A Textbook Case

5

“Sachs!” Lincoln Rhyme was calling into his headset microphone. He was in his parlor lab, surrounded by the thousands of evidence containers. He hadn’t moved much; it was difficult to maneuver.

He glanced at Thom, who was also on the phone, trying to reach someone at the command post for an update. Neither Sellitto nor Detective Ron Simpson was answering.

The report from the scene was that there’d been a huge explosion in the basement of the townhouse that Sachs had been searching. The tenants and their pets had been saved — as had the bulk of the building; the fire was mostly out. But Sachs and the intended victim, both of whom were in the laundry room, where the device was set, were unaccounted for.

Rhyme was furious with her for not waiting for the Bomb Squad.

“It’s their fucking job,” he muttered, drawing a quizzical glance from his aide, who would, of course, have no idea whom he was fighting with.

He made a mobile call. But Lon Sellitto didn’t pick up.

“Goddamn it!”

Police and fire reports tumbled their way.

Oh, Jesus Christ…

And then, at last, “Rhyme…”

“Sachs! Where are you? What happened?”

“Wait one—”

“I don’t want to wait one anything. What the hell happened?” He nodded at Thom, who hung up his own on-hold call.

“We’re fine. The vic and I got out the back. We just made it to the corridor before it blew.”

She went on to describe what he’d rigged.

“I wanted to collect some of the evidence, Rhyme. Anything. This time there wasn’t any contamination. But I didn’t have the chance.”

“You’re all right?”

“Yeah, dizzy from the fumes, smoke.”

“The vic?”

“Same, dizzy, she’s on oxygen. She breathed ‘em for longer than I did.”

“She see anything?”

Sachs explained that, as in the homicide on Twenty-sixth Street, the perp had hit her from behind and duct-taped her, then rigged the bomb.

“Same thing, Rhyme. It was slow. Like he wanted her to think about the death she was facing. Lon’s interviewing her.”

“Come on back here right away, Sachs. We just handed our unsub his first defeat and he’s probably not very happy about it. And that young guy, Marko? Is he there?”

“He came over from the academy. He and I’re going to walk the grid. Not that there’s much to collect.”

“Well, tell him he did a competent job,” Rhyme said and disconnected.

Though it sounded like damning with faint praise, in fact, coming from Lincoln Rhyme, it was a stellar compliment.

At midnight, Sachs, Sellitto and Cooper were in the parlor.

The opposite of the earlier scene, the site of the attempt on Tenth Street had yielded Evidence Lite; Sachs could carry all of it herself in one milk carton.

Sellitto had interviewed the victim, Simone Randall, at length. Like Jane Levine at the first crime scene, she had no enemies, certainly none who’d do something like this. She worked as an assistant in the entertainment field. She and her boss had just gotten back from a meeting on the West Coast. Simone had no clue why someone would do this to her and hadn’t seen any threats when she’d arrived. She told Sachs about the other people on the street as she’d gotten out of the taxi: two guys making out and a homeless woman. Patrol officers canvassed but didn’t come up with anybody. He also contacted Simone’s boss, who’d dropped her off in front of her apartment, but he hadn’t seen anything either, except the three people that Simone had mentioned.

The victim added that she thought she’d seen somebody watching the building with binoculars off and on for the past month, from the garden in the city park across the street, but he might just have been bird-watching.

“Where our unsub picked up his vegetative evidence and soil,” Rhyme noted.

But Simone had not seen the person clearly.

Sellitto said, “That’s it. Zip. Zilch.”

“Hell,” Rhyme muttered, wheeling back and beaching his chair on a pile of evidence envelopes containing plastic utensils. With the bits of food and drink beginning to decay, the parlor was taking on an unhealthy smell.

He didn’t know when a case had frustrated him so much.

Thom surveyed his boss and said, “I’m going to want you to get some sleep.”

“Fine,” Rhyme snapped, “if you’re ‘going to’ want that, it means you don’t want it yet.”

“Lincoln.” Thom was placid but firm, in his caregiver/mother-hen mode. The criminalist didn’t feel like arguing. Besides, Thom was usually right about Rhyme’s physical state, even if the criminalist didn’t want to admit it. The life expectancy for those with his level of quadriplegia can be less than that of the general population, and Rhyme had Thom to thank for the fact he was still on earth… and relatively healthy.

And he was exhausted.

“Twenty minutes, please.”

“ ‘Please,’ ” Thom said with mock shock. “That didn’t sound sincere.”

It wasn’t.

Though as things turned out, even twenty minutes was too much.

There virtually was no evidence, nothing to analyze, no conclusions to be drawn.

And yet the unsub had been just as clever as at the earlier scene.

The fire meant there was nothing left to trace back to his home, place of work or future attacks. The fire had turned nearly everything to ash and the water from the fire department had blended clues with extraneous materials and produced a useless black sludge. He was sure, too, that the few recognizable remnants — the Frappuccino bottle, the duct tape, the matches — would have come from the trash.

Even an analysis of the accelerant gasoline revealed it was an unbranded generic — and could have been bought in any of five hundred stations in the area.

Ah, fire, Rhyme reflected cynically.

As he’d written in his textbook:

As for the things that might have helped — footprints along the perp’s entrance and exit routes? And tool marks where he’d picked the locks? Of course, he’d worn booties and gloves — and had figured that any telltale clues would be destroyed by the firemen charging into the building, swinging axes and knocking down doors.

Which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Thom said, “Lincoln.”

The grace period was up. It was time for bed.

Maybe something would occur to him in the morning.