He turned and walked back to his car. He sat, calming, in the front seat, not looking back. Breathing.
Let it go.
Five minutes later he started at his phone’s buzz. He noted Ruth’s number on caller ID.
“Hi, there.”
“Uhm, Shreve. I heard. Is it true about Spencer?”
“Afraid it is. I’ll tell you more later. I don’t want to talk on an open line.”
“Okay. But that’s not why I called. We heard from Washington.”
The Wizard.
“He wanted to schedule a call with you for tomorrow afternoon.”
Didn’t firing squads gather at dawn ?
“That’s fine,” he said. “Send me the details.” He stretched. A joint popped. “Say, Ruth?”
“Yes?”
“What did he sound like?”
There was a pause. “He…It wasn’t so good, I don’t think, Shreve.”
“Okay, Ruth. Thank you.”
He disconnected and looked out over the busy crime scene at Spencer Boston’s house. The sour chemical vapors still lingered, surrounding the Colonial home and the grounds.
Smoke…
So that was it. Whether Moreno was guilty or not was irrelevant; Washington now had plenty of reason to disband NIOS. Metzger had picked for his administrations director a whistleblower, and for his defense contractor a corrupt CEO who’d ordered people tortured and killed.
This was the end.
Metzger sighed and put the car in gear, thinking: Sorry, America. I did the best I could.
VII
MESSAGES
SATURDAY, MAY 20
CHAPTER 93
At nine on Saturday morning Lincoln Rhyme was maneuvering through the lab and dictating the evidence report to back up the Walker trial and the Swann plea agreement.
He noted too his calendar, up on a big monitor.
Surgery Friday, May 26. Be at hospital at 9 a.m.
NO liquor after midnight. None. Not a drop.
He smiled at the second line, Thom’s entry.
The town house was quiet. His aide was in the kitchen and Sachs was in her apartment in Brooklyn. She’d had basement problems and was waiting for the contractor. She would also be seeing Nance Laurel later today – getting together for drinks and dinner.
And dish on men too…
Rhyme was pleased the women had, against all odds, become friends. Sachs didn’t have many.
The sound of a doorbell echoed and Rhyme heard Thom’s footfalls making for the portal. A moment later he returned with a tall figure in a brown suit, white shirt and green tie whose hue he couldn’t begin to describe.
NYPD Captain Bill Myers. Special Services Division. Whatever that might be.
Greetings were exchanged and the man fell into an effusive tone, with Myers complimenting Rhyme on the resolution of the case.
“Never in a million years would have seen that potentiality,” the captain said.
“Was surprised at how it turned out.”
“I’ll say. Some pretty decent deductions on your part.”
The word “decent” only describes that which is socially proper or non obscene; it doesn’t mean fair or good. But you can’t change a jargonist so Rhyme kept mum. He realized that silence had descended as Myers took in the gas chromatograph with an intensity that circumstances – and the equipment itself – didn’t warrant.
Then the captain looked around the lab and observed that they were alone.
And Rhyme knew.
“This’s about Amelia, right, Bill?”
Wishing he hadn’t used her first name. Neither of them was the least superstitious, except in this tradition. They never referred to each other by their givens.
“Yes. Lon talked to you? About my problems with her health issues?”
“He did.”
“Let me unpack it further,” Myers said. “I allowed her some time to finish this case and then have her take a medical. But I’m not going that route. I read the report of the take down in Glen Cove, when she and Officer Pulaski collared Jacob Swann. The medic’s report said that her knee gave out completely after the suspect noticed she was in pain and kicked or hit it. If Officer Pulaski hadn’t been there she would have been killed. And Spencer Boston too, and maybe a few of the tactical officers as they did a dynamic entry.”
Rhyme said bluntly, “She took down the perp, Bill.”
“She was lucky. The report said afterward she could hardly walk.”
“She’s fine now.”
“Is she?”
No, she wasn’t. Rhyme said nothing.
“It’s the elephant in the room, Lincoln. Nobody wants to talk about it but it’s a problematic circumstance. She’s putting herself and other people at risk. I wanted to talk to you alone about this. We huddled and conjured up a decision. I’m promoting her out of the field. She’ll be a supervisor in Major Cases. And we’ll rank her. Sergeant. But I know there’ll be pushback from her.”
Rhyme was furious. This was his Sachs the captain was talking about in the cheapest of clichés.
But he kept silent.
The captain continued, “I need you to talk her into it, Lincoln. We don’t want to lose her; she’s too good. But the department can’t keep her if she insists on being in the field. Desking her’s the only option.”
And what would she do post NYPD? Become a freelance consultant, like him? But that wasn’t Sachs’s way. She was a brilliant crime scene searcher, with her natural empathy and dogged nature. But she had to be a cop in the field, not lab bound, like he was. And forensics wasn’t her only specialty, of course; if she couldn’t speed to a hostage taking or robbery in progress to engage the perp, she’d wither.
“Will you talk to her, Lincoln?”
Finally he said, “I’ll talk to her.”
“Thank you. It’s for her own good, you know. We really do want the best. It’ll be a three sixty for everybody.”
The captain shook his hand and departed.
Rhyme stared at the table where Sachs had recently been sitting to work the Moreno case. He believed he could smell some of the gardenia soap she favored though possibly that was just a fragrance memory.
I’ll talk to her…
Then he turned his wheelchair and motored back to the whiteboards, examining them closely. Taking, as always, comfort in the elegance and intrigue of evidence.
CHAPTER 94
The 110 foot general cargo vessel, chugging under diesel power, plowed through the Caribbean Sea, a massive stretch of turquoise water once home to pirates and noble men of war and now the highway of tourists and the playground of the One Percent.
The ship was under a Dominican flag and was thirty years old. A Detroit 16 149 powered her through the water at a respectable thirteen knots, via a single screw. Her draft was fifteen feet but she rode high today, thanks to her light cargo.
A tall mast, forward, dominated the superstructure and the bridge was spacious but cluttered, filled with secondhand navigation equipment bolted, glued or tied down. The wheel was an old fashioned wooden ring with spokes.
Pirates…
At the helm was squat, fifty two year old Enrico Cruz. This was his real name, though most people knew him by his pseudonym, Henry Cross, a New Yorker who ran several nonprofit organizations, the largest and most prominent of which was Classrooms for the Americas.
Cruz was alone on the deck today because the man who was to have accompanied him today had been murdered by the U.S. government in suite 1200 of the South Cove Inn in the Bahamas. A single shot to the chest had guaranteed that Roberto Moreno would not make this voyage with his friend.
Cruz and Moreno had known each other for decades, ever since Moreno’s best friend, Cruz’s brother, José, had been murdered too – yes, that was the right word – by a U.S. helicopter gunship in Panama during the invasion in 1989.
Since that time the two men had worked together to wage a war on the nation that had descended blithely into Panama, his country, and decided that, oh, sorry, the dictator we’ve been supporting all these years is a bad man after all.