Authors: Otto Penzler
Capt. Rhyme took forensic science in New York City to a new level. He fought for budget increases to buy state-of-the-art equipment, evidence-collection gear, and computers. He personally created a number of databases of “samples,” such as motor oils, gasoline, dirt, insects, animal droppings, and construction materials, against which his officers could compare trace evidence from crime scenes and thus identify and locate the perpetrator with unprecedented speed. He would wander through the streets of the city at all hours, collecting such materials.
He developed new approaches to searching crime scenes (for which he coined the now-common term “walking the grid”). He instituted the practice of using a single officer to examine scenes, believing that a solo searcher could achieve a better understanding of the crime and the perpetrator than a group of officers could.
FBI Special Agent Frederick Dellray, who worked with Capt. Rhyme frequently, said, “When it came to physical evidence, there was not a soul in the country who was better. No, make that the world. I mean, he was the one we brought in to set up our Physical Evidence Response Team. Nobody from Washington or Quantico, nope. We picked him. I mean, this’s a guy solved a case ’cause he found a fleck of cow manure from the eighteen hundreds. He couldn’t tell you who Britney Spears is or who won American Idol, but, it came to evidence, that man knew f***ing everything.”
Although most senior crime scene officers are content to leave the actual searches and lab work to underlings, Capt. Rhyme would have none of that. Even as a captain, he searched scenes, gathered samples, and did much of the analysis himself.
“When we were partnered,” said Lt. Lon Sellitto, “he was a lot of times first officer at the scene and would insist on searching it himself, even if it was hot.”
A “hot” crime scene is one at which an armed and dangerous perpetrator might still be present.
“I remember one time,” Lt. Sellitto recalled, “he was running a scene and the perp comes back with a gun, starts shooting. Lincoln dives under cover and returns fire, but he was mad about the whole thing——every time he fired, he said, he was contaminating the scene. I told him later, ‘Geez, Linc, you shoot the guy, you’re not gonna have to worry about the scene.’ He didn’t laugh.”
When asked once about his fastidious approach to forensic work, Capt. Rhyme cited Locard’s Principle, which was named after the early French criminalist Edmond Locard, who stated that in every crime there is some exchange between the criminal and the victim, or the criminal and the scene, though the trace might be extremely difficult to find.
As Capt. Rhyme put it: “Often the only thing that will stop a vicious killer is a microscopic bit of dust, a hair, a fiber, a sloughed-off skin cell, a coffee stain. If you’re lazy or stupid and miss that cell or fiber, well, how’re you going to explain that to the family of the next victim?”
Capt. Rhyme insisted on employees’ total devotion to their job, and once fired an officer for using the toilet beside the bedroom where a murder had occurred.
Still, he rewarded hard work and loyalty. A former protégé reported that on more than one occasion, Capt. Rhyme would berate senior police officials to secure raises or promotions for his people. Or he would adamantly, and loudly, defend his team’s judgments about handling cases.
In several instances Capt. Rhyme himself ordered senior police officials, reporters, and even a deputy mayor arrested when their presence threatened to contaminate or interfere with a crime scene
In addition to gathering and analyzing evidence, Capt. Rhyme enjoyed testifying in court against those whose arrests he had participated in.
Bernard Rothstein, a well-known criminal-defense lawyer who has represented many organized-crime figures, recalled several cases in which Capt. Rhyme testified. “If I saw that Rhyme had done the forensic work in a case against one of my clients, I’d think, brother, I am not looking forward to that cross-examination. You can punch holes in the testimony of most crime scene cops when they get up on the stand. But Lincoln Rhyme? He’d punch holes in you.”
After his accident at the subway crime scene, Rhyme converted a parlor in his Central Park West town house into a forensic lab, one that was as well equipped as those in many small cities.
Det. Melvin Cooper, an NYPD crime scene officer who often worked with Capt. Rhyme and did much of his laboratory work for him, recalled one of the first cases run out of his town house. “It was a big homicide, and we had a bunch of evidence. We cranked up the gas chromatograph, the scanning electron microscope, and the mass spectrometer. Some other instruments too. Then I turned on a table lamp, and that was the last straw. It blew out the electricity. I don’t mean just his town house. I mean the entire block and a lot of Central Park too. Took us nearly an hour to get back on line.”
Despite his injury, Capt. Rhyme was not active in disability rights organizations. He once told a reporter, “I’m a white male who lives in New York City, is six feet tall, weighs 182 pounds, has dark hair, and is disabled. Those are all conditions that have, to a greater or lesser degree, affected my career as a criminalist. I don’t focus on any of them. My purpose in life is to find the truth behind crimes. Everything else is secondary. In other words, I’m a criminalist who, by the way, happens to be disabled.”
Ironically, largely because of this attitude, Capt. Rhyme has been held out by many advocates as an example of the new disabled movement, in which individuals are given neither to self-pity nor to exploiting or obsessing over their condition.
“Lincoln Rhyme stood for the proposition that the disabled are human beings first, with the same talents and passions——and shortcomings——as everyone else,” said Sonja Wente, director of the Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Center. “He avoided both the pedestal and the soapbox.”
Capt. Rhyme himself observed in a recent interview, “The line between the disabled and the nondisabled is shrinking. Computers, video cameras, high-definition monitors, biometric devices, and voice-recognition software have moved my life closer to that of somebody who’s fully able-bodied, while the same technology is creating a more sedentary, housebound life for those who have no disability whatsoever. From what I’ve read, I lead a more active life than a lot of people nowadays.”
Nonetheless, Capt. Rhyme did not simply accept his disability; he fought hard to maintain his ability to live as normal a life as he could and, in fact, to improve his condition.
“Lincoln engaged in a daily regimen of exercises on various machinery, including a stationary bike and a treadmill,” said Thom Reston, his personal aide and caregiver for a number of years. “I was always saying slow down, take it easy, watch your blood pressure.” The aide added, laughing, “He ignored me.”
In fact, in recent years, Reston said, the exercise paid off, and Capt. Rhyme was able to regain some use of his extremities and some sensation, a feat that spinal-cord doctors described as a rare achievement.
Capt. Rhyme was not only a practicing criminalist; throughout his tenure at the NYPD, he was in demand as a teacher and lecturer. After his accident, when traveling became more difficult, he continued to lecture on occasion at John Jay School of Criminal Justice and Fordham University in New York City. He wrote about forensic issues, and his articles have appeared in, among others, Forensic Science Review, The New Scotland Yard Forensic Investigation Annual, American College of Forensic Examiners Journal, Report of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, and The Journal of the International Institute of Forensic Science.
He authored two books: a text on forensic science used by thousands of police departments and law-enforcement agencies around the world, and a popular nonfiction book, The Scenes of the Crime, about sites in New York City where unsolved murders occurred. The book is still in print.
Capt. Rhyme was himself the subject of a series of bestselling popular novels, which recounted some of his better-known cases, including The Bone Collector, about a serial kidnapper; The Stone Monkey, recounting the hunt for a Chinese “snakehead,” or human smuggler; and The Twelfth Card, in which he and Det. Amelia Sachs, who worked with him often, investigated a crime that occurred just after the Civil War.
Publicly dismissive of the novels, he stated in interviews that he thought the books merely trivial “entertainments,” good for reading on airplanes or at the beach, but little else.
Privately, though, he was delighted to be the subject of the series, keeping an autographed set on his shelves. Visitors reported that he would often make them sit silently and listen to passages he particularly liked on CD.
“Lincoln and his ego were never far apart,” joked Mr. Reston.
Capt. Rhyme was divorced from his wife, Blaine Chapman Rhyme, twelve years ago. They had no children. He is survived by his partner, Det. Sachs; his aunt, Jeanette Hanson; and four cousins, Arthur Rhyme, Marie Rhyme-Sloane, Richard Hanson, and Margaret Hanson.
A memorial service for Capt. Rhyme will be held at 7:00 p.m., Monday, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, at Central Park West, New York, NY. Det. Sachs has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to a charitable organization for the benefit of children with spinal-cord injuries or disease.
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The first floor of the town house on Central Park West was quiet, dark. The lights were off, and little of the dusk light from outside penetrated the curtains in the east-facing room.
What had once been a quaint Victorian parlor was now filled with laboratory equipment, shelves, cabinets, office chairs, electronic devices. On examining tables were plastic and paper bags, and tubes and boxes containing evidence. They were in no particular order.
The atmosphere here was of a workplace whose otherwise busy pulse had been stopped cold.
Tall, red-haired Amelia Sachs stood in the corner, beside frumpy Lon Sellitto. They both wore black suits.
Her eyes gazed down at Lincoln Rhyme’s obituary.
Sellitto glanced down at it. “Weird, hm?”
She gave a faint, unhappy laugh, then shook her head.
“I felt exactly the same way. Hard enough to think about the idea, you know, without seeing it in black-and-white.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s it.”
Sellitto looked at his watch. “Well, it’s about time.”
The hour was close to seven p.m., Monday, when the obit announced the memorial service was about to start.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
The two shared a glance, left the town house. Sachs locked the door. She glanced up at Lincoln Rhyme’s darkened bedroom, outside of which falcons nested on the ledge. She and Sellitto started down the street toward the Society for Ethical Culture, which was just a short walk away.
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Amelia Sachs returned to the town house, accompanied by a group of other officers.
Casual observers might have thought that the cops were returning from the memorial service for a reception at the home of the deceased.
But they’d have been wrong. The hour was merely 7:20, which wouldn’t have allowed nearly enough time for a proper service, even for someone as unspiritual as Lincoln Rhyme. And a closer look at the officers would have revealed that they had their weapons drawn and were whispering into microphones held in hands or protruding from headsets.
The dozen officers split into two groups, and on word from Lon Sellitto at a nearby command post, one sped through the front door, another jogged around back.
Amelia Sachs, not surprisingly, was the first one through the front door.
The lights flashed on and she crouched in the doorway, ignoring the painful griping of arthritic joints as she trained her Glock on an astonished man in a suit and dark blue shirt, bending over an evidence table. He was surprised in the act of picking up a plastic bag in his latex-gloved fingers.
“Freeze,” Sachs barked, and he did, noting undoubtedly the steadiness of her hand holding the pistol and the look in her eye that explained she was more than prepared to fire it.
“I—”
“Hands on your head.”
The solidly built middle-aged man sighed in disgust, dropped the bag, and complied. “Look, I can explain.”
Sachs wondered how often she’d heard that in her years as a cop, at moments just like this.
“Cuff him, search him,” she barked to young, spiky-haired Ron Pulaski and the other officers on the takedown team. “He’s a cop. Remember, he might have two weapons.”
They relieved the man of his service Glock and, yep, a backup in an ankle holster, then cuffed him.
“You don’t understand.”
Sachs had heard that quite a bit too.
“Detective Peter Antonini, you’re under arrest for murder.” She offered up the mantra of the Miranda warning, then asked, “Do you wish to waive your right to remain silent?”
“No, I sure as hell don’t.”
“There’s not much he needs to say anyway,” said a new voice in the room. Lincoln Rhyme wheeled his TDX wheelchair out of the small elevator that connected the lab with the upstairs bedroom. He nodded at the examination table. “Looks like the evidence tells it all.”
art
“You?” Antonini gasped. “You’re… you were dead.”
“I thought you wanted to remain silent,” Rhyme reminded him, enjoying the look of absolute astonishment on the guilty man’s face.