Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? Would it do any good to tell them about the agony he felt in his neck and shoulders? Or about the phantom pain – far weaker and far eerier – roaming through his alien body? About the exhaustion he felt from the daily struggle to do, well, everything? About the most overwhelming fatigue of all – from having to rely on someone else?
Maybe he could tell them about the mosquito that’d gotten into the room last night and strafed his head for an hour; Rhyme grew dizzy with fatigue nodding it away until the insect finally landed on his ear, where Rhyme let it stab him – since that was a place he could rub against the pillow for relief from the itch.
Sellitto lifted an eyebrow.
“Today,” Rhyme sighed. “One day. That’s it.”
“Thanks, Linc. We owe you.” Sellitto pulled up a chair next to the bed. Nodded Banks to do the same, “Now. Gimme your thoughts. What’s this asshole’s game?”
Rhyme said, “Not so fast. I don’t work alone.”
“Fair enough. Who d’you want on board?”
“A tech from IRD. Whoever’s the best in the lab. I want him here with the basic equipment. And we better get some tactical boys. Emergency Services. Oh, and I want some phones,” Rhyme instructed, glancing at the Scotch on his dresser. He remembered the brandy Berger had in his kit. No way was he going out on cheap crap like that. His Final Exit number would be courtesy of either sixteen-year-old Lagavulin or opulent Macallan aged for decades. Or – why not? – both.
Banks pulled out his own cellular phone. “What kind of lines? Just -”
“Landlines.”
“In here?”
“Of course not,” Rhyme barked.
Sellitto said, “He means he wants people to make calls. From the Big Building.”
“Oh.”
“Call downtown,” Sellitto ordered. “Have ’em give us three or four dispatchers.”
“Lon,” Rhyme asked, “who’s doing the spadework on the death this morning?”
Banks stifled a laugh. “The Hardy Boys.”
A glare from Rhyme took the smile off his face. “Detectives Bedding and Saul, sir,” the boy added quickly.
But then Sellitto grinned too. “The Hardy Boys. Everybody calls ’ em that. You don’t know ’em, Linc. They’re from the Homicide Task Force downtown.”
“They look kind of alike is the thing,” Banks explained. “And, well, their delivery is a little funny.”
“I don’t want comedians.”
“No, they’re good,” Sellitto said. “The best canvassers we got. You know that beast ’napped that eight-year-old girl in Queens last year? Bedding and Saul did the canvass. Interviewed the entire ’hood – took twenty-two hundred statements. It was ’causa them we saved her. When we heard the vic this morning was the passenger from JFK, Chief Wilson himself put ’em on board.”
“What’re they doing now?”
“Witnesses mostly. Around the train tracks. And sniffing around about the driver and the cab.”
Rhyme yelled to Thom in the hallway, “Did you call Berger? No, of course you didn’t. The word ‘insubordination’ mean anything to you? At least make yourself useful. Bring that crime scene report closer and start turning the pages.” He nodded toward the turning frame. “That damn thing’s an Edsel.”
“Aren’t we in a sunny mood today?” the aide spat back.
“Hold it up higher. I’m getting glare.”
He read for a minute. Then looked up.
Sellitto was on the phone but Rhyme interrupted him. “Whatever happens at three today, if we can find where he’s talking about, it’s going to be a crime scene. I’ll need someone to work it.”
“Good,” Sellitto said. “I’ll call Peretti. Toss him a bone. I know his nose’ll be out of joint ’cause we’re tiptoeing around him.”
Rhyme grunted. “Did I ask for Peretti?”
“But he’s the IRD golden boy,” Banks said.
“I don’t want him,” Rhyme muttered. “There’s somebody else I want.”
Sellitto and Banks exchanged glances. The older detective smiled, brushing pointlessly at his wrinkled shirt. “Whoever you want, Linc, you got him. Remember, you’re king for a day.”
Staring at the dim eye.
T.J. Colfax, dark-haired refugee from the hills of Eastern Tennessee, NYU Business School grad, quick-as-a-whip currency trader, had just swum out of a deep dream. Her tangled hair stuck to her cheeks, sweat crawling in veins down her face and neck and chest.
She found herself looking into the black eye – a hole in a rusty pipe, about six inches across, from which a small access plate had been removed.
She sucked mildewy air through her nose – her mouth was still taped shut. Tasting plastic, the hot adhesive. Bitter.
And John? she wondered. Where was he? Refusing to think about the loud crack she’d heard last night in the basement. She’d grown up in Eastern Tennessee and knew what gunshots sounded like.
Please, she prayed for her boss. Let him be all right.
Stay calm, she raged to herself. You fucking start to cry again, you remember what happened. In the basement, after the gunshot, she’d lost it completely, breaking down, sobbing in panic, and had nearly suffocated.
Right. Calm.
Look at the black eye in the pipe. Pretend it’s winking at you. The eye of your guardian angel.
T.J. sat on the floor, surrounded by a hundred pipes and ducts and snakes of conduit and wires. Hotter than her brother’s diner, hotter than the back seat of Jule Whelan’s Nova ten years ago. Water dripped, stalactites drooped from the ancient girders above her head. A half-dozen tiny yellow bulbs were the only illumination. Above her head – directly above – was a sign. She couldn’t read it clearly, though she caught the red border. At the end of whatever the message might have been was a fat exclamation point.
She struggled once more but the cuffs held her tight, pinching against the bone. From her throat rose a desperate cry, an animal’s cry. But the thick tape on her mouth and the insistent churning of machinery swallowed up the sound; no one could’ve heard her.
The black eye continued to stare. You’ll save me, won’t you? she thought.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a clanging slam, an iron bell, far away. Like a ship’s door slamming shut. The noise came from the hole in the pipe. From her friendly eye.
She jerked the cuffs against the pipe and tried to stand. But she couldn’t move more than a few inches.
Okay, don’t panic. Just relax. You’ll be all right.
It was then that she happened to see the sign above her head. In her jockeying for slack she’d straightened up slightly and moved her head to the side. This gave her an oblique view of the words.
Oh, no. Oh, Jesus in my heart…
The tears began again.
She imagined her mother, her hair pulled back from her round face, wearing her cornflower-blue housedress, whispering, “Be all raht, honey love. Doan’ you worry.”
But she didn’t believe the words.
She believed what the sign said.
Extreme Danger! Superheated steam under High Pressure. Do not remove plate from pipe. Call Consolidated Edison for access. Extreme danger!
The black eye gaped at her, the eye that opened into the heart of the steam pipe. It stared directly at the pink flesh of her chest. From somewhere deep inside the pipe came another clink of metal on metal, workers hammering, tightening old joints.
As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.
FIVE
“HERE’S THE SITUATION,” Lincoln Rhyme announced. “We’ve got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline.”
“No ransom demands” – Sellitto supplemented Rhyme’s synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. “Jerry,” Rhyme said to Banks, “brief them about the scene this morning.”