“It doesn’t look like sand.” Gilligan was squinting.
“No, most of them didn’t use sand. Pulverized marble or burnt eggshell were more accurate. This one? It’s tin oxide. Hourglasses gave us the term ‘knots,’ for speed.”
“Yeah?” Gilligan asked. “I’ve got a boat. Nice one.”
Which I might have bought him, thought Hale.
“Sailors tied knots into a rope and then fixed it to a log. They threw the rope overboard and used an hourglass to see how many knots flipped through their fingers for a given period of time.”
“Cool. I’ll tell my boating buddies.”
Hale finished his coffee, washed the cup and dried his hands. “You spare fifteen minutes now? I have an idea — it’ll be good for both of us — and I want your thoughts.”
Gilligan looked at his digital watch. Cheap. No judgment from Hale. A watch like this might drift.5 seconds a day; a million-dollar mechanical model typically loses twice that. “Sure, I guess.”
Hale once again checked the monitors. Clear. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and the two men stepped outside. Hale set the locks and they continued down the dusty cobblestones.
“Graveyard,” Gilligan muttered.
“What?”
The detective waved his arm, indicating the dilapidated buildings lining the cul-de-sac. “They look like big tombstones.”
They walked around the chain barrier and onto the quiet street, so typical of this part of Greenwich Village.
“Better if we take one car. Yours?”
Gilligan said, “I’ve got to be at One PP in a half hour.”
“I have a meeting too, uptown. I’ll take the train.”
They climbed into the sweet-smelling Lexus, which was spotless. The mileage would be low. Maybe Hale had bought him this, rather than the boat. Maybe a portion of each.
As Gilligan started the engine, Hale asked, “The GPS is disconnected, right?”
“Yeah. I made sure.”
“Head south. Then east. We’re going to Webber and Blenheim.”
After twenty minutes of negotiating the narrow downtown streets, which grew increasingly deserted, they arrived at the intersection. A vacant lot took up half the block. Mostly dirt, some clumps of grass. A dead tree. Trash. In a few places, the sunken brownstone remains of tenements, typical of nineteenth-century Lower East Side.
“What’s here?”
“Part of my plans for Rhyme.”
The detective pulled the sleek car to the curb — carefully; he’d be afraid of scratching the wheels. “He really is an arrogant son of a bitch, you know.”
“No doubt about that.”
They climbed from the car and walked to the six-foot-high chain-link fence around the lot. The gate had been stretched open, so it was easy to slip through.
Hale pointed to a row of abandoned tenements on the other side of the lot.
Gilligan said, “I was thinking about Rhyme.”
“Yes?”
“My brother and me, we hunt. Have all our lives. We’re fucking good shots. Rhyme gets out of the town house some.”
Hale was thinking: Rhyme goes to the Manhattan School of Criminal Justice for the courses he teaches. Tuesday and Thursday and every other weekend. The school was two thousand, three hundred feet from the town house. Usually, his aide drove him in the disabled-accessible van, but on nice days he sometimes motored his way to and from class.
“I could get up on one of those buildings. Two shots. That’d be it. A third for his aide, so he doesn’t try any lifesaving shit. I’d only charge an extra fifty K. What do you think?”
Hale was silent. Then: “No, I think we’ll stick to what I’ve planned.”
Gilligan laughed. “We negotiating? Okay, thirty K.”
“The plan.”
“Like building a watch,” Gilligan said. “You don’t change the design halfway through.”
“Just like that.”
Hale had slowed and Gilligan walked ahead a few paces. When he turned back, he found that he was looking at Hale’s hand, which held a silenced weapon pointed his way.
His eyes revealed shock.
Disbelief too, as if having seen Hale put his Glock back into the compartment beside the trailer door, it was impossible to fathom the concept that someone could actually own two pistols.
11
Lon Sellitto: “So what is it, kryptonite?”
A pop culture reference, Rhyme guessed. Maybe some weapon used by a villain in a movie.
“An inorganic acid. Hydrofluoric. HF’s the chemical symbol. Technically it’s classified as a weak acid.”
Sachs scoffed and Sellitto grumbled, “Weak? Tell him that.” Nodding toward the pictures of the dead construction worker.
“That only means it partially dissociates in water. It’s an ion issue. It can be as corrosive as any other acid. But with HF, corrosion isn’t the real problem. It’s the combination of the elements that makes it so deadly. It’s a one-two punch. The H — hydrogen — burns through the top layer of skin so fast you hardly feel it... Though you definitely do an hour or two later. Then, once it’s in your body, the F — fluoride — attacks internal cells. The result is liquefaction necrosis. And the name of that condition pretty much says it all. Poisoning occurs by contact or inhalation. Breathe it and it’ll burn all the way through your lungs. Dyspnea, cyanosis, pulmonary edema.”
This description coincided with Sachs hitting the oxygen once more.
“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Does it take much?”
“No, a few drops’ll kill you. There’s no antidote. And you can’t wash it off. All you can do is try to treat the symptoms. Massive pain and infection.” He called to Cooper, “Anything else in addition to the acid in the sample?”
“Fragments and sludge of industrial concrete, sand, steel, a little iron, all in states suggesting they were dissolved by the acid.”
“What’s the concentration?” Rhyme asked.
“Thirty-two percent.”
“That’s a mistake. Run it again or recalibrate the equipment.”
“Done all of the above. Thirty-two percent.”
The highest concentration that Rhyme had ever heard of was twenty, and that was just for shipment and storage — in very specialized containers. The product was then greatly diluted for sale to end users. On the market, it was, at the most, two to four percent. A concentration that Sachs had collected at the scene would quickly eat through anything but the very few materials impervious to it, and gas released when it was exposed to air could kill within minutes.
She had been very fortunate to have missed any more exposure in the tunnel beneath the jobsite.
He glanced her way. She was only half listening. She was inhaling more oxygen and staring at some pictures of upturned rebar rods. They were rusty, but two were darker. Dried blood.
The operator must have landed on these when he fell from the sky.
Rhyme nodded at another one of her pictures on the monitor, depicting the counterweight trolley. The acid delivery device was a smoking discolored blob.
“Damn it. He got it up there somehow. The top of the crane. We’ll have to work on that. Once it was in place, how was it activated?”
“The detonator,” Cooper said, holding up another clear plastic container. Inside was what appeared to be a small board of solid-state electronics, also deformed and charred by the acid. He was speaking with the respirator on, through the attached mike.
“Small charge, probably just pulled open a half-dozen big-caliber rounds for the gunpowder.”