“It was hidden under some towels and newspapers.”
This was disappointing. Cloth was not the most helpful of substances in forensic analysis — you couldn’t lift prints from most types, and certainly not from terry cloth. But there was always the chance that trace substances were embedded in the fibers that might link the drugs to Velasquez. Perhaps they could get fingerprints off the paper bag and maybe even a DNA hit. Maybe the baggie would reveal something helpful but perps tended to be very careful when handling product.
Sellitto announced that the evidence wasn’t a danger, and Sachs replaced everything in the evidence bags.
She started toward the sterile portion of the lab, outside of which Mel Cooper, no longer playing the role of bodyguard, was once again dressing in protective gear. She was halfway to the glass door when a phone dinged with an incoming text alert.
It was the mobile that the drug runner had ditched outside of Velasquez’s social club.
Sellitto extracted the unit from the evidence bag.
He read, “Says: ‘I’m at Del’s, Atlantic Ave. Where are you?’ ” He gave a laugh. “Must be a buddy of the runner. He doesn’t know what happened at Velasquez’s. We gotta work this. Keep him in play.”
Sachs said, “Tell him...” She thought for a moment. “Say, ‘Meet me at the Irving Grill. Twenty-Second Street. We can celebrate.’ ”
“Good,” Sellitto said and slowly typed in the message. When he finished he looked up. “We’ll get a team there. Nothing to collar him for... yet. Maybe he’s got a weapon or some product. If it’s in plain view, we got probable cause.”
The detective, Sachs and Rhyme stared at the screen, which revealed only the three pulsing dots, telling them that the other party was typing.
It was then that the phone itself rang with an incoming call from an unknown number.
“I pick up?” Sellitto asked the others. Then he frowned. “Wait. What the hell?”
Rhyme too had heard what sounded like a soft pop from the phone. He was watching a faint white cloud puff from the side of the unit, which stopped ringing.
“The hell...?” Sellitto looked down at the screen, “Another text... Jesus.”
Rhyme was close enough to read the message himself.
The powder’s botulinum toxin, Mr. Rhyme. In sixty seconds, everyone in the room will be either dead or in a coma from which they won’t recover. Goodbye.
In his dive of a safe house, Valentin Renard broke in half the phone he’d used to send Lincoln Rhyme the text about the poison. The pieces went into a bag for later disposal.
He changed back into clothes he felt more comfortable wearing than the common garments he’d worn when carrying out his plan. The Ferragamo, the Chanel belt, the Kiton shoes. He made no apologies for liking the nicer things in life. He put one hundred percent of himself into everything he did and that had made him a great deal of money over his relatively few years. It was appropriate that he spend his resources in ways that maximized contentment.
This was his philosophy of life.
He left the house, heading west. He noted a funky vegetarian restaurant he would dine in tonight. A glance at the menu told him that he could eat in this restaurant every night for a week and the bill would still be less than that for a recent dinner at L’Etoile, on the Upper East Side. No judgment, just an observation.
He collected his Mercedes and pulled into the street.
A half hour later he found a parking place and climbed from the sleek vehicle. He walked a half block to the residence he sought and climbed the stairs, where he rang the bell, looking up at the security camera just above and to the right of the door. He made sure those inside got a good look at his face.
The door lock clicked.
He stepped into the front entryway. There he paused and offered a nod — and a smile — to Lincoln Rhyme, who wheeled forward and heartily shook his hand.
Of all the students in Lincoln Rhyme’s Philosophy of Criminal Apprehension seminar at the college nearby, Valentin Renard was the most brilliant, with honors degrees in economics, psychology, law and history.
He was also the most eclectic.
Young Valentin had studied abroad and traveled extensively; his mother worked for the State Department and his father was a senior Interpol official then prosecutor for the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
After receiving several degrees, he’d settled into a career on Wall Street, where his investment strategies had made him a multimillionaire — enough money to live on for the rest of his life. He now dabbled in charitable foundations — among them, literacy and arranging lectures on art, economics and history for young people. He was quite the accomplished violinist and performed occasionally. His sport was fencing.
What truly fascinated the man, though, was crime.
Rhyme had learned this one night after class when they’d shared a single malt illicitly smuggled into the classroom by the student. Renard had wanted to interview the criminalist about some of his more memorable cases.
It seemed that the young man had no interest in working professionally in law enforcement. No, his passion was somewhat different: he collected crimes, though only those committed by the cleverest and most dangerous perpetrators. Over the years, he had assembled nearly nine hundred binders, filled with notes, transcripts, maps, charts and photographs. Each was devoted to a particularly notable crime, both domestic and foreign. He kept these in a massive library in his apartment, not far from Rhyme’s on the Upper West Side.
Each file was digitized as well and Renard made that version available to any law enforcement officer who requested to view it.
When Rhyme heard that someone had put out a hit on him, his first thought was: preparedness.
Person Y. Who are you? How’re you coming at me? And when?
Whom better to call than Valentin Renard? What better solution than to ask him to imagine himself a brilliant assassin and devise the perfect plan for Rhyme’s murder? Just after Fred Dellray had delivered the news from England, Rhyme had contacted the student and he’d agreed, immediately intrigued at the assignment.
Now, sitting in Rhyme’s parlor with the others, Renard unbuttoned the jacket of his luxurious Italian suit. Beneath he wore an off-white shirt, monogrammed with royal blue stitching, VMR. He sipped coffee as Rhyme explained to Cooper and Sellitto what he’d done.
“And you didn’t goddamn tell us?” Sellitto blustered, looking at Rhyme.
“Only Amelia,” Rhyme said.
Renard set the cup down. “That was my idea. I thought it was best that everyone react the way they normally would to a threat — we let the chess match play out as it naturally would.”
Rhyme shrugged. “Anyway, Lon, I didn’t know myself what he was going to do. Once Valentin agreed, that was our last contact.”
Sachs said to Renard, “Tell us how you put the plan together.”
The man, handsome as a model, cocked his head. “First of all, I decided I needed to get into a killer’s mindset. I became an assassin. I did everything he would do. Paid cash, used my knuckles or wore gloves to avoid prints. Avoided security cameras.
“As for the plan itself, I thought back on some of the smarter assassinations in my collection. A likely model occurred to me. The murder of a Russian general in Warsaw in the nineteen seventies. It involved an initial attempt on the man’s life followed by a second one. Both were stopped by the general’s security team. That put them into a mode that I call ‘off-edge.’ By that I mean it wasn’t as though they thought there was no threat at all, but psychologically they grew less cautious.”