More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

LOCARD’S PRINCIPLE

“It’s politically sensitive.”

“Politics.” Lincoln Rhyme offered a distracted grunt to the heavyset, disheveled man who was leaning against a dresser in the bedroom of the criminalist’s Upper West Side town house.

“No, it’s important.”

“And sensitive,” Rhyme echoed. He wasn’t pleased with visitors in general; was much less pleased with visitors at eight-thirty in the morning.

Detective Lon Sellitto pushed away from the dresser and took the coffee Rhyme’s aide, Thom, offered. He sipped.

“That’s not bad.”

“Thanks,” Thom said.

“No,” Sellitto corrected. “I mean his hand. Look.”

A quadriplegic, injured while running a crime scene some years ago, Rhyme had been undergoing therapy and had regained some slight movement in his right hand. He was immensely proud of the accomplishment but it was against his nature to gloat — about personal achievements, at least; he ignored Sellitto and continued squeezing a soft rubber ball. Yes, some movement in his hand had indeed returned but the feelings were haywire. He felt textures and temperatures that didn’t match the properties of the sponge rubber.

Another grunt. He flicked the ball away with his index finger. “I’m not really crazy about drop-ins, Lon.”

“We got a crunch, Linc.”

A politically sensitive one. Rhyme continued, “Amelia and I’ve got a few other cases going on at the moment, you know.” He sipped the strong coffee through a straw. The tumbler was mounted on the headboard to his right. To his left was a microphone, connected to a voice recognition system that in turn was hooked into an environmental control unit, the central nervous system of his bedroom.

“Like I said, a crunch.”

“Hmm.” More coffee.

Rhyme carefully examined Sellitto — the Major Cases detective with whom he used to work frequently when Rhyme had run NYPD’s crime scene unit. He seemed tired. Rhyme reflected that however early Rhyme had wakened, Sellitto had probably been up several hours before, responding to the 10–29 homicide call.

Sellitto explained that the entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronald Larkin, fifty-five, had just been shot to death in the bedroom of his Upper East Side town house. The first responders found a dead body, a wounded and sobbing wife, very little evidence and no witnesses whatsoever.

Both the feds and the NYPD upper echelons wanted Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, to work the scene, with Sellitto as lead detective. Rhyme was often the choice for big cases because, despite his reclusive nature, he was well known to the public and his presence suggested the mayor and brass were serious about a collar.

“You know Larkin?”

“Refresh my memory.” Unless facts had to do with his job — consulting forensic scientist, or “criminalist” — Rhyme didn’t pay much attention to trivia.

“Ronald Larkin, come on, Linc. Everybody knows him.”

“Lon, the sooner you tell me, the sooner I’ll be able to say no.”

“He’s been in that kind of mood,” Thom told Sellitto.

“Yeah, for the last twenty years.”

“Onward and upward,” Rhyme said with cheerful impatience, sipping more coffee through the straw.

“Ronald Larkin hit it big in energy. Pipelines, electricity, water, geothermal.”

“He was a good guy,” Thom interjected, feeding Rhyme a breakfast of eggs and a bagel. “Environmentally conscious.”

“Happy day,” Rhyme said sourly.

Sellitto helped himself to a second bagel and continued, “He’d retired last year, turns the company over to somebody else and starts a foundation with his brother. Doing good things in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He lives in LA but he and his wife have a place here. They flew into town last night. Early this morning they’re in bed and somebody fires through the window, takes him out.”

“Robbery?”

“Nope.”

Really? Rhyme grew more intrigued. He turned quickly away from the incoming bagel, like a baby avoiding a spoon of mashed carrots.

“Lincoln,” Thom said.

“I’ll eat later. The wife?”

“She got hit but rolled onto the floor, grabbed the phone, called nine-one-one. The shooter didn’t wait around to finish the job.”

“What’d she see?”

“Not much, I don’t think. She’s in the hospital. Haven’t had a chance to talk to her more than a few words. She’s hysterical. They only got married a month ago.”

“Ah, a recent wife…. Even if she was wounded, that doesn’t mean she didn’t hire somebody to kill hubby and hurt her a little in the process.”

“You know, Linc, I’ve done this before…. I checked already. There’s no motive. She’s got money of her own from Daddy. And she signed a prenup. In the event of his death all she gets is a hundred thousand and can keep the engagement ring. Not worth the needle, you know.”

“That’s the deal he cut with his wife? No wonder he’s rich. You mentioned politically sensitive?”

“Here’s one of the richest men in the country, way involved in the Third World, and he gets offed in our backyard. The mayor’s not happy. The brass isn’t happy.”

“Which means you must be one sad puppy.”

“They want you and Amelia, Linc. Come on, it’s an interesting case. You like challenges.”

After the accident at the subway crime scene that left him disabled, Rhyme’s life became very different from his life before. Back then he would prowl through the playground that is New York City, observing people and where they lived and what they did, collecting samples of soil, building materials, plants, insects, trash, rocks… anything that might help him run a case. His inability to do this now was terribly frustrating. And, always independent, he detested relying on anyone else.

But Lincoln Rhyme had always lived a cerebral life. Before the accident, boredom had been his worst enemy. Now, it was the same. And Sellitto — intentionally, of course — had just teased him with two words that often got his attention.

Interesting… challenge…

“So, what do you say, Linc?”

Another pause. He glanced at the half-eaten bagel. He’d lost his appetite altogether. “Let’s get downstairs. See if we can find out a little more about Mr. Larkin’s demise.”

“Good,” said Thom, sounding relieved. He was the one who often took the brunt of Rhyme’s bad moods when he was involved in uninteresting, unchallenging cases, as had been the situation lately.

The handsome blond aide, far stronger than his slim physique suggested, dressed Rhyme in sweats and executed a sitting transfer to move him from the elaborate motorized bed into an elaborate motorized wheelchair, a sporty red Storm Arrow. Using the one working finger of his left hand, the ring finger, Rhyme maneuvered the chair into the tiny elevator that took him down to the first floor of the Central Park West town house.

Once there, he steered into the parlor, which bore no resemblance to the Victorian sitting room it had once been. The place was now a forensic lab that would rival those in a medium-size town anywhere in America. Computers, microscopes, chemicals, petri dishes, beakers, pipettes, shelves containing books and supplies. Not a square inch was unoccupied, except for the examination tables. Wires like sleeping snakes lay everywhere.

Sellitto clomped down the stairs, finishing the bagel — either his or Rhyme’s.

“I better track down Amelia,” Rhyme said. “Let her know we’ve got a scene to run.”

“Oh, kinda forgot to mention,” Sellitto said as he chewed. “I called her already. She’s probably at the scene by now.”

Amelia Sachs never got over the somber curtain that surrounded the site of a homicide.

She believed this was good, though. To feel the sorrow and the outrage at intentional death pushed her to do the job that much better.

Standing in front of the three-story town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the tall, redheaded detective was aware of this pall now, and perhaps felt it a bit more than she normally would have, knowing that Ron Larkin’s death could affect many, many needy people around the world. What would happen to the foundation now that he was gone?

“Sachs? Where are we?” Rhyme’s impatient voice cut through her headset. She turned the volume down.

“Just got here,” she replied, worrying her fingernail. She tended to hurt herself in small, compulsive ways — particularly when she was about to search a scene where a tragedy like this had occurred. She felt the pressure of getting it right. To make sure the killer was identified and collared.

She was in working clothes: not the dark suits she favored as a detective, but the white hooded overalls worn by crime scene searchers, to make certain that they didn’t contaminate the scene with their own hair, sloughed-off epidermal cells and any of the thousands of bits of trace evidence we constantly carry around with us.

“I don’t see anything, Sachs. What’s the problem?”

“There. How’s that?” She clicked a switch on her headset.

“Ah, perfect. Hmm. Did that used to be a geranium?”

Sachs was looking at a planter containing a shriveled plant beside the front door. “You’re talking to the wrong girl, Rhyme. I buy ’em, I plant ’em, I kill ’em.”

“I’m told they need water occasionally.”

Rhyme was in his town house about a mile and a half away, across Central Park, at the moment but was seeing exactly what Sachs saw, thanks to a high-definition video feed, running from a tiny camera mounted on her headset to the CSU’s rapid response vehicle. From there it continued its wireless journey onward, ending up on a flat-screen monitor two feet in front of the criminalist. They’d worked together for years, with Rhyme generally in his lab or bedroom and Sachs working the crime scenes herself, reporting to him via radio. They’d tried video in the past but the resulting image wasn’t clear enough to be helpful; Rhyme had bullied the NYPD into paying some big bucks for an HD system.

They’d tested it before but this was the first time it would be used on a case.

Carrying the basic crime scene equipment, Sachs started forward. She glanced down at the doormat, which contained a lightning bolt above the letters LES, for Larkin Energy Services.

“His logo?”

“I’d guess,” she replied. “You read the article about him, Rhyme?”

“Missed it.”

“He was one of the most popular bosses in the country.”

Rhyme grunted. “All it takes is one disgruntled employee. I always wondered about that word. Is a happy employee ‘gruntled’? Where’s the scene?”

She continued into the town house.

A uniformed officer stood downstairs. He looked up and nodded.

“Where’s his wife?” Sachs asked. She wanted to get the chronology of events.

But the woman, the officer explained, was still at the hospital being treated for a wound. She was expected to be released soon. Two detectives from Major Cases were with her.

“I’ll want to talk to her, Rhyme.”

“We’ll have Lon get her over here after she’s released. Where’s the bedroom. I can’t see it.” His tone suggested he was struggling not to be impatient.

Sachs sometimes thought that his gruffness was a means to shelter himself from the emotional dangers of police work. Sometimes she believed that it was simply his nature to be gruff.

“Bedroom?”

“Upstairs, Detective.” The patrolman nodded.

She went up two flights of steep, narrow steps.

The site of the murder was a large bedroom decorated in French provincial style. The furniture and art were undoubtedly expensive but Sachs found that there were so many flourishes and scrolls and draped cloth — in gaudy yellows and greens and golds — that the room set her on edge. A designer’s room, not a homeowner’s room.

Near the far window was the bed, ironically underneath an old painting of shot birds on a kitchen table. The bedclothes were on the floor, flung there by the medical crews attending to Ronald Larkin, she supposed. The sheet and pillows revealed a large brown bloodstain.

Sachs stepped closer and wondered if there’d been—

“Any slug penetration?” Rhyme asked.

She smiled. Those words were going to be the next in her thoughts. She’d forgotten he was seeing exactly what she was.

“Doesn’t seem to be.” She could find no bullet holes on Larkin’s side of the bed. “We’ll have to check with the medical examiner.”

“Tells me he might’ve used fragmenting bullets.”

Professional killers sometimes bought or made rounds that broke apart when they hit flesh — to cause more damage and be more likely to inflict fatal wounds. Fired from this close — about six feet away — you would have expected a normal slug to continue through the skull and exit.

“What’s that?” Rhyme asked. “To your left.”

“There we go.” She was looking at a bullet hole in the side of a gilded bedside table, bits of fiber protruded. Sachs picked up the pillow. The slugs had pierced it and continued on. She found another hole in the wall. And on the floor a smaller bloodstain, from the wife’s wound, she supposed. There were bits of dull lead on the floor. “Yep. Frags.”

She shook her head.

“What’re you doing, Sachs? You’re making me dizzy.”

“Oh. Forgot we’re attached, Rhyme. I was just thinking about the slugs. The pain.”

Fragmenting bullets tend to be less numbing than regular rounds and cause more agony as the pieces fan out in the body.

“Yes, well.” Rhyme added nothing more.

Sachs would take samples and photos later. Now she wanted to get a sense of how the crime had occurred. She stepped outside onto the small balcony — the home of three more drought-stricken plants. It was clear where the killer had stood, aiming through the window. He might’ve intended to break in and shoot from closer but had been deterred by the locked windows and French door. Rather than waking his victims by trying to jimmy the lock he’d smashed the glass and fired through the hole.

“How’d he get there? From the roof?” Rhyme asked. “Ah, no, I see. What the hell’s on the hook?”

Sachs was wondering the same. She was gazing at a grappling hook, from which a rope dangled into the backyard garden below. She examined the hook.

“Cloth, Rhyme. Flannel. Looks like he cut a shirt up.”

“So nobody’d hear it make contact when he threw it. Clever boy. I assume it’s a knotted rope?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?” She looked over the balcony at the thirty-foot black rope. The cord had knots tied in it about every two feet.

“Even the best athletes can’t climb a rope thinner than about an inch. You can climb down one but not up. Gravity — one of the four universal forces in physics, by the way. It’s the weakest one, but it still works pretty damn well. Hard to beat it. Okay, Sachs, walk the grid and collect the collectibles. Then come on home.”

“Been having a dis-cussion with one of my buddies. Here we are, all cozy in BK. Hey, hey, smile when I’m talking ’bout you.”

Fred Dellray was on the other end of the phone, in Brooklyn apparently. Rhyme could picture him with one of his CIs. The tall, lanky FBI agent, with piercing eyes as dark as his skin, ran a network of confidential informants — the chic term for snitches. Much of Dellray’s work nowadays was counterterrorism and he’d developed a number of international connections.

One of whom was apparently discussing rumors with Dellray about the Ronald Larkin killing. (Though CIs never really discussed anything with the agent. Either they told him what he wanted to know or they didn’t, and in the case of the latter, good luck.)

“Word is goin’ ’round, Lincoln, that this shooter is a serious pro-fessional, know what I mean? Just in case you couldn’ta figured that one out on your own. I mean, money, money, money. No dollar a-mount but think way outside the Wal-Mart price tag for a kill.”

“Any details on the shooter? Description?”

“Only deets are: U.S. citizen but may have other passports. Spent a lot of time overseas, trained in Europe, word is. Africa, and Middle East connections lately. But then all the bad boys do.”

“Mercenary?”

“Most likely.”

Rhyme had assisted in several cases involving mercenary soldiers, one not too long ago, in fact, an arms importing scheme in Brooklyn. Rhyme had dealt with many types of criminals in his career but he’d found the mercenaries to be, on the whole, far more dangerous than your average street thug, even those in the mob. They often felt a moral justification in killing, were extremely smart and often had a worldwide network of contacts. Unlike a punk in Tony Soprano’s crew, they knew how to slip across borders and disappear into jurisdictions where you’d never find them.

“Any thoughts on who hired him?”

“Nup, not a skinny li’l fact on that one.”

“Working with backup?”

“Dunno. But lots of ’em do.”

“Why was Larkin hit?” Rhyme asked into the speakerphone.

“Ah, that’d be the other un-known….” He apparently turned aside to say something to his snitch, who replied in a fast, eager-to-please voice, though Rhyme couldn’t make out his words. Dellray came back on. “Sorry, Lincoln. No reasons my good friend here heard about. And I know he’d share with me. ’Cause that’s the kinda friend he aspires to be. Wish I had more for you, Lincoln. I’ll keep lookin.”

“Appreciate it, Fred.” They hung up.

He turned to the man sitting on a stool next to him and nodded a greeting.

Mel Cooper had arrived when Rhyme was on the phone with Dellray. He was a slightly built, balding man somewhere in his thirties, precise of movement (he was a champion ballroom dancer). Cooper was a forensic lab technician, based in the Crime Scene headquarters in Queens. Rhyme, who’d hired the tech at the NYPD years ago, occasionally still shanghaied him to work on cases here in the town house. He now shoved his thick glasses up on his nose. They discussed the mercenary angle, though Rhyme could see that the news didn’t mean much to him. Cooper preferred dealing with the information provided by microscopes, density gradient units and computers to that offered by human beings.

A prejudice that Rhyme largely shared.

A few minutes later the criminalist heard the front door open and Amelia Sachs’s confident stride on the marble. Then silence as she hit the carpet and finally a different sound on the wood floor.

She stepped inside, bearing two cartons of evidence.

A smiling greeting to Mel Cooper, then she kissed Rhyme and set the cartons down on an examining table.

Cooper and Sachs both pulled on powder-free latex gloves.

And they got to work.

“Weapon first,” Rhyme said.

They pieced together the bullets and learned that they were.32 caliber, probably fired from an automatic — Sachs found bits of fireproof fiber that would have come from a sound suppressor, and silencers are not effective with revolvers, only autoloaders or single-shot weapons. Rhyme noted again the killer’s professional quality that Dellray had alluded to, since he’d taken the time to pick up the spent shell casings from the balcony; automatics eject the used brass.

Unfortunately the bullets were too shattered to reveal anything about the lands and grooves — the rifling in the barrel — which could in turn help identify the type of pistol the killer had used. The medical examiner might find some intact slugs during the autopsy, but Rhyme doubted it; bone will easily shatter fragile bullets like these.

“Friction ridges?” The technical term for fingerprints.

“Zip. Some latex glove marks on the window. Looks like he wiped some dirt away to get a better shot.”

Rhyme grunted in frustration. “Shoe tread marks?”

“None on the balcony. And in the garden at the foot of the rope? He obliterated his prints before he left.”

The grappling hook was a CMI brand with epoxy-coated tines. They’d been wrapped in strips of gray and blue flannel, cut, as Sachs speculated, from an old shirt — no identifying label, of course.

Pro-fessional…

The knotted rope was Mil-Spec 550 chute cord, black, with a nylon braided shroud over seven inner lines.

Cooper, who’d gone online to get a profile of the rope, looked up from the computer and reported, “Sold all over the country. And it’s cheap. He’d’ve paid cash for it.”

It was far better to have expensive evidence, bought with traceable credit cards.

Sachs handed a small plastic envelope to Mel Cooper. “I found this near the grappling hook.”

“What is it?” he asked, looking at the small fleck inside.

“Lint, I think. Might be from his pockets. I figured he pulled out his weapon as soon as he climbed over the railing.”

“I’ll burn a sample,” Cooper said and turned to a large machine sitting in the corner of the lab, switching it on.

“How about trace?” Rhyme asked.

“Nothing in the garden or the wall he scaled to get into the backyard. On the balcony, we’ve got a few things. Dirt from the garden. Then sand and some other dirt that doesn’t match what’s in the garden or the planters. A bit of rubber — maybe from the sole of a boot or shoe. Two hairs — black and curly. No bulb attached.”

This meant that there could be no DNA analysis; you need the root of the hair for that. Still, the strands had most likely come from the killer. Ron Larkin had pure gray hair and his wife was a redhead.

Mel Cooper looked up from the computer screen of the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which had run an analysis of the lint. “He’s a bodybuilder, I’d guess. Dianabol. Steroid used by athletes.”

“What kind of sports?” Rhyme asked.

“You’re asking the wrong person, Lincoln. I don’t do a performance-enhanced foxtrot or waltz. But if he’s got traces in his pocket lint I think it’s safe to say he’s serious about it.”

“And then this…” Sachs held up another plastic bag. At first glance, it appeared empty. But with his magnifying glasses on, Cooper found and extracted a small brown fiber. He held it up for Rhyme to see.

“Good catch, Sachs,” Rhyme said, straining his head closer. “Nothing gets by you. What is it?”

Cooper put the fiber under an optical stereo microscope and bent over the twin eyepieces. He then turned to a computer and typed with lightning-fast fingers. “I think…” He looked back to the microscope. “It’s coir fiber.”

“Which is?”

“I’m finding out.” Cooper read for a moment then reported: “Used for ropes mostly. Also rugs, runners, coasters, decorative nicknacks.”

“But not the rope he rode in on?” Rhyme asked.

“No. That’s pure nylon. This is something else. Coir comes from coconut. The biggest producers are in Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa.”

“Doesn’t exactly point directly to his front door now, does it? What else do we have?”

“That’s it.”

“Check the sand and dirt. GC ’em.”

A gas chromatograph test revealed that the trace contained significant levels of diesel fuel and saltwater.

“But a special kind of fuel,” he said, reading the screen of the nearby computer. “It’s got microbiocides in it. With the saltwater that means its probably marine fuel. Diesel fuel in ships often gets contaminated with microorganisms. The manufacturers put in an additive to prevent that.”

Sachs said, “So, he’s got a boat. Or lives near a dock.”

“Or came ashore by boat,” Rhyme said. Vessels were still the most untraceable way to get into the country on the Eastern Seaboard — and also one of the best ways to avoid roadblocks and surveillance if you wanted to travel around the New York area.

“Let’s add it all to a chart. Thom! If you’d be… Thom?”

“Yes?” The aide walked into the parlor. Like Sachs and Cooper he was wearing gloves but his were yellow and had the name Playtex on them.

“Could you jot down our findings to date?” Rhyme nodded toward the whiteboard and Thom stripped off the gloves and wrote what his boss dictated.

Rhyme scanned the list. His eyes fixed on one item.

“The rope,” Rhyme said.

“Well… “Sachs looked at Cooper. “I thought—”

“I know it’s nylon. And it’s untraceable. But what about it’s so interesting?”

Sachs shook her head. “I give.”

“The knots. They’ve been compressed ever since he tied them.”

Cooper said, “Still don’t get it, Lincoln.”

He smiled. “Look at them like little surprise packages of evidence. I wonder what’s inside, don’t you? Let’s open them up.”

“You mean me, right?” Cooper said.

“I’d love to help, Mel. But…” Rhyme gave a smile.

The tech picked up the rope in his gloved hands. He started to untie a knot. “Like iron.”

“So much the better for us. Whatever’s inside has been trapped nice and tight since he tied them.”

“If there’s anything there at all,” Cooper said. “This could be a total waste of time.”

“I like that, Mel. It sums up the whole business of crime scene work, wouldn’t you say?”

When Rhyme had lived alone, the front parlor of his town house — across the hall from the lab — had been used as a storeroom. But now that Sachs was living here part of the time she and Thom had redecorated, turned it into a comfortable living room.

There were contemporary Asian paintings and silk screens, from NoHo and East Village galleries, a large portrait of Houdini (a present from a woman they’d worked with on a case some years ago), a Blue Dog print, two large flower arrangements and comfortable furniture imported all the way from New Jersey.

On the mantel rested pictures of Sachs’s father and mother and of her as a teenage girl, peeking out from under the hood of a ’68 Dodge Charger she and her father worked on for months before finally admitting to themselves that the patient was terminal.

And her history wasn’t the only one represented in the parlor.

She’d sent Thom on a mission into the basement of the town house where he’d rummaged through boxes and returned with framed decorations and citations from Rhyme’s days with the NYPD. Personal photographs, as well. Several of them showed Rhyme during his Illinois childhood, with his parents and other relatives. One was of the boy and his folks in front of their house, beside a large blue sedan. The parents smiled at the camera. Lincoln was smiling as well, but his was a different expression — one of curiosity — and the eyes were looking to the side at something off camera.

One snapshot depicted a slim, intense, teenage Lincoln. He was wearing a school track uniform.

Thom now opened the front door and ushered three people into the room: Lon Sellitto, as well as a portly sixtyish man in a gray suit and minister’s collar and, gripping his arm, a woman with pale skin and eyes as red as her hair. She had no reaction to the wheelchair.

“Mrs. Larkin,” the criminalist said. “I’m Lincoln Rhyme. This is Amelia Sachs.”

“Call me Kitty, please.” She nodded a greeting.

“John Markel,” the reverend said and shook Sachs’s hand, gave a sallow smile to Rhyme.

He explained that his diocese, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, operated several charities in the Sudan and Liberia and ran a school in the Congo. “Ron and I have worked together for years. We were going to have lunch today, about our work over there.” He sighed and shook his head. “Then I heard the news.”

He’d hurried to the hospital to be with Kitty and then said he’d accompany her here.

“You don’t have to stay, John,” the widow said. “But thank you for coming.”

“Edith and I want you to spend the night with us. We don’t want you alone,” the man said.

“Oh, thank you, John, but I should be with Ron’s brother and his family. And his son too.”

“I understand. But if you need anything, please call.”

She nodded and embraced him.

Before he left, Sachs asked the minister if he had any ideas about who the killer might be. The question caught him off guard. “Killing someone like Ron Larkin? It’s inexplicable. I’d have no idea who’d want him dead.”

Thom saw the minister out, and Kitty sat on a couch. The aide returned a moment later with a tray of coffee. Kitty took a cup but didn’t sip any. She let it sit between her clasped hands.

Sachs nodded at the large bandage on her forearm. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, as if the only pain came from speaking. She stared at her arm. “The doctor said it was part of one of the bullets. It broke apart.” She looked up. “It might have been from the one that killed Ron. I don’t know what to think about that.”

Rhyme deferred to Sachs, who had more people skills than he, and the detective asked her about the shooting.

Kitty and her husband had been traveling around the country to meet with the heads of companies and other not-for-profits. Last night they’d flown in from Atlanta, where they’d been meeting with one of the suppliers the charity was purchasing baby formula from. The limo had picked them up at LaGuardia and then taken them to the town house, around midnight.

“The car dropped us off. We went inside and went to bed right away — it was late, we were exhausted. Then early this morning I heard something. It woke me up. A shuffle, I don’t know. Or a scraping sound. I remember I was so tired I didn’t move. I just lay there with my eyes open.”

That probably saved her life, Rhyme reflected. If she’d rolled over or gotten out of bed, the killer would have shot her first.

Then she saw something on the balcony, the form of a man.

“At first I thought it was a window washer. I mean, I knew it couldn’t be but I was groggy and he looked like he was holding a squeegee. But it wasn’t that at all.”

The.32.

She heard glass breaking and pops, then her husband grunting.

“I screamed and rolled out of bed. I called nine-one-one. I didn’t even realize I’d been shot until later and I saw I was bleeding.”

Sachs drew her out and got some more information. The killer was a white man with dark curly hair, wearing some kind of dark clothes. He had broad shoulders.

Steroids…

The light, Kitty said, was too dim to see his face.

Recalling the HD images of the town house, Rhyme asked, “Did you happen to go out on the balcony when you got home? Was there anything unusual there? Any furniture moved?”

“No, we just went right to bed.”

Sachs asked, “How could the killer have found out you’d be there last night?”

“It was in the papers. We were here for several fund-raisers and to meet with the heads of other philanthropic foundations. The Times had an article on it, I think.”

Sellitto asked, “You have any thoughts about why he might’ve been killed?”

Her hands were knotted together. Rhyme wondered if she was going to break down. She took a breath and said, “I know he had enemies. When he was in Africa or the Far East he had a security detail. But here… I don’t know. It was all so new to me…. You might want to talk to his brother. I spoke to him this morning. He’s flying back from Kenya with his wife now. They’ll be here tonight. Or if you want to talk to somebody now, you could call Bob Kelsey. He was Ron’s right-hand man in the foundation. He’s pretty upset but he’d want to help.”

And with that her voice stopped working. She choked and began to sob.

Sachs looked at Rhyme, who nodded.

She said, “That’s all, Kitty. We don’t want to keep you any longer.”

Finally she controlled herself.

Thom walked into the room and gave her a Kleenex. She thanked him and wiped her face.

“Now,” Lon Sellitto said, “we’re going to have someone keep an eye on you.”

Kitty shook her head and gave a faint laugh. “I know I’m a little shaky. But I’ll be okay. I just… It’s all so overwhelming. I’ll stay with Ron’s brother when they get back. And I have family in the area too. Oh, and Ron’s son and his wife are flying back from China.” A deep breath. “That was the hardest call. His son.”

“Well, Mrs. Larkin, I’m talking about a bodyguard.”

“A… guard? Why?”

Sachs said, “You’re a material witness. He tried to kill you too. There’s a chance he might try again.”

“But I didn’t see anything, really.”

Rhyme pointed out, “He doesn’t know that.”

The policewoman said, “And there’s more to being a material witness than identifying the perp. You could testify as to the time the incident occurred, the sound of the shots, where he was standing, how he stood, how he held the gun. All those things can help convict him.”

“Well, we have security people in the company.”

Sellitto said, “Probably better to stick with a police officer, you know.”

“I guess… Sure. I just can’t imagine anybody’d go to the trouble to hurt me. “

Rhyme noticed Lon Sellitto trying to put a good front on. “Hey,” the rumpled detective said, “the odds’re a thousand to one against it. But, you know, why not be on the safe side?”

A burly man stood at the window of the little-used kitchen in his house in New Jersey. His back was to the view — not a bad one: skyline of Manhattan — and he was watching a small, flat-screen TV in the living room.

“I’m watching it right now, Captain.”

It had been some years since Carter had been a soldier — he was now a “security consultant,” which was as good a job description as any — but after all the military training he felt most comfortable addressing people by rank. He himself was simply Carter. To the people who hired him, to the people he worked with. Carter.

On the TV a commentator was mentioning that Ronald Larkin’s wife had survived the attack. She was described as a material witness.

“Hmm.” Carter grunted.

When Carter was overseas on his “security” assignments, he often relied on journalists for information. He was amazed at how much sensitive material they gave away, in exchange for what he told them — which was usually just a bunch of crap.

A second newscaster came on and the story turned into one about all the good done by the Larkin Foundation, how much money it gave away.

Carter had been involved with a lot of really rich people. Only a couple of sheiks in the Mideast had as much money as Ronald Larkin, he believed.

Oh, there was that French businessman…

But, like Larkin, he wasn’t rich anymore. He was dead.

“Larkin had come to town to meet with executives from other nonprofits about merging their organizations into a super-charity to consolidate their efforts in Africa, where famine and illness are rampant. And now let’s go to our correspondent in the Darfur region of Western Sudan, where…”

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Carter shut the set off, the remote a tiny thing in his massive hand.

Carter was then listening carefully to the captain, who was pretty troubled.

After a moment of silence, Carter said, “I’ll take care of it, Captain. I’ll make sure it gets done right.”

After he hung up, Carter walked into his bedroom and looked through the closet, where he found a business suit. He started to pull on the navy-blue trousers but then stopped. He replaced the suit in the closet and picked one that was a size 48. It was much easier to carry a gun inconspicuously when you wore a suit that was one size too large.

Ten minutes later he was in his forest-green Jeep Cherokee, heading toward Manhattan.

Robert Kelsey, a balding, fit businessman, was the operations director for the Larkin Foundation, which meant his job was to give away about three billion dollars a year.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Rhyme agreed, after the man explained: government regulations, tax laws, Washington politics, Third World politics and, perhaps the most daunting of all, fielding requests from the thousands of people and organizations who came to you, needing money for their heartbreaking causes — people you had to send away empty-handed.

The man was on the same couch as Kitty Larkin an hour before. He too had that distracted, disheveled air of someone wakened early with tragic news and was as yet unable to fully absorb it.

“We’ve got some evidence, a few leads,” Lon Sellitto said, “but we don’t have a clear motive yet. You have any ideas who’d want him dead? Mrs. Larkin didn’t have any thoughts on that.”

Lincoln Rhyme was rarely interested in a suspect’s motives — he considered them to be the weakest leg of a case. (Evidence was, of course, to him strongest.) Still, obvious motives can point you in the direction of good evidence that will get a conviction.

“Who’d want him dead?” Kelsey repeated with a grim smile. “For a man who gave away billions to kids who were starving or sick, you’d be amazed at how many enemies he had. But I’ll try to give you an idea. Our big drives for the past couple of years have been getting food and HIV drugs to Africa and funding for education in Asia and Latin America. The hardest place to work has been Africa. Darfur, Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia…. Ron refused to give money directly to the government. It’d just disappear into the pockets of the local officials. So what we do is buy the food here or in Europe and ship it to where it’s needed. Same with the medicine. Not that that cuts out corruption. The minute a ship docks, there’ll be somebody with a gun helping himself to your rice or wheat. The baby formula’s stolen and either sold or used to cut drugs. And the HIV medicine’s transferred into new bottles and sold across the borders to people with money to pay the going rate. The sick ones it was intended for get watered-down versions. Or sometimes just water.”

“That bad?” Sellitto asked. “Jesus.”

“Oh, yeah. We lose fifteen, twenty percent a year of our African donations to theft and hijacking. Tens of millions. And we’re luckier than most charities over there…. That’s why Ron was so unpopular. He insists that we control the distribution of the food and medicine over there. We cut deals with the best local organizations who’d get the job done. Sometimes those groups, like Liberian Relief, are allied with the opposition political parties. So, right there, that means he’s a threat to the government in power.

“Then there’re other regions where the government’s legit and he distributes through them. Which makes him a threat to the opposition party. Then there’re the warlords. And the fundamentalist Islamic groups who don’t want any Western aid at all. And the armies and militias who want people famished because they use hunger as a tool… Oh, it’s a nightmare.”

Kelsey gave a bitter laugh. “Then anti-U.S. countries around the world: the Arab bloc, Iran and Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia in the Far East…. The foundation’s private, of course, but over there they see us as an arm of Washington. And, in a way, we are. Oh, and that’s just overseas. Now, let’s talk about America.”

“Here?” Sachs asked. “He had enemies here?”

“Oh, yeah. You think the business of charity is filled with saints? Guess again. My background was corporate accounting, and I’ll tell you that the most ruthless corporate raiders are nothing compared to the CEO’s of a charity. Ron bought the food from a half-dozen suppliers here and in Europe. I can’t tell you how many tons of rotten rice and corn they tried to sell us. Ron reported a half-dozen of them to the FDA.

“Then some executives seem to think charity begins at home. One organization wanted to work with us and Ron found out that the head was getting a salary of five hundred thousand a year and flew around the country in a private jet that was paid for by the endowment.

“Ron dropped them cold, called up the Times and gave them the story. The CEO was fired the next day.”

Kelsey realized he was getting worked up. “Sorry. It’s hard to do good nowadays. And, now, with him gone? It’s going to be that much harder.”

“What about Larkin’s personal life?”

“His first wife died ten years ago,” Kelsey said. “He has a grown son who’s involved in energy joint ventures in China. They had a very good relationship. He’ll be devastated by this.”

“What about his new wife?”

“Oh, Kitty? She was good for him, and she loved him too. See, she’s got money of her own — her father had a textile business or something. Ron’d meet a lot of women who were just after one thing, you can imagine. It was hard for him. But she was genuine.”

“His brother?” Sellitto asked.

“Peter? What about…? Oh, you mean, could he have been involved in his death?” A laugh. “No, no, impossible. They were very close. He’s successful too. Has his own company. Not as rich as Ron, but I’m talking thirty billion instead of a hundred. He didn’t need any money. Besides, they had the same values, worked hard for the foundation. It was Ron’s full-time job, but Peter still put in twenty, thirty hours a week, on top of his full schedule as CEO of his own company.”

Sellitto then asked for a specific list of people who might have a grudge against Ron Larkin — from all of the categories Kelsey had mentioned. He wrote for some time.

Kelsey handed Sellitto the sheet and said he’d try to think of anyone else. The man, looking dazed, said good-bye and left.

Mel Cooper came out of the lab flexing his hands.

“How’s the mission?” Rhyme asked.

“Do you know how many knots there were?”

“Twenty-four,” Rhyme said. “And I noted the tense of the verb. You’re finished.”

“I think I have carpal tunnel. But we were successful.”

“You find his business card?”

“Maybe something just as good. A husk. A very small husk.”

“Of what?”

“Rice.”

Rhyme nodded, pursing his lips. And Sachs said exactly what he was thinking: “Shipments of food that the foundation sent to Africa? So the shooter might’ve been recruited there.”

“Or by somebody who owns a farm. Or sells rice. The one who sold the rotten shipments maybe.”

“And the marine diesel oil,” Mel Cooper said, nodding at the chart. “Cargo ships.”

Sachs added the entry to their chart.

“Let’s look over the list that Kelsey made for us.”

Sachs taped the page on a whiteboard.

“The usual suspects?” Rhyme snorted a cold laugh. “Typical homicides have, what? Four or five tops? And what pond are we fishing in here?” A nod at the list. “Most of the Third World, half of the Middle East and Europe and a good chunk of the Fortune Five Hundred corporations.”

“And all he was doing,” Sachs said, “was giving away money to people who needed it.”

“Don’t you know that expression?” Sellitto muttered. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

The young officer wasn’t comfortable.

He was a newly appointed detective, still awaiting rank, and had been given the thankless job of escorting the poor widow back to her town house to collect some clothes, then hand her over to a bodyguard.

Not that she was beating up on him or anything. No, it was just the opposite. She seemed so distant and upset and weepy that he didn’t know what to say to her, how to act. He wished his wife were here; she’d calm the woman down pretty fast. But the detective himself? Nope, wasn’t his strength. He was sympathetic, sure, but he didn’t know how to express it. He’d been on the force only five years, mostly in Patrol, and he’d had very few opportunities to meet grieving relatives. Once, a garbage truck plowed into the side of a parked SUV, killing the woman driver. He’d had to tell the husband what had happened, and it had taken him weeks to get over the look of horror and sorrow in the man’s face.

Now, he was working as a detective in Narcotics. Occasional bodies, occasional widows. None of them grieving like this. A lot didn’t seem to care their husbands were dead.

He watched Kitty Larkin standing in the front doorway of her town house, paralyzed, it seemed.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, then mentally kicked himself.

Duh…

He meant, of course, was there something out of the ordinary about the house, something he should be looking into, calling Lieutenant Sellitto about. His hand strayed to his Glock, which he’d drawn a half dozen times in his career, but never fired.

Kitty shook her head. “No,” she whispered, and seemed to realize that she’d stopped walking. “Sorry.” She continued into the house. “I’ll just be a few minutes. I’ll pack a bag.”

The detective was making a circuit from the front to the back of the house when he saw a black sedan pull up in the street.

An African American woman in a dark suit climbed out and walked up to him. She flashed a badge.

U.S. Department of State.

“I’m taking over security for Mrs. Larkin,” she said with a faint accent the man couldn’t place.

“You’re—”

“Taking over security for Mrs. Larkin,” the woman repeated slowly.

Good, the officer thought, relieved that he wouldn’t have to sit around and watch the woman cry. But then he thought: Hold on.

“Just a second.”

“What do you mean?”

The cop pulled out his phone and called Lieutenant Sellitto.

“Yeah?” the gruff Major Cases cop asked.

“Detective, just wanted to let you know that the bodyguard got here, for the Larkin woman. She’s from the State Department, though, not us.”

“The what?”

“State Department.”

“Yeah? What’s her name?”

The detective asked to see her ID again and she showed it to him. “Norma Sedgwick.”

“Hold on a minute.”

He said to Norma. “Just have to check.”

She didn’t seem mad but her face registered a bit of “whatever.” It seemed like a rookie putdown. Okay, you feddie bitch, you ever get shot at by a crank-crazed eighteen-year-old armed with a SIG-Sauer and a knife? Which is how he’d spent last Monday evening.

He just smiled at her.

On the other end of the line Sellitto’s hand was over the receiver and he was talking with someone else. The detective wondered if it was the legendary Lincoln Rhyme. He knew Sellitto worked with him from time to time. He’d never met Rhyme. There were rumors that he didn’t really exist.

A few minutes later — it seemed like forever — Sellitto came back on the line.

“Yeah, it’s okay.”

Thank you, the detective thought. He could leave Mrs. Larkin and her grief and flee back to the place where he was a lot more comfortable: the drug world of East New York and the South Bronx.

“Norma, where’re we going?” Kitty, in the backseat, asked the stocky, attractive State Department agent, driving the Lincoln Town Car.

“A hotel near our office in Midtown. We basically own one of the upper floors, so the staff doesn’t put any guests there without our okay. Right now it’s empty. You’ll be the only one there. I’ll be staying in the room across the hall, and another agent’ll be there through the night. It’s not the best hotel in the world, probably not what you’re used to, but not bad. In any case, it’s safer than you staying in your town house.”

“Maybe,” the widow said softly. “But I’m going back there as soon as I can.” She looked up and, in the rearview mirror, saw the agent’s dark face studying her. “Let’s hope everything’s resolved soon.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Norma asked, “How’s your arm?”

“It’s nothing, really.” The widow touched the bandage. Her wound still stung badly but she’d stopped taking the painkillers the doctor had prescribed for her.

“Why is the State Department interested in me? I don’t quite understand.”

“Well, your husband’s work overseas.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sensitive issues. You know.” She didn’t add anything more.

And Kitty thought: This is ridiculous. The last thing in the world she wanted was a bodyguard. She’d try to have the woman sent back to her office as soon as Peter Larkin and his wife arrived.

Kitty was thinking of Peter and his family when she became aware that Norma Sedgwick had stiffened. Her shoulders hunched and she kept glancing into the rearview mirror. “Mrs. Larkin, I think there’s a vehicle following us.”

“What?” Kitty turned around. “Impossible.”

“No, I’m pretty sure. I’ve been practicing evasive turns but he’s stayed with me the whole time.”

“That green Jeep?”

“That’s it, yes.”

“Who’s driving?”

“A man, I think. White. Seems to be alone.”

Kitty looked. Couldn’t see inside. The windows were tinted.

Norma picked up her cell phone and started to make a call.

This was crazy, Kitty thought. It made no sense for—

“Look out!” Norma cried.

In a burst of speed the Cherokee accelerated right toward them and then drove them off the street over the curb into the park.

“What’s he doing?” Norma barked.

“I can’t tell!”

Into her phone the agent said, “This is Sedgwick. We’ve got an assailant! Madison and Twenty-third. The park. He’s—”

The Jeep then backed up and accelerated directly toward them.

Kitty screamed, lowered her head and waited for the impact.

But Norma accelerated and drove the car farther onto the grass of the park, stopping just before slamming into a temporary chain-link fence around a construction site. The Jeep bounded over the curb and came to a stop nearby.

“Get out, get the hell out!” Norma shouted. “Move!” She jumped from the front seat and, gun in her hand, ripped the back door open.

Clutching her purse, Kitty scrabbled out of the car. Norma took her by the arm and virtually dragged her into a stand of bushes, while pedestrians and park sitters fled. The Jeep stopped. The door flew open and Kitty believed the driver slid out.

“Are you all right?” Holding her weapon, Norma looked her over carefully.

“Yes, yes!” Kitty shouted. “I’m fine. Watch him! He’s out of the car.”

The attacker, a solid white man in a dark suit and white shirt, moved quickly through the bushes toward them, then vanished behind a pile of construction material.

“Where is he? Where?”

Kitty glanced down at the gun in the woman’s hand. She held it steady and seemed to know what she was doing. But she’d driven them into a cul de sac. There was nowhere to run. Kitty looked back toward the car. Nothing.

Motion above them.

Norma barked a scream, and Kitty looked up to see a figure hanging over the fence, a gun in his hand.

But it wasn’t the attacker. They were looking at a uniformed NYPD officer. He saw the ID around Norma’s neck but he wasn’t taking chances. His gun was aimed directly toward the agent.

“Lower the weapon and identify yourself!”

“I’m State Department. Security.”

“Lower the weapon and show me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kitty snapped. “She’s guarding me. There’s a man after us.”

Norma pointed her gun toward the ground and with her other hand held out her ID. He read it and nodded. “You should’ve called it in.”

“It just happened. Look, over there. Your two o’clock. White male, big guy. Drove us off the street. Probably armed.”

“What’s he after?”

“She’s a homicide witness.”

Then the officer frowned. “Is that him?” He was gazing at Norma’s car. Kitty saw a man crouching behind it.

“Yeah,” Norma said. Then to Kitty, “Get down!” And shoved her onto the asphalt walkway they were crouching on. Kitty was furious. She should’ve insisted they stay at the town house.

“You, wait!” the officer called, starting forward. “Police. Don’t move!”

But by then the attacker had realized that he was outnumbered. He raced back to his Jeep. He backed the vehicle over the curb and sped up Madison, leaving a trail of blue smoke in his wake.

Via the high-def video system, Lincoln Rhyme, in his lab, was watching Kitty Larkin talk to Sellitto and Sachs inside the black Town Car. The widow was giving them an account of the incident in a shaky voice.

Rhyme was thinking: This system is quite an invention. It was as if the people were right there in front of him.

“I couldn’t really say what happened,” Kitty said. “It was all so fast. I didn’t even see him clearly.”

Norma Sedgwick gave a similar account of the incident. They differed in the color of the Jeep’s shade of green, in the height of the assailant, in the color of his shirt.

Witnesses… Rhyme didn’t have much faith in them. Even honest ones get confused. They miss things. They misinterpret what they do see.

He was impatient. “Sachs?”

He saw the screen jump a little as she heard his voice.

“Excuse me,” she said to Kitty and Sellitto. The scene swiveled as she climbed out of the car and walked away.

“What, Rhyme?”

“We don’t need to worry about what they saw or didn’t see. I want the scene searched. Every inch.”

“Okay, Rhyme. I’ll get to work.”

Sachs walked the grid — Rhyme’s term for the most comprehensive, some would say compulsive, way of searching a crime scene — with her usual diligence. A lab tech from Queens processed the evidence in the back of the Crime Scene’s rapid response vehicle. But the only things relating to the Larkin killing were two more of the coir fibers like the one on the balcony. One of the fibers was pressed into a small black fleck, which might’ve come from an old leather-bound book; Rhyme remembered similar evidence from a case some years ago.

“Nothing else?” he asked, irritated.

“Nope.”

Rhyme sighed.

There is a well-known rule in forensics called Locard’s Principle. The Frenchman Edmond Locard, one of the fathers of forensic science, came up with a rule that posited an inevitable exchange of trace evidence (he spoke of “dust”) between the perpetrator and either the crime scene or the victim.

Rhyme believed in Locard’s Principle; in fact, it was the underlying force that drove him to relentlessly push those who worked for him — and to push himself too. If that connection, however fragile, can be established, then the perp might be found, crimes solved and future tragedies prevented.

But making that link assumes the investigator can locate, identify and grasp the implications of that trace evidence. In the case of the Larkin homicide Rhyme wasn’t sure that he could. Circumstance might play a role in this — the environment, third parties, fate. Then too the killer might simply be too smart and diligent. Too pro-fessional, as Fred Dellray had observed.

Sachs took every defeat personally. “Sorry, Rhyme. I know it’s important.”

He said something dismissive. Not to worry, we’ll keep looking over things in the lab here, maybe the autopsy will reveal something helpful….

But he supposed his reassurance rang false to her.

It certainly did to him.

“Are you all right?” Norma asked.

“Knees hurt. When I went down on the ground.”

“Sorry about that,” the agent said, looking over Kitty from the rearview mirror. Norma had high cheekbones and exotic Egyptian eyes.

“Don’t be silly. You saved my life.” Kitty, though, was still angry. She lapsed into silence.

They drove for another twenty minutes. Kitty realized they were going in circles a lot and doubling back. She looked behind her once and saw that they were being followed — only this time it was an unmarked police car driven by that tall officer with hair as red as her own, Amelia Sachs.

Norma’s phone rang. She picked it up, had a conversation and then disconnected.

“That was her, the policewoman behind us. No sign of the Jeep.”

Kitty nodded. “And nobody saw the license plate?”

“No. But they’re probably stolen tags.”

They continued on, driving in a random pattern. Sachs would disappear occasionally, driving up one street and down another, apparently looking for the man’s Jeep.

The agent began, “I guess—”

Her phone rang. “Agent Sedgwick… What?”

Kitty looked in the mirror, alarmed. What now? She was getting sick of the intrigue.

“It’s Amelia,” Norma said to her. “She said she spotted the Jeep! He’s nearby.”

“Where?”

“A block! He was driving parallel to us. How? There’s no way he could’ve followed us!”

She listened into the phone again. Then reported to Kitty, “She’s in pursuit. She’s called in some other units. He’s headed toward the FDR.” Into the phone she asked, “How did he find us?… You think? Hold on.”

Norma asked Kitty, “He was hiding behind our car in Madison Square Park, right?”

“Yes.”

She relayed this to the policewoman. There was a pause. “Okay, maybe. We’ll check.”

Norma disconnected. “She thinks he might not’ve been trying to hurt you back in the park. He wanted to get us out of the car to plant a tracker after we jumped out.”

“A tracker?”

“Like a GPS, a homing device. I’m going to look.” She parked and climbed out, saying, “You check the backseat. And your suitcases. He might’ve slipped it in there. It would be a small plastic or metal box.”

Lord, what a nightmare this was, Kitty thought, even angrier now. Who the hell was this guy? Who’d hired him?

Kitty tore open her two suitcases and dumped the contents on the seat, looking through everything carefully.

Nothing.

But then she heard: “Hey, check it out.”

Kitty looked out the window and saw the State Department agent holding a small white cylinder about three inches across, resting on a tissue so she wouldn’t disturb fingerprints, Kitty guessed. “Magnetized, stuck up in the wheel well. It’s a big one. Probably has a range of five miles. He could’ve found us anywhere in the area. Damn, that was a good call.” She set it on the street near the curb, hunched down and, using the tissue, tinkered, apparently disabling it.

A moment later Norma’s phone rang again. The agent listened and then reported in a grim voice, “He got away. Disappeared on the Lower East Side.”

Kitty rubbed her face, disgusted.

Norma told the detective about the tracking device and added that they were going on to the hotel.

“Wait,” said Kitty as she repacked the suitcases. “Why do you think he only left one tracker?”

The agent blinked. Then nodded. She said into the phone, “Detective Sachs, you think you could give us a ride?”

Fifteen minutes later Amelia Sachs arrived. Norma handed her the tracker and she put it in a plastic bag.

Then the agent hustled Kitty Larkin into the detective’s car and together the three women drove to the hotel. On the way the agent arranged for another State Department security person to pick up the Town Car and get it back to the pool for a complete inspection. There was even some speculation that the killer might’ve planted an explosive device at the same time he stuck the tracker in the wheel well, so the NYPD bomb squad would have a look as well.

Sachs dropped the women off, explaining that she’d take the tracker back to the town house of that officer in the wheelchair, or consultant, whatever he was, Lincoln Rhyme. She sped off.

Norma escorted Kitty inside the hotel. It was a pretty seedy place, the woman thought. She would have expected material witnesses and security-conscious diplomats to be housed in better digs.

The agent spoke to someone at the front desk, handed him an envelope and returned to Kitty.

“Do I need to check in?”

“No, everything’s taken care of.”

They got out on the fourteenth floor. Norma showed her to a room, checked it out herself and handed her the key. “You can call room service for anything you want.”

“I just want to call my family and Peter and then get some rest.”

“Sure, dear, you go right ahead. I’ll be across the hall if you need anything.”

Kitty hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob and stepped into the room. It was just as tacky as the lobby suggested and smelled of mildew. She sat heavily on the bed, sighing. She noticed the window shades were up, which seemed a stupid idea for a hotel where they stashed witnesses. She rose and pulled the drapes shut, then turned the lights on in the room.

She called the number of Peter Larkin’s office and identified herself. She accepted the gush of sympathy the man’s secretary offered and then asked when Peter and his wife would be arriving. It would be around nine that night. She left a message for him to call her as soon as they got in.

Then she kicked her shoes off, lay back on the bed, closed her eyes and fell into a troubled sleep.

Rhyme pressed his head back into the headrest of his wheelchair. He felt Sachs’s hand curl around his neck and massage. He could feel her hand at one moment and then, though he knew she continued the massage, the sensation vanished as her fingers moved down, below the fourth cervical vertebra, the site of his disabling injury.

At another time, this might give rise to reflections — either on his condition, or on his relationship with Amelia Sachs. But now he was aware of nothing but the urgency to nail the killer of Ron Larkin, the man who gave away billions.

“How’re we doing, Mel?”

“Give me a minute.”

“You’ve had plenty of them. What’s going on?”

The massaging sensation stopped, but this was due not to the migration of her hand but because she’d stepped away and was helping Cooper prepare a slide for examination under the microscope.

Rhyme looked over the updated evidence chart for the hundredth time.

The answer was there. It had to be. There were no other options. No witnesses, no clear motives, no succinct list of suspects.

The evidence, the minuscule bits of trace, held the key.

Locard’s Principle…

Rhyme glanced at the clock.

“Mel?”

Without looking up from the Bausch and Lomb, the tech repeated patiently, “It should only be a minute.”

But every minute that passed meant that the killer was sixty seconds closer to escaping.

Or, Rhyme feared, sixty seconds closer to murdering once again.

Carter was sitting in his green Jeep, looking over Brooklyn from a spot near the South Street Seaport.

He was sipping coffee and enjoying the view. The tall-masted clipper ship, the bridges, the boat traffic.

Carter had no boss except the people who hired him, and he kept his own hours. Sometimes he’d get up early — four a.m. — and, when the Fulton Fish Market was still operating, drive here. He’d wander past stalls, staring at the tuna, the squid, the flounder, the crabs. It reminded him of seaports overseas.

He was sorry the fish market had closed. Financial problems, he guessed. Or unions maybe.

Carter had solved a lot of union problems in his day.

His cell phone rang. He glanced down at caller ID.

“Captain,” he said in a respectful voice.

He listened carefully, then said, “Sure. I can do that.” He disconnected and placed a call overseas.

Carter was glad he didn’t have to go anywhere for a few minutes. A small cargo ship was steaming up the East River and he enjoyed watching its progress.

“Oui?” a voice answered from the other side of the world.

Carter began a conversation, not even aware that he’d lapsed into French.

Kitty awoke to a phone call.

She picked it up. “Hello?”

Peter Larkin’s voice said, “Kitty. How are you?”

She’d seen plenty of pictures of him, but only met the man once, at the wedding. She remembered him clearly: tall, lean, with thinning hair. He resembled his brother only in facial structure.

“Oh, Peter, this is so terrible.”

“Are you doing okay?”

“I suppose.” She cleared her throat. “I was just asleep, and I was dreaming about him. I woke up and for a minute I was fine. Then I remembered what had happened. It’s so terrible. How are you?”

“I can’t even think. We didn’t sleep on the plane….”

They commiserated for a few minutes more, then Peter explained they were at the airport and their luggage had just arrived. He and his wife would be in the town house in an hour or two. His daughter, a college student at Yale, was already there.

Kitty glanced at her watch, the one Ron had given her. It was simple and elegant and probably worth ten thousand dollars. “Why don’t you get some rest tonight and I’ll come by in the morning.”

“Of course. You have the address?”

“It’s somewhere. I… I don’t know where. I’m just not thinking straight.”

He gave it to her again.

“It’ll be good to see you, Kitty.”

“Family has to be together at times like this.”

Kitty went into the bathroom and washed her face in icy water, rinsing away the last dullness of sleep.

She returned to the room and gazed at herself in the wall mirror, thinking how different she looked from the woman she really was. Not Kitty Larkin at all, but someone named Priscilla Endicott, a name lost behind a lengthy string of aliases.

When you were a professional killer, you couldn’t afford to be yourself of course.

A left-wing radical in the United States, an advocate — and occasional practitioner — of political violence, Priscilla had moved overseas after college, where she’d floated among several underground movements and ended up helping out political terrorists in Ireland and Italy. But by the age of thirty she realized that politics don’t pay the bill, at least not simpleminded communist and socialist politics, and she decided to offer her talents to those who’d pay: security consultants in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. When even that didn’t pay enough, she changed her line of work again, keeping the title but taking on a whole new job description, which she described as “problem solver.”

Four months ago, while sunbathing at a pool in the United Arab Emirates, she’d gotten a phone call from a trusted contact. After some negotiation, she’d been hired, for $5 million U.S., to kill Ron Larkin and his brother and wife, the three people instrumental in overseeing the Larkin Foundation.

Priscilla had changed her appearance: weight gain, dyed hair, colored contact lenses, strategic collagen injections. She became Catherine “Kitty” Biddle Simpson, created a credible biography and managed to get close to Larkin through some charities in Los Angeles. She’d spent plenty of time in Africa and could discuss the region intelligently. She even knew a great deal about the plight of the children, having turned a number of them into orphans.

Kitty laid on the charm (and a few other skills, of course), they began dating and she looked for a chance to complete her contract. But it wasn’t easy. Oh, she could’ve killed him at any time, but murdering a very public and popular man like Ronald Larkin, not to mention his brother and sister-in-law too, and getting away, of course, was much harder than she’d thought.

But then Ron Larkin himself provided a solution. Amusing her no end, he proposed to her.

As his wife she’d have complete access to his life, without the security people around, and his brother and sister-in-law would automatically trust her.

The first thing she said was, “Yes, dear, but I don’t want a penny of your money.”

“Well…”

“No, I’ve got my father’s trust fund,” she’d explained. “Besides, honey, what I like about you isn’t the dollar signs. It’s what you do for people. And, okay, you got a decent body for an old guy,” she’d joked.

Under those circumstances, who could possibly suspect her?

Then after a bout of marital bliss (occasional sex, many rich dinners, countless boring businesspeople), it was time to act.

On Tuesday night they’d arrived at LaGuardia (flying on a private jet, she could bring her guns and the other accoutrements of her trade with her), driven to the town house and gone to bed. At 4:30 a.m., she’d dressed and pulled on latex gloves, screwed the suppressor onto the barrel of her favorite.32 automatic and stepped outside onto the balcony, feeling the cool, electric smell of New York City air in the morning. She’d distributed the planted evidence — the trace she scattered around to lead the police off — then rested the grappling hook on the railing, tossed the rope over the side. She’d returned to the window, cracked the pane and fired — hitting Ron three times and sending the fourth and fifth rounds into her own pillow.

Then she called 9–1–1, hysterical, to report the attack. After hanging up she’d unscrewed the back of the television, put the gun, silencer, ammunition and gloves inside, and with her cuticle scissors, slit her arm and jammed a fragment of shattered bullet into the wound. Then she staggered downstairs to await the police. Ron’s brother and sister-in-law would arrive as soon as possible, of course, and she’d kill them too, making it look like the same man was behind their deaths.

Planned perfectly…

But, of course, while plans can be perfect, the execution — so to speak — never is.

My God, a real hit man — the guy in the Jeep — had showed up, trying to take her out.

The best she could figure was that one of her enemies — she’d made plenty over the years — had recognized her from the news about Ron, despite her effort not to be photographed in public and her changed appearance.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with Priscilla Endicott; maybe the man’s goal was to kill Mrs. Kitty Larkin. Hired by a former mistress of Larkin’s? she wondered. Or a jilted girlfriend?

She gave a bitter laugh at the irony. Here, the police and State Department were protecting her from a killer — just not the particular killer they believed him to be.

Priscilla now dialed a number on her mobile (she wouldn’t trust a hotel phone).

“Hello?” a man answered.

“It’s me.”

“My God, what the hell is going on? I see the stories — somebody’s after you?”

“Relax.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“I don’t know for sure. I did a job in the Congo last year and one of the targets got away. Maybe him.”

“So he has nothing to do with us?”

“No.”

“But what’re we going to do about it?”

“You sound panicked,” Priscilla said.

“Of course I’m panicking. What—”

“Take a deep breath.”

“What’re we going to do?” he repeated, sounding even more panicked.

“I say we have a goddamn good laugh about it.”

Silence. Maybe he thought she was hysterical. Then he asked, “What do you mean?”

“Our biggest problem has always been giving the police another suspect, somebody other than you and me.”

“Right.”

“Well, now we’ve got one. Peter and his wife’ll be at their town house in about an hour. I’ll sneak out of where I am now, kill them and get back before I’m missed. They’ll think the guy in the Jeep did it. He’s not stupid. When he hears that they’re looking for him for the homicide, he’ll probably take off. I’ll be safe, you’ll be safe.”

The man was quiet for a moment. Then gave a brief chuckle. “It could work,” he said.

“It will work. What’s the status of the second installment?”

“In your account.”

“Good. I won’t call again. Just watch the news. Oh, one thing. I don’t know if it’s going to bother you…. It seems that Peter’s daughter just got into town from college. She’ll be with them when I get there.”

The man didn’t hesitate before asking, “What’s the problem with that?”

“I guess that means,” Priscilla said, “that there isn’t one.”

Two hours later the woman slipped out the side door of the hotel, unseen by the desk clerk. She’d taken a cab to a street corner two blocks from the town house of Peter and Sandra Larkin, then walked the rest of the way.

The wealthy lifestyle of these particular targets, with their private homes in Manhattan, was very helpful. Getting into a doorman building unseen could be a bitch.

She paused outside the town house and looked into her purse, checking the weapon, which she’d retrieved from the TV in the bedroom of Ron Larkin’s town house when she’d gone there to pack her suitcases earlier.

She now climbed the stairs, looked up and down the street. No one. She pulled on latex gloves and pressed the buzzer.

A moment later.

“Hello?”

“Peter, it’s Kitty. I have to see you.”

“Oh, Kitty,” the brother said. “We weren’t expecting you till tomorrow. But we’re glad you’re here. Come on up. We’re all in the living room. Second floor. The door’s open. Come on in.”

The buzz of the door lock echoed through the misty night.

Priscilla pushed inside.

She was thinking of the sequence. If they were all together, hit the most dangerous target first and fast: That would be any bodyguards. And the daughter’s boyfriend, if there was one. Then Peter Larkin. He was a large man and could be a threat. A head shot for him. Then the daughter, who’d be younger and possibly more athletic. Finally the wife.

Then she’d leave more of the planted evidence to link this killing to Ron’s: the steroids, the dark curly hairs (stolen from a barbershop trash bin), another fleck of rubber peeled off a running shoe she later discarded, more of the sand and dirt she’d scraped up from a marina in L.A.

Priscilla recited: Find the target, look for guards, check the backdrop, possible security systems, especially cameras. Aim, squeeze, count your rounds.

Climbing the stairs, she was aware of the musty smell of an apartment not much used, but the place was very elegant nonetheless. Both Peter’s and Ron’s fortunes were obscene. Billions. Thinking that this much money was controlled by just two individuals reignited some of her latent political views about inequality in the distribution of wealth, despite their charitable efforts. Still, Priscilla Endicott couldn’t very well take the high moral ground any longer; she herself was a wealthy woman now — and it was her craft of killing that had made her one.

Reaching into her purse, Priscilla lifted her gun, clicked the safety off.

She walked inside the living room quickly, the gun behind her back.

“Hello?”

She stopped fast, staring at the empty room.

Had she gotten the wrong room? she wondered.

The TV was on. The stereo too. But not a single human being was here.

Oh, no…

She turned to flee.

Which is when the tactical team — five officers — pushed from the two side doorways, shoving their weapons toward her, shouting, screaming, grabbing. In less than a second the.32 was out of her hands and she was on the floor, with her wrists cuffed behind her.

Lincoln Rhyme surveyed the town house from the sidewalk.

“Pretty nice place,” Amelia Sachs said.

“Seems okay.” Architecture, like décor, didn’t mean a lot to him.

Lon Sellitto glanced up at the tall building too. “Jesus. I knew they were rich, but really.” He was standing with the lieutenant from Emergency Services, the man who’d directed the takedown.

A moment later the door opened and the woman who’d been hired to kill Ron Larkin, his brother and sister-in-law was escorted out, cuffed. Given her ruthlessness and ingenuity, Rhyme and Sellitto had ordered her feet shackled too.

The officers accompanying her paused, and the criminalist looked her over.

“Miranda?” Rhyme asked one of the tactical cops.

He nodded.

But the killer didn’t seem to care about having her lawyer present when she spoke. She leaned toward Rhyme and whispered harshly, “How? How the hell did you do it?”

Locard’s Principle, the criminalist thought. But his answer to her was: “The fiber. The coir fiber made me suspicious right away.”

She shook her head.

Rhyme explained, “Amelia found it on the balcony. I remembered seeing the Larkin Energy logo on the doormat in front of the town house when Amelia got there to search the scene. And I remembered that coir fibers are used in making rugs and mats. She checked later and found out the fiber did come from the same mat.

“Now, how did the fiber get from the doormat to the balcony? It couldn’t’ve been when you and Ron arrived at the house together last night. You said you hadn’t been on the balcony. And obviously you hadn’t been there for a long time — otherwise you would’ve watered the houseplants. Same for any caretakers. The mysterious killer? Would he have wiped his feet on the doormat on a busy street then walked around to the back of the building, climbed the rope to the balcony? Didn’t make sense. So,” he repeated dramatically, “how did the fiber get there?

“I’ll tell you, Kitty: You picked it up from the mat on your shoe when you got in from the airport. And you left it on the balcony early this morning when you stepped outside to kill Ron.”

She blinked, shaking her head no, but Rhyme could see from the dismay in her face that the words struck close to home. She’d thought of almost everything. But as Locard might’ve said, Almost isn’t good enough when it comes to evidence.

“Then the other clues on the balcony? The steroid, the rubber, the lint, sand and dirt with the diesel traces, the hairs. I suspected they were planted by you to support your story of the bodybuilding hit man. But proving it was something else. So I—”

It was then that Kitty, or whatever her name was, stiffened. “God, no. It’s him! He’s going to—”

Rhyme swiveled around in the chair to see a green Jeep Cherokee pull up and double-park next to them. Climbing out was a solidly built man with a crew cut, wearing a conservative suit. He snapped closed a cell phone and walked toward them.

“No!” Kitty cried.

“Captain,” the man said, nodding at Rhyme. The criminalist was amused that Jed Carter insisted on using Rhyme’s rank when he was with the NYPD.

Carter was a freelance security consultant for companies doing business in Africa and the Middle East. Rhyme had met him on that Brooklyn illegal arms case a few months ago, when the former mercenary soldier had helped the FBI and the NYPD take down the principal gunrunner. Carter was humorless and stiff — and surely had a past Rhyme didn’t want to know too much about — but he’d proved invaluable in nailing the perp. (He also seemed eager to make amends for some of his own past missions in Third World countries.)

Carter shook Sellitto’s hand, then the tactical officer’s. He nodded respectfully to Amelia Sachs.

“What is this?” Kitty gasped.

Sachs said, “Like Lincoln was saying, we suspected you but we ran your prints and you weren’t on file anywhere.”

“Will be soon, though,” Sellitto pointed out cheerfully.

“So we didn’t have enough proof to get a search warrant.”

“Not on the basis of one fiber. So I enlisted the help of Mr. Carter here — and Agent Sedgwick.”

Norma, from State Department security, worked regularly with Fred Dellray. He’d contacted her and explained that they’d needed someone to play bodyguard and to help them fake an assault. She’d agreed. They’d arranged the undercover set for Madison Square Park, along with an officer from Patrol, in hopes that they’d find some more of the trace that Rhyme suspected was planted. If so, it had to come from Kitty and would place her on the balcony, justifying a search warrant.

But his idea didn’t work. Sachs searched Madison Square Park around where Kitty had lain, as well as the Lincoln, inside and out, but she could find none of the planted evidence or any trace linking her to the weapon.

So they’d tried once more. Rhyme decided that they needed to search her suitcases. Sachs called Norma about a tracking device that the supposed killer had planted. While Norma pretended to find one under the car — it was her Olay skin cream jar — Kitty had dumped the contents of her suitcases out into the backseat to look for the device.

After Sachs dropped them off at the hotel, she returned immediately to the sedan and searched the hell out of it. She found traces of the steroid, a bit more of the diesel-laden sand and dirt and another grain of rice. Ironically, it turned out the rice husk in the rope and the grain of rice in the State Department sedan weren’t from any shipments of food to Africa. Their source was a spoonful of dried rice in a lace ball tied with a silver ribbon, a souvenir from Kitty’s and Ron’s wedding. The woman had neglected to take it out of her suitcase.

Rhyme added, “Detective Sellitto went to the courthouse, got a warrant and a wiretap.”

“A tap?” Kitty whispered.

“Yep. On your cell.”

“Shit.” Kitty closed her eyes, a bitter grimace on her face.

“Oh, yeah,” Sellitto muttered. “We got the asshole who hired you.”

It wasn’t a warlord, vengeful employee, Third World dictator or corrupt CEO who wanted Ron and his brother dead. And it wasn’t the Reverend John Markel — briefly a suspect because of the fleck of leather at the Madison Square scene, possibly shed by a Bible.

No, Robert Kelsey, the operations director of the foundation, was whom she’d called an hour ago. When he’d learned that Ron Larkin was thinking of merging with several other foundations, Kelsey knew there’d be a complete audit of the operation and it would be discovered that he’d been taking money from warlords and corrupt government officials in Africa in exchange for information about where the ship containing food and drugs would be docking.

Oh, yeah. We lose fifteen, twenty percent a year of our African donations to theft and hijacking. Tens of millions….

He had to kill them, he reasoned, to stop any mergers.

Kelsey had confessed, in exchange for an agreement not to seek the death penalty. But he swore he didn’t know Kitty’s real identity. Sachs and Sellitto believed him; Kitty wasn’t a stupid woman, and she’d have to operate through a number of anonymous identities.

That’s why Rhyme had called Carter not long ago, to see if the former mercenary could learn more about her. The man now said, “I’ve been speaking to some of my associates in Marseilles, Bahrain and Cape Town, Captain. They’re asking about her now. They think it won’t take too long to get an ID. I mean, she’s not exactly your typical merc.”

Amen, thought Lincoln Rhyme.

“This is a mistake,” Kitty growled at Rhyme. Which could be interpreted to mean either he was erroneous or that stopping her was foolhardy and dangerous.

Whatever the message, her opinion meant nothing to him.

Lon Sellitto escorted her to a squad car and got in his own Crown Victoria. The entourage headed downtown to Central Booking.

Soon all the tactical officers were gone. Jed Carter promised he’d call as soon as he heard about anyone who fit Kitty’s description. “Good-bye, Captain. Ma’am.” He ambled off to his green Jeep.

Rhyme and Sachs were alone on the street. “Okay,” he said, meaning, Let’s get home. He wanted the Glenmorangie whisky Thom had denied him in anticipation of the operation here. (“It’s not like I’m going to be fighting anybody hand-to-hand.” Still, as often, the aide won.)

He asked Sachs to call Thom now; he was parked up the street in Rhyme’s custom-made van.

But Sachs frowned. “Oh, we can’t leave yet.”

“Why?”

“There’re some people who want to meet you. Ron Larkin’s brother and family.” They had been ushered into an upstairs bedroom with armed guards as soon as Kitty had arrived. She glanced at the third-floor window and waved at the faces of a middle-aged couple looking down at Rhyme and Sachs at the moment.

“Do we have to?”

“You saved their lives, Rhyme.”

“Isn’t that enough? I have to make small talk too?”

She laughed. “Five minutes. It’ll mean a lot to them.”

“Well, I’d love to,” he said, offering a rather insincere smile. “But it’s not exactly accessible.” Nodding at the stairs and then his wheelchair.

“Oh, don’t worry, Rhyme,” Sachs said, resting her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll bet they’ll come to us.”