The Broken Window (35 page)

“It’s fine.” Rhyme disconnected. He stared at the evidence boards for a long time. “Lon, I’ve got an idea.”

“What?” Sellitto asked.

“Our boy’s always one step ahead of us. We’ve been going about this like he’s any other perp. But he’s not.”

The man who knows everything…

“I want to try something a little different. I want some help.”

“From who?”

“Downtown.”

“Big area. Where exactly?”

“Malloy. And somebody at City Hall.”

“City Hall? The fuck for? Why do you think they’ll even take your phone call?”

“Because they have to.”

“That’s a reason?”

“You’ve gotta convince them, Lon. We need an edge on this guy. But you can do it.”

“Do what exactly?”

“I think we need an expert.”

“What kind?”

“Computer expert.”

“We’ve got Rodney.”

“He’s not exactly what I have in mind.”

The man had been knifed to death.

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Efficiently, yes, but also gratuitously, stabbed in the chest and then viciously slashed—in anger, Sachs assessed. This was another side to 522. She’d seen injuries like these at other scenes; the energetic and ill-aimed cuts suggested that the killer was losing control.

That was good for the investigators; emotional criminals are also careless criminals. They’re more public and they leave more evidence than perps who exercise self-control. But, as Amelia Sachs had learned from her days on the street, the downside is that they’re much more dangerous. People as crazed and dangerous as 522 drew no distinction among their intended victims, innocent bystanders and the police.

Any threat—any
inconvenience
—had to be dealt with instantly and fully. And to hell with logic.

In the harsh halogen lamps set up by the crime-scene team, bathing the graveyard in unreal light, Sachs looked over the victim, on his back, feet splayed where they’d danced outward in his death throes. A huge comma of blood leading away from the corpse stained the asphalt sidewalk in Forest Hills Memorial Gardens and a fringe of grass beyond.

None of the canvassers could find any witnesses, and Miguel Abrera, the SSD janitor, couldn’t add anything. He was badly shaken both because he’d been a potential target of the killer and because his friend had died; he’d gotten to know the groundskeeper in his frequent visits to the graves of his wife and child. That night he’d had a vague feeling that someone had followed him from the subway and he’d even stopped and glanced into a bar window to look for reflections of a mugger tailing him. But the trick hadn’t worked—he’d seen no one—and he’d continued on to the cemetery.

Now, in her white overalls, Sachs directed two crime-scene officers from the main CS operation in Queens to photograph and video everything. She processed the body and began to walk the grid. She was especially diligent. This was an important scene. The killing had happened fast and violently—the groundskeeper had obviously surprised 522—and they had grappled, which meant more chances to find some evidence here that would lead to more information about the killer and his residence or place of work.

Sachs began on the grid—walking over the scene foot by foot in one direction and then turning perpendicular and searching the same area again.

Halfway through she stopped abruptly.

A noise.

She was sure it was the sound of metal against metal. A gun chambering a round? A knife opening?

She looked around quickly but saw only the dusk-blanketed cemetery. Amelia Sachs didn’t believe in ghosts, and normally found resting grounds like this peaceful, even comforting. But now her teeth were clenched, her palms sweating in the latex gloves.

She’d just turned back to the body when she gasped, seeing a flash of light nearby.

Was it a streetlight through those bushes?

Or 522 moving closer, a knife in his hand?

Uncontrolled…

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And she couldn’t help but think he’d already tried once to kill her—the setup near DeLeon Williams’s house with the federal agent—and failed. Maybe he was determined to finish what he’d started.

She returned to her task. But as she was nearly finished collecting evidence, she shivered. Movement again—this time on the far side of the lights, but still within the cemetery, which had been closed by patrol officers. She squinted through the glare. Had it been the breeze jostling a tree? An animal?

Her father, a lifer of a cop and a generous source of street wisdom, once told her, “Forget the dead bodies, Amie, they’re not going to hurt you. Worry about the ones who
made
’em dead.”

Echoing Rhyme’s admonition to “search carefully, but watch your back.”

Amelia Sachs didn’t believe in a sixth sense. Not in the way people think of the supernatural. To her, the whole natural world was so amazing and our senses and thought processes so complex and powerful that we didn’t need superhuman skills to make the most perceptive of deductions.

She was sure somebody was there.

She stepped out of the crime-scene perimeter and strapped her Glock onto her hip. Tapped the grip a few times to orient her hand, in case she needed to draw fast. She went back to the grid, finished with the evidence and turned quickly in the direction where she’d seen the movement earlier.

The lights were blinding but she knew without doubt that a man was there, in the shadows of the building, studying her from the back of the crematorium. Maybe a worker but she wasn’t taking any chances. Hand on her pistol, she strode forward twenty feet. Her white jumpsuit made a nice target in the failing light but she decided not to waste time stripping it off.

She drew her Glock and pushed fast through the bushes, starting a painful jog on arthritic legs toward the figure. But then Sachs stopped, grimacing, as she looked at the loading dock of the crematorium, where she’d seen the intruder. Her mouth tightened, angry at herself. The man, a silhouette against a streetlight outside the cemetery, was a cop; she could see the outline of the patrolman’s hat and noted the slumped, bored posture of a man on guard duty. She called, “Officer? You see anybody over there?”

“No, Detective Sachs,” he answered. “Sure haven’t.”

“Thanks.”

She finished with the evidence, then released the scene to the medical examiner tour doctor.

Returning to her car, she opened the trunk and began stripping off the white jumpsuit. She was chatting with the other officers from the CS main headquarters in Queens. They too had changed out of their own overalls. One frowned and was looking around for something he’d misplaced.

“Lose something?” she asked.

The man frowned. “Yeah. It was right here. My hat.”

Sachs froze. “What?”

“It’s missing.”

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Shit. She tossed the jumpsuit into the trunk and jogged fast to the sergeant from the local precinct, who was the immediate supervisor here. “Did you have anybody secure the loading dock?” she asked breathlessly.

“Over there? Naw. I didn’t bother. We had the whole area sealed and—”

Goddamnit.

Turning, she sprinted to the loading dock, her Glock in hand. She shouted to the officers nearby, “He was here! By the crematorium. Move!”

Sachs paused at the old redbrick structure, noticing the open gate leading out to the street. A fast search of the grounds revealed no sign of 522. She continued on to the street and looked out fast, left and right.

Traffic, curious onlookers—dozens of them—but the suspect was gone.

Sachs returned to the loading dock and wasn’t surprised to find the police officer’s hat lying nearby. It sat next to a sign, Leave Caskets Here. She collected the hat, slipped it into an evidence bag and returned to the other officers. Sachs and a local precinct sergeant sent officers around the neighborhood to see if anybody had spotted him. Then she returned to her car. Of course, he’d be far away by now but still she couldn’t shake the raw uneasiness—which was due mostly to the fact that he hadn’t tried to escape when he saw her walking toward the crematorium but casually stood his ground.

Though what chilled her the most was the memory of his casual voice—referring to her by name.

“Are they going to do it?” Rhyme snapped as Lon Sellitto walked through the door from his mission downtown with Captain Malloy and the deputy mayor, Ron Scott, about what Rhyme was calling the

“Expert Plan.”

“They’re not happy. It’s expensive and they—”

“Bull… shit. Get somebody on the phone.”

“Hold on, hold on. They’ll do it. They’re making the arrangements. I’m just saying they’re grumbling about it.”

“You should have told me up front they agreed. I don’t care how much they grumble.”

“Joe Malloy’ll give me a call with the details.”

At around 9:30 P.M. the door opened and Amelia Sachs entered, carrying the evidence she’d collected at the groundskeeper’s murder scene.

“He was there,” she said.

Rhyme didn’t understand her.

“Five Twenty-Two. At the cemetery. He was watching us.”

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“No shit,” Sellitto said.

“He was gone by the time I realized it.” She held up a patrolman’s hat and explained that he’d been watching her in disguise.

“The fuck he’d do that for?”

“Information,” Rhyme said softly. “The more he knows, the more powerful he is, the more vulnerable we become…”

“You canvass?” Sellitto asked.

“A team from the precinct did. Nobody saw anything.”

“He knows everything. We know zilch.”

She unpacked the crate as Rhyme’s eyes took in each evidence-collection bag she lifted out. “They struggled. Could be some good transfer trace.”

“Let’s hope.”

“I talked to Abrera, the janitor. He said that for the past month, he’s noticed some strange things. His time sheets were changed, there were deposits into his checking account he didn’t make.”

Cooper suggested, “Like Jorgensen—identity theft?”

“No, no,” Rhyme said. “I’ll bet Five Twenty-Two was grooming him to take the fall. Maybe a suicide.

Plant a note on him… It was his wife and child’s grave?”

“That’s right.”

“Sure. He’s despondent. Going to kill himself. Confesses to all the crimes in a suicide note. We close the case. But the groundskeeper interrupts him in the act. And now Five Twenty-Two’s up a creek. He can’t try this again; we’ll be expecting a fake suicide now. He’ll have to try something else. But what?”

Cooper had started going over the evidence. “No hairs in the hat, no trace at all… But you know what I’ve got? A bit of adhesive. Generic though. Can’t source it.”

“He removed the trace with tape or a roller before he left the hat,” Rhyme said, grimacing. Nothing 522

did would surprise him anymore.

Cooper then announced, “From the other scene—by the grave—I’ve got a fiber. It’s similar to the rope used in the earlier crime.”

“Good. What’s in it?”

Cooper prepared the sample and tested it. A short time later he announced, “Okay, got two things. The most common is naphthalene in an inert crystal medium.”

“Mothballs,” Rhyme announced. The substance had figured in a poisoning case years ago. “But they’d be old ones.” He explained that naphthalene had largely been abandoned in favor of safer materials.

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“Or,” he added, “from out of the country. Fewer safety codes on consumer products in a lot of places.”

“Then something else.” Cooper gestured at the computer screen. The substance it revealed was Na(C6H11NHSO2O). “And it’s bound with lecithin, carnauba wax, citrus acid.”

“What the hell’s that?” Rhyme blurted.

Another database was consulted. “Sodium cyclamate.”

“Oh, artificial sweetener, right?”

“That’s it,” Cooper said, reading. “Banned by the FDA thirty years ago. The ban’s still under challenge but no products have been made with it since the seventies.”

Then Rhyme’s mind made a few leaps, mimicking his eyes as they jumped from item to item on the evidence boards. “Old cardboard. Mold. Desiccated tobacco. The doll’s hair? Old soda? And boxes of mothballs? What the hell does it add up to? Does he live near an antiques store? Over one?”

They continued the analysis: minute traces of phosphorus sesquisulfide, the main ingredient in safety matches; more Trade Center dust; and leaves from a dieffenbachia, also called leopard lily. It was a common houseplant.

Other evidence included paper fibers from yellow legal pads, probably two different ones because of the color variations in the dyes. But they weren’t distinctive enough to trace to a source. Also, more of the spicy substance that Rhyme had found in the knife used to murder the coin collector. This time they had enough to properly examine the grains and the color. “It’s cayenne pepper,” Cooper announced.

Sellitto mumbled, “Used to be you could pin somebody to a Latin neighborhood with that. Now, you can get salsa and hot sauce everywhere. Whole Foods to 7-Elevens.”

The only other clue was a shoeprint in the dirt of a recently dug grave near the site of the killing. Sachs deduced it was 522’s because it appeared to have been left by someone running from that area toward the exit.

Comparing the electrostatic print with the database of shoe treadmarks revealed that 522’s shoes were well-worn size-11 Skechers, a practical, though not particularly stylish, model often worn by workers and hikers.

While Sachs took a phone call, Rhyme told Thom to write the details on the chart as he dictated. Rhyme stared at the information—much more than when they’d started. Yet it was leading them nowhere.

UNSUB 522 PROFILE

· Male

· Possibly smokes or lives/works with someone who does, or near source of tobacco

· Has children or lives/works near them or near source of toys

· Interest in art, coins?

· Probably white or light-skinned ethnic

· Medium build

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· Strong—able to strangle victims

· Access to voice-disguise equipment

· Possibly computer literate; knows OurWorld. Other social-networking sites?