The Midnight Lock

1

Something wasn’t right.

Annabelle Talese, though, couldn’t quite figure out what that might be.

One aspect of this concern, or disorientation, or mystery, could be explained by the presence of a hangover, though a minor one. She called them “hangunders” — maybe one and a half glasses of sauvignon blanc too many. She’d been out with Trish and Gab at Tito’s, which had to be one of the strangest of all restaurants on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: a fusion of Serbian and Tex-Mex. Fried cheese with beans and salsa was a specialty.

Big wine pours too.

As she lay on her side, she brushed the tickling, thick blond hair away from her eyes and wondered: What’s wrong with this picture?

Well, for one thing, the window was open a few inches; a May breeze, thick with the gassy-asphalt scent of Manhattan, eased in. She rarely opened it. Why had she done so last night?

The twenty-seven-year-old, who had dabbled at modeling and was now content behind the scenes of the fashion world, rolled upright and tugged her Hamilton T-shirt down, twisted it straight. Adjusted her silk boxers. Finger-combed her curls.

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed, feeling for her slippers.

They weren’t where she’d kicked them off last night before climbing under the blankets.

All right. What’s going on?

Talese had no phobias or OCD issues, except one: New York City streets. She couldn’t help but picture the carpet of germs and other unmentionable critters that populated the city’s asphalt — and which got tracked into her apartment, even when, as she did every day, she stowed her shoes in a carton by the door (and insisted her friends do the same).

She never went barefoot in the apartment.

Instead of the slippers, though, the dress she’d worn yesterday, a frilly, floral number, lay spread out beneath her dangling feet.

The front hem was drawn up, almost to the décolletage, as if the garment were flashing her.

Wait a minute... Talese had a memory — more hazy than distinct — of tossing the garment into the hamper before her night-time routine.

Talese qualified her narrative now. The slippers weren’t where she thought she’d left them. The dress wasn’t in the hamper where she thought she’d tossed it.

Maybe Draco, the bartender, always a flirt, had been a little more generous than usual.

Was the drink count, possibly, 2.5 on the scale?

Careful, girl. You need to watch that.

As always, upon waking, the phone.

She turned toward the bedside table.

It wasn’t there.

No landline for her, her mobile was her only link at night. She always kept it near and charged. The umbilical, attached to the wall plug, was present, but no phone.

Jesus... What’s going on?

Then she saw the slippers. The pink fuzzy things were across the room, each on either side of, and facing, a small wooden chair. It had been scooted closer to the bed than she normally kept it. The slippers were facing the chair in a way that was almost eerily obscene — as if they’d been worn by somebody whose legs were spread and who was sitting on a lap.

“No,” Talese gasped, now spotting what was on the floor beside the chair: a plate with a half-eaten cookie on it.

Her heart thrummed fast; her breath grew shallow. Somebody’d been in the apartment last night! They’d rearranged her clothes, eaten the cookie.

Not six feet away from her!

The phone, the phone... where’s the goddamn phone?

Talese reached for the dress on the floor.

Then froze. Don’t! He... she figured the intruder would have been male — had touched it.

My God... She ran to her closet and pulled on jeans and an NYU sweatshirt, then stepped into the first pair of sneakers she found.

Out! Get out now! The neighbors, the police...

Fighting back tears from fright, she started out of the bedroom, then noticed that one of her dresser drawers was partially open. It was where she kept her underwear. She’d noted something boldly colorful inside.

She approached slowly, pulled it fully open and looked down. She gasped and finally the tears broke free.

On top of her panties was a page from a newspaper. It wasn’t one she read, so he would have brought it with him. Written on it, in lipstick — the shade that she favored, Fierce Pink — were three words:

Annabelle Talese turned to sprint to the front door. She got about ten feet before she stopped fast.

She’d noticed three things:

One was that the butcher block knife holder, sitting on the island in the small kitchen, had a blank slot, the upper right-hand corner, where the largest blade had rested.

The second was that the closet in the hallway that led to the front door was open. Talese always kept it closed. There was an automated switch in the frame so that when you opened the door, the bulb inside went on. The closet now, however, was dark. She would have to walk past it to get to the front door.

The third thing was that the two deadbolts on the door were turned to the locked position.

Which meant — since the man who’d broken inside had no keys — he was still here.

2

The defense attorney, approaching the empty witness stand, beside which Lincoln Rhyme sat in his motorized wheelchair, said: “Mr. Rhyme, I’ll remind you that you’re still under oath.”

Rhyme frowned and looked over the solidly built, black-haired lawyer, whose last name was Coughlin. Rhyme affected a pensive expression. “I wasn’t aware that something might have happened to damage the oath.”

Did the judge offer a faint smile? Rhyme couldn’t see clearly. He was on the main floor of the courtroom, and the judge was considerably above and largely behind him.

The testimonial oath in court had always struck Rhyme as an unnecessary mouthful, even with the “so help you God” snipped off.

Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Why did swearing have to be solemn? And once one affirmed the first “truth,” was there any point to the overkill? How about: “Do you swear you won’t lie? If you do, we’ll arrest you.”

More efficient.

He now relented. “I acknowledge that I’m under oath.”

The trial was being conducted in New York Supreme Court — which, despite the name, was in fact a lower-level court in the state. The room was wood paneled and scuffed, the walls hung with pictures of jurists from over the years, going back, it seemed, to the days of Reconstruction. The proceeding itself, however, was pure twenty-first century. On the prosecution and defense tables were computers and tablets — the judge had a slim high-def monitor too. There was not a single law book in the room.

Present were thirty or so spectators, most here to see the infamous defendant, though perhaps a few hoping to see Rhyme.

Coughlin, whose age Rhyme figured to be about fifty, said, “I’ll get to the substance of my cross-examination.” He flipped through notes. Maybe there were no books, but Rhyme noted easily a hundred pounds of foolscap between the defense and the prosecution tables.

“Thank you, sir,” said the judge.

Being a criminalist, a forensic scientist aiding in criminal investigation, is only partly about the laboratory; the other aspect of the job is performing. The prosecutor needs an expert witness to present findings in an articulate way and to patiently and effectively parry the defense counsel’s assault on your conclusions. On redirect, a good prosecutor can sometimes rehabilitate a witness battered by the defense, but it’s best not to get into hard straits in the first place. Lincoln Rhyme was reclusive by nature, and loved his time in a laboratory above all, but he was not entirely introverted. Who doesn’t enjoy a little grandstanding before the jury, and sparring with the defendant’s attorney?

“You testified on direct that no fingerprints of my client were left at the crime scene where Leon Murphy was murdered, correct?”

“No, I did not.”

Coughlin frowned, looking at a yellow pad that might have contained perceptive notes or might have contained doodles or a recipe for beef brisket. Rhyme happened to be hungry. It was ten a.m. and he’d missed breakfast.

Coughlin glanced at his client. Viktor Antony Buryak, fifty-two. Dark-haired like his mouthpiece but bulkier, with Slavic features and pale skin. He wore a tailored charcoal gray suit and a burgundy vest. Buryak’s face was oddly unthreatening. Rhyme could picture him serving up pancakes at a church basement fundraiser and remembering every parent by name and giving the kids an extra splash of syrup.

“Do you want me to read you back your testimony?” Coughlin, who’d been hovering close to Rhyme, like a shark near chum, lifted a palm.

“No need. I remember it. I stated — under oath, I’ll just reassure you — that of the fingerprints collected at the scene of Leon Murphy’s murder, none could be identified as your client’s.”

“What exactly is the difference?”

“You said I testified that your client left no fingerprints at the scene. He might very well have left a million of them. The evidence collection team simply didn’t recover any.”

Coughlin rolled his eyes. “Move to strike.”

Judge Williams told the jury, “You’ll disregard Mr. Rhyme’s response. But try again, Mr. Coughlin.”

Looking put out, Coughlin said, “Mr. Rhyme, no fingerprints of my client were discovered at the crime scene where the convicted felon Leon Murphy was shot, correct?”

“I can’t answer because I can’t speak to whether the victim was a convicted felon or not.”

Coughlin sighed.

The judge stirred.

Rhyme said, “I agree with your ‘were discovered’ part of that sentence.”

Coughlin and Buryak shared a look. The client was taking this better than his attorney. The lawyer returned to his table and glanced down.

Rhyme regarded the jury and found more than a few looking his way. They’d be curious about his condition. Some defense attorneys, he’d heard, privately complained about his presence, given that he was a quadriplegic, testifying from a wheelchair — which, they believed, generated sympathy for the prosecution.

But what could he do? Wheelchair bound he was. Criminalist he was.

Rhyme’s eyes circled to the defendant. Buryak was a unique figure in the history of organized crime in the region. He owned a number of businesses in the city, but that wasn’t how he made most of his money. He offered a unique service in the underworld, one that had probably cost more lives than any other organized crime outfit in New York’s exceedingly criminal history.

The People of the State of New York v. Viktor Buryak, however, had nothing to do with that. This was about a single incident, a single crime, a single murder.

Leon Murphy had been shot to death a week or so after a meeting with the manager of a warehouse that Buryak owned. Murphy was a psychotic wannabe gangbanger who fancied himself a descendant of the Westies, the brutal Irish gang that had once ruled Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan. Murphy had made a sales pitch offering protection to the warehouse manager.

A very bad business idea, selling that particular product to that particular consumer.

Coughlin asked, “Did you find footprints near Leon Murphy’s body? Or near where the bullet casing was found?”

“Near the body, the field was grassy, no footprints could be ascertained. Near the bullet casing, the evidence collection technicians found footprints but because of a recent rain it was impossible to determine the type of shoe.”

“So you can’t testify that my client’s footprints were found at the scene of the crime?”

“Don’t you think that can be inferred from my prior comment?” Rhyme asked acerbically. He’d learned that nobody cares about badgering attorneys. That’s what they’re paid for.

“Mr. Rhyme, does the NYPD forensics unit routinely collect DNA at crime scenes?”

“Yes.”

“And did you discover any of my client’s DNA at the scene where Leon Murphy was killed?”

“No.”

“Mr. Rhyme, you analyzed the bullet that killed Mr. Murphy, correct? That is, the lead slug?”

“Yes.”

“And you analyzed the shell casing too?”

“That’s correct.”

“And, once more, what caliber was that?”

“Nine-millimeter parabellum.”

“And you testified that the lands and grooves, that is the rifling of the barrel, suggest that the gun was a Glock seventeen.”

“A Glock definitely, a model seventeen most likely.”

“Mr. Rhyme, did you or any investigators you were working with check firearms records in any state or federal databases with regard to my client?”

“Yes.”

“And does or did he own a Glock, specifically a model seventeen?”

“I have no idea.”

“Explain, Mr. Rhyme.”

“He might own a dozen.”

“Your Honor,” said Coughlin. He sounded slightly wounded that Rhyme was treating him so unfairly.

Was Viktor Buryak on the verge of smiling?

“Mr. Rhyme.” The judge was growing weary.

“He asked if he owned a Glock, and I testified that I have no idea. Which I don’t. I can testify that the record shows that, in New York State, he owns no legally registered Glocks.”

ADA Sellars said, “Your Honor, the defense is straying from Captain Rhyme’s contribution to the case, which is not firearms purchase records. It relates solely to his expertise in physical evidence.”

Coughlin said, “Let me lay this foundation, Your Honor. It will be clear in a moment where I’m going.”

Rhyme looked at his keen eyes and wondered what that destination might be.

“Proceed... for the moment.”

“Mr. Rhyme, to recap, could you confirm that my client’s DNA was not found at either the site of the body or site of the shell casing?”

“Correct.”

“Or on the body or shell casing.”

“That’s true.”

“And his footprints and fingerprints were not found at either place?”

“Correct.”

“And no fibers or hairs that could be traced to him were found there?”

“Correct.”

“And state and federal records do not indicate that he owns or owned a Glock semiautomatic pistol?”

“Correct.”

“In fact the only forensic connection between the murder of Leon Murphy and my client is a few grains of sand on the ground where the victim was found.”

“Six,” Rhyme countered. “More than a few.”

Coughlin smiled — it was directed at the jury. “Six grains of sand.”

“Please explain again how that sand connects my client to the murder.”

“The sand was unusual in composition. It was made up of calcium sulfate dihydrate, with silicon dioxide, along with the presence of another substance, C₁₂H₂₄, about three quarters saturated hydrocarbons and one quarter aromatic hydrocarbons.”

“About that other substance, as you call it. Could you translate for us, please?”

“It’s a particular grade of diesel fuel.”

“But why does this connect my client to the scene?”

“Because samples were taken from the street in front of his driveway in Forest Hills, Queens, and similar sand was found there. Control samples taken from where the body was found revealed no such sand.”

“Did the sand taken from my client’s home match that at the scene where Leon Murphy was murdered?”

Rhyme hesitated. “The word ‘match’ in forensic science means identical. Fingerprints match. DNA matches. There are some chemical mixtures that are so complex that they could be said to match. In forensics, barring those situations, we use the word ‘associated.’ You could also say very, very similar to.”

Coughlin repeated, “‘Very, very...’ I see. So then you can’t testify that the grains of sand at my client’s home matched the grains of sand at the crime scene.”

“I just said—”

The attorney snapped, “Can you say the grains of sand from my client’s house matched the six grains of sand discovered at the crime scene?”

After a long moment, Rhyme said, “No, I cannot.”

Coughlin brushed a hand through his sturdy hair. “Almost done, Mr. Rhyme. But before you leave, I’d like to ask you just a few more questions.” A fast look to the jury, then back. “And these are about you.”

3

Will it be murder or not?

Will I be watching a human being’s bloody end?

The clearing is surrounded by lush greenery and, beyond, sandy fields. In the hazy distance are hills like camel humps. A jetliner’s contrail slices the sky, high, high, in the air. A voluptuous storm cloud looms and there will be rain soon.

I stretch and observe closely, looking at two men, both sinewy, dark complected, black hair, Latinx features. They are wearing gray slacks and T-shirts with images and type.

I myself am dressed similarly, though my slacks are beige and my T-shirt black, with no markings.

All of us wear running shoes.

The man with the knife is in an AC/DC T-shirt. The man standing in front of him, his hands bound behind his back, is wearing a faded yellow and green shirt. I think there was a sports team logo on the breast but washing has removed it. Brazil soccer, maybe.

AC/DC is speaking loudly, in Spanish. The knife moves but not threateningly. The man is simply gesturing. Making points, emphasizing. His body language suggests he’s worked up. The strident words spew from the wiry man in staccato bursts.

The man with his hands bound with long and sloppily tied rope is looking as bewildered as afraid.

The lecturer raises the knife in the air. It has a smooth edge on the bottom of the blade, a serrated one on the top.

The question remains: Will it be murder?

Maybe this is just a message. Pure, and ponderous, talk. Intimidation.

When people are about to die, they don’t get desperate and try to fight or run. They’re passive and perhaps cry or perhaps ask, “Why, why, why?” but little more than that. Maybe there’s some negotiation: Promises of money, or sex. Promises of changed ways. Mutterings of regret.

Never begging for mercy. Which I find interesting.

AC/DC’s diatribe seems to be winding down. The motion with the knife slows. The bound man is crying.

And, of course, I’m wondering what I should do.

Playing God means making tough decisions.

Sitting forward in anticipation, eyes on the wicked knife, which seems stained with dried blood, I ask myself: What’s it going to be?

4

“Mr. Rhyme,” Coughlin was saying, “you analyze evidence in your town house, is that correct?”

“In a laboratory in my town house, yes.”

“Not a bad commute,” the man offered casually, smiling. Several jurors joined him.

Rhyme dipped his head, acknowledging the tepid cleverness.

“What precautions do you take to make sure there is no contamination of the evidence gathered at the crime scene by substances in the town house?”

“We comply with the American Forensic Institute’s Committee of Area Contamination Guidelines. One hundred percent.”

“Tell us specifically how?”

“The lab is scrubbed three times a day with disinfectants. It’s separated from the rest of the town house by a floor-to-ceiling glass divider, with positive pressurization so intake of substances from outside cannot happen. No one goes into the lab without wearing protective clothing — bonnets, booties, mask and a lab coat. Gloves too. This protects them and protects the evidence from contamination.”

“Booties, you said.”

“Like the sort surgeons wear.”

“With all respect to your condition, Mr. Rhyme, you can’t put booties on your wheels, now, can you?”

“I mostly supervise the lab work of others.”

“Do you ever go into the — is it called a sterile area?”

Rhyme hesitated again. He glanced at the prosecutor. Sellars’s face revealed a hint of uneasiness. “Yes, sterile area. And I do go in occasionally to analyze evidence. I wear all of the other personal protective gear I just mentioned and—”

“I’d like to focus on the wheels of your chair. How do you protect them against contamination?”

“The wheels are carefully cleaned by my aide before I go inside. They’re brushed and scrubbed.”

Coughlin glanced at the wheelchair. It was an Invacare model with large wheels in the center and two coaster wheels in the front and two in the back. This let Rhyme turn in any direction he wished without having to drive forward or back.

“This is the chair you’d use when you go into the lab?”

“Yes, but again—”

“‘Yes’ is fine, sir. Now what type of tires are those?”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“If they’re standard, they’d be fourteen-inch Invacare 3.00-8 foam filled. Also known as flat free, or solid tires.”

“I believe that’s correct.” Well, the man had done some homework. And when had the lawyer’s private eye been spying on Rhyme?

“And Invacare is known for quality products for the disabled, aren’t they?”

“Objection,” said Sellars. “The witness is not an expert on a corporation’s reputation. Besides, what’s the point of this line of questioning?”

“I’ll withdraw the question about quality products, Your Honor. I’m getting to my point now.”

“Very well. With some vivace, perhaps.” The judge was known to be an opera fan.

“Of course, Your Honor. Mr. Rhyme, do the tires on that wheelchair perform to your satisfaction?”

“Well, yes.”

“Including good traction?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that’s because of the deep tread?”

“Objection.”

“Mr. Coughlin, if you want to introduce the wheels into evidence, make your motion.”

“That won’t be necessary, Your Honor.”

Of course it wasn’t. The jurors had all gotten a look at the treads, which were deep. The lawyer had made his point.

“Mr. Rhyme, how long would you say it takes your aide to clean those treads?”

“Probably twenty minutes.”

“For both of them?”

“That’s right.”

“Ten minutes each.”

“That’s what the math would say.” Getting a few smiles himself.

“I’ve read your treatises, Mr. Rhyme. You’ve written that trace evidence adheres like glue to hands, feet, hair. And can be so small that it’s virtually undetectable without special equipment like powerful microscopes. Is that correct? Those are your words, are they not?”

“Yes, but—”

“Now, you made a reference to the AFI’s Committee of Area Contamination Guidelines. Isn’t it true that those guidelines deal exclusively with the issue of DNA contamination?”

Rhyme paused. His eyes met the prosecutor’s. “This is correct.”

“They say nothing about other substances?”

“No, though by following them—”

“Mr. Rhyme, please. The guidelines were not meant to address other forms of trace evidence analyzed in the lab. Is that a true statement?”

“It is,” Rhyme muttered.

Coughlin’s eyes lit up. “If you knew that the guidelines applied only to DNA, why would you cite them as proof of your diligence in handling the trace evidence against my client?”

“I didn’t think about it.”

“Could it be that you wanted to attempt to shore up your credibility because you are not in fact very confident about the evidence presented against my client?”

“Objection.”

“Sustained.”

But of course the jurors’ memories could not be erased. They’d just heard that Rhyme was not completely playing fair.

“Mr. Rhyme, were you inside the sterile area of your lab when the analysis of this sand was going on?”

Rhyme fell silent. He looked at Thom in the back of the courtroom, his trim aide wearing today an impeccable navy-blue suit, off-white shirt and dark gray tie.

Coughlin prodded, “Mr. Rhyme?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And when you went inside, did your aide scrub the treads of those tires?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Wipes and bleach.”

“Did he use a Q-tip or similar item to dig into the treads?”

“No. He used wipes.”

“And that was for only ten minutes per wheel.”

“Objection.”

Coughlin trimmed out the “only” and asked, “And that was for ten minutes per wheel?”

“About that, yes.”

“Mr. Rhyme, you must have a lot of equipment in the lab. Chromatographs, electron microscopes, drying hoods... Typical forensic devices.”

“That’s right.”

“And they generate a fair amount of heat?”

“When they’re in operation, yes.”

“Are there fans in the lab?”

Rhyme was silent for a moment. “Yes.”

“And a fan could, in theory, blow trace evidence around. So that foreign matter brought inside the lab could contaminate a soil sample?”

“Objection.”

The judge: “He’s an expert witness. I’ll allow the hypothetical. Mr. Rhyme, please answer.”

“In theory.”

“Mr. Rhyme, the evidence report states that your laboratory analyzed the soil samples from the murder scene and from my client’s property on April twentieth. Is that correct?”

“That sounds right.”

“And on that day were you outside your town house for any reason?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, I’ll refresh your memory. You gave a lecture at the Manhattan School of Criminal Justice on West Seventy-Fourth Street. This was at ten a.m.”

“I’d have to check.”

“Your lecture was on YouTube. It’s time-stamped.”

“Then,” Rhyme said stiffly, “I guess the answer is yes.”

“Your Honor,” Coughlin said as he lifted another document and approached the bench, “I’d like to introduce into evidence Defense Exhibit One.” He handed two copies to a woman bailiff, who gave one to the judge and the other to Sellars. The ADA read through the pages and then looked at Rhyme with a frown.

After skimming her copy, the judge asked, “Mr. Sellars?”

A sigh. “No objection.”

Coughlin approached Rhyme and placed a copy open before him. “Mr. Rhyme, this is a report from Albrecht and Tanner Forensic Services. Are you familiar with them?”

“I am.”

“Could you describe them to the court?”

“They are a private forensic laboratory. They do commercial work for construction and manufacturing companies mostly.”

“Are they a respected operation?”

“Yes.”

“This report was commissioned by my firm and, in full disclosure, I’ll add that we paid the company’s standard fee for their services. I’m reading from their report. ‘Our technicians collected eighty-four ground samples from sidewalks, gardens, planting beds and public works sites.

“‘These samples were stored in sterile containers and returned for analysis in our laboratory. Per instructions, our technicians were told to look for the presence of calcium sulfate dihydrate, with silicon dioxide, in combination with C₁₂H₂₄ — saturated hydrocarbons (seventy-five percent) and aromatic hydrocarbons (twenty-five percent). Our analysts did find significant quantities of such substances.’”

Coughlin cast a dramatic glance toward the jury then to his witness. “Mr. Rhyme, what the report is describing is a particular type of sand mixed in with diesel fuel, correct?”

“Yes.”

“You see the proportion of chemicals in those samples?”

Rhyme looked down.

“I do.”

“And is that proportion identical to the proportion of chemicals in the six grains of sand the prosecution introduced as evidence linking my client to the murder scene?”

Rhyme looked toward Sellars, then quickly away. “It is.”

Coughlin returned to the report. “Under the heading ‘Location of Collection,’ the report states, ‘These samples of sand came from a work site on the west side of Central Park West, in the three hundred block.’ Mr. Rhyme.” Coughlin turned. “Is your town house, which contains your laboratory, located in the three hundred block of Central Park West?”

Clearing his throat, he responded. “Yes.”

“Is it possible, Mr. Rhyme, that those six grains of sand you claim link my client’s home to the site where Leon Murphy was killed came not from either of those locations, but from right outside your front door, and that they were tracked into your laboratory in the treads of your wheelchair, and that therefore no trace evidence exists suggesting my client is guilty?”

Rhyme’s lips tightened.

“Your Honor?” Coughlin asked.

“Mr. Rhyme, please answer.”

Rhyme cleared his throat. “What you describe is possible.”

“No further questions.”

5

I see that, no, it’s not a scare tactic.

This is going to be murder. The real thing.

Blood is about to flow.

In quantity.

AC/DC, the one with the knife, grabs the victim’s hair with his left hand, pulls it back and works the knife around the neck, the way you slit the paper wrapper atop a bottle of whisky. The victim gives a squeak as if of surprise and the crimson fluid flows. Oh my, it sprays. He sinks to his side. The knife man saws and saws — the knife merely appeared sharp — and finally detaches the head. He tosses it contemptuously aside and continues to lecture. The body doesn’t twitch or curl. It’s completely still.

And now for my role in the matter.

My decision.

I hit the space bar to freeze the video. I sip some caffeine-free cola and realize it’s gone warm and flat during the course of the past hour or so; I’ve been engrossed in videos of the sort I’ve just been watching. One loses track.

I sit up a bit straighter and lift one shoulder, then the other. A bone pops. I’m at my workbench in a chair that’s padded but not made for long-term sitting, though I usually sit in it long-term. I’ve been meaning to get a new one and I will soon. I have my eye on a thousand-dollar, special-order model.

I read the comments populating the screen below the frozen video.

Why indeed? I think. That was a bit of a disappointment.

So, decision time.

I type several keys and hit Return.

The screen goes black, replaced by the words:

This will piss off a lot of our audience. I sometimes read comments complaining about the company deleting a video. They cry censorship. How can we ignore the First Amendment?

But viewers on social media are rarely constitutional scholars and they miss the significant fact that the First Amendment prohibits governmental censorship. My company — ViewNow — like YouTube, Instagram and all the others can delete to their hearts’ delight. Completely legal. You don’t like it, type in another URL and browse elsewhere.

I had debated a different route. Rather than deleting the vid, I could have put it behind an entry page. When a viewer clicked on the title, “Justice Cartel Style,” a pop-up would have appeared.

But the video was, like most nowadays, high-def. The blood was vivid and plentiful, the death yelp — the last sound ever to be uttered by the victim — clear. So the execution had to go altogether.

My job as content moderator is to consider what’s in the best interest of my employer. And that means striking the fine balance between the titillating, shocking and disgusting on the one hand, and the cute, funny and inspiring, on the other. Ultimately, of course, I suspect that when it comes to offense, the wunderkind execs within the Silicon Valley headquarters of ViewNow don’t give two shits about producing upright content; they’re terrified of scaring off advertisers if the vids are too troubling (though I was amused when a banner ad at the bottom of the Los Zetas beheading was for Family Pride Life Insurance).

One more question remains: Should I delete the poster’s account because of his offense?

So far he’s uploaded scenes from the video games Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, very violent but computer generated. No real San Andreans or Old West settlers were killed in the making of those games.

However, I see his journey. From those games and violent Japanese anime, he’s moved on to posting more real-life scenes of gore and death, lifted from other sites, of people killed in various genocides and mass murders — after the deed is done.

Today’s cartel beheading is the first real-time murder he’s posted.

Will, someday, he decide that this isn’t enough and move from observer to participant?

Lust transports you.

A fact I know very well.

Cancel, or not?

I’m God. I can do what I want.

My finger hovers over the keys.

Ah, let him have his little hobby.

After I close out the beheading video another pops up in its place. A helpful algorithm shot it my way.

It’s the conspiracy theorist going by the name Verum, who posts several times a week. We are on the lookout for politically inflammatory material too, in addition to the blood and sex. And the anonymous Verum certainly walks a fine line.

The figure pixelated past recognition sits at a desk. The room is white and a curtain is drawn over a large window. There are hooks on the walls, where paintings would hang when taping is not in progress.

Verum is obsessed with secrecy.

For good reason.

The deep voice is also distorted and all the eerier for it.

“Friends: I’ve come into possession of a classified report about a program the Hidden have created in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. The K to Twelve Improvement Project is a secret program initiated to map every student in the system by facial recognition. The data will be used to track the whereabouts of the youngsters and their parents and will allow the government to create political, religious and economic profiles far more invasive than anything we’ve ever seen.

“The Hidden will stop at nothing to destroy our privacy! In the comments below this video you’ll find the names and addresses of the superintendents of those schools. Don’t let them get away with using our children as fodder for the War!

“Say your prayers and stay prepared!

“My name is Verum, Latin for ‘true.’ That is what my message is. What you do with it is up to you.”

Below is a URL for a site in the dark web where one can contribute money to fight the Hidden, which Verum passionately attacks but has never quite defined. The ads are targeted: survival gear, weapons, books by other conspiracy theorists.

One could block Verum’s posts for containing purported facts that are “inaccurate” or “cannot be verified.”

Or — ever useful — the community standard thing.

Some of the posts have also incited followers to violence. It’s us versus the Hidden.

I let it stand.

Rising, I walk across my workshop floor, worried and uneven oak one hundred and fifty years old. I get a cold cola.

The space isn’t large. It has a raftered ceiling and brick walls. Wooden posts rise. The windows are covered with steel security panels. This was so that a hundred and twenty years ago no one would break into the Sebastiano Bakery Supply Company and steal equipment. The sheets serve my needs well too. I hardly want intruders, though I’m less worried about thieves than others who might come a’calling.

I keep it well lit because when it’s dark it reminds me of the Consequences Room and that just makes me furious.

I happen to glance at a rough-brick wall into which I’ve pounded tenpenny nails and hung on them my collection of locks. One hundred and forty-two of them. Also mesh bags of keys, of which I own at least a thousand.

No other decorations grace the walls of the workshop because if you have locks and keys why would you need any other art?

Glancing at my phone for the time.

I log off and, in an instant, Los Zetas beheadings and copyright violations and Verum’s anarchical rhetoric are gone.

I have plans to make.

Last night’s Visit to Annabelle Talese’s was a challenge. But nothing compares with tonight’s.

That’s going to require considerably more finesse.

6

Criminal investigators call potential suspects “people of interest.”

Lincoln Rhyme coined a term that was a forensic scientist’s counterpart: a “substance of interest.” He bestowed this designation on a material when it was the odd thing out, appearing at a crime scene when there was no reason for it to be there.

Hearing Rhyme’s characterization, Ron Pulaski, the young patrol officer who often assisted Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, had said, “Oh, yeah — the kids’ books. What’s out of place in this picture? You know, like a shark nesting in a tree.” He was the father of two.

At first inclined to belittle the simile, Rhyme had reconsidered and said, “Exactly.”

In this instance the substance was NaClO₂, known more commonly by its nickname, sodium chlorite.

The trace had been found at a homicide, the backyard of a modest mansion in a posh neighborhood of Queens. Alekos Gregorios, a well-off owner of a chain of industrial laundromats, had been robbed and stabbed to death. Two detectives from the 112 House on Austin Street — Tye Kelly and Crystal Wilson — were running the case and, confronting delays at NYPD’s main crime lab, had asked Rhyme if he could short-circuit the system and take a look at the evidence. Any opinions would be welcome.

He’d agreed.

Gregorios, a widower, lived alone. His neighbors reported seeing nothing suspicious around the time of death, but his grown son, who’d had dinner with him that evening, told police that his father had had a run-in with a homeless man earlier in the day. The man was tampering with the gate to the enclosed backyard and Gregorios ran him off. The man had threatened Gregorios, who had not taken the mad rant seriously.

The son had only his father’s description: white with wild, unwashed brown hair and wearing a filthy raincoat.

No other details.

New York City’s homeless population hovered around fifty thousand, so canvassing the streets and shelters was not an efficient way to proceed. The detectives hoped Rhyme could narrow down the search.

Enter NaClO₂, the substance of interest, which Rhyme had isolated.

He was presently back in his town house, on Central Park West — the very venue that had been the subject of the debate in the case against Viktor Buryak.

The stately premises dated to the era when Victoria ruled England and Boss Tweed New York, each with unchallenged power over their respective worlds, which were not wholly dissimilar, varying only in geographical reach.

Other than the paneled walls, rich oak floors and plastered ceiling, the parlor looked nothing like it would have a century and a half ago. While a portion was a contemporary sitting room with chairs and tables and bookshelves, the rest was what he’d described to attorney Coughlin: a well-equipped forensic lab, the sort that any smallor even medium-sized police department or sheriff’s office might envy. Ringing the workstations were spark emission and fluorescence spectrometers, evidence-drying cabinets, a fingerprint fuming chamber, hyperspectral image analyzer, automated DNA sequencer, blood chemistry analyzer, liquid and gas chromatographs and a freezer no different from what one might find in the kitchen.

Tucked into a corner were the microscopes — binocular, compound and confocal and scanning electron — and the scores of hand-held instruments that are a forensic scientist’s tools of the trade.

The lab had a decidedly industrial feel to it, but to Lincoln Rhyme one word and one word only applied: “homey.”

For a moment his mind wandered back to the trial and he wondered how the jury deliberations were going at that moment.

He himself had never served on a jury before. Criminalists consulting for the NYPD and FBI last about sixty seconds in voir dire.

Rhyme now studied the dry marker whiteboard on which certain details of the Gregorios killing were notated. Since Rhyme was merely an advisor, only the basics were jotted down or taped up, not all the minutiae of the case: a brief description of the suspect; the time of death (9 p.m. or so); security camera status (present in the vicinity but not aimed at the scene); the killer’s mismatched shoes (not unusual among the homeless); and a stark photo of the three knife wounds in the victim’s torso. The absence of other wounds suggested that the killer had hidden on the property and surprised Gregorios. In some states, like California, this would be called “lying in wait,” and made the crime a capital offense. In New York the penal code made no reference to lying in wait, but the suspect’s behavior would help the prosecutor prove intent.

The photos vividly revealed the eviscerated body and the Rorschach stain of blood on the broad path of white and beige pebbles.

Then there was the trace.

On his pants pocket — the hip, where presumably he’d kept his wallet — an evidence collection tech had lifted a sample, which contained NaClO₂, along with citric acid and cherry syrup.

Rhyme had dictated a memo to the detectives in the 112 House, a copy of which was on the board.

The response, not long after, was from Detective Tye Kelly:

Rhyme then noted the front door to the town house opening. He heard the sticky rush of traffic speeding along Central Park West.

“How did it go?” Amelia Sachs asked, entering the parlor from the hallway. Meaning not the Gregorios case, he understood, but his testimony at the Buryak trial.

“It went,” Rhyme said to his wife. He gave a shrug, one of the few gestures he was capable of. “We’ll just have to see.”

Amelia Sachs, tall and trim, brushed her long red hair off of her face.

She bent down and kissed him on the mouth. He smelled the sweet/sour aroma of gunshot residue. She said, “You look, hm, troubled.”

He grimaced. “The defense lawyer. I just don’t know. Was he good, or not? Don’t know.”

“I won’t ask how long you think the deliberations’ll be.”

Sachs, a seasoned NYPD detective, had herself testified in hundreds of trials. She knew the pointlessness of the inquiry.

“How’d it go for you?” he asked.

Sachs competed in practical shooting matches, also known as dynamic or action shooting. Contestants moved from station to station, firing at paper or steel targets, with the score based on best aim, fastest time and the power of the rounds. Shooters would fire from prone, kneeling and standing positions and often did not know ahead of time the configuration of the stations or where the targets would be. There was considerable improvisation in practical shooting.

Sachs enjoyed firearm competitions, or just plain practicing on the range, as much as she enjoyed surging around the track, or through city traffic, behind the wheel of her red muscle car, a Ford Torino.

“Not so great,” she replied to his question.

“Meaning?”

“Second.” A shrug that echoed his.

“Weren’t there fifty people competing?”

Her shoulders rose again.

Sachs was her own toughest critic, though she did admit, “The guy got first place? He does it full-time.”

Rhyme had learned from her that marksmen could make good money on the competition circuit — not from prizes but from sponsorships and teaching classes.

Thom brought in mugs of coffee and a platter of cookies.

At the moment, though, Rhyme had little thirst — not for coffee, at least.

“No,” Thom said.

Rhyme frowned. “I don’t recall asking a question.”

“No, but your eyes did.”

“Thinking I was looking at the single malt? I wasn’t.”

He had been.

“It’s too early.”

There was no medical opinion that Rhyme had ever seen about those afflicted by quadriplegia limiting their intake of alcohol, and even if such studies existed, he would have ignored them.

“It was a difficult morning. The trial. You were there.”

“Too early,” Thom pronounced and set the mug of coffee on the table beside where Rhyme had parked his chair. “And, by the way, I thought you handled it well. On the stand.”

A sigh — too dramatically loud, Rhyme had to admit. He looked at the bottle, which the aide had left in the parlor but was too high to reach. Damn it. Of course it was well within Sachs’s reach but in matters of Rhyme’s health, she deferred to Thom — at least, most of the time. This morning would not be an exception, apparently.

He lifted the mug and sipped. He grudgingly admitted to himself that the brew was pretty good. He replaced the cup, not spilling a drop. With surgery and relentless therapy, he now had nearly complete control of his right arm and hand. The advancements for patients suffering from spinal cord injuries had accelerated greatly in recent years and Rhyme’s several doctors had presented him various options to improve his state even more. He was not averse to doing so but knew he would resent the time that the procedure and recovery would steal away from his investigating work.

For now he was content with the functioning of the limb — and, by twist of fate, his left ring finger, which might seem an ineffectual appendage, but the digit could pilot the wheelchair expertly. Leaving his right hand to grip evidence... or a glass of twelve-year-old scotch.

Though not today.

He debated calling ADA Sellars. But why bother? The prosecutor would call when he heard something.

His phone hummed, and he told it to answer.

“Lon.”

The voice grumbled: “Got an odd one I could use some help with, Linc. Amelia?”

“I’m here too, Lon.”

In Lincoln Rhyme’s town house, phones were always on speaker.

“You both free?”

Rhyme said, “First. Define ‘odd.’”

“Aw, lemme do it in person. I’m pulling up now.”

7

Upper East Side.

I’m walking from the subway station, not fast, not slow. Blending into the crowds, I move north.

Anyone glancing at me would see nothing out of the ordinary: abundant dark hair, longish, more unruly than curly. My body is slim, lanky. My fingers are long and my ears are bigger than I’d like. I think that’s why I get few haircuts, to cover up the flaw. I also wear stocking caps a lot. In New York City, you can get away with this kind of head covering most of the year. If you’re thirty or under, like me. (One difference: mine pulls down into a ski mask.)

I’m in those running shoes that are similar to the ones worn by Los Zetas. They were made in China and are an off-brand. They’re comfortable enough. Mostly I wear these because I heard that police sometimes have a database of shoe tread marks and it would be easier to identify and trace a well-known style. Maybe I’m overthinking but what can it hurt?

At the moment I’m wearing blue jeans and, under a black windbreaker, a dress shirt, pink, a nice one; it was a present from a girlfriend, now former. This puts me in mind of Aleksandra. She isn’t former; she’s very present. Coincidentally she mentioned not long ago that pink happens to be her favorite color.

In one of my sessions with Dr. Patricia she found hope for me when, in answer to her question as to whether I was seeing anyone, I said yes and told her about Aleksandra. “She’s pretty, Russian, a professional makeup artist. She’s built like a dancer. She used to be one when she was little.”

From Aleksandra I learned that all Russian girls are either dancers or gymnasts when they’re young. “There are no exceptions to rule,” she announced, her expression charmingly professorial.

I turn on 97th Street and, when no one is looking, slip through a chain-link fence and into the half-collapsed building that smells of mold, brick dust, urine.

It was formerly owned by a Bechtel, or Bechtels plural, whoever the family might be, according to the carving in the crown of the structure.

The place is pretty disgusting but suits my needs perfectly: it overlooks the service entrance to the apartment building that will be the site of my Visit tonight.

This shadowy neighborhood is the East Nineties. It’s a transitional area. To me it has a thin, gloomy quality. It’s illuminated by no direct sun, only reflected light. The word “diluted” comes to mind.

I have entered carefully, keeping an eye out for occupants. If there are any they’re strung out on meth or heroin or crack, if anyone still does crack, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be witnesses. I have my knife, of course, but I hardly want to use it — who needs that fuss?

But the structure is unoccupied, as it was on my last two visits here. Not surprising. It looks like the whole place could come down at any minute.

I am, though, concerned about the trash here. The Chinese shoe tread is anonymous, yes, but I don’t know how effective the rubber is in protecting against tainted hypodermic needles.

I gaze out, looking over the occasional passerby. I’m an expert at watching people and because of that I am an expert at knowing when I’m being watched. Right now, I’m not. I’m hidden behind the panes of glass, just like I’m hidden to those who post on ViewNow — invisible, but always watching.

I study her building: dun-colored stone, aluminum trim around the windows, a weatherworn green canopy leading to the street. Ten stories. Not many young people here, or retirees. This part of town — while pale and nondescript, architecturally bland — is expensive.

But Carrie Noelle can afford it. Her business is, by all accounts, successful.

Being here now is part of the way I approach my Visits. Always planning ahead.

There are two ways to pick locks: The crude approach involves either using a snap gun — which you stick into a keyway and pull the trigger until the lock opens — or bumping, bluntly pounding a key blank until you defeat the device. The second approach is rake picking — the subtle, the artist’s approach. My approach.

Similarly there are two ways to approach breaking and entering. Some burglars improvise. They show up at the home and just see what happens.

I’m incapable of that. My Visits involve exhaustive preparation. I need to know about security in the building, front door, service door, cameras in lobbies and hallways or outside, doormen, vantage points, homeless men or women stationed nearby, who, like crank heads, might be stoned or crazy or drunk, but who can have just fine memories and describe me to a tee.

Curiously, I learned not long ago, serial killers too are divided into two categories: disorganized and organized offenders.

I see now that nothing has changed. No new cameras in or around Carrie’s building. No homeless squatters in adjacent doorways. A simple Webb-Miller on the service entrance. Which hardly even counts. I call such locks hiccups.

One more thing to check.

And I have to wait but a moment. Ms. Carrie Noelle, in person, walks into view, returning from a lunch date I knew she had scheduled.

She is tall, in her mid-thirties. Her outfit today is jeans and a leather jacket. Running shoes, orange and stylish, not gaudy. Her chestnut hair’s tied back in a ponytail. Not model beautiful but quite pretty. The woman walks in smooth strides. There’s an athleticism about her. Catlike. She not only resembles but she moves just as elegantly as my gorgeous Aleksandra.

Every Russian girl, she is gymnast or dancer growing up...

Carrie is walking along the sidewalk in front of the Bechtel Building. She passes the window, not ten feet away but doesn’t glance in.

And the final element of the prep: I confirm that she’s alone. Carrie isn’t on the arm of a man who would complicate my Visit. (I’d say man or woman, but I know that she’s straight.)

Of course she could have a suitor stop by later tonight, but that hasn’t been her style.

All by her lonesome.

She proceeds to the front of her building. She greets a neighbor, a retiree, he seems. He’s walking toward the entrance too. They smile — hers is radiant — and they exchange a few words. With his key he opens the door (a silly Henderson pin tumbler).

The bags she carts are cumbersome and, gentleman that he must be, he volunteers to help her. She hands one over. As he takes it he glances in and once again smiles, lifting an impressed eyebrow.

Which says to me that the recipient of whatever is inside will be delighted with the purchase. On the other hand, noting the logo of the store on the bag, aren’t children always overjoyed when their parents put that very special new toy into their little hands?

8

“Rumpled” was the go-to word in describing Lon Sellitto, the middle-aged detective first grade who had been the criminalist’s partner years ago, before Rhyme moved to Crime Scene and, later, ascended to be the head of NYPD Investigation and Resources Division, which included the CSU.

Pressing his mobile to his ear, the stocky man with thinning hair of a shade that could best be described as brown-gray made his way into the parlor, nodding greetings to Rhyme and Sachs, as he steamed toward the cookies. He tucked the phone between cheek and shoulder and broke one in half carefully, then set the larger portion back on the tray before negating the show of willpower by scarfing down the surviving half.

He was apparently on hold. He said to no one, “Oatmeal. Raisins. Damn, that man can bake.” He glanced toward Sachs. “You ever bake?”

She seemed perplexed, as if she’d been asked that old saw about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, or however it went. “Once, I think. No, that was something else.”

Sellitto asked, “How’d the trial go?”

Rhyme grumbled, “No earthly idea. It’s in the jury’s hands now.” His voice conveyed the message that he didn’t want to think about, much less discuss, the trial. He said, “‘Odd’? You said, ‘odd.’” The criminalist’s heart was beginning to thud a bit faster — as always, the messenger was his temple. Lincoln Rhyme lived for “odd,” along with “unusual” and “challenging.” “Inexplicable” too. A case where Thug A shoots Thug B, who’s then caught with the murder weapon ten minutes later, did not intrigue. His worst enemy was not a psychotic killer but boredom. Before the accident, and after, to be bored was to die a little.

Amelia Sachs was also eyeing the visitor with some anticipation, it appeared. She was assigned to Major Cases — where Sellitto was a supervising lieutenant. She could catch a job for anybody at MC who needed her but she worked most frequently for Sellitto — and she always did when Rhyme was brought on as consultant.

The detective was then speaking to the person on the other end of the line. “Yessir... We’re on it... Okay... Well.” He paced up to the immaculate glass wall that separated the non-sterile part of the parlor from the lab. He rapped on the glass absently. He nodded, as one will do when concluding a conversation, even when the person he was speaking with was off camera, miles away. “Yessir.” The phone vanished into the pocket of his brown suit. The man had other colors in his wardrobe but when he thought of Sellitto, Rhyme thought of brown.

Thom appeared, with another steaming mug. “Here you go, Lon. How’ve you been? How’s Rachel? You ever get that dog you were talking about?”

“Don’t interrupt him, Thom. He’s here to tell us an interesting tale, aren’t you, Lon? About something odd.”

“You make the best coffee.”

“Thank you.”

“Molasses in the cookies?”

“Not too much. It can overwhelm.”

“Interruption, I was saying,” Rhyme said in a slow, cool voice.

Sellitto said, “Rachel bakes. She made scones the other day. Which I’m not even sure what that is. Kinda dry. Good with butter. Okay, okay, Linc. A couple uniforms from the Twenty House get a call.”

The precinct, a 1960s-era structure with a white stone façade, always in need of scrubbing, was within walking — or rolling — distance of the town house and Rhyme had been there on investigations more than a few times in the past years.

“Case like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

And Lon Sellitto had witnessed a great deal of mayhem over his years as an NYPD beat cop then detective.

“So. Here’s the sit.”

“The what?” Sachs asked.

“The situation. Everybody’s using ‘sit’ in OnePP.”

At another time Rhyme would have lectured his former partner about the sanctity of language, suggesting that dismembering a word spoke volumes about the intelligence and vanity of the dismemberer — nor was he particularly happy at the curious renaming of One Police Plaza. But he let it go.

“Victim was a woman named Annabelle Talese. Twenty-seven, marketing manager for a fashion company and an influencer.”

“What’s an influencer?” Rhyme asked.

“Do you not watch any television, Linc? Surf the web? Or listen to podcasts?”

“What’s a podcast?... That I’m joking about. But influencer?”

Sachs said, “Somebody who talks about a product online. I use this mascara for my morning routine. I like this line of sweaters from ABC knitwear. They get paid by the manufacturer, or they make money from advertising. Influencers’re pretty or handsome. At least, that helps. Unboxing videos’re part of it too. Pam told me about them.”

The young woman, whom Sachs had taken under her wing after saving her from terrorists, was presently studying criminalistics in Chicago.

Rhyme looked at her, querying.

“Somebody buys a product and then videos themselves taking it out of the box and setting it up.”

“Will wonders never cease,” Rhyme said and glanced at Sellitto with a can-we-move-it-along expression.

“A perp breaks into her place in the middle of the night.”

“Homicide?” Rhyme asked.

“No.”

“Sexual battery?” from Sachs.

“Probably not.”

Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. It was she who said, “‘Probably’?”

“Here’s part of the ‘odd.’” Sellitto took a long drink of coffee, which apparently authorized him to chew down another cookie. “Might have touched her, but she couldn’t tell. Basically what he does is he moves things around in her apartment. Personal things, clothes, hygiene stuff, sits beside the bed and eats one of these.” He pointed at the pastry.

“Jesus,” Thom said.

“I’ll say. Kid was petrified. Thought he might still be in the apartment after she woke up.”

“Why?”

“That’s the other part of ‘odd.’ The door was locked, both the knob and two deadbolts, so she figured he had to be there. Only he wasn’t.”

“So,” Sachs said. “He had a key.”

“No, he didn’t. She’s sure of that. He picked the locks to get in. And used his tools to lock up after he left. What kind of burglar does that?”

9

Sachs asked, “And she’s positive there’s no spare key?”

“She was going to give a set to her mother but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. A responding said she admitted she’d been drinking the night before. But nothing more than on a typical gals’ night out. Can I say ‘gal’?”

“Lon,” Rhyme said impatiently.

“Anyway, her word, not mine. Then they wondered if she’d moved things herself — you know, staging it to blame an ex or the landlord. But she didn’t point any fingers, so that theory’s shot. And anyway, they said she was really freaked. Genuinely. She thought it might be a ghost but decided that, quote, ‘wasn’t real likely.’”

Sachs sat down in front of a computer and went online. After she did some keyboarding, a video began to play. It depicted an attractive woman, blond, in a low-cut sweater, sitting at her kitchen table in a bright and neatly ordered dwelling — it smacked of your average New York City apartment. She was smiling broadly at the camera. She was holding up some makeup accessory with affection.

Influencing, apparently.

Sachs froze the image and studied the woman closely. “Annabelle,” she whispered.

This was her way, Rhyme understood. Sachs wanted to know the victims in the cases she was running, wanted to know their histories, their loves, their fears, as many details of their lives as she could absorb — and wanted to know too, in the case of murder, what the last few minutes of those lives had entailed. This bonding with the victim, she believed, made her a better investigator, and the process started with knowing the name.

Though Rhyme was no less sympathetic to the victims’ fates than Sachs, such details did not interest, much less motivate, him.

There were people cops and there were science cops, and the two of them were respective examples of each. This created occasional tension. But, on the whole, it could be argued that this very contrast was what made them click so well.

“So, breaking and entering,” Rhyme said, eyes off the computer and on the ceiling. “Moving things around. A chance for prints, DNA, footprints. Anything else?”

“Well, stole a knife and a pair of panties.”

“Hm.” The suggestion of sex and violence was always troubling, even if he had not, at this point, acted on it.

“But the strangest part was he left a message. It was on a torn-out newspaper page. Left it in her underwear drawer. He used her lipstick to write on it. ‘Reckoning,’ and it was signed ‘the Locksmith.’”

“What was the newspaper?” Sachs asked.

“Daily Herald,” Sellitto said. “From February of this year.”

Rhyme didn’t know it. He paid scant attention to news unless a story shed light on a case he was investigating or contained information that might be useful in the future. He had little patience for most media.

The lieutenant continued, “A rag. Tabloid scandal sheet. The company that publishes it owns a TV station — same thing — and some shock-jock radio shows.”

“Shock jock.” Rhyme had not heard the term but when he realized “disc jockey,” he got it.

He said thoughtfully, “Okay, Lon. She’s upset. Who wouldn’t be? She caught a stalker, maybe. Or it was random. But there was no assault.”

Assault is awareness of physical contact of any kind. She was asleep.

“Probably no battery,” Rhyme continued.

Nonconsensual contact.

“But even that would be hard to prove if there’s no evidence of touching. So you’ve got second-degree burglary.”

Breaking into a commercial building required several conditions to make the crime a burglary, such as the perp’s being armed with a deadly weapon or causing injury to someone. But no such requirements were necessary when the trespasser broke into someone’s personal dwelling. Simple breaking and entering made the Locksmith’s crime a felony.

But that hardly turned it into the crime of the century.

Sellitto caught the point. “Okay, okay, got it, Linc. He messed with her mind but considering what he could’ve done... So, you want to know what the hell’m I doing here, other than an excuse to have Thom’s baked goods. It’s a non-case, right? Well, there’s more.”

He dug out his phone and fiddled, then displayed the screen to Rhyme and Sachs. It was a picture of a social media post: the Herald page that Sellitto had referred to earlier, sitting in a dresser drawer, atop garments, the word “reckoning” and the nickname barely visible; the image was dark, shot without the flash, so as not to wake her, Rhyme supposed. Beneath the picture was typed Annabelle’s address and the words: “Who’ll be next?”

“He posted it somewhere underground but it went viral fast: Facebook and Twitter pages — newspapers, TV stations mostly. Word’s out now and reporters’re calling downtown. It’s holy hell. The brass can’t afford to flub a case that’s got a press-magnet of a perp like this guy. Especially now.”

Rhyme was all too aware of the scandal of recently botched investigations and trials in New York City.

Sellitto continued, “That’s who I was on the horn with when I got here.”

Rhyme had been wondering about the “Yessir.” He said, “So it’s about politics, Lon. Who has time for that? Anyway, I’m doing my part to take the trash out.” He nodded at the whiteboard of the Viktor Buryak investigation.

“I know you are. But I’m not through pitching my case. The respondings’s report ends up on Benny Morgenstern’s desk.”

Sachs said to Rhyme, “Gold shield, Major Cases. Been there a long time.”

Sellitto said, “Yeah. He’s like the wise old man of the squad. Yoda.”

Rhyme frowned. “I don’t know any brass named Yoda.”

Sellitto stared for a moment, then, apparently deciding his former partner was serious, said, “Just hear him out.”

10

Via Zoom, Rhyme — and the others in the parlor — were looking at a round man with a pale, freckled face.

Benny Morgenstern was in his fifties, not exactly the “old man” Sellitto had suggested. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt without a tie. He sat at a cluttered desk, filled with file folders and what appeared to be locks and keys, as well as metalworking tools.

A main bailiwick of the NYPD Major Cases squad was burglaries, robberies and hijackings — crimes that involved perps getting into places that were locked up for the very purpose of keeping them out.

“Captain Rhyme. You don’t remember. We met a while ago. The Whitestone Brinks case.”

He remembered the case — a four-million-dollar heist — though not the detective.

Rhyme’s response was a nod.

“Hi, Benny,” Sachs said.

“Amelia. Lon’s briefed you, I guess. But here’s the situation.”

Ah, “situation” — not “sit.” Rhyme cast a glance to Sellitto, who whispered, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” in response.

“I had one of the respondings take a shot of Ms. Talese’s front door. Hold on.”

He shared a screen on Zoom, and Rhyme could see a knob with a keyhole in the center and two different deadbolts, one above the knob, one below.

Morgenstern continued, “Now, this isn’t going to mean a lot to you... not yet. Bear with me. In the knob, there’s a generic pin tumbler lock. Anybody could pick that with a basic set of tools and an hour to watch YouTube videos. But the deadbolts: Hendricks Model Forty-One on top. And Stahl-Groen Sixteen on the bottom. At lock-picking conventions, they’re competition models.”

“Lock-picking conventions?” Rhyme asked.

“Like hacker conventions. Oh, some professional locksmiths show up, but most of the action is with the bad boys and girls. The picking underworld. Open-society activists, WikiLeaks, that sort of crew. They have contests to see who can crack complicated locks before the clock runs out. Even some of the best pickers in the world can’t get through these babies in time. Some can’t even pick ’em at all. And your guy, the Locksmith, couldn’t stand in a New York apartment building for a half hour, working away. He’d have four, five minutes. Tops.” Morgenstern’s voice seemed laced with astonishment. Admiration too, perhaps.

“Now, it gets better. Or worse.” The detective swiped the page and a picture of a wall appeared, with what seemed to be an electronics panel.

“He gets through the deadbolts, and then has five seconds to disable her alarm. Which he does.”

Morgenstern continued, “Maybe he got her code. He could snatch her purse and it’s inside, but that’s unlikely. Let’s assume he hacked it out of service. Her model’s wireless. There’re three ways to take them out. All three involve using an RF — radio frequency — transmitter. One way is brute force, standing outside and transmitting every possible combination of four-digit pins. It takes about an hour and twenty minutes to get from 0000 to 9999. But, of course, that wouldn’t work in a Manhattan apartment. The second way is to hide a recorder nearby and capture the frequency of the disarm code. Then, when you go to break in, you play it back with the transmitter. But that too: hard to hide in an apartment building like hers.

“So, I think what the Locksmith did was the third way: he jammed the system. See, when you open the front door, a sensor mounted in the frame sends an activation transmission to the main box. That starts the five-second clock running; if you don’t enter the right pin in that time, the alarm goes off.

“But what you can do before you open the door is transmit a constant frequency that jams the link between the door sensor and the box. The ‘door open’ message never gets through to the panel. He probably used a Hack-InRF — that’s the most popular system.”

“And you can just buy them?” Rhyme asked.

“Yep. Or make one, if you’re electronically inclined.” Morgenstern stopped the screen share and his face appeared once more in a larger window. He must’ve had thirty locks on his desk. Was picking a hobby for him? Rhyme wondered.

“Now, something you have to know. We’re pretty sure he’s done this before. Similar MO. Somebody at the Six House got a call. This was in February.”

Rhyme asked, “The Village?”

“Yeah. Greenwich Street. That one, a woman came home and found somebody’d been there. Moved things around. Pulled her bedsheets down. Ate some snack food.”

Rhyme asked, “And they were sure nobody had a key?”

“Correct.”

“Did he take any souvenirs or leave a message?”

“No.”

“Maybe a former romantic interest with a grudge,” Sachs suggested.

“The responding asked but there wasn’t anybody she could think of.”

Sachs asked, “Did the gold shield in that case send in ECTs?”

“No, Crime Scene wasn’t involved. The vic didn’t want to pursue it. And if you’re thinking of running it now, Amelia, the place’s been scrubbed. A while ago. She moved out a week after it happened — out of town in fact, she was so freaked. And it’s New York so there was a new tenant in, in about five seconds, freshly painted walls and steam-cleaned carpet.”

“Were those locks as tough as the ones this morning?” Rhyme asked.

“I don’t know. It was just an incident report, no follow-up, no investigation.” His eyes lowered and he read from a sheet of paper. “Now, the other one, March. Midtown South, off Ninth Avenue. This MO was closer to last night’s. A perp breaks into the vic’s apartment while she’s asleep. Rearranges her things, underwear and stuff. Get this, he made a goddamn sandwich and ate it. Well, ate half of it — to let her know what he’d done. Left the dirty plate on her bedside table.”

Sachs asked, “She slept through it too?”

“She was on some kind of mood drug, she said. And I’ll save you the breath. No ECTs, no investigation. And she was out of the place in three days. Only her sister had a set of keys, and they were accounted for. No exes as possible doers either.”

“Notice a trend?” Sellitto asked. “First victim, she wasn’t home. Second, she was but he didn’t play with knives and underwear. Last night: he left a newspaper with a possibly threatening message and he’s stepped up to flirting with sharp objects and lingerie.”

Rhyme asked, “You ever hear the nickname ‘the Locksmith’?”

“No, never.”

“That souvenir he left, the Daily Herald,” Sachs asked, “does it mean anything in the lock community?”

“That rag? Can’t imagine what. Maybe he just needed some stationery.”

“Where could we start looking for somebody had these skills?” Lon Sellitto asked Morgenstern.

“It’s a guy in the trade, you’re thinking. But probably not. For one thing, all the commercial locksmiths know they’re the first ones we’d look to when a perp is as sophisticated as this. Also, there’s a thing about tradesmen locksmiths. Pride in profession and that means not using their skills for illegal crap.

“I can get you a list of a few who’ve strayed, but I’d say he does something else for work and got obsessed with picking separately. Studied it on the side, and I mean studied it. Probably hooked up with a mentor at a convention — and one hell of a mentor, at that.”

Sellitto asked, “Any trademark moves that might help?”

“No, there’s no signature, as it were. He’s just very, very good. The best I’ve seen. Basically, unless you’ve got guard dogs, a CIA-level alarm system and a door bar — you know, that rod from the door to the floor inside — you’re not going to be able to keep this guy out.”

Sachs said to the screen, “Thanks, Benny.”

“A last word? One thing about picking: the good ones’re brilliant. You have to outthink the lock maker, and outthink the lock. You’ve got to be a chess player. And you have to do it all with a clock ticking down. Your boy here, he’s got that intelligence and he’s got the skill. That’s a real bad combination for somebody with a playbook like his. You want my advice, devote resources. Find him. And fast. There’s some bad shit looming.”

Morgenstern ended the session.

Rhyme was staring out the window. He believed Sellitto was speaking to him but he wasn’t listening. What he was thinking of was another perp, a man who was as close as could be to the word “nemesis” — a characterization that Rhyme considered both profoundly unprofessional and yet completely accurate.

The Watchmaker and Rhyme had gone head-to-head several times over the years. In each instance, Rhyme had foiled his attempts at assassination or terror attacks, but the man had always escaped and gone on to commit more crimes outside of Rhyme’s jurisdiction. The last time they’d met, the Watchmaker had assured him that one of them would not survive their next encounter.

Not long ago, Rhyme had learned from an intelligence source in England that someone was targeting him for a hit. The matter was still under investigation, but Rhyme now suspected the Watchmaker was involved. Was it possible that the Locksmith was working for the “nemesis”? Or was he, in fact, the Watchmaker himself.

The Locksmith’s MO and obsession with mechanical devices echoed those of the Watchmaker. Had the man returned to the city to target Rhyme? But, on reflection, it seemed unlikely. His personal enemy’s passion was timepieces and it seemed unlikely that he would so compulsively take up the topic of locks this late in his career.

But one thing did resonate: the Watchmaker’s skills were those of a master illusionist. He kept the police and the public and the real victim of his crimes focused elsewhere.

Rhyme wondered if the same were true with the Locksmith.

What was actually going on?

Sellitto asked Rhyme and Sachs, “So. You’ll run it?”

The couple regarded each other and it was she who nodded their collective assent.

Then Rhyme said to her, “Check NCIC, Interpol and our own databases.”

With a parting glance at Annabelle — Rhyme had forgotten her last name — Sachs exited that page and logged on to a secure NYPD server. Her fingers, tipped in uncolored, close-cut nails, pounded hard. A moment later. “No references to ‘Locksmith’ as a proper name or nick or aka. Some perps were locksmiths by profession but picking skills had nothing to do with the crimes and they’re either long gone or nowhere near here.”

Rhyme mused, “So he’s created himself from whole cloth. Interesting.”

Sachs logged out of the server. “Did the page of the newspaper he left mean anything to her?”

“I don’t know,” Sellitto said. “They declared a crime scene and backed out, the uniforms did.”

Sachs asked, “The picture he posted, could Computer Crimes trace it?”

“No, it went to an underground image board — there’s no trail.”

Rhyme said to Sachs, “Okay, get to her apartment. Walk the grid.”

“I’ll interview her too and get some uniforms for a canvass.”

“Video in the building?” Rhyme asked.

Sellitto told him no.

Rhyme reflected: a canvass wouldn’t do much good then since the officers would have no description. All they could ask neighbors was if they’d seen anyone “suspicious” — a line out of a shamus movie from the ’40s. He didn’t care much, though. He was distrustful of witnesses and their accounts anyway.

He wanted the evidence.

Sachs asked, “Where’s Annabelle now?”

Sellitto said, “At her neighbors’. She won’t go back to the apartment alone.”

“Hardly blame her there.”

Rhyme said, “I’ll call Mel. Lon, can you get me Pulaski? Is he free?” Rhyme added, “I want him free.”

“He’ll be free.”

“Let’s get a board going.”

Sachs moved aside the Buryak and the Gregorios whiteboards and positioned a blank one in the middle of the room. She picked up a dry marker. In every case in which the real identity of the perp was not known, Rhyme and the team would assign him or her a code name, usually “unsub” — unknown subject — followed by numbers representing the month and day of the crime. In this case, though, they didn’t have to go to the trouble.

The perp had named himself.

She wrote The Locksmith at the top of the board, perfectly centered and in fine, elegant script.

11

Returning to my workshop, from the surveillance at darling Carrie Noelle’s, I look up and down the scuffed and littered street. Two people with their backs to me, a couple. No worries there. I recognize them as residents, hipsters, if they still have hipsters now. The man has an elaborate beard. I’m always clean shaven. Fewer hairs for me to shed and for the police to find.

I step to the front door of the old Sebastiano Bakery Supply Company building, which is a judicious distance from my apartment.

At the door I extract my red and black keychain, a tacky souvenir, but one I have quite the affection for: it depicts the Tower of London. On it are a half-dozen keys, most of which are unusual. One of them is Swiss, and the titanium blade is rounded, and the bitting — the ridges to push up the pins in the tumbler lock — are inside the tube so it cannot be duplicated by someone taking a photograph or making an impression. This key opens the top lock.

The two below it require other keys on my chain: a dimple key and a chain key, whose shaft dangles in links, as the name suggests, making the lock it opens virtually impossible to pick. By everyone else, I mean. I cracked it in two minutes and seven seconds.

I step inside and re-secure the locks, set a steel bar from a metal bracket in the floor to one in the door, a forty-five-degree angle. One who picks locks appreciates that locks can be picked. Metal bars cannot.

On a table by the door I set the keys and my brass folding blade knife that I’m never without. I shed my jacket and hat and check the news on my phone. I’m curious what they have to say about my Visit to the pretty — no, beautiful — influencer Annabelle Talese. Oh, I’m quite the celebrity, apparently. The whole town is in a tizzy. The Locksmith this, the Locksmith that. I wondered how long it would take for the picture, once posted on one of the forums, to migrate to the popular media.

Record time, it seems.

I spend some time looking over my tools, cleaning and oiling the ones that need it. I have quite the collection: two-piece bypass lock shanks, small keyway finger lock rakes, other mini rakes, heat-shrink lock pick sleeves, glasspaper, pick handles, bump keys, bump hammers, top of keyway tension wrenches, circular tension tools, cylinder lock jigglers, skeleton keys, wafer lock rakes, picks for double-sided locks, standard rakes, dimple rakes, wave rakes, pen-style lock pick, on and on...

And in boxes neatly arrayed: snap guns and electric pick guns, the EPGs looking like stainless-steel electric toothbrushes with dozens of needle tips. Efficient and fast. To be used sometimes, but artless.

Also, practice locks (made of clear plastic so you can see your progress in picking).

Now I sit in the chair I will someday replace and scoot forward, greeting my opponent for tonight.

The lovely and infuriating SecurPoint Model 85. It’s mounted in a slab of wood, like a doorframe, which is in turn bolted to a stand. Though I’ve seen it a hundred times in person, and a thousand in my mind, I look over the lock once more, perhaps the way a chess player regards his opponent before the first move.

I look at the SecurPoint as an astonishingly beautiful and coy woman whose mind is impossible to fathom and who has her own secret agenda for granting you access to her heart and her body. Or not.

Inhaling slowly, exhaling.

I pull the lock closer yet. Then pick up my tension tool and rake and slip them inside.

12

Amelia Sachs had never seen a victim looking so upset.

She and Annabelle Talese were sitting in the front seat of the detective’s ruddy Ford Torino, outside the woman’s apartment building.

She fidgeted — even more than Sachs herself would do when stressed, and Amelia Sachs was quite the fidgeter.

Talese would twine her pale lemon hair around her fingers, pull it back over her shoulders, release it then twist some more. Her face was fraught with worry and she examined every passerby on the sidewalk. In her eyes, suspicion vied with fear.

She had agreed to assist Sachs when she walked the grid, by gowning up herself and pointing out where the Locksmith had been and what he’d touched, though it had taken her some minutes to work up the courage.

Once the search was done, samples collected and photos taken, the woman had wanted to leave, and so the interview was conducted here, in the safe confines of a solid Detroit-built vehicle.

At one point, when Sachs adjusted her jacket, she inadvertently revealed her pistol; Talese noted the weapon and relaxed a touch.

Sachs produced a pad of paper and a pen. And a digital recorder, which she set on the dashboard. “You okay with this?” Indicating the slim Sony.

“Yes, anything.”

Sachs pushed the button and a cyclops eye glowed red.

“Now you’re absolutely certain no one could have keys?”

“Positive.”

It wasn’t an apartment, but a co-op; she owned the place and was able to put her own locks in, which she’d done about six months ago.

“Who installed them?”

She gave the name of the company.

The recorder sucked up decibels, while Sachs took notes.

Benny Morgenstern had sent the names of the victims in the Village in February and on Ninth Avenue in March. Sachs displayed her phone and asked, “Do you know them?”

“No, never heard of them.”

She leaned toward the likelihood that the invasions were random. But that didn’t mean he had targeted, or was going to target, one particular individual, and the others were misdirecting camo.

“That newspaper he left?”

“It’s garbage. I don’t read the Herald.”

“You know anybody at the paper? Or their TV station?”

“Oh, the WMG channel? That’s crap too. And, no, I don’t.”

“The articles?”

Sachs displayed a photo of the page.

“They don’t mean anything.”

“The word on the paper: ‘reckoning’? It suggests somebody wanted to get even. You think of anybody in your life like that?”

“My God, no.”

“Do you think the intrusion was meant to intimidate you? Have you been a whistleblower? A witness to a crime?”

“No, nothing like that.”

Sachs didn’t know how the Locksmith came to learn of the other women who’d been his victims earlier, but she suggested it was possible Talese had come to his attention through her influencing job. “I’ve seen some of your videos. They’re good. They look professional.”

“Thanks.”

“Any fans who could be stalkers?”

“It’s possible, I guess. I only use my first name but it’s pretty easy to get my last — and an address. All that data-mining stuff.”

“Can you go through comments and pick out the inappropriate ones?”

“Oh, I have the comments turned off. You can only look at my vids. It’s the smartest thing when you’re influencing. I’ve talked to a couple other girls in the business, friends of mine. They leave the comments on. You should see what people post; some of it’s disgusting.”

The woman scanned the streets, tugged at her hair. Pulled a scrunchie out of her purse, a bright red one, and started to bind her hair with it, but then stopped. She dug into the bag again and exchanged it for a rubber band, presumably so she wouldn’t stand out quite so much. She sighed and lowered her head. Sachs wondered if she’d cry. She didn’t.

“I’m sure you know quite a bit about computers and the internet,” Sachs said.

“Not a lot. Enough to make the vids and post them is all.”

“I’m thinking we could contact all the platforms you post on and talk to security there. That’d give us the IPs of everybody who’s watched you. Might get us some names to work with.”

Now, Talese gave an ever-so-faint smile. “Detective, the thing is, I post on five different platforms and the analytics show I have a total of, um, about two hundred and thirty thousand subscribers and fans. And you can triple that to get the number of people who just hit the site to watch me and never subscribe.”

Well, that answered that.

“Anyone in the building who might be an issue?”

A shrug. “I don’t know most of my neighbors. It’s New York, right?”

“Have you noticed anybody following you or watching you over the past few weeks?”

“No.”

“And as far as you know, he only took the knife and your underwear?”

“I think that’s it. No jewelry, checkbooks, computer, TV. What a normal thief would take.”

Sachs closed the notebook and shut off the recorder.

Talese stared at the façade of the building. “I’m going to stay with my mother. Long Island. Until I sell it and buy something new. Can I pack a suitcase?”

“Of course.”

“Will you come with me?”

Sachs smiled. “Sure.”

They climbed from the car and Talese stood with her hands on her hips, staring up at the tall building once again.

“He did take something else, Detective.”

Sachs looked her way.

Annabelle Talese’s voice dropped to a whisper. “He stole my home. I loved it so much, and he took it away from me.”

13

Rhyme glanced up as Amelia Sachs entered.

He was in the hallway and he looked outside, past her, noting the remnants of construction work on the street.

These samples of sand came from a work site on the west side of Central Park West, in the three hundred block...

His heart accelerated some, wondering what the verdict against Viktor Buryak would be. It was so important. Lives depended on it.

Sachs had just returned from walking the grid at Annabelle Talese’s apartment, which was located about five blocks from Rhyme’s town house on the Upper West Side.

She was carrying a milk carton, in which she’d put the evidence bags of what she’d collected. There didn’t seem to be much, he was disappointed to see.

“Amelia!” Mel Cooper, Rhyme’s primary lab man, was an NYPD detective. He was slight and balding. His shoes vied with his thick-framed eyeglasses to be the less stylish accessory, though Rhyme had seen pictures of him tuxed-up in a ballroom dancing competition with his gorgeous Scandinavian girlfriend, and he cut quite the figure. He was presently gloved and was dressing in a mask, lab coat, booties and bonnet.

“I’ll take that, thank you,” said Cooper, lifting the crate away from her. He stepped into the sterile portion of the lab.

“Ron’s canvassing,” Rhyme told her.

Ron Pulaski, the earnest young patrol officer, had become an expert at crime scene work thanks to Rhyme and a solid interviewer thanks to her.

“Benny gave him a list of locksmiths in the city, and he got some himself off the internet. Quite a few, as it turns out. He’s talking to them all.” Pulaski was conducting a phone canvass to see if the locksmiths had any thoughts about who the perp might be, given his level of skill. Phone calls weren’t as efficient as in-person interviews, but Rhyme didn’t feel they had much time. Instinct told him that the Locksmith would move on another victim soon.

“Got the name of the locksmith that installed Annabelle’s locks.” She explained she’d texted it to Pulaski.

Rhyme said, “He’s also checking out locksmith conventions — what Benny was telling us about.”

But, he added, there were none in the Northeast, either presently or in the near future, though Benny had told him that the organizers often didn’t advertise the events to the general public and word of the gatherings spread only on the dark web.

Lon Sellitto was canvassing too, in a variation of Pulaski’s hunt. As he’d promised, Benny Morgenstern had given the lieutenant a list of locksmiths who’d been arrested for using their skills illegally or suspected of doing so. Sellitto was presently tracking them down for interviews — either as suspects themselves or to see if they had an idea about who the Locksmith might be.

So far, neither patrol officer nor detective had had any success.

In the sterile portion of the lab, Cooper was setting out the items Sachs had brought from Talese’s apartment.

Lincoln Rhyme missed much about the able-bodied life. There was the contented stroll for bagels Sunday morning with your partner — at 11 a.m. after waking late. There was attending plays without half the audience staring at your elaborate contraption of a wheelchair. There was pursuing and eliminating a strafing fly.

But Rhyme missed two things most dearly. The first was meandering on foot through this magnificent playground of a city, New York, and learning what he could about its people, its geography, its economy, its foliage, its underbelly. Doing so informed his work as a criminalist and helped him match evidence to place, and place to perp.

And the second absence that tugged at his heart? Slipping on the Tyvek jumpsuit, donning gloves and picking up and examining the evidence to trick from it the truth about what had happened at the scene.

“Let’s move here, okay?” Rhyme grumbled. The Locksmith was presently getting farther and farther from the Talese scene. And, possibly, getting closer and closer to another intrusion, where perhaps his goal would be different, and rather than stealing a knife he would use it.

Then too there was always the possibility that the victim might awaken and scream and fight back — a possibility that the Locksmith surely had considered; he’d be fully prepared to take a life to save himself.

Cooper first photographed the torn-out page 3 from the tabloid the Daily Herald, from February 17 of this year. He shot the back of the sheet too and loaded the images onto the high-def screens.

On the front, which had been signed by the Locksmith, apparently in Talese’s lipstick, were five articles, with these headlines:

The back of the page was ads. Get-rich-quick schemes, real estate ventures that smelled of scams, dating and massage services. Sex trade lite.

Sachs said, “None of the articles mean anything to Annabelle.”

Rhyme skimmed them. “Not exactly hard news, is it?”

She shrugged. “Maybe he just needed something to write on. He brought it with him. She said she doesn’t buy the paper.”

Cooper chuckled. “Nobody who reads the Herald admits they read the Herald.”

Rhyme said, “Let’s call the newspaper, legal department, and see if they have any thoughts. Since he posted the picture, they might already be aware of it.”

She looked up the company’s number on her phone and called. The company’s general counsel was on conference calls but his assistant assured Sachs he would call back. She left her and Sellitto’s numbers.

Cooper was examining evidence under a blue-glowing alternative light source.

“Hm. Knows what he’s doing. I’m not seeing a lot. No prints or fibers on the paper itself. And it was ripped apart from the other page folio. No cutting-instrument tool marks. The lipstick he wrote his message in is associated with what Amelia found in the apartment — the victim’s.”

The intercom system between sterile and non was good. It sounded as if Mel Cooper were right next to them.

Sachs wrote the findings on the whiteboard, below her notation about the absence of latents at the scene, and the fact he’d stolen a pair of her panties and a kitchen knife. A Chef’s Choice model, ten inch.

Cooper continued, “Everything he touched, negative on prints and DNA. He was in gloves. The cookie was half eaten, but he broke it in half before indulging — there was no saliva. This guy is good.”

More than a decade ago a brilliant French criminalist, Edmond Locard, wrote, as Rhyme paraphrased in his classes: “At every crime scene there is a transfer of trace between the criminal and the victim or the scene itself. This evidence might be invisible to the naked eye, undetectable by scent. But it’s there for the crime scene officer with the diligence and patience to find it.”

Locard referred to the trace as “dust” but that was as good a metaphor as any.

Most perps committing serious crimes nowadays wore face masks, shower caps and shirts with long sleeves tucked into their latex or nitrile gloves, keeping the trace evidence they’d brought with them — hairs and skin cells bearing that wonderful and damning deoxyribonucleic acid — from sloughing off at the scene. This was not that they were foundationally cleverer than in the past, or had stumbled across a website devoted to Locard, but because they could be counted on to have a cable TV subscription and an interest in police procedurals.

But the Locksmith was particularly cautious.

Rhyme thought yet again of the Watchmaker and the care he similarly took on his dark assignments.

“Shoe. Size eleven.”

That would make it more likely than not that he was of average height, though he could be obese or skeletal. All investigators were, of course, aware that shoes and feet correspond only if the wearer wishes them to. Rhyme once pursued a killer who left size 12 shoe prints, while his feet came in at 8. There’d been cases where it worked the other way as well, such as when a male killer crammed his size 11 feet into a woman’s size 6 flat. The smart, though undoubtedly painful ploy, confounded the investigation for several days.

“Pattern says it’s a running shoe. But it’s not in the database. So, no brand or model number. Four different types of dirt in the treads: one primarily sand, two basic dirt — minerals and loam — and the last is mostly clay. I’m checking on other substances now.”

Up went the information on the chart.

Sachs added, “I followed his route, service door to basement, elevator, her apartment and back again.”

“Video in the elevator, hallways?”

“No.”

“He’d’ve checked that out ahead of time.”

Cooper said, “Even without a camera, he was taking a chance on the elevator. Somebody else could’ve gotten in at any time. New York, city of night owls.”

“Not if he had an FDNY fire service key,” Rhyme said. “Call Benny back.”

14

“Benny,” Rhyme said, “you’re on speaker here. We were wondering about an FDNY key.”

“She was in a high-rise, and he didn’t want to risk another passenger getting on, on the way up or the way down,” Morgenstern said.

“Exactly. Could he’ve picked the fire service lock?”

“This guy could have, piece of cake. But he wouldn’t need to. You can buy sets for a hundred bucks.”

“Assuming there’s no way to trace purchases?”

“Dozens of sellers. Take days. And anyway, since he doesn’t want a trail, he probably got a set at one of those lock-picking conventions I was telling you about. And then, I don’t know her building’s setup, but a lot of them keep a key in a case near the elevator doors on the ground floor or basement. Of course, if you use one and you’re not fire service, you’re in trouble, but I don’t think your perp gives a shit.”

Sachs thanked Benny once more and they disconnected.

“Wonder if he is FDNY,” Cooper said.

Sachs offered, “I don’t see the Locksmith in that culture. Usually fire workers have family. They have friends. Our perp’s a loner. Besides, if they want to get through a door, they don’t pick locks. They use an axe.”

Rhyme agreed it wasn’t a likely theory.

Sachs was staring at the evidence chart. A whisper: “What do you want? Why’re you doing this?”

Just like he wasn’t a people cop, Rhyme wasn’t a motive cop either. The why of crimes usually didn’t draw his interest unless it helped uncover relevant evidence. Whether you kill for money, kill for passion or kill because you’re a schizophrenic off your meds and believe you’re saving the world from zombies, to Rhyme the reasons were irrelevant. Yet the “odd” nature of the case made Rhyme curious about the man’s purpose.

He asked if his wife had any theories about what he was up to.

Sachs thought for a moment. “I see it going two ways. One, he’s got a political or philosophical beef with the Herald, or maybe all media. They invade people’s lives — and that’s why he’s breaking in. It’s a message in itself. Remember, Benny was talking about lock-picking conventions? He said some pickers were like hackers. Open-society activists.”

Rhyme asked, “And number two?”

“The paper’s a red herring. Nothing to do with his real mission. He’s an illusionist and’s got something else entirely going on.”

Rhyme smiled. “I was just thinking of the Watchmaker.”

“So was I.”

“Let’s keep going with the evidence.”

Slowly, despite the Locksmith’s care, they made some discoveries that could be linked to the perp — by comparing them to control samples Sachs had taken from Talese’s apartment. These included diesel fuel and silane, which was a cleanser, fragments of asphalt, sandstone, tiny slivers of white porcelain and rubber, small pieces of copper wire.

Rhyme mused, “Old electrical systems, early twentieth century. Porcelain’s shattered by blunt force.”

After another run of trace through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, Cooper called, “Found triclosan, ammonium laureth sulfate, lauryl polyglucose, sodium chloride, pentasodium pentetate, magnesium and sodium bisulfite, D&C Orange dye number four.”

Rhyme said, “Dish detergent.”

Sachs shook her head. “Not so helpful, that.”

“Maybe not,” Rhyme said slowly. “Where was it, Mel?”

“Mixed into the soil from his shoes.”

“Ah. Interesting. Dishwater on your hands, on your clothing. But how often do you walk through it? At home, rarely. Working in a restaurant kitchen, yes, but I have a feeling he’s not a busboy or dishwasher.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Where, where...” Rhyme’s lids opened quickly. He asked Sachs and Cooper, “Do you know about the gates in Central Park?”

Neither of them did.

He explained that when the park was being developed in the mid-1800s, twenty sandstone gates were built, though they were more entrances than gates, since they had no physical barrier such as bars. Each was named in honor of a group, an activity, a calling — among them Artisans, Women, Warriors, Mariners, Inventors. There was even a Stranger Gate.

“Every year in May, the city scrubs the gates with diluted dish detergent. It cleans sandstone but doesn’t damage the rock — it’s very soft. Then they hose down the surfaces, leaving pools of detergent on sidewalks.”

Ever since he began with the NYPD many years ago, Rhyme had made it a professional mission to learn as many of the intricacies of the city as he possibly could. As he wrote in his book, “You need to know the geography and workings of the city the way a doctor knows the bones and organs of the human body.”

“We’re onto something here,” he whispered. “More. Keep going. I want more.”

Cooper, bending over the lab’s compound microscope, said, “Have something here. I’ll put it on the screen.”

After some keyboard taps, a number of grainy objects appeared on the monitor. The image was of what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece: bits of some red substance, the shape of grains of sand. According to the scale at the bottom of the monitor, they would be the size of dust particles.

“From his shoe again?”

“That’s right.”

“GC it,” Rhyme ordered. “I want the composition.”

After analyzing a sample, Cooper said, “Silica, alumina, lime, iron oxide and magnesia. In descending amounts.”

Rhyme announced, “Brick. Silica’s sand, alumina’s clay. The red comes from the iron and lower baking temperatures of nineteenth-century furnaces. So it’s old.”

“Well,” Cooper said slowly, with emphasis in his voice, “one other substance.” He looked toward Rhyme. “Dried blood. Ninety-nine percent sure it was on his shoe. Amelia got samples in two places.”

“Species?”

“Human.”

“TSD?”

The time since deposition — how long has passed since blood was spilled — could be determined by Raman spectroscopy. The technique, relatively new in the armory of forensic scientists, works by hitting a sample with a laser beam and measuring the intensity of the scattered light. Rhyme particularly liked the technique as it was nondestructive and the sample could later be tested for DNA.

Cooper ran a sample and read the results, in the form of a chart.

“It’s five, six days old, more or less.”

Rhyme’s eyes swiveled to Sachs’s. Her face was troubled. She said, “Maybe he cut himself accidentally... Or maybe he’s already started using a knife.”

Cooper then ran the DNA and sent the results to the CODIS database. They soon received the message that there were no matches.

Closing his eyes again, Rhyme let his head loll back against the padded rest. He thought past the blood. He would assume that the Locksmith was in fact dangerous, if not deadly. His sole concern now was finding him. What did the evidence have to say about that?

Soap.

Brick.

Tiny shards of porcelain.

Copper wire.

Rhyme’s phone buzzed, and he answered.

The caller was Assistant District Attorney Sellars, the prosecutor in the People of the State of New York v. Viktor Buryak.

“Lincoln. The jury came back with a verdict.”

“And?”

“They found him not guilty. All counts.”

15

Not good enough.

It’s taken me fifty-nine seconds to pick the SecurPoint 85.

Way too long.

Carrie Noelle’s apartment door is held fast by two locks, as are most residences in New York. The simple one in the knob and the SecurPoint.

They are both pin tumblers, one of the oldest designs in history. The man who earned the patent for the design in the U.S. was the famous Linus Yale Sr. The lock he created and his son’s refinement of it are basically the same as are in use today, even after a hundred and fifty years.

In these locks there’s a rotating plug into which the key is inserted (through the “keyway,” not “keyhole”). The plug and the surrounding casing each have corresponding holes drilled into them and inside the holes are spring-loaded pins, which keep the plug from turning and opening the deadbolt or latch. The serrated ridges on the key push the pins up to the shear line, which frees the plug to turn.

To pick a pin tumbler, the process is simple: You insert a tension wrench into the keyway and twist the plug, which puts pressure against the pins and keeps them from springing back into the secure position. Then you use a thin rake — which looks like a dentist’s pick — to push the pins upward until they’re above the shear line.

Ah, but the SecurPoint...

It’s similar to the famed Medeco. The ends of the pins within the lock are cleverly chiseled and, even more challenging, they rotate, so the tip of the rake must not only catch the sharp end of each pin but must twist it to free the plug and allow it to open. (When a Medeco executive patented the design, in the 1960s, he offered fifty thousand dollars to anyone who could pick it — a popular promotional gambit of lock makers. At the time, only one person in the world was able to do so — an NYPD detective, as a matter of fact.)

Cracking the SecurPoint in fifty-nine seconds?

That’s probably a world record. But it’s still too long.

Tonight, for my Visit, I need it to be thirty or under.

Not that an alarm would go off. It’s just that I’ve assessed that for Carrie’s size of apartment building, the number of residents, the time of early morning, I can afford to be crouched in front of her door for no more than a half minute. Beyond that time, the risk is unacceptable.

SecurPoints can be bumped — that is, opened by brute force, achieved by jamming a blank key into the passage over and over and occasionally hitting the key with a hammer or mallet. But I despise bumping. Again, the artistic element. The elegance.

It’s also noisy.

I know very well — from the incident in 2019 — the disaster that noise can lead to during a Visit. A simple thing like a latch clicking can result in tragedy.

No, I’ll rake open the SecurPoint, and I’ll do it quickly and silently, so that Carrie Noelle won’t hear a thing and will continue to slumber in innocence. And vulnerability.

I inhale and exhale slowly, concentrate all my being on the SecurPoint 85.

Locks have been picked by actually looking into the keyway. The greatest picker of all time, a lock salesman named Alfred C. Hobbs, cracked the supposedly unpickable Detector lock at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Britain. Some of his tools had tiny mirrors on them (which was considered cheating, and the event became known as the Great Controversy).

I don’t have such tools. But I do “peer” inside the lock in a way. I close my eyes and visualize the pins and tumblers with the same clarity as if seeing them under a brightly lit microscope.

I become one with the device.

Lock picking has been called a dark side of zen.

A tap on the stopwatch.

In goes the tension tool, in goes the rake.

Five seconds, ten, twenty, twenty-five... thirty, forty.

Click.

The lock opens.

Forty-one seconds. At a recent lock-picking convention, the record for cracking a SecurPoint 85 was one minute and four seconds.

I’ve done it in nearly half that time.

But still not good enough.

I step back, make a cup of herbal tea. As I do I picture Carrie Noelle, who is a tea lover too. She’s wildly appealing in spandex — hip huggers and tank tops are her outfits of choice. She tends toward bright colors.

I wonder what kind of kitchen knives she has. She’ll have some. Everybody does. They’re a perfect Christmas present.

Once again I study my prey, the SecurPoint.

Seductive, sexy, coy.

Whom I want to be inside, need to be inside.

From my hundreds of tools, I select a different rake.

Inhaling and exhaling. I reset then hit the stopwatch again.

Tension bar inserted.

Rake inserted.

The tools are moving slowly, back, forth. Up, down.

My eyes are closed, feeling the pins as if with the tips of my fingers.

Click.

Eyes open. Twenty-eight seconds.

I’m filled with indescribable warmth.

Well, Carrie, it appears that you’re going to have some company tonight.

“Friends: The Hidden have a new way to strike. The news made it all the way out here to the West Coast: in New York a vicious organized crime boss was found not guilty of murder, which there’s no doubt he committed. And how did this happen? The state’s expert witness intentionally got him off because he manipulated the evidence!

“And why? Because this criminal has ties to senior politicians and, more frightening, employees of our national security agencies.

“Yet another weapon the Hidden wield to subvert justice!

“I’ve found a classified report that states that this is the dozenth time in the last few months the police have bungled investigations or prosecutors have dropped the ball.

“But of course they haven’t ‘bungled’ anything. They’re infiltrated by the Hidden, which decides what is and is not justice.

“New York is hardly alone. In Minnesota, the Health and Human Services Division of domestic abuse shelters had been infiltrated by the Hidden and used as a cover for sex trafficking. In Orlando the Hidden have formed alliances with gangs, paying them to riot and to burn the businesses of legitimate, hardworking Americans. And no one is ever prosecuted.

“Say your prayers and stay prepared!

“My name is Verum, Latin for ‘true.’ That is what my message is. What you do with it is up to you.”

16

Rhyme’s phone hummed. He noted the area code and exchange.

What was this about?

He shared a glance with Sachs, who turned the volume of the TV down. They’d been watching the breaking story of the Buryak verdict. The mobster in the glorious suit and colorful vest was shown walking out of court. He wasn’t smiling. His brow was furrowed, as if the trial had been an irritating distraction and he was once again concentrating on projects that lay ahead.

Rhyme ordered the phone to answer. “Yes?”

“Mr. Rhyme?” a woman’s matter-of-fact voice asked.

“That’s right.”

“Commissioner Willis would like to set up a Zoom call. Are you free?”

Another glance between the two of them.

“When?” he asked.

“Now.”

“Send me the link.” He gave his email address.

“Thank you.”

They disconnected.

“What’s up?” Cooper asked.

“No idea.”

“What do you know about Willis?” he asked them both.

Cooper shook his head. Sachs said, “Sally Willis, first deputy commissioner.”

The NYPD has two sides. One, headed by the chief of department, handles criminal investigations. It includes the detective and patrol bureaus. The other is civilian; it takes care of all non-criminal administrative matters. The first deputy commissioner heads this operation.

Sachs continued, “She’s tough. She came out of Internal Affairs. At IAB, she was by the book. She’d write you up for pocketing a bribe or wearing white socks. Made no difference.”

The footwear reference, Rhyme knew, meant citing an officer for a minor uniform violation.

“Known as the Iron Maiden.”

Lovely.

A moment later the pulsing tone echoed through the parlor. Rhyme said, “Command. Email.”

A window popped up on a large screen.

“Command. Open.” Then, after the Zoom invitation appeared, Rhyme said, “Command. Cursor to hyperlink. Command. Enter.”

He joined with computer audio and clicked on the video camera icon and a red light on the webcam glowed. A moment later he was looking at a nondescript conference room, presumably somewhere in One Police Plaza. The wide-angle shot revealed several people around the end of a conference table. A blond woman in her mid to late fifties was in the center.

He knew the other two. To her right was a solidly built Black man of about forty-five. Francis Duvalier was a senior assistant district attorney. Rhyme had testified in some of his trials; he was good and a preferred prosecutor for high-profile cases. The other was Alonzo Rodriguez, whose official title was commanding officer at large in the Detective Bureau. He was round and balding and his face was squat, distinguished by an odd attempt at a handlebar mustache. All three were in dark jackets and white shirts. The men wore ties in different shades of blue. Willis wore a pearl choker.

“Captain Rhyme, I’m First Deputy Commissioner Willis.” Her voice was gravelly. Rhyme noted she used the mouthful of a title. Others might have said “Dep Com” or just their first name.

Noted too that she’d used his title as well. Perhaps a sign of deference, perhaps not.

“Commissioner. And Francis, Al.”

“Lincoln,” they said simultaneously.

The trio was stony faced.

Rhyme said, “I’m here with Detectives Sachs and Cooper.”

“Good.”

A curious comment. He waited.

“Captain Rhyme, first, I think I can speak for the entire department when I say we truly appreciate your contributions to investigations and prosecutions over the years.”

He tipped his head again.

“I assume you’ve heard about the Viktor Buryak verdict.”

“I have.”

She looked at Duvalier, who said, “Lincoln, there was a jury poll taken after the verdict.” He was hesitating, which Rhyme had never known him to do. “Eight members of the jury said the reason they couldn’t convict was because of your testimony. They said that the evidence was questionable.”

Rhyme was silent.

The man continued, “You and I, we both know that juries can be tough to figure. But that many of them, focusing on the same issue?”

Willis continued, “Somehow, the poll went public. I guess some jurors talked to the press. It became an issue. There’ve been stories: a man nearly convicted of murder on the basis of erroneous evidence. You know we’ve had problems in the past.”

She was referring to incidents in the NYPD lab where evidence technicians were sloppy or lazy, or who in a few cases were bribed to intentionally alter evidence.

“Captain, we needed to do something. To shore up the department’s credibility. This comes from the top. I’ve met with some people here, including the commissioner. It’s been approved by the chief of department too. We’ve come to a decision. A press release is going out as we speak. Effective immediately, the NYPD will no longer be using civilian consultants in criminal investigations.”

Rhyme said coolly, “If I’m not mistaken, you wanted me on the Locksmith case. Weren’t you feeling that he’d thrown the home invasion in your face and you wanted him collared as fast as possible? Was I mistaken about that?”

The trio looked toward one another uneasily. Willis continued, “Circumstances changed.”

Amelia Sachs was blunter. “Bullshit.”

“Detective Sachs, this decision was not made lightly. And it’s not just you, Captain Rhyme. No outside contractors at all — not for investigative work.”

Sachs persisted: “So you’ll shoot yourself in the foot because of the... what? Optics? One mistake out of thousands, and you hit us with this?”

“Detective, maybe in the future we might be able to put some quality control measures into place and revisit the decision. A year or two.”

“Commissioner, name one investigator who hasn’t fumbled a lead or missed the boat with a sample of trace or DNA...”

This was true. Yet the situation here was more complicated, because of that series of missteps in investigations and prosecutions Lon Sellitto had referred to earlier. These had been embarrassing for the NYPD and, worse, they had proved deadly. Several drug dealers who’d gotten off went on to kill rivals and bystanders. One sex trafficker had raped a teenager after his acquittal and fled to a Latin-American country with no extradition to the U.S.

This move, banning consultants, was clever. It would lay the blame for the Buryak screwup at the feet of someone not directly with the NYPD. And by banning consultants, the city — that is, the mayor — would be seen as taking strong action to clean house.

Willis’s harsh voice continued, “I should bring up another policy we’ve instituted: that any employee of the NYPD who employs or works with a civilian will be subject to discipline, including suspension and firing.”

Mel Cooper said, “And what do the PBA attorneys say about that?”

“They’re in agreement.”

Well, this had certainly been thought out.

Rhyme found himself looking at Al Rodriguez, who grimaced, gave a faint shrug and thumbed at his thin mustache.

Willis said, “Also effective immediately, Detectives Sachs and Cooper, you’re to have no communication with Captain Rhyme.”

“Commissioner,” said Sachs, “Lincoln and I are married.” Her voice registered disgust.

“You know what I’m saying, Detective. No professional communication. I’ll be having the same conversation with Lieutenant Sellitto and Patrolman Pulaski. The officers on the Locksmith case will continue to run it. But all forensics will be done by department personnel at the lab in Queens.”

Sachs sighed and sat in a rattan chair.

Willis said, “I’m sorry about this.”

Rhyme now understood from her voice that “this” referred to something yet to be.

It was for someone else, Rodriguez, to tell him.

In a rather imperious voice he said, “The commissioner and chief of department have been in touch with the district attorney. His policy is that any officer who intentionally uses civilian consultants in an investigation may be indicted for obstruction of justice. The consultant too.” Rodriguez added, “I’ve been put in charge of enforcing that policy.”

An assignment that he would not be pleased about.

Still, he said what was inevitable.

“Detectives Sachs and Cooper, pack up all the evidence there and have it transported to Queens. Thank you for your time, Captain,” Willis said. “I am sorry it worked out this way.”

The Zoom screen vanished.

17

Viktor Buryak was in his lovely Tudor home in a leafy section of Forest Hills, Queens, the most idyllic suburb of New York City, in his opinion, apologies to Staten Island.

Buryak was sipping strong English breakfast tea, his second favorite drink. The brew was wonderful. It warmed him, heart and belly. His wife ordered this brand online for him. After he’d had a serious bout of the flu some years ago, coffee became repulsive and he began drinking tea. A man curious by nature, Buryak had looked into the origin of the beverage. His research, hardly academically rigorous, revealed that English breakfast tea was misnamed in several ways. It came from India, Sri Lanka and Kenya, not England. It was imported to the British Isles by the Portuguese, who drank it in the afternoon. A Scotsman popularized its consumption at breakfast. Victoria was responsible for bringing the seductively fragrant leaves south, and it was the Americans who had given it the name “English,” which made sense because why would the Brits refer to it that way? To them it was just “tea.”

His two cats chased each other briefly, amusing Buryak. They were grayish Maine Coons and massive. Brick, the female, was dominant and feisty. The male, Labyrinth, was younger and was happily bullied. Lab had replaced Mortar when he passed, several years ago.

He turned to his computer — a high-def model the size of a small TV — and began the meeting.

“Gentlemen.”

There were five windows open on the monitor. Buryak’s face was in one — the upper right — and from three other squares, faces peered out as well. He received in reply nods or greetings as perfunctory as his had been.

As each person spoke, a red outline appeared around the window. The program was similar to Zoom, but had been created by Buryak’s IT people and was virtually unhackable. As far as tracing went, if you rode the coattails of the proxies, you ended up somewhere in Europe but there the trail would end.

In the upper left was Harry Welbourne, a sinewy and sour fifty-five-year-old. He radiated impatience, here and in person. He would be in his office in Newark. In the lower left was Kevin Duggin, whose face, very dark, was as round as Welbourne’s was narrow. There was no telling where youthful, muscular Duggin might be. His businesses were scattered throughout East New York and Brownsville. But judging from the background — a Miró-like modern painting — he was probably in either his town house in Harlem or his house on the South Shore of Long Island. In the final occupied window were the Twins — Buryak always thought of them in upper case. Stoddard and Steven Boscombe. Both of the thirty-seven-year-olds wore their blond hair shoulder-length and middle-parted.

The center window was black.

“I heard about the verdict, Viktor. Congratulations, man.” This was from Stoddard. Fortunately — for those wishing to tell them apart, if not for the man himself — Steven’s cheek was disfigured by a two-inch-long scar.

Duggin was nodding. “I feel for you, man. Been there. Nothing worse than sweating out those verdicts. Who was the ADA?”

“Prick named Sellars.”

Stoddard: “Murphy had to go. No loss to the world there. Wonder who did it.”

“Don’t have a clue. It’s being looked into.”

Welbourne rarely spoke and he didn’t now.

Buryak said, “Let us get down to business, okay?” He’d been in the U.S. for thirty years. His Ukrainian accent had all but vanished and his English was flawless. Occasionally, though, he tended to speak more formally than colloquially.

“Got my checkbook,” Duggin said.

Stoddard offered, “You’re playing with the big boys now.” His brother snickered.

Welbourne might have grunted. Buryak couldn’t tell.

“First lot...” He typed and a picture of a yellow articulated dump truck appeared. “This is a Volvo, ten years old. Payload capacity 28 short tons. Gross weight 104,499 pounds. Max engine gross power 315, gross torque 1,505. Max speed of 33 miles per hour. As you can see it’s in fair condition. The reserve bid is fifty thousand dollars, and I’ll accept increases of five.”

“Fifty,” the Twins said simultaneously. Their high voices, coupled with their cold blue eyes, made the stereo effect just plain eerie.

Duggin: “Five five.”

“Sixty,” scarfaced Steve said.

In his rich baritone voice Duggin said, “Sixty-five.”

Buryak was watching Welbourne, who was looking at another part of the screen. His eyes narrowed. He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to someone off camera.

The Twins regarded each other and chimed in with, “Seventy.”

Buryak said, “Come, please. It is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. This truck can turn your businesses clean around. Did you hear? Three fifteen horsepower? Three fifteen!”

He enjoyed playing auctioneer.

Duggin said, “Come on, you motherfuckers. You’re killing me. Seventy-five.”

No one looked at the camera; Duggin and the twins were gazing at their upper left-hand corners, trying to see if they could get a clue as to what Welbourne was up to. The New Jerseyan was reading another portion of the screen, maybe some personal information, a spreadsheet or a website. He jotted another note and handed it off.

The brothers muted their call and began conferring.

“It’s at seventy-five, Harry.”

“I’m aware.”

“You heard that torque.”

“I heard.”

“Viktor, my friend,” Duggin said, “ain’t it time to bang the gavel?”

“Not yet, Kevin.”

Duggin slouched back in what appeared to be quite a luxurious black leather chair and sipped from a mug. “I think it oughta be fucking gavel time,” he muttered.

The Twins unmuted. “Eighty.”

Duggin: “Eight five.”

“Crap,” Steven spat out. “You don’t even know what the fuck to do with a truck like that.”

“Now, gentlemen, pretend we’re at Christie’s. A little civility.”

The brothers looked at each other once again. They shook their heads simultaneously.

Buryak was disappointed. He’d thought this lot would do better.

“Going once...”

Welbourne took a slip of paper from a hand that ended in red polished nails. He read it.

“Going twice.”

Welbourne looked into the camera. “One hundred ten thousand.”

Yes!

Duggin grimaced, and the twins exchanged perplexed glances. All three remained grudgingly silent.

“Sold!” Buryak slapped his desktop in lieu of a gavel.

“I’ll wire the money now,” Welbourne said in his quiet, unemotional voice.

“It will take about a week to ten days for prep.”

“All right.”

“Now, let’s move on to lot two.” A picture of a twenty-foot cabin cruiser on a trailer appeared. It was old, the paint job uneven, missing some windows.

“This is what is called a fixer-upper, but well worth the investment. Let me give you the details.”

18

Shortsighted, foolish...

Lincoln Rhyme was staring at the triptych of evidence boards.

In the corner was the Alekos Gregorios killing. Behind it, the Viktor Buryak — Leon Murphy case.

Which was, of course, not a case any longer at all.

Front and center was the Locksmith. It contained scores of notations, which Sachs would photograph and transcribe onto a similar board in the crime scene main facility in Queens — now that the case had been stolen away.

Rhyme knew he probably wasn’t the best criminalist in the world. Out there somewhere — France, Botswana, Singapore, Brazil, the U.A.E., or, likely, in the borough of Queens, at the main NYPD lab — there was a man or woman with forensic skills that outshone his. But one thing was undeniable. Rhyme knew the city of New York as well as he knew this town house. And it was that knowledge base, combined with his natural talents for chemistry, physics and deduction, that made him unique.

Was some of this assessment ego?

Yes, of course. But ego and skill do not, by any means, exist in opposition. A good argument could be made that they have a correlated, and possibly causal, relationship.

“Here.”

He looked up. Thom handed him a glass. Inside was amber-colored liquor. He smelled peat... but not too much. One of his favorite Glenmorangies, and a double pour. His aide, who’d been fired as often as he’d quit yet was still here, could read moods.

He sipped. It helped some, but Lincoln Rhyme’s fiercest genre of anger was reserved for stupidity, even more so than corruption and deceit.

And with this sociopath roaming the streets of the city for reasons unknown, it was reckless in the extreme to sideline him.

He and Thom were alone in the town house. Cooper had packed up the evidence and had taken it to Queens. Amelia Sachs was at Major Cases. She’d gone down there to hand deliver a particular missive to Lon Sellitto.

His phone hummed and not the sound but his glance at the caller ID made his heart stir.

“Lon. Tell me.”

The pause delivered the answer.

“Sorry, Linc. They’re not budging. I got all the way to the commissioner.”

Rhyme had figured this would be the answer. In fact, he nearly smiled at the image of the rotund, rumpled detective lieutenant insisting his way into the commissioner’s office and pleading the case for Lincoln Rhyme’s reinstatement. Sellitto would have wanted to mutter, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” But, of course, he would have brought all the negotiating skills of a seasoned homicide detective to the game.

“I found something else. You heard about this blogger? Verum?”

“No.”

“Crank conspiracy guy. Posts online, these videos about politics, society, all kinds of bullshit. Lies, but people eat them up. He’s got thousands of followers online.”

“‘Verum’? Latin for ‘true.’ Except what he says isn’t.”

“You got it. Looks like he’s in California, maybe L.A., but he’s been posting about New York. There’s this conspiracy he calls the Hidden. Some movement trying to destroy American institutions. He said that’s why Buryak got off. The trial was thrown.”

“I’m part of a secret state, hm? I missed the thank-you cards from Buryak for doing my part to set him free.”

“And then he’s saying that the police aren’t doing enough to stop the Locksmith because they’re part of it too. City Hall.”

Ah, he got it now. Rhyme barked a sour laugh. “It’s not the brass, is it, Lon? The ban-the-consultants didn’t come from the brass; it was the mayor. He wanted me out because of the election. I’m a fall guy.”

Rhyme knew next to nothing about politics — it didn’t affect his universe of forensic science — but he did know a special election for governor was coming up soon, and Mayor Harrison — a Bronx-born lifelong shirtsleeve politician — was going head-to-head with billionaire businessman Edward Roland, who lived in a posh portion of Westchester County.

“Looks like it.” Sellitto scoffed.

So, Rhyme found himself a pawn in a political contest, a role he didn’t think he’d ever played before.

“Listen, Lon, you seen Amelia yet?”

“She dropped it off.” His voice was low.

“You take credit. Don’t tell anybody it came from me.”

“Fuck, Linc. I take credit all the time for shit you come up with.”

“Night, Lon.”

The call was disconnected.

He was staring at the Locksmith whiteboard when his computer dinged with the sound of an incoming email. It was a Zoom invitation from a man he hadn’t spoken to in some time. NYPD Commanding Officer Brett Evans — the same rank as somber Rodriguez, of the handlebar affectation.

Rhyme took another sip of scotch and, manually this time, clicked on the link.

Soon he was looking at a man in his mid-fifties. Evans was the epitome of police brass. He had a lined, lean face, broad shoulders and hair going gray. His eyes were forever calm. This was a chest-up-only angle but Rhyme remembered him as having slim legs. “Dapper” was the word that came to mind.

“Lincoln, sorry to bother you at night.”

“No worries, Brett.” Rhyme rarely littered conversations with pleasantries like “doing well?” or “what’s happening?” and he didn’t now. He waited.

“I heard what happened, Lincoln. Jesus.” His face was troubled.

Rhyme couldn’t help but chuckle. “Aren’t you afraid of getting busted, Brett, talking to me? Obstruction of justice, conspiracy... treason?”

“You always did have a sense of humor. Anyway, Lincoln, as soon as I heard I called Sally Willis. I put in a word for you. Nobody’s changing their mind.”

Evans had worked his way up from patrol to gold shield and beyond. Commanding officers, or “commanders,” perched in the loftiest aeries of NYPD hierarchy.

But their power did not trump City Hall’s.

“No, it’s set in stone. Nothing to do. You can’t appeal a business decision.”

Evans mused, “The O’Neil case? Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Remember it, sure.”

Rhyme — yes, as a consultant — had handled forensics at a scene detective third grade Evans had run near the West Side piers. In walking the grid at a warehouse, long abandoned by the ruthless Eddie O’Neil, Sachs had discovered an unusual feather. After several days of analysis and research — and eyes-closed pondering, Rhyme was able to trace it to a neighborhood pet store, where O’Neil, they learned, bought his illegally imported birds. The owner of the store — after some horse-trading (Rhyme liked the animal motif) — agreed to be a confidential informant against the mobster. O’Neil got collared minutes before a shootout with rivals that could have led to the deaths of dozens of innocent pedestrians and drivers on Ninth Avenue.

That had been the case that made Evans’s career.

“I owe you for that one. Always have. So, listen, Lincoln. I’ve got some buddies in New Jersey State Police. They use consultants, no problem.” He chuckled. “And, I mean, plenty of homicide in New Jersey, right? The Sopranos.”

Rhyme had no idea what opera singers had to do with murder in New Jersey, but there was no disputing his premise.

“They’d love you on board.”

“Appreciate it, Brett,” Rhyme said, not adding that he wouldn’t take a job with that outfit, as fine as it was, because his expertise was New York City and he was not inclined to begin his education anew into infrastructure, geography and culture.

And then there was the commute...

“I also know some people at commercial forensic operations in the city,” Evans added. “That work can be just as challenging, right?”

No, it didn’t come close. He said, “I’m sure it is. But for now I just need to think about things for a bit.”

“Sure. I understand. You should know, there’re more than a few of us here think this is bullshit.”

But there were some important ones who did not.

“Thanks for the call, Brett.”

Rhyme was tired, bone tired. He summoned Thom, who escorted him upstairs in the tiny elevator and got him ready for bed.

Soon he was lying on the elaborate, mechanically operated mattress and starting to doze off. Just before sleep arrived, though, he thought: Yes, indeed he was a pawn in the chess game of state politics — a piece that had been removed from the board, without sufficient tactical forethought.

And, unable to avoid belaboring the metaphor a bit longer, he wondered: Just how would his sacrifice affect the endgame?

19

When is a truck not a truck?

Viktor Buryak was alone, cats excepted. He was jotting notes on the results of the auction and he was pleased. The wire transfers from the three bidders were already in. With Buryak, customers always paid up front.

Everyone had bought something. Welbourne, the truck. The twins, the boat. And Kevin Duggin picked up a backhoe.

Buryak was, he felt, part of a new generation of mobsters. That didn’t mean he was Gen ZZ or whatever was current, of course. Buryak was in his fifties, conservative, a traditionalist. He wore a suit every day, usually with a stylish vest. He polished his shoes. He never indulged in illegal substances — and why would he when he had tea and his first favorite beverage, fine brandy?

And neither did new generation mean developing and selling state-of-the-art designer drugs to those who were under thirty but who had a six-figure disposable income.

No, the innovative part was what his company, VB Auctions, actually sold.

The bidders in tonight’s auction had no need for any such equipment and wouldn’t even take delivery. Buryak was cautious to the edge of paranoia and so he’d come up with the idea of a phony auction.

What the men had really been bidding for was the commodity that was Viktor Buryak’s specialty, and perhaps the most dangerous product in the city. Worse than drugs, plastic explosives, poisons, machine guns.

Information.

The “dump truck” that stone-faced Welbourne bought was really a file that Buryak and his employees would assemble. It would contain exacting details of shipments of fentanyl and OxyContin from a warehouse in Pennsylvania to Virginia to New York and on to its ultimate destination in Connecticut (the circuitous route, which involved using separate trucks decorated with fake signage, was for security).

The file would also include the names of the drivers, their personal information (family members too) and the names of police in each jurisdiction the trucks would roll through, including, in New York City, a few precincts with cops who could be counted on to turn a blind eye, or even help Welbourne’s hijackers.

The “boat” the Twins had bought was a dossier on a man named Suarez who’d come to New York from Miami, with a small crew, and was planning on starting a drug operation that catered to the Latinx population. It was small-time and not much of a threat to any of the bidders, but the dossier could be used to guarantee that the man would have to kick over a good portion of the take to the winner. It contained sexting messages between the married Suarez and a mistress. Selfies too of both of them, several naked in bed, the bath, the floor, the kitchen island (really? Buryak had thought). The girlfriend was, literally, that: a girl, sixteen, which made the pictures child pornography and their self-documented activities statutory rape.

Suarez would pay big.

Duggin had gone away happy too. The “backhoe” was a year’s worth of monthly reports on when and where the NYPD vice and drug teams would conduct raids. Duggin’s specialty was sex trafficking, and his crew ran more than a dozen massage parlors in the city. Buryak had been amused when, after he won the auction, Duggin had brayed a laugh. “Bought myself a back-hoe. Damn.”

As a cover, yes, VB did move industrial machinery and made a fair profit doing so. But the golden kernel of the operation was what took up ninety percent of the time, resources and space: the research department, which operated much like a corporate espionage/private eye/data-mining firm. His people conducted interviews and performed surveillance and collected data. But they dug much, much deeper to unearth sensitive information that no one else could provide.

Admittedly, some of the practices were questionable — using Bulgarian and Czech Republic hackers (they were the masters). And then there was always the ever-popular business model of extortion, blackmail and broken limbs or threatened children.

Knowledge is power, and armed with Buryak’s facts and figures, the crime bosses in the New York area were thriving. Arrests were down by thirty percent and an outfit paying for Buryak’s services could count on hobbling an upstart competitor before they got a toehold in the territory. And the products and services that Buryak didn’t deal in, but that his clients did, proliferated all the more abundantly on the streets of New York, Bridgewater, Newark, Trenton and every other supermarket catering to consumers with that insatiable need for drugs, guns, sex, stolen credit cards and merchandise.

His success, he knew, put a figurative price on his head. The police and FBI wanted desperately to stop him. Look at that bullshit Leon Murphy case. Utterly trumped up. But no one was more security minded than he was, a lesson learned early, on the streets in Kiev when his father — a loud and proud organized criminal — was arrested in front of the family home by police who decided that lifting his hands and crying “Ne zachepy moho syna!” warranted bullets in his head.

At least they heeded his plea and did not in fact hurt his son. They told the boy to stick to the straight and narrow — well, an equivalent Ukrainian cliché.

But, of course, he did not. The fourteen-year-old knew only his father’s calling, but from that blood-spattered moment on, he followed what he called “prophylactic practices” to stay safe, alive and out of prison.

He convinced his mother to move to the U.S., where at least due process would give you a fighting chance and lawyers could be miracle workers. He identified a pretty and moderately sexy woman who was Ukrainian American and he became a citizen of the country. On the surface he was a legitimate businessman, running a successful company. He was active in church. He donated to good causes and served on charitable boards.

None of which fooled a single soul. There was no doubt among the authorities he was data-miner-in-chief to the gangs — the “Godfather of Information,” some paper dubbed him — but proving it was another matter. This, he knew, was why the prosecutor clutched at straws and tried to bring him down with that bogus murder charge.

He himself never stepped over into the dark side of his operation. He had minions for that. They were well paid for their loyalty. But more important they were mostly married or had children. There was the unspoken whip: that if they broke the watertight seal and Buryak got damp, very bad things would happen. (Only once had he transgressed, murdering a contractor who’d come across a stash of unaccounted millions in his country house and tried to extort him. He’d successfully turned the man’s death into an accident, but the effort that took, and the anxiety it caused, told him he would never take matters into his own hands again.)

This was why he’d been mortified and infuriated to have been arrested — and tried, no less — for the death of a punk like Leon Murphy. Killing someone for trying to sell protection at one of Buryak’s warehouses? No point. He would’ve sent a lieutenant to sit down with Murphy in a bar and explain about the dangers of identity theft. “Such a problem, such a hassle... People lose everything. They even end up on the street, Leon.”

Why waste ammunition?

His phone — an encrypted satellite — hummed.

It was his head of research department. “Willem.”

“Sir. Are you free?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I need to talk to you about the Chemist. Our reception team picked up some information you need to know about. The tap in the courthouse prosecution room.”

“All right.”

“They didn’t get as much as they’d hoped. He doesn’t talk much. At least the audio quality’s good. He said that if you were acquitted, he would find some evidence to quote ‘nail you’ for something.”

“The Chemist said that?”

“That’s right.”

“I see. Anything specific?”

“No.”

“That was it. He left the room. After that, we powered down the bugs. They sweep occasionally and we couldn’t afford for them to be found.”

“Thank you, Willem.”

“You need anything more, sir, let me know.”

They disconnected.

He rose and walked into the huge Mediterranean-style kitchen, the cats following like dolphins beside a cruise ship. His wife was not home to make him tea, so he boiled water and made a fresh pot himself. He took it and a porcelain cup back to his office.

So. The Chemist would continue to be a problem. This wasn’t a surprise to Viktor Buryak. He’d seen in the man’s eyes humiliation and the pain of defeat when the clever lawyer, Coughlin, cut him to pieces on the stand. And the man couldn’t get him for Murphy’s death again; double jeopardy guaranteed that. So he would come after him some other way.

Would he go so far as to plant evidence against him, set him up for another crime, even another homicide he didn’t commit?

This didn’t seem far-fetched.

He now took a sip of the delightfully hot tea and sent an encrypted message to Aaron Douglass. If anyone could make a problem like Lincoln Rhyme, aka the Chemist, go away, he was the man to do it.