The Steel Kiss

Chapter 16

Morning, a Chelsea morning. Chelsea light streams through the open shutters.

I’m in the Toy Room, transcribing the diary once again. Sister Mary Frances’s diligence is revealed in the perfectly scripted words I form on the thick paper.

I put the diary and the recorder away. I stretch and stand up and walk to the futon, look down, scanning Alicia’s body. Pale, really pale. Mouth kind of open, eyes kind of shut.

Pretty, even in the messy clothes, the twisted sheets.

Beside the bed is a band saw, which is really quite a wicked piece of machinery. If they had one during the Middle Ages, imagine how many people would have renounced the devil. Slice, slice, off with a finger.

Off with whatever.

A voice makes me jump. “Vernon.”

I turn. Alicia is stirring. Blinking against the halogen lights.

She sits up, blinking and stretching too. “Morning,” she says, shy and cautious.

This is a word she’s never said to me before. A first, staying over.

A first, her seeing the Toy Room. Which no one else has ever done — and which I thought would never, ever happen.

Letting someone into my sanctuary, letting someone see the real me was hard to do, so very hard. I could never explain it right but it was like risking everything to let her in. One-night stands, fucking to exhaustion, that’s easy. But taking a woman to a gallery exhibition showing paintings you’re hopelessly passionate about — that’s a chance that’s so risky. What if she laughs, what if she looks bored, what if she decides you miss her mark completely?

And wants to go away.

But last night, walking into the Toy Room and, on my command, opening her eyes, Alicia was as delighted as I’ve ever seen her. She gazed over the workbench, the saws, the tools, the hammers, the chisels. My new implement, the razor with the tiny teeth, my favorite. My child. I loved seeing her pale brow and cheeks, lit by the blue-white reflections shooting from all the steel surfaces.

But what really entranced her was what I constructed with those tools.

“You made these?” she asked last night.

“Did,” I told her uncertainly.

“Oh, Vernon. They’re works of art.”

And, hearing that, my life was about as perfect as it could be.

A good day...

But just after that, last night, we grew very, very busy and, after, fell fast asleep. Now this morning she wants to see more of my handiwork.

Before I can turn away or hand her a robe she’s out of bed, and Alicia does in her way what I have done by sharing the room with her. Because now, in the light, she remains naked and I can see her scars clearly. This is the first time she’s allowed me to view them full. The high-necked dress or blouse covers them when she’s clothed. The thick sheltering bra and high panties when she’s half naked. And when we’re in bed, the lights are always low to nonexistent. Now, though, here’s every inch of her body to see in sun-splayed clarity: the slashed breast and thigh, the burned groin, the patch where her arm bone poked through her pale skin after being so fiercely bent.

I hurt for this woman — because of these scars and the scars within, all going back to her husband, years ago, that terrible time. I want to make her whole, make her perfect again, untwist the arm that her husband twisted, unburn her low belly, mend her breast. But all I have are my steel tools and all they could do is the opposite of my good intent: cutting and crushing and snapping flesh.

What I can do, though, is to ignore the troubled skin, which is not at all difficult, and show her — it’s quite obvious now — how much I desire her. And, I think, in this way I can heal the other scars, the ones inside.

I’m devoting a portion of my life to that task. Making her scars vanish.

Alicia looks up at my eyes and comes close to smiling. Then, it’s time, she enwraps her bothered flesh with a sheet stained from us both because it’s what any normal couple would do upon waking. She walks to the shelves, and once more looks over the miniatures I’ve built with my panoply of tools.

I construct almost exclusively furniture. Not toys, not Kids-R-Us plastic or mismatched wood glued together by children in China. But fine-worked, quality pieces, only tiny, tiny, tiny. I spend days on each piece, sometimes weeks. Turning legs on a model maker’s lathe, using the precious razor saw to make even seams, lacquering chests of drawers and desks and headboards with ten coats of varnish, so they are smooth and shiny and dark as a still autumn pond.

Alicia says: “This’s as good as anything you’d find in an artisan’s workshop in High Point. North Carolina, you know. Where they make real furniture. Really, Vernon, amazing.” And I can tell from her face she means it.

“You told me you sold things for a living. eBay and online. I just assumed you bought things and marked them up and sold them.”

“No, I wouldn’t like that. I like making things.”

“You shouldn't call them ‘things.’ They’re more than things. They’re works of art.”

I might be blushing. I don’t know. And for a moment I want to hug her, kiss her, but not in the way I usually grip her and taste her finger or mouth or nipple or groin. Just hold my lips against her temple. This might be what love is but I don’t know about that and I don’t want to think beyond this now.

“It’s quite a workshop.” She’s looking around.

“My Toy Room. That’s what I call it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this is what you do? You were all mysterious.”

“Just...” I shrug. The answer of course is Shoppers. The bullies, the rude, the people who humiliate for sport. Vernon Griffith sits in his dark room and makes toys... Why bother to get to know him? I need somebody chic or cool or handsome.

I don’t answer.

“Who buys them?”

I can’t help but laugh. “The people who pay the most are the American Girl folks. Mostly they’re lawyers and doctors and CEOs, who’d do anything, spend any amount for their little girls.” I know they don’t appreciate the pieces — even the ones I charge a thousand for — any more than they would a hunk of molded polyurethane. And I doubt they enjoy their children’s faces when they open the package (I suspect the kids’ reaction is a millimeter above indifference). No, what the businessmen enjoy is showing off to neighbors. “Oh, look what I had commissioned for Ashleigh. It’s teak, you know.’ ”

(And I always reflect on the irony of parents’ buying for their adorable little ones a chest of drawers made by the same hands that have cracked skulls or sliced tender throats with a lovely implement.)

“I don’t know,” Alicia says. “I would have. Appreciated them, I mean. Oh, and look. You do historical things too.” She’s looking at a catapult, a siege tower, a medieval banquet table, a torture rack (one of my more popular items, which I find amusing).

“We can thank Game of Thrones for that. And I made a lot of Elvish and Orc things when the Hobbit movies came out. Anything medieval is okay as long as it’s generic. I was going to do Hunger Games but I was worried about trademark and copyright stuff. You have to be careful with Disney too. And Pixar. Oh, you have to see this.”

I find a book on my shelf, hold it up. The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

“What is this, Vernon?” She sidles close and I feel her body against mine as I flip the pages.

“Woman in Chicago, a millionaire heiress. Long time ago. She died in ’sixty-two. Frances Glessner Lee. Ever heard of her?”

“No.”

“Quite a person. She didn’t do heiress, society stuff. She was fascinated with crime, murder mostly. And had dinner parties, fancy ones, for police investigators. She learned all about solving murders. But she wanted to do more. So she got details on famous murders and made dioramas — you know, like dollhouse rooms — of crime scenes. Every detail was perfect.”

The book is photographs of her miniature scenes. Names like Three Room Dwelling and The Pink Bathroom. Every one features a doll of a corpse where a corpse actually lay, bloodstains where the bloodstains really were.

I think suddenly of Red. What I found out about her, Ms. Shopper Amelia Sachs, is that she specializes in crime scene work. Two thoughts: She would probably appreciate the book.

The other: A miniature diorama in which a doll representing her shapely body lies on the floor of her town house. Skull cracked, red hair redder from the blood.

We laugh at some of the perfect detail Lee included in her work. I put the book away.

“Would you like one?” I ask.

She turns. “One what?”

I nod toward the shelves. “A miniature.”

“I... I don’t know. Aren’t those part of your inventory?”

“Yes. But the buyers will wait. What do you want? Any one in particular?”

She leans forward and her eyes settle on a baby carriage.

“It’s so perfect.” She offers her second smile.

There are two perambulators. One made on commission and one I’ve done just because I enjoy making baby carriages. Couldn’t say why. Babies and children do not, never have, never will figure in my life.

She points to the one that’s under commission. The better one. I pick it up and hand it to her. She touches it carefully and repeats, “It’s perfect. Every part. Look at how the wheels turn! It even has springs!”

“Have to keep the baby comfy,” I say.

“Thank you, Vernon.” She kisses my cheek. And turns away, letting the sheet slither to the floor while she lies on the bed, gazing up at me.

I debate. An hour won’t delay me significantly.

Besides, it seems humane to give the person I’m going to kill today a little more time on God’s earth.

“I want that damn thing out of here,” Rhyme was grumbling to Thom, nodding toward the escalator.

“Your Exhibit A? What am I supposed to do? It’s five tons of industrial machinery.”

Rhyme was truly irritated by the device’s presence. A reminder that what, yes, might very well have been Exhibit A was going to be no such thing.

Thom was looking for the paperwork that came with the unit. “Call Whitmore. Mister Whitmore. He arranged it.”

“I did call. He didn’t get back to me.”

“Well, Lincoln, don’t you think it might be best to let him handle it? Or do you really want me to look up ‘partial escalator removal services’ on Craigslist?”

“What’s Craigslist?”

“We’ll wait for the lawyer to contact the company. At least his people knew what they were doing. The floors aren’t actually scratched at all. Surprise to me.”

The doorbell rang and Rhyme was pleased to see that Juliette Archer had arrived. He noted that she was alone, no brother in tow. He suspected she’d insisted he drop her off on the sidewalk to negotiate the “intimidating” ramp on her own. No babying allowed.

He wondered what assignment to give her. There wasn’t anything that got his heart racing. Academic research for a school of criminalistics in Munich, a position paper on mass spectrometry for publication here in a scientific journal he contributed to, a proposal about extracting trace evidence from smoke.

“Morning,” she said, wheeling into the parlor. Smiling to Thom.

“Welcome back,” the aide said.

Rhyme offered, “Do you speak German, by any chance?”

“No, afraid not.”

“Ah, well. I’ll find something else to occupy your time. I think there are a few projects that aren’t too boring.”

“Well, boring or not, I’m happy to work on anything you have. And forgive the dangling modifier there.”

He gave a chuckle. True, she’d just said that whether or not she was boring, she’d be happy to work on any project. Grammar, punctuation and syntax could be formidable opponents.

“Breakfast, Juliette?” Thom asked.

“I’ve eaten already. Thanks.”

“Lincoln? What’s it going to be?”

Rhyme was wheeling closer to the escalator unit. “I don’t think any one piece would weigh more than a hundred pounds. Anybody could take it apart. But I suppose we should wait for—” His voice braked to a stop.

Thom was asking something once again.

Rhyme didn’t hear a word.

“Lincoln?... What... Well, that’s a fierce gaze. I was only asking what you wanted for breakfast.”

He ignored the aide and wheeled closer yet to the scaffolding and examined the deadly access panel and, below it, the switch and servo motor operating the latch.

“What is the number one rule in engineering?” he whispered.

“I have no idea. What do you want for breakfast?”

He continued, rhetorically, “The answer is efficiency. Designs should have no more components—”

Archer finished his sentence, more or less: “—than are necessary to perform the intended function.”

“Exactly!”

Thom said, “Fine, fine. Now. Pancakes, bagel, yogurt? All of the above?”

“Goddamn it.” Though directed at himself, not his aide.

“What is it, Lincoln?” Archer asked.

He’d made a mistake. And nothing infuriated Lincoln Rhyme more than that. He pivoted and sped his chair forward to the nearest computer, on which he summoned the close-up pictures that Mel Cooper had taken of the interior of the escalator. Yes, he was right.

How the hell had he missed it?

In fact, he hadn’t missed the critical fact at all. He’d noted, but unforgivably had not focused on, the very words he’d thought to himself:

The switch wire ended in a plug inserted into one of the outlets on the side of the servo unit inside...

One of the outlets.

He explained now to Archer: “Look at the servo motor operating the latch. Right side.”

“Ah,” she said, a hint of disgust in her voice, as well. “It has two outlets.”

“Right.”

“We saw that. We looked right at it.” Archer was shaking her head.

Rhyme scowled. “We sure did.”

There was no reason to have a second outlet in the motor unless something — another switch, presumably — was plugged into it.

Of course, this was true of the mock-up in front of them. What of the escalator actually involved in the accident? He posed this question to Archer.

She pointed out that Amelia Sachs had taken some pictures of that one, unofficially.

“Good.” He called them up.

Thom tried again, “Lincoln? Breakfast.”

“Later.”

“Now.”

“Anything. I don’t care.” He and Archer stared at the pictures. But they didn’t answer the question; the angles were wrong and there was too much blood inside the pit where the tragedy had occurred to see clearly.

“I wonder — a second switch,” Rhyme said in a soft voice.

Archer said, “Which malfunctioned. And, if we’re lucky, it’s made by a company other than Midwest Conveyance. A company with a lot of assets.”

He continued, “Where would it be? The other switch? Anything in the documentation?”

Nothing, she reported, after scrolling through what she’d downloaded. “How can we find out?”

“Here’s a thought. The mall in Brooklyn, where the accident happened? All the escalators would be the same, right?”

“I’d assume so.”

“How’s this? Whitmore hires a private eye — he must have a dozen he uses. The PI jams something into one of the escalator steps. Shuts it down.” Rhyme nodded. He liked this idea. “They’ll get a repair crew in right away. Whitmore’s man could stay close and take pictures inside when they get it open.”

Thom, who’d overheard, was frowning. “Seriously, Lincoln? You don’t think that crosses some line?”

Rhyme scowled. “What I’m thinking about is Sandy Frommer and her son.”

Juliette Archer said, “Before you do that, can I try something?”

He quite liked the idea of sabotage. But he said, “What do you suggest?”

“Hello?”

“Is this Attorney Holbrook?”

“Yes, who’s this?” the voice resonated from the speaker of Rhyme’s landline.

“My name is Juliette Archer. I work with the men you were Skyping with yesterday. Evers Whitmore. And Lincoln Rhyme.”

A moment of silence as the man recalled. “Oh, the case. The lawyer and the consultant. About the personal injury suit. Greg Frommer.”

“That’s right.”

“Yes, I think somebody mentioned your name. You’re a consultant too?”

Rhyme watched her face, narrow, her blue eyes focused on the floor. She was concentrating, and hard.

“I am.”

The man muttered, “Well, we’re still bankrupt. Nothing’s changed. Like I said, you want to file a motion to lift the stay, go ahead. The trustee’ll fight it, I doubt you’ll win, but feel free.”

“No, I’m calling about something else.” Archer had the same edgy tone in her voice that Rhyme recalled from when he’d sent her away from his town house, arriving for the first day of internship.

He wondered where she was going.

“And what’s that?” Holbrook asked.

“You were courteous enough to suggest we might pursue other defendants, though none of those worked out.”

The in-house counsel sounded wary as he said, “No, I didn’t think that seemed likely. After all, Midwest Conveyance was the company that was responsible. I admitted that. And I’m sorry we aren’t able to help your client, the widow.”

“Didn’t seem likely,” she echoed. “Still, you never suggested the one company that might be a viable defendant.”

Silence.

“You know whom I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“What’s your point, Ms. Archer?”

“That you didn’t tell us about the second switch that opens the access panel.”

“Second switch?” His tone suggested he was stalling.

“That’s my question, Mr. Holbrook. Who makes it? How does it work? We need to know.”

“I really can’t help you, Ms. Archer. I should go.”

“Did you know that Lincoln Rhyme, the other consultant on this case, has worked most frequently with the NYPD and—”

“We’re not in that jurisdiction.”

“And, I was going to say, with the FBI too.”

“There are no state or federal crimes involved here. There are confidentiality agreements that preclude me from talking about companies we’re in a contractual relationship with.”

“You’ve just confirmed that there is a second switch that could open the access panel.”

“I... Well. I’m terminating this conversation. I’m going to hang up now and—”

“—and after you do, I’m calling Sandy Frommer and suggesting she and her lawyer hold a press conference about Midwest’s lack of cooperation in finding who really was responsible for her husband’s death. I’ll suggest they use the phrase ‘cover-up.’ I’m guessing that wouldn’t play well in bankruptcy court, especially among creditors who’d love to get their hands on the personal assets of the executives of the company.”

A sigh.

“Help us out here. She’s a widow with a son. I believed you when you said you were sorry. Go the next step and tell us. Please. Who makes the second switch?”

“Do you have time for leisure reading, Ms. Archer?”

She was frowning. A glance at Rhyme. She said, “Occasionally.”

Pages rustled, Rhyme could hear.

The lawyer said, “I myself am a big fan of Entertainment Weekly. And Fly Fishing Today. But I still find time for Industrial Systems Monthly. I enjoyed the March issue particularly. Pages forty and forty-one.”

“What—”

“Goodbye, Ms. Archer. I will not pick up if you call back.”

She disconnected.

“Good,” Rhyme said. “From Boston Law?”

“Legal,” she corrected. “But, no. I was vamping.”

Rhyme was already online. He found a digital version of the magazine Holbrook had mentioned and scrolled to the pages cited. It was an advertisement for a product made by a company called CIR Microsystems. Much of the copy was technical, none of which he understood at first glance. Featured was a gray box with wires protruding. According to a caption, it was a DataWise5000.

“The hell is it?” Rhyme asked.

Archer shook her head and went online. A few seconds of Google and she had an answer. “Well. Listen to this. It’s a smart controller.”

“I believe I’ve heard the term. Tell me more.”

She read for a few minutes then explained: “A lot of products have them built in. Conveyance systems — escalators, elevators — and cars, trains, industrial machinery, medical equipment, construction equipment. Hundreds of consumer appliances: stoves, heating systems, lighting in your house, security, door locks. You can send and receive data to and from machinery with your phone or tablet or computer, wherever you are. And control the products remotely.”

“So maybe a maintenance worker sent a signal by mistake and the access panel opened? Or stray radio waves triggered it.”

“It’s possible. I’m on Wikipedia. And... oh. My.”

“What?”

“I’m just reading about CIR Micro, the maker of the controller.”

“And?”

“The head of the place, Vinay Parth Chaudhary, is being called the new Bill Gates.” She looked over at Rhyme. “And the company’s worth eight hundred billion. Let’s call Evers Whitmore. I think we’re back in the game.”

Chapter 17

No help from CSU headquarters on the brand of varnish or cosmetics found at the earlier scenes, or the type of sawdust. Nor had there been any more insights into trace or DNA on the White Castle napkins.

But at least the car service lead blossomed.

“Got it.” Ron Pulaski held up a pad to Sachs, sitting across from him in their war room at One PP. The young officer read from his notes. “Driver, Eduardo. He remembers the unsub, picked him up across the street from the White Castle, had a bag full of burgers. Ate them while they drove. About five or six. Maybe more. He talked to himself some. And spoke in a weird monotone. Skinny, looked down all the time. Scary. And it was the day of the murder.”

“The driver got a good look at him?”

“Not really. Just: lanky, skinny, tall. The green jacket and Atlanta baseball cap.”

Sachs asked, “How could he not get a look at him?”

“Dirty glass. The partition, you know. Plexiglas.”

He added that the driver had dropped their unsub in downtown Manhattan, about four blocks from the murder site.

“What time?”

“About six p.m.”

Hours before the murder. What had he done during that time? she wondered.

Pulaski added, “The driver stayed at the corner where he dropped him off — had some calls to make — and watched him for a minute. The unsub didn’t go to any of the buildings at the intersection near where they stopped; he walked a block away to another one. The driver could have dropped him there, but maybe our boy didn’t want to be seen going into a particular place.” The young officer went online, she could see, and called up a map of the city.

He tapped a satellite image, overhead, of a building. “Here it is. This has to be it.”

The picture view revealed a small building, terra-cotta in color. “Small factory, offices, warehouse?”

“Doesn’t seem residential.”

Sachs said, “Let’s go take a look.”

They left One PP and headed downstairs to her car. In ten minutes they were cruising through congested downtown traffic, Sachs pumping the accelerator in low gears when she could, cutting in and out of the lanes as aggressively as ever.

Wondering, as she often did, what would they learn?

Sometimes leads provided a minor fact to help in the investigation.

Sometimes they were a waste of time.

And sometimes they took you straight to the perp’s front door.

Mel Cooper was back in Rhyme’s Central Park West parlor.

Sorry, Amelia, Rhyme thought. After the discovery of the potential new defendant, I need him more than you do. We’ll argue later.

Evers Whitmore was present too.

The three men were staring into a dark portion of the room, where Juliette Archer sat in front of a computer, verbally commanding her computer to do her bidding.

“Up three lines. Right two words. Select. Cut...”

So very difficult to live life without shortcuts, Rhyme thought. Being disabled put you in a very nineteenth-century world. Everything took longer. He himself had tried eye recognition, voice recognition, a laser-emitting device attached to his ear that activated portions of the screen. He had returned to the old-fashioned way, using his hand on a joystick or touchpad. This was clumsy and slow but the technique approached normal, and Rhyme had finally mastered it. He saw that Archer needed to settle into an artificiality that was right for her.

In a few minutes she wheeled about and joined them. On the screen nearby were the fruits of her work but she began to report verbally on what she’d found, without glancing toward the notes glowing on the monitors.

“Okay. CIR Microsystems. Vinay Chaudhary’s company. It’s the number one manufacturer of smart controllers in the country. Revenues of two billion annually.”

“My, that’s helpful,” the understated Whitmore said.

“The controller’s basically a small computer with a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection or cellular one mounted in the machine or appliance it controls. It’s really pretty simple. Say it’s mounted in a stove. The controller is online with the stove manufacturer’s cloud server. The homeowner has an app on his smartphone to communicate with the stove from anywhere in the world. He logs into the server and can send or receive signals to and from the controller — to shut the stove off or on. The manufacturer also is online with the stove, to collect data from the controller: usage information, diagnostics, maintenance scheduling, breakdowns — it can even be alerted to burned-out lights in the oven.”

Cooper asked, “Any problem with the DataWise Five Thousand controller in the past? Activating when it shouldn’t?”

“None that I could find but I was playing Google Roulette. Give me some time and I might find something more.”

“So how did it open the panel?” Rhyme mused. “A stray signal ordered the controller to open the door, something in the mall itself. Or from the cloud? Or did the DataWise just short out and send the open command itself?”

Archer looked up from the computer and said, “Have something here. Take a look at this. It’s from a blog about two months ago. Social Engineering Second-ly. That’s ‘second’ as in the unit of time, I think. Updated every second. As opposed to Monthly or Weekly. Doesn’t quite work.”

Rhyme said, “Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good.”

He and the others read:

“Bingo,” Archer said, smiling.

More sedately Whitmore mused, “We could argue that the controller is defective because it wasn’t shielded from ambient signals.”

Rhyme said, “Who posted that? We should talk to him.”

The blog gave little personal information and no address.

Rhyme said, “Rodney.”

“Who?” Archer asked.

“You’ll see,” Rhyme said. A glance at Cooper, who smiled knowingly and said, “I’ll get the volume.” And turned down the control on the speakerphone.

And despite the reduced decibels, when the phone was answered a moment later, relentless rock music pounded into the parlor.

“A bit more,” Rhyme called to Cooper, who complied.

A voice from the other end of the line, “’Lo?”

Archer frowned in curiosity.

“Rodney! Can we lose the music?”

“Sure. Hi, Lincoln.” The chugga-chugga bass diminished to a whisper. It was not, however, lost.

Rodney Szarnek was a senior detective with the NYPD’s elite Computer Crimes Unit. He was impressively brilliant at collaring perps and helping other investigators with the computer side of a case, though irritatingly in love with the worst music on earth.

Rhyme explained that the detective was on speaker, then told him about the case. The smart controller in an escalator might have malfunctioned, resulting in a gruesome death. “But it’s not a case, Rodney.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s civil. Mel Cooper’s here but only on vacation.”

“And I’m confused.”

“I’m not working with the department, Rodney,” Rhyme said patiently.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“If you’ve quit, why have you not quit? I ask only because we’re having this conversation.”

“I resigned from criminal practice. I’m consulting on a civil case.”

A pause. “Oh. Well. In that case I can’t really help you. You understand, Wish I could.”

“No, I know that. All I need is for you to tell us how to find the physical address of somebody who’s written a blog about these controllers. We want to talk to him, maybe hire him as an expert witness. Pretend we’re at a cocktail party, you and me.”

“Well, finding somebody online? That’s easy enough. A WhoIs search. W-H-O-I-S. Run the.com or.net name through that. Of course, he might be using a privacy service as the domain registrant. That’s so pissed-off ex-wives or pissed-off ex-husbands can’t find out where the registrant lives.”

Rhyme looked to Cooper, who typed at the keyboard in front of his monitor. He nodded at the results. Rhyme read them. “It says Privacy Plus, New Zealand.”

“Yep, that’s a service to mask the physical address. And New Zealand? No court order. You’re screwed.”

Rhyme said calmly, “But we can’t afford to be screwed, Rodney. Let’s think harder.”

Szarnek cleared his throat. “Well, speaking theoretically, you catch that word? The-o-ret-i-cally? To get past a privacy service, one might go online and download and install — on a flash drive, of course, to be burned later — a program like, let’s just say, HiddenSurf. Then one would run that and then do a search of Russian websites for a program called, let’s just say, Ogrableniye. Means ‘robbery’ in Russian. Don’t we love our Slavic friends’ subtlety? Ogrableniye is a hacker code. Completely illegal. Terrible. I don’t approve one bit. Because it allows people to hack into a, say, a privacy service even in, oh, say, New Zealand, and look up the physical address of someone whose IP — internet — address you know.”

“We’d better hang up now, Rodney.”

“I’m in favor of that. Although how can we hang up if you and I haven’t even been talking?”

Music rose to lofty decibels and they disconnected.

Rhyme said, “Did somebody write all that down, know what to do? We’ve got to—”

Archer looked up from her computer screen and said, “Bad news, good news.”

“What?”

“I followed his instructions. The bad news is you’ve already started to get Russian porn spam. But the good news: I’ve got the blogger’s address. And, the better news: He’s here in town.”

Chapter 18

Too many people in this city,” Ron Pulaski said. Then seemed to regret the comment since the perp they were now seeking was in his own demented way addressing the population situation.

The young officer’s complaint really was that there were too many people crossing streets against lights and that those lights were not in his and Amelia Sachs’s favor.

She, however, wasn’t that concerned about either limitation. True, transit was slow but they were making steady progress from One PP to the intersection where the gypsy cab had dropped Unsub 40 the night he’d murdered Todd Williams with his inelegant but effective tool. Sachs was engaging in what she called the touchless nudge — easing the car close to those blocking the way with an air of sufficient distraction to make the pedestrian feel deliciously imperiled and, accordingly, scoot out of the way.

Finally they escaped from the downtown area known in the 1800s as Five Points, the most dangerous few square miles in the United States (now far more pristine, though, some said cynically, populated by as many criminals as back in the day; the neighborhood embraced City Hall).

In ten minutes, they spotted the gypsy cab on the Lower East Side, parts of which were growing into hipster and artist enclaves. Not here. Dilapidated commercial buildings ruled, and a number of vacant lots.

In the phone conversation, arranging this meeting, the driver had said, “You’ll see me, white Ford. Dripping wet. Just clean her.” The accent had been a mystery.

Sachs nosed the Torino into a space, avoiding mounds of trash banked at the curb, and they climbed out. The short, swarthy driver, in jeans and a blue Real Madrid soccer shirt, exited his cab and joined them.

“I’m Detective Sachs. This is Officer Pulaski.”

“Hi, hi.” He shook their hands enthusiastically. Some people are nervous meeting the police, some are critical of authority, and some — a few — act like they’re in the presence of rock stars.

Eduardo was going to give White Castle’s Charlotte a run for the money.

“So, I happy to help. Happy.”

“Good. Appreciate it. Tell me about this man.”

“He very tall and very skinny. Weird, don’t you know?”

“Any—”

“Distinguishing characteristics?” he blurted.

“Yes.”

“No, no, couldn’t see much. Hat on. Braves. The team, don’t you know?”

“Yes, we know.” Pulaski was looking around, taking in the empty street. Warehouses, small offices. Nothing residential or retail. He turned back to his notebook, in which he was transcribing whatever the man had to say.

“Sunglasses, he wore too.”

“Hair color?”

“Lighter, I think. But, the hat. You know.”

“And his clothes?”

“Green jacket, yellow-green. Dark pants. And a backpack. Oh, and a bag.”

“Bag?”

“Plastic. Like he bought something and they put it in bag. He look in bag a couple times, I driving him.”

Charlotte had said the same.

“Any logo on the bag?”

“Logo?”

“Store name, picture? Smiley face.”

“Emoji! No.”

“How big was the bag?” Sachs asked.

“Not big. Strawberries.”

“He had strawberries?” Pulaski wondered.

“No, no. I mean about size of package of strawberries. Just thinking that. Or blueberries, or salad dressing or a large can of tomatoes. That big,” Eduardo said, beaming. “Exactly.”

“Any idea what was in it?”

“No. Hear something metal. Click, a click.”

“Did he make any phone calls?”

“No. But he kind of talk to himself. I told you that on phone. I could not hear good. First, I say, ‘What that, sir?’ Thinking he talking to me. But he said, ‘Nothing.’ I meaning, he said something. ‘Nothing’ was what he said. Don’t you know? And then he quiet after that. Just look out window. Wouldn’t look at me. So couldn’t really see scars. You always like scars. Police. Distinguishing things. But didn’t see any.”

Pulaski asked, “Did he have an accent?”

“Yes.”

“What was it?”

“American,” Eduardo answered. He wasn’t being ironic.

“So, you stopped here. This intersection?”

“Yes, yes. I thought you want to see where exactly.”

“We do. He paid with cash?”

“Yes, yes, that’s all we take, don’t you know?”

“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you still have the money he paid you with?”

“For fingerprints!”

“That’s right.”

“No.” The driver shook his head broadly.

“Where did he go? I understand you waited here and saw him go into one of those buildings.” Pulaski was looking up from the notebook.

“I did, yes. I will tell you.” He pointed up the street. “You can just see it, that one. Beige.” He wrung two syllables out of the color.”

From here they could make out only a sliver of a five-story building; the front was on an adjoining street. It was surrounded by a vacant lot on one side and a half-demolished building on the other.

Eduardo continued, “I remember because I am thinking maybe whoever he was going to see was not home, or not there, and this neighborhood? No cruising medallions so he want to go back to Queens and I could make a second fare. But I saw him go through back door. That’s when I left, don’t you know?”

“We appreciate your help.”

“He a killer?” Eduardo grinned happily.

“He’s wanted in connection with a homicide, yes. If you see him again, if he comes by your office in Queens, call nine one one and give them my name.” She dealt out another of her cards. “Don’t do anything yourself, try to stop him.”

“No, I call you, Officer Detective.”

After he’d left, she and Pulaski started toward the building he’d pointed out. They got no more than a half block when she stopped fast.

“What is it, Amelia?” Pulaski whispered.

She was squinting. “What street is that? That the building faces?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled out his Samsung and loaded a map. “Ridge.” The young officer frowned. “Why’s that familiar?... Hell.”

Sachs nodded. “Yep. It’s where Todd Williams worked.” She’d learned where the victim’s office was and retraced his steps from the murder site back to here, canvassing for clues. She’d also tried to interview others in the ramshackle building but of the few people who had offices in the structure — only three or four, the rest of the space being empty — no one had seen anything helpful to the investigation.

“They knew each other. The unsub and Williams. Well, this changes everything.”

It wasn’t a robbery or random killing at all.

Sachs mused, “The unsub got here four hours before the murder. Did they stay in the building? If so, doing what? Or did they go somewhere else?”

And other questions: Did Unsub 40 come to this area often? Did he live near here?

She looked around the street. The occupied buildings included a few tenements and what seemed to be warehouses and wholesalers. The canvass probably wouldn’t take too long. She’d assemble a team from the local precinct.

Sachs spotted a homeless man, lean and pale, foraging through a trash bin.

Approaching, Sachs said, “Hi. Can I ask you a question?”

“Just did.” His dark face wrinkled.

“I’m sorry?”

He returned to digging through the bin. “Just did ask me a question.”

She laughed. “You live near here?”

“Simon Says.” He found a half sandwich and put it into his shopping bag. “Okay. I’m being fun. Shelter up the street. Or under the bridge. Depending.” The hands and neck and calves, which were uncovered by the greasy clothing, were quite muscular.

“Did you seen anybody tall and real thin go into that building a few weeks ago? Or any other time?”

“No.” He moved on to another bin.

Sachs and Pulaski trailed. “You sure?” Pulaski asked. “Want another look?”

“No. Simon Says.”

Sachs waited.

The man said, “You asked if I saw him going into the building. Nup. Didn’t. You didn’t ask if I’d seen him period. Which I have. Simon Says.”

“Okay, where have you seen him?”

“Now you’re cooking with gas. Standing right Jiminy there.” He pointed: the far intersection, the direction they were going. “Skinny guy, but eating like a... do sailors eat? No, they swear. Chimneys smoke. He was eating something, munchin’ it down. Was gonna hit him up for something. But felt off. Kind of talking to himself. Also, eating that way, thought he seemed greedy. Chomp, chomp, chomp. I wouldn’t get anything.”

“When was this?”

“A while ago.”

“How long? A week, a few days?”

“Simon Says.”

Sachs tried, “What do you mean by a while ago?”

“Ten, fifteen.”

“Days?”

“Minutes. He was just there.”

Jesus.

Sachs unbuttoned her jacket and glanced up the street. Pulaski too grew vigilant, looking in the directions she was not.

“He go in any particular way?” she asked.

And don’t fucking Simon Says me.

“No, just standing there. I went on looking for stuff, and that was it. Didn’t see him again. Could be here, could be there, could be anywhere.”

Pulaski was pressing the transmit button on the Motorola mike pinned to his shoulder. He called in a request for backup and, before she could remind him to do so, he said, “Silent roll-up. Suspect may be unaware of our presence. K.”

“K,” came the staticky response.

Sachs got the homeless man’s name, which wasn’t Simon, and the shelter he sometimes stayed in. She thanked him and told him it was best to leave. She was tempted to hand him a twenty but if it came down to testifying in court about the presence of the unsub, a defense lawyer would ask if he’d been paid anything by the police.

“You better get back to the shelter. Safer.”

“Yes, ma’am. Yes, sir, Officer, sir.”

He started away.

Ron Pulaski said, “Oh, hey, look.”

The man slowly pivoted. Pulaski was pointing at something in the street a few feet away from them. It was a twenty-dollar bill.

“You drop that?” Pulaski asked.

“Me. Ha.”

“If we take it, we have to report it. Pain in the ass.”

“Bullshit.”

Sachs, playing along. “True. Rules.”

Pulaski said, “You go ahead and take it. Finders keepers.”

“Think I will. Simon Says. There’s a reason you get half sandwiches in the trash. Nobody throws out a good sandwich.” He scooped up the money with his long, sinewy fingers and pocketed it.

Sachs nodded to Pulaski, acknowledging the good deed. It had never occurred to her to handle it that way.

The man wandered off, muttering to himself.

“How long, you think?” she asked

“Before backup? Eight, nine minutes.”

“He can’t’ve gotten very far. Let’s check the ground for footprints. See if we can find which way he went, size thirteens.”

And began to walk a lazy grid in search of tread marks. The search was, of course, slowed by the fact that each officer looked up from time to time, searching for a threat.

Just because Unsub 40 had not shot anyone yet didn’t mean he wasn’t willing and able to try.

Chapter 19

Thom had dropped Evers Whitmore and Lincoln Rhyme off in front of the building that housed the blogger’s office, whose address Juliette Archer had tracked down, and drove off to park the accessible van in a lot a few blocks away.

The lawyer once again pressed the button on the intercom. Social Engineering Second-ly. It was on the top floor.

Still no answer.

“We can keep looking,” Whitmore said. “There have to be other people who’ve researched the DataWise.”

But Rhyme wanted the man who’d written the piece that Archer had found. He wanted to know exactly what kind of ambient radio waves had caused it to activate.

Expert witness...

A perfect one.

Whitmore gazed around the deserted streets. “We can leave a note, I suppose.”

“No,” Rhyme said. “He’ll never contact us. We know where he works now. Let’s come back tomorrow. We can—”

“What was that?” Whitmore said quickly.

Rhyme too had heard the scrape of sole on the cobblestones. Around the corner, it seemed.

Whitmore, Rhyme had learned, was not given to displays of emotion but Rhyme could tell from the lawyer’s uncharacteristically darting eyes that he was concerned.

Rhyme was too.

The footsteps seemed furtive. The neighborhood deserted.

The lawyer said, “I’ve never done criminal work, but I’ve been shot at twice pursuant to civil suits. The perpetrators missed both times and might have been trying only to scare me. But it was still an unpleasant experience.”

Rhyme had been shot at, as well, and could concur.

Another scrape.

From where? Rhyme had no idea.

Whitmore added, “I also received in the mail a rat without its head. The head arrived a week later with a note suggesting I withdraw a lawsuit.” It was nerves talking at this point.

“But you didn’t.” Rhyme was scanning the street, and the buildings. This was not a particularly dangerous neighborhood, statistically, but if a mugger wanted to nail someone easy, this pair would be a good choice. A slim nerdy lawyer and a gimp.

Whitmore said, “No, the case stood. In fact, I ran some forensics on the rat, found human DNA, and my private eye got samples of personal effects of everyone connected to the case. The rodent was a gift from the brother of the defendant.” Whitmore was looking around again. One black window seemed particularly to bother him, though Rhyme could have told him that snipers weren’t a major risk.

“You would have thought that the brother would be a rather obvious suspect. But he seemed to believe he could get away with it. I sued him for intentional infliction of emotional distress. I wasn’t actually that distressed but I made a credible witness. The jury was rather sympathetic. I testified I had nightmares about rats. This was true but the opposing counsel failed to ask when. The last time was when I was eight. Mr. Rhyme, did you hear that noise again?”

He nodded.

“Do you have a gun?” the lawyer asked.

Rhyme’s expression, as he turned toward Whitmore: Do I look like I’m a fast-draw kind of person?

Then more footsteps, growing closer.

Cocking his head to the right, Rhyme whispered, “He’s coming from that direction.”

They remained still for a moment. There was a sound from where he’d just indicated: A click of metal.

Chambering a bullet before the mugging?

Or just planning to shoot and pilfer after?

Time to leave. Now. Rhyme gestured with his head and Whitmore nodded. Rhyme could move fast, if roughly, over the cobblestones toward one of the busy north — south avenues.

He whispered Thom’s number to Whitmore. “Text him. Have him meet us a block north, Broadway.”

The lawyer did this and slipped his phone back into his pocket. With effort he dragged Rhyme’s heavy chair over the curb.

Another whisper to Whitmore: “He’s close. Move, fast.”

They started up the street, along the front of the office building.

When they arrived at the corner and hurried past it, both men froze.

Staring directly into the muzzle of a pistol.

“Oh, my,” Whitmore gasped.

Lincoln Rhyme’s response was more subdued. “Sachs. What the hell are you doing here?”

Chapter 20

Rhyme watched his partner examining him and Whitmore with a perplexed frown for mere seconds before she slipped the blocky Austrian pistol back into the plastic holster with a definitive click.

The frown vanished and she turned to her right and called, “Ron! Clear!”

Footsteps from around the corner. Rhyme watched Pulaski approach, also holstering his weapon. “Lincoln!” A curious glance at the lawyer.

Rhyme introduced them.

Pulaski blurted to Rhyme, “What’re you doing here?”

“Just asking the same question, Rookie.”

And the answer was soon clear, once he and Sachs explained what had brought them to the building on Ridge Street in lower Manhattan, on their respective missions. The victim of the unsub whom Sachs had been on the trail of for the past several weeks, Todd Williams, was in fact the man who’d posted the blog about the dangers of DataWise5000 controllers. Since Rhyme was no longer doing criminal work she’d never had reason to mention Williams’s name, merely giving him the gist of the Unsub 40 case.

Sachs explained that she and Pulaski had run down a lead: The unsub had taken a car service from Queens to this area and the driver had seen him go through the back door of this building about four hours before Williams’s death.

Rhyme said, “Williams published a blog piece about the risks of a particular kind of Wi-Fi smart controller — the same type that we think malfunctioned in the escalator and probably caused the access panel to open. Since the widow can’t sue the escalator manufacturer — they’re in bankruptcy — we’re considering a suit against the controller company. We were hoping Williams could be an expert witness, or at least tell us more about how the controllers could fail. But now...”

Sachs asked, “You thinking what I am?”

“Yep. Your unsub reads Todd’s blog about the controller, thinks it might be a nifty murder weapon — for whatever reason. Contacts Todd, arranges to meet him here. Learns what he needs to so he can hack into the controller.”

Sachs continued the likely narrative: “Then suggests they go to the club, Forty Degrees North. But before they get there, he pulls Todd into the construction site and beats him to death with his hammer. Makes it look like a robbery. He killed him there, rather than here, to keep the investigation focused away from Williams’s office.”

Whitmore said, “I don’t quite follow this, Mr. Rhyme.”

Rhyme said, “Amelia was after the perp at the mall in Brooklyn. She assumed it was a coincidence that the escalator collapsed while she was there.”

Sachs added, “But it wasn’t. Unsub Forty knew how to hack the controller and opened the door intentionally.”

“To cause a distraction and escape?” Pulaski asked. “When he saw you were after him?”

Rhyme’s face tightened at the young man’s flawed thinking. “How would he know there was a DataWise controller in the escalator?”

Blushing, the young man said, “Sure, sure. Wasn’t thinking. He’d have had it planned out ahead of time. He was at the mall — to kill either somebody at random or Frommer in particular — by popping open the access panel.”

Pulaski’s Motorola crackled. He stepped aside to take the transmission.

Sachs explained to Rhyme and Whitmore, “The unsub was spotted here about twenty minutes ago. We called in backup. That’s why the weapons; we thought you might be him when we heard you on the other side of the building.”

The young officer rejoined them. “One car patrolling the neighborhood, other’s pulling up here. No sign of him yet.”

Rhyme said, “Any chance he’s in the building?”

“Homeless guy said he was standing at that intersection,” Sachs said, nodding. “He probably would have seen him if the unsub’d come this way.”

Whitmore asked, “But I’m curious. Why would he come back here?”

Rhyme said, “He might live nearby.” The area was mostly commercial but there were pockets of tenements and newer — that is, seventy-five- or eighty-year-old — apartments.

“Or he’s worried he didn’t cover his tracks well enough and came back to look for evidence. He saw us and took off.” She looked over the building. “See if it’s been broken into, Ron.”

He circled the structure and returned. “Windows’re intact. But the back door might’ve been jimmied. Scratch marks.”

Rhyme couldn’t feel the thud in his insensate chest but he knew this occurred... from the rapid pulse in his forehead. “You said to look for evidence, Sachs. He could also—”

“Have come here to destroy it!” She spun toward the building.

It was at just that moment that there came a muffled whump from within the building. Whatever kind of incendiary device Unsub 40 had planted, it must have been quite large. Within seconds, smoke and flames began spiraling out of the ground-floor windows, which had shattered from the heat.

Rhyme caught a mouthful of smoke and ash and, coughing hard, he struggled to maneuver backward in his chair. Evers Whitmore helped him do so, kicking away a trash basket that was blocking the criminalist’s escape. Ron Pulaski called Dispatch to send the FDNY.

And Amelia Sachs ran to the front door of the building, picked up a loose cobblestone and used it to smash through the glass of the door. She turned to Rhyme and shouted, “What floor is the blogger’s office on?”

“Sachs, no!”

“What floor?”

“The top,” he replied, still coughing hard.

She turned and leapt inside, barely avoiding the points of glass that ringed the open doorway like shark’s teeth.

She’s going in?

Well. Good fortune for me.

My police girl, Red, the thief of White Castle, has no idea that it’s five full gallons of low-octane gas pooling in flame in the basement. An ocean of flame. The building, dry as a California pine, won’t last long.

Will she? Will she last very long?

I was going right back home, to Chelsea, and an Internet café, to send out a few emails. But I decided to stay. I’m looking out a hall window, fifth floor, of an abandoned tenement across the street and a few doors down. Bad for living in, good for spying. I crouch, shrinking, to watch what’s unfolding below me.

Can’t see me here, none of them can.

Pretty sure.

No, no one’s looking up. Police cars are cruising but looking on the streets and sidewalks only. They’re thinking I’ve gone. Because who would wait around?

Well, I would. To see who exactly it is after me. And to see who will crisp to death, or suffocate, thanks to the gift I left. Smoke from the building is thick already. And thickening more. How can Red breathe? How can she see?

Sirens, I can hear them. Fire engine intersection horns, blaring. I love the sound, trumpeting pain and sorrow.

If it goes as planned, all the tidbits of evidence I left behind in Todd’s office, careless me, will be melted to nothing. I know from Frances Lee’s crime scene dollhouses how telling evidence can be — why, look how Red put an end to my precious sliders.

Burning it is best.

Burn to ash, to dust, to greasy plastic smoke.

And Red?

Myself, I never much cared for burning bones. It’s not satisfying. Cracking them is better. But however she goes is good. Hair burned off, skin, fat, then the bones, fine. As long as she goes. A little pain wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

Smoke is curling up like a huge black pig’s tail. Help will be here soon. But the fire is progressing nicely.

I’m not close to the raging inferno but not too far either. Maybe I’ll hear her screams.

Unlikely — but one can always hope.

Chapter 21

Smoke is wet, smoke is scaly, smoke is a creature that slides into your body and strangles from within.

Amelia Sachs was squinting through the white then brown then black clouds as she charged up the stairs to the top floor of the building dying of fire in its low heart.

She had to get inside the blogger’s office. If the unsub had gone to such lengths to destroy the place, that meant there was evidence inside. Something that would lead to him or to future victims.

Go, she told herself, retched, spat, then said the command out loud.

The door was locked, of course — which was why he’d started the fire in the basement, more accessible than the room he needed to destroy. She tested the door with her shoulder. No, breaking in wasn’t going to happen. You can breach a door with crowbars, battering rams and special shotgun slugs (aiming for the hinges only; you can’t shoot out a lock). But you can’t kick in most wooden doors.

So she’d float like an angel. As smoke ganged around her, heat too, she stumbled to the window in the hallway and kicked this one out too. Unlike the door downstairs, which left jagged shards, the window here vanished into cascading splinters, opening a star-shaped entrance into the void. Cool air rushed past her. She inhaled deeply, relieved at the oxygen, but — from the suddenly increasing roar behind her — she realized she’d just fed the inferno, as well.

She looked out and down, Not a wide sidewalk of a ledge, but sufficient. And the window into the blogger’s office was a mere five or six feet away from the open rectangle Sachs now climbed into. She was luxuriating in the clean air, sucking it voluptuously into her stinging lungs. She glanced down to the ground. Nobody beneath her. This was the back of the building, opposite from where Rhyme and the others were waiting and, she hoped, the fire department was arriving to squelch the flames.

Yes, she heard sirens. But silently commanded them: Get closer, if you don’t mind.

Looking behind her. The billows of smoke were growing denser. All black now, not timid white or ambivalent brown.

Coughing and retching. God, her chest hurt.

So, onto the ledge.

Sachs’s animal fear was claustrophobia, not heights, yet she was in no hurry to tumble fifty feet to slick cobblestones. The ledge was a good eight inches, and she had to traverse only two yards to get to the Williams’s office. Better without shoes but she’d have to break that window too to get inside and litter the floor with razors. Keep the footware.

Go. No time.

Her phone was ringing.

Not hardly answering at the moment...

Onto the ledge, gripping the window frame, and turning to face the building’s exterior wall. She then eased to her right, weight on her toes, fingers digging into the seams between the soot-stained stones. Cramps radiated through her wrists.

From within the building a groan. Something structural was failing.

How bad an idea was this?

Not a question to be asking at the moment.

One yard, then the second, and she arrived at Williams’s window. Inside there was a faint patina of smoke but visibility seemed good. Placing her hands on the side of the frame, gripping hard, she eased back her knee and kicked. The pane shattered into a thousand pieces, littering the floor in the tiny, dim office.

Getting inside, however, was trickier than she’d thought. A center-of-gravity issue. Lowering her head and shoulders to duck in sent her rear into the void and that started to tilt her backward.

Nope...

At least her hands had good purchase on the frame — the parts where no glass remained. Try sideways. Angling to her right, easing her left leg in and then shifting her weight to that limb. Sachs reached inside, seeking something to grip. A metal square, a file cabinet, she guessed. Smooth, no handle. She could feel only the side of the furniture. But recalling a Discovery Channel or some such show about rock climbing, she pictured free climbers working their fingers into the tiniest of crevices and supporting their full weight. She moved her hand to the back of the cabinet, wedged fingers between metal and the wall and started to shift her weight inside.

Tipping point.

A few inches, balanced.

Push. Now.

Sachs tumbled inside, falling on the glass-encrusted floor.

No cuts. Well, none serious. She felt a bit of sting in her knee — the joint that had tormented with arthritic pain, until the surgery. Now the ache was back, thanks to the fall. But she rose and tested. The mechanism functioned. She glanced at the smoke rolling inside from under the door. The whole office now felt hot. Could the flames have risen this fast and be roasting the oak under her feet?

She coughed hard. Found an unopened bottle of Deer Park, unscrewed the cap and chugged. Spat again

Scanning fast, Sachs noted three file cabinets, shelves filled with paper in all forms: magazines, newspapers, printouts, pamphlets. All extremely combustible, she noted. Riffling, she saw they were mostly generic articles about the dangers of data mining, government intrusion into privacy, identity theft. She didn’t immediately see anything related to the controllers Rhyme and Whitmore had been talking about or anything else that might have motivated their unsub to murder Williams.

In the corner, flames teased their way out from under a baseboard. And ignited a bookshelf. Across the room, another tongue of fire lapped at a cardboard box and, with no delay at all, set it on fire.

The building groaned again and the door began to sweat varnish.

Gasped at another sound: The window opposite the one she’d climbed through, the front of the building, crashed inward. In a lick of a second her Glock was out, though the draw was mere instinct; she knew the intruder wasn’t a threat but was in fact what she’d counted on for salvation all along. Sachs nodded to the New York City firefighter, perched nonchalantly on a ladder, connected to a truck forty some odd feet below.

The woman guided the top of the ladder to a hover about two feet from the windowsill. She called, “Building’s gonna drop, Detective. You leave now.”

If she’d had an hour she might have parsed the documents and found something relevant that might lead to the unsub’s motive, victims past and victims future, his identity. She did the only thing available, though. Grabbed the laptop computer, ripped out the power cord and with no time to unscrew the wires connecting it to the monitor sliced the unit free with her switchblade.

“Leave that,” the FDNY firefighter said through her mask.

“Can’t,” Sachs said and hurried to the window.

“Need both your hands!” Shouting was required now. The building moaned as its bones snapped.

But Sachs kept her arm around the computer and clambered out onto the ladder, gripping with her right hand only. Her legs scissored around the edge and another rung. Every muscle in her body, it seemed, was cramping. But still she held on.

The operator below maneuvered them away from the building. The office room Sachs had been in just seconds before was suddenly awash with flame.

“Thanks!” Sachs called. The woman was either deaf to her words because of the roar or was pissed that Sachs had ignored her warning. There was no response.

The ladder retracted. They were twenty feet above the ground when it jerked and Sachs finally had to release the computer to keep from plunging to the street.

The laptop spun to the sidewalk and cracked open, raining bits of plastic and keys in a dozen different directions.

An hour later Lincoln Rhyme and Juliette Archer were at one of the evidence tables. Mel Cooper was nearby. Evers Whitmore stood in the corner, juggling two calls on two mobiles.

They were awaiting the evidence from the burned-out building; the structure was completely gone. It had collapsed into a pile of smoldering stone and melted plastic, glass and metal. Sachs had ordered a backhoe to excavate and Rhyme hoped something of the incendiary device might remain.

As for the computer, Ron Pulaski had taken it downtown to the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit at One PP in hopes that Sachs’s mad vertical dash hadn’t been in vain; Rodney Szarnek would determine if any data on the laptop was salvageable.

The front door now opened and another figure walked into the parlor. Amelia Sachs’s face was smudged, her hair askew, and she wore two bandages, presumably covering cuts from broken glass — it seemed she’d taken out at least three panes in her dramatic break-in of Williams’s office.

Rhyme was actually surprised she wasn’t more badly hurt. He wasn’t happy she’d ignored him and taken the risk. But they’d fallen into an unspoken agreement years ago. She pushed herself and that was just who she was.

When you move they can’t getcha...

An expression of her father’s and it was her motto in life.

Sachs carried a small milk crate, containing evidence from the building — very little, however, as was often the case when a scene is destroyed by flames. His damning clues.

A bout of coughing. Tears ran.

“Sachs, you okay?” Rhyme asked. She’d refused a trip to the emergency room and remained at the scorched site to excavate and to walk the grid, as soon as the fire department gave the all-clear, while Rhyme, Whitmore and Thom had returned to his town house here.

“Little smoke. Nothing.” More coughing. She handed the crate to Cooper, who examined the bags.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He stepped to the chromatograph to begin running the analysis. Sachs, wiping her eyes, was looking over at Juliette Archer. Rhyme realized they’d never met. He introduced them.

Archer said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Sachs nodded a greeting, rather than offering a hand, of course. “You’re the intern Lincoln mentioned was going to be helping out.”

Rhyme supposed he’d never mentioned that Archer was in wheelchair. In fact, he believed he’d never told Sachs anything about his student, even the name or sex.

Sachs looked briefly at Rhyme, a cryptic glance, perhaps chiding, perhaps not. And then to Archer: “Nice to meet you.”

Whitmore disconnected from one, then another, call, “Detective Sachs. You sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing, really.”

The lawyer said, “Never thought when I got a call about taking on a personal injury lawsuit, it would turn out like this.”

Rhyme said to Sachs, “So your case and our case, they’re one and the same — often misstated as one in the same, by the way.”

From his perch near the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, Mel Cooper said, “I don’t quite follow what’s going on.”

Rhyme explained about Unsub 40’s reading Todd Williams’s blog and deciding to tap him for help in hacking a DataWise controller to turn it into a weapon. “He says, we can guess, he wants to help Williams expose the dangers of these things, down with digital society, capitalism, bullshit like that.” Rhyme nodded to the blog post, still on one of the monitors. “Williams teaches the unsub how to hack the system and the unsub kills him. He’s expendable.”

Archer added, “He’s also a liability. A news story about the escalator accident might mention the controller in the press. Williams would know who was behind it.”

Rhyme nodded and continued, “Amelia is after him in Brooklyn and follows him into the mall, where he’s going to kill his first victim.”

Archer asked, “How do we know it’s his first victim?”

A reasonable question. But Rhyme said, “Williams was killed just a few weeks ago and I don’t recall any suspicious product-related deaths in the news. We may find more, but for now let’s assume the escalator was the first. The question is, was it a one-off? Or does he have more planned?”

“And why?” the lawyer asked. “What’s his motive? Using a controller to kill — it has to be a lot of trouble.”

Rhyme added, “And it’s a lot riskier,” at the same time as Archer said, “And he’s more at risk.” The criminalist grunted a laugh. “Well, we don’t know why and we don’t particularly care. When we catch him, we can ask. When the hell is the computer going to be ready?”

“Ron said it should be within the hour.”

“And where the hell is the rookie?” Rhyme muttered. “That other case? Gutiérrez, I think he mentioned.”

“I think so.”

“Was Gutiérrez the killer or killee?”

Sachs said, “Perp. I don’t know why it’s heated up.”

“Well, we’ll make do...”

Which brought Sachs’s attention to bear on Rhyme.

“Do you mean that?”

“What?” Not understanding at all what she was getting at.

“ ‘We’ll make do.’ Are you going to help us? It’s criminal now.”

“Of course I will.”

A faint smile on her face.

Rhyme said, “I don’t have any choice. We get the unsub, then Sandy Frommer can sue him for wrongful death.”

Rhyme recalled what Whitmore had said about intervening causes. The controller itself wasn’t the cause of Greg Frommer’s death; it was Unsub 40’s hacking that had killed him. It was like someone’s cutting the brake lines of a car, killing the driver. The car manufacturer wasn’t liable.

A look at the lawyer. “Sandy will be able to sue the unsub, right?”

“Of course. The O. J. Simpson scenario. If we’re lucky this individual — your unsub — has assets.”

“I’m not un-retiring, Sachs. But our paths coincide for a while.”

The smile faded. “Sure.”

Mel Cooper tested the evidence Sachs had found. He asked, “Site of origin?”

“Right.”

Arson produces very distinct patterns as flames start and spread. It’s at the origin site that investigators can expect to find the best evidence about the perp.

He read from the GC/MS monitor. “Traces of wax, low-octane gasoline — not enough to link it to a particular maker — and cotton, plastic, matches.”

“Candle bomb.”

“Right.”

A simple improvised explosive device can be made from a jug of gasoline, using a candle as a fuse.

Cooper confirmed that the trace was so minimal he couldn’t source any of the other ingredients in the unsub’s IED. As Rhyme had suspected.

Sachs got another call, coughed a bit before taking it. “Hello?” Nodding, listening. “Thanks.”

It wasn’t good news, Rhyme could tell.

She finished up the call and turned to the others in the room. “Full canvass of the neighborhood. No one saw him. He must’ve left just after setting the bomb.”

A shrug. Nothing other than Rhyme had expected.

A moment later another call. Rodney Szarnek’s name flashed onto caller ID.

Ah, let’s hope for the best.

“Answer,” Rhyme commanded.

The rock music was back. But only momentarily. Before Rhyme could say, “Shut the damn music off, please,” the officer downed the volume.

“Lincoln.”

“Rodney, you’re on speaker here with... a bunch of people. No time for roll call. Was Todd Williams’s computer salvageable?”

A pause, which Rhyme took to be one of surprise. “Well, sure. A fall like that is nothing. You can drop a computer out of an airplane and the data’ll survive. Black boxes, you know.”

“What do you have?”

“Looks like the relationship between this Williams and your unsub is recent. I found some emails between them. I’ll send them to you.”

A moment later a secure email popped up on the screen. They read the first of the attachments accompanying it.

Archer said, “Ah. We have initials”

“Maybe,” Rhyme said. “Go on, Rodney.”

Szarnek continued, “Your unsub used an anonymous email account. Logged in from an untraceable IP. They set up a meeting for the day of the murder.”

Cooper looked over the email. “Not particularly smart. Look at the mistakes, commas, and the homonyms. Y-O-U apostrophe R-E instead of ‘your.’ And ‘Their’ too.”

Rhyme corrected, “Heteronyms. Same pronunciation, different spelling and meaning. Homonyms have the same pronunciation and same spelling but different meaning.”

Staring at the screen, Archer provided the classic example: “Bark — what a dog does and a covering on a tree. Homonym.” She then added, “But I don’t think he’s stupid. I think he’s pretending to be. Run-on sentences, the heteronyms — they’re obvious. But he uses the clause ‘as you suggest’ correctly. Not ‘like you suggest.’ ”

Rhyme agreed. “And the infinitive after ‘to try.’ It’s non-standard to say ‘try and’; you should say ‘try to.’ And using ‘then’ for ‘than’ would have been flagged by most usage checkers, even on a basic phone. No, you’re right; he’s faking.”

Szarnek broke in with, “Now for the big find. The most troubling find.”

Whitmore asked, “Which is what, Mr. Szarnek?”

“For hours before the murder — while Todd and your unsub were meeting, I assume — Todd was online. He did two things. First, he bought a database. He used a Bitcoin account and bought it from a commercial data miner. He spoofed he was an ad agency — used a real one with an account he’d hacked — and he claimed he needed the information for market research. It was a laundry list of the products that DataWise Five Thousand controllers are found in.”

“How many?”

“A lot. About eight hundred different products, nearly three million units shipped to the Northeast of the U.S., including the New York metro area. Some couldn’t do any real harm if a third party took control: computers, printers, lights. Others could be deadly: cars, trains, elevators, defibs, heart monitors, pacemakers, microwaves, ovens, power tools, furnaces, cranes — the big ones used in construction work and on docks. I’d guess sixty percent of them could be dangerous. Then, the second thing he bought, a database of purchasers of those products. Some are other equipment manufacturers. Like Midwest Conveyance. Others are individual consumers, who bought smart appliances. Names and addresses. Again, New York and Northeast mostly.”

Archer asked, “That’s available? That information?”

Another pause. Perhaps this was one of astonishment. “Data mining, Ms....”

“Archer.”

“You have no idea what aggregators know about you. The data collection is why when you buy, in this case, a smart stove you start getting direct-mail ads for other products that might be cloud-oriented. By buying the stove you’ve declared yourself to be in a certain demographic.”

“So he simply browses through the list and finds a dangerous product with a DataWise inside, like the escalator. He hacks in and waits so that — if he’s a decent monster — it’s not a child or pregnant woman riding to the second floor, and pushes the button.”

Sachs asked, “How did he hack it? It can’t have been that easy.”

No pause this time. Just a laugh. “Well. Okay. About the Internet of Things — a phrase I completely detest, but there it is. Can I give you a brief lesson?”

“I like the brief part, Rodney.”

“Smart products from household lights all the way up to the ones I just mentioned are quote ‘embedded’ with wireless connectivity circuits.”

Rhyme recalled this from Williams’s blog.

“Now, embedded devices use special protocols — rules, let’s call them — which govern how computer devices talk to the cloud and to each other in the networks. ZigBee and Z-Wave are the most popular protocols. The DataWise controller and some other companies use Wi-Swift. The protocols provide for encryption keys to make sure only legitimate users and devices are recognized but there’s a moment of vulnerability when the stove or webcam and the network try to shake hands, and hackers can sniff that out and get the network key.

“To make matters worse the manufacturers are, well, don’t be shocked — greedy! New software takes time to write, and that flies in the face of the time-to-market issue high-tech companies face. The longer it takes to start selling a product the greater the risk that somebody’ll beat you to it. So what’s happened is these smart controller companies use existing software for their embedded products — and I mean old, ancient software. Dinosaur-ware. Early Windows and Apple operating systems and some open source code, stripped of gingerbread like the Solitaire game and PaintShop. The software is more vulnerable to security exploits than if the company wrote new code that was specific to the products the smart controller’s installed in.”

“Exploit?” From Whitmore.

“Hacking. Finding a weakness and, well, exploiting it. You know the refrigerator hack? This was epic. A product line of smart fridges was running some old software written for PCs. Hackers got inside and turned the controller into a spambot. Refrigerators around the world were writing and sending penis-enhancement emails and vitamin offers to millions of addresses. The homeowners never knew.”

“The companies that make these smart controllers? Can’t they protect against hackers?” Archer asked.

“Well, they try to. They’re always sending out updates with security patches. Ever logged onto your PC and you have to wait because Windows is installing updates? That’s probably a security patch. Sometimes you have to install them yourself. Sometimes — like with Google — they’re downloaded and installed automatically. The patch’ll usually do the trick... until some hacker comes up with a new exploit, of course.”

Rhyme asked, “Can he be traced when he’s online and controlling the product?”

“Possibly. You’ll have to talk to the controller maker about that.”

“We’ll do that, Rodney. Thanks.”

They disconnected.

Sachs said, “I’ll have somebody at One PP get us the number of a contact at the controller company.” She stepped away to make a call. She completed it and said, “They’ll get back to us ASAP.”

Then simultaneously three phones in the parlor sounded. Sachs’s, Whitmore’s and Cooper’s.

“Well,” Sachs said, reading. “Looks like we have our motive.” Her face glowed from the phone screen as she read.

“What?” Rhyme asked.

Whitmore said, “My paralegal has sent me a text. A posting on several newspapers’ online editions in the op-ed sections, claiming credit for the escalator death.”

“It’s up here,” Cooper said. They all turned toward the display.

Rhyme mentioned that the unsub’s email to Todd Williams was signed P. G.

“Legit?” Cooper asked.

Curiously many people took credit for crimes that they had nothing to do with.

“No, I’m sure it’s from him,” Rhyme said.

“How do you—?” Archer started. Then: “Sure, the word ‘control.’ It’s in quotation marks. And the reference to ‘wise’ and ‘data.’ ”

“Exactly. Hacking the DataWise isn’t public information; only our unsub would know about it. And some of the same intentional grammatical mistakes, the Y-O-U-R-E. And the incorrect use of ‘that’ for ‘which.’ ”

Sachs said, “Let’s find out if he’s done this before...” She went online and began a search. A few minutes later, “Nothing in NCIC.” The National Crime Information Center compiles warrants and profile information on tens of thousands of suspects throughout the United States and some foreign nations. Sachs added that the popular press had reported no activist groups mounting attacks that were in anyway similar to what Unsub 40 had done. Nor were there any references to “the People’s Guardian.”

Juliette Archer, Rhyme realized, had wheeled away from the others and was looking over a computer screen. She called, “I’ve got it.”

“What?” Rhyme asked bluntly, irritated that there were no new leads in a case in which the unsub was possibly targeting more victims right at the moment.

“The controller company. CIR Micro?” She returned to the others and nodded at the screen she’d just called up. “That’s the CEO’s direct line, Vinay Chaudhary.”

“How’d you get that?” Sachs asked, seemingly irritated that the NYPD assistance she’d requested hadn’t been as fast as an amateur.

“Just a little detective work,” Archer answered.

“Let’s talk to him,” Rhyme said.

Sachs typed the number into her phone and apparently got Chaudhary’s assistant, from what Rhyme could deduce. After an explanation, Sachs’s body language, registering surprise, suggested she was on with the CEO himself. It appeared he wasn’t resistant to talking with them, though — she explained after disconnecting — he wasn’t free just now. He could speak to them in about forty-five minutes.

Presumably, after he had his lawyers assembled around him, circling the wagons when hostiles appeared on the bluffs over their heads.

Chapter 22

Whatta we got, Sarge?” The question slipped smoothly through the officer’s headset.

The DSS tactical surveillance van, plumbing today, was parked directly across from the bar and NYPD Sergeant Joe Reilly had good eyes on the inside of the dive. He replied, “Both of ’em, sitting, hanging. Drinkin’ beers. No cares in the world.” A paunchy, gray-haired officer in Narcotics, Reilly had been a supervisor with the Drug Street Sweep program since it had started years ago; back then radios crackled like wadded-up waxed paper. Amazing they could coordinate the busts at all. Now it was all high-def digital, as if the tactical team officer he was speaking with was only feet away, not in a restaurant up the street in this scruffy Brooklyn ’hood.

Reilly wasn’t alone in the van. Beside him, operating the camera controls, was a prim and proper stocky young African American officer, a whiz with the electronic eyes and ears, though she wore too much perfume for the sergeant’s taste.

“Any weapons?” the voice in his ear asked. The undercover tac team was a half block away from Richie’s bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant and they damn well better’ve ordered the calzone Reilly had told them to get for him. And no spinach. Ham and Swiss. Period. Soda. Diet.

Reilly peered at the screen image of the two beer drinkers under surveillance. The woman officer shook her head. Reilly said, “Negative presenting.”

Which didn’t mean the two men they were watching weren’t armed to the teeth.

“Just the two of them?”

Woulda said three, it’d been three. Four, four.

“Yeah.” Reilly stretched. Hoped this wasn’t a damn waste of time. There’d been good intel that a senior asshole from one of the Dominican Republic crews was meeting a local punk in Richie’s. Maybe transferring something big. But the DR guy was late and the punk — skinny, twitchy — was just hanging with some unknown, a white male, youngish, acting kind of twitchy himself.

The tac officer on the radio took a sip of something, slurping, and said, “How late is Big Boy?”

The Dominican was not only high up in the crews but tipped the scales at three hundred plus.

“Half an hour.” Reilly looked at his watch. “Forty minutes.”

“He ain’t gonna show,” the tac cop muttered. He was now chewing.

The gangbanger’s absence probably wasn’t cold feet, Reilly guessed. Drug suppliers at the Dominican’s level are just very, very busy.

“You sure the unknown with him isn’t with the DR crew?”

Reilly laughed. “Not unless times’re so hard they’re hiring choirboys. White ones. And times ain’t that hard.”

“Any idea who?”

“Nup. Descrip is blond, six feet, fucking piss-me-off skinny.” Reilly scanned the guy’s face close up. “You know, he’s looking funny.”

“What’sat mean?” the take-down guy said, between bites.

Fuck that. I want my calzone.

“Nervous.”

“He made you, Sarge?”

“I’m sitting in a fucking plumbing van on a street in Brooklyn that’s filled with plumbing supply stores. The camera lens is about the size of your cat’s dick.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“No, he didn’t make me. Just, he doesn’t want to be with our boy.”

“Who would?”

Good point. Alphonse Gravita — aka Alpho, but more popularly Alpo, woof woof — was a shining piece of non-work. The germ of a dealer had been lucky enough to miss getting busted but he had his eye on moving up, expanding his street business from the mini mart he hung out in in Ocean Hill to Bed-Stuy and Brownsville.

“Hold on.” Reilly sat up straighter.

“The DR guy there?”

“Negative. But Alpo and his buddy... wait, something’s happening.”

“What?” The chewing had stopped.

“Looks like a transaction... Pull out.” The latter spoken to the perfumed cop sitting beside him.

Bad choice of words, he decided. Or good. But she missed the innuendo.

The officer zoomed out to get a broader shot, to catch everything that Alpo and the blond man were doing. Alpo was looking around and fishing in his pocket. The blond kid was too. Then palm met palm.

“Okay, got an exchange.”

“What was it?”

“Shit. Fair number of bills. But couldn’t see the product. Could you see?”

“No, sir,” the surveillance woman answered. Gardenia came to mind, the perfume, though Reilly had no clue what gardenias smelled — or looked — like.

The tactical cop radioed, “Your call, Sarge.”

Reilly debated. They’d just seen an illegal drug transaction. They could come home with two heads. But it might make sense to collar White Boy alone, outside, and keep Alpo in play. They’d have at least one collar to their credit if they couldn’t go back to the 73 with the DR scumbag in metal. The kid might also have intel about the Dominican. They could squeeze the nervous little punk until he gave up plenty.

Or just let this one pass — obviously the deal wasn’t that big. The blond kid could walk away and they’d hope Big Boy showed up.

Tactical: “They’re still there, just sitting there?”

“Right.”

“We move in?”

“No, don’t want to lose the Alpo connection to our DR friends. Maybe take the other guy if he leaves. Until then wait.”

“The DR guy’s fifty minutes late.”

Reilly made a decision.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. But answer the question: You order me that calzone?”

Lincoln Rhyme was saying, “We know he’s going to hit somebody again. I want a memo out to every precinct and FDNY station. Any accident involving a product, seeming accident, I want to hear about it. Stat. Immediately. ASAP. Whatever cliché you want to use.”

Mel Cooper said he’d take care of that and drew his phone the way he would the small revolver he wore almost quaintly on his hip.

Sachs received a text and glanced at her phone. “The smart controller company. They want to talk.”

“Or,” Archer said, “tell us in person how uncooperative they intend to be.”

When it came to investigative work, she was quite the fast learner, Rhyme reflected and called for Thom to set up a Skype call.

Soon the distinctive heartbeat of the app’s ringtone pulsed through the room and a moment later the screen came to life.

It wasn’t much of a wagon circling. Only two people from CIR Micro were on the screen and one of them, he easily deduced, was Vinay Parth Chaudhary himself, looking both South Asian and authoritarian. He wore a collarless shirt and stylish metal-framed glasses.

The other was a sallow-faced, solid man in his fifties. The lawyer, presumably. He was in a suit, no tie.

They sat in an antiseptic office: a bare table, on which were two monitors, bookending the pair. On the wall behind them was a slash of maroon and blue paint. Rhyme at first thought it was a painting but saw that, no, it was directly on the wall. Maybe a stylized rendering of the company’s logo.

“I’m Amelia Sachs, detective with the NYPD. We spoke earlier. This is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic consultant who’s assisting on our case.” It was just the two of them. As earlier, Rhyme had decided that the company might be less cooperative with more people present, even if the outfit wasn’t any longer a target of litigation.

“I’m Vinay Chaudhary, president and CEO. This is Stanley Frost, our chief general counsel.” His voice was pleasant, calm. Hardly any inflection. He didn’t appear threatened. But Rhyme supposed that men who are worth forty billion dollars rarely are.

“This is about a crime involving our products?” Frost asked.

“That’s right. Your DataWise Five Thousand smart controller. An individual here in New York City intentionally sent a signal to one of those devices that was installed in a Midwest Conveyance escalator. It activated the access panel at the top of an up escalator. It opened. A man fell in and was killed.”

Chaudhary: “I heard about the accident, of course. But I didn’t know it was intentional. How terrible. I do have to say, we told Midwest to use the DataWise solely for uploading diagnostic and maintenance data and for emergency shutoff. Not to allow access.”

“We have correspondence to show that,” Frost the lawyer said.

The CEO continued, “And the Midwest Conveyance controllers were installed several years ago. We’ve sent the company forty, forty-five security patches since then. They would’ve kept the hacker out. If they didn’t install them promptly then there’s nothing we can do.”

Rhyme said, “This isn’t about your liability. It’s the hacker we’re after, not you.”

“Your name again, please?” Chaudhary asked.

“Lincoln Rhyme.”

“I believe I’ve heard of you. The newspapers, or a TV show.”

“Possibly. Now, this suspect learned how to get inside from somebody who’d blogged about it.”

Chaudhary was nodding. “You’re probably thinking of the Social Engineering Second-ly blog.”

“Yes, we are.”

“Well, the blogger used an early model and he intentionally didn’t download and install the security patches. If he had, he never would have gotten the DataWise to malfunction. But he didn’t say that in his blog, of course. It’s much more sensational to suggest that any thirteen-year-old can run an exploit. Gets you a lot more hits on your blog when you raise the battle flag of privacy breaches and malfunctions. The DataWise has far fewer vulnerabilities than ninety percent of the systems out there.”

Frost added, “We have a white-hat firm we work with — ethical hackers. You know the term?”

“We can figure it out,” Sachs said.

“Which spends all day looking for ways to hack into the DataWise servers our clients use. Any hint of an exploit, we send out a patch. If that blogger had done that he never would have gotten inside. What does he have to say about it?”

Sachs said, “I’m afraid our suspect killed him after he learned how to hack into the system.”

“No!” Chaudhary actually gasped.

“It’s true.”

“Well, I’m certainly very sorry about it. Terrible.”

Rhyme continued, “The subject we’re after has a list of products that use your controller and people and companies who bought those products. A very long list.”

“It’s been a good few years.”

The lawyer turned to the CEO, saying nothing, but perhaps sending a signal to avoid hinting at the company’s net worth, even though this wasn’t about the company’s potential liability. Lawyering 101.

Chaudhary said, an aside, “It’s okay. I want to help.”

Rhyme pressed on. “And we have reason to believe that he’s going to do this again. Kill someone else.”

The man frowned. “On purpose? Why on earth?”

Sachs said, “Domestic terrorist, you could say. He has a grudge against consumerism. Maybe capitalism in general. He’s sent some email rants to various news organizations. You can find stories about them, I’m sure. He calls himself the People’s Guardian.”

Chaudhary said, “But... is he psychotic?”

“We don’t know what he is,” Rhyme said impatiently. “Now, why we’re calling. I’d like to know a few things. First, is it possible to trace where he’s physically located when he takes over control of a product? And it seems he’ll be nearby, so he can see the incident and decide exactly when to activate the controller. Or, another question, is it possible to trace his identity?”

Chaudhary answered: “Technically, tracing, yes. But again that’s the province of each manufacturer — the webcam maker, the stove maker, the car companies. We couldn’t do it from our facilities. We simply make the controller hardware and write the script — the software in the controllers. He’d be hacking into the system through our customers’ cloud servers.”

“That’s what the NYPD technical department says,” Rhyme confirmed.

“Then, if you knew in advance which appliance or device — I mean, the actual unit itself — he was targeting, the manufacturing company could trace his location. But then how you’d find the stove or water heater he was targeting I don’t know. And even if you could he’d be using proxies to log into the cloud. You’d have to identify those. Finally, you’d have only seconds to find out before he logged out and powered down after the hack. As for identity, he’s too smart not to use burner phones, unregistered pads or computers and anonymous proxies or virtual private networks. That’s Hacking One Oh One.”

This was more discouraging than he’d hoped. Rhyme then said, “All right. One other thing: Is there some security measure you can take to stop him getting access?”

“Surely. The manufacturers of the embedded products — the stoves, HVAC systems, medical equipment, escalators — just need to install the security patches we send them. I know from his blog how that fellow — what was his name?”

“Todd Williams.”

“How he ran the exploit. Yes, there was a vulnerability. We patched it within a day of learning it and sent out the updates. That was a month ago. Maybe more.”

“Why wouldn’t Midwest Conveyance have installed them?”

“Sometimes companies don’t update out of laziness, sometimes business. Updating requires a reboot and often some tinkering with the code. That takes the whole cloud offline for a while. Their customers aren’t happy with any disruption of service. Once people get used to a convenience it’s impossible to take it away from them. Turning lights off remotely if you forgot, when you left the house on vacation? Keeping an eye on the babysitter in real time? Ten years ago, when that wasn’t an option, you never thought twice about not being able to. But now? Everyone who has a smart product expects it to keep performing. If it doesn’t they’ll go elsewhere.”

“You said it wouldn’t take long.”

Chaudhary smiled. “The study of the psychology of consumers is a fascinating topic. Disappointments are remembered. Loyalties shift in milliseconds. Now, Mr. Rhyme and Detective...”

“Sachs.”

“I have a meeting I need to attend. But before that we’ll send all our customers another link to the security patches with a memo reminding them they have to install those patches. People’s lives could be at stake.”

“Thanks,” Sachs said.

“Good luck to you. If we can help, please let us know.”

The webcam closed. And Rhyme and Sachs reconvened the team, reporting on what Chaudhary had said.

Which, while it might stymie some of Unsub 40’s future attacks, was essentially of no help whatsoever in tracking him down.

Rhyme glanced at the whiteboard he, Archer and Whitmore had created for the Midwest Conveyance case. “I want to consolidate our charts, Sachs. See what evidence we’ve got.”

Rather than actually transport the Unsub 40 whiteboards from Sachs’s war room at One PP to the parlor here, she asked an assistant at Major Cases to take phone pictures and email them. They arrived in seconds.

Sachs now transcribed the details of the crime scenes onto the whiteboard. And added what they’d learned from Williams’s computer. The team reviewed them.

Rhyme watched Sachs staring at the chart, her right index finger and thumb spinning her blue-stone ring compulsively. Shaking her head, she muttered, “We’re still waiting for the sawdust, the varnish and the DNA and friction ridges from the napkins. CS in Queens never got back to us.” A glance toward him, a cool glance, as if speedbump was his fault. Which, he guessed, it partly was, thanks to the Cooper kidnapping.

“Let me see the micro pictures of the sawdust,” Rhyme said.

Sachs went online, into the secure CSU database, typed in the case file and conjured up the images.

Rhyme looked them over. “I’d say mahogany. Mel?”

After a fast examination the tech said, “Ninety-nine percent sure. Yes.”

“Ah, Sachs, you were right. Mea culpa for stealing him out from under your nose.” He’d meant this as a joke but she didn’t respond. Rhyme continued, “And you’re right about sanding. The particles aren’t from sawing. Suggests fine woodworking.” She wrote this down. And Rhyme added, “No idea about the varnish. There’s no database. We’ll just have to see what the analysts can come up with. What’s the story with the napkins?”

Sachs explained about the White Castle lead. “I don’t know why the hell it’s taking so long to run DNA and enhanced friction ridge.” She snagged her phone and called the crime scene operation in Queens, had a brief conversation. Disconnected.

A scowl. “It’s taking so long because they lost them.”

“What?” Cooper asked.

“Somebody in the evidence room lost the napkins. They got tagged wrong, seems. A clerk’s looking.”

It could be, Rhyme knew, an imposing quest. The evidence room was not one room at all but a number of them, which contained hundreds of thousands of items of evidence. Looking for a needle in a stack of needles, Rhyme had once heard.

“Well, fire whoever dropped the ball on that one,” he snapped.

He scanned the chart again, noting the new entries. Unsub 40 was either very lucky or very careful. The evidence gave no clear direction either as to where he lived or worked or to where he might be going to strike next, assuming he’d picked up some of the trace while assessing a future victim.

So. This is her home.

Red’s.

Amelia Sachs, the Shopper.

The Shopper who was not courteous enough to burn to death in Todd Williams’s office building.

I happen to be across the street from her Brooklyn town house, dolled up in some worker’s clothing, coveralls, which, well, cover all. So as not to draw attention. Tired, now toward the end of a long, long workday (though I’m largely pretending at the moment, the fatigue is true). Coffee in one hand, mobile phone in another, pretending to read texts, though in reality I’ve been reading how well my screed against consumerism went over in the press. Why, I’ve even had some likes!

Studying Red’s town house carefully. A Shopper. Yes, she is and she’ll suffer for it but I’ve softened a bit (White Castles from the frozen foods section are not bad) and I’ve decided, Red isn’t the sadistic sort. A Shopper with a heart she is. The sort of girl who if I had asked her out wouldn’t laugh in my face and let loose about string beans and sacks of bones. She’d blush and keep a pretty smile on her pretty face. “Sorry, I have plans.”

Which maybe she would have had, or maybe she wouldn’t. Not the point. The worst, the absolute worst, would have been that blush and that forced formal smile — the iceberg tip of her discomfort, which I had caused. As if I’d tried to save a butterfly and crushed it accidentally, the dead form resting in my hands, sparkly with blue and gold dust from its broken wings.

That would be the worst. Making me feel doubly bad.

A Shopper with a heart...

So when I destroy Red’s life I will probably feel some regret. But I think this in passing and get back to the task at hand.

Nice place she has here. Old-time Brooklyn. Classic. Amelia Sachs. German name, I guess. She doesn’t look German, but I really don’t know what a German looks like, now I think about it. She doesn’t have braided blond hair and blue Aryan eyes.

I’ve been debating what to do about her. Red owns no products that have DataWise5000 controllers in them. At least not that I can find. She’s not on my magic lists that Todd so helpfully got for me before his bones started to crack. Of course once a product gets out into the hands of the public, it can bob like a cork in the ocean until it washes up in someone else’s kitchen or garage or living room. But I scanned Red’s house for signals, like Todd showed me, and while I found some lonely little devices sending out their wireless beacons, begging to join a network, none of them will help me turn her into a mass of broken bone or blistered flesh.

Sipping coffee, which I’m not really sipping, looking at cell phone, which I’m not really looking at... pretending. I’m blending in — an impatient workman waiting for a ride home at the end of the day.

Though I’m not impatient at all.

I’m patient as stone.

Which pays off. Because only a half hour later I see something interesting.

And I realize I now have the final piece of the puzzle to solve my Red problem.

All right, I think, finishing my beverage and putting the crumpled cup into my pocket (learned my lesson there!), it’s time to go. We’ve got work to do.

Chapter 23

Ron Pulaski walked out the front door of Richie’s bar. He felt good, almost light-headed.

He turned south and kept walking quickly, head down.

What sat in his front left pocket was minuscule but seemed like ten pounds of gold. He casually slipped his hand into his pocket and touched it for the comfort. Thank you, Lord.

And thank you, he thought too to the guy he’d been sharing a beer with a minute ago: Alpho (Pulaski didn’t like to use the dog food nic, even skels deserved respect). He’d hooked Pulaski up with just what he needed. Oh, yeah.

He could...

“Excuse me, sir. If you could stop right there, please. Take your hand out of your pocket.”

Face burning, heart thudding, Pulaski stopped in his tracks. Knew he wasn’t being mugged. But he also knew what was going down. The tone of voice, the words. He turned to see two large men, dressed in jeans and jackets, street clothes, but he knew right away who they were — not their names, but their jobs: tactical cops, undercover. He glanced at their shields, gold shields dangling from silver chains.

Shit...

He slowly removed his hand and kept both palms open. Non-threatening. He knew the drill; he’d been on the other side hundreds of times.

Pulaski said, “I’m NYPD, assigned to Major Crimes. I have a weapon in an ankle holster and my shield’s inside my jacket.” Trying to sound confident. But his voice was unsteady. His heart slammed.

They frowned. “Okay,” the bigger one, bald, stepped forward. His partner kept his hand near his weapon. Baldie: “We just want to make sure everybody stays safe, you understand. I’m going to ask you to turn around and put your hands against the wall.”

“Sure.” It does no good to argue. Pulaski wondered if he’d throw up. Deep breath. Okay, control it. He did. More or less.

The officers — they smelled of a task force — got the gun and the shield. They didn’t give them back. His wallet too. Pulaski was inclined to argue that one but didn’t.

“Okay. Turn around.” From the other officer — blond hair in a spiky cut. He was flipping through the wallet. He clustered it, the gun and the shield in his left hand.

Both officers looked around and directed Pulaski into a doorway, out of sight of the pavement. He understood. They’d been conducting surveillance at Richie’s, probably on Alphonse, waiting for a contact to show up. And they didn’t want to blow the main operation by getting spotted now.

Baldie spoke into his microphone. “Sarge, we got him. The thing is he’s on the force. Major Cases... I know... I’ll find out.” He cocked his head. “Pulaski? You running an op here? Major Cases always coordinates with us, DSS. So we’re confused.”

“Not an op.”

“What’d you buy?” Baldie seemed to like doing the talking. They were close. His breath smelled of pizza. Garlic and oregano. He glanced at Pulaski’s pocket.

“Nothing.”

“Look, man, we got it on video. Everything.”

Shit. The plumbing van across the street. He had to give ’em credit. There were a dozen plumbing supply stores on the block. A lumberyard truck, a taco truck, an HVAC truck... he thought that was weird. But not plumbing.

“It’s not what you think.”

“Yeah, it is what we think, Pulaski. There’s nothing we can do. It’s on tape that’s gotta be logged in,” the blond partner said. He seemed personally upset at the prospect of busting a fellow cop for scoring drugs. But being upset wasn’t going to stop him. Either of them. It just seemed that Blondie would enjoy a collar a bit less than his partner.

“We’re in this far, Pulaski. You gotta give us what you scored. If it’s a misdemeanor amount it won’t go so bad. You can work out something with the DA and Benevolent Association.”

They’d probably be thinking Pulaski might be part of a sting himself — scoring drugs knowing surveillance was there and seeing if Baldie and Blondie let him go, professional courtesy. Then Internal Affairs would sweep in and take them down. So they’d have to treat him like any other buyer.

“I didn’t score any drugs.”

There was silence.

“Search me.”

A glance between them. Blondie did. A good search. They knew what they were about.

Then Baldie was talking into his microphone. “Sarge, nothing on him... K.” He disconnected and barked: “So, the fuck’s going on here, Pulaski?”

“That.” He nodded at a wad of papers Blondie had lifted from his pocket. Blondie handed it to him. He opened one small sheet of paper and handed it back.

“What’sis?”

“I had some money trouble last month. Need a couple large. Somebody put me in touch with Alpho. He hooked me up with a money man. I paid him back the last of the vig today. He gave me the marker back.”

The cops looked at the IOU.

Borrowing money at exorbitant rates of interest isn’t illegal unless it’s done to launder cash — though doing so probably tripped over some departmental regs.

Baldie spoke into the microphone. “Wasn’t drugs, Sarge. Juice. Paid his vig and got the note back... Yeah... I will.”

“You know, that was just fucking stupid, Officer.”

“Yeah? How fucking stupid is it to borrow some green for a friend who’s losing a leg ’cause he’s got cancer and no insurance?” The fear had translated into anger and he decided if you’re going to make something up, pick the most outrageous story you can.

That set them back a bit. But Baldie wasn’t deterred for long. “You could’ve screwed up a major operation here. Your boy back there, Alpo, was supposed to be meeting somebody senior with a DR crew. He comes in, tips to you being blue and who knows what might’ve happened? He could’ve had a shooter with him.”

Pulaski shrugged.

“He say anything about a Dominican?”

“No. We talked sports and how fucked people can get when they borrow at twenty percent interest. My piece and shield. The wallet too.”

Pulaski took them and eased to his knees, re-holstering his weapon. He snapped the strap around the small pistol and rose. “Anything else?” No response. Pulaski gazed at him for a moment then, without a word, he turned and walked away.

If he’d thought his heart was beating fast a few moments ago, it was like a machine gun now.

Man, man, man... You lucky son of a bitch, he told himself. But not all luck. He’d planned ahead. Alpho had called him earlier and said he had a lead to Oden, the man who could supply Pulaski with the new breed of Oxy. “Catch or whatever the fuck you call it.” They’d meet at Richie’s and Pulaski would pay him two thousand for the information.

But leaving One PP, where he’d dropped off the computer from the arson scene downtown, Pulaski began to feel paranoid. What if he was seen talking to Alpho by a friend, or fellow cop? He needed an excuse for hanging with the guy. He’d bought drugs once from him but wouldn’t do that again.

For some reason the IOU idea had jumped into his head. Not bad. He’d scrawled out a fake marker. When Alpho gave him the Oden info he’d slipped it into the same pocket as the note. It wouldn’t pass forensics — no friction ridges other than his own... and forget about handwriting analysis. But he guessed that the DSS cops back there weren’t much concerned about him. They just wanted to get back to their pizza and the Dominican banger stakeout.

He now extracted and looked over the note Alpho had given him, memorizing the address and the other information on it. He closed his eyes and recited it a dozen times.

The hour was getting late. Lincoln and Amelia had to be wondering where he was. And he himself was curious if there’d been anything on Williams’s computer that might lead to Unsub 40. But, checking his phone, neither had called. He texted Amelia that he was heading home — the Gutiérrez case had taken up more time than he’d believed it would — but if she needed anything, give him a call.

Was she mad? Probably. But nothing he could do about it.

He was going to flag down a cab but was painfully aware of how much of his own money he’d just handed over to Alpho so it was subway time. He walked back to Broadway Junction to begin the complicated journey to his wife and children. Feeling dirty, tainted. And sure that even seeing their soft, smiling faces would do little to bring him comfort.

Amelia Sachs pulled her Torino up to the curb and shut the engine off. Sat for a moment, reading texts. She slipped the phone away but still didn’t get out of the car.

After leaving Rhyme’s she’d gone on two missions. The first was to meet with a reporter for one of the big local papers and give him a follow-up to the People’s Guardian story. As part of the article he would print the list of products that contained smart controllers — though in the online edition, since the number of such items was so lengthy. She’d also explained what Chaudhary had said, that manufacturers were reluctant or too lazy to install the patches to improve security. The CEO was going to contact them again but she’d decided that a news story about that reticence would create some public relations pressure for them to install the security updates.

The reporter had thanked her for the tip and left to further research and write up the story.

Sachs had then stopped by One PP briefly and was now here on her second mission — in Little Italy, little indeed, having been taken over by hipsters from the north and Chinese restaurants and gift stores from the south. She climbed out of the car, snagged her briefcase and walked south. Slowing her pace to a stop, she noted the man’s silhouette in a window of the coffeehouse before her.

This place had been here for years, a classic espresso-and-pastry shop right out of a 1940s film. The name was Antonios (there had been only one owner by that name; the family, or the sign-painter, had never bothered with an apostrophe). Sachs preferred it to the three or four other surviving bistros here in south-central Greenwich Village, all of them resiliently resisting the chain-store approach to caffeine.

Sachs pushed inside, a bell mounted to the door jingling cheerfully, and she was assaulted by the smells of rich coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, yeast.

Eyes still on Nick Carelli, who was scrolling through an iPad.

After a brief pause she walked up to him and said, “Hi.”

“Hey.” He stood up, looked into her eyes and kept his gaze there. No embrace.

She sat and set the briefcase on her lap. Defensive, the way suspects being grilled sometimes crossed their arms.

“What would you like?” Nick asked.

He was drinking black coffee, and she had a memory of a cold Sunday morning, both Nick and she off duty, she in a pajama top, he in the matching bottoms, as she made two cups of coffee, pouring boiling water through a cone filter, the sound like crinkling cellophane. She would sip hers immediately while he would set his cup in the fridge for a few minutes; he liked tepid drinks, never hot.

“Nothing. I can’t stay.”

Did he seem disappointed? She believed so.

“Newfangled.” He pointed to the iPad with a smile.

“A lot’s changed.”

“I think I’m at a disadvantage. Don’t you need to be about thirteen to master something like this?”

“That’s the upper limit,” Sachs said. She couldn’t help but note once more that Nick looked good. Even better than when she’d seen him last. Less gaunt than then. More upright, the slouch gone. He’d had a haircut too. His appearance seemed better now than in his younger days when he’d been, she thought, too skinny. The sprinkles of gray among the black strands helped. And the years — and prison — didn’t seem to have dimmed his sparkly-eyed boyishness. A bit of the frat boy was forever inside. Sachs had believed back then that he hadn’t so much ruthlessly planned and executed the hijackings, as fallen in with the wrong crowd and, for the hell of it, thought he’d try something daring, without considering the consequences.

“So. Here you are.” She opened her briefcase and handed over three thick folders containing about eight hundred sheets of paper. The documentation on his case and related investigations. She’d skimmed the file years ago — not wanting to, but unable to resist. She’d learned that back then there’d been several hijacking rings operating in the city. Nick’s arrest was one of seven in a three-month period. Some other perps had been cops as well. If he had been a sole hijacker — especially one going for a plea — the file would have been much skimpier. He flipped through one of the folders fast, smiled and touched her arm.

Not her hand. That would have seemed inappropriate. Just her forearm. Still, even through layers of wool and cotton, she felt the electricity that she remembered from years ago. Wished she hadn’t. Really wished that.

He must have felt her stiffen. Certainly he saw her look away. Nick lifted his hand off her sleeve.

She said, “You’ve got to be careful, Nick. You can’t associate with anybody’s got a record. Your PO’s told you that.”

“If there’s anybody who can help me and there’s any risk, or it even looks like they’re connected, I’ll use, you know, an intermediary to contact them, a friend. Promise.”

“Make sure.”

She stood.

“You’re positive you don’t have time for a fast dinner?”

“I’ve got to get home to my mother.”

“How is she?”

“Well enough for the surgery.”

“I don’t know how to thank you, Amelia.”

“Prove you’re innocent,” she said. “That’s how.”

Chapter 24

Policing, Nick Carelli knew, was mostly paperwork.

You wanted collars but you hated collars because of all the forms, the notes, the triplicate, quadruplicate and whatever the hell five copies of something was.

But the good news now was that the Internal Affairs cops on his case, and the regular gold shields, had really done their homework, and he had paperwork galore to prowl through. Probably there was so much because they’d thought they had a crooked cop and a crooked cop is the best kind of perp. You nail a boy in blue who’s screwed up and the world’s your oyster. Press, promotion, adulation from the public.

In his apartment now. Sitting at a table he’d been meaning to level with a folded piece of paper since he’d moved back in, Nick was looking through what Amelia had brought him, ream upon ream of paperwork. Looking for a key to his salvation.

He sipped coffee, black and lukewarm. Not hot, not iced. Tepid. He didn’t know why, but this was the way he always drank coffee. He remembered being with Amelia and she’d make it the old-fashioned drip way — pre-Keurig days — pouring it through a cone filter. One of his favorite memories, a freezing-cold morning, sharing the ugliest pair of striped beige pajamas on earth. Her toenails blue from polish. His blue from the cold.

He’d gulped several mugs of Folgers since he’d started going through the files Ame — no, Amelia — had brought him. How many hours had it been? He didn’t want to guess.

He suddenly was aware of a scent that took him back years. He cocked his head, inhaled. Yes, definitely. The source? He lifted one of the file folders. Where Amelia had undoubtedly held it. She wasn’t into perfume. But she tended to use the same lotions and shampoos, which had their own distinctive fragrance. This was what he now smelled. Hand cream, Guerlain, he believed. Amazed the name came back to him.

He discarded a few other memories, with difficulty, and returned to the paperwork. Page after page.

An hour crawled past. Another. Numbing. He decided to go for a late-night run. Five more minutes.

But finding what he so desperately wanted took only two.

Jesus. Oh, my sweet Jesus!

He was reading from a report that had been put together as part of the larger investigation into police involvement in hijackings. It was dated nearly a year after he had gone to jail. There was a photocopy of a detective’s handwritten notes, very hard to read — it looked like the officer had used pencil.

I’ll say he’s key, Nick Carelli thought. For my mission at least. Flannigan’s was one of the underground meeting places for organized crime operations. This mysterious “J” figure, who’d just arrived in BK — Brooklyn — with connections and a wife, Nanci, would know who was who in the hijacking scene back then. And if he couldn’t directly help Nick, he’d probably know somebody who could. He flipped through the remaining pages, hoping to find a transcript of the notes, which would be easier to read, but no. There wasn’t much else. And no follow-up finding the “J” figure and his wife Nanci.

Then he saw why.

An NYPD memo announced the end of Operation Take Back. The commissioner praised the officers for greatly reducing the incidence of hijackings and the involvement of corrupt police officers in them. Many ’jackers and their police allies were behind bars; others, against whom cases could not be made, had been driven out of the business. The real answer was made clear in several other memos, announcing the formation of several anti-terrorist and — drug task forces. Resources within the NYPD were limited, always true, and stolen TVs fall pretty low on the gotta-stop-it scale, compared with al-Qaeda wannabes in Westchester targeting synagogues and Times Square.

Well, good news for him. This meant it was all the more likely J and Nanci were still free and would be able to help him.

His first reaction was to pick up the phone and call Amelia, tell her that what she’d done — betting on him — had paid off. But then he decided not to. He’d called her earlier to thank her and she hadn’t picked up. He sensed she wouldn’t pick up now either. Anyway, he wanted something more substantive to tell her and he still had to track down this J, convince him to help. And Nick didn’t have a lot of street cred. Former cop and former con. That meant a lot of folks, from both sides of the swamp, wouldn’t be real inclined to help him out.

Also, talking to Amelia would give free rein to those feelings again, and that was not, he guessed, a good idea.

Or was it?

He pictured her again, that long red hair, her face, the full lips. She seemed hardly to have aged while he was inside. He remembered waking up beside her, listening to the clock radio, the announcer: “Ten-ten WINS... you give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world.”

Reflect later, he told himself bluntly. Get your ass in gear. You’ve got work to do.

Chapter 25

Their first argument of substance.

About something small. But an essential aspect of forensic work is that something small can mean the difference between a killer killing once more or never again.

“It’s your database,” Juliette Archer was saying to Rhyme. “You put it together.” A concession of sorts. But then she added, “That was, of course, a while ago, no?”

They were in the parlor. Mel Cooper was the only one present. Pulaski was home, as was Sachs, with her mother.

Cooper was holding a dry marker, glancing with his infinitely patient face from Rhyme to Archer, waiting for a conclusion to settle like a bee on a stamen. So far, only flutter.

Rhyme replied, “Geologic shifts happen rather slowly in my experience. Over millions of years, in fact.” A subtle but acerbic assault on her position.

The issue was a simple one, having to do with the humus — decomposed earth — Sachs had found at the earlier crime scene. The composition of the humus, Rhyme believed, dictated that its source was Queens, and, because of the large amounts of fertilizer and weed killer (he too largely discounted bombs and human poisons), it was a place where an impressive lawn was important, like a country club, resort, mansion, golf course.

Archer thought Queens was too restrictive, even though Rhyme’s soil database, which, yes, he’d compiled years ago at the NYPD, suggested that the trace Sachs had found came from the eastern portion of the borough, where it bordered Nassau County.

She explained her reasoning: “I’ll give you that the soil material might’ve originated in Queens. But how many gardening and landscaping businesses are there? Tons.”

“Tons?” Rhyme’s tone sneered at the imprecise word.

“Many,” Archer corrected. “It could have been shipped to a resort in Westchester, where it picked up the herbicides and fertilizer. Or a golf course on Staten Island, for a dirt trap or something there—”

Rhyme said, “I don’t think they have those at golf courses. Dirt traps.”

“Whatever they might have, the courses order landscaping supplies and soil from Queens and have them shipped to New Jersey, Connecticut, the Bronx,” she replied. “Our unsub might’ve picked the trace in Bergen County, where he lives or works, and left a sample at the scene. He does woodworking at a posh country club there.”

“Possibly. But we play the odds,” Rhyme explained. “It’s more likely than not that our perp was in Queens when he picked up the humus.”

Archer would not back down. “Lincoln, when we do medical investigations in epidemiology, tracing infectious diseases, the worst thing you can do is draw a conclusion prematurely. Do you know the myopia study?”

Nearsightedness was relevant why? Rhyme wondered. “Missed it.” His own eyes were on the single-malt whisky bottle hovering just out of reach.

Archer continued, “A few years ago some doctors noticed that children who slept with the lights on were more likely to develop myopia. The MDs began to create programs to modify children’s sleeping habits, change the lighting in the room, arrange for counseling if children were anxious in the dark. Lots of money was spent on campaigns to reduce myopia.”

“And?”

“The researchers got the causation fixed in their head at the beginning. Lights on leads to myopia.”

Despite his impatience he was intrigued. “But that wasn’t the case.”

“Nope. Myopia is genetic. Because of their vision problems, parents with severe myopia tended to leave the lights on in their children’s rooms more frequently than parents with normal eyesight. Leaving lights on didn’t cause myopia; it followed from myopia. And that causation error set research back years. My point, in our case, is that if we’re convinced he has a connection with Queens, we’ll stop looking at the other possibilities. Once you get something into your head do you know how hard it is to dislodge?”

“Like the Pachelbel Canon? I truly dislike that piece of music.”

“I find it lovely.”

Rhyme said stridently, “We know for a fact he has a Queens connection. White Castle burgers and the car service he used there. Probably some shops he goes to.”

“That’s western Queens. By the East River. The soil and fertilizer are from miles away, east. Look, I’m not saying ignore Queens but give it gradiently less importance.”

He didn’t believe he’d ever heard that adverb.

Archer persisted. “Look for other locales in the New York City area where landscaping supplies from Queens were delivered. That’s all. He might’ve picked up the trace in the Bronx or Newark, New Jersey.”

“Or Montana,” Rhyme mused with the cool, sardonic tone he quite loved. “Let’s get a dozen officers together and have them canvass Helena for somebody who visited an eastern Queens landscaping company for a lawn gnome.”

Patience finally depleting, Mel Cooper brandished the marker again and asked, “What do you want me to write up on the board?”

Rhyme said, “Put the humus originated in Queens but that our perp might have picked it up in Montana. No, let’s start alphabetically. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas ...”

“Lincoln. It’s getting late,” Cooper said.

He asked Archer, “Can you live with Queens with a question mark?”

“Two question marks,” she countered.

Ridiculous. Did the woman ever back down? “All right. Two goddamn question marks.”

Cooper wrote.

Rhyme said, “And don’t forget the ‘well-tended lawn.’ ” He glanced at Archer, who seemed to have no objections.

The fact was that he enjoyed this. Debate was the heart-and-soul of crime scene work, the back-and-forth. He and Sachs used to do this all the time.

Thom appeared in the doorway. “Lincoln.”

“Oh, I know that tone. You better get used to it, Juliette: the caregiver of the iron fist. Make sure you brush the little teeth and tinkle and hit the hay.”

“You’ve been up for too many hours today,” Thom said. “And your blood pressure’s been high lately.”

“It’s high because you hound me to check my blood pressure.”

“Whatever the reason,” the aide said with infuriating cheer, “we can’t afford it to be so high. Can we?”

In fact, no, he couldn’t. A quad’s physical condition leads to several maladies that could be life threatening. Sepsis from bedsores, respiratory problems, blood clots and the ace of spades: autonomic dysreflexia. When an even minor irritation — like a full bladder — goes unrelieved, because the brain’s unaware of it, various changes occur as the body tries to regulate itself. Often the heart rate slows and, in compensation, the blood pressure rises. It can lead to strokes and death.

“All right,” he said, surrendering. He would have fought longer but it occurred to him that he had to be a reasonable model for Archer. She too would be at risk from dysreflexia and she’d have to take the threat seriously.

“My brother’ll be here any minute, anyway,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” She wheeled into the front hallway.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Rhyme muttered, staring at the evidence charts. Thinking: What do the clues tell us — where is your next move going to be, Unsub 40? And where do you hang your hat?

Is it Montana, Alabama, Westchester... the Bronx?

Or is it Queens??

“Man walks into a bar. Says, ‘Hell, that hurt.’ ”

Nick was speaking to the back of a man he’d snuck up behind, sitting at a bar — the other kind.

Freddy Caruthers didn’t turn. He kept his eyes on the TV above the premium booze. This was happening in a somewhat classy pub in Brooklyn, Park Slope. “Hell. I know that voice. No. No way. Nick?”

“Hey.”

Now Freddy turned, looked Nick up and down and waited all of a half second to hug him.

The man pretty much resembled a toad.

Though a friendly, cheerful one, a grin burned onto his toady face.

“Man, man, man. Heard you were out.” He backed off and gave an arm’s-length gaze. “Damn.”

Freddy and Nick went way back. They’d been classmates, public school classmates (no private schools in Sandy Hook, at least not for them). Nick was the good-looking one, the athlete. Freddy — five two then and now — couldn’t swing a bat or catch a pass, let alone dunk. But he had other skills. You needed a term paper, he’d write one for you. Free of charge. You needed to know if Myra Handleman had a date for the prom, he’d tell you who and give good advice how to convince her to break it and say yes to you instead. You needed help on a test, Freddy had a knack for knowing what questions would be asked (students speculated that he broke into teachers’ offices late at night — some said in a ninja outfit — but Nick suspected that Freddy simply thought the way the teachers thought).

Nick had built his cred on an impressive batting average and the class officer thing — looks too, sure.

Freddy had nurtured his differently, by working the system the way Amelia would needle-valve a carburetor. The rumor was Freddy got laid more than anybody else in high school. Nick doubted it but he still remembered that the plum Linda Rawlins, a foot taller and Cosmo beautiful, was Freddy’s date to the junior prom. Nick stayed home with TV and the Mets.

“So. What’re you up to, man?” Nick asked, sitting down. He gestured to the bartender and ordered a ginger ale.

Freddy was nursing a beer. A lite.

“Consulting.” And Freddy laughed. “How’s that for a job title? Ha! Really. Sounds like I’m a hit man or some shit. But it’s like Shark Tank.”

Nick shook his head. No clue. Not a lot of pop culture inside.

“A TV show about business start-ups. I hook entrepreneurs up with investors. Small business. I learned Armenian and—”

“You what?”

“Armenian. It’s a language.”

“I know it is. But what?”

“Lot of Armenians here.”

“Where?”

“New York. I put together Armenian businessmen with money people. Not just Armenians but anybody. Lot of Chinese.”

“You speak—”

“Nee-how!”

“Rich.” They high-fived.

Freddy grimaced. “Mandarin’s a bitch. So, you did your time. You’re out. That’s good. Say, I heard your brother passed. I’m sorry about that.”

Nick looked around. He took a breath. Then, in a soft voice, told Freddy about his brother, his own innocence.

Toady eyes narrowed. “No shit, man... That’s heavy.”

“Donnie didn’t know what he was getting into. You remember him, a child.”

“We always thought he had some problems, sure. Nobody cared. Just, he wasn’t quite right. All respect.”

“No worries,” Nick said, sipping the soda he’d ordered.

“Delgado. Doesn’t surprise me. Piece of crap. Total floating crap. Deserved what he got.”

Nick said, “You treated him good — Donnie.”

“And there’s no way he could’ve done time.” Freddy toyed with his beer bottle, peeling the wet label down. “You did the right thing. Jesus, I don’t know I could’ve done that.” He grinned. “Course, my brother’s an asshole. I woulda let him spin in the wind.”

Nick laughed hard. “But now I’ve got to get my life back. I’ve lost some years. I’m going to get a business going.”

“Find a lady, Nick. Man needs a woman in his life.”

“Oh, I’m working on that.”

“Good for you. And you can still have kids.”

“You’ve got the twins, right?”

“And two more. Twins’re boys. The four- and five-year-old’re girls. The wife said enough is enough. But, hell, that’s what God put us here for, right? So you need some money? I can stand you to some. Not a lot. Ten, twelve K.”

“No, no, I’m fine there, got some inheritance.”

“Shit, really?”

“But, Freddy, I do need a favor.”

“What?”

“I found out that there’s somebody who might know about the ’jacking Donnie was behind. Maybe he was a fence, maybe he just took delivery of some merch. Maybe he financed the job. I’m hoping he knows I wasn’t behind it. I gotta find him.”

“Who is it?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t have much to go on. I could ask around the ’hood, but you know—”

“Sure, nobody’d trust you. Think you were a CI or something.”

“Well, that, yeah. But mostly, if this guy was actually connected, I can’t really be seen talking to him.”

“Oh, shit, sure. The parole thing.”

“That’s it.”

“You need me to ask around?”

Nick raised his hands. “You can say no.”

“Nick, I gotta say there was a lot of people in the ’hood who didn’t believe it. They thought some other cop fucked you over ’cause you wouldn’t play along. Everybody liked you, Nick. You were a golden boy.”

Nick slapped Freddy’s arm and felt his eyes welling up. “Means everything to me, man.”

“What kind of business you looking at?”

“Restaurant, I’ve decided.”

“Yeah. Ballbreaker work. But there’s money to be made. I do some Armenian restaurant deals. You ever have Armenian food?”

“No. I never have. Don’t think so.”

“You’d like it. Middle Eastern, you know. I do more shoe stores and clothes and prepaid phone card operations but some restaurants.”

“My lawyer’s looking for one.”

“So this guy?” Energetic, Freddy drained his beer and ordered another.

“This guy I was mentioning? Yeah. He hangs in Flannigan’s. Or did.”

“Oh, then likely connected.”

“Right. His first name starts with a J. And he’s got a wife named Nanci.”

“And that’s it? That’s all you know?”

“’Fraid so.”

“Well, it’s a start. I’ll do what I can, man.”

“One way or another I’ll make it up to you.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Freddy laughed. “Those were the days, high school. Going to Shea or up to the Bronx. Remember that feeling, early in the season? You—”

“Oh, Jesus. I know what you’re going to say. You walk up the stairs before the game, into the stadium, and through the tunnel into the stands and there’s the whole park in front of you like Saint Peter opened the gates.”

“The smell of everything. Wet concrete, popcorn, beer, the grass.”

“Fertilizer too, I think.”

“Never thought about that. Yeah, probably fertilizer. You know, Nicky Boy, maybe it won’t be that hard to find this guy, J, and his lady... What’s her name again?”

“Nanci. With an i.”

“Nanci. Since you went in, there’s this thing called data mining.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s just say you can do all the searching you need by sitting on your ass.”

“I’ve used Google.”

“That’s a place to start. But there’s more to it than that. There’re services. You drop a few bills, they can find anything. I kid you not. A little bit of luck, you’ll get his name, address, where he went to school, what kind of dog he has, how big Nanci’s tits are and how long his dick is.”

“Seriously?”

Freddy frowned. “Okay. Probably not the boobs and dick, but that’s not impossible. The world has changed, my friend. The world has changed.”