Rostov believed him. And, on reflection, he decided it was helpful that the man was Iranian. He’d sell out a Jew in an instant and probably an Indian, as well.
“Nashim, Nashim... We are going to be playing game then. You like games?”
He was silent.
“Scavengering hunt. You know this?”
“I know what it is.”
“Here, now, my friend. Here. You are going to start asking questions. Be careful. You should not be obvious. But ask about this VL and this Saul Weintraub. Yes, yes! You are ready to play, my friend?”
“I will. I promise I will.”
“Give me your phone number.”
Rostov punched the number in and then hit dial. Nashim’s phone hummed. “Good, good. You are not fakey man. Okay. You get busy now, Nashim. I will call tomorrow and find out what you can tell me. And I will keep calling until you win scavengering hunt. I am rooting for you! Now I will go home and you go home.” Rostov clapped him on the back. He started away then paused. “Your daughters. What are their names?”
He suddently felt the urge, felt hungry.
Gone to the stone...
The Iranian was staring. “No! I will tell you nothing about them.”
Rostov shrugged. “Does not matter. I will make up my own. The tall one I think will be Scheherazade. And the younger one, prettier, I am saying, my opinion only... she will be Kitten. Good night, Nashim. Good night, my friend.”
Chapter 8
As dusk settled outside, those in Rhyme’s parlor laboratory were beginning their hunt for the man they’d dubbed Unsub 47, after the street where the robbery and murders had occurred.
He was watching the progress as Sachs and Mel Cooper — his prize NYPD lab man — analyzed what she’d returned with from Patel Designs.
Lon Sellitto was here too, presently on his mobile in the corner, fielding questions from his superiors. The press was having a field day with the story of the box-cutter-wielding killer in the Diamond District, the last thing that City Hall wanted. Like hungry zoo animals, the media would have to be fed something. This was not Rhyme’s concern, however. He kept his attention on the progress of the slightly built, admittedly nerdy lab technician and on Sachs as the two labored away.
The uniformed officer Ron Pulaski had been deployed. He was out in the Diamond District, canvassing. And having little success. He’d called in five minutes earlier and reported on his lack of results. Armed with a list of Jatin Patel’s clients and business associates, he was canvassing to see if anyone had heard about potential threats (or to assess if they themselves were the unsub).
Yet no one Pulaski or the other canvassing officers spoke to had any thoughts on who “S” or “VL” from Patel’s calendar were.
This lack of insight was true too of those in the stores and restaurants along 47th Street and nearby. “Nobody’s talking to me, Lincoln,” the young officer had said. “It’s like they’re afraid to be seen helping. As if the unsub is nearby, taking notes.”
“Keep at it, Rookie,” Rhyme said and hung up. He wasn’t enamored of witnesses in any event — their testimony, he felt, was aggressively unreliable — and was hoping mostly that someone might point Pulaski in the direction of evidence that the fleeing perp had discarded or accidentally shed.
He looked over the four-by-three-foot erasable whiteboard on which Sachs and Cooper were recording their results.
They knew a few things from the anonymous call (assuming it was accurate): The perp was probably white, male, his face obscured by a black cloth ski mask. He wore gloves and was armed. Average height. Another call had been made to 911, reporting that the killer had carried a black briefcase. It hadn’t been found at the scene, so he would have it with him possibly, unless he’d ditched it.
Sachs believed that the caller was the employee or associate of Patel’s who’d walked into the crime and been shot, VL. A canvass of the Port Authority, where he’d made the most recent phone call, had revealed no sightings of anyone injured. Rhyme had wanted someone to remove the coins from the pay phones from which the man had made the call and fingerprint them.
“You don’t need a quarter to call nine one one,” Sellitto had said, amused. “The city got that worked out in the budget.” Hospitals had been alerted to report anyone injured by what would be rock splinters but the odds that the roughly one thousand emergency room doctors in the New York area would learn of this request and follow through, if they did, were pretty damn slim.
Sachs had called the company that owned the diamonds, Grace-Cabot in Cape Town, South Africa. It was hours later there, early morning, and she’d left a message. There was, after all, a possibility that the stones had been shipped back or were elsewhere, perhaps contracted out to other diamond cutters who worked with Patel.
If that was true the case would become even more confounding, and it would be up to the high-value evidence technicians to run an inventory and learn if anything was in fact missing.
As for physical evidence, there’d been hundreds of friction ridge images — fingerprints — discovered: the shop, the elevator, the handles of the doors to the street, the doors to the stairwell, the railings in the stairwells. But none were in the IAFIS database. He hadn’t expected any hits; the number of cloth glove prints suggested Unsub 47 never took them off.
Don’t make it easy for us, do they? A rhetorical query that Rhyme didn’t bother to express aloud.
Some crimes — sexual in nature and physical fights, for instance — are usually DNA-rich exchanges, and the deoxyribonucleic acid database — CODIS, in America — might reveal an identity in such instances. But a crime like this, by a gloved killer, wearing a long-sleeve outer garment and slacks — as well as the ski mask — would offer little chance for him to leave behind DNA.
Some cloth fibers had been found, none of which matched the clothing worn by the victims. Some were black cotton, most likely from gloves — since they were found on doorknobs and drawers. Also, Sachs had discovered black polyester fibers, which were probably from the ski mask.
No empty cartridge shells from the gunshot; he’d taken the brass with him.
“What do we have there?” Rhyme asked his lab man impatiently. His eyes on the electrostatic footprints from Jatin Patel’s shop, now scanned and slapped onto a high-def screen.
Mel Cooper was wearing a white lab coat, cap and gloves, as well as a face mask. And his ever-present Harry Potter glasses. “Hard to say for certain but our boy’s between a ten and an eleven and a half.” Since shoe toes curl upward and heel size varies, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain an exact size. “And some distinctive wear marks but there’s no tread.”
“So businessman footwear.”
“Right.” Much better if the perps wear running shoes. The distinctive tread marks will usually give you brand and model number, and sometimes even color can be ascertained from the model.
“Any small lines in the blood, next to the shoe prints?” Rhyme was looking at an image shot by Sachs on her Sony digital camera.
“Lines?” Cooper asked.
“Wormy lines, squiggly lines,” Rhyme muttered. “I can’t tell.” When he noted that both Sellitto and Cooper were glancing his way, perplexed, he started to speak but Sachs, hunched over an examination table, said, “From dangling shoelaces. They might not show up in the electrostatics but they would in the blood.”
Rhyme smiled. He loved her.
“Ah.” Cooper examined the footprint photos. Sellitto looked once, then checked texts.
“Ah, bored, are we, Lon? Many a case’s been closed because of something as trivial as finding out if the perp wears shoes with laces or not.”