Sachs was nodding. “Sure.”
Rhyme agreed. “Okay, he can run the fed S &S teams. I want a team on each church right away. All entrances. But they should stay way back. I don’t want to spook him. Maybe we can nail him in the act.”
Sellitto took a phone call. He looked up, eyes closed. “Jesus.”
“Oh, no,” Rhyme muttered.
The detective wiped his sweating face and nodded. “Central got a 9-1-1 from the night manager at this place? The Midtown Residence Hotel? Woman and her little girl called him from La Guardia, said they were just about to get a cab. That was a while ago; they never showed up. With all the news about the ’nappings he thought he should call. Her name’s Carole Ganz. From Chicago.”
“Hell,” Banks muttered. “A little girl, too? Oughta just pull all the cabs off the streets till we nail his butt.”
Rhyme was drenched with weariness. His head raged. He remembered working a crime scene at a bomb factory. Nitroglycerin had bled out of some dynamite and seeped into an armchair Rhyme had to search for trace. Nitro gave you blinding headaches.
The screen of Cooper’s computer flickered. “E-mail,” he announced and called up the message. He read the fine type.
“They’ve polarized all the samples of cello that ESU collected. They think the scrap we found in the bone at the Pearl Street scene was from a ShopRite grocery store. It’s closest to the cello they use.”
“Good,” Rhyme called. He nodded at the poster. “Cross off all the grocery stores but the ShopRites. What locations do we have?”
He watched Thom ink through the stores, leaving four.
B’way & 82nd
Greenwich & Bank
8th Ave. & 24th
Houston & Lafayette
“That leaves us with the Upper West Side, West Village, Chelsea and the Lower East Side.”
“But he could have gone anywhere to buy them.”
“Oh, sure he could’ve, Sachs. He could’ve bought them in White Plains when he was stealing the car. Or in Cleveland visiting his mother. But see, there’s a point when unsubs feel comfortable in their deception and they stop bothering to cover their tracks. The stupid – or lazy – ones toss the smoking gun in the Dumpster behind their building and go on their merry way. The smarter ones drop it in a bucket of Spackle and pitch it into Hell Gate. The brilliant ones sneak into a refinery and vaporize it in a five-thousand-degree-centigrade furnace. Our unsub’s smart, sure. But he’s like every other perp in the history of the world. He’s got limits. I’m betting he thinks we won’t have the time or inclination to look for him or his safe house because we’ll be concentrating on the planted clues. And of course he’s dead wrong. This is exactly how we’ll find him. Now, let’s see if we can’t get a little closer to his lair. Mel, anything in the vic’s clothes from the last scene?”
But the tidal water had washed away virtually everything from William Everett’s clothing.
“You say they fought, Sachs? The unsub and this Everett?”
“Wasn’t much of a fight. Everett grabbed his shirt.”
Rhyme clicked his tongue. “I must be getting tired. If I’d thought about it I would have had you scrape under his nails. Even if he was underwater that’s one place -”
“Here you go,” she said, holding up two small plastic bags.
“You scraped?”
She nodded.
“But why’re there two bags?”
Holding up one bag then the other she said, “Left hand, right hand.”
Mel Cooper broke into a laugh. “Even you never thought about separate bags for scraping, Lincoln. It’s a great idea.”
Rhyme grunted. “Differentiating the hands might have some marginal forensic value.”
“Whoa,” Cooper said, laughing still. “That means he thinks it’s a brilliant idea and he’s sorry he didn’t think of it first.”
The tech examined the scrapings. “Got some brick here.”
“There was no brick anywhere around the drainpipe or the field,” Sachs said.
“It’s fragments. But there’s something attached to it. I can’t tell what.”
Banks asked, “Could it’ve come from the stockyard tunnel? There was a lotta brick there, right?”
“All that came from Annie Oakley here,” Rhyme said, nodding ruefully at Sachs. “No, remember, the unsub’d left before she pulled out her six-gun.” Then he frowned, found himself straining forward. “Mel, I want to see that brick. In the ’scope. Is there any way?”
Cooper looked over Rhyme’s computer. “I think we can rig something up.” He ran a cable from the video-output port on the compound ’scope to his own computer and then dug into a large suitcase. He pulled out a long, thick gray wire. “This’s a serial cable.” He connected the two computers and transferred some software to Rhyme’s Compaq. In five minutes, Rhyme, delighted, was seeing exactly what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece.
The criminalist’s eyes scanned the chunk of brick – hugely magnified. He laughed out loud. “He outfoxed himself. See those white blobs attached to the brick?”
“What are they?” Sellitto asked.
“Looks like glue,” Cooper offered.
“Exactly. From a pet-hair roller. Perps who’re real cautious use them to clean trace off themselves. But it backfired. Some bits of adhesive must’ve come off the roller and stuck to his clothes. So we know it’s from his safe house. Held the brick in place until Everett picked it up under his fingernails.”
“Does the brick tell us anything?” Sachs asked.
“It’s old. And it’s expensive – cheap brick was very porous because they mixed in filler. I’d guess his place is either institutional or built by someone wealthy. At least a hundred years old. Maybe older.”
“Ah, here we go,” Cooper said. “Another bit of glove, it looks like. If the damn things keep disintegrating we’ll be down to his friction ridges before too long.”
Rhyme’s screen flashed and a moment later what he recognized as a tiny fleck of leather came on the screen. “Something’s funny here,” Cooper said.
“It’s not red,” Rhyme observed. “Like the other particle. This fleck’s black. Run it through the microspectro-photometer.”
Cooper ran the test and then tapped his computer screen. “It’s leather. But the dye is different. Maybe it’s stained or faded.”
Rhyme was leaning forward, straining, looking closely at the fleck on the screen when he realized he was in trouble. Serious trouble.
“Hey, you okay?” It was Sachs who’d spoken.
Rhyme didn’t answer. His neck and jaw began to shiver violently. A feeling like panic rose from the crest of his shattered spine and moved up into his scalp. Then, as if a thermostat had clicked on, the chills and goose bumps vanished and he began to sweat. Perspiration poured from his face and tickled frantically.
“Thom!” he whispered. “Thom, it’s happening.”
Then he gasped as the headache seared through his face and spread along the walls of his skull. He jammed his teeth together, swayed his head, anything to stop the unbearable agony. But nothing worked. The light in the room flickered. The pain was so bad his reaction was to flee from it, to run flat-out on legs that hadn’t moved in years.
“Lincoln!” Sellitto was shouting.
“His face,” Sachs gasped, “it’s bright red.”
And his hands were pale as ivory. All of his body below the magic latitude at C4 was turning white. Rhyme’s blood, on its phony, desperate mission to get to where it thought it was needed, surged into the tiny capillaries of his brain, expanding them, threatening to burst the delicate filaments.
As the attack grew worse Rhyme was aware of Thom over him, ripping the blankets off the Clinitron. He was aware of Sachs stepping forward, her radiant blue eyes narrowed in concern. The last thing he saw before the blackness was the falcon pushing off the ledge on his huge wings, startled by the sudden flurry of activity in the room, seeking easy oblivion in the hot air over the empty streets of the city.