Authors: Jeffery Deaver
So, for now, the relationship with Pam was enough. Sachs enjoyed her role and took it seriously; the girl was lowering her reticence to trust adults. And Rhyme genuinely enjoyed her company. Presently he was helping her outline a book about her experiences in the right-wing underground to be called
Captivity
.
Thom had told her that she had a chance of getting on
Oprah
.
Speeding around a taxi, Sachs now said, “You never answered. How was studying?”
“Great.”
“You set for that test on Thursday?”
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“Got it down. No problem.”
Sachs gave a laugh. “You didn’t even crack a book today, did you?”
“Amelia, come on. It was such a neat day! The weather’s been sucky all week. We
had
to get outside.”
Sachs’s instinct was to remind her of the importance of getting good scores on her finals. Pam was smart, with a high IQ and a voracious appetite for books, but after her bizarre schooling she’d find it tough to get into a good college. The girl, though, looked so happy that Sachs relented. “So what’d you do?”
“Just walked. All the way up to Harlem, around the reservoir. Oh, and there was this concert by the boathouse, just a cover band, you know, but they
totally
nailed Coldplay…” Pam thought back.
“Mostly, like, Stuart and I just talked. About nothing. That’s the best, you ask me.”
Amelia Sachs couldn’t disagree. “Is he cute?”
“Oh, yeah. Way cute.”
“Have a picture?”
“Amelia! That’d be so uncool.”
“After this case is over, how ’bout we have dinner, the three of us?”
“Yeah? You really want to meet him?”
“Any boy going out with you better know that you’ve got somebody watching your back. Somebody who carries a gun and handcuffs. Okay, hold on to the dog; I’m in the mood to drive.”
Sachs downshifted hard, pumped the gas and left two exclamation points of rubber on the dull black asphalt.
Since Amelia Sachs had begun spending occasional nights and weekends here at Rhyme’s, certain changes had occurred around the Victorian town house. When he’d lived here alone, after the accident and before Sachs, the place had been more or less neat—depending on whether or not he’d been firing aides and housekeepers—but “homey” wasn’t a word that described it. Nothing personal had graced the walls—none of the certificates, degrees, commendations and medals he’d received during his celebrated tenure as head of the NYPD crime-scene operation. Nor any pictures of his parents, Teddy and Anne, or his uncle Henry’s family.
Sachs hadn’t approved. “It’s important,” she lectured, “your past, your family. You’re purging your history, Rhyme.”
He’d never seen her apartment—the place wasn’t disabled accessible—but he knew that the rooms were chockablock with evidence of
her
history. He’d seen many of the pictures, of course: Amelia Sachs
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as a pretty young girl (with freckles that had long since vanished) who didn’t smile a lot; as a high school student with mechanics tools in hand; as a college-age daughter flanked on holidays by a grinning cop father and a stern mother; as a magazine and advertising model, her eyes offering the chic frigidity that was au courant (but which Rhyme knew was contempt for the way models were considered mere coat hangers).
Hundreds of other pix too, shot mostly by her father, the man with a quick-draw Kodak.
Sachs had studied Rhyme’s bare walls and had gone where the aides—even Thom—did not: the boxes in the basement, scores of cartons containing evidence of Rhyme’s prior life, his life in the Before, artifacts hidden away and as unmentioned as first wife to second. Many of these certificates and diplomas and family pictures now filled the walls and mantelpiece.
Including the one he was presently studying—of himself as a lean teenager, in a track uniform, taken after he’d just competed in a varsity meet. It depicted him with unruly hair and a prominent Tom Cruise nose, bending forward with his hands on his knees, having just finished what was probably a mile run.
Rhyme was never a sprinter; he liked the lyricism, the elegance of the longer distances. He considered running “a process.” Sometimes he would not stop running even after crossing the finish line.
His family would have been in the stands. Both father and uncle resided in suburbs of Chicago, though some distance apart. Lincoln’s home was to the west, in the flat, balding sprawl that was then still partly farmland, a target of both thoughtless developers and frightening tornados. Henry Rhyme and his family were somewhat immune to both, being on the lakefront in Evanston.
Henry commuted twice a week to teach his advanced physics courses at the University of Chicago, a long, two-train trek through the city’s many social divides. His wife, Paula, taught at Northwestern. The couple had three children, Robert, Marie and Arthur, all named after scientists, Oppenheimer and Curie being the most famous. Art was named after Arthur Compton, who in 1942 ran the famed Metallurgic Lab at the University of Chicago, the cover for the project to create the world’s first controlled nuclear chain reaction. All the children had attended good schools. Robert, Northwestern Medical. Marie, UC-Berkeley. Arthur went to M.I.T.
Robert had died years earlier in an industrial accident in Europe. Marie was working in China on environmental issues. As for the Rhyme parents, only one remained of the four: Aunt Paula now lived in an assisted-care facility, amid vivid, coherent memories of sixty years ago, while experiencing the present in bewildering fragments.
Rhyme now continued to stare at the picture of himself. He was unable to look away, recalling the track meet… In his college classes Professor Henry Rhyme signified approval with a subtle, raised eyebrow.
But on the playing field, he was always leaping to his feet in the bleachers, whistling and bellowing for Lincoln to
push, push, push, you can do it!
Encouraging him over the finish line first (he often was).
Following the meet, Rhyme supposed he’d gone off with Arthur. The boys spent as much time together as they could, filling the sibling gap. Robert and Marie were considerably older than Arthur, and Lincoln was an only child.
So Lincoln and Art adopted each other. Most weekends and every summer the surrogate brothers would go off on their adventures, often in Arthur’s Corvette (Uncle Henry, even as a professor, made several times what Rhyme’s father did; Teddy was a scientist too, though he was more comfortable out of the spotlight). The boys’ outings were typical teenage venture—girls, ball games, movies, arguing, eating burgers and pizza, sneaking beer and explaining the world. And more girls.
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Now, sitting in the new TDX wheelchair, Rhyme wondered where exactly he and Arthur had gone after the meet.
Arthur, his surrogate brother…
Who never came to see him after his spine was cracked like a piece of defective wood.
Why, Arthur? Tell me why…
But these memories were derailed by the ringing doorbell in his town house. Thom veered toward the hallway and a moment later, a slightly built, balding man wearing a tuxedo strode into the room. Mel Cooper shoved his thick glasses up on his thin nose and nodded to Rhyme. “Afternoon.”
“Formal?” Rhyme asked, glancing at the tux.
“The dance competition. If we’d been finalists, you know I wouldn’t have come.” He took off jacket and bow tie, then rolled up the sleeves of the frilly shirt. “So what do we have, this
unique
case you were telling me about?”
Rhyme filled him in.
“I’m sorry about your cousin, Lincoln. I don’t think you ever mentioned him.”
“What do you think of the M.O.?”
“If it’s true it’s brilliant.” Cooper gazed at the evidence chart of the Alice Sanderson homicide.
“Thoughts?” Rhyme asked.
“Well, half the evidence at your cousin’s was in the car or the garage. A lot easier to plant it there than in the house.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
The doorbell rang again. A moment later Rhyme heard his aide’s footsteps returning solo. Rhyme was wondering if someone had delivered a package. But then his mind jumped: Sunday. A visitor could be in street clothes and running shoes, which would make no sound on the entryway floor.
Of course.
Young Ron Pulaski turned the corner and nodded shyly. He wasn’t a rookie any longer, having been a uniformed patrolman for several years. But he looked like a rookie and so, to Rhyme, that’s what he was. And probably would always be.
The shoes were indeed quiet Nikes but he was wearing a very loud Hawaiian shirt over blue jeans. His blond hair was stylishly spiked and a scar prominently marked his forehead—a remnant from a nearly fatal attack during his first case with Rhyme and Sachs. The assault was so vicious that he’d suffered a brain injury and nearly quit the force. The young man had decided to fight his way through rehab and stay on the NYPD, inspired largely by Rhyme (a fact he shared only with Sachs, of course, not the criminalist himself; she relayed the news).
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He blinked at Cooper’s tux and then nodded hello to both men.
“Your dishes spotless, Pulaski? Your flowers watered? Your leftovers tucked away in freezer bags?”
“I left right away, sir.”
The men were going over the case when they heard Sachs’s voice from the doorway. “A costume party.” She was looking at Cooper’s tuxedo and Pulaski’s brash shirt. To the lab man she said, “You’re looking pretty smart. That’s the word for somebody in a tux, right? ‘Smart’?”
“Sadly, ‘semifinalist’ is the only thing that comes to my mind.”
“Is Gretta taking it well?”
His beautiful Scandinavian girlfriend was, he reported, “hanging out with her friends and drowning her sorrows with Aquavit. Her homeland’s beverage. But, if you ask me, it’s undrinkable.”
“How’s your mom?”
Cooper lived with his mother, a feisty lady who was a long-term Queensean.
“She’s doing well. Out for brunch at the Boat House.”
Sachs also asked about Pulaski’s wife and two young children. Then added, “Thanks for coming in on Sunday.” To Rhyme: “You did tell him how much we appreciate it, didn’t you?”
“I’m sure I did,” he muttered. “Now, if we could get to work… So what’ve you got?” He eyed the large brown folder she carried.
“Evidence inventory and photos from the coin theft and rape.”
“Where’s the actual P.E.?”
“Archived in the evidence warehouse on Long Island.”
“Well, let’s take a look.”
As she had with his cousin’s file, Sachs picked up a marker and began writing on another whiteboard.
HOMICIDE/THEFT — MARCH 27
March 27
Crime: Homicide, theft of six boxes of rare coins
COD: Blood loss, shock, due to multiple stab wounds
Location: Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
Victim: Howard Schwartz
Suspect: Randall Pemberton
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EVIDENCE LOG FROM VICTIM’S HOUSE:
· Grease
· Flecks of dried hair spray
· Polyester fibers
· Wool fibers
· Shoeprint of size 9 1/2 Bass walker
Witness reported man in tan-colored vest fleeing to black Honda Accord
EVIDENCE INVENTORY FROM SUSPECT’S HOUSE AND CAR:
· Grease on umbrella on patio, matching what was found at victim’s house
· Pair of 9 1/2 Bass walkers
· Clairol hair spray, matching fleck found at scene
· Knife/Trace embedded in handle:
· Dust matching nothing at either crime scene or suspect’s house
· Flecks of old cardboard
· Knife/Trace on blade:
· Victim’s blood. Positive match
· Suspect owned 2004 black Honda Accord
· One coin identified as coming from the collection of victim
· A Culberton Outdoor Company vest, tan. Polyester fiber found at the scene matches
· A wool blanket in the car. The wool fiber at the scene matches Note: Prior to trial, investigators canvassed major coin dealers in metro area or on the Internet. No one attempted to fence the particular stolen coins.
“So if our perp stole the coins he’s kept them. And ‘dust matching nothing at either crime scene.’… That means it probably came from the perp’s house. But what the hell kind of dust is it? Didn’t they analyze it?” Rhyme shook his head. “Okay, I want to see the pictures. Where are they?”
“I’m getting them. Hold on.”
Sachs found some tape and mounted printouts on a third whiteboard. Rhyme maneuvered closer and squinted up at the dozens of photos of the crime scenes. The coin collector’s living space was tidy, the perp’s less so. The kitchen, where the coin and knife had been found, under the sink, was cluttered, the table covered with dirty dishes and food cartons. On the table was a pile of mail, most of it apparently junk.
“Next one,” he announced. “Let’s go.” He tried to keep his voice from tipping into impatience.
HOMICIDE/RAPE — APRIL 18
April 18
Crime: Homicide, rape
COD: Strangulation
Location: Brooklyn
Victim: Rita Moscone
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Suspect: Joseph Knightly
EVIDENCE FROM VICTIM’S APARTMENT:
· Traces of Colgate-Palmolive Softsoap hand soap
· Condom lubricant
· Rope fibers
· Dust adhering to duct tape, matching no samplars in apartment
· Duct tape, American Adhesive brand
· Fleck of latex
· Wool/polyester fibers, black
· Tobacco on victim (see note below)
EVIDENCE FROM SUSPECT’S HOUSE:
· Durex condoms containing lubricant identical to that found on victim
· Coil of rope, fibers matching those found at crime scene
· Two-foot length of same rope, victim’s blood on it, along with two-inch strand of BASF B35 nylon 6, most likely source a doll’s hair
· Colgate-Palmolive Softsoap
· Duct tape, American Adhesive brand
· Latex gloves, matching the fleck found at the scene
· Men’s socks, wool-polyester blend, matching fiber found at scene. Another identical pair in the garage, containing traces of victim’s blood