She explained that the substance, whatever it was, had begun to dissolve the concrete of the weights itself. “Made them lighter and the crane began to tip forward. The operator did what he could, but finally two of the weights dropped free, and that was it.” Her voice sounded husky and tired, and she paused for more oxygen. She coughed hard several times and wiped her mouth with a tissue, then glanced unobtrusively at it. Rhyme could see no blood, but his view was masked; he wondered if she could.
She repeated what she’d told him earlier — about all the workers in gloves and boots. Dressing like them, the unsub might as well have been invisible.
Murder in a construction site...
“The precinct’s got a dozen uniforms out canvassing stores and offices nearby. See if anybody got a look of someone carting a box into the site.”
Rhyme grimaced. Videos and witnesses, yet only enough evidence to fit into — not even fill — two small milk crates.
Ridiculous.
Sellitto looked toward Cooper, who was running samples through his equipment. “You found out what that shit is yet, Mel?”
Eyes on the crime scene images, Rhyme gave a brief laugh of surprise. “Well, we know what it is. The only question is can we find out where the unsub got it.”
“You know just by looking at the pictures?” Sellitto asked.
“Of course. That, and Amelia’s symptoms.”
“And?”
“Take radioactive toxins and botulinum out of the equation, and it’s the most dangerous substance on earth.”
10
“Hey,” said Andy Gilligan in greeting.
Charles Hale nodded and through the curtain in the door window scanned Hamilton Court once more.
The cop snapped, “I looked. Nobody was following. I know what I’m doing. Not my first circus.”
Wasn’t the expression “rodeo”?
Hale closed and locked the door, then put the gun back into the compartment, feeling no urge to explain his caution or to comment on the fact that Gilligan himself had been clutching a firearm as he approached the trailer.
They moved to the center section of the mobile construction headquarters and sat at the table. “Coffee?” Hale asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“It went all right?”
The detective clicked his tongue. “Perfect. None of them suspect anything. Now, here’s this,” Gilligan said, as if about to deliver a Christmas present to a buddy. He withdrew several sheets from his inside jacket pocket. It was quite the nice garment. The detective, Hale had learned, had several sources of income — all of it tax free — beyond what the NYPD paid him. Hale himself had put $100K into an offshore account for Gilligan this year alone.
“What is it?”
“Lifted it from a file at Rhyme’s. It’ll be helpful.”
Hale opened the sheets and scanned the list of eighteen names. Most of them were crossed out.
“You’ll want to talk to the others, the one’s I haven’t checked off,” Gilligan said. “Might be a witness.”
“What’s the climate like there, in Rhyme’s?”
“The crane thing’s got them occupied. Totally. My case is on the back burner.”
He was referring to the Department of Structures and Engineering theft. The possessive pronoun “my” was true in two senses: it was Gilligan’s case because he was lead detective on it — but also because he was the thief, the man who’d broken into the building and stolen the documents and drives.
He was the man Rhyme and Amelia Sachs had nicknamed Unsub 212.
The stolen DSE materials were what now covered the table in front of the men.
“Anything new I should know about Rhyme’s security?”
“No. Still just the parcel X-ray machine. The biotox frame. The detectors for bombs and radiation.”
When the detective had first reported to Hale that there was a uranium detector, Gilligan had laughed. “Rhyme thinks somebody’s going to nuke him?”
Hale had not bothered to explain that dirty devices — which spread radioactive material — are a far more realistic danger than a nuclear reaction.
“And still no metal detectors?”
“No.”
“The video you took? The card?”
Gilligan seemed hesitant as he handed Hale an SD card. “I didn’t get much. I didn’t want to, you know, be too obvious, taping.”
The detective had worn a body cam with a button lens on the occasions he’d been to Rhyme’s. Some of this was to allow Hale to see exactly what the defenses were like in the town house.
Hale also wanted to see the criminalist himself. Like a herpetologist needs to observe his favorite species of snake in its own environment.
He called up a movie-viewing program on his laptop, loaded the card and scrubbed through what Gilligan had recorded.
The quality was good for the most part. The detective had stood still and panned slowly. He did, however, cover the lens with his sleeve frequently — out of fear of being detected, probably.
Hale now froze a frame, leaning toward the screen.
He was looking at a particularly clear, well-lit capture.
And studied the image intensely.
Lincoln Rhyme is a handsome man, with a prominent nose and thick, trimmed dark hair. Those confined to wheelchairs sometimes gain weight or grow gaunt. Rhyme has done neither. He exercises, it’s clear.
His dark eyes are keen, and a comma of hair falls over his right forehead. His brows are furrowed as he looks toward the portion of his parlor sealed off by a glass wall. It is the sterile side of the room, the laboratory. This hermetical sealing is similar to the finest watchmaking facilities, which are kept breathlessly clean, out of fear that dust — or far worse, a bit of sand or grit — might make its way into the works and render the timepiece useless.
Interrupting Hale’s reverie, Gilligan now said, “You want, I can still try for the mike.” A brief pause. “I’d have to charge you more because of the risk, of course.”
They had debated sneaking a transmitter into the room. Without a metal detector at the door, it would be easy to smuggle in a bug. But Rhyme or someone else would probably sweep the place — especially now that he knew he was the target of a killer.
“No.”
Hale pushed the Play triangle once again.
Now Gilligan has turned from Rhyme and is walking along the row of bookshelves. The camera pans across the titles. Some are books on the law and police procedure, but more are titles devoted to the sciences, notably chemistry, physics, geology and other environmental subjects. One is The Analysis and Classification of Mud on the Eastern Seaboard.
The camera pans back. After mundane footage, the video goes black.
Hale wished Gilligan had gotten a scan of the evidence boards, but he was apparently too nervous to do so.
As Hale sat back, reflecting on what he’d just seen, sipping coffee, Gilligan was looking at the timepieces.
The clepsydra, in particular, grabbed his attention. The instrument was about eighteen inches high. The frame was of ebony and the top and bottom disks featured brass buttons depicting the signs of the zodiac.
“You make that?” Gilligan asked.
“The clepsydra? No. I found it at an antiques store and liked the lines.”
Gilligan asked, “Clep... what?”
“Clepsydra. Predecessor of the hourglass. Same principal, measuring the passage of time, but with dripping water. They predate the sand models by two thousand years. There were problems with them — they couldn’t be used on ships because of the rocking. Condensation was an issue too. Hourglasses like those” — he pointed to two on a shelf nearby — “came about around eight hundred ad. They were inventions of the church, for timing mass and services.”