Authors: Otto Penzler
The criminalist wheeled to the evidence table and looked over what the officers had pulled from Antonini’s pocket—Baggies of hair and dirt and other trace evidence, which he had intended to substitute for the evidence sitting on the table, evidence the officer believed would convict him of murder.
“You son of a bitch.”
“He keeps talking,” Rhyme said, amused. “What’s the point of Miranda?”
At which point detective second-class Peter Antonini, attached to Major Cases, did indeed fall silent as Sachs called Sellitto in the command van and told him about the successful takedown. Sellitto would in turn relay the news to the brass at One Police Plaza.
You were dead.…
Rhyme’s phony death and the obituary had been a last-ditch effort to solve a series of crimes that cut to the heart of the NYPD, crimes that might have gone unnoticed if not for an offhand observation made by Ron Pulaski a week before.
The young officer was in the lab helping Sellitto and Rhyme on a murder investigation in Lower Manhattan, when a supervisor called with the news that the suspect had shot himself. Rhyme found the death troubling; he wanted closure in his cases, sure, but resolution by suicide was inelegant. It didn’t allow for complete explanations, and Lincoln Rhyme detested unanswered questions.
It was then that Pulaski had frowned and said, “Another one?”
“Whatta you mean?” Sellitto had barked.
“One of our suspects dying before he gets collared. That’s happened before. Those two others. Remember, sir?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Tell us, Pulaski,” Rhyme had encouraged.
“About two months, that Hidalgo woman, she was killed in a mugging.”
Rhyme remembered. A woman being investigated for attempted murder—beating her young child nearly to death—was found dead, killed during an apparent robbery. The evidence had initially suggested that Maria Hidalgo was guilty of beating the child, but after her death it was found that she was innocent. Her ex-husband had had some kind of psychotic break and attacked the child. Sadly, she’d died before she could be vindicated.
The other case, Pulaski had reminded them, involved an Arab American who’d gotten into a fight with some non-Muslim men and killed one of them. Rhyme and Sellitto were looking into the politically charged case, when the suspect had fallen in his bathtub and drowned. Rhyme later determined that the Muslim had killed the victim, but under circumstances that suggested manslaughter or even negligent homicide, not murder.
He, too, died before the facts had come out.
“Kinda strange,” Sellitto had said, then nodded at Pulaski. “Good thinking, kid.”
Rhyme had said, “Yeah, too strange. Pulaski, do me favor and check out if there’re any other cases like those—where suspects under investigation got offed or committed suicide.”
A few days later, Pulaski came back with the results: There were seven cases in which suspects had died while out on bail or before they’d been officially arrested. The means of death were suicide, accident, and random mugging.
Sellitto and Rhyme wondered if maybe a rogue cop was taking justice into his own hands—getting details on the progress of cases, deciding the suspects were guilty, and executing them himself, avoiding the risk that the suspects might get off at trial.
The detective and Rhyme understood the terrible damage this could cause the department if true—a murderer in their midst using NYPD resources to facilitate his crimes. They talked to Chief of Department McNulty and were given carte blanche to get to the truth.
Amelia Sachs, Pulaski, and Sellitto interviewed friends and family of the suspects and witnesses nearby at the time they had died. From these accounts, it appeared that a middle-aged white man had been seen with many of the suspects just before their deaths. Several witnesses thought the man had displayed a gold shield; he was therefore a detective. The killer clearly knew Rhyme, since three of the victims were apparently murdered while the criminalist was running their cases. He and Sachs came up with a list of white detectives, aged thirty-five to fifty-five, he’d worked with over the past six months.
They surreptitiously checked the detectives’ whereabouts at the times of the killings, eventually clearing all but twelve.
Rhyme opened an official investigation into the most recent case—the fake suicide that Pulaski had commented on. The scene was pretty cold and hadn’t been well preserved—being only a suicide—but Amelia Sachs came up with a few clues that gave some hope of finding the killer. A few clothing fibers that didn’t match anything in the victim’s apartment, tool marks that might have come from jimmying a window, and traces of unusual cooking oil. Those weren’t helpful in finding the killer’s identity, but something else she found suggested where he might live: traces of loam-rich soil that turned out to be unique to the banks of the Hudson River, some of which contained “white gas,” kerosene used in boats.
So it was possible that the rogue cop lived near the river in Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester, or New Jersey.
This narrowed the list to four detectives: from the Bronx, Diego Sanchez; from New Jersey, Carl Sibiewski; from Westchester, Peter Antonini and Eddie Yu.
But there the case stalled. The evidence wasn’t strong enough to get a warrant to search their houses for the clothing fibers, tools, cooking oil, and guns.
They needed to flush him out. And Rhyme had an idea how.
The killer would know that Rhyme was investigating the suicide—it was an official case—and would know that the criminalist had some evidence. They decided to give him the perfect opportunity to steal it or replace it with something implicating someone else.
So Rhyme arranged his own death and had the chief send out the memo about it to a number of officers, including the four suspects (the others were told of the ploy, and they agreed to play along). The memo would mention the memorial service, implying that at that time the lab would be unoccupied.
Sellitto set up a search-and-surveillance team outside the town house, and while Rhyme remained in his bedroom, Sachs and Sellitto played the good mourners and left, giving the perp a chance to break in and show himself.
Which he oh so courteously had done, using a screwdriver that appeared to be the same one that had left marks on the windows of prior victims’ residences.
Rhyme now ordered, “Get a warrant. I want all the clothes in his house, cooking oils and soil samples, other tools too. And any guns. Send ’em to ballistics.”
As he was led to the door, Peter Antonini pulled away roughly from one of the officers holding him and spun to face Rhyme and Sachs. “You think the system works. You think justice is served.” His eyes were mad with rage. “But it doesn’t. I’ve been a cop long enough to know how screwed up it all is. You know how many guilty people get off every day? Murderers, child abusers, wife beaters… I’m sick of it!”
Amelia Sachs responded. “And what about those innocent ones you killed? Our system would have worked for them. Yours didn’t.”
“Acceptable losses,” he said coolly. “Sacrifices have to be made.”
Rhyme sighed. He found rants tedious. “It’s time you left, Detective Antonini. Get him downtown.”
The escorts led him out the door.
“Thom, if you don’t mind, it’s cocktail hour. Well past it, in fact.”
A few moments later, as Thom was fastening a cup of single-malt scotch to Rhyme’s chair, Lon Sellitto walked into the room. He squinted at Rhyme. “You don’t even look sick. Let alone dead.”
“Funny. Have a drink.”
The chunky detective pursed his lips, then said, “You know how many calories’re in whiskey?”
“Less than a doughnut, I’ll bet.”
Sellitto cocked his head, meaning good point, and took the glass Thom offered. Sachs declined, as did Pulaski.
The rumpled detective sipped the whiskey. “Chief of department’s on his way. Wants to thank you. Press officer too.”
“Oh, great,” Rhyme muttered. “Just what I need. A bunch of sappy-eyed grateful visitors. Hell. I liked being dead better.”
“Linc, got a question. Why’d you pick the Watchmaker to do the deed?”
“Because he’s the only credible perp I could think of.” Rhyme had recently foiled an elaborate murder plot by the professional killer, who’d threatened Rhyme’s life before disappearing. “Everybody on the force knows he wants to kill me.” The criminalist took a long sip of the smoky liquor. “And he’s probably one of the few men in the world who could.”
An uneasy silence followed that sobering comment, and Pulaski apparently felt the need to fill it. “Hey, Detective Rhyme, is this all accurate?” A nod at the memo that contained his obituary.
“Of course it is,” Rhyme said, as if the comment were absurd. “It had to be—in case the killer knew something about me. Otherwise he might think something was up.”
“Oh, sure. I guess.”
“And by the way, do you always get your superior officers’ attention with ‘hey’?”
“Sorry. I—”
“Relax, rookie. I’m a civilian, not your superior. But it’s something to ponder.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, sir.”
Sachs sat next to Rhyme and put her hand on his—the right one, which had some motion and sensation. She squeezed his fingers. “Gave me kind of a pause.” Looking down at the sheet. “Lon and I were talking about it.”
It had given Rhyme some pause too. He felt the breeze from death’s wings nearly every day, closer than to most people. He’d learned to ignore the presence. But seeing the account in black-and-white had been a bit startling.
“Whatta you gonna do with it?” Sellitto asked, glancing down at the paper.
“Save it, of course. Such beautiful prose, such pithy journalism… Besides, it’s going to come in handy someday.”
Sellitto barked a laugh. “Hell, Linc, you’re gonna live forever. You know what they say. Only the good die young.”
COLIN DEXTER
Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1930, Colin Dexter graduated from Cambridge University and spent most of his professional life as an educator in his beloved Oxford. He came comparatively late to crime writing, being already in his forties when he attempted his first novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, which was accepted by the second publisher to which it was sent. It introduced Inspector Morse, the somewhat curmudgeonly senior officer in the Criminal Investigator Department with the Thames Valley Police, and Sergeant Lewis, who appeared in every one of Dexter’s thirteen novels and most of the short stories collected in Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories (1993).
Among his numerous awards are Gold Daggers from the British Crime Writers’ Association for The Wench Is Dead (1989) and The Way Through the Woods (1992) and the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, presented to him in 1997.
The hugely successful Inspector Morse television series, produced by ITV in England and shown in the United States on PBS, was based on the books and additional stories; it starred John Thaw and Kevin Whateley, running for thirty-three episodes from 1987 to 2000. Like Alfred Hitchcock did in his films, Colin Dexter made brief cameo appearances in most of the episodes.
INSPECTOR MORSE
BY COLIN DEXTER
Perhaps (I hope) the most sensible way for me to write about Chief Inspector Morse is to try to answer some of the many questions that have been put to me most frequently by audiences and correspondents. Then, at least, I can believe that my answers will be focused upon things in which people seem genuinely interested.
But first, a few brief words about myself. The whole of my working life was spent in education: first, as a teacher of Latin and Greek in English grammar schools; second, with increasing deafness blighting my life, as a senior administrative officer with the Oxford Delegacy of Local Examinations, in charge of Latin, Greek, Ancient History, and English.
Well, here goes!
What emboldened you to enlist in the rather crowded ranks of the crime-writing fraternity?
It is not unknown, even in midsummer, for the heavens to open in North Wales; and there are few things more dispiriting than to sit in a guesthouse with the rain streaming in rivulets down the windows, and with offspring affirming that every other father somehow manages to locate a splendid resort, with blue skies and warm seas, for the annual family holiday. That was my situation one Saturday afternoon in August 1973. Having rather nervously asserted that we were not planning a premature return to Oxford, I shut myself up in the narrow confines of the kitchen with a biro and a pad of ruled paper—with only a very vague idea of what I was intending to do. I had already finished reading the two paperback detective stories left by previous guests, and I figured that if I tried hard, I might possibly do almost as well in the genre myself. So for a couple of hours I tried very hard, resulting in how many paragraphs, I cannot recall. I doubt more than two or three. It was, however, that all-important start: Initium est dimidium facti (the beginning is one half of the deed), as the Roman proverb has it.
Had I any reason other than vanity for wishing to see my name on the jacket of a detective story? Not money, certainly, since I was fortunate enough to enjoy a well-paid university post, annually climbing a little higher up the salary scale. If, as Dr. Johnson remarked—in an uncharacteristically cynical vein—“no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” then I was one of the blockheads. And not because I thought I had anything of criminological, psychological, or sociological import to communicate to my fellow man. I had just one simple aim in mind—an aim to which I have always held firm in my subsequent writings: to tell a story that would entertain whatever readers might be coming my way.