Benny Morgenstern had sent the names of the victims in the Village in February and on Ninth Avenue in March. Sachs displayed her phone and asked, “Do you know them?”
“No, never heard of them.”
She leaned toward the likelihood that the invasions were random. But that didn’t mean he had targeted, or was going to target, one particular individual, and the others were misdirecting camo.
“That newspaper he left?”
“It’s garbage. I don’t read the Herald.”
“You know anybody at the paper? Or their TV station?”
“Oh, the WMG channel? That’s crap too. And, no, I don’t.”
“The articles?”
Sachs displayed a photo of the page.
“They don’t mean anything.”
“The word on the paper: ‘reckoning’? It suggests somebody wanted to get even. You think of anybody in your life like that?”
“My God, no.”
“Do you think the intrusion was meant to intimidate you? Have you been a whistleblower? A witness to a crime?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Sachs didn’t know how the Locksmith came to learn of the other women who’d been his victims earlier, but she suggested it was possible Talese had come to his attention through her influencing job. “I’ve seen some of your videos. They’re good. They look professional.”
“Thanks.”
“Any fans who could be stalkers?”
“It’s possible, I guess. I only use my first name but it’s pretty easy to get my last — and an address. All that data-mining stuff.”
“Can you go through comments and pick out the inappropriate ones?”
“Oh, I have the comments turned off. You can only look at my vids. It’s the smartest thing when you’re influencing. I’ve talked to a couple other girls in the business, friends of mine. They leave the comments on. You should see what people post; some of it’s disgusting.”
The woman scanned the streets, tugged at her hair. Pulled a scrunchie out of her purse, a bright red one, and started to bind her hair with it, but then stopped. She dug into the bag again and exchanged it for a rubber band, presumably so she wouldn’t stand out quite so much. She sighed and lowered her head. Sachs wondered if she’d cry. She didn’t.
“I’m sure you know quite a bit about computers and the internet,” Sachs said.
“Not a lot. Enough to make the vids and post them is all.”
“I’m thinking we could contact all the platforms you post on and talk to security there. That’d give us the IPs of everybody who’s watched you. Might get us some names to work with.”
Now, Talese gave an ever-so-faint smile. “Detective, the thing is, I post on five different platforms and the analytics show I have a total of, um, about two hundred and thirty thousand subscribers and fans. And you can triple that to get the number of people who just hit the site to watch me and never subscribe.”
Well, that answered that.
“Anyone in the building who might be an issue?”
A shrug. “I don’t know most of my neighbors. It’s New York, right?”
“Have you noticed anybody following you or watching you over the past few weeks?”
“No.”
“And as far as you know, he only took the knife and your underwear?”
“I think that’s it. No jewelry, checkbooks, computer, TV. What a normal thief would take.”
Sachs closed the notebook and shut off the recorder.
Talese stared at the façade of the building. “I’m going to stay with my mother. Long Island. Until I sell it and buy something new. Can I pack a suitcase?”
“Of course.”
“Will you come with me?”
Sachs smiled. “Sure.”
They climbed from the car and Talese stood with her hands on her hips, staring up at the tall building once again.
“He did take something else, Detective.”
Sachs looked her way.
Annabelle Talese’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He stole my home. I loved it so much, and he took it away from me.”
13
Rhyme glanced up as Amelia Sachs entered.
He was in the hallway and he looked outside, past her, noting the remnants of construction work on the street.
These samples of sand came from a work site on the west side of Central Park West, in the three hundred block...
His heart accelerated some, wondering what the verdict against Viktor Buryak would be. It was so important. Lives depended on it.
Sachs had just returned from walking the grid at Annabelle Talese’s apartment, which was located about five blocks from Rhyme’s town house on the Upper West Side.
She was carrying a milk carton, in which she’d put the evidence bags of what she’d collected. There didn’t seem to be much, he was disappointed to see.
“Amelia!” Mel Cooper, Rhyme’s primary lab man, was an NYPD detective. He was slight and balding. His shoes vied with his thick-framed eyeglasses to be the less stylish accessory, though Rhyme had seen pictures of him tuxed-up in a ballroom dancing competition with his gorgeous Scandinavian girlfriend, and he cut quite the figure. He was presently gloved and was dressing in a mask, lab coat, booties and bonnet.
“I’ll take that, thank you,” said Cooper, lifting the crate away from her. He stepped into the sterile portion of the lab.
“Ron’s canvassing,” Rhyme told her.
Ron Pulaski, the earnest young patrol officer, had become an expert at crime scene work thanks to Rhyme and a solid interviewer thanks to her.
“Benny gave him a list of locksmiths in the city, and he got some himself off the internet. Quite a few, as it turns out. He’s talking to them all.” Pulaski was conducting a phone canvass to see if the locksmiths had any thoughts about who the perp might be, given his level of skill. Phone calls weren’t as efficient as in-person interviews, but Rhyme didn’t feel they had much time. Instinct told him that the Locksmith would move on another victim soon.
“Got the name of the locksmith that installed Annabelle’s locks.” She explained she’d texted it to Pulaski.
Rhyme said, “He’s also checking out locksmith conventions — what Benny was telling us about.”
But, he added, there were none in the Northeast, either presently or in the near future, though Benny had told him that the organizers often didn’t advertise the events to the general public and word of the gatherings spread only on the dark web.
Lon Sellitto was canvassing too, in a variation of Pulaski’s hunt. As he’d promised, Benny Morgenstern had given the lieutenant a list of locksmiths who’d been arrested for using their skills illegally or suspected of doing so. Sellitto was presently tracking them down for interviews — either as suspects themselves or to see if they had an idea about who the Locksmith might be.
So far, neither patrol officer nor detective had had any success.
In the sterile portion of the lab, Cooper was setting out the items Sachs had brought from Talese’s apartment.
Lincoln Rhyme missed much about the able-bodied life. There was the contented stroll for bagels Sunday morning with your partner — at 11 a.m. after waking late. There was attending plays without half the audience staring at your elaborate contraption of a wheelchair. There was pursuing and eliminating a strafing fly.
But Rhyme missed two things most dearly. The first was meandering on foot through this magnificent playground of a city, New York, and learning what he could about its people, its geography, its economy, its foliage, its underbelly. Doing so informed his work as a criminalist and helped him match evidence to place, and place to perp.
And the second absence that tugged at his heart? Slipping on the Tyvek jumpsuit, donning gloves and picking up and examining the evidence to trick from it the truth about what had happened at the scene.