about physical imperfections like too much girth or too little hair.
But today it seemed that the detective’s enthusiastic spirit was work related. He waved several documents in the air. “They upheld the conviction.”
“Ah,” Rhyme said. “The shoe case?”
“Yep.”
Rhyme was pleased, of course, though hardly surprised. Why would he be? He’d put together the bulk of the case against the murderer; there was no way the conviction would have collapsed.
It had been an interesting one: Two Balkan diplomats had been murdered on Roosevelt Island – the curious strip of residential land in the middle of the East River – and their right shoes stolen. As often happened when faced with tough cases, the NYPD hired Rhyme on as a consulting criminalist – the au courant jargon for forensic scientist – to help in the investigation.
Amelia Sachs had run the scene, and the evidence had been gathered and analyzed. But the clues had not led them in any obvious directions, and the police were left to conclude that the murders had somehow been inspired by European politics. The case remained open but quiescent for some time – until an FBI memo went around the NYPD about a briefcase abandoned at JFK airport. The case contained articles about global positioning systems, two dozen electronic circuits and a man’s right shoe. The heel had been hollowed out and inside was a computer chip. Rhyme had wondered if it was one of the Roosevelt Island shoes and, sure enough, it was. Other clues in the briefcase led back to the murder scene as well.
Spy stuff…shades of Robert Ludlum. Theories began to circulate immediately and the FBI and the State Department went into overdrive. A man from Langley showed up too, the first time Rhyme could remember the CIA taking an interest in one of his cases.
The criminalist still laughed at the disappointment of the global-conspiracy-loving Feds, when, a week after finding the shoe, Detective Amelia Sachs led a tactical team in a take-down of a businessman from Paramus, New Jersey, a gruff fellow who had at best a USA Today grasp of foreign politics.
Rhyme had proven through moisture and chemical analysis of the composite heel material that the hollowing-out had occurred weeks after the men had been killed. He found too that the computer chip had been purchased from PC Warehouse, and that the GPS information not only wasn’t secret, it had been downloaded from websites that were a year or two out of date.
A staged crime scene, Rhyme had concluded. And went on to trace stone dust in the briefcase to a kitchen and bathroom countertop company in Jersey. A fast look at the phone records of the owner and credit card receipts led to the conclusion that the man’s wife was sleeping with one of the diplomats. Her husband had found out about the liaison and, along with a Tony Soprano wannabe who worked for him in the slab yard, killed her lover and the man’s unfortunate associate on Roosevelt Island, then staged the evidence to make the crime seem politically motivated.
“An affair, yes, though not a diplomatic one,” Rhyme had offered dramatically at the conclusion of his testimony in court. “Undercover action, yes, though not espionage.”
“Objection,” the weary defense lawyer had said.
“Sustained.” Though the judge couldn’t keep from laughing.
The jury took forty-two minutes to convict the businessman. The lawyers had, of course, appealed – they always do – but, as Sellitto had just revealed, the appellate court upheld the conviction.
Thom said, “Say, let’s celebrate the victory with a ride to the hospital. You ready?”
“Don’t push it,” Rhyme grumbled.
It was at that moment that Sellitto’s pager went off. He looked at the screen, frowned and then pulled his cell phone off his belt and made a call.
“Sellitto here. What’s up?…” The big man nodded slowly, his hand absently kneading his belly roll. He’d been trying Atkins lately. Eating a lot of steaks and eggs had apparently not had much effect. “She’s all right?…And the perp?…Yeah…That’s not good. Hold on.” He looked up. “A ten twenty-four call just came in. That African-American museum on Five-five? The vic was a young girl. Teenager. Attempted rape.”
Amelia Sachs winced at this news, exuding sympathy. Rhyme had a different reaction; his mind automatically wondered: How many crime scenes were there? Did the perp chase her and possibly drop evidence? Did they grapple, exchanging trace? Did he take public transportation to and from the scene? Or was a car involved?
Another thought crossed his mind as well, one that he had no intention of sharing, however.
“Injuries?” Sachs asked.
“Scraped hand is all. She got away and found a uniform on patrol nearby. He checked it out but the beast was gone by then…So, can you guys run the scene?”
Sachs looked at Rhyme. “I know what you’re going to say: that we’re busy.”
The entire NYPD was feeling a crunch. Many officers had been pulled off regular detail and assigned to anti-terrorism duty, which was particularly hectic lately; the FBI had gotten several anonymous reports about possible bombings of Israeli targets in the area. (The reassignments reminded Rhyme of Sachs’s stories her grandfather would tell about life in prewar Germany. Grandpa Sachs’s father-in-law had been a criminal police detective in Berlin and was constantly losing his personnel to the national government whenever a crisis arose.) Because of the diverted resources, Rhyme was busier than he’d been in months. He and Sachs were presently running two white-collar fraud investigations, one armed robbery and a cold-case murder from three years ago.
“Yep, really busy,” Rhyme summarized.
“Either rains or it pours,” Sellitto said. He frowned. “I don’t quite get that expression.”
“Believe that’s ‘Never rains but it pours.’ A statement of irony.” Rhyme cocked his head. “Love to help. I mean it. But we’ve got all those other cases. And, look at the time, I have an appointment now. At the hospital.”
“Come on, Linc,” Sellitto said. “Nothing else you’re working on’s like this – the vic’s a kid. That’s one bad actor, going after teenagers. Take him off the street and who knows how many girls we’ll save. You know the city – doesn’t matter what else is going on. Some beast starts going after kids, the brass’ll give you whatever you need to nail him.”
“But that’d make it five cases,” Rhyme said petulantly. He let the silence build up. Then, reluctantly, he asked, “How old is she?”
“Sixteen, for Christ’s sake. Come on, Linc.”
A sigh. He finally said, “Oh, all right. I’ll do it.”
“You will?” Sellitto asked, surprised.
“Everybody thinks I’m disagreeable,” Rhyme scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Everybody thinks I’m the wet blanket – there’s another cliché for you, Lon. I was just pointing out that we have to consider priorities. But I think you’re right. This’s more important.”
It was the aide who asked, “Your helpful nature have anything to do with the fact you’ll have to postpone your hospital visit?”
“Of course not. I didn’t even think about that. But now you mention it, I guess we better cancel. Good idea, Thom.”
“It isn’t my idea – you engineered it.”
True, he was thinking. But he now asked indignantly, “Me? You make it sound like I’ve been attacking people in Midtown.”
“You know what I mean,” Thom said. “You can have the test and be back before Amelia’s through with the crime scene.”
“There might be delays at the hospital. Why do I even say ‘might’? Always are.”
Sachs said, “I’ll call Dr. Sherman and reschedule.”
“Cancel, sure. But don’t reschedule. We have no idea how long this could take. The perp might be an organized offender.”
“I’ll reschedule,” she said.
“Let’s plan on two, three weeks.”
“I’ll see when he’s available,” Sachs said firmly.
But Lincoln Rhyme could be as stubborn as his partner. “We’ll worry about that later. Now, we’ve got a rapist out there. Who knows what he’s up to at the moment? Probably targeting somebody else. Thom, call Mel Cooper and get him in here. Let’s move. Every minute we delay is a gift to the perp. Hey, how’s that expression, Lon? The genesis of a cliché – and you were there.”
Instinct.
Portables – beat cops – develop a sixth sense for knowing when somebody’s concealing a gun. Veterans on the force’ll tell you it’s really nothing more than the way the suspect carries himself – less a matter of a pistol’s heaviness in pounds than the weight of consequences of having it close to you. The power it gives you.
The risk of getting caught too. Carrying an unlicensed weapon in New York comes with a Cracker Jack prize: an automatic stint in jail. You carry concealed, you do time. Simple as that.
No, Amelia Sachs couldn’t say exactly how she understood it, but she knew that the man leaning against a wall across the street from the Museum of African-American Culture and History was armed. Smoking a cigarette, arms crossed, he gazed at the police line, the flashing lights, the officers.
As she approached the scene Sachs was greeted by a blond NYPD uniform – so young he had to be a rookie. He said, “Hi, there. I was the first officer. I -”
Sachs smiled and whispered, “Don’t look at me. Keep your eyes on that garbage pile up the street.”
The rookie looked at her, blinked. “Sorry?”
“Garbage,” she repeated in a harsh whisper. “Not me.”
“Sorry, Detective,” said the young man, who sported a trim haircut and a nameplate on his chest that read R. Pulaski. The tag had not a single ding or scratch on it.
Sachs pointed to the trash. “Shrug.”
He shrugged.
“Come on with me. Keep watching it.”
“Is there -?”
“Smile.”
“I -”
“How many cops does it take to change a lightbulb?” Sachs asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How many?”
“I don’t know either. It’s not a joke. But laugh like I just told you a great punch line.”
He laughed. A little nervous. But it was a laugh.
“Keep watching it.”
“The trash?”
Sachs unbuttoned her suit jacket. “Now we’re not laughing. We’re concerned about the garbage.”
“Why -?”
“Ahead.”
“Right. I’m not laughing. I’m looking at the trash.”
“Good.”
The man with the gun kept lounging against a building. He was in his forties, solid, with razor-cut hair. She now saw the bulge at his hip, which told her it was a long pistol, probably a revolver, since it seemed to swell out where the cylinder would be. “Here’s the situation,” she said softly to the rookie. “Man on our two o’clock. He’s carrying.”
Bless him, the rookie – with spiky little-boy hair as shiny beige as caramel – kept looking at the garbage. “The perp? You think it’s the perp in the assault?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. I care about the fact that he’s carrying.”
“What do we do?”
“Keep on going. We pass him, watching the garbage. Decide we’re not interested. Head back toward the scene. You slow up and ask me if I want coffee. I say yes. You go around to his right. He’ll keep his eyes on me.”
“Why will he watch you?”
Refreshing naiveté. “He just will. You double back. Get close to him. Make a little noise, clear your throat or something. He’ll turn. Then I’ll come up behind him.”
“Sure, I’ve got it…Should I, you know, draw down on him?”
“No. Just let him know you’re there and stand behind him.”
“What if he pulls his gun?”
“Then you draw down on him.”
“What if he starts to shoot?”
“I don’t think he will.”
“But if he does?”
“Then you shoot him. What’s your first name?”
“Ronald. Ron.”
“How long you out?”
“Three weeks.”
“You’ll do fine. Let’s go.”
They walked to the garbage pile, concerned. But then they decided it was no threat and started back. Pulaski stopped suddenly. “Hey, how ’bout some coffee, Detective?”
Overacting – he’d never be a guest on Inside the Actor’s Studio – but all things considered it was a credible performance. “Sure, thanks.”
He doubled back then paused. Shouted: “How do you like it?”
“Uhm, sugar,” she said.
“How many sugars?”
Jesus Lord…She said, “One.”
“Got it. Hey, you want a Danish too?”
Okay, cool it, her eyes told him. “Just coffee’s fine.” She turned toward the crime scene, sensing the man with the gun study her long red hair, tied in a ponytail. He glanced at her chest, then her butt.
Why will he watch you?
He just will.
Sachs continued toward the museum. She glanced in a window across the street, checking out the reflection. When the smoker’s eyes swiveled back toward Pulaski she turned quickly and approached, jacket pulled aside like a gunfighter’s dust coat so she could get her Glock out fast if she needed to.
“Sir,” she said firmly. “Please keep your hands where I can see them.”
“Do as the lady says.” Pulaski stood on the other side of the guy, hand near his weapon.
The man glanced at Sachs. “That was pretty smooth, Officer.”
“Just don’t move those hands. Are you carrying a weapon?”
“Yeah,” the man replied, “and it’s bigger than what I used to carry in the Three Five.”
The numbers referred to a precinct house. He was a former cop.
Probably.
“Working security?”
“That’s right.”
“Let me see your ticket. With your left hand, you don’t mind. Keep your right where it is.”
He pulled out his wallet and handed it to her. His carry permit and security guard’s license were in order. Still, she called it in and checked out the guy. He was legit. “Thanks.” Sachs relaxed, handing him back the papers.
“Not a problem, Detective. You got yourself some scene here, looks like.” Nodding toward the squad cars blocking the street in front of the museum.
“We’ll see.” Noncommittal.
The guard put the wallet away. “I was Patrol for twelve years. Retired on a medical and was going stir crazy.” He nodded at the building behind him. “You’ll see a couple other guys carrying round here. This’s one of the biggest jewelry operations in the city. It’s an annex for the American Jewelry Exchange in the diamond district. We get a couple million bucks’ worth of stones from Amsterdam and Jerusalem every day.”
She glanced at the building. Didn’t look very imposing, just like any other office building.
He laughed. “I thought it’d be a piece of cake, this job, but I work as hard here as when I was on a beat. Well, good luck with the scene. Wish I could help, but I got here after the excitement.” He turned to the rookie and said, “Hey, kid.” He nodded toward Sachs. “On the job, in front of people, you don’t call her ‘lady.’ She’s ‘Detective.’”
The rookie looked at him uneasily but she could see he got the message – one that Sachs herself had been going to deliver when they were out of earshot.
“Sorry,” Pulaski said to her.
You didn’t know. Now you do.
Which could be the motto of police training everywhere.
They turned to go. The guard called, “Oh, hey, rookie?”
Pulaski turned.
“You forgot the coffee.” Grinned.
At the entrance to the museum Lon Sellitto was surveying the street and talking to a sergeant. The big detective looked at the kid’s name tag and asked, “Pulaski, you were first officer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’sa story?”
The kid cleared his throat and pointed to an alley. “I was positioned across the street, roughly there, on routine patrol. At about oh-eight-thirty the victim, an African-American female, sixteen years of age, approached me and reported that -”
“You can just tell it in your own words,” Sachs said.
“Sure. Okay. What it was, I was standing right about there and this girl comes up to me, all upset. Her name’s Geneva Settle, junior in high school. She was working on a term paper or something on the fifth floor.” Pointing to the museum. “And this guy attacks her. White, six feet, wearing a ski mask. Was going to rape her.”
“You know that how?” Sellitto asked.
“I found his rape pack upstairs.”
“You looked in it?” Sachs asked, frowning.
“With a pen. That’s all. I didn’t touch it.”
“Good. Go on.”
“The girl gets away, comes down the fire stairs and into the alley. He’s after her, but he turns the other way.”
“Anybody see what happened to him?” Sellitto asked.
“No, sir.”
He looked over the street. “You set up the press perimeter?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it’s fifty feet too close. Get ’em the hell away. Press’re like leeches. Remember that.”
“Sure, Detective.”
You didn’t know. Now you do.
He hurried off and started moving the line back.
“Where’s the girl?” Sachs asked.
The sergeant, a solid Hispanic man with thick, graying hair, said, “An officer took her and her friend to Midtown North. They’re calling her parents.” Sharp autumn sunlight reflected off his many gold decorations. “After they get in touch with them, somebody was going to take ’ em to Captain Rhyme ’s place to interview her.” He laughed. “She’s a smart one. Know what she did?”
“What?”
“She had an idea there might be some trouble, so she dressed up this mannequin in her sweatshirt and hat. The perp went after that. Bought her time to get away.”
Sachs laughed. “And she’s only sixteen? Smart.”
Sellitto said to her, “You run the scene. I’m going to get a canvass going.” He wandered up the sidewalk to a cluster of officers – one uniform and two Anti-Crime cops in dress-down plain clothes – and sent them around the crowd and into nearby stores and office buildings to check for witnesses. He rounded up a separate team to interview each of the half dozen pushcart vendors here, some selling coffee and doughnuts at the moment, others setting up for lunches of hot dogs, pretzels, gyros and falafel pita-bread sandwiches.
A honk sounded and she turned. The CS bus had arrived from the Crime Scene Unit HQ in Queens.
“Hey, Detective,” the driver said, getting out.
Sachs nodded a greeting to him and his partner. She knew the young men from prior cases. She pulled off her jacket and weapon, dressed in white Tyvek overalls, which minimized contamination of the scene. She then strapped her Glock back on her hip, thinking of Rhyme’s constant admonition to his CS crews: Search well but watch your back.
“Give me a hand with the bags?” she asked, hefting one of the metal suitcases containing basic evidence-collection and -transport equipment.
“You bet.” A CSU tech grabbed two of the other cases.
She pulled on a hands-free headset and plugged it into her Handi-Talkie just as Ron Pulaski returned from his press push-back duty. He led Sachs and the Crime Scene officers into the building. They got off the elevator on the fifth floor and walked to the right, to double doors below a sign that said, Booker T. Washington Room.
“That’s the scene in there.”
Sachs and the techs opened the suitcases, started removing equipment. Pulaski continued, “I’m pretty sure he came through these doors. The only other exit is the fire stairwell and you can’t enter from the outside, and it wasn’t jimmied. So, he comes through this door, locks it and then goes after the girl. She escaped through the fire door.”
“Who unlocked the front one for you?” Sachs asked.
“Guy named Don Barry, head librarian.”
“He go in with you?”
“No.”
“Where is he now?”
“His office – third floor. I wondered if maybe it was an inside job, you know? So I asked him for a list of all his white male employees and where they were when she was attacked.”
“Good.” Sachs had been planning to do the same.
“He said he’d bring the list down to us as soon as he was done.”
“Now, tell me what I’ll find inside.”
“The girl was at the microfiche reader. It’s around the corner to the right. You’ll see it easy.” Pulaski pointed to the end of a large room filled with tall rows of bookshelves, beyond which was an open area where Sachs could see mannequins dressed in period clothing, paintings, cases of antique jewelry, purses, shoes, accessories – your typical dusty museum displays, the sort of stuff you look at while you’re really wondering what restaurant to eat at after you’ve had enough culture.
“What’s security like around here?” Sachs was looking for surveillance cameras on the ceiling.
“Zip. No cameras. No guards, no sign-in sheets. You just walk in.”
“Never easy, is it?”
“No, ma’…No, Detective.”
She thought about telling him that “ma’am” was okay, not like “lady,” but didn’t know how to explain the distinction. “One question. Did you close the fire door downstairs?”
“No, I left it just the way I found it. Open.”
“So the scene could be hot.”
“Hot?”
“The perp could’ve come back.”
“I…”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Pulaski. I just want to know.”
“Well, I guess he could’ve, yeah.”
“All right, you stay in the doorway here. I want you to listen.”
“For what?”
“Well, the guy shooting at me, for instance. But probably better if you heard footsteps or somebody racking a shotgun first.”
“Watch your back, you’re saying?”
She winked. And started forward to the scene.
So, she’s Crime Scene, thought Thompson Boyd, watching the woman walk back and forth in the library, studying the floor, looking for fingerprints and clues and whatever it was they looked for. He wasn’t concerned about what she might find. He’d been careful, as always.
Thompson was standing in the sixth-floor window of the building across Fifty-fifth Street from the museum. After the girl got away, he’d circled around two blocks and made his way into this building, then climbed the stairs to the hallway from which he was now looking over the street.
He’d had a second chance to kill the girl a few minutes ago; she’d been on the street for a moment, talking to officers, in front of the museum. But there were way too many police around for him to shoot her and get away. Still he’d been able to take a picture of her with the camera in his mobile phone before she and her friend had been hustled off to a squad car, which sped west. Besides, Thompson still had more to do here, and so he’d taken up this vantage point.
From his prison days Thompson knew a lot about law enforcers. He could easily spot the lazy ones, the scared ones, the ones who were stupid and gullible. He could also spot the talented cops, the smart ones, the ones who were a threat.
Like the woman he was looking at right now.
As he put drops in his perpetually troubled eyes, Thompson found himself curious about her. As she searched the scene she had this concentration in her eyes, looking sort of devout, the same look Thompson’s mother sometimes used to get in church.
She disappeared from view but, whistling softly, Thompson kept his eyes on the window. Finally the woman in white returned to view. He noted the precision with which she did everything, the careful way she walked, her delicate touch as she picked up and examined things so as not to hurt the evidence. Another man might’ve been turned on by her beauty, her figure; even through the jumpsuit, it was easy to imagine what her body was like. But those thoughts, like usual, were far from his mind. Still, he believed he sensed some small enjoyment inside him as he watched her at work.
Something from his past came back to him… He frowned, looking at her walking back and forth, back and forth…Yes, that was it. The pattern reminded him of the sidewinder rattlesnakes his father would point out when they were hunting together or going for walks in the Texas sand near the family trailer, outside Amarillo.
Look at them, son. Look. Ain’t they something? But don’t you get too close. They’ll kill you in a kiss.
He leaned against the wall and continued to study the woman in white, moving back and forth, back and forth.
“How does it look, Sachs?”
“Good,” she replied to Rhyme, via their radio connection.
She was just finishing walking the grid – the word referring to a method of searching a crime scene: examining it the way you’d mow a lawn, walking from one end of the site to the other then returning, slightly to the side. And then doing the same once more, but the second time walking perpendicular to the first search. Looking up and down too, floor to ceiling. This way, no inch or angle was left unseen. There are a number of ways to search crime scenes but Rhyme always insisted on this one.
“‘Good’ means what?” he asked testily. Rhyme didn’t like generalizations, or what he called “soft” assessments.
“He forgot the rape pack,” she replied. Since the Motorola link between Rhyme and Sachs was mostly a means to bring his surrogate presence to crime scenes, they usually dispensed with the NYPD conventions of radio protocol, like ending each transmission with a K
“Did he now? Might be as good as his wallet for ID’ing him. What’s he got in his?”
“Little weird, Rhyme. It’s got the typical duct tape, box cutter, condoms. But there’s also a tarot card. Picture of this guy hanging from a scaffold.”
“Wonder if he’s a genuine sicko, or just a copycat?” Rhyme mused. Over the years many killers had left tarot cards and other occult memorabilia at crime scenes – the most notable recent case being the Washington, D.C., snipers of several years earlier.
Sachs continued, “The good news is that he kept everything in a nice slick plastic bag.”
“Excellent.” While perps might think to wear gloves at the crime scene itself, they often forgot about prints on the items they carried with them to commit that crime. A discarded condom wrapper had convicted many a rapist who’d otherwise been compulsive about not leaving his prints or bodily fluids at a scene. In this case, even if the killer thought to clean off the tape, knife and condoms, it was possible that he’d forgotten to wipe the bag.
She now placed the pack in a paper evidence bag – paper was generally better than plastic for preserving evidence – and set it aside. “He left it on a bookshelf near where the girl was sitting. I’m checking for latents.” She dusted the shelves with fluorescent powder, donned orange goggles and shone an alternative light source on the area. ALS lamps reveal markings like blood, semen and fingerprints that are otherwise invisible. Playing the light up and down, she transmitted, “No prints. But I can see he’s wearing latex gloves.”
“Ah, that’s good. For two reasons.” Rhyme’s voice had a professorial tone. He was testing her.
Two? she wondered. One came immediately to mind: If they were able to recover the glove they could lift a print from inside the fingers (something else perps often forgot). But the second?
She asked him.
“Obvious. It means he’s probably got a record, so when we do find a print, AFIS’ll tell us who he is.” State-based automated fingerprint identification systems and the FBI’s Integrated AFIS were computer databases that could provide print matches in minutes, as opposed to days or even weeks with manual examinations.
“Sure,” Sachs said, troubled that she’d blown the quiz.
“What else rates the assessment ‘good’?”
“They waxed the floor last night.”
“And the attack happened early this morning. So you’ve got a good canvas for his footprints.”
“Yep. There’re some distinct ones here.” Kneeling, she took an electrostatic image of the print of the man’s tread marks. She was sure they were his; she could clearly see the trail where he’d walked up to Geneva’s table, adjusted his stance to get a good grip on the club to strike her and then chased her down the hall. She’d also compared the prints with those of the only other man who’d been here this morning: those of Ron Pulaski, whose mirror-shined issue shoes left a very different impression.
She explained about the girl’s using the mannequin to distract the killer and escape. He chuckled at her ingenuity. She added, “Rhyme, he hit her – well, the mannequin – really hard. A blunt object. So hard he cracked the plastic through her stocking cap. Then he must’ve been mad she fooled him. He smashed the microfiche reader too.”
“Blunt object,” Rhyme repeated. “Can you lift an impression?”
When he was head of the Crime Scene Unit at the NYPD, before his accident, Rhyme had compiled a number of database files to help identify evidence and impressions found at scenes. The blunt object file contained hundreds of pictures of impact marks left on skin and inanimate surfaces by various types of objects – from tire irons to human bones to ice. But after carefully examining both the mannequin and the smashed microfiche reader, Sachs said, “No, Rhyme. I don’t see any. The cap Geneva put on the mannequin -”
“ Geneva?”
“That’s her name.”
“Oh. Go on.”
She was momentarily irritated – as she often was – that he hadn’t expressed any interest in knowing anything about the girl or her state of mind. It often troubled her that Rhyme was so detached about the crime and the victims. This, he said, was how a criminalist needed to be. You didn’t want pilots so awed by a beautiful sunset or so terrified of a thunderstorm that they flew into a mountain, the same was true with cops. She saw his point but to Amelia Sachs victims were human beings, and crimes were not scientific exercises; they were horrific events. Especially when the victim was a sixteen-year-old girl.
She continued, “The cap she put on the mannequin dispersed the force of the blow. And the microfiche reader’s shattered too.”
Rhyme said, “Well, bring back some of the pieces of what he hit. There might be some transfer there.”
“Sure.”
There were some voices in the background at Rhyme’s. He said in an odd, troubled tone, “Finish up and get back here soon, Sachs.”
“I’m almost done,” she told him. “I’m going to walk the grid at the escape route… Rhyme, what’s the matter?”
Silence. When he spoke next he sounded even more bothered. “I have to go, Sachs. It seems I have some visitors.”
“Who -?”
But he’d already disconnected.
The woman in white, the pro, had disappeared from the window of the library.
But Thompson Boyd wasn’t interested in her anymore. From his perch sixty feet above the street he was now watching an older cop, walking toward some witnesses. The man was middle-aged, heavy and in a God-wrinkled suit. Thompson knew this sort of officer too. He wasn’t brilliant but he’d be like the bulldog he resembled. There was nothing that would stop him from getting to the heart of a case.
When the fat cop nodded toward another man, a tall black man in a brown suit, walking out of the museum, Thompson left his vantage point and hurried downstairs. Pausing at the ground floor, he took his pistol out of his pocket and checked it to make sure nothing had become lodged in the barrel or cylinder. He wondered if it had been this – the sound of opening and closing the cylinder in the library – that had alerted the girl that he was a threat.
Now, even though nobody seemed to be nearby, he checked the pistol absolutely silently.
Learn from your mistakes.
By the book.
The gun was in order. Hiding it under his coat, Thompson walked down the dim stairway and exited through the far lobby, on Fifty-sixth Street, then stepped into an alley that took him back toward the museum.
There was no one guarding the entrance to the other end of the alley at Fifty-fifth. Undetected, Thompson eased up to a battered green Dumpster, stinking of rotting food. He looked into the street. It had been reopened to traffic but several dozen people from offices and shops nearby remained on the sidewalks, hoping for a look at something exciting to tell their office-mates and families about. Most of the police had left. The woman in white – the kissing snake – was still upstairs. Outside were two squad cars and a Crime Scene Unit van, as well as three uniformed cops, two plainclothes ones and that fat, rumpled detective.
Thompson gripped the gun firmly. Shooting was a very ineffective way to kill someone. But sometimes, like now, there was no option. If you had to shoot, procedures dictated you aimed for the heart. Never the head. The skull was solid enough to deflect a bullet in many circumstances, and the cranium was also relatively small and hard to hit.
Always the chest.
Thompson’s keen, blue eyes looked over the heavy cop in the wrinkled suit, as he glanced at a piece of paper.
Calm as dead wood, Thompson rested the gun on his left forearm, aimed carefully with a steady hand. He fired four fast shots.
The first one hit the thigh of a woman standing on the sidewalk.
The others struck his intended victim just where he’d aimed. The three tiny dots appeared in the center of his chest; they’d become three rosettes of blood by the time the body hit the ground.
Two girls stood in front of him and, though their physiques were totally opposite, it was the difference in their eyes that Lincoln Rhyme noticed first.
The heavy one – dressed in gaudy clothes and shiny jewelry, her fingernails long and orange – had eyes that danced like skittish insects. Unable to look at Rhyme, or anything else, for more than a second, she made a dizzying visual circuit of his lab: the scientific instruments, the beakers, chemicals, the computers and monitors, wires everywhere. At Rhyme’s legs and his wheelchair, of course. She chewed gum loudly.
The other girl, short, skinny and boyish, had a stillness about her. She gazed at Lincoln Rhyme steadily. One fast glance at the wheelchair, then back to him. The lab didn’t interest her.
“This’s Geneva Settle,” explained the calm patrolwoman, Jennifer Robinson, nodding at the slim girl, the one with the unwavering eyes. Robinson was a friend of Amelia Sachs, who’d arranged for her to drive the girls here from the Midtown North house.
“And this’s her friend,” Robinson continued, “Lakeesha Scott. Lose the gum, Lakeesha.”
The girl gave a beleaguered look but stuffed the wad somewhere in her large purse, without bothering to wrap it.
The patrolwoman said, “She and Geneva went to the museum together this morning.”
“Only I didn’t see nothing,” Lakeesha said preemptively. Was the big girl nervous because of the attack, he wondered, or was she uncomfortable because Rhyme was a crip? Both probably.
Geneva was dressed in a gray T-shirt and black baggy pants and running shoes, which Rhyme guessed was the fashion among high school students nowadays. Sellitto had said the girl was sixteen but she looked younger. While Lakeesha’s hair was done in a mass of thin gold and black braids, tied so taut that her scalp showed, Geneva’s was cropped short.
“I told the girls who you are, Captain,” Robinson explained, using the title that was some years out of date. “And that you’re going to ask them some questions about what happened. Geneva wants to get back to her school but I said she’d have to wait.”
“I have some tests,” Geneva said.
Lakeesha tsked a sound through her white teeth.
Robinson continued, “Geneva’s parents are out of the country. But they’re getting the next flight back. Her uncle’s been staying with her while they’ve been away.”
“Where are they?” Rhyme asked. “Your parents?”
“My father’s teaching a symposium at Oxford.”
“He’s a professor?”
She nodded. “Literature. At Hunter.”
Rhyme chided himself for being surprised that a young girl from Harlem would have intellectual, globe-trotting parents. He was angry for stereotyping but mostly piqued that he’d made a flawed deduction. True, she was decked out like a gangsta but he might’ve guessed she had academic roots; she’d been attacked during an early-morning visit to a library, not hanging out on the street corner or watching TV before school.
Lakeesha fished a package of cigarettes out of her purse.
Rhyme began, “There’s no -”
Thom walked through the doorway. “- smoking in here.” He lifted the pack away from the girl and stuffed it back into her bag. Unfazed that two teenagers had suddenly materialized on his watch, Thom smiled. “Soft drinks?”
“You got coffee?” Lakeesha asked.
“I do, yes.” Thom glanced at Jennifer Robinson and Rhyme, who shook their heads.
“I like it strong,” the big girl announced.
“Do you?” Thom asked. “So do I.” To Geneva: “Anything for you?”
The girl shook her head.
Rhyme glanced longingly at the bottle of scotch sitting on a shelf nearby. Thom noticed and laughed. The aide disappeared. To Rhyme’s distress, Patrolwoman Robinson said, “I’ve got to get back to the house, sir.”
“Ah, you do?” Rhyme asked, dismayed. “You sure you couldn’t stay a little longer?”
“Can’t, sir. But you need anything else, just gimme a call.”
How about a babysitter?
Rhyme didn’t believe in fate but, if he had, he would have noted a deft jab here: he’d taken on the case to avoid the test at the hospital and now was being paid back for the deception by suffering through an immensely awkward half hour or so in the company of two high school girls. Young people were not his forte.
“So long, Captain.” Robinson walked out the door.
He muttered, “Yeah.”
Thom returned a few minutes later with a tray. He poured a cup of coffee for Lakeesha and handed Geneva a mug, which, Rhyme smelled, contained hot chocolate.
“I took a guess you’d like something anyway,” the aide said. “You don’t want it, you can leave it.”
“No, that’s fine. Thanks.” Geneva stared at the hot surface. Took a sip, another, lowered the cup and gazed at the floor. Took several more sips.
“You’re all right?” Rhyme asked.
Geneva nodded.
“I am too,” Lakeesha said.
“He attacked both of you?” Rhyme asked.
“Naw, not me.” Lakeesha looked him over. “You like that actor broke his neck?” She slurped her coffee, added more sugar. Slurped again.
“That’s right.”
“An’ you can’t move nothin’?”
“Not much.”
“Damn.”
“Keesh,” Geneva whispered. “Chill, girl.”
“Just, you know, damn.”
Silence again. Only eight minutes had passed since they’d arrived. It seemed like hours. What should he do? Have Thom run out and buy a board game?
There were, of course, questions that had to be asked. But Rhyme was reluctant to do so himself. Interviewing and interrogation were skills he didn’t possess. When he was on the force he’d questioned suspects maybe a dozen times, and had never had one of those oh-Jesus moments when the grillee broke down and confessed. Sachs, on the other hand, was a natural at the art. She warned rookies that you could blow an entire case with a single wrong word. She called it “contaminating the mind,” the counterpart to Rhyme’s number-one sin: contaminating a crime scene.
Lakeesha asked, “How you move round in that chair?”
“Shhh,” Geneva warned.
“I only askin’.”
“Well, don’t.”
“Ain’t no harm in asking nothin’.”
Lakeesha had lost her skittishness completely now. Rhyme decided she was actually pretty savvy. She acts uneasy at first, making it seem like she’s naive, vulnerable, that you have the advantage, but all the while she’s sizing things up. Once she’s got a handle on the situation, she knows whether or not to trot out the bluster.
In fact, Rhyme was thankful for something to make conversation about. He explained about the ECU, the environmental control unit, how the touch pad under his left ring finger could direct the movement and speed of the wheelchair.
“One finger?” Keesha glanced at one of her orange nails. “That all you can move?”
“That’s right. Other than my head and shoulders.”
“Mr. Rhyme,” Geneva said, looking at a red Swatch, which sat large and obvious on her thin wrist, “about those tests? The first one’s in a couple of hours. How long’ll this be?”
“School?” Rhyme asked, surprised. “Oh, you can stay home today, I’m sure. After what happened, your teachers’ll understand.”
“Well, I don’t really want to stay home. I need to take the tests.”
“Yo, yo, girl, time out. Here the man say you can take a pass, all one hundred percent phat, and you sayin’ no. Come on. That wack.”
Geneva looked up into her friend’s eyes. “And you’re taking your tests too. You’re not skipping.”
“It ain’t skippin’, you got a pass,” the big girl pointed out with flawless logic.
Rhyme’s phone rang and he was grateful for the interruption.
“Command, answer phone,” he said into the hands-free microphone.
“Def!” Lakeesha said, lifting her eyebrows. “Look at that, Gen. I want one of them.”
Eyes narrowing, Geneva whispered something to her friend, who rolled her eyes and slurped more coffee.
“Rhyme,” Sachs’s voice said.
“They’re here, Sachs,” Rhyme said in a brittle voice. “ Geneva and her friend. And I’m hoping you’re -”
“Rhyme,” she repeated. It was a particular tone. Something was wrong.
“What is it?”
“The scene was hot, after all.”
“He was there?”
“Yep. Never left. Or doubled back.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t me he was after.”
“What happened?”
“Got up close, into an alley. Fired four shots. He wounded a bystander…and he killed a witness. His name was Don Barry. He was in charge of the library at the museum. He took three rounds in the heart. Died instantly.”
“You’re sure the shooter’s the same?”
“Yep. The shoe prints I found from his shooting position match the ones in the library. Lon was just starting to interview him. He was standing right in front of him when it happened.”
“He get a look at the doer?”
“Nope. Nobody did. He was hiding behind a Dumpster. Couple of the uniforms on the scene went to work on the woman to save her. She had a major bleeder. He got away in the crowd. Just disappeared.”
“Somebody take care of the details?”
Calling the next of kin. Details.
“Lon was going to make the calls but he had phone problems or something. There was a sergeant on the scene. He did it.”
“All right, Sachs, come on back with what you’ve found… Command, disconnect.” He looked up and found the two girls staring at him.
He explained, “It looks like the man who attacked you didn’t leave, after all. Or he came back. He killed the head librarian and -”
“Mr. Barry?” A gasp from Geneva Settle. She stopped moving, simply froze.
“That’s right.”
“Shit,” Lakeesha whispered. She closed her eyes and shivered.
A moment later Geneva’s mouth tightened and she looked down. She set the cocoa on a table. “No, no…”
“I’m sorry,” Rhyme said. “Was he a friend of yours?”
She shook her head. “Not really. He was just helping me with my paper.” Geneva sat forward in her chair. “But it doesn’t matter if he was a friend or not. He’s dead – that’s so terrible.” She whispered angrily, “Why? Why did he do it?”
“He was a witness, I’d guess. He could identify the man who attacked you.”
“So he’s dead because of me.”
Rhyme muttered some words to her, no, how could it be her fault? She didn’t plan on being attacked. It was just bad luck for Barry. Wrong time, wrong place.
But the reassurance had no effect on the girl. Her face grew taut, her eyes cold. Rhyme didn’t have a clue what to do next. It wasn’t enough that he had to endure the presence of teenagers – now he had to comfort them, get their minds off this tragedy. He wheeled closer to the girls and pushed his patience to its limit by making small talk.
An endless twenty minutes later, Sachs and Sellitto arrived at Rhyme’s, accompanied by a young, blond patrol officer named Pulaski.
Sellitto explained that he’d requisitioned the kid to cart the evidence back to Rhyme’s and help with the investigation. Clearly a rookie, he had “eager” written on his smooth forehead. He’d obviously been briefed about the criminalist’s disability; he was overly oblivious to the fact that the man was paralyzed. Rhyme hated these fake reactions. He infinitely preferred Lakeesha’s brashness.
Just, you know, damn…
The two detectives greeted the girls. Pulaski looked them over sympathetically and asked in a kid-friendly voice how they were doing. Rhyme noted a nicked wedding ring on his finger and deduced a high school marriage; only having children of your own could produce this kind of look.
Lakeesha answered, “Messed up is what I be. Buggin’…Some asshole tryin’ to bust up my girlfriend. Whatta you think?”
Geneva said she was doing all right.
“I understand you’re staying with a relative?” Sachs asked.
“My uncle. He’s living at our place till my folks get back from London.”
Rhyme happened to look at Lon Sellitto. Something was wrong. He’d changed dramatically in the past two hours. The boisterous mood had vanished. His eyes were spooked and he was fidgety. Rhyme noticed too that his fingers repeatedly touched a particular spot on his cheek. He’d rubbed it red.
“Get dinged by some lead?” Rhyme asked, recalling that the detective had been right next to the librarian when the perp had shot him. Maybe Sellitto had been hit by a bullet fragment or bit of stone if a slug had passed through Barry and struck a building.
“What?” Then Sellitto realized he’d been rubbing his skin and dropped his hand. He said in a soft voice, so the girls couldn’t hear, “I was pretty close to the vic. Got spattered by some blood. That’s all. Nothing.”
But a moment later he absently started the rubbing again.
The gesture reminded Rhyme of Sachs, who had the habit of scratching her scalp and worrying her nails. The compulsion came and went, linked somehow to her drive, her ambition, the indefinable churning inside most cops. Police officers hurt themselves in a hundred different ways. The harm ranged from the minor inflictions of Sachs’s, to destroying marriages and children’s spirits with harsh words, to closing your lips around the tangy barrel of your service pistol. He’d never seen it in Lon Sellitto, though.
Geneva asked Sachs, “There was no mistake?”
“Mistake?”
“About Dr. Barry.”
“I’m sorry, no. He’s dead.”
The girl was motionless. Rhyme could feel her sorrow.
Anger too. Her eyes were black dots of fury. Then she looked at her watch, said to Rhyme, “Those tests I mentioned?”
“Well, let’s just get some questions out of the way and then we’ll see. Sachs?”
With the evidence now set out on the examining table and chain of custody cards completed, Sachs pulled up a chair beside Rhyme and interviewed the girls. She asked Geneva exactly what had happened. The girl explained she’d been looking up an article in an old magazine when somebody came into the library. She’d heard hesitant footsteps. Then a laugh. The voice of a man ending a conversation and the snap of a closing cell phone.
The girl squinted. “Hey, you know, maybe what you could do is check out all the mobile companies in town. See who was on the phone then.”
Rhyme gave a laugh. “That’s a good thought. But at any given moment in Manhattan there’re about fifty thousand cell phone calls in progress. Besides, I doubt he was really on the phone.”
“He was frontin’? How you know that?” Lakeesha asked, furtively slipping two sticks of gum into her mouth.
“I don’t know it. I suspect it. Like the laughing. He was probably doing it to make Geneva drop her guard. You tend not to notice people on cell phones. And you rarely think of them as being a threat.”
Geneva was nodding. “Yeah. I was kinda freaked when he first came into the library. But when I heard him on the phone, well, I thought it’s rude to be talking on a phone in a library but I wasn’t scared anymore.”
“What happened then?” Sachs asked.
She explained that she’d heard a second click – she thought it sounded like a gun – and saw a man in a ski mask. She then told how she’d dismantled the mannequin and dressed it in her own clothes.
“That phat,” Lakeesha offered proudly. “My sista here, she smart.”
She sure is, Rhyme thought.
“I hid in the stacks till he walked to the microfiche reader then I ran for the fire door.”
“You didn’t see anything else about him?” Sachs asked.
“No.”
“What color was the mask?”
“Dark. I don’t know exactly.”
“Other clothes?”
“I didn’t see anything else really. Not that I remember. I was pretty freaked.”
“I’m sure you were,” Sachs said. “When you were hiding in the stacks, were you looking in his direction? So you’d know when to run?”
Geneva frowned for a moment. “Well, yeah, that’s right, I was looking. I forgot about that. I watched through the bottom shelves so I could run when he got close to my chair.”
“So maybe you saw a little more of him then.”
“Oh, you know, I did. I think he had brown shoes. Yeah, brown. Sort of a lighter shade, not dark brown.”
“Good. And what about his pants?”
“Dark, I’m pretty sure. But that’s all I could see, just the cuffs.”
“You smell anything?”
“No…Wait. Maybe I did. You know, something sweet, like flowers.”
“And then?”
“He came up to the chair and I heard this crack and then another couple of sounds. Something breaking.”
“The microfiche reader,” Sachs said. “He smashed it.”
“By then I was running as fast as I could. To the fire door. I went down the stairs and when I got to the street I found Keesh and we were going to run. But I was thinking maybe he was going to hurt somebody else. So I turned around and” – she looked at Pulaski – “we saw you.”
Sachs asked Lakeesha, “Did you see the attacker?”
“Nothin’. I was just chillin’ and then Gen come up, runnin’ all fast and buggin’ an’ ever’thing, you know what I’m sayin’? I didn’t see nothin’.”
Rhyme asked Sellitto, “The doer killed Barry because he was a witness – what’d he see?”
“He said he didn’t see anything. He gave me the names of the museum’s white, male employees in case it was one of them. There’re two but they checked out. One was taking his daughter to school at the time, the other was in the main office, people around him.”
“So, an opportunistic perp,” Sachs mused. “Saw her go inside and went after her.”
“A museum?” Rhyme asked. “Odd choice.”
Sellitto asked both girls, “Did you see anyone following you today?”
Lakeesha said, “We come down on the C train durin’ rush hour. Eighth Avenue line…be all crowded and nasty. Couldn’t see nobody weird. You?”
Geneva shook her head.
“How ’bout recently? Anybody hassling you? Hitting on you?”
Neither of them could think of anybody who’d seemed to be a threat. Embarrassed, Geneva said, “Not exactly a lot of stalkers coming round after me. They’d be looking for a little more booty, you know. Blingier.”
“Blingier?”
“Girl mean flashy,” translated Lakeesha, who obviously typified both booty and bling. She frowned and glanced at Geneva. “Why you gotta go there, girl? Don’t be talkin’ trash ’bout yo’self.”
Sachs looked at Rhyme, who was frowning. “What’re you thinking?”
“Something’s not right. Let’s go over the evidence while Geneva’s here. There might be some things that she can help explain.”
The girl shook her head. “That test?” She held up her watch.
“This won’t take long,” Rhyme said.
Geneva looked at her friend. “You can just make it to study period.”
“I’ma stay with you. I can’t be sittin’ for all them hours in class worryin’ ’bout you and ever’thing.”
Geneva gave a wry laugh. “No way, girl.” She asked Rhyme, “You don’t need her, do you?”
He glanced at Sachs, who shook her head. Sellitto jotted down her address and phone number. “We’ll call you if we have any more questions.”
“Take a pass, girl,” she said. “Just kick it an’ stay home.”
“I’ll see you at school,” Geneva said firmly. “You’ll be there?” Then lifted an eyebrow. “Word?”
Two loud snaps of gum. A sigh. “Word.” At the door the girl paused and turned back, said to Rhyme, “Yo, mister, how long fo’ you get outa that chair?”
No one said anything to fill the awkward moment. Awkward to everyone, Rhyme supposed, but himself.
“It’ll probably be a long time,” he said to her.
“Man, that suck.”
“Yeah,” Rhyme said. “Sometimes it does.”
She headed into the hall, toward the front door. They heard, “Damn, watch it, dude.” The outer door slammed.
Mel Cooper entered the room, looking back at the spot where he’d nearly been run down by a teenager who outweighed him by fifty pounds. “Okay,” he said to no one. “I’m not going to ask.” He pulled off his green windbreaker and nodded a greeting to everyone.
The slim, balding man had been working as a forensic scientist for an upstate New York police department some years ago when he’d politely but insistently told Rhyme, then head of NYPD forensics, that one of his analyses was wrong. Rhyme had far more respect for people who pointed out mistakes than for sycophants – provided, of course, they were correct, which Cooper had been. Rhyme had immediately started a campaign to get the man to New York City, a challenge at which he ultimately succeeded.
Cooper was a born scientist but even more important he was a born forensic scientist, which is very different. It’s often thought that “forensic” refers to crime scene work, but in fact the word means any aspect of debating issues in courts of law. To be a successful criminalist you have to translate raw facts into a form that’ll be useful to the prosecutor. It’s not enough, for instance, to simply determine the presence of nux vomica plant materials at a suspected crime scene – many of which are used for such innocuous medical purposes as treating ear inflammations. A true forensic scientist like Mel Cooper would know instantly that those same materials produce the deadly alkaloid poison strychnine.
Cooper had the trappings of a computer-game nerd – he lived with his mother, still wore madras shirts with chinos and had a Woody Allen physique. But looks were deceiving. Cooper’s longtime girlfriend was a tall, gorgeous blonde. Together they would sail in unison across ballroom floors in dance competitions, in which they were often top champions. Recently they’d taken up skeet shooting and winemaking (to which Cooper was meticulously applying principles of chemistry and physics).
Rhyme briefed him on the case and they turned to the evidence. Rhyme said, “Let’s look at the pack.”
Donning latex gloves, Cooper glanced at Sachs, who pointed out the paper bag containing the rape pack. He opened it over a large piece of newsprint – to catch bits of ambient trace – and extracted the bag. It was a thin plastic sack. No store logo was printed on it, only a large yellow smiley face. The tech now opened the bag, then paused. He said, “I smell something…” A deep inhalation. “Flowery. What is that?” Cooper carried the bag to Rhyme and he smelled it. There was something familiar about the fragrance, but he couldn’t decide what. “Geneva?”
“Yes?”
“Is that what you smelled back in the library?”
She sniffed. “Yeah, that’s it.”
Sachs said, “Jasmine. I think it’s jasmine.”
“On the chart,” Rhyme announced.
“What chart?” Cooper asked, looking around.
In each of his cases, Rhyme made whiteboard charts of evidence found at crime scenes and profiles of the perps. “Start one,” he ordered. “And we need to call him something. Somebody give me a name.”
No one had any inspiration.
Rhyme said, “No time to be creative. October ninth today, right? Ten/nine. So he’ll be Unsub one-oh-nine. Thom! We need your elegant handwriting.”
“No need to butter up,” the aide said as he stepped into the room with another coffeepot.
“Unsub one-oh-nine. Evidence and profile charts. He’s a white male. Height?”
Geneva said, “I don’t know. Everybody’s tall to me. Six feet, I’d guess.”
“You seem observant. We’ll go with that. Weight?”
“Not too big or small.” She fell quiet for a moment, troubled. “About Dr. Barry’s weight.”
Sellitto said, “Make it one eighty. Age?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see his face.”
“Voice?”
“I didn’t pay any attention. Average, I guess.”
Rhyme continued, “And light brown shoes, dark slacks, dark ski mask. A pack in a bag that smells of jasmine. He smells of it too. Soap or lotion maybe.”
“Pack?” Thom asked. “What do you mean?”
“Rape pack,” Geneva said. A glance at Rhyme. “You don’t need to sugarcoat anything for me. If that’s what you were doing.”
“Fair enough.” Rhyme nodded at her. “Let’s keep going.” He noticed Sachs’s face turn dark as she watched Cooper pick up the bag.
“What’s wrong?”
“The smiley face. On a rape pack bag. What kind of sick asshole’d do that?”
He was perplexed by her anger. “You realize that it’s good news he used that, don’t you, Sachs?”
“Good news?”
“It limits the number of stores we have to search for. Not as easy as a bag with an individuated logo on it but better than unprinted plastic.”
“I suppose,” she said, grimacing. “But still.”
Wearing latex gloves, Mel Cooper looked through the bag. He took out the tarot card first. It showed a man hanging upside down by his foot from a scaffold. Beams of light radiated from his head. His face was oddly passive. He didn’t seem to be in pain. Above him was the Roman numeral for twelve, XII.
“Mean anything to you?” Rhyme asked Geneva.
She shook her head.
Cooper mused, “Some kind of ritual or cult thing?”
Sachs said, “Got a thought.” She pulled out her cell phone, placed a call. Rhyme deduced that the person she’d spoken to would be arriving soon. “I called a specialist – about the card.”
“Good.”
Cooper examined the card for prints and found none. Nor was any helpful trace revealed.
“What else was in the bag?” Rhyme asked.
“Okay,” the tech replied, “we’ve got a brand-new roll of duct tape, a box cutter, Trojan condoms. Nothing traceable. And…bingo!” Cooper held up a little slip of paper. “A receipt.”
Rhyme wheeled closer and looked it over. There was no store name; the slip had been printed by an adding machine. The ink was faded.
“Won’t tell us very much,” Pulaski said then seemed to think he shouldn’t be talking.
What was he doing here? Rhyme wondered.
Oh, that’s right. Helping Sellitto.
“Sorry to differ,” Rhyme said stridently. “Tells us a lot. He bought all the items in the pack at one store – you can compare the receipt to the price tags – well, along with something else he bought for five ninety-five that wasn’t in the bag. Maybe the tarot deck. So we’ve got a store that sells duct tape, box cutters and condoms. Got to be a variety store or variety drugstore. We know it’s not a chain because there’s no logo on the bag or receipt. And it’s low-budget since it only has cash drawers, not computerized registers. Not to mention the cheap prices. And the sales tax tells us that the store is in…” He squinted as he compared the subtotal on the receipt with the amount of tax. “Goddamnit, who knows math? What’s the percentage?”
Cooper said, “I’ve got a calculator.”
Geneva glanced at the receipt. “Eight point six two five.”
“How’d you do that?” Sachs asked.
“I just kind of can,” she said.
Rhyme repeated, “Eight point six two five. That’s the combined New York state and city sales tax. Puts the store in one of the five boroughs.” A glance at Pulaski. “So, Patrolman, still think it’s not very revealing?”
“Got it, sir.”
“I’m decommissioned. Sir isn’t necessary. All right. Print everything and let’s see what we can find.”
“Me?” the rookie asked uncertainly.
“No. Them.”
Cooper and Sachs used a variety of techniques to raise prints on the evidence: fluorescent powder, Ardrox spray and superglue fumes on slick surfaces, iodine vapor and ninhydrin on porous, some of which raised prints by themselves, while others displayed the results under an alternative light source.
Looking up at the team through his large orange goggles, the tech reported, “Prints on the receipt, prints on the merchandise. They’re all the same. Only, the thing is, they’re small, too small to be from a six-foot-tall man. A petite woman or a teenage girl, the clerk’s, I’d say. I see smudges too. I’d guess the unsub wiped his own off.”
While it was difficult to remove all the oils and residue left by human fingers, prints could be obliterated easily by a brief rubbing.
“Run what you’ve got through IAFIS.”
Cooper lifted copies of the prints and scanned them. Ten minutes later the FBI’s integrated automated fingerprint identification system had verified that the prints did not belong to anyone on file in the major databases, city, state and federal. Cooper also sent them to some of the local databases that weren’t linked to the FBI’s system.
“Shoes,” Rhyme announced.
Sachs produced the electrostatic print. The tread marks were worn, so the shoes were old.
“Size eleven,” Cooper announced.
There was a loose correlation between foot size and bone structure and height, though it was tenuous as circumstantial evidence in court. Still, the size suggested that Geneva had probably been right in her assessment that the man was around six feet tall.
“What about a brand?”
Cooper ran the image through the department’s shoe-tread database and came up with a match. “Bass-brand shoes, walkers. At least three years old. They discontinued this model that year.”
Rhyme said, “The tread wear tells us he has a slightly turned out right foot, but no noticeable limp and no serious bunions, ingrown nails or other malades des pieds.”
“I didn’t know you spoke French, Lincoln,” Cooper said.
Only to the extent it helped an investigation. This particular phrase had come about when he was running the missing-right-shoes case and had spoken on a number of occasions to a French cop.
“What’s the trace situation?”
Cooper was poring over the evidence collection bags containing the tiny particles that had adhered to Sachs’s trace collector, which was a sticky roller, like the kind for removing lint and pet hair. Rollers had replaced DustBuster vacuum cleaners as the collector of choice for fiber, hair and dry residue.
Wearing the magnifiers again, the tech used fine tweezers to pick up materials. He prepared a slide and placed it under the microscope, then adjusted the magnification and focus. Simultaneously, the image popped up on several flat-screen computer monitors around the room. Rhyme turned his chair and examined the images closely. He could see flecks that appeared to be bits of dust, several fibers, white puffy objects, and what looked like tiny amber shells shed by insects – exoskeletons. When Cooper moved the stage of the scope, some small balls of spongy, off-white fibrous material were visible.
“Where did this come from?”
Sachs looked over the tag. “Two sources: the floor near the table where Geneva was sitting and beside the Dumpster where he was standing when he shot Barry.”
Trace evidence in a public place was often useless because there were so many chances for strangers unconnected to the crime to shed material. But similar trace being found in two separate locations where the perp had been suggested strongly that it had been left by him.
“Thank you, Lord,” Rhyme muttered, “for thy wisdom in creating deep-tread shoes.”
Sachs and Thom glanced at each other.
“Wondering about my good mood?” Rhyme asked, continuing to stare at the screen. “Was that the reason for the sidelong look? I can be cheerful sometimes, you know.”
“Blue moon,” the aide muttered.
“Cliché alert, Lon. You catch that one? Now, back to the trace. We know he shed it. What is it? And can it lead us to his den?”
Forensic scientists confront a pyramid-shaped task in analyzing evidence. The initial – and usually easiest – job is to identify a substance (finding that a brown stain, for instance, is blood and whether it’s human or animal, or that a piece of lead is a bullet fragment).
The second task is to classify that sample, that is, put it in a subcategory (like determining that the blood is O positive, that the bullet that shed the fragment was a.38). Learning that evidence falls into a particular class may have some value to police and prosecutors if the suspect can be linked to evidence in a similar class – his shirt has a type-O-positive bloodstain on it, he owns a.38 – though that connection isn’t conclusive.
The final task, and the ultimate goal of all forensic scientists, is to individuate the evidence – unquestionably link this particular bit of evidence to a single location or human being (the DNA from the blood on the suspect’s shirt matches that of the victim, the bullet has a unique mark that could be made only by his gun).
The team was now low on this forensic pyramid. The strands, for instance, were fibers of some sort, they knew. But more than a thousand different fibers were made in the United States annually and over seven thousand different types of pigments were used to color them. Still, the team could narrow down the field. Cooper’s analysis revealed that the fibers shed by the killer were plant based – rather than animal or mineral – and they were thick.
“I’m betting it’s cotton rope,” Rhyme suggested.
Cooper nodded as he read through a database of vegetable-based fibers. “Yep, that’s it. Generic, though. No manufacturer.”
One fiber contained no pigments but the other had a staining agent of some kind. It was brown and Cooper thought the stain might be blood. A test with the phenolphthalein presumptive blood test revealed that it was.
“His?” Sellitto wondered.
“Who knows?” Cooper responded, continuing to examine the sample. “But it’s definitely human. With the compression and fractured ends, I’d speculate the rope’s a garrotte. We’ve seen that before. It could be this was the intended murder weapon.”
His blunt object would be simply to subdue his victim, rather than to kill her (it’s hard, messy work beating someone to death). He also had the gun, but that would be too loud to use if you wanted to keep the murder quiet in order to escape. A garrotte made sense.
Geneva sighed. “Mr. Rhyme? My test.”
“Test?”
“At school.”
“Oh, sure. Just a minute…I want to know what kind of bug that exoskeleton’s from,” Rhyme continued.
“Officer,” Sachs said to Pulaski.
“Yes, m’…Detective?”
“How ’bout you help us out here?”
“Sure thing.”
Cooper printed out a color image of the bit of exoskeleton and handed it to the rookie. Sachs sat him down in front of one of the computers and typed in commands to get into the department’s insect database – the NYPD was one of the few police departments in the world that had not only an extensive library of insect information but a forensic entomologist on staff. After a brief pause the screen began to fill with thumbnail images of insect parts.
“Man, there’re a lot of them. You know, I’ve never actually done this before.” He squinted as the files flipped past.
Sachs stifled a smile. “Not exactly like CSI, is it?” she asked. “Just scroll through slowly and look for something you think matches. ‘Slow’ is the key word.”
Rhyme said, “More mistakes in forensic analysis occur because technicians rush than because of any other cause.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Sachs said, “And now you do.”
“GC those white blobs there,” Rhyme ordered. “What the hell are they?”
Mel Cooper lifted several samples off the tape and ran them through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, the workhorse instrument in all forensic labs. It separates unknown trace into its component parts and then identifies them. The results would take fifteen minutes or so, and while they waited for the analysis Cooper pieced together the bullet the emergency room doctor had removed from the leg of the woman whom the killer had shot. Sachs had reported the gun had to be a revolver, not an automatic, since there were no brass cartridges ejected at the scene of the shooting outside the museum.
“Oh, these’re nasty,” Cooper said softly, examining the fragments with a pair of tweezers. “The gun’s small, a.22. But they’re magnum rounds.”
“Good,” Rhyme said. He was pleased because the powerful magnum version of the rimfire 22-caliber bullet was rare ammunition and therefore would be easier to trace. The fact that the gun was a revolver made it rarer still. Which meant they should be able to find the manufacturer easily.
Sachs, who was a competitive pistol shooter, didn’t even need to look it up. “North American Arms is the only one I know of. Their Black Widow model maybe, but I’d guess the Mini-Master. It’s got a four-inch barrel. That’s more accurate and he grouped those shots real tight.”
Rhyme asked the tech, who was poring over the examination board, “What’d you mean by nasty?”
“Take a look.”
Rhyme, Sachs and Sellitto moved forward. Cooper was pushing around bits of blood-stained metal with the tweezers. “Looks like he made them himself.”
“Explosive rounds?”
“No, almost as bad. Maybe worse. The outer shell of the bullet’s thin lead. Inside, the slug was filled with these.”
There were a half dozen tiny needles, about three-eighths of an inch long. Upon impact, the bullet would shatter and the pins would tumble in a V pattern throughout the body. Though the slugs were small they’d do far more damage than regular rounds. They weren’t designed to stop an attacker; their purpose was solely to destroy internal tissue. And without the numbing effect of a large-caliber slug’s impact, these shells would result in agonizing wounds.
Lon Sellitto shook his head, eyes fixed on the needles, and scratched the invisible stain on his face, probably thinking how close he’d come to being hit with one of these slugs. “Jesus,” he muttered. His voice broke and he cleared his throat, laughed to cover it up and walked away from the table.
Curiously, the lieutenant’s reaction was more troubled than the girl’s. Geneva didn’t seem to pay much attention to the details of her attacker’s gruesome rounds. She glanced again at her watch and slouched impatiently.
Cooper scanned the largest pieces of the bullet and ran the information about the slugs through IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, which nearly a thousand police departments around the country subscribe to, as well as the FBI’s DRUGFIRE system. These huge databases can match a slug, fragments or brass casing to bullets or weapons on file. A gun found on a suspect today, for instance, can quickly be matched to a bullet recovered from a victim five years ago.
The results on these slugs, though, came back negative. The needles themselves appeared to have been broken off the end of sewing needles, the sort you could buy anywhere. Untraceable.
“Never easy, is it?” Cooper muttered. At Rhyme’s direction, he also searched for registered owners of Mini-Masters, and the smaller Black Widows, in.22 magnum, and came back with nearly a thousand owners, none of whom had criminal records. Stores aren’t required by law to keep records of who buys ammunition and therefore they never did. For the time being, the weapon was a dead end.
“Pulaski?” Rhyme shouted. “What’s with the bug?”
“The exoskeleton – is that what you called it? That’s what you mean, sir?”
“Right, right, right. What about it?”
“No matches yet. What exactly is an exoskeleton?”
Rhyme didn’t answer. He glanced at the screen and saw that the young man was only a small way into the Hemiptera order of insects. He had a long way to go. “Keep at it.”
The GC/MS computer beeped; it had completed its analysis of the white blobs. On the screen was a peak-and-valley chart, below which was a block of text.
Cooper leaned forward and said, “We’ve got curcumin, demethoxycurcumin, bis-demethoxycurcumin, volatile oil, amino acids, lysine and tryptophan, theronine and isoleucine, chloride, various other trace proteins and large proportion of starches, oils, triglycerides, sodium, polysaccharides…Never seen that combination.”
The GC/MS was miraculous in isolating and identifying substances, but not necessarily so great in telling you what they added up to. Rhyme was often able to deduce common substances, like gasoline or explosives, just from a list of their ingredients. But these were new to him. He cocked his head and began to categorize those substances in the list that, as a scientist, he knew would logically be found together and which would not. “The curcumin, its compounds and the polysaccharides obviously fit together.”
“Obviously,” was the wry response of Amelia Sachs, who used to ditch science class in high school to go drag racing.
“We’ll call that Substance One. Then the amino acids, other proteins, starches and triglycerides – they’re often found together, too. We’ll call them Substance Two. The chloride -”
“Poison, right?” asked Pulaski.
“- and sodium,” muttered Rhyme, “are most likely salt.” A glance at the rookie. “Dangerous only in the case of people with high blood pressure. Or if you’re a garden slug.”
The kid turned back to the insect database.
“So – with the amino acids and starches and oils – I’m thinking Substance Two is a food, salty food. Go online, Mel, and find out what the hell curcumin is in.”
Cooper did. “You’re right. It’s a vegetable dye used in food products. Usually found in connection with those other items in Substance One. Volatile oils too.”
“What sort of food products?”
“Hundreds of them.”
“How ’bout some for-instances.”
Cooper began to read from a lengthy list. But Rhyme interrupted. “Hold on. Is popcorn on the list?”
“Let’s see…yeah, it is.”
Rhyme turned and called to Pulaski, “You can stop.”
“Stop?”
“It’s not an exoskeleton. It’s a shell from a popcorn kernel. Salt and oil and popcorn. Should’ve figured that one out up front, damnit.” It was a cheerful expletive nonetheless. “On the chart, Thom. Our boy likes junk food.”
“Should I write that?”
“Of course not. He could hate popcorn. Maybe he works in a popcorn factory or movie theater. Just add ‘popcorn.’” Rhyme looked at the chart. “Now let’s find out about that other trace. The off-white stuff.”
Cooper ran another GC/MS test. The results indicated that it was sucrose and uric acid.
“The acid’s concentrated,” the tech said. “The sugar’s pure – no other foodstuffs – and the crystalline structure’s unique. I’ve never seen it milled like that.”
Rhyme was troubled by this news. “Send it to the FBI’s bomb people.”
“Bomb?” Sellitto asked.
Rhyme said, “Haven’t been reading my book, hmmm?”
“No,” the big detective shot back. “I’ve been busy catching bad guys.”
“Touché. But it’d be helpful to at least take a look at the headings from time to time. As in ‘Homemade Explosive Devices.’ Sugar’s often an ingredient. Mix it with sodium nitrate and you’ve got a smoke bomb. With permanganate, it’s a low explosive – which can still do a lot of damage if you pack it into a pipe. I’m not sure how the uric acid figures but the Bureau’s got the best database in the world. They’ll tell us.”
The FBI’s lab is available to handle evidence analysis for state and local law enforcers, at no charge, provided that the requesting agency agrees to two things: to accept the FBI’s results as final and to show them to the defendant’s lawyer. Because of the Bureau’s generosity – and its talent – the agents are inundated with requests for assistance; they run more than 700,000 analyses a year.
Even New York ’s finest would stand in line like everyone else to get this bit of sugar analyzed. But Lincoln Rhyme had an in – Fred Dellray, a special agent in the FBI’s Manhattan office, often worked with Rhyme and Sellitto and he carried a lot of weight in the Bureau. Equally important was the fact that Rhyme had helped the FBI set up its PERT system – the Physical Evidence Response Team. Sellitto called Dellray, who was presently on the task force checking out those reports of potential terrorist bombings in New York. Dellray got on the horn to FBI HQ in Washington, D.C., and within minutes a technician had been recruited to help on the Unsub 109 case. Cooper sent him the results of the analyses and compressed digital images of the substance via secure email.
No more than ten minutes passed before the phone rang.
“Command, answer,” Rhyme snapped into his voice recognition control system.
“Detective Rhyme, please.”
“This’s Rhyme.”
“I’m Examiner Phillips down on Ninth Street.” Washington’s Ninth Street, he meant. FBI headquarters.
“What do you have for us?” Rhyme asked briskly.
“And thanks for calling back so fast,” Sachs said quickly. She sometimes had to run interference for Rhyme’s bluntness.
“No worries, ma’am. Well, I was thinking it was pretty odd, what you sent down. So I sent it to Materials Analysis. That did the trick. We’ve got a ninety-seven percent certainty as to the substance.”
How dangerous was the explosive? Rhyme wondered. He said, “Go ahead. What is it?”
“Cotton candy.”
That wasn’t a street name he knew. But there were a number of new-generation explosives that had detonation rates of thirty thousand feet per second, ten times the speed of a bullet. Was this one of those? He asked, “What’re its properties?”
A pause. “It tastes good.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s sweet. It tastes good.”
Rhyme asked, “You mean it’s real cotton candy, like you’d find at a fair?”
“Yeah, what’d you think I meant?”
“Never mind.” Sighing, the criminalist asked, “And the uric acid was from his shoe when he stepped in some dog pee on the sidewalk?”
“Can’t say where he stepped on it,” the examiner said, displaying the precision the Bureau was known for. “But the sample does test positive for canine urine.”
He thanked the man and disconnected. He turned to the team. “Popcorn and cotton candy on his shoes at the same time?” Rhyme mused. “Where’d that put him?”
“Ball game?”
“The New York teams haven’t played at home lately. I’m thinking maybe our unsub walked through a neighborhood where there’d been a fair or carnival in the past day or so.” He asked Geneva, “Did you go to any fairs recently? Could he have seen you there?”
“Me? No. I don’t really go to fairs.”
Rhyme said to Pulaski, “Since you’re off bug detail, Patrolman, call whoever you need to and find out every permit that’s been issued for a fair, carnival, festival, religious feast, whatever.”
“I’m on it,” the rookie said.
“What else do we have?” Rhyme asked.
“Flakes from the carriage of the microfiche reader, where he hit it with the blunt object.”
“Flakes?”
“Bits of varnish, I’d guess, from whatever he used.”
“Okay, run them through Maryland.”
The FBI had a huge database of current and past paint samples, located in one of its Maryland facilities. This was mostly used for matching paint evidence to cars. But there were hundreds of samples of varnish as well. After another call from Dellray, Cooper sent the GC/MS composition analysis and other data on the lacquer flakes off to the Bureau. Within a few minutes the phone rang, and this FBI examiner reported that the varnish matched a product sold exclusively to manufacturers of martial arts equipment, like nunchakus and security batons. He added the discouraging news that the substance contained no manufacturer’s markers and was sold in large quantities – meaning it was virtually untraceable.
“Okay, we’ve got a rapist with a nunchaku, funky bullets, a bloody rope…man is a walking nightmare.”
The doorbell rang and a moment later Thom ushered in a woman in her twenties, his arm around her shoulders.
“Look who’s here,” the aide announced.
The slim woman had spiky purple hair and a pretty face. Her stretch pants and sweater revealed an athletic body – actually, a performer’s body, Rhyme knew.
“Kara,” Rhyme said. “Good to see you again. I deduce you’re the specialist Sachs called.”
“Hi.” The young woman hugged Sachs, greeted the others and closed her hands around Rhyme’s. Sachs introduced her to Geneva, who looked her over with a reserved face.
Kara (it was a stage name; she wouldn’t reveal her real one) was an illusionist and performance artist who had helped Rhyme and Sachs as a consultant in a recent murder case, where a killer used his skills as a magician and sleight-of-hand artist to get close to victims, murder them and get away.
She lived in Greenwich Village, but had been visiting her mother in a care facility uptown when Sachs had called, she explained. They spent a few moments catching up – Kara was putting together a one-woman show for the Performance Warehouse in Soho, and was dating an acrobat – then Rhyme said, “We need some expertise.”
“You bet,” the young woman said. “Whatever I can do.”
Sachs explained about the case. She frowned and whispered, “I’m sorry,” to Geneva when she heard about the attempted rape.
The student just shrugged.
“He had this with him,” Cooper said, holding up The Hanged Man tarot card from the rape pack.
“We thought you could tell us something about it.”
Kara had explained to Rhyme and Sachs that the world of magic was divided into two camps, those who were entertainers, who made no claim to having supernatural skills, and those who asserted they had occult powers. Kara had no patience for the latter – she was solely a performer – but because of her experience working in magic stores for rent and food money she knew something about fortune-telling.
She explained, “Okay, tarot’s an old method of divining that goes back to ancient Egypt. The tarot deck of cards’re divided into the minor arcana – they correspond to the fifty-two-card playing deck – and the major arcana, zero through twenty-one. They sort of represent a journey through life. The Hanged Man’s the twelfth card in the major arcana.” She shook her head. “But something doesn’t make sense.”
“What’s that?” Sellitto asked, subtly rubbing his skin.
“It’s not a bad card at all. Look at the picture.”
“He does look pretty peaceful,” Sachs said, “considering he’s hanging upside down.”
“The figure in the picture’s based on the Norse god Odin. He hung upside down for nine days on a search for inner knowledge. You get this card in a reading, it means you’re about to start a quest for spiritual enlightenment.” She nodded at a computer. “You mind?”
Cooper waved her to it. She typed a Google search and a few seconds later found a website. “How do I print this out?”
Sachs helped her, and a moment later a sheet rolled out of the laser printer. Cooper taped it up on the evidence board. “That’s the meaning,” she said.
The Hanged Man does not refer to someone being punished. Its appearance in a reading indicates spiritual searching leading to a decision, a transition, a change of direction. The card often foretells a surrendering to experience, ending a struggle, accepting what is. When this card appears in your reading you must listen to your inner self, even if that message seems to be contrary to logic.
Kara said, “It has nothing to do with violence or death. It’s about being spiritually suspended and waiting.” She shook her head. “It’s not the kind of thing a killer would leave – if he knew anything at all about tarot cards. If he’d wanted to leave something destructive, it would’ve been The Tower or one of the cards from the sword suit in the minor arcana. Those’re bad news.”
“So he picked it only because it looked scary,” Rhyme summarized. And because he planned to garrotte, or “hang,” Geneva.
“That’s what I’d guess.”
“That’s helpful,” Rhyme said.
Sachs too thanked her.
“I should get back. Have to rehearse.” Kara shook Geneva’s hand. “Hope things work out okay for you.”
“Thanks.”
Kara walked to the door. She stopped and looked at Geneva. “You like illusion and magic shows?”
“I don’t get out too much,” the girl said. “Pretty busy in school.”
“Well, I’m doing a show in three weeks. If you’re interested, all the details are on the ticket.”
“The…?”
“Ticket.”
“I don’t have a ticket.”
“Yes, you do,” Kara said. “It’s in your purse. Oh, and the flower with it? Consider it a good luck charm.”
She left, and they heard the door close.
“What’s she talking about?” Geneva asked, looking down at her purse, which was closed.
Sachs laughed. “Open it up.”
She unzipped the top and blinked in surprise. Sitting just inside was a ticket to one of Kara’s performances. Next to it was a pressed violet. “How did she do that?” Geneva whispered.
“We’ve never quite been able to catch her,” Rhyme said. “All we know is, she’s pretty damn good.”
“Man, I’ll say.” The student held up the dried purple flower.
The criminalist’s eyes slipped to the tarot card, as Cooper taped it to the evidence board, next to its meaning. “So, it seems like the sort of thing a killer would leave in an occult assault. But he didn’t have a clue what it was. He picked it for effect. So that means…” But his voice faded as he stared at the rest of the evidence chart. “Jesus.”
The others looked at him.
“What?” Cooper asked.
“We’ve got it all wrong.”
Taking a break from rubbing his face, Sellitto asked, “Whatta you mean?”
“Look at the prints on what was in the rape pack. He wiped his own off, right?”
“Yeah,” Cooper confirmed.
“But there are prints,” the criminalist offered. “And they’re probably the clerk’s, since they’re the same that’re on the receipt.”
“Right.” Sellitto shrugged. “So?”
“So he wiped his prints before he got to the cash register. While he was in the store.” Silence in the room. Irritated that nobody caught on, the criminalist continued, “Because he wanted the clerk’s prints on everything.”
Sachs understood. “He meant to leave the rape pack behind. So we’d find it.”
Pulaski was nodding. “Otherwise, he’d just have wiped everything after he got it home.”
“Ex-actly,” Rhyme said with a hint of triumph in his voice. “I think it was staged evidence. To make us think it was a rape, with some kind of occult overtones. Okay, okay… Let’s step back.” Rhyme was amused at Pulaski’s uneasy glance at Rhyme’s legs when the criminalist used the expression. “An attacker tracks down Geneva in a public museum. Not the typical setting for sexual assault. Then he hits her – well, the mannequin – hard enough to kill her, if not knock her out for hours. If that’s the case then what’s he need the box cutter and duct tape for? And he leaves a tarot card he thinks is scary but is really just about spiritual searching? No, it wasn’t an attempted rape at all.”
“What’s he up to then?” Sellitto asked.
“That’s what we damn well better find out.” Rhyme thought for a moment then asked, “And you said that Dr. Barry didn’t see anything?”
“That’s what he told me,” Sellitto replied.
“But the unsub still comes back and kills him.” Rhyme frowned. “And Mr. One-oh-nine broke up the microfiche reader. He’s a pro, but tantrums’re very un-pro. His vic’s getting away – he’s not going to waste time thumpin’ on things because he’s having a bad morning.” Rhyme asked the girl, “You said you were reading some old newspaper?”
“Magazine,” she corrected.
“On the microfiche reader?”
“Right.”
“Those?” Rhyme nodded at a large plastic evidence bag containing a box of microfiche trays that Sachs had brought back from the library. Two slots, carriages one and three, were empty.
Geneva looked at the box. She nodded. “Yeah. Those were the ones that had the article I was reading, the missing ones.”
“Did you get the one that was in the reader?”
Sachs replied, “There wasn’t one. He must’ve taken it with him.”
“And smashed the machine so we wouldn’t notice that the tray was gone. Oh, this is getting interesting. What was he up to? What the hell was his motive?”
Sellitto laughed. “I thought you didn’t care about motive. Only evidence.”
“You need to draw the distinction, Lon, between using motive to prove a case in court – which is speculation at best – and using motive to lead you to the evidence, which conclusively convicts a perp: A man kills his business partner with a gun that we trace to his garage loaded with bullets he bought per a receipt with his fingerprints on it. In that case who cares if he killed the partner because he thinks a talking dog told him to or because the guy was sleeping with his wife? The evidence makes the case.
“But what if there are no bullets, gun, receipt or tire tracks? Then a perfectly valid question is why was the vic killed? Answering that can point us toward the evidence that will convict him. Sorry for the lecture,” he added with no apology in his voice.
“Good mood gone, is it?” Thom asked.
Rhyme grumbled, “I’m missing something here and I don’t like it.”
Geneva was frowning. Rhyme noticed and asked, “What?”
“Well, I was thinking…Dr. Barry said that somebody else was interested in the same issue of that magazine that I was. He wanted to read it, but Dr. Barry told him he’d have to wait until I was through with it.”
“Did he say who?”
“No.”
Rhyme considered this. “So let’s speculate: The librarian tells this somebody that you’re interested in the magazine. The unsub wants to steal it and he wants to kill you because you’ve read it or will read it.” The criminalist wasn’t convinced this was the situation, of course. But one of the things that made him so successful was his willingness to consider bold, sometimes farfetched theories. “And he took the one article you were reading, right?”
The girl nodded.
“It was like he knew exactly what to look for… What was it about?”
“Nothing important. Just this ancestor of mine. My teacher’s into all this Roots stuff and we had to write about somebody in our past.”
“Who was he, this ancestor?”
“My great-great-great-whatever, a freed slave. I went to the museum last week and found out there was an article about him in this issue of Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. They didn’t have it in the library but Mr. Barry said he’d get the microfiche from storage. It just came in.”
“What was the story about specifically?” Rhyme persisted.
She hesitated then said impatiently, “Charles Singleton, my ancestor, was a slave in Virginia. His master had this change of heart and he freed all of his slaves. And because Charles and his wife had been with the family for so long and had taught their children to read and write, their master gave them a farm in New York state. Charles was a soldier in the Civil War. He came back home afterwards and in eighteen sixty-eight he got accused of stealing some money from a black educational fund. That’s all the article in the magazine was about. I’d just gotten to the part where he jumped into the river to escape from the police when that man showed up.”
Rhyme noted that she spoke well but held on to her words tightly, as if they were squirming puppies trying to escape. With educated parents on one side and homegirl friends like Lakeesha on the other, it was only natural that the girl suffered from some linguistic multiple personality.
“So you don’t know what happened to him?” Sachs asked.
Geneva shook her head.
“I think we have to assume that the unsub had some interest in what you were researching. Who knew what the topic of your paper was? Your teacher, I assume.”
“No, I never told him specifically. I don’t think I told anybody but Lakeesha. She might’ve mentioned it to somebody but I doubt it. Assignments don’t take up a lot of her attention, you know what I’m saying? Not even her own. Last week I went to this law office in Harlem to see if they had any old records about crimes in the eighteen hundreds but I didn’t tell the lawyer there very much. Of course, Dr. Barry would’ve known.”
“And he would’ve mentioned it to that other person who was interested in the magazine too,” Rhyme pointed out. “Now, just for the sake of argument, let’s assume there’s something in that article that the unsub doesn’t want known – maybe about your ancestor, maybe something else entirely.” A glance at Sachs. “Anybody still at the scene?”
“A portable.”
“Have ’em canvass the employees. See if Barry mentioned that somebody was interested in that old magazine. Have them go through his desk too.” Rhyme had another thought. “And I want his phone records for the past month.”
Sellitto shook his head. “Linc, really…this’s sounding pretty thin, don’t you think? We’re talking, what? The eighteen hundreds? This isn’t a cold case. It’s a frozen one.”
“A pro who staged a scene, nearly killed one person, and did kill another – right in front of a half dozen cops – just to steal that article? That’s not thin, Lon. That’s got searchlights all over it.”
The big cop shrugged and called the precinct to relay the order to the cop still on duty at the crime scene and then called Warrants to have them issue a phone record subpoena on the museum’s and Barry’s personal phones.
Rhyme looked over the slim girl and decided that he had no choice; he had to deliver the tough news. “You know what all this might mean, don’t you?”
A pause, though he could see in Sachs’s troubled glance at Geneva that the policewoman at least knew exactly what it meant. It was she who said to the girl, “Lincoln’s saying that it’s likely that he’s probably still after you.”
“That’s wack,” Geneva Settle offered, shaking her head.
After a pause, Rhyme replied solemnly, “I’m afraid it’s anything but.”
Sitting at the Internet access station in a quick-copy shop in downtown Manhattan, Thompson Boyd was reading through the local TV station website, which updated news every few minutes.
The headline of the article he read was: MUSEUM OFFICIAL MURDERED; WITNESS IN ASSAULT ON STUDENT.
Whistling, almost silently, he examined the accompanying picture, which showed the library director he’d just killed talking to a uniformed policeman on the street in front of the museum. The caption read, Dr. Donald Barry speaks with police shortly before he was shot to death.
Because of her age, Geneva Settle wasn’t identified by name, though she was described as a high school student living in Harlem. Thompson was grateful for that information; he hadn’t known which borough of the city she lived in. He hooked his phone to the USB port on the computer and transferred the picture he’d taken of the girl. This he then uploaded to an anonymous email account.
He logged off, paid for his time – in cash, of course – and strolled along lower Broadway, in the heart of the financial district. He bought a coffee from a vendor, drank half of it, then slipped the microfiche plates he’d stolen into the cup, replaced the lid and dropped them into a trash basket.
He paused at a phone kiosk, looked around and saw no one was paying him any attention. He dialed a number. There was no outgoing message from the voice mail service, only a beep. “Me. Problem with the Settle situation. I need you to find out where she goes to school or where she lives. She’s a high school student in Harlem. That’s all I know. I’ve sent a picture of her to your account… Oh, one thing – if you get a chance to take care of her yourself, there’s another fifty thousand in it for you. Give me a call when you get this message. We’ll talk about it.” Thompson recited the number of the phone where he stood then hung up. He stepped back, crossed his arms and waited, whistling softly. He’d gotten through only three bars of Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” before the phone started to ring.
The criminalist looked at Sellitto. “Where’s Roland?”
“ Bell? He delivered somebody into witness protection upstate but he should be back by now. Think we should give him a call?”
“Yes,” Rhyme said.
Sellitto called the detective’s mobile phone and, from the conversation, Rhyme deduced that Bell would leave Police Plaza immediately and head uptown.
Rhyme noticed Geneva ’s frown. “Detective Bell ’s just going to look out for you. Like a bodyguard. Until we get everything sorted out…Now, do you have any idea what Charles was accused of stealing?”
“The article said gold or money or something.”
“Missing gold. Ah, that’s interesting. Greed – one of your better motives.”
“Would your uncle know anything about it?” Sachs asked her.
“My uncle? Oh, no, he’s my mother’s brother. Charles was from my father’s side of the family. And Dad just knew a few things. My great-aunt gave me a few letters of Charles’s. But she didn’t know anything more about him.”
“Where are they? Those letters?” Rhyme asked.
“I have one with me.” She fished in her purse and pulled it out. “And the others’re at home. My aunt thought she might have some more boxes of Charles’s things but she wasn’t sure where they were.” Geneva fell silent as the brows in her dark, round face furrowed and she said to Sachs, “One thing? If it’s helpful?”
“Go ahead,” Sachs said.
“I remember from one of the letters. Charles talked about this secret he had.”
“Secret?” Sachs asked.
“Yeah, he said it bothered him not to be able to reveal the truth. But there’d be a disaster, a tragedy, if he did. Something like that.”
“Maybe it was the theft he was talking about,” Rhyme said.
Geneva stiffened. “I don’t think he did it. I think he was framed.”
“Why?” Rhyme asked.
A shrug. “Read the letter.” The girl started to hand it to Rhyme, then caught herself and gave it to Mel Cooper, unapologetic about the faux pas.
The tech placed it in an optical reader and a moment later the elegantly scripted words from the nineteenth century were scrolling across flat-screen monitors from the twenty-first.
Mrs. Violet Singleton
In care of
Mr. & Mrs. William Dodd
Essex Farm Road
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
July 14, 1863
My dearest Violet:
News has surely reached you of the terrible events in New York of late. I can now report that peace has returned, but the cost was great.
The climate here has been incendiary, with hundreds of thousands of less fortunate citizens still reeling from the economic panic of several years ago – Mr. Greeley’s Tribune reported that unconscionable stock speculation and imprudent lending had led to the “bursting bubbles” of the world’s financial markets.
In this atmosphere, it took merely a small spark to ignite the recent rioting: the order to draft men into the Federal army, which was acknowledged by many to be necessary in our fight against the Rebels, owing to the enemy’s surprising strength and resilience. Still, the opposition to the draft was sturdier, and more deadly, than any had anticipated. And we – Coloreds, abolitionists and Republicans, – became the target of their hate, as much as the conscription provost and his men, if not more so.
Rioters, largely Irishmen, swept through the city, attacking any Colored they might see, sacking houses and places of work. I had by happenstance been in the company of two teachers and the director of the Colored Children’s Orphanage when a mob attacked the building and set it aflame! Why, more than 200 children were inside! With God’s help, we were able to lead the little ones to safety at a nearby police station, but the rioters would have killed us all if they had had their way.
Fighting continued throughout the day. That evening the lynchings began. After one Negro was hanged, his body was set on fire, and the rioters danced around it in drunken revels. I was aghast!
I have now fled to our farm up north and will henceforth keep my attention fixed on my mission of educating children in our school, working the orchard and furthering, however I can, the cause of freedom of our people.
My dearest wife, in the aftermath of these terrible events, life to me seems precarious and fleeting, and – if you are inclined to the journey, – it is my desire that you and our son now join me. I am enclosing herewith tickets for you both, and ten dollars for expenses. I will meet your train in New Jersey and we will take a boat up the river to our farm. You can assist me in teaching, and Joshua can continue his studies and help us and James in the cider mill and shop. Should anyone ask your business and destination, respond as do I: say only that we are caretakers of the farm, tending it for Master Trilling in his absence. Seeing the hatred in the eyes of the rioters has brought home to me the fact that nowhere is safe, and even in our idyllic locale, arson, theft and pillaging might very likely ensue, should it be learned that the owners of the farm are Negroes.
I have come from a place where I was held in captivity and considered to be merely a three-fifths man. I had hoped that moving North would change this. But, alas, that is not yet the case. The tragic events of the past few days tell me that you and I and those of our kind are not yet treated as whole men and women, and our battle to achieve wholeness in the eyes of others must continue with unflagging determination.
My warmest regards to your sister and William, as well as their children, of course. Tell Joshua I am proud of his achievement in the subject of geography.
I live for the day, now soon, I pray, when I will see you and our son once again.
Yours in love,
Charles
Geneva took the letter off the optical scanner. She looked up and said, “The Civil War Draft Riots of 1863. Worst civil disturbance in U.S. history.”
“He doesn’t say anything about his secret,” Rhyme pointed out.
“That’s in one of the letters I have at home. I was showing you this so you’d know he wasn’t a thief.”
Rhyme frowned. “But the theft was, what, five years after he wrote that? Why do you think that means he’s not guilty?”
“My point,” Geneva said, “is that he doesn’t sound like a thief, does he? Not somebody who’s going to steal from an education trust for former slaves.”
Rhyme said simply, “That’s not proof.”
“I think it is.” The girl looked over the letter again, smoothed it with her hand.
“What’s that three-fifths-man thing?” Sellitto asked.
Rhyme recalled something from American history. But unless information was relevant to his career as a criminalist, he discarded it as useless clutter. He shook his head.
Geneva explained, “Before the Civil War, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation in Congress. It wasn’t an evil Confederate conspiracy, like you’d think; the North came up with that rule. They didn’t want slaves counted at all, because that would give the South more representatives in Congress and the electoral college. The South wanted them counted as full people. The three-fifths rule was a compromise.”
“They were counted for representation,” Thom pointed out, “but they still couldn’t vote.”
“Oh, of course not,” Geneva said.
“Just like women, by the way,” Sachs added.
The social history of America wasn’t of any interest to Rhyme at the moment. “I’d like to see the other letters. And I want to find another copy of that magazine, Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated. What issue?”
“July twenty-third, 1868,” Geneva said. “But I’ve had a tough time finding it.”
“I’ll do my best,” Mel Cooper said. And Rhyme heard the railroad track clatter of his fingers on the keyboard.
Geneva was looking at her battered Swatch. “I really -”
“Hey, y’all,” a man’s voice called from the doorway. Wearing a brown tweed sports coat, blue shirt and jeans, Detective Roland Bell walked into the lab. A law enforcer in his native North Carolina, Bell had moved to New York a few years ago for personal reasons. He had a flop of brown hair, gentle eyes and was so easygoing that his urban coworkers sometimes felt a stab of impatience working with him, though Rhyme suspected the reason he sometimes moved slowly wasn’t Southern heritage at all but his meticulous nature, owing to the importance of his job within the NYPD. Bell’s specialty was protecting witnesses and other potential victims. His operation wasn’t an official unit in the NYPD but it still had a name: “SWAT.” This wasn’t the traditional weapons and tactics acronym, though; it was short for “Saving the Witness’s Ass Team.”
“Roland, this is Geneva Settle.”
“Hey there, miss,” he drawled and shook her hand.
“I don’t need a bodyguard,” she said firmly.
“Don’t you worry – I won’t get in your way,” Bell said. “You got my word of honor on that. I’ll stay as outa sight as a tick in tall grass.” A glance at Sellitto. “Now what’re we up against here?”
The heavyset detective ran through the details of the case and what they knew so far. Bell didn’t frown or shake his head but Rhyme could see his eyes go still, which signaled his concern. But when Sellitto was done, Bell put on his down-home face again and asked Geneva a number of questions about herself and her family to give him an idea of how to set up the protection detail. She answered hesitatingly, as if she begrudged the effort.
Finally Bell was finished and Geneva said impatiently, “I really have to go. Could somebody drive me home? I’ll get Charles’s letters for you. But then I have to go to school.”
“Detective Bell’ll take you home,” Rhyme said then added with a laugh, “but about school, I thought we’d agreed you’d take the day off. Take a makeup.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I didn’t agree to that. You said, ‘Let’s just get some questions out of the way and then we’ll see.’”
Not many people quoted Lincoln Rhyme’s words back at him. He grumbled, “Whatever I said, I think you’ll have to stay home, now that we know the perp may still be after you. It’s just not safe.”
“Mr. Rhyme, I need to take those tests. Makeups at my school – they sometimes don’t get scheduled, test books get lost, you don’t get credit.” Geneva was angrily gripping an empty belt loop on her jeans. She was so skinny. He wondered if her parents were health freaks, keeping her on a diet of organic granola and tofu. It seemed that a lot of professors leaned in that direction.
“I’ll call the school right now,” Sachs said. “We’ll tell them there’s been an incident and -”
“I think I really want to go,” Geneva said softly, eyes looking steadily into Rhyme’s. “Now.”
“Just stay at home for a day or two until we find out more. Or,” Rhyme added with a laugh, “until we nail his ass.”
It was supposed to be light, to win her over by talking teenage. But he regretted the words instantly. He hadn’t been real with her – solely because she was young. It was like the people who came to visit him and were overly loud and jokey because he was a quad. They pissed him off.
Just like she was pissed at him now.
She said, “I’d really appreciate a ride, if you don’t mind. Or I’ll take the train. But I have to leave now, if you want those letters.”
Irritated to have to be fighting this battle, Rhyme said with finality, “I’ll have to say no.”
“Can I borrow your phone?”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“There’s a man I want to call.”
“A man?”
“He’s the lawyer I mentioned. Wesley Goades. He used to work for the biggest insurance company in the country, and now he runs a legal clinic in Harlem.”
“And you want to call him?” Sellitto asked. “Why?”
“Because I want to ask him if you can keep me from going to school.”
Rhyme scoffed. “It’s for your own good.”
“That’s sort of for me to decide, isn’t it?”
“Your parents or your uncle.”
“They’re not the ones who have to graduate from eleventh grade next spring.”
Sachs chuckled. Rhyme shot her a dark look.
“Just for a day or two, miss,” Bell said.
Geneva ignored him and continued, “Mr. Goades got John David Colson released from Sing-Sing after he’d been in prison for ten years for a murder he didn’t commit. And he’s sued New York, I mean, the state itself, two or three times. He won every trial. And he just did a Supreme Court case. About homeless rights.”
“Won that one too, did he?” Rhyme asked wryly.
“He usually wins. In fact, I don’t think he’s ever lost.”
“This’s crazy,” Sellitto muttered, absently brushing at a dot of blood on his jacket. He muttered, “You’re a kid -”
Wrong thing to say.
Geneva glared at him and snapped, “You’re not going to let me make a phone call? Don’t prisoners get to do that, even?”
The big detective sighed. He gestured toward the phone.
She walked to it, looked in her address book and punched in a number.
“Wesley Goades,” Rhyme said.
Geneva cocked her head as the call was connected. She said to Rhyme, “He went to Harvard. Oh, and he sued the army too. Gay rights, I think.”
She spoke into the phone. “Mr. Goades, please…Could you tell him Geneva Settle called? I was a witness to a crime, and I’m being held by the police.” She gave the address of Rhyme’s town house then added, “It’s against my will and -”
Rhyme glanced at Sellitto, who rolled his eyes and said, “All right.”
“Hold on,” Geneva said into the phone. Then turned to the big detective, who towered over her. “I can go to school?”
“For the test. That’s all.”
“There are two of them.”
“All right. Both goddamn tests,” Sellitto muttered. To Bell, he said, “Stay with her.”
“Like a flat-coated retriever, y’all got that right.”
Into the phone Geneva said, “Tell Mr. Goades never mind. We’ve got it worked out.” She hung up.
Rhyme said, “But first I want those letters.”
“Deal.” She slung her book bag over her shoulder.
“You,” Sellitto barked to Pulaski, “go with ’em.”
“Yes, sir.”
After Bell, Geneva and the rookie had left, Sachs looked at the door and laughed. “Now, that’s one spitfire.”
“Wesley Goades.” Rhyme smiled. “I think she was making him up. Probably called time and temperature.”
He nodded toward the evidence board. “Let’s get going on all of this. Mel, you take over street-fair detail. And I want the facts and profile of what we’ve got so far sent to VICAP and NCIC. I want all the libraries and schools in town polled to see if this guy who talked to Barry also called them and asked about Singleton or that Coloreds’ Weekly magazine. Oh, and find out who makes smiley-face bags.”
“Tall order,” Cooper called.
“Hey, guess what? Life’s a tall order sometimes. Then send a sample of the blood on the rope to CODIS.”
“I thought you didn’t think it was a sex crime.” CODIS was a database that contained the DNA of known sex offenders.
“The operative words are ‘I think,’ Mel. Not ‘I know to a fucking certainty.’”
“So much for the mood,” Thom said.
“One other thing…” He wheeled closer and examined the pictures of the librarian’s body and the diagram of the shooting crime scene, which Sachs had drawn. “The woman was how far from the vic?” Rhyme asked Sellitto.
“Who, the bystander? I’d guess fifteen feet to the side.”
“Who was hit first?”
“She was.”
“And the shots were grouped tight? The ones that hit the librarian?”
“Real tight. Inches apart. He knows how to shoot.”
Rhyme muttered, “It wasn’t a miss, the woman. He shot her on purpose.”
“What?”
The criminalist asked the best pistol shot in the room, “Sachs, when you’re rapid-firing, what’s the one shot that’s bound to be the most accurate?”
“The first. You’re not fighting recoil.”
Rhyme said, “He wounded her intentionally – aimed for a major blood vessel – to draw off as many officers as he could and give him a chance to get away.”
Cooper muttered, “Jesus.”
“Tell Bell. And Bo Haumann and his people at Emergency Services. Let ’em know that’s the kind of perp we’re dealing with – one who’s more than happy to target innocents.”