Rhyme asked, “And number two?”
“The paper’s a red herring. Nothing to do with his real mission. He’s an illusionist and’s got something else entirely going on.”
Rhyme smiled. “I was just thinking of the Watchmaker.”
“So was I.”
“Let’s keep going with the evidence.”
Slowly, despite the Locksmith’s care, they made some discoveries that could be linked to the perp — by comparing them to control samples Sachs had taken from Talese’s apartment. These included diesel fuel and silane, which was a cleanser, fragments of asphalt, sandstone, tiny slivers of white porcelain and rubber, small pieces of copper wire.
Rhyme mused, “Old electrical systems, early twentieth century. Porcelain’s shattered by blunt force.”
After another run of trace through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, Cooper called, “Found triclosan, ammonium laureth sulfate, lauryl polyglucose, sodium chloride, pentasodium pentetate, magnesium and sodium bisulfite, D&C Orange dye number four.”
Rhyme said, “Dish detergent.”
Sachs shook her head. “Not so helpful, that.”
“Maybe not,” Rhyme said slowly. “Where was it, Mel?”
“Mixed into the soil from his shoes.”
“Ah. Interesting. Dishwater on your hands, on your clothing. But how often do you walk through it? At home, rarely. Working in a restaurant kitchen, yes, but I have a feeling he’s not a busboy or dishwasher.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Where, where...” Rhyme’s lids opened quickly. He asked Sachs and Cooper, “Do you know about the gates in Central Park?”
Neither of them did.
He explained that when the park was being developed in the mid-1800s, twenty sandstone gates were built, though they were more entrances than gates, since they had no physical barrier such as bars. Each was named in honor of a group, an activity, a calling — among them Artisans, Women, Warriors, Mariners, Inventors. There was even a Stranger Gate.
“Every year in May, the city scrubs the gates with diluted dish detergent. It cleans sandstone but doesn’t damage the rock — it’s very soft. Then they hose down the surfaces, leaving pools of detergent on sidewalks.”
Ever since he began with the NYPD many years ago, Rhyme had made it a professional mission to learn as many of the intricacies of the city as he possibly could. As he wrote in his book, “You need to know the geography and workings of the city the way a doctor knows the bones and organs of the human body.”
“We’re onto something here,” he whispered. “More. Keep going. I want more.”
Cooper, bending over the lab’s compound microscope, said, “Have something here. I’ll put it on the screen.”
After some keyboard taps, a number of grainy objects appeared on the monitor. The image was of what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece: bits of some red substance, the shape of grains of sand. According to the scale at the bottom of the monitor, they would be the size of dust particles.
“From his shoe again?”
“That’s right.”
“GC it,” Rhyme ordered. “I want the composition.”
After analyzing a sample, Cooper said, “Silica, alumina, lime, iron oxide and magnesia. In descending amounts.”
Rhyme announced, “Brick. Silica’s sand, alumina’s clay. The red comes from the iron and lower baking temperatures of nineteenth-century furnaces. So it’s old.”
“Well,” Cooper said slowly, with emphasis in his voice, “one other substance.” He looked toward Rhyme. “Dried blood. Ninety-nine percent sure it was on his shoe. Amelia got samples in two places.”
“Species?”
“Human.”
“TSD?”
The time since deposition — how long has passed since blood was spilled — could be determined by Raman spectroscopy. The technique, relatively new in the armory of forensic scientists, works by hitting a sample with a laser beam and measuring the intensity of the scattered light. Rhyme particularly liked the technique as it was nondestructive and the sample could later be tested for DNA.
Cooper ran a sample and read the results, in the form of a chart.
“It’s five, six days old, more or less.”
Rhyme’s eyes swiveled to Sachs’s. Her face was troubled. She said, “Maybe he cut himself accidentally... Or maybe he’s already started using a knife.”
Cooper then ran the DNA and sent the results to the CODIS database. They soon received the message that there were no matches.
Closing his eyes again, Rhyme let his head loll back against the padded rest. He thought past the blood. He would assume that the Locksmith was in fact dangerous, if not deadly. His sole concern now was finding him. What did the evidence have to say about that?
Soap.
Brick.
Tiny shards of porcelain.
Copper wire.
Rhyme’s phone buzzed, and he answered.
The caller was Assistant District Attorney Sellars, the prosecutor in the People of the State of New York v. Viktor Buryak.
“Lincoln. The jury came back with a verdict.”
“And?”
“They found him not guilty. All counts.”
15
Not good enough.
It’s taken me fifty-nine seconds to pick the SecurPoint 85.
Way too long.
Carrie Noelle’s apartment door is held fast by two locks, as are most residences in New York. The simple one in the knob and the SecurPoint.
They are both pin tumblers, one of the oldest designs in history. The man who earned the patent for the design in the U.S. was the famous Linus Yale Sr. The lock he created and his son’s refinement of it are basically the same as are in use today, even after a hundred and fifty years.
In these locks there’s a rotating plug into which the key is inserted (through the “keyway,” not “keyhole”). The plug and the surrounding casing each have corresponding holes drilled into them and inside the holes are spring-loaded pins, which keep the plug from turning and opening the deadbolt or latch. The serrated ridges on the key push the pins up to the shear line, which frees the plug to turn.
To pick a pin tumbler, the process is simple: You insert a tension wrench into the keyway and twist the plug, which puts pressure against the pins and keeps them from springing back into the secure position. Then you use a thin rake — which looks like a dentist’s pick — to push the pins upward until they’re above the shear line.
Ah, but the SecurPoint...
It’s similar to the famed Medeco. The ends of the pins within the lock are cleverly chiseled and, even more challenging, they rotate, so the tip of the rake must not only catch the sharp end of each pin but must twist it to free the plug and allow it to open. (When a Medeco executive patented the design, in the 1960s, he offered fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could pick it — a popular promotional gambit of lock makers. At the time, only one person in the world was able to do so — an NYPD detective, as a matter of fact.)
Cracking the SecurPoint in fifty-nine seconds?
That’s probably a world record. But it’s still too long.
Tonight, for my Visit, I need it to be thirty or under.
Not that an alarm would go off. It’s just that I’ve assessed that for Carrie’s size of apartment building, the number of residents, the time of early morning, I can afford to be crouched in front of her door for no more than a half minute. Beyond that time, the risk is unacceptable.
SecurPoints can be bumped — that is, opened by brute force, achieved by jamming a blank key into the passage over and over and occasionally hitting the key with a hammer or mallet. But I despise bumping. Again, the artistic element. The elegance.