A Textbook Case (2 page)

“Rhyme, you there?”

A moment of clatter. “Yes, yes, you there, you at the scene? Are you on the grid, Sachs? Time’s wasting.”

“Just got here. I’m ready to go. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, why wouldn’t I be?”

A three-hour microsurgery operation a couple of days ago?

She didn’t answer.

“What’s that light? Jesus, it’s bright.”

She’d glanced at the sky and a slash of morning sun would have blasted into the video camera and onto the high-def monitor Rhyme would be looking at. “Sorry.”

In a gloved hand Sachs picked up the evidence collection bag—a small suitcase—and a flashlight and began walking down the ramp into the garage.

She was glancing at her feet. Odd.

Rhyme caught it, too. “What’m I looking at, Sachs?”

“Trash.” The ramp was filthy. A nearby Dumpster was on its side and the dozen garbage bags inside had been pulled out and ripped open. The contents covered the ground.

It was a mess.

“Hard to hear you, Sachs.”

“I’m wearing an N-Ninety-five.”

“Chemical, gas?”

“That first responding told me it was a good idea.”

“It’s really dark,” the criminalist then muttered.

The video camera automatically went to low-light mode—that greenish tint from spy movies and reality TV—but there were limits to how much bits and bytes could convey.

Eyes, too, for that matter. It
was
dark. She noted the bulbs were missing. She paused.

“What?” he asked.

“The bulbs aren’t just missing, Rhyme. Somebody took them out and broke them. They’re shattered.”

“If our doer’s behind it, that means he probably isn’t from the building. He doesn’t know where the switch is and didn’t want to take the time to find it.”

Count on Rhyme to come to conclusions like that… from a mere wisp of an observation.

“But why broken?”

“Maybe just being cautious. Tough to get prints or lift other trace from a shattered bulb. Hm, he could be a smart one.”

Rhyme, Sachs was pleased to note, was in a good mood. The medical treatments—complicated, expensive and more than a little risky—were going well. He’d regained significant movement in both arms and hands. Not sensation; nothing would bring that back, at least not as medical science stood nowadays, but he was far less dependent than he had once been and that meant the world to a man like Lincoln Rhyme.

She finally had to resort to her flashlight. She clicked on the long Maglite and continued past a dozen parked cars, some of whose owners were undoubtedly furious that they had not been allowed to use their vehicles, because of the minor inconvenience of a murder near where they’d parked. But, on the other hand, there’d also be plenty who’d do whatever they could to help nail the suspect.

Nothing teaches you human nature like being a cop.

Sachs felt a ping of the arthritis pain that plagued her in her knees and slowed. She then stopped altogether, not because of joint discomfort, but because of noises. Creaks and taps. A door closed—an interior door, not a car. It seemed a long ways off, but she couldn’t tell. The walls muffled and confused sounds.

Footsteps?

She turned suddenly, nearly swapping flashlight for Glock.

No, just dripping water, from a pipe. Water dribbled down the incline, mixing with the papers and other trash on the floor; there was even more garbage here.

“Okay, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m almost at the bottom level. She and her car’re around that corner.”

“Go on, Sachs.”

She realized she’d stopped. She was uneasy. “I just can’t figure out all this garbage.”

Sachs began walking again, slowly making her way to the corner, paused, set down the suitcase and drew her gun. In the flashlight beam was a faint haze. She lifted the mask off, inhaled and coughed. There was pungency to the air. Paint maybe, or chemicals. And smoke. She found the source. Yes, some newspapers were smoldering in the corner.

That’s what Marko had been referring to.

“Okay, I’m going into the scene, Rhyme.”

Thinking of Marko’s words.

The worst…

Weapon up, she turned the corner and aimed the powerful wide-angle beam of the flashlight at the victim and her vehicle.

Sachs gasped. “Oh, Jesus, Rhyme. Oh, no…”

At 4:00 p.m. Amelia Sachs walked into Lincoln Rhyme’s townhouse on Central Park West.

Rhyme found himself glaring toward her—partly because of the powerful autumn light streaming in from the open door behind her, partly because of his impatience.

The crime scene search had taken forever, six and a half hours to be precise, the longest for a single scene he could remember.

Sachs had told him that the young officer who’d been first response reported it was the worst scene he’d ever come across. Partly, he meant that the victim had died a horrific, sadistic death. But equally he was referring to the complete contamination of the scene.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sachs had told Rhyme through the microphone. And gazing at the high-def screen, he had to admit that he hadn’t either. Every square inch of the area—from the ramp to the garage floor to the victim’s car and surrounding area—was obliterated, covered with trash. And painted, powdered, coated with liquids, dusted with dirt and powders.

It was actually hard to locate the victim herself for all the mess.

Rhyme now piloted his red Storm Arrow wheelchair to the front door, through which Sachs was carrying a large carton filled with evidence collection bags. She explained that the first responder, a crime scene officer named Marko, and she had sped here in their private vehicles—his an SUV. Rhyme noted that the vehicle was loaded to the gunwales with cartons of evidence. Young man, picking up a massive carton, had a military air about him. He did a double-take when he saw Rhyme. He nodded.

Rhyme ignored him, focusing on the astonishing quantity of evidence. Sachs’s ancient Ford was filled, too. He didn’t see how she’d been able to drive it.

“Christ,” he muttered.

Lincoln Rhyme had a handsome face, hair a bit long for NYPD regulation but that mattered not at all since he was no longer NYPD. His nose was prominent, his lips full, though they grew thin quickly, like irises dilating in light, when he was displeased, which occurred with some frequency, given his impatience and pole-vault high standards for crime scene work. A pink scar was visible at the base of his throat; it resembled a bullet wound but in fact it was from the ventilator tube, which had kept him alive after the accident.

A breath of autumn wind blew through the open door and a comma of black hair tickled his forehead. He clumsily lifted his right hand to brush it away, a gesture that would have been impossible several years ago, when he’d been completely paralyzed below the neck. Those little things—the inability to scratch an itch, the impossibility of feeding oneself, the incessant
nag
of the condition—were what wore you down, more than the broader consequences of cataclysmic injury. At the moment, his left arm was bandaged to his body; he’d had additional surgery to give that limb the same awkward, but miraculous, skill of the right.

His brown eyes squinting at the curbside, Rhyme lost count of the boxes Marko was unloading. He spun around in his chair and steamed back toward the townhouse’s parlor. “Thom! Thom!”

The man he was shouting for was practically in sotto voce distance, ten feet away, though not quite in sight. “I’m right here, you don’t need to—”

“We have to
do
something with this,” Rhyme said, as his caregiver appeared. The young man was today wearing what he usually did on the job—dress slacks, tan today, and dark blue shirt and a floral tie.

“Hi, Amelia.”

Sachs was coming through the front door.

“Thom.” He took the box from her and she headed out for another shipment.

Rhyme glanced from the carton to Thom Reston’s face. “Look at that! And look outside. We need to find places to organize it. Everything in the den… it has to go!”

“I’ll clear some space.”

“We can’t clear it. We have to empty it. I want everything gone.”

“All right.” The aide took off the yellow kitchen gloves he was wearing and began sliding furniture out of the room.

The den was what served as the living room for the townhouse; the other room that had been intended for social liaisons in the Victorian era, the parlor, Rhyme had converted to a forensics lab, as extensive as those in many medium-sized towns. Rhyme was by no means wealthy, but he’d received a good settlement when he’d been injured and he charged a lot for his forensic consulting activities. Much of the income went right back into his company and he had bought as many forensic “toys” as he could afford (that’s how Amelia Sachs had referred to them, after seeing his eyes light up when there’d been a new acquisition; to Rhyme they were simply tools).

“Mel!” Rhyme was shouting again.

This time he was speaking to his associate, who was at an evidence examination station in the parlor. NYPD Detective Mel Cooper, blond though balding and nerdish, was Rhyme’s number-one lab man.

Cooper had arrived three hours ago from Queens, where he both worked, at the police department’s crime scene headquarters, and lived. He would handle much of the lab work in what was being called the Unsub 26 homicide case, so named because the killer, an unknown subject, had killed the victim on East Twenty-sixth Street. Cooper had ready sheets of sterile examination paper covering work surfaces, friction ridge equipment to find latent prints, microscopes, scales, the density gradient unit and the dozens of other tools of the trade needed for forensic analysis.

He, too, was staring at the increasing piles of collection bags, boxes and jars that Sachs, Marko and now Thom were carting in and trying to find a place for.

“This is from
one
scene?”

“Apparently,” Rhyme said.

“And it wasn’t a mass disaster?” This was the quantity of evidence that resulted from plane crashes and bomb blasts.

“One unsub, one vic.”

Cooper glanced around the parlor and into hallway in dismay. “You remember that line in
Jaws
, Lincoln? They’re after the shark.”

“Shark,” Rhyme said absently.

“The big shark. They get their first glimpse of it—it’s really big—and one of them says, ‘I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.’ That’s us.”

“Boat?”

“
Jaws
. The movie.”

“I never saw it,” Rhyme muttered.

# # #

The murder weapon was about the only easy part of the analysis: It was the victim’s car.

The killer had snuck up behind and hit her, probably with a piece of rock or cinderblock, hard enough to stun, but not kill, her. He’d then taped her eyes, mouth, feet and arms and dragged her behind the car. Then Unsub 26 had started the Prius and backed it onto her abdomen, leaving it there. The Toyota is front heavy, with the rear weight about 530 kilos, Rhyme had learned. Only one wheel was resting on the victim, which would have cut down some of the pressure, but the medical examiner said the internal damage was devastating. Still, it took her close to an hour to die—mostly from shock and bleeding.

But apart from the COD determination Rhyme and his team had made no other evidentiary discoveries. In fact, all they’d been able to do was catalog the evidence, everyone chipping in: Sachs, Cooper and Marko. Even Thom was helping.

Lon Sellitto arrived.

Oh, Lord no…

Rhyme had to laugh, though bitterly, seeing that the big detective was carrying yet another massive box of evidence collection bags.

“Not more?” asked a dismayed Mel Cooper; usually he was the epitome of detached calm.

“They found another exit route.” The big detective handed off the box to Marko. “But this should be the end of it.” Then he frowned as he looked around at the hundreds of collection and sample bags lining the walls throughout the first floor of the townhouse. “I don’t have any idea what the fuck’s going on here.”

But Lincoln Rhyme did.

“Oh, what’s going on, Lon, is our unsub’s smart. He’s
brilliant
.” Rhyme looked around. “I say ‘he,’ but remember, we keep open minds. It could be a she, too. Never make assumptions.”

“He, she or it,” Sellitto muttered. “I still don’t get it.”

The criminalist continued, “You know Locard’s Principle?”

“Sorta.”

“How about you, Marko?”

The young officer blinked and answered, as if reciting. A hundred years ago, he said, the famed French criminalist Edmond Locard developed a theory: In every crime there is an exchange of evidence between the perpetrator and the victim or the scene. The trace elements swapped may be extremely minuscule but they always exist and in most cases can lead to the perp if the investigator has the intelligence and resources to discover them.

“Close enough. Well, at the scene—” Rhyme’s hand rose unsteadily and he pointed at the pictures Sachs had shot of the victim’s body and that Cooper had printed out “—we know the unsub left something of himself. He
had
to. Locard’s Principle is never wrong. But, you see, he
knew
he’d leave something.”

Sachs said, “And rather than trying to clean up all traces of himself afterward, he did the opposite. He covered up many clues as to who he is, why he’s doing this, what he has planned next.”

Brilliant…

Too much evidence instead of too little.

Rhyme had to admit he felt a grudging admiration for the unsub. Last year, he had appeared in a documentary on the A&E network, about a woman’s conviction for homicide in Florida. She had been sentenced to life on the basis of evidence that turned out to have been tainted—the crime scene officer had first searched the site of the homicide and then the suspect’s house, accidentally depositing a tiny paint chip from the murder site on the woman’s clothes as he gathered them in her house. This chip placed her at the scene and the jury convicted. A review of forensic evidence collection procedures revealed that officer had been told to use the same gloves in searching both scenes, as a money-saving measure. In a second trial, the woman was found not guilty.