A Textbook Case

3

Mel Cooper was wrong.

It took nearly seven more hours to finish just categorizing the evidence. At 3:15 in the morning they decided to knock off for the night.

Sachs stayed with Rhyme, as she did three or four nights a week, and Cooper slept in the guest room. Sellitto returned to his house, where his partner, Rachel, whom he described as his “Better Other,” was waiting for him. Marko headed back to his home, wherever that might be.

By nine the next morning the team, minus the young CS officer, was back.

As in every case they worked, Rhyme asked for a whiteboard chart listing the evidence. Sachs did the honors. She moved stiffly to the board. Rhyme noted the hitch in her leg; she suffered from arthritis and the extended search in a damp, subterranean garage had taken its toll. Once or twice, reaching to the top to start a new entry, she winced.

Finally she finished — all three boards in Rhyme’s parlor were required. And that was just to list what the teams had found. There was no analysis at all, much less insightful deductions that could be made about sources or inferences as to prospective victims.

Everyone in the room fell silent and stared.

Rhyme barked, “The chart reads like the table of contents in my goddamn book.”

Several years ago Rhyme had written a textbook, A Comprehensive Guide to Evidence Collection and Analysis, which was a best seller, at least in the law enforcement community if not in the Times.

Sachs: “I don’t know where to start, Rhyme.”

Well, guess what? Rhyme thought, I don’t either. He was recalling another passage in the book.

“It’s even more brilliant than I thought,” the criminalist mused. “Getting most of what he used in the crime from the trash — covered with other people’s prints. And contaminating the scene with, literally, pounds of trace and other garbage. For things he couldn’t obscure — he could hardly bring a dozen shoes with him or somebody else’s fingers — he wore booties and gloves.”

Sachs said, “But those can’t be his gloves, all the latex ones. He wouldn’t leave them behind.”

“Probably not. But we can’t afford not to analyze them, can we? And he knows it.”

“I suppose not,” said Mel Cooper, as discouraged as the rest of them. Rhyme believed the tech had had a ballroom dancing date with his girlfriend of many years last night. They were competitors and apparently quite accomplished. Lincoln Rhyme did not follow dancing.

“And he…” Rhyme’s voice faded as several thoughts came to him.

“Linc—”

Rhyme lifted his right arm and waved Sellitto silent as he continued to stare.

Finally the criminalist said excitedly, “Think about this. This person knows evidence. And that means he knows there’s a good chance he’s got some trace or other clue on him that could lead us to his identity or to the next victim he’s got in mind.”

“Right,” Lon Sellitto said. “And?”

Rhyme was peering at the charts. “So what did he use the most of to contaminate the scene?”

Sachs said, “Trash—”

“No, that was a general smokescreen. It just happened to be there. Something specific, I’m looking for.”

Cooper shoved his Harry Potter glasses higher on his nose as he read the charts. He offered, “Fibers, hair, general trace—”

“Yes, but those are givens at every crime scene. I want to know what’s special?”

“What’s the most unique, you mean?” Sellitto offered.

“No, I don’t mean that, Lon,” Rhyme said sourly. “Because something is either unique or not. You don’t have varying degrees of one-ness.”

“Haven’t had a grammar lesson from you lately, Lincoln. I was wondering if you’d quit the schoolmarm union.”

Drawing a smile from Thom, who was delivering coffee and pastries.

Sachs was studying the chart. She said, “Dirt and… vegetation.”

Rhyme squinted. “Yes, good. That could be it. He knew he picked up some trace either where the perp lives or works, or where he’s been scoping out another victim, and he had to cover that up.”

“Which means,” Sachs said, “a garden, park or yard?”

“I’d say, yes. Soil and the greenery. That could hold the clue. It cuts the search down a bit…. We should start there. Then anything else?” Rhyme reviewed the chart again. “The detergent and cleansers — why’d he sprinkle or pour so many of those in the scene? We need to start working our way through those, too.” Rhyme looked around. “That kid, Marko? Why isn’t he here?”

Sachs said, “He called. He had something he had to do back in Queens, HQ. But he’d still like to help us out if we need him. You want me to call him?”

“I do, Sachs. Fast!”

An exhausting time.

A business trip with her boss to California and back in under twenty-four hours.

Productive, necessary, but stressful.

They were now cabbing it into the city from JFK, where their flight had landed at 6:00 p.m. She was exhausted, a bit tipsy from the two glasses of wine and mildly resenting the three hours that you lost flying east.

Her boss, late forties, tanned and trim, now slipped his iPhone away — he’d been making a date for tomorrow — and then turned to her with a laugh. “Did you hear them? They really used the word ‘unpack.’ ”

As in “unpack it for us,” meaning presumably explain to the network the story they’d come to pitch.

“Since when did ‘explain’ fall off the A-list of words?”

Simone smiled. “And the net executive? She said the concept was definitely ‘seismic.’ You know, you need a translator app in Hollywood.”

Her boss laughed and Simone eyed him obliquely. A great guy. Funny, smart, in great shape thanks to a health club regimen that bordered on the religious. He was also extremely talented, which meant extremely successful.

Oh, and single, too.

He sure was a big helping of temptation, you bet, but Simone, despite being in her mid-thirties and sans boyfriend at the moment, had successfully corralled the baby and the lonely hormones; she could look at her boss objectively. The man’s obsessive craving for detail and perfection, his intensity would drive her crazy if they were partners. Work was everything. He lived his life as if he were planning out a production. That was it: life as storyboard, preproduction, production and post. This was undoubtedly a reason his marriage hadn’t worked out and why he tended to go out with somebody for only a month or two at the most.

Good luck, James, she thought. I wish you the best.

Not that he’d ever actually asked you out, Simone reflected wryly.

The cab now approached her neighborhood — Greenwich Village. For Simone, there was no other place to live in New York City. It was, truly, a village. A neighborhood.

The cab dropped her at Tenth Street. “Hm,” her boss said, looking out the window at two men, constructed like bodybuilders, kissing passionately as they stood on the steps of the building next to hers.

He said, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” The famous line from Seinfeld.

Simone smiled, then looked at the main kisser. What a waste.

Then she said good night to her boss and stepped out of the cab, grabbed her suitcase from the trunk. She paused to let a stocky homeless woman wheel her packed grocery cart past — filled with everything but groceries, of course. Simone thought about giving her some change. But then she reflected, why do I think the woman’s homeless? Maybe she’s an eccentric millionaire.

She climbed the stairs to her apartment, smelling that odd aroma of the building, which defied description, as did many of the buildings here. What on earth was it?

Eau de Old New York Apartment.

Insecticide, takeout Chinese, takeout curry, ancient wood, Lysol, damp brick, cooked onions.

Her cat more or less forgave her, though he didn’t have much to complain about. The kibble dish, tended to by her neighbor, was filled with manna from heaven. The water, too, was full and the radio was playing NPR, which was Ruffles’s favorite. He seemed to enjoy the pledge drives as much as This American Life.

Simone checked messages — nothing urgent there, though she noted no caller-ID-blocked numbers. She’d had a lot of those recently. Telemarketers, of course.

She then unpacked and assembled a laundry pile. Simone had never returned from a trip without doing her laundry the night she was back.

Clothes cooties, she called it.

Thanks, Mom.

Simone pulled her sweats on, gathered up the clothes and a cheerful orange bottle of Tide. She took the back stairway, which led to the basement laundry and storage rooms. Simone descended from the second floor to the first and then started down the steps that would take her to the basement. This stairwell was dark, though there was some illumination from downstairs, the laundry room presumably, or maybe the storeroom. She flicked the switch several times. Then squinted and noted that the bulb was missing and not just — it had fallen to the stairs and shattered.

It was at this point that Simone started feeling uneasy.

But she continued, walking carefully to avoid as much of the broken glass as she could in her Crocs. On the basement level, another bulb was broken, too.

Creeping me out.

Okay, that’s it. Hell with OCD issues. I’ll do the laundry tomorrow.

Then squinted and saw, with some relief, that she’d have to wait anyway. There was a sign on the laundry room door. Out of Order. The sign was battered and torn. She’d never seen it before; when the washer or dryer weren’t working, Henry had always just hand-written a sign, informing the tenants when they could expect the machines to be up and running again.

She turned and, eager to get the hell back to Ruffles and her apartment, took one step toward the stairs.

She felt two things in serial. First, a faint chill as the door leading to the storeroom and, eventually, to the alley, opened.

And then a searing explosion of pain as the rock, the bottle, the weight of the world slammed into the back of her head.