There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme’s dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme’d be home of course) but he’d discouraged that. And he’d stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He’d spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he’d given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.
Solitude.
It was all he craved, and oh how he missed it now.
Pacing, looking tense, was compact Jim Polling. Lon Sellitto was the case officer but an incident like this needed a captain on board and Polling had volunteered for the job. The case was a time bomb and could nuke careers in a heartbeat so the chief and the dep coms were happy to have him intercept the flak. They’d be practicing the fine art of distancing and when the Beta-cams rolled their press conferences would be peppered with words like delegated and assigned and taking the advice of and they’d be fast to glance at Polling when it came time to field the hardball questions. Rhyme couldn’t imagine why any cop in the world would volunteer to head up a case like this one.
Polling was an odd one. The little man had pummeled his way through Midtown North Precinct as one of the city’s most successful, and notorious, homicide detectives. Known for his bad temper, he’d gotten into serious trouble when he’d killed an unarmed suspect. But he’d managed, amazingly, to pull his career together by getting a conviction in the Shepherd case – the cop-serial-killer case, the one in which Rhyme’d been injured. Promoted to captain after that very public collar, Polling went through one of those embarrassing midlife changes – giving up blue jeans and Sears suits for Brooks Brothers (today he wore navy-blue Calvin Klein casual) – and began his dogged climb toward a plush corner office high in One Police Plaza.
Another officer leaned against a nearby table. Crew-cut, rangy Bo Haumann was a captain and head of the Emergency Services Unit. NYPD’s SWAT team.
Banks finished his synopsis just as Sellitto pushed disconnect and folded his phone. “The Hardy Boys.”
“Anything more on the cab?” Polling asked.
“Nothing. They’re still beating bushes.”
“Any sign she was fucking somebody she shouldn’t’ve been?” Polling asked. “Maybe a psycho boyfriend?”
“Naw, no boyfriends. Just dated a few guys casually. No stalkers, it looks like.”
“And still no ransom calls?” Rhyme asked.
“No.”
The doorbell rang. Thom went to answer it.
Rhyme looked toward the approaching voices.
A moment later the aide escorted a uniformed police officer up the stairs. She appeared very young from a distance but as she drew closer he could see she was probably thirty or so. She was tall and had that sullen, equine beauty of women gazing out from the pages of fashion magazines.
We see others as we see ourselves and since the accident Lincoln Rhyme rarely thought of people in terms of their bodies. He observed her height, trim hips, fiery red hair. Somebody else’d weigh those features and say, What a knockout. But for Rhyme that thought didn’t occur to him. What did register was the look in her eyes.
Not the surprise – obviously, nobody’d warned he was a crip – but something else. An expression he’d never seen before. It was as if his condition was putting her at ease. The exact opposite of how most people reacted. As she walked into the room she was relaxing.
“Officer Sachs?” Rhyme asked.
“Yessir,” she said, catching herself just as she was about to extend a hand. “Detective Rhyme.”
Sellitto introduced her to Polling and Haumann. She’d know about the latter two, by reputation if nothing else, and now her eyes grew cautious once more.
She took in the room, the dust, the gloominess. Glanced at one of the art posters. It was partially unrolled, lying under a table. Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. The lonely people in a diner late at night. That one had been the last to come down.
Rhyme briefly explained about the 3:00 p.m. deadline. Sachs nodded calmly but Rhyme could see the flicker of what? – fear? disgust? – in her eyes.
Jerry Banks, fingers encumbered by a class ring but not a wedding band, was attracted immediately by the lamp of her beauty and offered her a particular smile. But Sachs’s single glance in response made clear that no matches were being made here. And probably never would be.
Polling said, “Maybe it’s a trap. We find the place he’s leading us to, walk in and there’s a bomb.”
“I doubt it,” Sellitto said, shrugging, “why go to all this trouble? If you want to kill cops all you gotta do is find one and fucking shoot him.”
Awkward silence for a moment as Polling looked quickly from Sellitto to Rhyme. The collective thought registered that it was on the Shepherd case that Rhyme had been injured.
But faux pas meant nothing to Lincoln Rhyme. He continued, “I agree with Lon. But I’d tell any Search and Surveillance or HRT teams to keep an eye out for ambush. Our boy seems to be writing his own rules.”
Sachs looked again at the poster of the Hopper painting. Rhyme followed her gaze. Maybe the people in the diner really weren’t lonely, he reflected. Come to think of it, they all looked pretty damn content.
“We’ve got two types of physical evidence here,” Rhyme continued. “Standard PE. What the unsub didn’t mean to leave behind. Hair, fibers, fingerprints, maybe blood, shoeprints. If we can find enough of it – and if we’re lucky – that’ll lead us to the primary crime scene. That’s where he lives.”
“Or his hidey-hole,” Sellitto offered. “Something temporary.”
“A safe house?” Rhyme mused, nodding. “Bet you’re right, Lon. He needs someplace to operate out of.” He continued, “Then there’s the planted evidence. Apart from the scraps of paper – which tell us the time and date – we’ve got the bolt, the wad of asbestos and the sand.”
“A fucking scavenger hunt,” Haumann growled and ran a hand through his slick buzz cut. He looked just like the drill sergeant Rhyme recalled he’d been.
“So I can tell the brass there’s a chance of getting the vic in time?” Polling asked.
“I think so, yes.”
The captain made a call and wandered to the corner of the room as he talked. When he hung up he grunted, “The mayor. The chiefs with ’im. There’s gonna be a press conference in an hour and I gotta be there to make sure their dicks’re in their pants and their flies’re zipped. Anything more I can tell the big boys?”
Sellitto glanced at Rhyme, who shook his head.
“Not yet,” the detective said.
Polling gave Sellitto his cellular phone number and left, literally jogging out the door.
A moment later a skinny, balding man in his thirties ambled up the stairs. Mel Cooper was as goofy-looking as ever, the nerdy neighbor in a sitcom. He was followed by two younger cops carrying a steamer trunk and two suitcases that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds each. The officers deposited their heavy loads and left.
“Mel.”
“Detective.” Cooper walked up to Rhyme and gripped his useless right hand. The only physical contact today with any of his guests, Rhyme noted. He and Cooper had worked together for years. With degrees in organic chemistry, math and physics, Cooper was an expert both in identification – friction-ridge prints, DNA and forensic reconstruction – and in PE analysis.
“How’s the world’s foremost criminalist?” Cooper asked him.