The Cutting Edge

Monday, March 15

Chapter 31

Now, where is my kuritsa?

Where are you, my little hen?

Aren’t you tired of working, aren’t you hungry for some curry, some vindaloo shrimp, some basmati rice? And who doesn’t love that wonderful raita?

The young man that Vladimir Rostov was waiting for was working in a jewelry store that specialized in wedding bands and engagement rings. It was lunchtime and the fucking kid better take a break soon. Rostov had enjoyed his time with the lovebirds — especially the ring swallowing! But now to work. Finding VL and slicing his throat.

That’s why he was here in this greasy Irish bar, where he sat on a stool, having a bourbon and studying the building across the street.

Come on, my little kuritsa... Your Vladimir is getting impatient and you won’t like him that way. His knife is sitting heavy in his pocket. The razor blade is lonely.

His Persian, no, Iranian, kuritsa, Nashim, had come through for him, and delivered the name of a young man who had worked for Patel a year ago and stayed in touch with the diamond cutter and those who worked for and with him. His first name was Kirtan, and Nashim didn’t know his home address but he did know where he worked: the store that Rostov was staring at right now. He had a passing regret that because of the Persian’s success, Rostov had no excuse to visit Nashim’s plump daughters, Scheherazade and Kitten.

Ah, families, families, families...

After his parents had gone their separate ways and fled the suburbs of Moscow, twelve-year-old Vladimir had found himself in Mirny, a town of about twenty thousand at the time, smack in the middle of Siberia. If Hell had been ice, rather than fire, Mirny could be the Underworld.

The village had sprung from the frozen steppes seventy or so years ago when a vast diamond pipe was discovered. Mir means “peace” in Russian. The geologist who found the lode sent a coded message to Moscow that he was about to “smoke the pipe of peace,” which meant he’d made an amazing find. The town was called Mirny, the mine Mir, and in its heyday it produced two thousand kilos of diamonds a year, 20 percent of them high-quality. Upon its discovery, Mir sent shivers of panic through the staid halls of De Beers, which knew that its output could cause the price of diamonds to plummet. (Still, ever conscious of controlling the market, the Russians manipulated output and bought up reserves — De Beers’s included — to keep prices sky-high.) The mine began as an open pit, ultimately seventeen hundred feet deep, and when that was played out the state company began digging tunnels.

It was in these unforgiving shafts that Gregor Rostov insisted his nephew work, when he wasn’t studying in high school and, later, the polytechnic college. Gregor claimed he used his “pull” to get the boy a job, when in reality the mine was begging for workers mad enough to descend into the shafts.

Digging the open pit had been an engineering challenge — jet engines to heat the ground and soften it enough to dig — but tunneling was a nightmare. Workers were often drowned or crushed, stone dust destroyed lungs faster than three-pack-a-day smoking habits, chemical fumes burned out eyes, tongues and noses. Unstable explosives neatly removed other parts of the body.

It was far warmer down there than at the gray, skin-cracking surface, of course. But more important to Vladimir, it was populated only with rock and dust and diamonds — not the crew-cut youths who leered and bullied the outsider from Moscow, the girls who ignored him, the glum aunt and uncle who resented having to share the tiny apartment with the boy.

Because he was younger, he wasn’t expected to heft the loads of the adult laborers and was treated as something of a mascot. He was safe here. With his stone. Working double shifts. Sometimes staying for days at a time. Wandering the shafts.

Once, he was discovered without his pants, which lay in a pile near him in a deserted shaft. A supervisor had made an unexpected visit to the location. As Rostov dressed hastily the man noted what the boy had been up to. He chose not to reprimand him but firmly told him to confine such activities to his bedroom at home; more deviance would not be tolerated.

Vladimir frequently ignored the warning. He just made sure that he would find long-abandoned nooks and rock faces where there was no chance of discovery.

Gone to the stone...

But staying in the mine forever was not an option. He had to surface and return home to the fourth-floor walk-up apartment.

Uncle Gregor...

He was, by appearances, the meekest of men. A skinny man, as thin as his fiercely strong Belomorkanal cigarettes — the brand named after the infamous White Sea canal dug by gulag prisoners in the 1930s, with more than a hundred thousand perishing during the work. Gregor’s angular face was like Vladimir’s, protruding brows, broad lips tending toward purple, shoulders bony. His work in the mine involved instruments and clipboards. He had probably never lifted a shovel in his life. Vladimir thought his fingernails were remarkable. They were long and pale and perhaps sharpened. At least, so they seemed; in the games that were played almost nightly in the dim, cluttered apartment, the nails left red, painful trails along Vladimir’s spine.

Aunt Ro was the opposite, physically, of her husband. She was as sturdy as the cinder-block building they lived in. When the boy first met her, his impression was of a globe. At five two, she was formidable and, when she wanted something, that desire was all that existed in the universe.

Impatient too. And if Vladimir didn’t please her, she too left angry marks — though not with her nails. She would turn her engagement ring around as she lay into him. The diamond, which had come from the Mir mine, occasionally drew blood.

The years passed and at twenty he found himself a supervisor (you found few old men in the mines). After his uncle, and then aunt, died, he lived in the apartment attending school part-time, halfheartedly. He finally attained a degree in geology, barely passing.

His passion for the mine, the sensuous shafts, the warmth, the water, remained as strong as ever but Rostov the young man had hungers that he doubted could be satisfied in Mirny.

In any event, the decision was made for him. The mine closed, the lodes largely depleted.

Russia was one of the biggest producers of diamonds in the world and he might have found work elsewhere. But, he decided, no. He wanted more.

Hungers...

It was around then that Vladimir Rostov came to accept that he wasn’t right. The time in the mine, the time on the living room floor — the bed of rocks his uncle and aunt had strewn out for him to lie on... All those times had turned him into something as hard as a diamond. And just plain off.

Where to go?

The Chechnyans were misbehaving then. So why not the army?

Being gone to the stone was perfect training.

For the army and for what came later.

The life that had brought him now, to glorious, fucking America.

Another sip of bourbon in the Irish bar...

Come along, Rostov thought angrily.

Then he brightened. Inside the store, Kirtan shook a customer’s hand, a farewell gesture, and pulled on his jacket.

Rostov finished his drink — an off brand but not bad, and cheap. He wiped the glass with a napkin to remove his prints. This was a bit paranoid but Vladimir Rostov was still alive and not in prison when, by rights, he should have been jailed or more likely killed long ago.

One fond glance back at the waitress’s fine ass, then he was out the door into the cold, damp air. A diesel truck went past, spewing exhaust, reminding of home. No city on earth did exhaust better than Moscow. Beijing maybe, but he’d never been there.

He stayed on this side of the street — too many cameras in the windows of the ancient, ten-story structure, part of whose ground floor was occupied by Kirtan’s employer, Midtown Gifts. This, like many jewelry stores and diamond factories, avoided any mention in the name that gems were involved. A practice that, while it made sense for security, made tracking down Mr. VL fucking hell.

The building would have had a nice basement — nice and silent, that is — but he couldn’t have his chat with the kuritsa down there because of the cameras, as well as the armed guard in the arcade; there were two other jewelry stores on the first floor and a furrier that sold, wholesale only, mink, chinchilla and fox. The African American guard was fat and looked bored and seemed to be the sort who didn’t like wearing — much less using — his pistol, which was an old-style revolver.

His plan was to follow the boy and approach him somewhere deserted. An alley would be good but Manhattan seemed to have no alleys, at least none that he could find. Queens, yes, Brooklyn, yes. But not here. Manhattan had sexy women, cheap liquor, wonderful diamonds and plenty of magnificent shopping districts... but no fucking alleys.

He wondered how far he would have to follow the boy before he got him alone. He hoped it was near and he hoped it was soon. If not, he’d have to trail him home, after work. And Rostov was impatient. He needed VL and needed him now. There weren’t a lot of other options. None of his other sources had yielded up what he needed. And Nashim had been able to come up with only Kirtan’s name.

But it turned out that the round, dark-haired kid didn’t go very far. Despite his sub-Asian ethnicity Kirtan didn’t opt for curry or tandoori chicken. He walked into a tried-and-true New York City coffee shop. A waitress pointed him to a booth and he sat.

Would this work for him? Rostov was doubtful. Too many people. But he’d check it out. It wasn’t the best opportunity. But it was an opportunity.

Rostov, who wore the ski mask rolled up into a normal-looking stocking cap, stepped inside the restaurant. He sat at the counter and ordered coffee. Before it came, he rose and went into a back corridor, where the restrooms were located. He went inside, coughed hard for thirty seconds, regarded the paper towel, then pitched it out and returned to the corridor.

He found something else too. An unlocked door, leading to the cellar. He supposed restaurant supplies were stored down there and employees might come down at any minute. Everyone, though, seemed busy in the kitchen.

The only question was: Would the kid pee after lunch?

Nothing to do but wait and see.

He returned to the counter and sipped his coffee while the boy ate his sandwich, examining his phone’s screen — maybe texting, or wasting time with Facebook or some kind of nonsense like that. Kirtan signaled for the waitress. Oh, please, don’t have dessert.

But, no, he wanted the check. He paid.

Rostov drained his coffee and again used his napkin to inconspicuously wipe the cup. He pushed it aside and the waitress swept the chipped ceramic away. He left her a five.

Well, Kirtan? Bodily functions calling?

Yes, they were! The kuritsa pulled on his jacket and walked down the corridor to the restrooms.

This was, yes, a risk. But sometimes your mind clicks and it snaps and you do things a sane man — even a killer — wouldn’t do.

Gone to the stone...

More often than not his madness worked to his advantage. That should be a lesson for everyone, Rostov sometimes thought.

As the boy walked inside the bathroom Rostov waited in the corridor near the cellar door.

His back was to the men’s room. After three or four minutes, he heard the door open and glanced at Kirtan, exiting. The boy said, “Excuse me, sir,” and Rostov turned, smiling, glanced around to make sure there was no one to see and with a short but fierce blow punched the boy directly in the throat. As he started to drop, Rostov caught him, pulled open the cellar door and shoved him down the rubber-treaded stairs headfirst.

It was a noisy tumble and Rostov turned to see if anyone had heard.

No. People eating, people talking, people examining cell phones.

The Russian slipped inside, onto the top step of the stairs, closed the door behind him and, pulling out the razor knife, started down into the cool, dim cellar.

Sachs was leaving her mother’s house, where she’d spent the night — in her childhood bedroom — when her phone trilled.

She dropped into the driver’s seat of her Torino and hit Answer.

“Rodney.”

A senior detective in the NYPD’s Computer Crimes Unit, Rodney Szarnek was a curious creature. The man, of ambiguous age but probably thirties, loved code, hacks, algorithms, boxes (the term for computers) and all things digital. He also mainlined rock music at illegal decibels. She heard Led Zeppelin pounding away in his office.

“Amelia. I called Lincoln and told him we had a break. He said to call you directly. You’re closer to where you have to be.”

“And where do I have to be?”

“Queens.”

“And why?”

“Remember we got a warrant and the provider coughed up Patel’s cell phone records?”

“Right.”

“I finally pieced together his calling patterns: his sister, other diamond merchants, overseas numbers — South Africa and Botswana — presumably for diamond orders. No calls to anybody with initials of VL. But there were a dozen calls in the past month to and from a Deepro Lahori.”

“Okay.”

“I did some homework. Actually a lot of homework. The last name — the L — intrigued me. Was that half of VL? I think so. Deepro’s son — apparently a diamond cutter — is named Vimal. Hold on, Amelia. I love this riff.”

She heard an electric guitar shred. She yawned.

“Could you hear it? You want me to replay it?”

“Rodney.”

“Okay. Just asking. I got a DMV picture. Just sending it now. Check your texts.”

Her phone dinged and she was looking at Vimal Lahori’s driver’s license photo. The image could easily have been that of the young man exiting the site of the killing through the loading dock on Saturday.

The address on the license was 4388 Monroe Street in Jackson Heights. A half hour away.

“Thanks, Rodney.”

“Disclaimer alert: Can’t say he’s your boy, not for certain.”

Only one way to find out...

Chapter 32

Monroe Street in Jackson Heights, Queens, was one of those spots that could not decide if it wanted gentrification or just to be left alone.

To be comfortable, to be quiet, to exist the way it had existed for fifty or maybe a hundred years. Who knew? Workers in small factories and warehouses and on jobsites lived here. Some white-collar entry-level kids in advertising, brokerage houses, publishing, fashion. And then the artists.

At the moment, on the street, near where Vimal Lahori lived, only a few people were outside on the sidewalk. One woman, in a black quilted coat and beret, was trailing behind a small dog on one of those retractable leashes, which was getting quite the workout because a series of suicidal squirrels waited until the last minute to zip away from the energetic canine.

A boy on a bicycle, maybe playing hooky. It was a school day, it was early afternoon.

A businesswoman in a raincoat and silly rain hat — clear plastic, like a bonnet, printed with yellow daisies.

Everyone moved quickly, presumably because of the damp, pasty chill.

But these fuckers didn’t have it so bad.

Moscow this time of year was a hundred times worse.

Thinking of his home city, Vladimir Rostov decided that this neighborhood of New York was much like the Barrikadnaya area northwest of Moscow; it differed only in that here the homes were single-family row houses. In Moscow — ach, in every Russian city — people lived in apartment buildings, towering, stolid and forever gloomy, the color of Stalin’s uniform.

Rostov had parked his Toyota up the street and was standing by a tree — the dark trunk, obscuring, he hoped, his dark jacket — and studying the modest home of Vimal Lahori and his family.

Rostov was proud of his detective work. Kirtan had come through — the boy with the crushed larynx and, it turned out, a broken wrist from the stairway tumble, so sorry, kuritsa. After the fall, Rostov had dragged the choking boy into the corner of the basement, behind an oil tank, pungent with the eye-stinging fumes from spilled fuel for the furnace. The ancient heater muttered softly, as flames roiled inside, and the two men — one on the floor, one crouching over him — were bathed in heat.

The boy couldn’t talk, of course, which made the process of extracting information a bit more complicated. But the silver lining was that he also wouldn’t be able to scream in pain and that had been the more important factor at the moment.

Rostov had pushed the blade from the utility knife, and tears began streaming in earnest from Kirtan’s eyes, leaving glossy tracks on his matte-olive skin. He’d shaken his head no, no, no. He’d mouthed something else as well, perhaps explaining — trying to explain — to Rostov that he had little to give him. Rostov had then noticed the boy wore a pinkie ring, gold with a diamond in it. It was one of those showy, pointless pieces. Diamonds only come alive when light bombards them from all sides and enters the facets on the girdle, the pavilion and crown. In a pinkie ring, made for uncultured businessmen, the diamond is cut very shallow and surrounded by metal, with no opportunity to breathe. Pinkie rings invariably contain inferior stones.

A waste of a noble diamond.

Rostov had smiled and turned his attention to the boy’s finger once more, caressing it. Kirtan tried to pull away. Useless. More caressing with the razor.

“No, no, baby kuritsa, don’t bother, no.”

It had taken only two brief cuts on the left-hand finger pads for the kid to jot down Vimal Lahori’s name and address with his right. A bit more information and Kirtan’s lunch hour — and his life — had come to a quick end.

Now it was time to get to work.

Still pressed against the tree, Rostov waited until the pedestrians, the dog and the bicyclist were gone and he made certain no one else was around. He started toward the Lahori house.

This neighborhood differed from Barrikadnaya in another regard: There was more landscaping here. Rostov took advantage of the cover offered by hedges and trees to get close to the house and not be seen by neighbors.

He noted lights on in the house and, through the lace curtains covering most of the windows, it was clear that there were inhabitants inside. Kirtan had told him that Vimal lived with his parents and a brother. The father was on disability, the mother was a nurse who worked irregular hours and the brother was a college freshman. Any or all of them could be at home.

Rostov would kill them all, of course, but to do so he would have to plan carefully. Those inside could be in different rooms and that meant a risk that somebody would hear the intrusion, dial 911 and drop the phone behind a couch. In a city like New York, the cops would arrive in minutes. He’d have to do some surveillance, wait till they were together, move in fast, brandishing the gun. Tie or tape them. Then the knife. It would have to be the knife. The houses were so close a gunshot could be heard by dozens of people.

In a crouch, taking cover behind evergreen bushes, he skirted the house, which was pale green, in need of paint. At a window toward the back, where he could see shadows in motion, he rose to full height. This allowed him to peek inside, the kitchen. A woman of about forty-five stood at the stove. She was obviously Indian. Pretty enough but not appealing to Rostov, with her gray-brown skin and short, wavy black hair, shiny like the plastic do on a doll. He could see her face was troubled. As she absently stirred a pan, she cocked her head and Rostov believed that she was listening to something that upset her: voices. He listened carefully and he could hear them too. Male voices engaged in an argument, it sounded like, though Rostov could not hear the words. They were quite muted. He heard pounding like soft hammer blows at a distance.

A moment later she turned and a man in his fifties, gray and paunchy, appeared from what seemed to be basement stairs. He was agitated. Rostov ducked but kept his ear cocked toward the window.

The woman avoided his eyes and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this.”

“It’s for his own good. He’s full of stupid ideas. Stupid! You were too indulgent when he was young.”

This was probably true, Rostov thought.

Women.

Good for one thing. Well, that and cooking.

He now heard the muted sound of a power tool somewhere in the house. It sounded like a grinder, electric sander. Somebody was doing some construction.

Another voice asked something. Younger, male. Rostov couldn’t detect the words.

The man who’d come from the basement, surely Vimal’s father, barked, “Sunny, you will go to your room. Don’t worry about this. It’s not your business.”

A response, indiscernible.

“He’s in his studio working on a sculpture. He’s fine. Go. Now!”

Sunny. Vimal’s brother. This meant it was Vimal whom the father had been arguing with in the basement.

You shouldn’t be doing this...

What would that mean?

So then: four people inside: mother, father and two brothers.

This was a challenge, indeed. But he decided that simple was better. If Vimal was in the basement, he’d slip into the house and take the first person he came across by surprise, slash their throat, then when someone came to see the disturbance, kill that person. And so on. Vimal wouldn’t hear, with all the racket from his sander. He’d then walk downstairs and have his visit with the boy.

All right, you kur. Here we go.

He turned toward the front of the house and made his way, crouching, to a bush beside the porch. He dipped his hand into his pocket to grip the knife. He was almost there when he heard the sound of an urgently approaching car. He stepped back fast, and a flash of red appeared in his periphery. An old American car skidded to a stop in front of the kuritsa’s house.

Shit. He dropped behind the bushy shrubs, fragrant with dog pee.

A woman climbed out of the car. She was trim and tall, her dark-red hair pulled back into a ponytail.

No, no, no!

This fucking kuritsa is a cop. He saw a badge on her hip, just peeking from beneath her dark sport jacket. And he noted how her hand absently slipped farther back to orient herself as to where the grip of her long-barrel Glock was. He knew this was a kuritsa who knew how to draw and shoot.

Rostov was furious.

If only he’d been a half hour earlier, this would have been finished.

At least she hadn’t called in backup. The boy was no suspect, only a witness. She’d just want to ask him questions. And warn him that he’d be in danger. And probably take him to protective custody.

Then Rostov squinted. He was only about fifteen feet away and noted something else about her. A faint shimmer: She wore, on her left hand, the heart finger, a ring with a stone that glinted blue. Was it a diamond? Her engagement ring, then probably yes.

A blue diamond...

He thought of the Winston Blue. This was tinier. Flawed, undoubtedly.

The Winston would never be his, of course.

But this one?

The cop woman was at the door now, ringing the bell. He heard it, muted, chiming inside.

He revised his plan but only slightly. He decided this might be a godsend. The woman would gather together everybody in one room to talk to them and interview Vimal.

The hens would be rounded up together, never expecting the fox to burst in on them with his gun and his razor knife claw.

Chapter 33

So you’re telling me that Vimal isn’t here?” Amelia Sachs was asking.

“I’m afraid not.”

She was speaking to Deepro Lahori who, despite his easy smile, exuded discomfort, if she could read his body language right.

“What did he say when you heard from him?”

Priming the pump.

“Oh. Well, it was yesterday. He said all was good. He would be away.”

“I see. What was your son’s connection with the victim? Jatin Patel?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all.”

That wasn’t a response.

“His connection?” she persisted.

“No, no connection at all, really. He just did a little work for him.” Lahori was a short but broad man, with sunken eyes and dark circles under them. Dark-complexioned, grayish skin. His thick black hair was streaked with gray. His wife, Divya, had a handsome face and sharp eyes. Sachs had seen a laundry hanger in the hall with a set of woman’s hospital scrubs under the plastic. She was a doctor or nurse, apparently.

And she was clearly uncomfortable with her husband’s words. Crossing her arms and shooting him a dark glance.

“A little work?” Sachs asked.

“Some diamond cutting.” Lahori seemed irritated that his wife’s body language had tipped off his deception. He glared. She ignored him and said, “Vimal was Mr. Patel’s apprentice.”

He snapped, “Not apprentice. That suggests he worked all the time with Mr. Patel. He didn’t. He didn’t study with him.”

Sachs wondered why Lahori seemed to feel that the nature of the boy’s chores for Patel correlated to what Vimal knew or didn’t know about the robbery and murder.

The noise of power tools rose. Somewhere in the house, somebody was doing some construction work. Power sanding, it seemed.

“Someone else is in the house?” Maybe another family member who knew something about where the boy might be.

But Lahori said quickly, “Only some workers.”

“What did he say about the murder? He was there.”

“No, he wasn’t there. He was going there but it happened before he arrived and he left.”

“Sir, the evidence shows that someone fitting your son’s description was present and was injured when the suspect shot at him.”

“What? Oh, my goodness.”

Lahori was an appallingly bad actor.

A young man appeared in the open, arched doorway to the living room. She thought at first he was Vimal but then noted he was younger by a few years, a teenager.

Sachs was about to play the obstruction of justice card with the father; instead she smiled at the teenager and asked, “You’re Vimal’s brother?”

“I am, yes.” Looking down, looking up, looking sideways.

“I’m Detective Sachs.”

“I’m Sunny.”

“Go to your room,” Lahori snapped. “This doesn’t involve you.”

But Sunny asked, “Have you found that man yet? The one who shot at Vimal?”

Lahori closed his eyes and grimaced. Busted by his own child.

“We’re working on that now.”

His father snapped, “Your room.”

The boy hesitated and then turned and left. Sunny would be a backup — if the father didn’t start cooperating soon. She sensed the wife would not directly cross her husband, though Sachs knew that she had information about her son.

The grinding, from downstairs, ceased. Sachs was grateful. The sound had been piercing.

“I need to know where he is. I need to know now.”

“He was so upset about what happened that he went away,” Lahori said. “With some friends. Maybe skiing. The cold weather lately. The resorts are still open. Have you heard?”

His wife stared at him — with the look of someone whose family had never even seen a ski resort.

“This is serious, Mr. Lahori. You’ve followed the news, the man they’re calling the Promisor? Well, that’s who’s looking for your son.”

“He wouldn’t be interested in my boy. He didn’t see anything!”

“He’s already killed another witness.”

“But Vimal couldn’t have seen him. There was a mask. I heard there was a mask. On the news. So he’d have no reason—”

“Enough!” This, from Divya Lahori.

“No,” Lahori growled.

“Yes, Deepro. This has gone on too long,” the wife said calmly. Then looked imploringly at Sachs. “You have to protect him.”

“We will. That’s why I’m here.”

So, wrong about Divya. She could stand up to her husband.

There was nothing to be gained by a cold glare at Lahori. But Amelia Sachs glared anyway. Then she asked, “Where is he?”

“He’s downstairs. In the basement. His sculpting studio is there,” the boys’ mother said.

She remembered that they believed the boy was a sculptor. The grinding sound would be Vimal working on a piece. She should have picked that up.

No matter. She’d soon have him in protective custody. She’d arranged for a safe house, and she would put a detail here too, to keep the family safe.

“So you lied to me.”

The father said defiantly, “I’m only trying to protect him.”

There was more to this than the father wanting to protect his son, though, Sachs assessed. Most parents would get the police on board as fast as possible.

But she said only, “Please, go get him now.”

His wife held out her hand, palm up. Lahori’s face tightened. He was fuming. He dug into his pocket and angrily handed over a set of keys with a trembling hand.

His father had locked him in the basement?

Divya Lahori was paying for her defiance with an icy gaze from her husband. She looked at his face once, then glanced away and walked toward the back of the house.

Chapter 34

With a gloved hand, Vladimir Rostov tested the front door of the Lahori residence.

Ah, ah, the helpful kur had left it unlocked.

This saved him from a dramatic — and potentially risky — entrance by kicking in a window. Subduing those inside would probably have required the use of his extremely loud pistol.

Stifling a cough — very bad time for a spell of hacking — he looked through the lace curtain in the door. His form would be visible if anyone looked but not obviously so. The overcast was thick and there was little backlight to cast a shadow in the entryway.

The kuritsa cop and the husband were in the living room, to the left. It seemed that the wife had gone to get Vimal, who was somewhere else in the house. The other boy — probably the brother — was not to be seen. It would be logical for the cop to bring Vimal into the living room too. She’d want to question them all.

All my little kur in a single henhouse.

Rostov could just see the redhead’s back from the doorway. She was five strides away. Rostov had an idea. He looked around and lifted a large brick from the garden. He returned to the door and peered in again. Yes, yes, this would work. Rostov would step inside fast, bring the brick down on her head and keep the father at bay with the gun. He’d get the cop’s gun and cuff her hands. Then take care of Vimal and the rest of the family.

And her? The cop? Rostov caught one more glimpse of the blue diamond on her pale finger. So alluring.

Gone to the stone...

Rostov pulled the ski mask down, took the gun in his left hand and slipped the brick under his arm. He gripped the doorknob.

Here we go, little kur. Here we go.

Then there came a cry from the back of the house. “No!” A woman’s voice. Vimal’s mother. She burst from a door in the back, in the kitchen. The door that Rostov had seen a few moments ago, the one that seemed to lead down to the basement. She paused in the hallway. Still on the front porch, Rostov crouched. But he didn’t need to see the drama. He could hear clearly enough.

“He’s gone! Vimal is gone!”

“How could he be gone?” Lahori raged, as if it were her fault.

“The saw? The one he uses for his sculpture? He used it to cut through the bars on the window.”

So the father had locked his own son in a cell in the basement.

Now the fucking kuritsa had escaped?

Rostov risked a look to see if they were coming out the front door. But, no, all three adults hurried to the back of the house and down the stairway to the cellar.

He backed away from the front door and down the steps. He walked into the neighbor’s property and jogged to the backyard.

Hiding behind a hedge, he peered into the Lahoris’ yard. No sign of the boy. But he did see thick metal bars lying on the grass in front of a low window.

He sighed and turned, striding quickly to the sidewalk. He got into his car. For ten minutes he cruised up and down the streets of the placid neighborhood, with no success. He searched for only a brief time, though, assuming that the redheaded kuritsa would call other officers to scour the neighborhood too.

Glancing to the seat beside him, he noticed some cold Roll N Roaster fries. He shoved them in his mouth, chewing absently and swallowing fast. He lit a cigarette and enjoyed the inhale. A setback, yes. But Vladimir Rostov wasn’t as upset as he might be.

The Promisor is savvy, the Promisor is devious.

And, even though he’s completely gone to the stone, he always has a backup plan.

Chapter 35

Three p.m.

This was the time Lincoln Rhyme and the man he’d texted yesterday, after meeting with Edward Ackroyd, had agreed on for a phone call.

And it was with, no less, a spy.

Lincoln Rhyme had a relationship with the American espionage community. It was ambivalent and infrequent but undeniable.

The reason he’d been unable to participate in the El Halcón case — the Mexican drug lord who was on federal trial for murder and assault — was due to a meeting in Washington, DC, to assist a new U.S. security agency.

Rhyme and Sachs had come into contact with the organization on a recent case. They, on the one hand, and the Alternative Intelligence Service, on the other, had butted heads over a clandestine operation the AIS had run in Naples, Italy. In the end, Rhyme and Sachs had saved the organization’s reputation — and some lives in the process. The director had been so impressed with their forensic work, he’d tried to recruit them.

But working for the AIS would involve considerable foreign travel. Given Rhyme’s physical limitations, he was not inclined to sign on, despite the intriguing jobs the organization promised. Besides, New York City had no lack of challenging cases. Why fish elsewhere? It was also his and Sachs’s home. He had, however, been happy to jet down to DC, to help the AIS set up a new division to use forensics and physical evidence as an intelligence resource.

At the first meeting in DC, one of the congressmen involved in the creation and funding of the AIS had said, “Glad you’re here, Captain Rhyme, Detective Sachs. We know you can help us in our task to parameter a new dynamic for evidentiary intelligence analytics and weaponization.”

Rhyme, who otherwise would have engaged in a bit of verbal fencing about verbosity and about turning “parameter” into a verb, reminded himself he was inside the Beltway, and simply ignored the bullshit. The concept was clever: The new division would employ crime scene and crime lab skills to gather and analyze intelligence... and, yes, to “weaponize” evidence.

Need to identify a mole within the American consulate in Frankfurt, when everybody passes the polygraph? Just find the one employee bearing a molecule of trace evidence that can be matched with a molecule of trace in the Generalkonsulat der Volksrepublik China.

Need a North Korean hit team in Tokyo taken down? Just deliver to the Japanese Keiji-kyoku some trace evidence and shoe prints suggesting they have illegal weapons, and, bang, they’re in jail — for a long, long time. So much more humane than snipers. And more important, somebody other than the U.S. government does the dirty work.

The name would be the EVIDINT Division of the AIS, a word coined by Rhyme himself. As in “evidence intelligence.” Spy-speak. Like HUMINT, human intelligence. Or ELINT, electronic intelligence.

It was the director of the AIS, Daryl Mulbry, whom Rhyme had texted when Ackroyd told him of Unsub 47’s Russian roots. Mulbry’s text suggested a 3 p.m. call.

Espionage apparently engendered promptness and at 3:00:02, his phone rang.

“Lincoln, hello!” The man, Rhyme recalled, was pale and slight and with thinning hair a light shade of brown. To judge by his patois, his roots were the Carolinas or Tennessee. When Rhyme had first met him he’d thought Mulbry was a minor, regulation-bound low-level diplomat. The man’s appearance and self-effacing manner gave no clue that he ran a hundred-million-dollar intelligence operation, including tactical teams, who, if they wanted you to disappear, could fulfill that task with a minimum of fuss.

“So sorry it’s taken this long to get back. Had a brouhaha in Europe. Was a mess. It’s largely — though not completely — cleared up now. But more about that later. What can I do for you? You want to know how your baby, the EVIDINT’s going? Swimmingly. Though that’s not a word I really understand. It’s not all that easy to swim. And one can drown, course.”

“Something else and it’s urgent.”

Mulbry was used to Rhyme’s impatience. “Of course.”

“We’ve got a perp in town, recently, we think. My diagnosis: he’s pretty unhinged. Obsessed with diamonds. Got away with a couple million worth of rough, it’s called. Uncut stones. He murdered some innocents. Tortured, in a couple of cases.”

“Torture? What was that about?”

“Mostly to track down witnesses. But probably for his own amusement too.”

“Details?”

“Not much. Russian national, Muscovite, fluent-ish in English. White. Blue eyes. Average height and build. Fashion choice leans toward dark casual clothing — off the rack — and ski masks.”

“You’re a card, Lincoln. Why the theft? Funding terrorism? Money laundering?”

“This is the odd part. He wants to save diamonds from desecration. Our British consultant describes him as a ‘nutter.’”

“He thinking of heading back home for the Motherland’s borscht or does he have more mischief in mind?”

“Staying put, at least temporarily, we’ll assume.”

“Recently here, you said. How recent?”

“Unknown. But we’ve checked for similar MO in the databases and nothing shows up. So let’s say the past week, ten days. Though that’s a big assumption.”

“Means of dispatching people?”

“Glock, short-barrel thirty-eight and razor knife.”

“My. Any indication of military training?”

“That’d be speculation too. But he’s smart. Careful with CCTVs and evidence.”

“All right and you want to know if I can find any names of Russkies who’ve come to the U.S. in that time. Of questionable backgrounds or circumstances.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay, Russian, diamonds, psycho, access to weapons. I’ll see what we can find. I’ll get the kids and the bots on it.” Rhyme heard typing. Fast as train wheels over old track.

Mulbry came back on. “Might be a while... and you might end up with quite the list. We don’t stop them at the border, those Russian folks, you know? The Cold War is over, haven’t you heard?”

Rhyme had to laugh at this.

“Now, Lincoln, as long as I have you, let me pose a question.”

Rhyme recalled what the man had said a moment ago.

More about that later...

“Hm?”

“That incident I was talking about. We wrapped up a radical cell in the suburbs of Paris. All good. But in the process our team vacuumed up some unrelated digital traffic that caught our attention. It was between Paris, Central America and New York City. That triad rings terrorist profile bells.”

Rhyme said, “Must be about a million emails a day along those routes.”

“You bet there are. But these were different. They were encrypted with duodecimal algorithms. Virtually unbreakable. Which makes us a tad nervous.”

Rhyme, who had a science background, knew the duodecimal numbering system, also called base 12 or dozenal. The binary system has two digits only, 0 and 1. The decimal has ten: 0 through 9. Duodecimal has twelve, 0 through 9 plus two extra symbols, usually and .

Mulbry continued, “The encryption package is so ‘righteous’ — that’s what the geeks say — that we’re treating the software as a weapon. It’s considered munitions under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, State Department. Since New York is one of the points of origin of the messages, I’m curious if anybody at NYPD has ever run across duodecimal encrypted emails or texts.”

“No. Never heard of it.” He looked up at Cooper. “Mel, any duodecimal encryption in cases you’ve run?”

“No.”

“Call Rodney and see if he’s heard of anything.” Back to the phone. “We’ll talk to our expert here. We’ll see.”

“Thanks. It’s got us troubled. We’re checking locations he or she or it were at when the messages were sent. Those’re hard to find too. Proxies, of course.” Another laugh. “Righteous ones.”

“I’ll let you know if we find something.”

The men said goodbye and disconnected.

Hm, interesting idea, dozenal as a basis for encryption. Though Rhyme’s background was chemistry primarily, he harbored an interest in math and he knew that a number of mathematicians believed that base twelve was far easier to learn and use in making calculations. He’d even read about a dozenal clock, in which a minute equals fifty seconds of current time. A clock reading 7:33.4 in dozenal, for instance, was 2:32.50 on a standard timepiece.

Fascinating.

But, of course, irrelevant. And Rhyme pushed the thoughts away. He hoped he could help Mulbry but Unsub 47 was his priority. His phone hummed. The number was unfamiliar.

Hoping for the caller’s sake it wasn’t a telemarketer, he answered, “Hello?”

“Mr. Rhyme? Captain Rhyme?” The accent was Spanish, and it was light.

“Yes?”

“My name is Antonio Carreras-López. I’m an attorney from Mexico. I’m in New York at the moment, and I wonder if I may have a moment of your time.”

“I’m very busy. What would this be in regard to?”

“One of my clients is presently on trial here.” The man’s voice was low and melodic. “I’d like to discuss a matter that’s come up. It involves you.”

“Who is your client?”

“He’s a Mexican national. If you follow the news, you might have heard of him. Eduardo Capilla. He is better known as El Halcón.”

Lincoln Rhyme was rarely shocked. But the ping in his insensate body was manifest as a significant throbbing in his head. This was the very case that he’d so wanted a piece of, but had been unable to participate in because of his commitment to Daryl Mulbry and the AIS down in Washington.

“I’m familiar with him. Go on, please.”

Carreras-López continued, “I know you understand the protocols of criminal trials. The prosecution is obligated to give the defense its evidentiary files prior to trial. In that material we received from the U.S. attorney, we discovered your name listed as a potential forensic analyst and witness. But a notation said you were not available.”

“I submitted my name to consult for the prosecution but I had to be out of town.”

“I looked you up, Captain, and was, I must say, impressed at your background and expertise. Extremely impressed.” He paused. “I gather that the consulting work you do is exclusively for the prosecution.”

“Some civil work — for plaintiffs and defendants — but in criminal, yes, I work for law enforcement.”

With the occasional spy thrown into the client mix.

“Yes, well, if I may take just a few moments of your time to explain. The trial is under way and the prosecution is presenting its case now. In looking over the evidence, our experts believe they have found something troubling. That the evidence, some of the evidence, has been manipulated by the police or FBI. My client is unpopular, and — frankly — he’s not such a very nice person. He has done some bad things in his life. But that does not mean he is guilty of the crimes he’s on trial for.”

“And you want to hire me to see if I can find proof the evidence was manipulated?”

“I think you are not a man who cares much about money, though we would pay a substantial fee. I think you are, however, a man who cares about right and wrong. And there is something very wrong about this case. But I can find no one who wishes to help me prove it. Of the four former prosecutors and retired forensic officers, and two professional forensic analysts I approached to help us, all have declined.”

“You’ve made a motion to exclude the evidence, or for a mistrial?”

“Not yet. We don’t want to do so without some substantive proof.”

Rhyme’s thoughts tumbled. “From what I read there were multiple charges.”

He heard a chuckle. “Oh, yes. Since you and I don’t have an attorney-client relationship, I will refrain from saying anything specific. But let me give you a hypothetical. A suspect is charged with five counts. There is no doubt he is guilty of one — let us say entering the country illegally. And there is ample evidence for that. And the jury will certainly convict. But the other, more serious counts, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, he is absolutely not guilty of. Someone else committed those crimes and my client, my hypothetical client, was not even present when they happened.”

“Justice,” Rhyme whispered.

The lawyer said, “Yes. The very issue at hand. Mr. Rhyme, in reading about you, I saw you once testified at the petition of a man seeking release from prison on the ground that the laboratory technician had intentionally altered DNA results. You told the court that whether it was intentional or innocent, a forensic scientist’s errors in processing evidence are inexcusable. Truth is paramount, you said.”

He recalled the case, easily picturing the face of the man who’d served eight years for a rape he did not commit. The convict’s eyes, fixed on Rhyme’s, had been filled with hope and desperation. The woman technician who’d intentionally written the false report, because she believed him guilty, had not looked up from the floor.

Rhyme said, “I never make a judgment about the moral nature of the defendants in the trials I work. I’m in the midst of a big case at the moment but if you want to come to my town house, we can talk about it.”

“Ah, really, Mr. Rhyme? I am so grateful.”

“I can’t promise anything but I’d like to hear the details.”

They chose a time and Rhyme gave his address. They disconnected.

Rhyme wheeled up to the evidence charts. Cooper was writing up some recent information from the crime lab in Queens: The DNA and fingerprinting from the jacket found in the storm drain had come back negative. So had the hairs and swabs from the Gravesend attack.

Rhyme noted the words on the whiteboard. He tucked them away and then returned to thinking about what the Mexican lawyer had told him. He thought too of Sachs, Sellitto, Cooper and the others, hard at work on the Unsub 47 case and reflected, What would they think if they knew I’m considering signing on with the drug dealer’s team?

There was no good answer to that question and so he ignored it and returned to the evidence.

Chapter 36

The word “bedridden” didn’t really fit for the now. It fit for the then.

The long-time-ago then.

The Jane Austen then. The Brontë Sisters. The novels that Claire Porter used to read and reread — in college and after. Recently, some of them.

Bedridden.

Often, in those books, a character was tucked away under down comforters and thick blankets, with a compress on a feverish forehead, because of some mysterious unnamed disease. Or exhaustion. Exhaustion was a common malady in the then. When reading about life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Porter always wondered what could be so stressful back then that you had to recuperate by staying in bed for weeks at a time. Or taking a cruise (if you were one of the posh people).

Posh. Another good then word.

Nothing posh about my bedridden life, thought the thirty-four-year-old.

Lying on her Sealy Posturepedic in the bedroom of their first-floor apartment in Brooklyn, Porter looked out the window at Cadman Park, monotone and wet and chill today, which fit her mood pretty well.

The slim brunette barista had been sidelined not by exhaustion or a novelist’s anonymous disease but because she’d tripped over a dog. Not even hers, but a fuzzy little thing that’d slipped a lead while she and her husband had been out jogging and darted in front of her. She’d twisted away, instinctively, and heard a pop in her ankle. Down she went.

Hell, a sprain, she’d thought.

Wrong. It was one fucking nightmare of a break.

Two surgeries to start, then a battle with infection, then under the knife again — to place steel pins. Bionic woman, her husband had joked gamely, though he was clearly shaken by her pain — and, understandably, dismayed by his new responsibilities; the couple had an eighteen-month-old daughter. Dad — a graphic designer in Midtown — was now living a double-shift life. And she couldn’t even think about his cheerfully forced nod when the doctor said it was best to avoid “intimate relations” that would put the ankle at risk for at least six months. (Something Victorian about the MO’s phrase too, come to think of it.)

With a crutch, Porter could just about handle the basics: The bathroom. A trip to the mini fridge that Sam had set up in this, the guest, bedroom. She could get a bottle and the solid food to feed Erin, whose small bed was beside hers. That was about the extent of her activity until the wound healed. How she loved to cook, how she loved to run, how she loved the barista job — the banter, the quirky and bizarre people she met.

But it was another month of being bedridden.

Claire Porter resolved to be good and follow orders. Another fall, the doctor warned, could make the injury far worse. Infection, necrosis of the skin. Ick. And though he hadn’t mentioned amputation, Google had. And once seated in her mind, that thought stuck like a leech and wouldn’t let go.

At least she could continue her online studies. Barista now, owner of a small restaurant consulting business in two years. She lifted the Mac onto her tummy, glanced at the crib. Thank you for snoozing, honey doll! Hell, she wanted to kiss the girl’s toffee-blond hair. But that would be a big project.

Bedridden.

She booted up and worked for a few minutes, then, goddamn it. The urge. She needed to use the bathroom.

It was funny how we can anticipate exactly where and how pain will get us. Porter went through the instinctive choreography of shifting one leg, the other, her torso and arms in a complicated pattern to let her sit up without bringing tears to her eyes.

Or puking.

She negotiated the sitting-up with relatively little discomfort. And she managed to snag the crutches pretty well.

Now the standing-up part.

A deep breath, everything coming into alignment. Okay, scoot forward.

Then... okay slow... then up.

Porter, who weighed in at about 110 pounds, felt the force of gravity tugging her down, down, down. The crutches did this, turned her into a load of bricks. But she managed. A few steps. She paused as her vision crinkled a bit. She was light-headed. Lowering her head, breathing deeply, she reminded herself to get up slowly next time. Fainting? She couldn’t even imagine what a fall would do to her fragile bones.

Then her head cleared and she moved toward the hall. She paused to look down at Erin, who slept the sleep of youthful oblivion, with dreams, if at all, simple and kind.

Claire Porter hobbled onward to the bathroom. Sam had modified it — he’d put a shower seat in the tub and replaced the wall-mounted head with a handheld unit. He’d added a high seat on the toilet so she didn’t need to put much weight on her foot.

One good thing about the accident. No fashion choices. It was sweats, sweats, sweats... Just tug the turquoise bottoms down with the panties and sit. Job done.

Getting up was a bit harder but she knew how to manage it.

Anticipation...

Up and pain-free. Damn, my right leg’s going to be solid wood by the time this is over.

As Claire Porter was washing her hands she felt a shudder throughout the apartment. Windows rattled and a glass sitting on the shelf leapt off the edge and died in a dozen shards on the tile floor.

Porter gasped.

My God. What was that? Another one of those earthquakes? She’d followed the news. Something about that drilling — the construction site they said was responsible was a half mile from here. There was a lot of protesting. Environmental folks versus big business. She couldn’t remember exactly.

Wow, a quake in New York! This was something. She’d have to tell her mother about it when they talked next. It had been a fairly minor tremor — no damage to the walls or windows.

But that was a problem.

And a serious one.

Bare feet. Broken glass.

Stupid, she thought. She had slippers (well, slipper; nothing was going on the bad foot) but hadn’t bothered to put it on. And now five feet of obstacle course to get to the hallway.

She looked down. When the glass hit, it hit hard.

Shit. It would be impossible for her to clean up the mess. Bending over was no option. She could use the crutch to push the bigger pieces out of the way but she couldn’t see the smaller ones on the white tile.

Towels. She would cover the floor with bath towels and place her good foot only where there were no lumps. The smaller ones wouldn’t penetrate — she hoped.

She pulled the thickest towels from the racks and strewed them on a path to the door.

One step. Good.

She paused to find a spot for the next one and froze.

What was that? She smelled natural gas.

“Jesus, Jesus...”

Porter recalled the terrible news story about what had happened after the first earthquake. The damage from the shaking hadn’t been bad at all. A few broken windows. But some gas lines had broken. The resulting explosions and fires had killed several people: a couple, trapped in their burning house.

Well, she and her daughter weren’t going to be victims.

They were on the first floor. She’d get Erin and clutch her tight and hobble outside, shouting her head off for the other tenants to get out too.

Move, move, move!

Another step.

One more. And then the glass splinter leveraged through the towel like a scorpion’s stinger and pierced her heel.

Porter screamed and fell backward. She released the crutch and got her hand behind her head just in time to keep her skull from cracking on the side of the porcelain bathtub. Pain careened through her body. Her vision crinkled again — from the agony. It then returned, though blurred by more tears.

The smell of gas was stronger here: Her face was beside the access panel to the bathroom pipes, which led down to the basement, where the cracked gas line would be.

Go! Somehow, she had to get to the room and save her baby.

Crawl over the fucking glass if you have to!

An image came to her: The news footage of the buildings burning following the most recent quakes — that horrifying tornado of orange flames and oily black smoke.

Save your daughter.

“Erin!” she cried involuntarily.

The girl must have heard — or perhaps she’d been woken by the foul smell of the gas — and she started screaming.

“No, honey, no! Mommy’s coming!” She struggled to roll onto her belly, so she could start her frantic crawl to her daughter.

But she hadn’t realized that her broken ankle had become wedged beneath the bathroom’s heavy wooden vanity. As she rolled over, she felt, and heard, the gritty snap of the delicate bone work giving way. Breathtaking pain exploded within her entire body.

Screaming in unison with her infant daughter, Claire Porter looked at her foot. The metal rods that the surgeon had implanted just the other day had ripped through the skin and, bloody, were poking out of the top of her foot. She gagged and felt her head thud hard against the tile floor as blackness embraced her like oily smoke.

Chapter 37

Vimal Lahori was back in his beloved bus station, the Port Authority.

Better this time. Less pain. The horror of the killing had diminished. And he had money.

At home last night, before he’d gone down to the studio to “have words” with his father, he’d walked upstairs on the pretext of getting a sweater. He’d done that... but he’d also taken the three thousand dollars — his three thousand — that Nouri had paid him, as well as his wallet. He had lifted another two hundred of his father’s because he was owed that, and much, much more, for the cutting jobs his father had rented him out for. He got his phone too. A razor, toothpaste and brush, the antiseptic Adeela had given him. Some bandages. And of course his Book, his most precious possession.

Vimal had been planning all along to escape last night as soon as his parents were busy with their game or had gone to sleep. He’d agreed to some ambiguous peace treaty with his father, which Vimal hadn’t meant a word of. But then it turned out that his father hadn’t meant a word of it either. He should have guessed that Papa was lying — and going to entrap him in the basement prison; the bottled water stacked up, the food in the fridge, the sleeping bag. Lite fucking beer?

Goddamn it.

He shivered with rage.

Vimal was now walking away from the Greyhound window. The one-way ticket cost him $317.50. The journey from New York to the station at 1716 7th Street, in Los Angeles, would take sixty-five hours.

Thinking about what was coming next, Vimal Lahori was sorrowful, he was terrified.

But these emotions were outweighed by the exhilaration he felt, and he knew he was doing the right thing. He turned his phone on and texted his mother that he loved her. And texted his brother that he loved him too and he’d be in touch from someplace out of town.

He then bought a soda — a large Cherry Coke, a secret delight (his father never let him have any beverage with caffeine because he was, for some reason, convinced it would make his son’s hands shake, resulting in a flawed diamond facet). Vimal bought a slice of pizza too. He stood, eating and sipping, at a dirty high-top table. There were no chairs for customers. To encourage turnover in the “dining room,” he guessed.

He looked into what amounted to his luggage — a canvas bag he’d bought for a dollar at a grocery store. And he took out what gave him as much comfort as the Port Authority itself.

The Book. A holy book in a way. It was something he turned to a lot, something that comforted him, that never failed to astonish.

The Collected Sketches of Michelangelo had been printed years ago, in the early part of the prior century. Vimal considered the master to be the greatest sculptor who’d ever lived and, given his own passion, it was logical that he’d be drawn to the man and his art. The artist was Vimal’s god. Oh, he liked pop music, manga and would have liked binge-worthy TV, had his father allowed him to watch much of it. But he loved Michelangelo and, in those moments when his ancestral country’s religious legacy — reincarnation — seemed plausible to him (this was rare, usually after wine), he fantasized that the ancient sculptor’s soul — part of it, at least — resided within Vimal himself.

Of course, Michelangelo was a prodigy. He was under thirty when he sculpted David and Pietà. Vimal didn’t rise to that level yet, though his own works, crafted in marble and granite and lapis, usually placed first or second in competitions around the New York City area.

But it had occurred to Vimal, with a shock, recently, that there was possibly a subtler, a subconscious, reason for his obsession with the man. Once, flipping through the pages, on break at Mr. Patel’s, he realized that the majority of Michelangelo’s sketches depicted in the volume, while superbly executed, were incomplete.

The man seemed incapable of finishing his drawings.

His 1508 study for Adam was merely a head and chest and floating, detached arms. His sketch for a Risen Christ featured a nearly faceless Jesus.

Incomplete...

Those sketches are just like me, Vimal had concluded, while acknowledging that the “disembodied” theory sounded like bad pop psychology on a bad TV show.

There was another parallel too between the two men. Vimal had shared this with Adeela and she’d given him one of her wry smiles. Meaning, Really? Aren’t you carrying this a bit far?

Well, no, he wasn’t.

The analogy was this: Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor before all else and only reluctantly would take on commissions for paintings. He wasn’t exactly a hack at this, of course, having produced the Sistine Chapel ceiling in merely four years, as well as The Last Judgment and dozens of other masterpieces. But Michelangelo’s passions lay elsewhere, with marble not canvas. And for Vimal, it was marble not jewelry.

Painting and diamond cutting, in their respective cases, simply didn’t ignite that undeniable, searing fire that flares when you’re doing the one thing that God, or the gods, or whatever, put you on earth for.

As he finished the greasy slice and slurped the last of the soda, anger at his father once more swelled. Then he tamped it down and, with a last look at the Poseidon statue, closed the book and replaced it in his bag.

Walking with his head mostly down — he wore a black baseball cap — he left the pizzeria and avoided the clusters of police, making his way to the waiting area. The bus would be leaving soon.

He sat down on a plastic chair, next to a pleasant-looking girl in her late twenties. He noticed from her ticket that, for the first leg of the journey at least, she would be on the same bus that his ticket was for. The address sticker on her guitar case was Springfield, Illinois. She wasn’t very Midwest in appearance, at least from Vimal’s limited knowledge of the region. Her hair was green and blue and she had three nose studs and a ring in her eyebrow. Vimal supposed that her dreams of stages and cabarets and theater in New York had come to an end. Her stoic face suggested this too. Wistful, as if she’d lost something important and given up looking. Which seemed sadder than sad.

Then Vimal reflected that this might be his imagination and she was going to spend a few days with some former roommates from college, drink plenty of wine from a box, sleep with a local bar boy and have the time of her life.

What was the truth?

The older he got, Vimal Lahori had decided, the less he knew.

A staticky voice — of indeterminate gender — announced that the bus was ready to depart. He leaned down, gathered his bag and rose.

“Any idea where he’s run off to?”

“None,” Sachs explained to Rhyme, who’d asked about Vimal Lahori, after the young man’s prison break from his own house. Clever, pretending to grind away on sculpture, all the while you’re cutting steel bars.

Sick, of course, that his father had decided to play jailer.

Sachs continued, “He took about three thousand from his father — though his mother tells me that it’s really his. Lahori takes everything the boy makes as a diamond cutter and banks it. He gives the kid an allowance.”

“At his age? Hm.”

The doorbell rang and Thom went to answer it. He returned a few moments later with Edward Ackroyd, dressed in a two-piece suit, pinstripe light gray, perfectly pressed. White shirt and red-and-blue-striped tie. Rhyme pictured him wearing this getup for a meeting at 10 Downing Street.

“Lincoln. Amelia.”

He’d given up, at last, on the “sir” and “ma’am.” Rhyme imagined that Scotland Yard protocols were largely baked in.

The insurance man said hello as well to Cooper.

“Any new leads?” he asked.

Rhyme offered the latest developments.

“Vimal Lahori.” Ackroyd nodded. “A bit more to go on. But locked in his basement?” A brief frown at this news. “And now he’s vanished. Doesn’t he know he’s in danger? Well, pointless question. Of course he does. But why doesn’t he want help?”

Sachs said, “The basement’s a clue. My guess is he’s avoiding his father as much as he’s avoiding Forty-Seven. We bring him in, he can’t escape Dad.”

Thom offered to take his coat but Ackroyd said he couldn’t stay; he had a meeting with another client.

The Brit said to Sachs, “So you met his family. Surely they must have some idea where he’s gone. Friends, other relatives.”

“They gave me a few names but nothing panned out. Vimal didn’t share much with anybody in the family. Dad offered five hundred dollars as a reward and the son of a diamond cutter Vimal was working for turned him in.” A shrug. “I suppose the father’s doing the same thing again. Maybe that’ll give us a lead. And they’ll contact me, if they hear.”

“You’re sure?” Rhyme asked. “They won’t try to lock him up again?”

“I waved the obstruction-of-justice flag. I think they’ll toe the line.”

Ackroyd told them that he himself was making little headway. “The diamond rough your unsub, the Promisor, stole at Patel’s has just vanished, which bears out that he’s a mad man and hoarding the stones. No one else has reported any calls from him, asking about the apprentice. And people are even more reluctant to talk than ever. He’s scaring everyone. I’ve heard anecdotes that the sales of engagement rings are down twenty percent.”

Well, Unsub 47 may have been psychotic but, if his goal was to make a statement about the sanctity of diamonds, he was pretty damn effective.

“Now, I could have called that in, of course. But I wanted to stop by. Brought you a present.” He was speaking to Rhyme. He reached into the plastic bag he held and extracted a box about six by nine inches, glossy, pictures of some electronic product on the top. He stripped off the plastic wrapping and extracted what seemed to be a tablet device. He set it next to Rhyme’s chair and pushed a button on the side. It came to life and a menu appeared. “Electronic crosswords. These are cryptics. There’re over ten thousand, all different levels of difficulty.”

Rhyme explained to Sachs that Ackroyd and his husband competed at crossword tournaments. And he gave her a brief description of how cryptics worked.

She was even less a game person than Rhyme but admitted that she found the idea intriguing.

Ackroyd said, “And this unit? It’s voice-activated. Made for...”

“You can say ‘crip’ or ‘gimp.’ I do.”

“I was going to say ‘handicapped.’ I don’t think that’s correct, however.”

“My response is what is a four-letter word starting with ‘s’ and completing the sentence, ‘I don’t give a...’?”

Ackroyd laughed briskly.

“Well, thank you, Edward.” Rhyme was truly pleased. He played chess some — and had tried Go, an Asian board game that was even more complicated. The cryptics seemed more up his alley. He loved words and how they fit together. The puzzles would be a good way to keep his mind active, a shield against his worst enemy: boredom.

After Ackroyd left, the team received a call from Rodney Szarnek. He said that Vimal’s phone had been detected. “He’s out of the area. GPS puts him on an expressway in Pennsylvania. Headed west. Doing sixty miles an hour or so. He’s driving or on a bus.”

“Bus probably,” Sachs said. “The family only has one car and my security team’d spot him if he snuck back to take it.”

“Maybe a friend’s driving him,” Cooper suggested.

“He made that call from the Port Authority on Saturday,” Rhyme pointed out. “Maybe he was checking out bus schedules then. I’d go with bus. You and Lon Sellitto set up a tracking operation. Get in touch with the state police in Pennsylvania.”

When he disconnected, Rhyme called Lon Sellitto to arrange to intercept the vehicle.

The doorbell rang again and Rhyme glanced at the security video screen. A short, round balding man stood there. He didn’t recognize him but had a pretty good idea who he was.

Thom slipped a glance toward Rhyme, who said, “Go ahead, let him in.”

A moment later the man was in the doorway. He glanced around the lab. He seemed impressed — and pleased — more than surprised.

“Captain Rhyme.”

Rhyme didn’t introduce him to the others. He said “Let’s go in the den. Across the hall.”

If Sachs or Cooper was curious about the visitor, their interest didn’t show and they went back to their work. Just as well.

What would they think if they knew...?

Chapter 38

Antonio Carreras-López wasn’t as portly as he’d seemed in the security video, though he was a solid man. Rhyme wondered if he’d been a weight lifter or wrestler in his youth. Now apparently in his late fifties, he still seemed quite strong though some of the weight was gone to fat.

His black hair, what remained, that is, was swept back and fixed in place with spray or cream. He wore glasses with thick tortoiseshell frames, perched atop a fleshy nose. His eyes were amused. Quick too.

The men were in the small formal room, across the entry hall from the parlor. Three walls were lined with bookcases and on the other hung four muted prints of pen-and-ink drawings of New York City in the nineteenth century. The guest said, “As I told you on the phone, I represent Mr. Eduardo Capilla — El Halcón — though I’m not admitted to the bar here in the United States. I am, however, supervising his defense.”

“Who are the lawyers representing him here?”

Carreras-López mentioned three names — all lawyers from Manhattan, though the trial was in the Eastern District of New York, which included Long Island, Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. Rhyme knew of the lead trial attorney, a high-profile and respected criminal defense lawyer. Rhyme had never testified in a case involving any of his clients.

He wasn’t sure this would have been a conflict, but the situation was certainly fraught with the smoke of impropriety so he thought it best, if he proceeded, that there be no connection with El Halcón’s legal team. The prosecutor on the other side was Henry Bishop, and Rhyme knew he hadn’t been involved in a case he’d prosecuted.

“Now, Captain Rhyme, as a first matter...”

“I’m retired and, please, ‘Lincoln’ is fine.”

“And I am Tony. Now the first thing. I will give you this.” He pushed an envelope toward Rhyme. “It’s a one-thousand-dollar retainer. Which makes you a contractor with the defense team. The attorney-client privilege extends to you now.”

So they would not have to speak hypothetically any longer.

Carreras-López hesitated as he held out a receipt, his eyes on Rhyme’s arm.

“I can sign,” Rhyme said, and he took the pen the lawyer offered and jotted his signature on the document. “Now. The details?”

“Yes. In essence: My client came into the U.S. illegally. We admit this. He flew to Canada on a commercial flight and entered legally into that country. But then he flew in a helicopter to Long Island, entering illegally. Yes, the craft flew under the radar, but that is not illegal in a helicopter. There are no minimum altitude requirements. So there is no FAA violation. El Halcón was met by a bodyguard who worked for the owner of a warehouse that El Halcón was going to buy. While the pilot waited, they drove to this complex so Mr. Capilla could look it over and discuss the purchase with the man.”

“Any controlled substances anywhere in this scenario?”

“No, sir. Absolutely not. The warehouse was solely for a transportation company that my client wanted to start up in America.”

“Aside from this, any warrants on your client?”

“None.”

“Then why enter illegally?”

“The answer is that my client’s profession in Mexico is well known. It is suspected that he is responsible for the influx of large quantities of drugs into the U.S. He was concerned that he would be detained at Passport Control on technicalities. Perhaps imprisoned on trumped-up charges.”

“Go on.”

“At the warehouse my client met with the owner of the facility—”

“His name?”

“Christopher Cody. They discussed the terms of the deal and my client took a tour. Now, it happened that Cody was under investigation on some weapons charges. Completely independent of my client. El Halcón did not know this. A local police officer was conducting some surveillance. When my client and the bodyguard showed up he grew suspicious. He thought these might be arms dealers. He sent a picture of my client to his office, which alerted the FBI. They identified my client, checked with Border Protection and learned he had entered illegally. A team of FBI and some local police hurried to the warehouse. A gunfight ensued. Mr. Cody and his bodyguard were killed, and one FBI agent and the local officer who had taken the photos were badly injured.”

Facts Rhyme was aware of.

“The prosecution claimed what?”

A shrug. “What they always claim. That officers and agents approached, calling for surrender, and the men inside opened fire.”

“And your client’s story?”

“The officers fired first without identifying themselves and the men in the warehouse returned fire. They believed it was a robbery or hijacking. In any event, my client did not participate. He was in the restroom at the time. On the floor, hiding, so he would not be hit by a stray bullet. And, quite frankly, terrified. There he stayed until the firing stopped. He came out, saw what had happened and was arrested.”

“Did the other men with him, inside, give any statements?”

“Mr. Cody was killed instantly, a shot in the head. The bodyguard survived for a day but never regained consciousness.”

“Tell me about the tainted evidence.”

“You see, when my client was being arrested he was placed facedown on the floor of the warehouse. At one point, an agent or officer — he couldn’t see who — came up to him and searched him. But then my client felt something pressed against his hands and clothing. It was cloth. He is sure the officer was transferring gunshot residue he’d lifted from Cody’s hands. When he asked what the man was doing, my client was told, ‘Shut the fuck up. Two of our guys’re shot to hell. You’re going away forever.’”

Rhyme said, “So the prosecution claims that after Cody was killed, your client picked up his gun and shot the officer?”

“That’s right.”

“Friction ridges — fingerprints — on the weapon?”

“Only Cody’s, not my client’s. There were no gloves or rags nearby he might’ve used to hold the gun but the prosecutor’s position is that he undid his shirt cuff button and held the pistol in the sleeve. That would explain the gunshot residue and the absence of fingerprints.”

“Clever theory. What are the exact charges?”

“The illegal entry into the U.S. — it’s called ‘entry at improper time or place’ under the statute. The charge carries a fine and imprisonment of up to six months. A federal misdemeanor. The other charges are what you’d expect: weapons, assault on a law enforcement officer, attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, Cody’s death — felony murder. We admit he was in the country illegally and he is willing to plead to that. So, now, that is our situation.” He eyed Rhyme closely. “You said you were busy. Working a big case.”

“I am, yes.”

“I am asking you is it possible to take some time and look at the evidence, see if you can find proof that the officers at the scene planted that residue?”

Rhyme’s head eased back. He gazed at the ceiling for a moment. Thoughts swirled.

Finally he said, “I’ll need all the forensic files. Yours and the prosecution’s.”

Carreras-López said, “I’ll have copies of the files sent over. A half hour. Gracias, sir. God bless you.” He pulled on his coat and left.

Rhyme placed a call to Ron Pulaski. He would have liked to pursue the El Halcón tainted-evidence matter on his own but that wasn’t possible. There’d be some fieldwork.

“Lincoln.”

“Need you to do something for me.”

“Sure. This about Forty-Seven?”

“No. A different case. There’ll be a box of files over here in a half hour. I’ll need you to collect it and take it home.”

“Home?” the officer asked. “As in home-home?”

“Exactly. I need a complete analysis of all the firearm, clothing, electrostatics and surface trace from the scene.”

“Sure, Lincoln.”

“Then I need you to do something else.”

“What’s that?”

“Keep quiet. Don’t say a word about this to any other living soul. You got that?”

Silence.

“You got that, Rookie?”

“Yes.” Pulaski was whispering, as if speaking any louder would itself be a breach of the rules.

Chapter 39

Another earthquake.”

Rhyme glanced toward Mel Cooper, who’d just delivered this news. The tech’s eyes were on the TV.

He followed the man’s gaze. On the screen, news cameras were filming an apartment in Brooklyn, engulfed in swirling flames and smoke. The cause was, as with the others, a gas line rupture, which had followed on the heels of the second quake.

Now the scene shifted to a press conference at City Hall. Rhyme read the closed-captioned account of the mayor’s words: In light of the second quake, the city had decided to reject Northeast Geo’s request to resume its geothermal drilling even on a limited basis. The talking heads appeared again: Ezekiel Shapiro — the bearded activist leader of the One Earth movement; Dwyer, head of Northeast Geo; and C. Hanson Collier, CEO of Algonquin Power.

As they spoke, the scene shifted to the blazing apartment building, surrounded by the clutter of fire trucks and emergency vehicles.

The text at the bottom reported three fatalities. The victims had been engulfed by flames.

The door buzzer sounded. Thom was out, at the store; Rhyme looked at the security camera screen. It was Lon Sellitto. Didn’t he have a goddamn key? After all these years? They should have one cut for him. Rhyme buzzed him in.

“Okay. Are you ready for this?”

Rhyme sighed and lifted an eyebrow.

Sellitto nodded at the screen, on which were stark images of brawny, spiraling flames, a black torrent of smoke.

The crawl at the bottom of the screen: Multiple fatalities.

The detective said, “Linc, that wasn’t from the quakes. All the fires were arson — just staged to make it look like the earthquakes caused ’em.”

“What?” Mel Cooper asked.

“That latest quake, the second one? Right after, this woman at home by Cadman Plaza — it’s near where the epicenter is — smells gas really strong. She thinks the quake broke the line and it’s gonna blow. She’s home with her kid, a baby. But the good news is she’s got a broken ankle. I mean, a totally fucked-up ankle. She falls and breaks it again and passes out.”

Good news...?

“But then she wakes up a few seconds later and she’s trapped. So what’s she do?”

“Move it along, Lon.”

“She has a brainstorm. She can’t get out, can’t walk, but maybe she can keep the gas from blowing up. She opens the access door in the bathroom, the door to the pipes, you know? And she turns a handheld shower sprayer on full and douses the basement, hoping to hit the pilot light of the water heater and put it out. While she’s spraying, she’s screaming her head off and somebody hears and gets the fire department and police there. They shut the gas off outside and get the woman and her baby out, and the other tenants.”

Rhyme glanced at the TV screen, the cyclone of fire. “So that fire was a second one.”

“Yeah.” Sellitto added with a grimace, “Three fatalities. It was a couple blocks from Claire’s.”

“Who?”

“Claire Porter. That shower thing. She was really thinking on her feet.” Sellitto winced. “Bad choice of words. She’s in emergency surgery right now for her ankle. Anyway. A marshal goes down to the basement to check out the leak. Guess what he finds?”

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow.

“If looks could talk,” Sellitto said.

“They can. Mine did. Let’s keep going.”

“IED on the gas line.”

Now Rhyme’s full attention settled. An improvised explosive device. He said, “Set up to cut through the line and let the gas flow for, what, five minutes then ignite it?”

“Ten minutes.”

“And the water she sprayed disabled it.”

“Bingo, Linc. Sometimes you do catch a break. The device was plastic and housed in a thermostat casing. If it works right and ignites the gas, there’s virtually nothing left and even if the fire marshal finds something, it’ll look like a melted, burnt-up thermostat, sitting in the rubble. Perfect arson. No evidence. No accelerant.”

The door buzzer again. It was a solid man in a black suit, holding a large carton. Rhyme hit the intercom. “Is that from Tony?”

Carreras-López: El Halcón’s lawyer.

The man leaned close to the speaker. “That’s right, sir.”

The case files he’d asked for, regarding the evidence-tampering claim. He glanced at Sellitto to see if he was paying any attention. But, no. The detective and Cooper were staring at the scene of the fire on the TV.

“Just leave it inside the front door. On the table.”

“Yessir.”

Rhyme hit the door lock, and the man set down the box of the El Halcón case files and left.

He turned to Sellitto. “Fire marshal’s gone back and checked out the prior fires?”

“Yep, every fire that started after the first and second earthquakes? There’re the shells of fake thermostats. Just like at Claire’s.”

Serial fires with sophisticated IEDs. What’s that about?

“As if that wasn’t interesting enough, here’s the juicy part. As soon as it was labeled arson the fire marshal called RTCC to pull the nearby video cams from the past few weeks.”

The computer surveillance center down at One Police Plaza.

He held up his phone. “And look who got videoed slipping into and out of Claire Porter’s building last week. The basement.”

It was a screenshot of a man in dark clothing and a stocking cap, carrying an orange vest and yellow hard hat. A bag was slung over his shoulder. It appeared heavy.

Identical to the image of Unsub 47 as he’d left the geothermal site later that same day, heading for the subway — minus the bag.

Sellitto said, “I had RTCC pull all the videos from her apartment to the drilling site. He walks right to the construction site, puts on his hat and vest and vanishes inside. It was an hour before he left and walked to the subway. And then I ordered videos near the sites of all the other gas fires. Within the space of two hours, Unsub Forty-Seven broke into every single one of them.”

Jesus. The unsub planted gas line bombs meant to mimic fires after the quakes? What was this about? Rhyme said, “I want to see the device. Get it here fast.”

“Already ordered. I thought you would. It’ll be here any minute.”

“And have an ECT crew walk the grid around where it was found in Ms. Porter’s building. Probably contaminated as hell but we’ll give it a shot.”

“K. Will do. Thanks. I gotta go. Mayor wants a briefing. You’ll copy me on all your brilliant insights, right?”

Rhyme grunted.

Sellitto pulled his jacket off the hook and left. Just as he stepped through the door, Ron Pulaski arrived, nodded to the lieutenant and continued into the hallway. Rhyme wheeled into the hallway to greet him.

The young officer sniffed the air and said, “I smell gas.”

Rhyme realized he did too, very faint. “It was Lon.” He explained about the IED that ate through the line at Claire Porter’s apartment. “Disarmed before it ignited. But anybody nearby would’ve picked up some odorant.” Since explosive — and suffocating — natural gas was odorless, sulfur-based chemicals, reeking of rotten eggs, were added to warn of leaks.

He explained they’d learned that the fires after the earthquakes were actually arson.

The young officer frowned at this. “Who set them?”

“It appears... and note that word. It appears to be Unsub Forty-Seven.”

“No way,” Pulaski muttered.

“We’ll see.” Rhyme nodded toward the box of files that Carreras-López’s driver had delivered. “Those’re the files in the El Halcón. Can you run the analysis tonight?”

Not really a question.

“Sure.”

“And I’m going to need you to walk the grid at the scene.”

“What scene?”

“Long Island. The warehouse where the El Halcón shoot-out took place. It’ll all be in the file. And remember—”

The Rookie whispered, “Not a word to anyone.”

Rhyme winked. Pulaski blinked at the alien expression,

The young officer collected the box for his furtive assignment and left.

Back to the parlor — where nobody seemed to have noticed Pulaski’s arrival, sans box, or his departure with it.

The buzzer rang yet again and Rhyme recognized the caller. He instructed the security system to open the door.

Into the parlor walked an officer from the Bomb Squad, based out of the 6th Precinct in Greenwich Village.

“Brad.”

“Lincoln.” Lieutenant Bradley Geffen, a compact, gray-haired man, walked forward and had no hesitation shaking Rhyme’s somewhat functioning right hand. Often people were intimidated by the disability but this was a man who would lie on his belly with tweezers and screwdriver and dismantle IEDs that could turn him into red vapor. Not much fazed him. If he resembled anyone, it would be a drill sergeant, with his sinewy, etched face, crew cut, piercing eyes.

He nodded a greeting to the others and stepped to an examination table in the parlor.

“What do we have?” Rhyme asked.

“Our boys and gals went over it.” He extracted an evidence bag from the attaché case he carried. “Never seen anything like it. But it’s pretty damn smart.”

He held it out for Rhyme to look at. Inside the bag was what appeared to be a typical white plastic thermostat housing along with some other metallic and plastic parts, none of which he recognized.

Turning it over, Geffen said, “There. See that hole? A timer opened a little spigot. Acid dripped out and melted the gas line. About ten minutes later, this part...” He touched a small gray box with two electrodes on it. “It would strike a spark. That would ignite both the gas and the solvent — it’s very flammable. Now, the delay was smart. It let the room build up with gas but not force all the air out.”

A room filled with gas only will sometimes not blow up. As with all fires, both air and fuel are required.

“We’ll take over, Bradley. Thanks.”

Geffen nodded and stepped out of the room. He moved stiffly, the result of an IED that detonated at a woman’s health clinic during the render-safe operation. (There was grim irony in the fanatics’ tactic: They’d planted the bomb between two buildings — the clinic and what they hadn’t realized was a church’s daycare center. If the structures hadn’t been evacuated, the daycare center would have sustained far more damage and injuries than the clinic.)

Cooper filled out the chain-of-custody card and began his analysis. He found no prints, and sent swabs out for DNA testing. He took a sample of the acid and ran it through the gas chromatograph. It would take some minutes for the results.

“Detonates by digital timer,” Cooper said as he examined the components with tweezers and a probe. “Battery life about two months.”

“It doesn’t look handmade,” Rhyme observed.

“No. Professionally assembled. Sold on the arms market, I’d imagine.”

“Any idea where it would’ve come from?”

“Nope. Nothing I’ve ever come across.” Cooper looked over the chromatograph/spectrometer. “Got the acid used to melt the line. Well, it’s not acid. It’s trichlorobenzene. Gas pipes are usually polyethylene and impervious to most acids. But benzene derivatives will melt them. And—”

“No. Can’t be.” Rhyme was staring at the evidence charts.

“What, Lincoln?”

What he was thinking seemed impossible. Or would have, if he hadn’t just learned about Unsub 47’s likely planting of the gas line IEDs.

“Get Lon back here. And do you have Edward Ackroyd’s number?”

“Somewhere.”

“Find it. I want him here. Now.”

“Sure.”

“Dial Sachs,” he commanded his phone.

She answered a minute later. “Rhyme.”

“I need you to run another scene, Sachs. Well, to be accurate, to run a scene you’ve run before but to look for something else.”

“Where?”

“It’s the geothermal site. The drilling shafts again.”

Where, he deduced, though she hadn’t mentioned it, she’d nearly been buried alive.

Sachs was silent.

There were plenty of competent evidence collection techs who could walk the grid and could probably find what he needed. But no one was better than Amelia Sachs. He wanted her, and only her.

“Sachs?”

“I’ll run it,” she said in a flat voice. “Tell me what I’m looking for.”

Chapter 40

Forty minutes later Sellitto and Ackroyd were in the parlor, along with Mel Cooper. Amelia Sachs was joining them, walking through the elegant archway that separated the hallway from the parlor.

Rhyme noted that she didn’t seem troubled to have revisited her near-burial ground. The hollow look on her face was gone completely and she wore the keen expression of a hunter. He noticed mud speckling her jeans.

Sellitto asked, “What’s this all about, Linc?”

“Let me try this out on you. Theory only. But let’s see. Whatever our unsub’s interest in diamonds is, he’s got another mission. He’s behind the earthquakes.”

Edward Ackroyd gave a brief laugh. “Behind the earthquakes? You mean... somehow he’s caused them?”

“Exactly.”

Sellitto said, “Better keep going on this one, Linc. Fill in the gaps. I see a lot of ’em.”

Rhyme was staring at the ceiling. His face knotted. “We... I should’ve thought better. Why would Forty-Seven go to the trouble to get a hard hat and go into the jobsite to buy a weapon from somebody? They’d meet in a bar or on the street somewhere. No, he needed access to the site itself.”

“Why?” the detective asked.

Rhyme looked at Sachs, who said, “I was just down to the site again. I found traces of RDX near several of the shafts.”

The main ingredient in C4 plastic explosive.

“At a construction site?” Sellitto asked. “C4’s never used commercially.”

It was a military explosive.

“And the site manager told me that one of his workers has gone missing. It was right after Unsub Forty-Seven was in the site. And there was a half ton of grout missing from the pallets in Area Seven.”

“Grout?” Cooper asked.

Rhyme explained, “It’s Forty-Seven’s plan. It’s why he’s here: planting gas line bombs and C4 charges to mimic earthquakes. Last week he placed the gas line IEDs in buildings near the geothermal site. Then he goes to the site, in his hard hat and vest, and meets the now-missing worker, who takes him to Area Seven. He drops C4 charges down some or all of the shafts, and the worker pours grout down them so that when the charges blow, you won’t hear the explosion. Then Forty-Seven ditches the empty shoulder bag and leaves — where we see him on the subway. Later that night, I’m guessing, he kills the worker and disposes of the body.”

“Pretty fucking bizarre, Linc. But can that even happen, explosions causing earthquakes?”

“That’s why I asked our expert here.” He looked at Edward Ackroyd. “You know if there’ve ever been any insurance claims because explosions in mines caused earthquakes?”

The Englishman reminded them of his earlier thoughts, about fracking and geothermal drilling potentially leading to quakes. “But as for explosions? I’ve never heard of that. But I’ll ask my research associate again. Somebody here or in London could have a look, I’m sure.”

“Do that, if you would.”

Ackroyd stepped to the corner and pulled out his phone. After a brief conversation he returned. “Sorry to report, our head researcher’s never heard of an earthquake induced through explosions. She’ll ask at headquarters in London and our other offices when they’re open. My initial thought is that it’s rather unlikely.”

Rhyme noticed Sachs open her purse. She withdrew a business card, read a number and placed a call.

Waiting for the connection, she said to the room, “Don McEllis, the state mining inspector.”

A voice answered, “Hello, Amelia. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she said shortly. “Listen, you’re on speaker here with Lincoln Rhyme, an NYPD consultant, and a few other people.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Dan, this is Lincoln.”

“Don,” Sachs corrected.

“We need to know if somebody can induce an earthquake by explosion.”

There was a pause. “You think these quakes in the past few days aren’t naturally occurring?”

“We aren’t sure. Can explosives cause an earthquake?”

“Well, in theory, yes, but you’d need a nuclear device, in just the right place, just the right megatons. But short of that, no.”

“C4 couldn’t do it? Do you know C4?”

“Plastic explosives, sure. But, no, it’d be impossible. Even a ton or two placed right on a fault line. That’s not how quakes work. But...”

Silence.

“Hello?” Rhyme asked.

They heard fast keyboarding. “Okay, okay. Give me an email address. I want you to see this.”

Cooper did so and a moment later a tone announced the arrival of a message.

McEllis said, “I’ve sent two seismograms.”

Cooper’s astute fingers typed on the keyboard, and the charts — with the familiar waves anyone with a TV and a love of natural disaster blockbusters would recognize — appeared on the screen. “Got them.”

The inspector continued, “The top one is from the most recent tremor here.”

At the far left, the stylus’s black line rose and fell only a little as it moved to the right over the course of several minutes. Then halfway along the chart the line jumped up and down in series of broad, sharp waves. As time passed, they tapered and grew smaller and smaller until the line returned to what it had been before the tremor.

“Now look at the second chart. It’s a record of a real earthquake, one in California. It seems similar but there’s one subtle difference. In the real quake, we can see just a bit of pre-quake ground motion a few seconds before the main disturbance. There’s none of that in the tremors here.”

Rhyme said, “So the explosions weren’t inducing an earthquake; they were mimicking one.”

“Exactly.” A moment later McEllis said, “But then how do you explain the fires... Ah, wait: Unless they were caused by charges too — separate ones, to make it more credible that it was a quake.”

When no one answered, he asked in an uncertain voice, “What exactly is this all about, Amelia?”

“We’re not sure yet, Don. But if you could — please keep it to yourself.”

“Of course. Sure.”

She looked at Rhyme, meaning: Anything else?

He shook his head. She thanked McEllis and they disconnected the call.

Rhyme echoed, “And what is this all about? What’s our unsub up to?”

“Terrorism,” Sachs suggested, then shook her head. “But nobody’s come forward. And why make an attack look like a natural disaster? That’s not the terrorist profile.”

Sellitto said, “One idea: He staged the quakes to cover up the arson. Maybe he’s working for a landlord wants to torch his buildings for insurance.”

Ackroyd said, “With respect, Lieutenant, it’d be the most elaborate insurance scam in history. And, besides, professional arsonists never risk murder or assault charges. They only torch buildings when they’re empty.”

“Granted.”

Rhyme said, “Well, there’s another way to look at it. What McEllis suggested: The fires were cosmetic. Just to give more credibility to the quakes — so that nobody would look too closely at suspicious seismograms. He wants them to seem real... How’s this: He wants to stop the geothermal operation.”

Sellitto offered, “Who’s on that list? Energy industry companies would see geothermal as a threat. Somebody wants the drilling site land. It’s prime real estate.”

“Environmentalists,” Cooper suggested. “That One Earth crowd? Though I don’t think tree huggers use C4 very much... or burn down buildings with people inside.”

Sachs said, “Whatever he’s up to, Forty-Seven seems like a triggerman or mercenary to me. Access to the arms market for the C4 and gas devices. Knows weapons. Doesn’t hesitate to kill. Somebody hired him, I’ll bet.”

Rhyme was inclined to agree. He then said, “One thing: We’ve got a decision to make.”

Sachs was nodding. “To tell or not to tell.”

“Announce the fact they’re fake?” Cooper asked.

“Right. He could have a dozen more IEDs planted in the shafts.”

Sellitto said, “There’ll be some panic. Everybody’ll think terrorism.”

“So, they think terrorism,” Rhyme countered. “I think we have to. And tell people in the general area of the drilling site that there might be a bomb on their gas lines. They should look for them. And announce that if there’s another tremor, they should evacuate or check for gas immediately.”

“It’ll be the commissioner’s and City Hall’s call, but if we do announce, we tip our hand,” Sellitto said. “The perp might book on out of town. Evidence’ll disappear.”

As for the last concern, Rhyme was amused: It was very difficult to make evidence disappear from him.

“If I may make an observation?” Ackroyd said.

“Yeah, sure,” Sellitto offered.

“I don’t doubt this fellow is deranged and has some perverse obsession with diamonds. But if he’s basically a mercenary, hired to sabotage the drilling, well, as soon as he finds out we’re onto him, he could sell my client’s rough as soon as he can and leave town. I think I should contact dealers again and explore that possibility.”

Sellitto and Rhyme agreed. Ackroyd pulled on his overcoat and, looking even more like a stolid British detective inspector, left to pursue that lead.

Sellitto too slipped on his jacket. “I’ll go talk to the commissioner and the mayor, recommend we announce the whole thing is probably fake. And I’ll have ESU and Bomb Squad set up a staging area down there. They’ll send a robot down the shafts, see if they can find any more IEDs and render safe.”

For his part, Rhyme had a task too. He placed another call to his spy down in the nation’s capital.

Chapter 41

Trooper J. T. Boyle had had, over the course of his fourteen-year career with the Pennsylvania State Police, some bizarre assignments. Chasing an Amish horse and buggy hijacked by a very non-Amish drunk college kid. The typical cats up trees (“Not our job, ma’am, but I’ll do the best I can”). Birthing babies.

But he’d never pulled over a whole bus before.

This job came as a courtesy to the NYPD, whom Boyle had worked with before and generally liked, though the language of some officers he didn’t approve of. On board the Greyhound he was now trailing was a witness on the run — and, no less, a witness from a case that’d made the news. WKPK, at least. The Promisor — the serial perp murdering young couples who’d just bought their engagement rings. That’d be one sick pup.

A New York detective was sure this witness was on the bus. Their computer department had found his phone and done some kind of high-tech thing so that its GPS kept working, and beaming the location, while incoming and outgoing calls were disabled, so no one could warn him that the police were after him if someone was inclined to do so. The screen showed No Service. He’d get suspicious after a while but after a while didn’t matter; Boyle had him now.

He lit up the Greyhound, which was on its way to Indianapolis. There, according to the ticket the witness, one Vimal Lahori, had bought, he would transfer to a bus for St. Louis. And onward and onward to Los Angeles. They knew his itinerary because they had tracked the phone to the Port Authority bus station in New York and run a scan of the CCTVs in the ticket seller’s cubicles, noting that a young man who fit the description of Vimal had bought such a ticket.

Except he wasn’t going to get any farther than the county lockup ten miles from here. Solely for his own protection. This Promisor knew about him and had already killed one witness. Though Trooper Boyle had to admit that the odds of the suspect getting all the way out here were pretty slim.

The bus eased to the side of the road and Boyle climbed out of his car. He wore the standard PSP trooper outfit: dark slacks, gray shirt, black tie. He pulled on his gray Smokey-Bear hat, with chin strap, and strode to the bus.

The door sha-hushed open.

Eyes scanning the passengers. No obvious threats. Not that he expected any. “Looking for somebody you got on board,” he said softly to the driver, a slim African American whose face registered concern. The decision had been made by the NYPD to not radio or call him earlier; they didn’t know what kind of actor he was and were concerned that the boy would catch any wary behavior, jump off the bus and flee. “He’s not armed. There’ll be no issue there.”

“’Kay. Feel free.”

At least the New York detective, a gruff-sounding guy, said he wasn’t armed. Witnesses generally weren’t but sometimes they were. This kid seemed like he fell into the unarmed category. Besides, he was Indian, as in overseas Indian, and in Boyle’s admittedly limited experience there didn’t seem to be a lot of firepower packed by people of that extraction.

Boyle had memorized the picture of Vimal, and he now made his way through the bus, looking, with a neutral expression, at the faces of the passengers he passed. Terrorism would be on everyone’s mind, of course. A bomb on the bus. Someone with a gun ready to blast away in the name of Allah or for no reason at all.

He nodded when smiled at, and answered questions like “What’s wrong?” and “Is there a problem?” with a noncommittal “Won’t keep you long, folks.”

But darn. He didn’t spot the boy. There were a couple of darker-skinned men but they were all much older and seemed Latino, not Indian.

He returned to the front of the bus and called that detective in New York.

“’Lo?” Lon Sellitto asked.

Unprofessional. But then again these were New Yorkers he was dealing with, whole different kettle of fish.

But by way of object lesson he said, “Sir, this is Trooper J. T. Boyle again. I’m on board the bus and’ve taken a look at all passengers. I don’t see him.”

“Did you—”

“Checked the john too, yessir.”

“—ask the driver if anybody got off at any stop?”

Boyle hesitated. He turned to the driver and asked if anybody’d gotten off at any stop.

“No, sir.”

“No, Detective, nobody got off,” Boyle said, then added, “Detective. Can you call it?”

“What?”

“Can you call the boy’s phone?”

“Oh. Hm. Good plan. Hold on.”

There were some clicks and then Sellitto said, “I’ve got that detective at Computer Crimes who’s been tracking it. Trooper? You’re on with Detective Szarnek.”

“Hey,” came the voice. Boyle heard rock-and-roll music.

These New York folks simply were not to be believed.

“Detective...” He didn’t try the name. “This is Trooper J. T. Boyle, state police.”

“Hi, Trooper.”

“Uhm, hi. Could you call the phone?”

“Sure. I’ll activate it.”

A moment later, the default ringtone of an iPhone bleated. The sound was coming from a row three back from the front. Boyle walked forward to find a passenger reaching into the side compartment of her bag, a frown on her face, and pulling the phone out, staring at it.

“Miss, am I right in figuring that’s not your phone?”

She looked up at him. Her face, surrounded by blue and green hair, was pretty, though in the trooper’s opinion spoiled by the nose studs and the ring in her eyebrow. She said, “No, sir. And I have no idea how it got here.”

Ron Pulaski entered the lab and Rhyme knew immediately two things: He’d had some success and he was as uneasy as hell about it.

“Rookie?”

He nodded, broadly and furtively, if doing both simultaneously were possible. He would have made an absolutely terrible spy.

“The den,” Rhyme said. He glanced back.

What would they say if they knew...?

The men crossed the hall and stepped, and wheeled, inside.

“What do you have?”

“I’m not feeling great about this, Lincoln.”

“Ah, it’s all good.”

“‘All good.’ You know, that sort of rates with that other phrase, ‘No worries.’ You notice people say them when all is not good and when there is something to worry about. I mean, you didn’t just break the law.”

Pulaski had been out to the warehouse where the shoot-out had occurred involving Eduardo Capilla — El Halcón.

“I doubt you did either.”

“Doubt? The place was sealed. You know it was sealed.”

“It’s a crime scene. I would assume it was sealed. Nobody was there, though?”

“No. Just the tape. And the notice that said not to enter. Oh, it also shared that entering was a federal offense.”

“Oh, you don’t take those things seriously, do you, Rookie?”

“Those things? Federal offenses. Of all the things I take seriously, federal offenses hover near the top.”

Rhyme was amused. He’s sounding more and more like me.

“Let’s get going. Where are we?”

From his bag Pulaski extracted a sheaf of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pages. “The ballistic and trace analysis from the prosecution and defense reports. Scene photos, diagrams.”

“Good. Spread them out.”

He did, filling the old, walnut coffee table, whose legs ended in carved claws. Rhyme studied them. He then said, “And samples from Long Island?”

In the interest of keeping the El Halcón mission on the down-low, Rhyme had retained a private forensic lab to analyze the new trace Pulaski had collected from the warehouse and had dropped off there earlier. Pulaski opened an envelope from the service and displayed the results.

“Turn the pages, if you would be so kind, Rookie.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Rhyme read the dense type.

“Now the files from PERT.”

“Not enough that I break into a crime scene. You’ve got me stealing from the FBI headquarters.”

“You didn’t steal a thing, Pulaski. Don’t exaggerate. You took pictures. That’s all.”

“Sounds like a fellow saying he only borrowed that watch from the jewelry counter at Macy’s. I’m just saying.”

The box delivered to his door by the lawyer’s driver wouldn’t have all of the crime scene and agents’ reports, merely what was going to be presented at trial. Rhyme needed to see everything.

From another envelope Pulaski pulled out a dozen more sheets of paper. He’d printed out the images taken at the FBI’s evidence room on his phone’s camera. He set these too in front of Rhyme and, like flipping pages of the score for a pianist, he lifted a page away once Rhyme had finished reading it, exposing the one below.

All right. Good. Taken together, all the paperwork detailed many things that he was interested in: the gunshot residue and other trace found on El Halcón’s hands and clothing, the trace on the floor of the warehouse, the location of the many bullets that had been fired — in the walls and ceiling and floor and the victims’ bodies. The data confirmed that El Halcón’s prints were not on the weapon in question, as Carreras-López had said, though his cuff contained gunshot residue — just where the drug lord had said the arresting officer had smeared a rag or piece of cloth containing the GSR.

Rhyme read everything again.

“What is it, Lincoln?”

Was he being that transparent? He was dismayed by what he’d found.

A failing like this? At least he could be grateful for El Halcón’s attorney — for coming to him and raising the falsified-evidence question. If not for the round, mild-spoken Mexican, the damage would never have come to light.

Pulaski persisted, “Is there a problem?”

“No, no. You’re a godsend, Rookie.”

“You’re being sarcastic.”

“No, I mean it. My delivery doesn’t always match my intent. That’s a quality for us all to guard against.”

“All right. Acknowledged. But come on, tell me. Am I going to get into trouble for this?”

“How much trouble can you get into when your mission is a higher cause?”

Pulaski pulled a tight grimace. “You know, Lincoln, my father always said you can never trust anybody when they answer a question with a question.”

Chapter 42

Hank, there’s a problem.”

The man uttering these words, a slim, baby-cheeked young assistant prosecutor, had not sounded too alarmed when he’d uttered the “P” word. Henry Bishop, the senior federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, remained in high spirits. The case against El Halcón was proceeding well. The groundwork had been laid, and they were just getting to the rock-solid forensics that the experts would present.

Bishop himself was slim, though at six feet, five inches, he appeared far more willowy than he really was. The blond, clean-shaven man worked out daily, and beneath his Brooks Brothers suits lurked muscle. He ticked off a notation on a list — on which many more notations required death by ticking — and looked up. “Yes?”

Larry Dobbs — whom Bishop thought of as First Assistant — continued, “I just got a call from somebody at PERT.”

The FBI’s physical evidence response team.

To Dobbs, Bishop said in a cool voice, “Let’s be clearer. Can you do that?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Now. Specifics.” Bishop was sitting in his office, overlooking the borough of Brooklyn. He noted a haze of smoke on the horizon. From the fire after that earthquake, which had not been far away. He’d felt the tremor in his office.

The young, buttoned-up assistant prosecutor said, “NYPD officer, a uniform, had some questions about the case.”

“Our case?”

“Right,” Dobbs confirmed.

“Well, say, the El Halcón case.”

“Sorry, Hank. The El Halcón case.”

“Not ‘the case.’ There’re a lot of ‘the cases.’”

Dobbs, standing across the bulky desk, said, “El Halcón.”

Bishop mused, “So New York City cop. Questions. Hm.”

The El Halcón investigation involved federal crimes and state crimes but New York had deferred to the feds. Yes, after Bishop got his convictions of El Halcón, the man would also be charged under the state penal code. But that prosecution would be icing on the cake and largely irrelevant, since the Mexican would never get out of federal prison to serve time in the state pen. So why would NYPD get involved? El Halcón had no city nexus.

Dobbs said, “The uniform comes into PERT. He knows all the codes, knows the case numbers, knows the people, knows the filing system. He asks to see the evidence logs. The gatekeeper lets him see everything. ’Cause he was in uniform and he knew everything about the case.”

“You said ‘gatekeeper.’ The way you phrased it, using that word. Assigning blame, are we?”

Dobbs swayed back and forth slowly. Skinny, a live wire of energy. “Occurred to me. Evidence room supervisor lets in a patrol officer whose name isn’t on the official roster and turns over records.” Dobbs added, “Tsk-tsk.”

The man actually said that? Bishop then asked, “Who was running the room? A special agent?”

“No. A civilian with Justice.”

“Oh, good. Heads can roll. And they will. But please. Keep up the narrative.”

“Anyway, the uniform said it was an allied case.”

“Allied case, NYPD? Makes no sense. Nassau County maybe. But not New York City. No NYPD jurisdiction on this one, period. What did he say?”

Dobbs offered, “He didn’t. Just asked for the files. Asked to take copies but the gatekeeper wouldn’t let him. It’s pretty likely, though, the uniform took cell phone shots.”

“The shit, you’re saying,” Bishop barked.

“Once he was finished he made a call. And the gate—”

“Got it, just say ‘civie.’ Fewer syllables.”

Dobbs seemed pleased to deliver the next bit of information. “The civie, she heard him say, ‘Lincoln, I got everything you wanted. Anything else?’”

Oh. The civie gatekeeper was a she. Harder to roll a female head, though it could be done.

Then he focused.

The assistant continued, “‘Lincoln.’ As in Lincoln Rhyme, I’d think. Rhyme works with NYPD a lot and knows PERT. He helped set it up. The guy wrote the book on forensics and crime scene. He’s in a wheelchair, you know.”

“Wheelchair,” Bishop mused. “What the hell did he want our evidence for? And unauthorized copying?” He tried to figure this out. He couldn’t make any headway. He waved Dobbs into a chair — he’d been hovering — and called a friend, a dep inspector at NYPD, and asked if he knew anything about it. But he learned that, no, the NYPD wasn’t pursuing a case against El Halcón. They thought the Mexican was a turd, who didn’t? But the only deaths he’d caused in New York City were from overdosing on his product; the shootout was outside the city limits.

He hung up, staring out the window. Dark-gray smoke still rose. The fire had been bad.

Mentally he kicked around several theories about Rhyme’s involvement. If, in fact, he had been involved.

“Rhyme’s off the force, right? The wheelchair thing, you mentioned.”

“Oh, yeah, Hank. For years. He consults.” Dobbs was really quite a bundle of eager.

“For NYPD. Us too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Has he ever done any consulting for a defense team?”

“I don’t know. He could. Lot of people do.”

“We’ve got a team on El Halcón’s attorney and the rest of his entourage, right?”

Dobbs said, “To the extent we can, Hank. There’re a lot of them. A dozen came up from Mexico City.”

“Find out if any of ’em ever went to Rhyme’s home or office.”

“Sure.”

“Now.”

“Sure.” The assistant made a phone call, had a conversation and a few moments later disconnected. “Well. Try this on, Hank.”

Oh, please. But he just lifted a querying eyebrow.

More eager than ever now. “Tony Carreras-López, El Halcón’s main lawyer from Mexico — we’re on him twenty-four/seven. He was at Rhyme’s place, Central Park West, today. Before that, just before that, he stopped at a bank. Chase. He was inside for fifteen minutes. Then to Rhyme’s, then back to his hotel.”

“Money? Withdrawal? Wire transfer?”

“Don’t know. No probable cause for a warrant, of course, so we couldn’t get any details.”

Was Carreras-López hiring Rhyme as a consultant for the defense to look for holes in the case?

Our case.

My case.

Bishop paused and closed his eyes momentarily. He couldn’t imagine what holes there might be. Of course, no crime scene officer was perfect, no lab analyst was perfect. And someone like Rhyme could very well find something that might derail the entire investigation.

And help that horrific piece of murdering shit, El Halcón, escape justice.

After a moment or two of thought, Bishop decided he had a way to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Yessir?”

“Come into my office.”

“Right away.”

A moment later a clean-cut, gray-suited man of thirty-five stepped into Bishop’s office. He nodded to Bishop and Dobbs.

“Have a seat.”

The man did and Bishop continued, “I need you to start a criminal investigation. Immediately. Tonight.”

“Yessir, of course,” said FBI Special Agent Eric Fallow, withdrawing a notebook from his pocket and uncapping his pen.

Chapter 43

Daryl Mulbry from Alternative Intelligence Service was calling back.

“Hello. Lincoln, this just keeps getting better and better! First, your unsub — what were you calling him?”

“Unsub Forty-Seven.”

“First, Mr. Forty-Seven is a brilliant diamond thief, then it seems he’s a psychotic serial killer who dubs himself the Promisor, and now we see he’s actually a mercenary hired to do some nasty deeds in Brooklyn. Though still a psycho, by the looks of it. Never a dull moment.”

“Daryl?”

A chuckle. “I know, you want to get down to business. First, here’s what I’ve got about your Russian. Or a Russian. Or some Russian. Probably yours. First, some background. There are known routes that operatives and assets take when they leave certain countries, Russia, for instance, and want to come into the U.S. We call it ‘purging,’ as in they purge their background by flying to three or four different cutout locations. One pattern is pretty common: Moscow to Tbilisi to Dubai to Barcelona to Newark. Four separate tickets, four separate identities. And that’s what we think this Russian did. There was no one individual on all of those flights — the separate tickets, separate names. But we took a peek at flight manifests — shhh, it’ll be our secret — and found there was one constant with all of them.”

“The luggage,” Rhyme interrupted.

Sachs was nodding. “He checked the bags separately on each flight but they weighed the same.”

Mulbry laughed with delight. “See, Lincoln, Amelia, I told you you’re just the material we need at AIS! Exactly. What’re the odds that four different men on four different flights would check luggage weighing exactly twelve point three kilos? Nonexistent. Pictures would prove it, and I’m sure you’d love one of his mug but we can’t get those from Passport Control. That would involve the NSA and, well, getting you data for a domestic case would be so... ‘illegal’ is the word that trips into my mind. But we’re convinced it’s your boy.

“The passport for the final leg, when he landed at Newark, was Georgian. Josef Dobyns. Not a watchlist baby. And his address here was a fake one in Paterson, New Jersey. I’ll send you all the names he used on the flights. You can check hotel registries. Though my bet is he’s got another ID that he hasn’t used before.”

“Five passports?” Sachs asked.

Mulbry only chuckled.

Rhyme gave the man Mel Cooper’s email and asked him to send the names on the passports.

“Now,” Mulbry continued, “you were asking about explosives. About a week ago we had an alert about a weapons package that was reportedly smuggled into the East Coast: three one-kilo packets of C4 and a crate of a dozen lehabahs.”

“Of what?”

“Gas line bombs. Lehabahs. The word’s Hebrew. It has two meanings: ‘flame,’ and ‘the tip of a spear or weapon.’”

Which, Rhyme reflected, described the mean little things pretty well. He asked, “A Mossad invention?”

Now that he dabbled in the world of espionage, he’d done some homework on the various intelligence agencies around the world. None was more clever at weaponry, or more talented at its deployment, than the Mossad.

“Yep. For just what you’re talking about: making it seem that there was a gas leak and explosion. Who knows how many Hamas or Hezbollah terrorist homes have gone up in flames quote ‘accidentally’?”

Three loads of C4. They didn’t know how much the unsub had used for the IEDs in the Northeast Geo shafts. They’d have to assume he had some left for at least one more “earthquake.” He had other lehabahs too. How much more carnage did he have in mind?

Mulbry now asked, “So, please, Lincoln, give. What’s this all about?”

“You followed the earthquakes in New York? And the fires?”

“Yes, sure. It’s big news everywhere.”

Sachs explained that their perp was creating the phony quakes and accompanying fires.

“So that’s what he was using the devices for. Hm. Clever.” His job, as head of the AIS, was to come up with ways to, well, alternatively engage the enemy. Faking earthquakes as a mask for arson fell squarely within the AIS toolbox. Mulbry was clearly impressed. “Why?”

Rhyme said, “That we don’t know. Our best guess is to stop the drilling. Somebody doesn’t want that geothermal operation up and running. We don’t see it as political terrorism.”

Mulbry said, “I agree. The C4 shipment and gas bombs raised eyebrows — anything like that always does, of course — but our algorithms scoured the intel and they couldn’t pin the explosive to known terrorist actors. We’ll keep an eye on that side of it, though.”

“Please do,” Sachs said.

“While I’ve got you on the line?”

“Yes, Daryl?”

“I got your email about the dozenal coding — that nobody at NYPD or FBI New York knew anyone who’d ever used it. Thank you again for checking, by the way. Now, actually there’s more to the matter. We were never able to decrypt the messages but we did trace the traffic pattern of a couple of them. To a hotel — a long-stay residence hotel — near the Seine in Paris. The Left Bank. Have you been?”

“No. Go on.”

“It’s remarkable — a whole different smell and feel. And the cultural history. Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialists. I digress.”

True.

“A couple of EVIDINT folks got inside and, my, had the place been scrubbed. And I mean literally: Beaucoup de bleach and le Windex for DNA and fingerprints. Traces of sandpaper to remove something from the floor and Gorilla Glue in places where trace had lodged, then pulling it out. I mean, really, whoever this person or cell is, they’re very, very good. But they missed one thing, a small piece of metal. Didn’t show up in any metal parts database. Homemade. We scanned it. Positive for radium. Not nuclear-device-quality but it might be part of a dirty bomb. Makes us all a bit nervous. Could you take a peek?”

“I will, sure, Daryl. Tell me: What does it look like?”

“Flexible, springy, silver-colored. Typical of mechanical detonators. There’s a trend away from electronic. You know, EMPs — electromagnetic pulses — can take out the digital detonators.”

“Send it overnight.” He gave the man his address.

As soon as they’d disconnected, Rhyme’s phone trilled. It was Crime Scene headquarters in Queens. He picked up and, via speakerphone, had a conversation with an analyst there. The man reported that searching the basement in Claire Porter’s apartment, near Cadman Plaza, had revealed that the fingerprints on and around the gas line were the superintendent’s or were very old and, in any case, came back negative from the IAFIS database. The lock was easily jimmied with basic tools, and whoever did it had apparently taken these with him when he left. The local precinct told him that a canvass of tenants and residents of nearby buildings found no one else who had seen the man in the hard hat and vest.

While he’d been talking to the detective in Brooklyn, Lon Sellitto had called.

Rhyme now called him back at One Police Plaza and hit Speakerphone.

“Got some news. Vimal sent his phone on a bus ride. Trooper tracked it down in Pennsylvania. Slipped it into the bag of some girl. So he’s back to being MIA. Damn smart kid.”

“Well.” Rhyme sighed. Smart indeed.

Sachs said, “He’s got a two-hour head start, wherever he’s going to. He’ll take Amtrak or public transit to Jersey, get to a smaller Greyhound station there. Or Westchester.”

Rhyme told him about the conversation with Mulbry. He had Cooper email the names of the four passports they suspected the unsub had used to travel here.

“K, Linc. I’ll order a canvass of hotels.”

Rhyme reminded him that their spy believed the unsub would have yet another identification, though.

Sellitto said, “Yeah, I’d guess. But we gotta do it.”

“Now, you’ll find this interesting, Lon.” Rhyme reported on the explosives that Mulbry had learned of.

“Israeli intelligence gas bombs? Fuck me.”

“Daryl’s still doing some looking.”

Sellitto said, “Well, one thing you should know, Linc: ESU and Bomb Squad talked to the mayor’s office. They decided not to send robots down the shafts at the geothermal site to try to render safe, but rather to just put bomb curtains over the openings. They think another explosion’ll at least give people in the vicinity ten minutes’ warning to evacuate. And the fire department’s sent extra trucks and crews to stage around the geothermal site — since it’s the hub of the attacks. If there’s another detonation, they’ll be ready to go at the first report of a fire. And...”

Silence.

“Lon?”

“Fucking hell,” the lieutenant muttered.

“What is it?”

“Just saw on the wire: Forty-Seven got another vic.”

Sachs asked, “Engaged couple?”

“No.” A pause, while Sellitto presumably read. “But it’s related. Somehow. Got to be. The vic was Kirtan Boshi. About Vimal’s age, Indian. Worked in the diamond business. An apprentice cutter. Just like Vimal. Can’t be a coincidence.”

“Circumstances?” Sachs asked.

“Basement of a coffee shop in the Fashion District. About a block from where he worked.” Sellitto paused. “Some employees just found the body but looks like he was killed around lunchtime today. Son of a bitch broke his windpipe. Killed him with the box cutter.”

“Kirtan was probably a friend of Vimal’s and knew where he lived. He probably gave the address up.”

“Yeah. He’d been tortured. A mess. And the unsub cut Kirtan’s ring finger off and put it in his mouth. Postmortem, but still.”

“Goddamn it,” Sachs muttered.

Rhyme looked her way.

“We canvassed for anybody who knew Vimal in every store in the Diamond District, Jackson Heights, other parts of Queens and Brooklyn. Never occurred to me to look for diamond cutters in the Fashion District. But Forty-Seven did. He outthought me.”

Us, Rhyme corrected silently. He outthought us. But he knew the words would mean little to her. Any failing to which she contributed, however small her part, she owned.

Sellitto said, “He’s got the Lahoris’ address now and he doesn’t know the boy’s on the run. Amelia, tell your security team at their house to stay out of sight and expect Forty-Seven might show up.”

“I will,” Sachs said. “Though I think he’s too smart to fall into a trap like that.” She sighed. “I’ll walk the grid at the coffee shop.”

Sellitto gave her the address and she hurried from the parlor, tugging her jacket on absently. A moment later Rhyme heard the engine of her big car fire up and a squeal as the tires slung her into traffic.

His eyes drifted toward the sounds out the window, gazing over the dun dusk.

So Unsub 47 had spent all day, last week, planting gas bombs meant to mimic the fires after earthquakes. Presumably more existed, and announcing that the authorities knew the quakes were being faked wouldn’t change the fact that they were timed to explode.

And even if his plans were now exposed, Unsub 47 would have no incentive whatsoever to remove the devices or let the police know where they were.

Chapter 44

The Promisor’s backup plan.

Vladimir Rostov steered the stolen Toyota carefully along the streets of Queens. East Elmhurst to be specific.

Somewhat carefully. He was used to driving in Moscow, where one didn’t need to be very careful; the congestion left little risk of high-speed collisions.

Here, though, the weaving was due to the fact he was digging beneath the passenger seat, as best he could. Making a sharp turn had catapulted his Roll N Roaster beef sandwich to the space between front passenger seat and door.

Where, where the hell, where?

Ah, he got a corner of the bag and pulled it out, ripped the paper apart with his teeth and began chewing the cold, but still tasty, sandwich.

Why the fuck don’t we have these in Moscow?

In three minutes the sandwich and fries were consumed. He belched and lit a cigarette. He noted that in America very few people smoked in cars any longer, unlike Russia. Of course, when he was through finding Vimal, the little kuritsa, and he was done with the car, he’d make sure it did plenty of smoking. This was a joke: The only way to get rid of the evidence in a vehicle was to burn it to the rims — which was, in fact, the source of an expression used in certain criminal circles in Russian. “Rim it,” a mob boss might say. Usually the automobile flambé contained merely evidence. Sometimes, a corpse. Sometimes, depending on your playful mood, the person might not yet be a corpse when you tied them up inside and set the gas tank ablazing.

Rostov now thought of the red-haired kuritsa cop once more. A fantasy blossomed in his mind: the woman as cowgirl. Vladimir Rostov happened to love the Louis L’Amour novels of the American West. He thought they were finely crafted jewels, adventure tales that gave you a peek at life back then. Russia had the Cossacks and, from Mongolia, the Tartars. But there was nothing romantic about marauding drunks and rapists. The American West... ah, those were the days of heroes! He owned all the Sergio Leone films. John Ford’s movies, too, starring John Wayne. And there was no better Western than Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.

He sometimes thought about living back then. The Germans were in Mexico. The Spanish and Portuguese in South and Central America. The French in Canada and the Caribbean.

There must have been some Russians in the nineteenth-century New World.

Oh, how he would have loved to be among them.

With his six-shooter and horse. And bourbon, of course.

And the whores.

His thoughts returned to the cowgirl kuritsa, the one with the red hair and the blue diamond on her white finger.

His blue diamond, his white finger.

He turned the corner and slowed. Vladimir Rostov was feeling proud of himself, for being smarter than the cowgirl cop.

Because I know where Vimal Lahori is going.

His backup plan.

When Rostov had his chat with Kirtan in the basement of the diner in the Fashion District, he’d learned more about Vimal than just his name and address and family. A cut here, a cut there. He’d found out Vimal had a girlfriend.

I’ll tell you but don’t hurt her!! Kirtan had written (the crushed throat matter).

“No, no, kuritsa. I won’t hurt a hair on her head. I just need to have a talk with Vimal. I won’t hurt him either. That’s a peeing promise.”

Rostov had had to read the response twice, to make it out — the kid’s hand was shaking so. The message was: Will die before I tell you if you hurt her.

Which made no sense.

“Hair on head. Really.”

Peeing promise. Rostov had just made that phrase up but he liked it. He’d use it again.

He’d bent down and slid the knife along the kid’s fingernail.

In three minutes, poof. Vimal’s girlfriend was Adeela Badour. And she lived in East Elmhurst, Queens, a mile or so from Vimal’s family.

A check of Google revealed that a Mohammad Badour lived at the address. And, yes, he had two daughters, Adeela and Taalia, twenty-two and ten. Though, sadly, no online pictures of the little creatures. Some parents were so protective.

“Anyone else?” Rostov had asked. “That Vimal is close to?”

Kirtan had shaken his head vigorously. His last gesture. Rostov had slit his throat then. It was a favor, he reasoned. The kid would have lived with guilt his whole life, for having given up Vimal and his friend.

After he died — which took some messy time — Rostov had cut his pinkie finger off and placed it, still holding the travesty of a ring, into Kirtan’s slack-jawed mouth. The Promisor didn’t have to limit himself to making statements only about diamonds on the fingers of slutty fiancées.

Adeela Badour...

He’d be at her house soon.

At a traffic light, he took a napkin from his pocket and coughed into it for a moment. Fucker, he thought angrily. A problem all his life. Cigarettes, of course. He’d stop smoking someday. The condition would go away.

He wondered if this Adeela was sexy. He generally preferred pale-complexioned women. But since he’d been thinking of the little Persian kur, Kitten and Scheherazade, he was of a mind to spend some time with a darker girl, an Arab girl. Hell, didn’t matter if she was sexy. He was hungry. He needed a woman. Now.

Oh, and the Promisor would keep his peeing promise to Kirtan. What was going to happen to her wouldn’t damage a single hair on her head.

Chapter 45

It’d be an adventure.”

“Adventure,” Adeela Badour replied to Vimal, clearly troubled by his choice of words. “What is this? A quest? The Hobbit.”

They were in her backyard. The Badours had a nice house, brick with red wooden trim, in East Elmhurst, Queens, about a mile from Vimal’s family. This neighborhood embraced LaGuardia airport and on days when the wind wasn’t kind, residents would have to endure the scream of jets skimming over houses to land on Runway 4. Today the air was, more or less, quiet.

The Badours’ home was bigger than the Lahoris’; Adeela’s father had a good job with a big tech company, her mother — like his — was a nurse. The place featured a yard with a well-tended garden, both rare here.

As far as Vimal was concerned, though, one of the better features was a detached garage, behind the house, which opened onto an alley, shared by all the homes here.

Better, because it was in the musty structure that Vimal and Adeela had first kissed — daringly in the backseat of her mother’s Subaru — after the adults had gone to sleep, of course — and where they had explored, touching and tasting, growing warm, teasing open buttons and finally a zipper or two.

At the moment, though, the mood was different. The only agenda item was escape.

He directed her into the garage, just to be out of sight, though he wasn’t concerned the ski-masked man had found his way here — that would be impossible. But he didn’t want neighbors to see him and call his father.

She leaned against her car, an old dark-green Mazda (fond memories there too, though the backseats were comically small). There was no room inside the garage for a second vehicle. Much of the rest of the space was occupied with a shabby workbench and limp storage cartons, inscribed with faded labels describing contents. Mothers dishes. Clothes for goodwill. Textbooks/diapers.

He said, “I’m not making, you know, light of it or anything. I mean, it’d be a change for you.”

“California?” she asked. “Why California?”

“Have you ever been?”

Adeela fired a thoughtful look, tilting her head. “In a land long ago, far away, there was a magical place out to the west, beyond the far reaches of humankind.”

Vimal sighed. Now she was being sardonic. “I’m just—”

“Disney, Legoland, San Francisco, Yosemite. I skied in July at Mammoth.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound like you were... what’s that word?”

“Young, provincial, naive?”

He sighed, but only slightly. Then recovered. “So? Did you like it?”

“Vim! Of course. That has nothing to do with anything. How can you just pick up and go — and expect me—”

“Not expect.”

“—to go with you?”

“UCLA has a fine arts program with a sculpting track. And a great medical school. I checked.” Then he took her hand.

“This isn’t the time to be thinking about that.” Her brown eyes narrowed. “You’re a witness to a murder. Do you get it, that this is not a normal time? Is that registering with you? You’re joking about adventures. This is serious!”

“I’m not saying we jump on the train today. I’ll go and then I’ll find a place and—”

“Train to California?” Her beautiful sculpted brows furrowed. “Oh, because you can’t fly because you’re on a watchlist. People don’t take trains across the country, Vim. Does that tell you anything?”

He fell silent. “Would you consider it?”

“Vim, just tell him you don’t want to cut anymore.”

He released her hand, stepped away and walked to the small window in the side wall of the garage, grimy and half obscured by a persistent weed. He laughed softly at her comment, which appeared to be a non sequitur, but was in fact the whole point of his fight.

His father, the person the police couldn’t protect him from.

The person he was fleeing as ardently as he was the killer.

Vimal loved Adeela Badour. He’d fallen for her the first time he’d seen her. It was in a coffee shop in Greenwich Village — one of the old-time ones, way-way-way pre-Starbucks. She’d been poring over a detailed diagram of the heart in an anatomy book and whispering the names of veins and arteries and muscles — or whatever medical students need to know about the pump, which was presumably everything.

He’d sat down and opened his Michelangelo book.

The ice-breaking conversation was, of course, anatomy. Flesh and blood, in one case. Marble, in the other.

They’d begun dating not long after that and had been in a monogamous relationship since then. From early on the subject of marriage surfaced regularly in his thoughts. On some days, he viewed marrying her as a goal that could be achieved by practical planning, like with most couples. Other days, more frequent, their saying “I do” was about as feasible as using their arms to fly.

The problem was that Romeo and Juliet thing.

The Lahoris were Kashmiri Hindu. Kashmir is a beautiful region in the north of the Asian subcontinent, but one that has for ages been the center of conflict. It’s claimed by India as well as by Pakistan and, halfheartedly, by China. For more than a thousand years, rule of the region as a whole, or portions of it, has traded hands among Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders — and the British too, of course, who came up with one of the more curious names ever for a country: the Princely State. In recent years the Hindu population of Kashmir, largely Saraswat Brahmin, lived in Kashmir Valley. Representing about 20 percent of the region’s inhabitants, they were a people moderate in their religious practice and they comfortably blended spiritual and secular lives, avoiding as much as they could the simmering turbulence of the area.

Inevitably, the peace and isolation didn’t last. In the 1980s a militant Kashmiri independence movement arose, composed largely of radicalized Muslims. Its mission was ethnic cleansing, which resulted in the infamous Exodus of 1990, in which more than 150,000 Kashmiri Hindus fled. Those who didn’t risked death. In the end, only several thousand Hindus remained in the valley.

Vimal was born in the United States and had no personal knowledge of these events — which were, of course, hardly topics touched upon by world history classes in American schools. But he was an expert on the independence movement, the rapes and murder, and the Exodus because Papa lectured him and Sunny on the topic frequently. Papa had been in the United States when the Exodus occurred but a number of his relatives had to abandon their homes, leaving all behind, to be relocated to India proper — the congested, polluted urban sprawl of the National Capital Region — Delhi. Several older aunties and uncles died prematurely, Papa was sure, because of the resettlement.

Papa harbored deep, unrelenting resentment toward all people Muslim.

Adeela Badour, for instance — had he known about her.

It didn’t matter that the Badour family had lived here for more generations than Papa and that their forebears had no connection with the radicals in the valley, or that they were moderate in religion and secular in worldview. Nor did it matter to Vimal’s father that Muslims in India suffered their own abuse at the hands of the Hindu majority.

No, no matter.

What irony here: His father had finally and reluctantly abandoned his insistence on an arranged marriage for his sons; Vimal could have married any Hindu woman of his choosing (though Papa occasionally reminded him that Akbar the Great, the most famous ruler of the Mughal Empire, and his courtesans vastly preferred Kashmiri women for wives and — yes, his father actually said — concubines, because of their beauty).

Possibly, eventually, with a great deal of lobbying by his mother, Vimal’s father might have accepted someone non-Hindu.

But Muslim?

Never.

But it was a Muslim who, sipping tea in Greenwich Village and looking over a drawing of a human heart, had stolen Vimal’s.

He now turned back to her, as she leaned against the car, arms folded.

Adeela repeated, “Tell him. You have to.”

I tried, Vimal Lahori thought. And I ended up a prisoner in my own basement.

He told her, “You don’t know him.”

“I’m Muslim, Vim. I know about parents.”

Silence filled the garage, then was suddenly broken by the sound of rain, loud, since the roof wasn’t insulated. Vimal glanced up and saw an abandoned bird’s nest.

With a faint gaze of resignation she said, “Do what you think you have to. I have three years in New York. After that, residency, which’ll be flexible. Maybe California. I could probably make that work. But I need those three years here.”

Her message wasn’t a threat, not by any means. Adeela was never threatening. She was simply and clinically pointing out the undeniable truth: A lot can happen in three years.

“You’re going to go, aren’t you?”

He nodded.

Her eyes closed. And she hugged him hard. “Do you have money?”

“Some.”

“I’ve got—”

“No.”

“You can borrow it. And I know somebody in Glendale.”

“Where’s that?”

She laughed. “Los Angeles. Do your homework. She taught at NYU for a year. She and her husband, they’re good people. Wait here. Taalia’s in the house.”

Adeela’s parents did not know she was dating Vimal but she was close to her younger sister, and the two girls and Vimal had seen a few movies together and had some fast, furtive meals. Better to have no witnesses.

Vimal noted on the workbench her phone, car keys and purse. This gave him an idea. He’d borrow her car and drive it to a suburban town that had a train station, Westchester somewhere. He’d leave it there. She could take the train to pick it up. And he could get a ticket to another train, Amtrak, and head up to Albany, then find a train going west.

He pocketed the keys. She’d understand.

Then he paused. He heard a car roll into the side street and the brakes squeal as the vehicle stopped. The engine went silent. He looked out and didn’t see the vehicle.

Nothing, he was sure. A neighbor. And reflected again that the odds of the killer finding Adeela’s house were just about zero.

He leaned against the workbench and waited for his Juliet to return.

Chapter 46

What a time this was.

As she walked up the stairs from the backyard into her house, she reflected that she could understand Vimal’s wanting to escape his father. Her own — as she’d said — could be overbearing. Oddly, in a culture often male-dominated, it was Adeela’s mother who was the formidable partner in the marriage. (This was the opposite of Vimal’s Hindu family.) After graduating, Adeela would get an internship and residency out of arm’s reach of her mother.

But not too far away. Probably Connecticut (Adeela Badour loved autumn foliage, just loved it). Maybe Long Island.

That was as far as she was willing to go.

California? Of course not.

And it wasn’t right for Vimal either. But she supposed it was not a bad idea for him to leave now, get to the West Coast for a time. Until they caught that madman.

She glanced into the living room and saw Taalia, on the couch. The ten-year-old was in a Phineas and Ferb T-shirt, and jeans. Adeela had to smile. What a child of our times! The girl was texting on the same phone that was pumping music through the massive pink headset embracing her ears and watching, distractedly, a muted Disney Channel cartoon.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Adeela stepped into her room, glancing at a poster on the wall: a periodic table of the elements, each represented by Japanese anime characters — from Sailor Moon as hydrogen to Vegeta as Ununoctium. She’d made it herself, inspired by a similar one she’d found online. Adeela was amused, recalling the fight she’d had with her mother about taping up other posters on her walls when she was in middle school: boy bands. Which depicted boys she had no interest in, bands that played music she never listened to. She’d done it simply out of defiance.

So totally mature of me, she now thought.

She pulled her checkbook from a folder and sat for a moment. Adeela had a decent-sized bank account. She’d worked a number of jobs since high school, and, though medical school was excruciatingly expensive, she had a student loan for most of it (the day of reckoning was some years away). She looked at her balance. A sigh. She wrote Vimal a check for two thousand dollars.

She tore the check out; the noise seemed particularly odd and troubling, something surgical. She thought of Vimal’s wound and his refusal to go to the ER.

Another sigh.

She walked down the stairs and into the kitchen, heading for the back door, when she heard a familiar click.

The front door opening.

Oh, no! Her mother must’ve returned early. But why the front door? The woman would have parked in the alley beside the garage.

Adeela walked to the doorway and peeked around the corner to the living room. She froze and gave a quiet gasp.

A man in a black coat and ski mask, holding one of those box-cutting knives in his right hand, was looking around. He spotted Taalia and moved quietly up behind her.

No, no, no!

Adeela stepped back, looked around the kitchen and ran to the island. A moment later, holding a ten-inch carving knife, she strode into the front hall. Her gaze toward him was pure steel.

The man blinked, glanced at the knife, and smiled. “Ah, little bird. Look at what you have there. You are the big one, Adeela.”

This would be the killer.

“And cute little Taalia, little birds.”

How the hell did he know their names?

“What do you want?” Her voice was firm. In fact, she didn’t feel an ounce of fear. She had told herself that this man was an infection, a weak blood vessel, a shattered bone. This was a clinical problem to be addressed.

He stepped closer. She lifted the knife to waist level. The sharpened side of the blade was up. She’d learned this in some spy movie.

He blinked and paused.

A gun appeared in his other hand, fished from his pocket.

Her resolve faltered for a fraction of a second. But then returned. Somehow, Adeela smiled. “A gunshot. The neighbors are home. They’d hear. You’d get arrested.”

He nodded at her sister, still lost in the oblivion of pixels and digital sound. He asked in an oddly accented voice, “What she listens to? Music kids listening to now. Lots and lots of crap, aren’t you thinking? I like strings, I like smooth horns, you know what it is.”

“You want money? You want the TV?”

He glanced. “Sixty-inch Sony? Ah, yes, yes. You help me carry to car? Thank you, birdie. No, no. You know what I want. And you tell me.”

He pointed the gun at the back of Taalia’s head.

“No,” Adeela growled and stepped closer. Still holding the knife. “Don’t point that at her. Turn it away.”

“Ah, but you sure I not fire gun. Scaredy of the noise. So why you worry?”

“Now.”

He hesitated, not sure what to make of her, and pointed the gun at the floor.

“If I tell you what you want to know, you’ll leave?”

“When parents are coming home?”

“Soon,” she said.

“And father, he is cop or soldier with big gun he carry all the time. Right? And knows karate like Bruce Lee.”

“No. But the more people, the more fucked you are.”

“Ha! No, no, am thinking nobody home for long time. You have nice knife, I have knife. Maybe we roll around and see who is the stabbed one first.” A sick grin.

Still Taalia had no idea of the drama behind her. Her small, perfect head nodded in time to a song.

He lifted the gun to Adeela now. “Not having time for shit like this.” The smirk vanished. “Vimal. Where he is?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes.”

He replaced the gun in his pocket and, with his thumb, pushed the blade farther out. He stepped closer to Taalia.

Adeela moved closer yet, chest heaving from the deep breaths, heart pounding, blood pressure through the ceiling, she thought with manic clarity, adrenaline levels soaring.

The man’s blue eyes were cold as marbles. He’d kill a child as easily as talk to her.

But then the frown. He cocked his head.

The sirens were just audible.

At last!

He looked past Adeela, into the kitchen — on the wall, where the central station alarm panel door was open, revealing the panic button for the police that Adeela had pressed when she’d picked up the knife.

The man’s shoulders rose and his eyes filled with madness. He lunged toward Taalia, maybe thinking he’d kidnap her and, somehow, trade her for Vimal.

This was not going to happen. Adeela jumped toward him, slashing with the knife. No design, no strategy, just swinging the blade toward his face, so fast the metal was invisible.

He was far larger than she, surely far stronger — and undoubtedly had experience with his knife. But he hadn’t expected her assault and he stumbled back. Adeela put herself between Taalia and him.

He stood still for a moment, and she fully expected that he’d pull the gun out and kill them both. Not for any particular reason — he had the mask on; she couldn’t identify him. But he would murder simply because he was insane.

Now the sirens were louder.

He grimaced. “You fucking bird. I am remembering you. I come back and visit.” He fled out the front door. Adeela followed and ran onto the porch. She saw him leap into a red Toyota and speed away. She didn’t get the license.

Adeela ran to her sister and pulled her to her feet. The headset fell off the girl, who gave a shriek of surprise and fear.

“What?”

“Come with me.”

“Why? I—”

“Now!” the older sister commanded.

Taalia’s round face — darker than Adeela’s — nodded slowly, eyes filled with fear. She was looking at the knife.

Holding the girl’s hand, Adeela sped out the back door and into the garage.

There, Vimal was looking out the window. He said, “I hear sirens. What’s that—” He stopped speaking as he turned and saw the blade and Taalia in tears.

Adeela raged in a whisper, “He was here. That man was here.”

“That man?”

She spat out, “You know who I mean!”

“No! Where is he?”

“He drove off. I called the police.”

“Are you all right?”

In an even softer, even angrier voice, she said, “After a knife fight, yeah. I’m great.”

“What?” He stared.

She glanced out the window — to make sure the intruder hadn’t circled back.

“We have to go. Get away. Now. We’ll drive to Westchester. You come with me for now, drop me at a train station.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes, get in the car. Please. Hey, Taal, want to go for a drive?” He had forced a smile on his face.

Taalia stepped behind her sister, wiping her tears. “What’s going on?”

“It’s okay,” Vimal said kindly.

“No, it’s not okay,” Adeela whispered.

Vimal opened the garage door, looked out.

“It’s clear,” he said, dropping into the driver’s seat of the car. “Get in. Get your phone and purse.” Nodding toward the workbench. “We’ll call the police and your parents on the way.”

“No,” she whispered.

“I have to go! I don’t want to leave you here.”

She gave him a soft smile. She walked to the window. And bent down.

He said, “You’re not coming?”

“No.”

She leaned forward and kissed him.

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you too,” she said.

And plunged the knife into the car’s front tire, which gave a slight shudder and hiss and then settled down to the rim.

Chapter 47

Vimal Lahori was in protective custody. Finally.

The Promisor, aka Unsub 47, had learned the address of his girlfriend and had gone there to, apparently, torture her into giving up the boy’s whereabouts. But the young woman had had the presence of mind — and grit — to summon police and fight him off.

In his parlor, Rhyme was learning these details from Amelia Sachs, who was relaying the conversation she’d had with the young man in an NYPD safe house on Staten Island.

Sachs added that the officers arriving on the scene moments later had radioed for assistance in locating the man’s car — a red Toyota, model unknown — and then detained Vimal.

The young man was sullen but cooperative, Sachs reported. She’d interviewed him in the Staten Island safe house where she’d stashed him. He couldn’t, however, provide any helpful additional insights. He explained that his failure to come forward had been out of fear, though Rhyme suspected it had also to do with the soap opera drama of his family life, as Sachs had suggested. He’d too had in his pocket, Sachs had reported, some chunks of stone — the kimberlite, it appeared. They had bits of crystals, possibly diamonds, in them, and Rhyme wondered if it was some of Patel’s inventory that he’d kept for himself. The fact he’d taken the stones that weren’t his would also have made him reluctant to go to the police.

As for the day of the killing on 47th Street, he’d returned from running an errand for Mr. Patel when he walked in on the horrible scene. He’d called 911 and told them what he’d seen.

She added that Vimal knew nothing of the rough that was stolen, nor had there been any discussions with his mentor, Patel, about recent security issues. The man never mentioned to his protégé concerns about anyone casing the place or unusual calls. There’d been no drop-in customers who might be inquiring about diamonds but who seemed more interested in cameras or guards. Patel had never, as far as Vimal knew, had any rivalries in the business that might give rise to such violence. While Vimal didn’t know for certain, it was ludicrous that Patel had had any connection to organized crime or had borrowed money from a loan shark.

In answer to Sachs’s question, Vimal confirmed what they’d deduced: He was an amateur sculptor, hoping to make it big in the art world. This explained the other trace found at the scene: the jade and lapis.

A search of Adeela’s house for evidence shed by Unsub 47 during his home invasion revealed nothing. Nor had there been any sightings of the red Toyota.

Other inquiries, to use Edward Ackroyd’s charming Scotland Yard word, were not proving successful either. A check of hotel registrations revealed no guests under the name of Dobyns, nor any of the other aliases the AIS had discovered that Unsub 47 had used.

Homeland Security and the bureau had continued to check out terrorist threats — of which there were plenty but none involving C4 or lehabah devices smuggled into the country, fake earthquakes in downtown Brooklyn or fires nearby.

A systematic search for future targets — wood-based apartments and buildings within a half mile of the drilling site — revealed no lehabahs on the gas lines.

Edward Ackroyd had found no one trying to move the rough on the underground market.

Rhyme wheeled to the window and gazed out upon the gray, still day. Even the evergreens seemed muted, their color bleached away. Across the street, a man walked by, minding the icy patches. His dog — a small fluffy thing — pranced over them without a care in the world.

Rhyme closed his eyes in frustration.

Then, as sometimes — not often but sometimes — happens, a break in a case came unexpectedly.

It arrived in the form of Ron Pulaski, who stepped into the parlor, nodded greetings to Rhyme and Sachs and said, “May have something here, Lincoln. On Forty-Seven.”

To differentiate this intelligence from their other — clandestine — assignment, working for the defense attorney representing El Halcón.

“Well, I don’t have a fucking lead at all. So, what?”

“I was wondering who’d have a motive to stop the drilling. We talked about environmentalists. But that seemed too obvious. So I started looking into energy industry competitors.”

Rhyme said, more reasonably, “Good. Initiative. What’d you find?”

“Unfair trade practice complaint with the FTC against Algonquin Power.”

Well, this was interesting.

“Apparently the company hired an oppo lobbying firm—”

“A what?”

“Oppo firm. They dig up — or make up — information that trashes business competitors or political candidates you’re running against.”

“Oppo. Makes sense. Though for some reason, I dislike the term. Go on.”

“The firm was hired to discredit alternative energy sources — any technology that would siphon off income from traditional oil and gas electrical production. For instance, they planted rumors that wind farms kill seagulls. And that solar panels make roofs heavier and more prone to collapsing in fires — and injuring firemen. Employees actually left seagull corpses near wind farms — killed elsewhere — and published pictures of fires in buildings equipped with solar panels, even though the panels had nothing to do with the roofs’ collapsing.” He smiled. “And they looked into research as to whether—”

“Geothermal drilling created earthquakes.”

“Exactly.”

“Algonquin,” Sachs mused. “Who’d we see from the company on TV?”

It was Thom who recalled. “C. Hanson Collier. President or CEO.” The aide frowned. “But didn’t he say he supported geothermal?”

Sachs said, “He’d have to do that, wouldn’t he? Play innocent. And now that I think about it, didn’t he say something like it wasn’t likely there’d be earthquakes? It was generally safe. Damning with faint praise.”

Rhyme then tossed a glance toward her.

She nodded and said to Pulaski, “Let’s go for a drive.”

Amelia Sachs had been here before.

Not long ago some individuals at Algonquin Consolidated Power and Light in Astoria, Queens, had been suspects in a series of crimes involving the New York City power grid.

Sachs and Rhyme had drawn the case.

The company, which supplied electric power and steam throughout much of the New York area, had its main facility and headquarters on the East River — across from Midtown Manhattan. The operation covered a number of blocks, with the main building — its façade was huge red and gray panels — rising two hundred feet above the streets. This, where the turbines were located, was the working heart of the complex, and massive pipes and electric wires — thick, inflexible cables — ran everywhere.

High above the street level, where Sachs, driving, and Pulaski were now pulling up to the plant, were four towering smokestacks, also red and gray, topped with blinking red lights as a warning to low-flying aircraft. In the summer the stacks seemed to exhale no vapor at all but today, with the March chill that just wouldn’t quit, wisps of steam trickled upward to dissolve in the dull white sky.

She braked the Torino Cobra to a stop and flashed her badge to the security guard at the main gate and told him she had an appointment with the CEO. The massive man, skin as pale as the overcast, glanced at her and Pulaski, who was in uniform. He made a call and, nodding to no one, told her where to park.

A second guard met them in a lobby and took them to the same place Sachs had been a few years before, on that prior case: the executive offices. The floor was right out of the 1950s, “modern” furniture upholstered in brown and white and tan, the designs geometric.

The art was black-and-white photos of the power plant over the years.

The employees here — mostly men — were dressed as if they too had been locked in time for seventy years. White shirts, dark ties, dark suits with jackets often buttoned. Hair was trim. Sachs imagined she could smell the Brylcreem her father wore, though surely this was a psychological, not an olfactory, sensation.

The guard deposited them in a waiting room outside the office of the CEO, C. Hanson Collier. He had not been head of the company when she and Rhyme had worked the prior case but she wondered if she’d passed him in the halls back then.

She glanced down at the kidney-shaped coffee table, on which sat copies of trade magazines. Electricity Transmission Monthly. Power Age. The Grid.

A limp Time, dated circa six months ago.

“How’re we going to handle it?” Pulaski asked.

“Rattle his cage,” Sachs said. “Let him know you found the memo. Watch his reaction.”

Sometimes you closed a case through DNA and trace evidence. Sometimes through a blink and a bead of sweat. A friend and colleague of Sachs and Rhyme was a state police investigator in California. Kathryn Dance. Her expertise was body language. Though not as savvy in the art of kinesics as Dance, Sachs, as a former street cop, had some talent at this esoteric skill.

They didn’t have many options, in any case. No forensics linked the CEO to the earthquakes or to Unsub 47. In fact, she knew that, if he was the mastermind, he would not personally be involved — other than making payment arrangements to the perp. And even that wasn’t certain. The oppo firm might have hired him themselves and sent Collier the bill for “media analysis and story placement.”

A precise young woman, in a brown suit, stepped into the doorway and asked Sachs and Pulaski to follow her. They navigated another long corridor, arriving finally at the CEO’s office. The assistant gestured them inside.

Collier looked like a former coal miner — a career guess that would not have been unreasonable, given that he now headed up a power company. But Sachs had done some homework and learned that prior to this gig he’d been CEO of a major clothing manufacturer. She supposed the principles of business apply equally whether you’re selling bras or voltage.

“Come on in, Detective. Officer.”

Hands were shaken and Collier gestured for them to sit. Same chairs, couches and coffee table as a few years ago.

“Now, what can I do for you?”

Sachs took the lead. “Mr. Collier, are you familiar with the stories about the earthquakes in Brooklyn?”

“Of course. Very odd.” He unbuttoned his dark-gray suit. The American flag pin in the buttonhole of his lapel was upside down. “Speculation that somebody’s using explosives to mimic quakes. Nobody’s sure why. Maybe to get the geothermal plant shut down. That’s what the journalists are saying. Industrial sabotage.” More wrinkles folded into his creased, pale face; it was naturally patterned, not from the sun. It was as if he still worked — and even lived — deep underground. “And why are you here exactly, Detective? Is it why I think?”

“The memo. The FTC complaint against Algonquin.”

Collier was nodding. “You know, those dead birds? Nobody killed them. Our firm hired somebody to drive around and find dead seagulls. Can you imagine some intern, first day on the job? ‘Need dead birds, kid.’ Though the fact is the windmill blades do kill them. The firm just added a few extras — for effect. And the fires with solar panels? That’s a known fact. The pictures weren’t exactly of ceilings that collapsed because of the panels. But what’s a little license among capitalists? You’re thinking we’re setting the explosions to make it look like the drilling was causing earthquakes.”

“Are you? Your oppo firm researched it. That was in the memo.”

“It was in the memo. But if you heard me on TV, which I guess you did, you’ll recall I was defending Northeast and geothermal drilling.”

“That’s not answering my question. Are you sabotaging the site?”

“No. Is that enough of an answer for you?”

“What about the oppo firm?”

“Fired them a year ago. The bad publicity wasn’t worth it. A couple of dead seagulls. Died of natural causes. You should have seen the hate mail we got.”

“Which,” Pulaski said, “might have taught you to be more careful.”

“No, Officer, it taught us to be smarter — in how we deal with alternative energy. We don’t try to run them out of business.”

He dug up a company brochure from his desk drawer and dropped it in front of them. Opening to the first page he tapped a passage. Algonquin’s wholly owned subsidiaries included three wind farms in Maine and a solar panel manufacturing operation.

“We buy them.” He opened another drawer, extracted a thick legal document and dropped it with a loud smack in front of her. “We’ll keep this one secret, you don’t mind. It’s not public yet.”

Sachs looked at the front page of the document.

She didn’t bother to flip through it. “You’re buying stock in the company?”

“Eventually, if it’s profitable, we’ll buy the rest. It has to prove itself. Deep-drilling geothermal — tapping into volcanic reserves — for electrical generation is profitable. Near-surface drilling on a large scale? The jury’s still out on that. Do you have a furnace at home or a heat pump?”

“Furnace.”

“Exactly. Heat pumps’re for wimps. Geothermal’s a heat pump. But there’re a lot of ecological wimps out there. So I’m hoping our investment will pay off. We’ll see.”

Sachs’s phone hummed with a text. She looked down at it.

She stood up. Pulaski glanced her way and rose too.

“Thanks for your time, Mr. Collier.”

“Ms. Evans will show you out.” He said nothing more, didn’t rise. He opened a folder and began reading.

The assistant appeared and escorted them down the hall.

As they walked into the parking lot, out of earshot of the employees, the young officer whispered, “We just going to let it go, like that? He showed us a contract. He might’ve had it printed out in case somebody called him on the earthquake plot. How do we know he’s not behind it?”

“Because of this.”

Sachs showed him her phone, the text she’d just gotten from Lon Sellitto.

“Oh. Well. We’re going to New Jersey?”

“We’re going to New Jersey.”

Chapter 48

This is a place where earth meets water in stark and stunning beauty.

This is a place where the rocks take on the texture and sheen and contradiction of art.

This is a place where brush, bush and trees rise along sheer cliffs with the effortless ease of smoke.

This is a place where someone whose life was devoted to the earth might, fittingly, die.

The body of Ezekiel Shapiro, in a fire department rescue basket, was now being winched to the top of the hundred-foot cliff of Palisades Park.

In the chill early evening, their breath easing in visible wisps from their mouths, Sachs, Pulaski and a number of New Jersey state troopers stood watching the fire department and rescue team. They were beside Shapiro’s car, which was surrounded by protective yellow tape.

Suicide is, after all, a crime.

It had not been the police but insurance man Edward Ackroyd who’d made the discovery that Shapiro had hired Unsub 47.

When Ackroyd told Sellitto what he’d found, the lieutenant had sent patrol cars to Shapiro’s office and home but apparently the environmentalist had seen them and realized that the authorities had learned about the plot.

He’d posted a suicide note online, driven here and killed himself.

Shapiro had hired Unsub 47 for two missions. The first was to close down the geothermal drilling as environmentally unsound. The second was to single out Jatin Patel for attack and robbery. The diamond cutter was apparently known for working on stones from mines that displaced indigenous people and polluted villages and rivers. The stolen rough, Ackroyd had learned, would be sold by 47 and the proceeds given to Shapiro, who would distribute it to environmental organizations to help the unfortunates.

I don’t think tree huggers use C4 very much... or burn down buildings with people inside...

Mel Cooper had been wrong.

Shapiro’s suicide note made clear, though, that he’d miscalculated. He’d wanted to scare the city, sure. The deaths by fire were not his idea, but had been the brainchild of the madman he’d hired — somebody who shared his fury at the destruction of the earth, but who had decided, on his own, to plant a series of incendiary devices to kill and injure.

Perhaps the deaths, though unintended, had been what pushed him to take his own life.

“Hey, Amelia.”

She turned to see a tall, blond officer, about her age. He was in uniform — dark slacks with an orange stripe down the outseam and a powder-blue shirt and tie. Latex gloves and booties too. Ed Bolton was a sergeant with the Crime Scene Investigation Unit of the New Jersey State Police’s Major Crime Bureau. He now pulled off the cornflower-blue accessories and stuffed them into his pants pocket.

Knowing that Bolton had run the scene was a relief. He’d have done as thorough a job as she would have.

She introduced him to Pulaski, who asked, “How’d you get onto it?”

“Trooper saw the car here and ran the plate. There was an area-wide out after you guys found he was behind those earthquakes and murders on Saturday and Sunday.”

“Positive ID? It’s Shapiro?”

“Uh-huh. One of our tac people rappelled down. Did a field FR. It’s him. Prints were on file after an arrest at a protest rally a few years ago. Pretty crazy, faking earthquakes.”

She asked, “So how does the scene look?”

“Nothing says anything other than suicide. No wits. And he drove here from the city, so no tollbooths.”

All the bridges and tunnels were toll-free entering New Jersey. There was no toll-taker video of someone else driving Shapiro’s car, with the activist in the trunk, for instance. That was improbable, of course. No one would have a motive to kill him — except, she supposed, Unsub 47, if he’d decided to keep the diamonds for himself. But even then, why kill Shapiro, why not just take the diamonds and go back to Russia?

And if he’d truly wanted to murder Shapiro, he wouldn’t’ve staged it. He would simply have shot the man, at a time and place of his convenience. The Russian was clever but apparently cared little for nuance.

Sachs asked, “The evidence’s gone to Hamilton?”

The state police’s crime scene headquarters.

“That’s right. We’ll get you copies as soon as we can, autopsy too.”

Sachs and Pulaski watched the basket in which the body was strapped breach the top of the cliff. Two muscular firefighters, one a man, one a woman, pulled it closer, unhooked the cable and carried the body to a waiting ambulance.

The view of Manhattan from here was spectacular in clear weather. Now the haze made the place look dystopian. Not many lights shone through the gray fog, though you could see the outlines of buildings large and buildings small. It seemed like a ghost town.

“Let’s run his house,” Sachs said, “see what we can find.”

Chapter 49

The U.S. attorney’s office was quiet.

This was one of those moments — early evening, of a weeknight — that Henry Bishop liked. Much of the rest of the building was empty, most of the support staff gone.

But those who remained were loyal and diligent and blindingly focused.

The sort of person that the lean, admittedly tense prosecutor preferred.

This place was comforting to him in the way that the Upper West Side apartment where he’d been living by himself for the past thirteen and a half months was not.

Bishop looked out over the dark night, and in his thoughts were a dozen — no, two dozen — matters about the El Halcón case. Every case was important but this one was more important than others of late. The crimes the Mexican had committed — the assaults on federal officers and the local policemen — were all terrible. But the crimes the man would commit — if he went free to continue to expand his operation to the United States — required that he be stopped now.

It was an adage in this business that you can’t try someone for future crimes. But Hank Bishop felt that in one way you could: Try somebody for his present crime, put him away for as long as you can, and you’ve “solved” any future crimes that person might have committed.

Bishop was going make sure that El Halcón was out of commission for a long, long time. He would delay the Mexican cartel’s move into the United States for a significant period, severely limiting the river of drugs cascading into this country. And crimping too the enforcement murders, bystander killings, underage prostitution, arms dealing and money laundering that were subsidiary enterprises in the El Halcón empire.

Considering this goal, Bishop happened to think of the one sore spot for him in the whole prosecution: that he hadn’t been able to learn the identity of El Halcón’s American partner, the man who was going to be running his operation after the Mexican returned home. The man who was the ultimate owner of the warehouse (Chris Cody, the man killed in the shoot-out, was merely a front, Bishop knew).

How Henry Bishop wanted this co-conspirator too.

But at least putting El Halcón away would slow up the expansion of the Mexican OC operation into America.

A knock on his doorjamb.

Special Agent Fallow stood there.

“Come on in.”

The man strode into the room and sat stiffly in the chair across from Bishop’s large desk, which was covered with a hundred file folders.

“And?”

Fallow opened his own folder and looked at some notes. “I think we’re good. There’s a CI we’ve got in Mexico City. He knows one of the guys up here in the Carreras-López entourage.”

Bishop loved confidential informants — snitches. They were either cowards or without consciences. Either one made them extremely valuable.

The agent continued, “Apparently, it’s true, Lincoln Rhyme’s been hired to analyze our evidence and look for improprieties. The withdrawal from Chase? Was a down payment that’s in Rhyme’s possession now. And the bulk — a half million, if he gets results? It’ll be wire-transferred. He’s got Rhyme’s bank’s routing and account number. Oh, and he gets two hundred fifty K, even if he doesn’t find problems with our case.” The agent shrugged. “But there’s nothing he did illegal. I tried to find conflict of interest but he’s never had any connection with anybody on the prosecution or the agents involved. Nothing.”

Bishop sneered. “And what does he think he’ll find? We’re buttoned up, aren’t we? Completely buttoned up.”

Fallow said nothing, but nodded.

“Why would Rhyme undermine us? Doesn’t he know what kind of evil El Halcón represents?”

Okay, a little melodramatic. But Bishop often addressed people — and himself — as if he were making closing statements to a jury.

“Next steps, sir?”

“Did you find the uniform who raided the PERT office?”

“I did. He’s Ronald Pulaski. Technically Patrol Division but generally works Major Cases. No discipline issues. Citations for bravery.”

Under other circumstances, Henry Bishop would have had some qualms about putting a decorated officer in jail. But Pulaski’s collaboration with Rhyme was a clear crime — and a stupid one, to boot. He should’ve known better. Also, Pulaski was a male and — presumably — white. Safer to destroy the career of somebody like that.

“Charges for Pulaski?” Fallow said. “We need to hit them hard, I’d say. Shut them down.”

Shut them down? Odd choice of words. But in principle, Bishop agreed.

The agent continued, “Obstruction. Conspiracy.”

“Theft of government documents too.”

“Good.”

“There’re probably some NYPD confidentiality and protocol rules he’s tripped over. But that’s not our issue. We’ll let their Internal Affairs handle that. I’ll put him in federal prison. The state can do what they want after he’s out. In ten years. Warrant him — Pulaski. Pick him up ASAP.”

Before he and Rhyme found one of those improprieties they’d been hired to hunt down.

Fallow asked, “You’re just going to let Rhyme...” Apparently Fallow was going to say “walk,” but he changed his mind. “Let him go?”

“No. We’ll get him for receiving stolen government files. Is there any facility that can handle him?”

“Lockdown medical unit in detention.”

“Good.”

“He’s got a caregiver.”

“A what?”

“An aide. Somebody who takes care of him.”

Bishop scoffed. “Well, he’s not going in with him. There’ll be some orderly or nurses who can do what they have to.”

Fallow said, “I’ll let the medical unit know.”

Bishop looked out the window. “And another thing. I’m going to make sure absolutely every law enforcement agency in the country knows what Rhyme’s done. He’ll never work as a consultant again. I hope he has a good retirement plan. After he gets out of jail, he’ll spend the rest of his life sitting home and watching soap operas.”