Part Six Cruciform Key [May 29, 9 A.M.]

79

“Arrest him.”

New York City Mayor Tony Harrison was standing at his office window, looking out at a wedge of the city, his city — a jurisdiction in which orders he gave and rules he set were to be carried out.

As clearly had not happened.

“Rhyme. I want him in jail. And I want his people fired. Sachs, Pulaski... All of them. Out. And no pensions. Can we do that?” Harrison noted that his sleeves were not rolled up in unison; some elbow showed on the starboard. He adjusted.

“I’d be careful with the pensions.” This was from the large outdoorsman detective, Richard Beaufort, of his security team. He bore a striking resemblance to some actor whose name the mayor could not recall. Maybe a TV show cop. Or an FBI agent.

Beaufort said, “We have to handle it carefully. I mean, they did collar the Locksmith. And that Whittaker woman.”

Abe Potter was present too. In contrast to the mayor’s cultivated casual look, the aide was pristine in a three-piece suit, the sort you rarely saw.

The athletic mayor smoothed his lush pelt of graying hair, in a politician’s ’do. “Have either of you seen Roland’s statement?”

Edward Roland, his slick, billionaire opponent in the quest for the governor’s mansion in Albany, had taken all of twenty minutes to issue a press release.

“No.” From Beaufort.

Potter said, “I did. It’s not good.”

“What did he say?” Beaufort asked.

“He said that I can’t control my own people. He called for me to step down. And he said the reason it took so long to stop the Locksmith was the breaches in the department. He cited those posts by Verum.”

Potter observed, “Who was the psychotic niece of Averell Whittaker, and she’s in jail for murder.”

“The followers — and that’s a lot of them — don’t believe it. They’re saying she was set up.”

Harrison sat in the simple desk chair he’d used when he was a city councilman in Brooklyn. On his first day in the mayor’s office he’d had the throne that the prior mayor had used removed and discarded. “Spin. We need to spin it. Okay, we’ll make it clear that Rhyme didn’t play any significant role in the investigation. That was misreported. And we’ll say that what little assistance he gave — I repeat, little assistance — didn’t contribute to finding the killer.”

Potter cleared his throat. “Uhm, Tony, then why arrest Rhyme, if that was all he did?”

Harrison grimaced. Good point. He thought for a moment. “The security guard...”

“I’m sorry?” Beaufort rubbed his fingers and thumb together. The mayor noticed the I’m-not-sure-about-this gesture.

“Okay, Rhyme and his team commandeered the investigation. If it had been handled by the precinct and Detective Bureau, they would’ve closed the case earlier, and no one would have died.”

Silence for a moment. Potter glanced from his boss to Beaufort, then back. “Well, I’m not law enforcement, but even I know that Rhyme and Amelia Sachs and the others close cases faster than any other team in the city.”

“True,” Beaufort said.

The mayor aligned sleeves once again. “You two may know that; the public doesn’t.”

The voting public.

“I take a firm stand. I acknowledge that they caught the Locksmith, but by running their own operation, in defiance of my orders, they set back the investigation and that may have resulted in the death of an innocent individual. But I’ll be magnanimous about it. We’ll let leak that I considered criminally negligent homicide against Rhyme but decided to go with obstruction of justice. It’s a Class A misdemeanor, which means up to a year in jail. We need to find a judge who’ll hit him with some time. Four, five months should be fine.”

“Firing the others?” Potter wondered.

Harrison considered. “Too far. Suspension, no pay. Disregard of orders. Make it six months.”

Beaufort stirred.

“Three months.” Harrison received a nod from the detective in reply.

Potter said, “What about the disabled thing?”

“Detention can handle it.” Harrison caught Beaufort’s troubled face. “You and Al Rodriguez were fine spying on him, but you’re not all right with this?”

Beaufort said, “The spying was for show. So the press — and the public — could see you were taking your order about consultants seriously. I never thought you’d actually want to collar him.”

“It has to happen. Or I lose credibility. And Roland is all over me. We need to find a prosecutor to get on board.”

Potter said, “O’Shaughnessy. He’s young. He’ll do anything we tell him.”

Harrison said, “Call Rodriguez. Have him handle the bust. And arrange for Rhyme to come here. I don’t want any raids on his town house.”

“Yessir.”

“No drama. He’s in a wheelchair. Let’s handle it with kid gloves.”

“While we book him in the Tombs,” Beaufort muttered.

“While we do just that,” Harrison said, putting what he thought was just the right amount of whipcrack into his voice, not pleased with Beaufort’s insubordination, tepid though it was.

Potter’s phone hummed with a text. He read and frowned.

Harrison sighed. “Another broadside from Roland?”

“No, seems there’s a disturbance on Broadway, Herald Square.”

“What is it?”

“Demonstrators, protesters, about Verum. Nobody’s sure yet. But Meyer’s department store’s burning.”

He glanced at Beaufort. “Call Rodriguez. Have him take care of the Rhyme arrest.” Then to Potter: “Call the chief and find out about this thing in Midtown.” He scoffed and cast his gaze out upon the city. “Riot. Just what I need.”

80

Alonzo Rodriguez slicked out his handlebar mustache, using the pocket mirror he carried for that purpose.

Fifty-two and somber and a cop blue to his heart, he had collared a respectable number of criminals in his days on the street. His arrest record was good and his arrest-to-conviction record exemplary. All of the perps he collared were guilty but many of them evoked some sympathy within Rodriguez. They were family men and women, they had fallen on hard times, they had children to support and the fact was the majority of them were in the slammer for non-violent drug offenses.

But the one thing that he couldn’t stand and had no patience for was a law enforcer who’d broken the rules.

That offense should bring down the wrath of God.

His phone hummed. “Yes?”

His assistant said in her pleasant alto voice, “Lincoln Rhyme is here, sir. He’s coming up with his aide.”

“Yeah, okay.” Rodriguez supposed he sounded gruff. No, he knew he sounded gruff. But try though he might, he could never deliver a single syllable that didn’t have rough edges, like a piece of chipped shale.

He opened a bottom desk drawer and took from it a compact Glock 26. As a commander he hadn’t carried a weapon on the job in several years. He kept it loaded, though not chambered. Glocks have light pulls. Now, he racked a round. Careful to keep his finger away from the trigger, he slipped the weapon into the holster, which he clipped to his belt.

Rodriguez rose and walked into the ante office. His assistant, a middle-aged woman with frothy brunette hair sprayed firmly into place, nodded. Her face was troubled. She wouldn’t know what exactly was going on — her boss with a weapon? — but she would sense that the outcome wasn’t going to be good.

In this, she was correct.

Down the hall, then into the elevator for a descent of several floors. He walked into Robbery. He approached a couple of detectives he knew. They were large men, one Anglo, one Black. They exchanged greetings.

“Need to borrow you guys for about fifteen. You free?”

With glances of curiosity toward each other, they said they were. One of them then noted the gun, and his expression made clear he had perhaps never seen a commander with a weapon affixed to his belt. “What’s up, Al?”

“Gotta collar somebody. I just want backup.”

“Well, sure. But only fifteen minutes? Where we going?”

“Not far.”

81

“I had an office here,” Lincoln Rhyme was telling Thom. “Back in the day.”

They were on the twelfth floor of OnePP, in the hallway beside the elevators, one of which they’d just exited.

The NYPD, like many big governmental organizations, was forever renaming its offspring. Now the Crime Scene Unit was part of the Detective Bureau’s Forensic Investigation Division. When Rhyme, a captain, ran the CSU, it was part of Investigation Resources.

He continued, “I didn’t spend much time here. I was usually in the field or the lab.”

Other differences between then and now: OnePP had been “the Big Building.” The uniforms had been redesigned, and there were more women, more people of color. He inhaled. Ah, but the cleanser was the same. At least that was his olfactory recollection, though he allowed that it could easily be imagination.

He said to Thom, “Brutalist.”

“What?” The aide was frowning.

“The style of the building. Architectural style.”

“That’s not real.”

“No, it is. Concrete, angular, colorless. Ugly. Popular in the sixties and seventies.”

“If I was the architect behind the movement,” Thom said, “I’d hire a PR firm to come up with a better name.”

The style was vastly different from the old headquarters at 24 °Centre Street, which had housed the NYPD from 1909 to 1973. A more beautiful building was not to be found in Lower Manhattan. Victorian and rococo, sweeping archways and domes and spires. There was much marble and brass and beveled glass.

They continued down the hall to the office of Commanding Officer Brett Evans, the man who had volunteered to set Rhyme up with work in New Jersey and who had run interference for him with Potter and Beaufort.

Thom opened the door and they entered the ante office.

“You must be Mr. Rhyme,” the personal assistant said. She was in her thirties, with quite dark skin and deep, black eyes. She wore a stylish lavender suit and Rhyme noted on the large desk two criminal law casebooks into which were wedged yellow pads, thick with scrawls. He wondered which law school she was attending at night.

“Ms. Williams,” he said, noting the placard. “We’re early.”

She was completely unfazed that he was in a complicated wheelchair. “Commander Evans’s on the phone. It should just be a minute or two.”

It was just a moment later that Rhyme heard the door open once more and a voice said, “Lincoln.”

He turned. Commander Al Rodriguez was accompanied by two large, unsmiling detectives. The jacket of one of the men was tugged back, perhaps so he could have easy access to his boxy gun. The gold shields looked Rhyme over and nodded. Rodriguez glanced at Thom. Rhyme couldn’t remember if they’d been introduced. Maybe. He didn’t bother to do so now.

“Sad day,” Rodriguez said.

Rhyme was silent. There was no point in denying or validating the comment; Rhyme was interested in emotion only to the extent that blood at a crime scene contained increased testosterone and decreased cortisol, which suggested the bleeder had been angry or agitated, which might in turn allow a helpful inference about what had happened.

Other than that? Observations about feelings good or feelings bad were invariably a waste of time.

The personal assistant, Williams, appeared uncertain. “Commander Rodriguez. Commander Evans has a meeting with Mr. Rhyme in a few minutes. Is there something I can do for you?”

“I’m going to need you to step into the hall,” he said firmly.

“I... why?”

“It’s official business.” He shot her a particular look and she gathered up mobile and purse and stepped out.

When the door closed Rodriguez said to Rhyme, “Let’s get it over with.”

The criminalist nodded.

They pushed into Evans’s office — first Rodriguez, then the other detectives, then Rhyme, followed by Thom. The room was a large space on whose wood-paneled walls were hung photos and paintings of former NYPD brass.

Evans, as distinguished as ever, looked up, blinking in surprise. But the reaction faded quickly. A brief sigh. A tightening of his lips. He stood.

“You’re not armed, are you, Brett?”

He shook his head.

Still, Rodriguez nodded at the detectives who stepped forward and frisked him. Rodriguez himself cuffed the commander.

“Brett Evans, you’re under arrest for obstruction of justice, conspiracy, larceny, accepting bribes. There’ll be other charges added later. Including homicides.” Rodriguez gave him the Miranda warning.

Evans offered a soft laugh. “It’s been so long since I’ve arrested anyone that I don’t think I could do that without a prompt.”

“You want to waive your right to an attorney?”

“I don’t believe I will.”

Rodriguez said to the detectives, “Central Booking. Lieutenant Sellitto’ll be there. He’s familiar with the charges.”

“Sure, Al.”

Evans was led out silently by the two big men.

Rodriguez pinched his handlebar mustache and said to Rhyme, “You ready to meet the mayor?”

He nodded. “This should be interesting.”

82

In a dress shirt, with the sleeves rolled up, Mayor Tony Harrison rose and strode past the men in his office.

He gripped the door and seemed to debate slamming it. The panel was quite heavy, though, and it would not have been a particularly dramatic gesture. Besides, Rhyme sensed that he felt he should maintain some decorum.

Even under these circumstances.

Rhyme and Thom, along with Al Rodriguez and football-build Richard Beaufort, were in the spacious office, decked out with a museum’s worth of New York historical memorabilia and offering quite the splendid view of the city, though a view that was a mere sliver of the urban sprawl that the man governed. Ironically one window faced north and in the far, far distance — invisible from here — was Albany, the place on which his sights and hopes were aimed.

Although Lincoln Rhyme had zero interest in politics, if he’d been forced to govern, he would have picked New York City in an instant over the state as a whole.

Harrison returned to his chair.

“Explain.” The grating word was directed at Rodriguez. “Brett Evans arrested — and not him?” A look at Rhyme.

Rodriguez said, “A couple of weeks ago I asked Captain Rhyme to help me run a sting operation. It’s been with full knowledge of the chief of department, the district attorney, and the department’s general counsel.”

“Sting? About what?”

“To get to the bottom of why there’ve been so many investigations and prosecutions compromised lately.”

The mayor’s eyes narrowed at this — the very incidents that his opponent for governor had been using as campaign fodder against him.

Beaufort sat and was silent, though he glanced toward Rhyme once or twice uncertainly.

Rodriguez continued, “I spent days looking over what went wrong, how stakeouts got made, how CIs had changes of heart — or ended up in the Gowanus Canal. I found dozens of incidents ruining investigations — incidents that just could not have happened unless somebody was tipping off suspects and defendants.”

“Somebody inside...” Harrison muttered. “We had a mole.”

Rodriguez nodded. “The only lead seemed to be that they were selling NYPD information to Viktor Buryak. So the DA had one of his prosecutors, John Sellars, bring a case against Buryak — for the murder of Leon Murphy.”

“Which I threw,” Rhyme said.

The mayor whispered, “You... you intentionally screwed up the case?”

“I did indeed.”

Rodriguez added, “It was touch-and-go for a while. We weren’t sure the jury would acquit Buryak but, thank God, they did. That put him back in play, on the street, with one big fear: that Lincoln — who’s known, all respect, to have a bit of an ego—”

“Not a worry.”

A faint smile appeared beneath the handlebar mustache. “A big fear that Lincoln would continue to go after him. We even made sure that Buryak heard that Lincoln was going to do anything he could to bring him down.”

“How?”

“Oh, Buryak’s people bugged the prosecution’s briefing room in the courthouse. We thought it might happen and scanned it. Left the bugs in place long enough to deliver the message.”

“The fuck.”

Rhyme added, “We were sure Buryak would use the department mole to find out what I was up to.”

Beaufort snapped, “So you were running an operation and didn’t tell me or the mayor?”

Rhyme hated obvious questions and tended not to answer them.

But Rodriguez offered, “We didn’t know where the leak was. Your office is copied on a lot of classified NYPD information. Somebody here could have been skimming it.”

The mayor gave a laugh. “I was a suspect too.”

Rhyme didn’t point out the embarrassing fallacy that it hardly made sense for Harrison to deal in stolen info since screwing with investigations and prosecutions worked against his interest as a candidate.

Rodriguez answered more delicately. “Not you, sir, but you have a big infrastructure here. The leak could have come from anywhere.” He continued, “The mole had to be pretty high up, someone with access to investigative information across all the divisions. That would include City Hall.”

Beaufort asked, “How did you get to Brett Evans?”

“Just like what we hoped would happen: Buryak put one of his people on me to stop my supposed renegade investigation against him. Aaron Douglass.”

Rodriguez explained, “He’s a gold shield with the OC Task Force working undercover in Buryak’s operation.”

“Maybe he was legit but he was the only connection we had to Buryak, so Amelia and I made up a story about some drug drops at the Red Hook piers in Brooklyn.”

Rodriguez said, “I put a team on Douglass. We ended up with this. Recorded at an outdoor café on the East Side. We got an undercover at a table next to Douglass and who shows up but Evans?” He put the transcript on the mayor’s desk.

EVANS: How’s Buryak?

DOUGLASS: Thank Christ he doesn’t watch the news. I told him I nailed that Sachs bitch downtown, ran over her. Then, the fuck, she shows up on TV talking about help us find the Locksmith.

EVANS: You could talk your way out of it.

DOUGLASS: Yeah, Viktor trusts me. More and more. Still. [Garbled noise.]

DOUGLASS: Listen, I’ve got something good you can sell to Viktor. There’s going to be a series of narc drops at the Red Hook piers. A lot. If you can get me details Viktor’ll put it up at one of his auctions. He’s got some customers’d pay large to know when a crime scene bus is taking the shipment to the Queens lab. Easy to knock over, especially if it’s late at night.

EVANS: Excellent. I’ll get on the horn with Narcotics now and get back to you... Aaron, let me ask you a question. You’re walking a tightrope here. You haven’t nailed Buryak yet. Isn’t your captain getting impatient? Six months with nothing solid against him. You have an endgame?

DOUGLASS: I’m banking ten K a week. I hang in for another, maybe, five, six months, and then I’m out. Retiring.

EVANS: And doing what?

DOUGLASS: Opening a chain of food trucks. Already got it planned.

You can be my first customer. You get a discount. [Laughter.]

The mayor pushed the document away. He muttered, “Jesus... I never would have guessed Brett. He always seemed rock solid.”

Rhyme said, “I was thinking I should’ve been more suspicious of him too. There was something odd about him calling me up after I was fired. Sure, I helped make his career, but that was years ago, and we haven’t talked much since. He was saying he’d get me a commercial job or a slot at the New Jersey State Police. But he was spying on me, wanted to know what I was up to.”

Harrison shook his head. His distinguished mane of silver hair was at odds with his rolled-up shirtsleeves. Like now, his top collar button was rarely fixed, his tie forever lopsided. “Looks like my firing you added a layer of complication.”

Rhyme muttered, “To put it mildly.”

Al Rodriguez said, “When I heard about your edict, sir, I called Sally Willis and talked my way into overseeing the disciplinary effort. Had to run interference and make it look like Lincoln and his team were toeing the line, while we went after the mole.”

Then the mayor was looking out over the harbor. “The Murphy murder. Did Buryak commit it?”

Rodriguez said, “No.”

“What if the jury’d come back with a guilty verdict?”

“We have the real perp on ice — a safe house in Queens. A signed confession. Buryak wasn’t at risk. And Sellars had some legitimate cause to bring the case: motive, means.”

“We got our mole. What about Douglass?”

“He’s disappeared. We’re looking for him.”

“And Buryak?” Harrison’s face was grim. “Do you have him on tape?”

“No,” Rodriguez said. “He’s been as cautious as he’s always been.”

“So back to fucking square one with him.”

“Well, about that...” Rhyme said absently and glanced at his phone.

83

Sitting in her Torino in a very pleasant portion of Queens, Amelia Sachs heard a crackle on her walkie-talkie.

“Detective Five Eight Eight Five, be advised, subject has been spotted in his car, heading toward home. Two blocks away. K.”

“Five Eight Eight Five,” she transmitted. “Is he alone? K.”

“Affirmative. K.”

Hell. She’d hoped to net two birds with one bust but this was the far more important avian and they couldn’t wait any longer.

She dropped the Torino into gear and drove forward, then turned the corner and stopped. She was across the street from an elegant estate, nestled in some fine landscaping. She killed the engine.

“Five Eight Eight Five. I’m ten twenty-three. I have visual on subject’s vehicle. Block and a half away. Get ready to move in. K.” She watched the white Mercedes sedan cruise smoothly toward her.

The four teams, in unmarkeds, responded they were ready.

She lifted the radio to her face, smelling the familiar pungent scent the devices off-gassed. “Five Eight Eight Five. He’s at the intersection Holly and June. K.”

Two minutes later the Mercedes pulled up to his front gate and Sachs saw his hand reach up to the visor and press the button on the remote to open the scrolly black metal gate.

Nothing happened. The receiver had been disabled by an NYPD tactical officer a half hour ago.

“Move in, move in, move in!” Sachs shouted, sprinting to the Mercedes. Her Glock was aimed at the driver’s head. The other cars skidded up, one blocking him in. In just a few seconds, nine officers surrounded the Mercedes.

“Unlock the door!” she shouted.

The driver did.

“I want to see your hands at all times. You understand. At every second!”

And nodding, Viktor Buryak climbed out, arms raised. While the other officers covered her, Sachs frisked him.

As a beefy officer cuffed him, Buryak gave a wry laugh. “You’re kidding me. Whatever Evans or anybody says, they’re lying. You got no tapes, nothing. And what’s all this goddamn SWAT shit for?”

Sachs didn’t respond. She read him his rights on the charge of murder in the second degree.


In the office of Mayor Tony Harrison, Lincoln Rhyme disconnected the call from Amelia Sachs.

He nodded to Al Rodriguez, then said to him, the mayor and Beaufort, “Buryak’s in custody and going to be transferred to Garner County on homicide charges.”

Rhyme believed the mayor actually gasped.

Rodriguez said, “Buryak always kept himself at arm’s length from anything that could implicate him. But for years we kept looking — and that included searching for any felonies or deaths within ten miles of Buryak’s offices and homes — his mansion in Forest Hills and his vacation house in Garner County. Couple months ago, we found one, a contractor in Garner died in a car crash coming home from a job last year. It was written up as accidental but it was suspicious. It happened on a clear afternoon on a straightaway — and just three miles from Buryak’s country house.”

Rhyme said, “We got credit card receipts that showed that Buryak bought a couple thousand dollars’ worth of building supplies around the time of the death. Just a theory: Had the contractor been working on his house and seen something incriminating? And had Buryak moved fast to eliminate the man and stage the accident?”

Rodriguez continued, “It all could have been a coincidence. But Amelia Sachs and Ron Pulaski drove up there and worked the scene. They found evidence linking Buryak to the worker’s death.”

“After all that time?”

Rhyme chose not to lecture the mayor about the skill of those two particular forensic scientists. He himself had been of some help too.

“We made him in March,” Rodriguez continued, “and could’ve moved on him at any time, but we had to keep him in play to find our mole. Once we had Evans, it was okay to roll Buryak up.”

“Jesus, Lord,” Harrison said, shaking his head. Then he was gazing at Rhyme. “My apologies, Captain — the consulting situation. It was politics, of course. How I hate it.”

Sometimes you hate it, Rhyme qualified silently.

“I’ll cancel that goddamn ban right away. I’ll call the commissioner and the chief of department.” The mayor then sat back and tugged the loose tie from the left side of his collar to the right. He said to Rhyme, “And is there anything else I can do for you? Anything at all?”

After a long moment, Rhyme replied, “As a matter of fact, there might just be.”

84

He’d had the lab to himself for the past hour, which was how he liked it.

Thom was in the kitchen, getting something ready for dinner, and Sachs was out buying wine and appetizers.

Tonight would be a celebration, he hoped.

He was finishing the report on the murder charge of Viktor Buryak. After Sachs and Pulaski had found evidence linking him to the same rock that contained the DNA of the contractor he’d killed, the local authorities executed a search warrant of the vacation home in Garner. The motive for the murder was what Rhyme had guessed. They found a room where Buryak was storing cash and thumb drives related to his business. It was a logical deduction that the contractor had stumbled upon the stash and was seen by Buryak. The mobster would have taken a hammer or blunt object to him and dragged him to the car then driven it to a deserted part of the state road and, with the dead man’s foot on the gas, flicked the transmission into gear. After the crash, he’d then pulled the body out and struck it in the head with the telltale rock to make it seem that was the cause of death.

A small town, winding roads and more than a few accidents? The local authorities wouldn’t think it anything untoward.

Rhyme put his digital signature on the report and sent it to Lon Sellitto, Amelia Sachs, the head of the NYPD’s Organized Crime squad and prosecutor John Sellars, as well as the district attorney in Garner County.

On the TV high on the wall in the nonsterile section of the parlor, Rhyme noted the words:

NEWS ALERT...

You saw this frequently, but these words were in bright red, all caps.

The typography suggested it was not hype, but a significant event.

The chyron scrolled:

Riots and arson in three cities... one dead, dozens injured. Followers of Verum take to the streets.

He shut the TV off, hearing the bubbling of Sachs’s Ford approaching. He’d have to tell her about these odd developments.

Glancing out the window, he saw the car skid to a stop — it seemed to be the only way she was capable of bringing vehicles to rest — directly in front of the building.

She shut the engine off but didn’t climb out. She would be texting or reading a message. Maybe the report on the Buryak murder investigation he’d just sent.

It was then that he looked past her, across Central Park West, and noticed a man who seemed to be watching Sachs from behind a food truck selling Jamaican fare. He was eating a sandwich, wrapped in paper and foil.

He tossed out what remained of his sandwich and after wiping his mouth and fingers with a napkin pulled on sunglasses and a black beret.

No!

It was Aaron Douglass, Buryak’s hit man.

Rhyme’s temple was pulsing with blood from his accelerating heart and he struggled to remain calm as he ordered, “Call Sachs.”

The phone’s electronic voice replied, “Calling Sachs.”

No ring; it went right to voice mail.

Christ!

Through the window, Rhyme saw that Douglass drew a gun from his belt and started across the street.

“Thom! Call nine one one. Gunman outside the town house!”

The aide appeared, phone in hand, not asking questions, dialing.

Rhyme called, “He’s going for Amelia.”

Thom started for the front door.

“Stop! You’ll get shot too!”

The aide paused, talking to Dispatch, as Rhyme accelerated fast and slapped the automatic door opener. But before he could call out to her, Douglass stepped to the front of the car and fired a half-dozen rounds, point blank, through the windshield. The bullets easily penetrated the glass.

“No!” Rhyme cried.

Douglass turned and, as Rhyme reversed backward quickly, fired several shots his way. They were wide and hit the brownstone, digging out bits of shrapnel. One stung his cheek.

The gunman started toward Rhyme but then sirens were audible. He hesitated and sprinted south, out of sight.

A moment later Rhyme heard more shots. The police weren’t that close yet. It couldn’t be them. Douglass would be firing into the air to stop a vehicle and carjack it. Or perhaps simply to shoot a driver in cold blood, dump the body and steal the car.

His eyes turned back to the Torino.

Rhyme believed he could see an arm extended — perhaps beckoning for help or struggling to open the door or rising into the air as a last living gesture.

The limb remained extended for a moment and then dropped out of sight.

85

Wearing Tyvek overalls, the medical examiner was trudging forward slowly. He was not a young man, like most of the tour docs were.

If you wanted to rise to the top, the line ME work was seen generally as a stepping-stone to better medical careers — like assistant prosecutors aiming for Wall Street law firms. Rhyme knew Dr. Jonny Christen well. They’d worked together when Rhyme was a Crime Scene man and then head of the Crime Scene Unit. He and Christen would often arrive at a scene together — even when Rhyme was brass and had no reason to walk the grid, other than he loved to do so.

Christen was a legend in the ME’s office. He’d officiated at the deaths of hundreds of celebrities, politicians and sports figures.

The deaths of cops too.

Which is what he was doing now.

He always seemed more respectful when examining the body of a fallen police officer than the others.

The rotund man with a white mustache now glanced down at the body that lay faceup on the sidewalk, the chest and face covered with a sheet. A shaft of sun happened to hit the gold shield on the belt and reflected outward, a sparkling starburst.

Rhyme nodded. He was looking at the bloodstained sheet. It was one that Amelia Sachs had picked out, dark gray, a color that pleased him, though you could make the argument that it wasn’t a color at all, of course, but a blend of black and white. To be precise.

There was an argument to be made — Lincoln Rhyme knew this better than anybody — that the sheet might contaminate the crime scene. That was true in theory, but here, on this busy urban thoroughfare, there had been plenty of eyewitnesses and so forensics, while necessary, would be — in a very non-Rhyme linguistic construction — less necessary than under other circumstances.

Christen pulled up the sheet. “Three to the chest, one to the neck.”

Footsteps behind him.

It was Ron Pulaski. “Lincoln, you okay?”

“Obviously I’m okay, Rookie. Don’t contaminate the scene any more than it is.”

Crime Scene evidence collection techs were already walking the grid.

The young officer stared at the body.

He was looking down when he heard the woman’s voice. “How bad will it be?”

Rhyme turned to see Amelia Sachs walking up beside him. He answered her question with the phrase he’d just thought: “Pretty bad.”

Aaron Douglass might have helped them put together hours of incriminating evidence against Viktor Buryak.

But Aaron Douglass was no more.

“No choice,” she said, clearly troubled that Douglass had given her no option other than to kill him.

Returning on foot northbound on the sidewalk, Sachs had been carrying two bags of deli food. She’d witnessed Douglass fire the rounds into the Torino and at Rhyme, then run south, to where his car was parked. She’d dumped the groceries, drawn down and demanded that he drop his weapon.

He had chosen to engage — unwisely, given her handgun skills (second place isn’t a blue ribbon, true, but it still means you put the slugs where they’re supposed to be ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time). Apparently his muzzle hadn’t moved more than thirty degrees in her direction, before he received a tight group of rounds.

Rhyme wondered if he’d died curious about whom exactly he’d shot in the driver’s seat of the Torino.

The answer to that question was: Lyle Spencer, the security chief of Whittaker Media Group.

It seemed that Spencer had quite the affection for sports cars, and Sachs had handed over the keys to him, saying, “There’s a blue flasher in the glove compartment. Probably best to keep it under a hundred.” She had then headed off on foot to the deli.

The lending of the car and the pedestrian grocery shopping mission were facts she had not shared with Rhyme until now — which explained his earlier panic.

Lyle Spencer, Rhyme was reflecting: the man who climbed a hundred-foot rope as if it were nothing to save Ron Pulaski’s life.

The man who’d considered a swan dive from a broken window in the Sandleman Building.

The man who had been one hell of a cop but who risked it all, and lost, to try to save his daughter.

The man who now joined Rhyme and Sachs, hobbling slowly and wincing with each step.

“How are you?” Sachs asked him.

“Two ribs cracked and bruises that’re the shape — and the color — of eggplants. Same size too. All right. Maybe I’m exaggerating.”

It seemed that while Spencer’s criminal past prohibited him from carrying weapons, he was never without PPE, personal protective equipment, when he was in the field. In this case a CoolMAX Level 3A vest.

“You’ll have dinner with us.” Sachs was righting the fallen groceries, the only casualty a bottle of Barolo Italian wine, whose shards she dropped into a trash receptacle.

She grimaced at the expensive loss.

“Love to but Mr. Whittaker called. He wants to see me. He’s giving me a promotion.” He glanced at his ruined shirt and jacket. “After a change of clothes.”

“Promotion,” Rhyme said slowly. He and Sachs exchanged glances, conspiratorial.

What came next fell within her bailiwick, so Rhyme remained silent and let her speak. “How’d you like a de-motion?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You caught the eye of some people in this case. Dep com level. They wouldn’t mind if you signed on.”

“Consultants are back in favor, hm? Well, honored, but you can guess what Mr. Whittaker pays me. I don’t think that’s in the city’s budget.”

“No, not consultant. True NYPD. You’d start at detective three. The demotion I mentioned was in terms of rank. You were detective first in Albany, right?”

He gave a hollow laugh. “Well, appreciate that. I really do. But the conviction, remember?”

Like most police departments, the NYPD did not allow felons to join their ranks.

Rhyme now navigated into the conversation. “You wouldn’t be a felon with a pardon and an expungement of your record.”

Spencer’s face was still. “That only happens if there’s a wrongful conviction. But mine wasn’t. I did the crime, got collared. Anyway, even if the department wanted to, it can’t issue pardons.”

“But the governor can,” Sachs said.

Spencer was frowning.

Rhyme told him, “And his handpicked candidate for Albany this coming November is Mayor Tony Harrison.”

And is there anything else I can do for you? Anything at all...

“If you want it, we’ll make it work,” Rhyme continued his sales pitch.

The big man ran his hand through his short hair and Rhyme noted again the scar. And the tat on his bare arm. T.S. He inhaled deeply and was clearly considering the offer hard. Rhyme wondered if it were possible that his daughter somehow figured into the complex of thoughts surging within him now. Maybe he’d hoped she’d follow him onto the force.

He whispered, “Yes, I want it.”

Smiling, Sachs said, “Good. Call Averell. Stay for dinner.”

Spencer and Sachs returned to the town house; Rhyme had noticed Lon Sellitto pulling up in an unmarked vehicle and parking at the curb. A blue-and-white stopped just behind. He and two uniforms climbed out of their vehicles.

Sellitto looked over the crime scene at Douglass’s body and at Sachs’s Torino. Rhyme had called him to tell him about the shooting and that Sachs and Spencer were all right. Sellitto nodded to Rhyme then he and the others turned and crossed the street, walking up to the food truck Aaron Douglass had been using for cover.

What was this about? Long way for Sellitto and the others to come for grilled goat sandwiches.

Sellitto spoke to the vendor, who slumped and grimaced. He turned around and a uniform cuffed him and led him to the backseat of the blue-and-white. Sellitto joined Rhyme. “One of Buryak’s plans was using food truck vendors as spies. Douglass ran them. We’re rolling them up all over town.”

The truck across the street had been there for the past few days. So Buryak’s people had been surveilling him the whole time.

Sellitto nodded and said, “I gotta get downtown. You hear the latest?”

“What’s that?”

“Check it out.” He produced a phone and played a video of a news broadcaster. She was saying, “This clip was just posted on ViewNow and a number of other social networking platforms.”

The scene cut to a video, depicting a pixelated figure in a dark, nondescript room. In a deep, electronically distorted voice, he or she said: “Friends: Verum is a martyr in the fight against the Hidden. But I am here to pick up her cause. I am devoting myself to fighting for you — your lives and your liberty. The Hidden have to know that this is war.

“Say your prayers and stay prepared!

“My name is Vindicta. Latin for ‘revenge.’ That’s your sacred duty. How you pursue it is up to you.”

Rhyme shook his head. So Joanna’s nonsensical fiction persisted and apparently her offspring were taking it very much to heart. And the movement seemed to be growing.

He couldn’t help but wonder too if the network’s broadcasting the clip was itself flaming the fires. The constant battle of the press: Where was the line between informing and inciting?

Sellitto put the phone away. “We’re all on alert. Somebody broke into the National Guard armory. Didn’t get away with anything, but it was troubling enough.” He gave a laugh. “And no, I checked, the Locksmith’s still in custody.”

Sellitto looked at Rhyme. “We might need you.”

“I’ll be here,” he said.

Sellitto climbed into his car, started the engine and pulled into traffic.

On the sidewalk Rhyme swiveled his chair and looked over the street, noting the skill of the crime scene officers as they bagged shell casings, took photos and videos, made measurements of bullet angles and collected Locard’s “dust.” Other officers were canvassing passersby. Rhyme, Sachs and Spencer would be interviewed too, but no hurry on that.

Rhyme’s eyes took in the swell of press and onlookers, moths drawn by the sharp glare of a crime scene: the astronaut-suited techs, the bus, the ambulance, the covered body, the bullet-hole-riddled windshield.

Some gazed with shock, some with fascination, some with glee subdued, some with glee unleashed.

And more than a few of them glanced at Rhyme too.

Immediately after the accident, so many years ago, he’d been aware that people tended to stare when they thought he wasn’t looking, and to avoid him when they thought he was. At first this angered him; he wanted to shout, “I’m just as normal as you are!”

But over the years, Rhyme got over that. He learned that there was no such thing as normal. Who on earth had that perfect physical and mental incarnation that piloted them about flawlessly every minute of every day? Disabled is a continuum. We each have a spot on that vast bandwidth.

It’s what we do with our unique frequency that counts.

Then he chided himself for lapsing into maudlin philosophy, however truly he believed those thoughts to be.

With his left ring finger, he turned the chair about and headed up the ramp to his town house, to join Amelia Sachs and their new friend.

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