The Steel Kiss

Chapter 26

At 12:30 a.m., Abe Benkoff took a last sip of his brandy and clicked off the streaming Mad Men episode with ten minutes left to go. He liked the show — he worked in advertising, one of the biggies in Midtown, though on Park, not Madison — but without Ruth here, it wasn’t as much fun to watch. He’d save the episode for when she returned from her mother’s in Connecticut the day after tomorrow.

Benkoff, fifty-eight, was sitting in his leather lounger in the couple’s town house in Murray Hill. Many old buildings here but he and Ruth had found a three-bedroom co-op in a building that was only six years old. A motivated seller. That coincided with Abe’s promotion to partner of WJ&K Worldwide, which meant a bonus. Which became the down payment. Still more than they could afford, technically. But with the kids gone, Ruth had said, “Go for it.”

And they had.

Great for entertaining. And it was just a walk to his job and hers, at a publisher in Times Square.

Not to mention the place was modern as modern could be. Abe and his wife had sunk tens of thousands into the decor and appliances, stainless steel, glass, ebony. State-of-the-art kitchen — a phrase that Abe would not let a copywriter slip into an ad, though it certainly did describe the room. Brushed-steel stove and oven and other accessories.

Tonight, though, he’d cranked up nothing more than the microwave, zapping General Tso’s Chicken from Hunan Host, up the street. Not so great in the calorie department but it had been a busy day, he’d gotten home late and didn’t have the energy — or — inclination — to whip up something healthy.

Was General Tso from Hunan province? Benkoff wondered, rising stiffly from the chair and gathering the dishes. And if not, would he be offended that he was being honored by a restaurant with roots from a different locale from his own?

Or was Hunan Host run by Taiwanese or Koreans or an enterprising couple from Laos?

It’s all in the marketing, as Abe Benkoff knew quite well, and Cambodian Star might raise a few questions and discourage diners. Or Pol Pot Express, he thought, both smiling and acknowledging his bad taste.

The plates and glass and utensils he took to the kitchen, rinsed and stacked them in the dishwasher rack. Abe started to leave then paused and returned. Then rearranged the dishes and utensils the way Ruth would have wanted. They loaded the device differently. He believed he was right — sharp ends down — but that was a battle not worth fighting. It was like trying to convince a Dem to vote Republican or vice versa.

After a shower, he donned pajamas and, snagging a book from above the toilet, he flopped into bed. There he set the alarm for six thirty, thinking about the health club. He laughed to himself and reset it for seven thirty. Benkoff opened to page thirty of the thriller, read five paragraphs, closed the book, doused the light and, rolling onto his side, fell asleep.

Exactly forty minutes later Abe Benkoff gasped and sat up in bed.

He was fully awake, sweating, gagging, from what was filling his bedroom.

Gas!

The room was filled with cooking gas! That rotten-egg stink. There was something wrong with the stove. Get the hell out! Call 911. But get out first.

Holding his breath, he instinctively reached for the bedside lamp and clicked it on.

He froze, his fingers gripping the switch Are you out of your mind? But the light didn’t, as he’d thought in a moment of icy panic, set the gas off and blow the apartment to pieces. He didn’t know what might do that but apparently a lightbulb wasn’t sufficient. Hand shaking, he shut the bulb out before it got hotter.

Okay, he thought, stumbling to his feet, the danger’s not explosions — not yet. But you’re going to suffocate if you don’t get out. Now. He pulled his robe on, feeling dizzy. He dropped to his knees and breathed slowly. Still, the stink, sure, but it wasn’t as bad lower, near the floor. Whatever was in natural gas, it seemed to be lighter than air and at the ground level he could breathe all right. He did this several times and then rose.

Clutching his phone, he made his way through the darkened apartment, picking his route thanks to the ample illumination from outside, washing through the ten-foot-high windows, unobstructed by curtains. His wife insisted on this and, though he didn’t care much for the glare and the lack of privacy, he silently thanked her for it now. He was sure that if there’d been curtains he might’ve stumbled in the dark, knocking over a lamp or some furniture, metal against stone... producing a spark that would ignite the gas.

Benkoff made it down the hall to the living room.

The smell was growing stronger. What the hell had happened? A broken pipe? Just his place or the entire floor? Or the entire building? He remembered the story of an apartment in Brooklyn where a gas main explosion had leveled the five-story structure, killing six people.

His head was growing lighter and lighter. Would he faint before he got to the front door? He had to pass the kitchen, where the gas probably was coming from. The fumes would be greatest there. Maybe he could open one of the windows in the den — he was just outside the doorway — and suck in more air.

No, just keep going. Most important, get out!

And resist making a phone call to the fire department now. The phone might ignite the gas. Just keep going. Fast, fast.

Dizzier, dizzier.

Whatever happened, he was so very glad that Ruth wasn’t home. Pure luck that she’d decided to stay in Connecticut after her business meetings.

Thank you for that, he thought to a generic god. Abe Benkoff hadn’t been to temple in twenty years. A lapse that would end next Friday, he decided — if he got out of here.

Then into the hallway and staggering toward the front door. He stumbled once, dropped the phone, snagged it and began to crawl again. He’d get outside, slam the door, behind him. Hit the fire alarm, warning the other tenants, and dial 911.

Twenty feet, ten.

The fumes weren’t so bad here in the front hallway of the apartment, some distance from the stove. Ten, fifteen feet.

A man of words and numbers, a man at home in the rarified world of offices, Benkoff now became a soldier, thinking only of survival. I’m going to make it. Goddamn it, I am.

Chapter 27

Lincoln Rhyme was awakened by his humming phone.

The clock: 6:17 a.m.

“Answer” was the groggy command to the unit. “Yes?” Directed to the caller.

“Rhyme, another one.”

He asked Amelia Sachs, “Unsub Forty?”

“Right.”

“What happened?”

“Murray Hill. Gas explosion. Looks like he sabotaged a stove — one of the products on the list Rodney found.”

“And the vic was on the second list, the purchasers?”

“Right. Put a new kitchen in a couple of years ago. Purchase information was in the data.”

Rhyme pressed his attendant button, to summon Thom.

Sachs continued, “Victim is Abe Benkoff, fifty-eight, advertising executive.” She paused a moment. “Rhyme, he burned to death. Ron’s pulling the vic’s vitals. I’m going to get down there now, run the scene.”

They disconnected. Rhyme called Mel Cooper, summoning him back to the town house in anticipation of analyzing what Sachs would find at Benkoff’s.

Thom arrived for the morning routine and in ten minutes Rhyme was downstairs, in the parlor. He turned his chair at an oblique angle and eased toward the evidence charts, looking over the findings from the past crime scenes, concerned that there might have been something they’d missed — he’d missed — that might have let them anticipate this attack.

Murray Hill ...

A fancy stove ...

Gas explosion ...

It was always a long shot, making an educated guess from the evidence in past crimes as to where the perp might strike in the future. In essence, doing so was dependent on the unsub’s visiting scenes to plan a crime, accidentally picking up evidence there and then depositing it at another scene, where it was discovered. Most serial killers or multiple doers weren’t so helpful.

But Unsub 40 had such a curious agenda and wielded such an odd weapon that it seemed he would have to do some homework a day or two or even more ahead of time to make sure he’d succeed with the murder.

Benkoff’s death, he thought grimly, might be the opposite of the Baxter case. There Rhyme had had too much evidence and had parsed it too carefully. Perhaps in the Unsub 40 situation he’d missed some clue in prior scenes that might have pointed to Abe Benkoff’s apartment as the site of a future attack. And he experienced that unnerving hollowness he’d felt when he learned of the businessman’s death. The uneasiness and, okay, guilt that had prompted his decision to end his career as a criminal forensic investigator.

This validated that decision. He couldn’t wait for this case to be done with. And he could get back to his life in the civil world — he smiled at the double-duty word — once more.

His phone hummed again.

Glancing at caller ID.

“Hello?”

“I saw the news,” Juliette Archer said. “The fire in Murray Hill. Stove malfunctioned. Was that our boy?”

“Looks like it. I was just about to call you. You free?”

“Actually, I’m on my way.”

Thinking about pain.

Breakfast in bed, just after waking, in Chelsea. I ate one sandwich — bologna, very underrated nowadays — and now am having another.

Six fifty a.m.

I’m tired after all the work last night. I tried to sleep in but couldn’t. Way too excited.

Pain ...

Because of my recent endeavors, I’ve studied the subject. I’ve learned there are various types. Neuropathic, for instance, is when a nerve is struck or impinged upon (hitting your funny bone — oh, yeah, nothing funny ‘bout that, is there?). Not necessarily excruciating. More twitchy and irritating.

Then there’s psychogenic, or somatoform, pain. This comes from environmental factors and stress and some physiologic stimuli. Migraines, for instance.

But the most common in our daily life is called nociceptive. Fancy word, I think, for when you miss the nail with your hammer and squoosh your thumb instead. A couple of fine categories of nociceptive give connoisseurs like myself much to work with. I think of Todd Williams: blunt trauma impact. Or rending with a razor saw (I used that not long before). Another: Alicia’s radius bone sprouting through her flesh as her husband, dull from whisky, twisted and pulled.

And then there’s thermal nociceptive pain. Cold, yes. But the worst is heat, of course. Freezing numbs. Fire makes you scream and scream and scream.

I had a pretty good view of my victim’s last few minutes. I was watching him the whole time, from across the street, the roof terrace of a not-very-secure five-story walk-up. It was easy to see him through the large windows. Waking up, idiotically turning on the light on the bedside table — worried me there. Wasn’t sure at that point if there was enough gas in the place to do what I hoped.

But a moment later he was walking toward the door, then crawling.

At that point I was sure there was enough gas and — feeling a bit perverse — I flicked the switch when he was only ten or twelve feet from the door, safety well within his grasp.

Except it hadn’t been, of course.

A simple command through the cloud and the CookSmart Deluxe stove came to life. Eleven thousand dollars and change buys you a very responsive appliance.

And my victim turned into a shadow in the flames, twitching and staggering, and staggering still when the smoke enshrouded him, though I caught of glimpse of him rolling onto his back, quivering, and turning pugilistic with hands and legs up. I lost sight and the smoke flowed and flowed and flowed.

At least he got a few good meals out of the fancy oven.

The job done, I left and came back here, filled with robust satisfaction, for a bit of sleep.

The People’s Guardian will write another missive to the press later, reminding them that excessive consumerism is a bad thing. Blah, blah, blah. You don’t have to be too articulate and clever with your manifestos after you burn someone to death.

I roll from bed and, in my pajamas, sit groggy on the bedside, think of the busy day ahead.

I have plans for another poor Shopper.

Nociceptive pain...

There are plans for Red too. I know now all I need to about her habits, I think. It should be good. It certainly will be enjoyable to me, what I have planned.

I have some time, so I go into the Toy Room.

The way I work when I build a miniature is to draw a blueprint first, though it’s not blue. Then I focus on each part of the item I’m making. Legs, drawers, tops, frames — whatever it might be. And I go in order of the most difficult task first. Carving eighteenth-century legs, for instance, is so very hard. Spindly yet complex, with swells and knobs and sweeps, angular. I coax them out of blocks of wood. I smooth with the blade and sand carefully. Then comes assembly. The one I’m holding is an Edwardian bed for an American Girl client, the father a lawyer in Minneapolis. I know because his check to my company includes the triplet “esq.” after his name. I almost didn’t do the job because Alicia told me of the trouble she had with lawyers after the situation with her husband. She was innocent of any wrongdoing; you’d think all would have gone well for her. But no. And it was the lawyers to thank. But I need to make a living and she wouldn’t care, I don’t think. Anyway, I didn’t tell her.

Peering through the magnifier, I ease the dowel joints together, knowing they’ll fit since I’ve measured twice. A joke. The old expression. Actually I measure a dozen times.

Furniture, as lessons for life.

In an hour the bed is nearly done and I look at it for some time under the ring of light on the business side of the magnifier glass. I tend to want to do some more finishing work but restrain myself now. Many pieces are ruined because the artisan didn’t know when to stop (a life lesson, I was saying). But I know when to stop. In a few days, after the varnish is long dried and rubbed smooth I will pack it up in bubble wrap and foam peanuts and ship it off.

As I study the piece and make a few final touches I click on the tape recorder. I just listen now. I’ll transcribe this entry of the diary later.

I click off the recorder, inspired to get cracking. I sit down at my computer, log into several virtual private networks serially, then head to Bulgaria and one of the Shitloadistans for a proxy.

I sit back and close my eyes. Then, channeled by the People’s Guardian, I begin to type.

Nick Carelli’s mobile hummed.

His lawyer.

When he’d gone into the system, caller ID was in its infancy. Now it was everywhere and, he’d decided, the most important thing invented in the past hundred years.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Nick. How’s it going? You adjusting well?”

“As can be expected.”

“Sure. Well. I’ve got a place for you to check out. I’ve emailed the address and the deal sheet. It’s preliminary so we’ll still have a lot of due diligence to do. The place is out a way so the asking isn’t going to give you a coronary. You get closer to the Heights and hipsters, there’s better revenue but you couldn’t afford it.”

“Great, man. Thanks. Hold on. I’ll check it out now.”

Nick went online and noted the address — solid, working-class and striving neighborhood in BK — and the name of the owner. “Is he there now?” Nick was feeling the electric prods again. Impatience. He recalled Amelia’s slogan: When you move they can’t getcha ...

“Yeah. He’s there. I just talked to his lawyer.” Then Sam fell silent. “Listen, Nick, are you sure you want to do this?”

“You gave me the lecture before.”

“I did, yes. It would’ve been nice if you’d listened to me.”

“Funny.”

“Restaurants’re one of the biggest money sucks in history. This one, okay, it’s got decent cash flow and a loyal clientele. I know it. I’ve been to it. Been around for twenty years, so it’s got serious goodwill. But still, you’ve never run a company before.”

“I can learn. Maybe I could hire the owner to stick around, be a consultant. He’s got an interest in making sure the place stays open and’s successful.” The proposal was the owner would get the purchase price plus a cut of the action. “He’s gotta have a sentimental attachment to the place. Wouldn’t you think?”

“I’d guess, sure.”

“It’s late in the game for me, Sam. I need to get going with my life. Oh, but the other thing I asked you.”

“I checked and triple-checked. Not a hint of criminal activity. The owner, his family, any of the employees. No records. Clean with the IRS and state too. Passed a couple of audits with flying colors. And I’m working on the liquor waiver.”

“Good. Thanks, Sam. I’m so psyched.”

“Nick. Slow down. You sound like you’re ready to sign the paperwork today. Don’t you at least want to try the lasagna?”

Chapter 28

Amelia Sachs returned to the town house with what seemed to Rhyme measly evidence. Two milk crates containing a half-dozen paper and plastic evidence collection bags.

The damn unsub kept burning things up and turning evidence to ash. Water was the worst elemental contaminant of crime scenes; fire was a close number two.

These boxes she handed off to Mel Cooper, who was wearing a lab coat over his corduroy beige slacks and short-sleeve white shirt, as well as surgical cap and gloves. “That’s all?” he asked, looking toward the door, thinking perhaps that other ECTs were bringing in more evidence.

Her grimace said it all. Nothing else would be forthcoming.

“Who was he?” Juliette Archer asked. “The victim?”

Ron Pulaski glanced through his notes: “A fifty-eight-year-old advertising account executive. Pretty senior. Abe Benkoff. He was responsible for some famous TV commercials.” The young officer ran through some of them. Rhyme, never a TV watcher, had not heard of the ads though, of course, he knew the clients: food companies, personal products, cars, airlines. “Fire marshal said they’re a week away from anything specific as to how it happened but off the record: There was a gas leak from a CookSmart range and oven. Six-burner gas stovetop, an electric oven. With the DataWise you can turn the stove on remotely — both the burners and the oven. It’s mostly designed to shut them off if you leave and think you might have left them on. But it works the other way too. The unsub disengaged the pilot light sparkers — those click, click things — and then turned the gas on.

“The marshal said the flow had to be going for close to forty minutes, given the size of the explosion. Then the unsub turned the sparkers back on. The whole place blew. Benkoff was about fifteen feet from the front door. Looked like he was trying to get out. The gas woke him up, they think.”

Archer: “Anyone else in the place?”

“No. He was married but his wife was out of town, business trip. They had two grown children. Nobody else in the building was hurt.”

Sachs began a whiteboard for this crime scene.

Her phone hummed and she took a call. After a brief conversation she hung up. Shrugged to Rhyme. “Another reporter about my statement to the press — about the security patches that CIR uploaded to its clients. The story’s got legs.” She was pleased. Word apparently was spreading about the dangers of products embedded with DataWise5000 controllers. And, according to the reports, people were paying attention.

She added, “Even if companies aren’t intimidated into Chaudhary’s security updates, at least we can hope their customers read the stories and stay offline or unplug their appliances.”

Rhyme’s computer sounded with an incoming news story on an RSS feed. “He’s sent out another chapter of the manifesto.”

“Nut job,” muttered Mel Cooper.

As good a diagnosis as any.

“If he’s guarding the people why is he killing them?”

“He’s only killing the ones who buy or install expensive products,” Rhyme pointed out.

“A distinction that’s lost on me,” Archer said. She scanned the diatribe carefully and said, “If he knows the premise of the philosophy, tabula rasa, he must’ve heard of John Locke. He’s playing down his intelligence again. What look like intentional misspellings. A few unnecessary uppercasings — so to speak.”

Rhyme laughed at her comment; one of those words was “Unnecessary.”

“Colon where a semi would be more appropriate. But using one means he knows how to use the other. Wrong use of ‘whom.’ ”

“Okay,” Rhyme said, not much interested in the profiling. “We’ve established he’s corrupting Ms. Peabody’s English lessons on purpose. Let’s get to the evidence. Where did you find that, Sachs?” It seemed there were two separate locations she’d searched; he could tell this from the separate containers.

“I did a fast grid in Benkoff’s apartment. Since the unsub’s using a remote, he doesn’t need to be inside a victim’s location. From the lists, he knows who has a product with a smart controller. But I took some samples anyway. Just in case he got in to Benkoff’s kitchen and added an accelerant.”

“Ah yes,” Rhyme said. “He might not have trusted that the natural gas would cause enough damage. Mel, check that first.”

The evidence collection bags Sachs pointed out each featured a glassine strip on which was written the room it had been collected in. The contents were several spoonsful of ash.

Cooper began the chromatographic and spectromic analysis. As the machine ran and he noted results, Sachs continued, “But I was thinking of the MO — that he needed to see inside the place. To make sure there was a victim present.”

Archer added, “And remember Rodney’s comment about his being ‘a decent monster’; he might’ve wanted to make sure there were no children, say, who were visiting. Or he doesn’t want to hurt poorer people. The ones who don’t buy the expensive products.”

“Maybe,” Sachs said, though Rhyme could tell she was doubtful. He tended to side with Sachs on this one. Unsub 40 didn’t seem troubled by finely parsed ethical concerns. “I think it was more an issue to make sure he had a victim in his sights. I found the one spot where he could see clearly into the Benkoffs’ apartment. The roof across the street. A resident there saw a tall, slim man come out of the lobby just after the explosion. White male, had a backpack, dressed in overalls like a worker. And a baseball cap. I got some trace from where he probably stood.”

“Access?” Rhyme asked.

“He could’ve taken the fire escape, would have been less visible. But he went for the front door.”

“Lock on that apartment’s door?” Archer asked.

Again, stealing the question from Rhyme.

“Old building. Old lock. Easily jimmied. No broken windows. No tool marks to speak of. Took trace from the lobby but...” She shrugged.

Archer said, “Lincoln’s book. Smart perps travel routes where there’s heavy foot traffic, and where, therefore, the likelihood of isolating usable trace diminishes logarithmically. That’s why he entered there.”

Stating the obvious, Rhyme thought, of his own observation. He’d always regretted putting that in the text. “So what do we have,” he asked impatiently, “from the roof?”

“For one thing, a piece of glass.” This was Archer’s observation. She’d wheeled close to the examination table and was staring at a clear plastic evidence bag, which appeared to contain dust only.

“Spread it out, Mel.”

The tech did.

“I still can’t see it,” Rhyme muttered.

“Them,” Archer corrected. “Two, no, three shards.”

“You have microscopic vision?”

Archer laughed. “God gave me good nails and twenty — twenty vision. That’s about it.”

No reference to what He was taking away.

With the help of magnifying goggles, Cooper found and extracted the shards of glass and put them under a microscope. The image was broadcast on the screen. Archer said, “Window glass, wouldn’t you think?”

“That’s right,” Rhyme said. He’d analyzed a thousand samples of glass in his years on crime scene detail — from splinters produced by bullets, falling bodies, rocks and auto crashes to shards intentionally and lovingly turned into knives. The fracture lines and the polished sides of the tiny pieces Sachs had collected left no doubt they were from windows. Not automotive — safety glass was very different — but residential. He mentioned this.

Cooper pointed out. “There, upper right-hand quadrant? Imperfection.”

It seemed to be a small bubble. Rhyme said, “Old. And cheap, I’d say.”

“That’s what I’d say. Seventy-five years? Older maybe.”

Modern window glass manufacturing produced a much closer to flawless.

“Compare them with the control samples. Where are they, Sachs?”

She pointed out several envelopes; they would contain trace samples from parts of the roof that were nowhere near the place the unsub had stood. Cooper went to work comparing the various items microscopically.

“Okay... No other bits of glass.”

And there’d been none in Todd Williams’s office building — the unsub had broken in through the back door. And none downstairs here either. Where had he picked it up?

“Anything else, the trace?”

Cooper had to wait to run the samples through the GC/MS. He was still awaiting the results from the ash Sachs had collected. In a few minutes they were finished. He read the compiled data. “No accelerant.”

“So that tells us he most likely didn’t break in and pour gas or kerosene around the place.”

“It wasn’t likely anyway,” Archer said.

“Why do you say that?” Sachs asked

“Gut feel. Almost like he’s proud he’s using the controller as a murder weapon. It would be... I don’t know, inelegant to have to add gasoline.”

“Maybe,” Sachs said.

Rhyme agreed with Archer but said nothing.

“Burn the other trace. From his vantage point on the roof.”

For a half hour or so, Cooper ran various samples through the machine, the chromatograph separating the components, the MS identifying them. Rhyme watched impatiently. Finally Cooper listed them:

Diesel fuel, no brand identified. Two soil samples, indigenous to shoreline Connecticut, Hudson River, New Jersey and Westchester County.

“Not Queens with two question marks?” Rhyme said wryly. Archer smiled his way. Sachs noted this, turned back to the whiteboard on which she was writing down their findings.

The tech continued. A number of samples of soft drinks: Sprite, and regular and Diet Coca-Cola, all in various dilutions, which meant they came from different sources — cups that contained ice; the beverage was not drunk directly from can or bottle. White wine, high sugar content. Typical of inexpensive sparkling or still white.

Silence flowed into the parlor, broken only by the tap of the gas chromatograph cooling. The device worked by subjecting its samples to temperatures that were about fifty degrees Celsius higher than the boiling point of the least volatile element of the sample. An inferno, in other words.

Sachs fielded a call. She stepped aside to take it. In a corner of the parlor, she stood with head down. Eventually she nodded and relief was obvious in her face. She disconnected. “The Borough Shooting Team was convened.” Rhyme recalled — the incident review after she parked a slug in the escalator motor to try to save Greg Frommer’s life. “Madino — the captain — says it’s a good panel. Uniforms and shields from the street. I’ll write up the FD/AR and that’ll be it, he said.”

Rhyme was pleased for her. The NYPD had so many regulations and formalities that they could overwhelm an officer just trying to do the job.

Cooper said, “Something else here. Traces of rubber, ammonia and the fiber, probably from paper — a paper towel.” He then ran through a lengthy laundry list of trace chemicals.

“Glazing compound,” Rhyme said absently.

“You knew that?” the intern asked, staring at the mouthful of substances, three lines long.

He explained. There’d been a case years ago in which a wife had slashed her husband’s jugular with the sharp edge of a pane of glass she’d worked out of the rec room window. As he slept she drew the glass over his jugular and he bled out quickly. She’d cleaned the glass and replaced it in the window, glazing the pane back in place. (Her bizarre strategy was that no murder weapon, that is, knife or other blade, could be traced back to her. Not true, of course, since she neglected to clean from her blouse the traces of glazing compound she’d used on the window after the murder. It took officers all of five minutes to find the pane; a luminol test confirmed the presence of blood.)

Sachs took another call. A cryptic reaction. Eyes flitting from window to floor to rococo ceiling. What was this about? he wondered.

She disconnected and grimaced. She walked to Rhyme. “I’m sorry. My mother.”

“She’s all right?”

“Fine. But they moved up a test.” Her face remained troubled. He knew she was torn between the case and her only living family member.

“Sachs, go,” he said.

“I—”

“Go. You have to.”

Without a word, Sachs headed out of the parlor.

Rhyme stared after her then turned slowly, the motor of his chair uttering a soft whine, and gazed at the challenging whiteboards.

Archer too was studying the writing carefully. “More questions than answers,” she muttered.

Welcome to the world of forensics, Rhyme thought.

Chapter 29

Sweeney Todd, now, that was a challenge.

Joe Heady, a carpenter at the Whitmore Theater in Times Square, was thinking of the successful revival of the Sondheim play a year ago. He and the other set builders and gaffers had had to create a working barber’s chair — well, working to the extent that it would drop open on command, allowing the customer to slide into the pit below after the Demon Barber of Fleet Street had sliced open his throat.

They’d worked for months to get the chair to function seamlessly — and to create a wonderfully gothic Dickensian set.

But the set for this job? Damn child’s play. Downright boring.

Heady lugged some two-by-four pieces of common-grade pine into the set construction workshop behind the theater on 46th Street and dumped them on the concrete floor. For this play his job was to build a large maze, the sort that a rat — make that a two-foot holographic projection rat — would poke through at various points in the play, which was about some family gathering and arguing and a bunch of other crap. Not a single cut throat for the entire two hours and change. Having read the script, Heady decided a little literal blood would have helped.

But a maze was what the set designer wanted and a maze she was going to get.

A big man, with bushy black-and-gray hair, Heady arranged the pieces of wood in the order in which he’d cut them and then stiffly rose. Actually grunting. Sixty-one years old, he’d given retirement a shot; he and the wife had moved here after his thirty-six years on the assembly line in Detroit. Living closer to the kids and grandkids in Jersey was great. Up to a point. But Heady wasn’t ready to hang up his tools yet, and his son-in-law hooked him up with this job. Heady was basically a machinist — the Detroit thing — but handy is handy, and the theater hired him on the spot for set-building carpentry. He loved the work. Only problem: The wood weighed a lot more than it did twenty years ago. Funny how that happens.

He spread the plans for the maze on a table nearby, then plucked a steel tape measure off his belt and a pencil — an old-time pencil, which he sharpened with a locking-blade knife — from his pocket and set them beside the plans. Pulling on his reading glasses, he reviewed the schematics.

This was one of the nicer theaters on Broadway and definitely one of the best set-building workshops in Manhattan. It was large, sixty by sixty feet, with the south wall stocked with more wood than most lumberyards had in inventory. Against the west wall were the bins of hardware (nails, nuts, bolts, springs, screws, washers, you name it), hand and small power tools, workbenches, paint and a small kitchen area. In the middle, mounted to the floor, were the big power tools.

The day was pleasant and the massive double doors — large enough for the delivery of the biggest props — were open onto 46th Street. A breeze wafted in, carrying smells that Heady liked: car exhaust, perfume from who knew where, charcoal smoke from the nut and pretzel vendors. The traffic was chaotic and people in every style of clothing you could imagine streamed past constantly, surging in every direction. He’d never developed affection for Motown. But now, a convert, he was a devout Manhattanite, even though he lived in Paramus.

And he loved his job too. On nice days like this, with the doors open, passersby sometimes stopped and glanced in, curious to watch the set builders at work. One of Heady’s proudest days was when someone called him to the door. The carpenter, anticipating a question about a tool or what set he was working on, was astonished when the man asked for an autograph. He’d loved the sets from the revival of The King and I and wanted Heady to sign the Playbill.

Heady heated up some water in the microwave, poured in some instant Starbucks coffee and sipped the black brew while he made notes about the cuts he was about to make. He glanced at the bench to make sure a necessary accessory was handy: sound-dampening earmuffs. He absolutely had to wear these because of a device that sat in the middle of the workshop.

The huge Ayoni table saw was the latest addition. The bulk of the work done in set building on Broadway is carpentry — cutting, framing, joining and painting. The Ayoni was rapidly becoming a workhorse for that task. Weighing in at over three hundred pounds, the device featured circular blades with edges sharp as shark’s teeth. The steel blades were interchangeable, in varying thicknesses and tooth depth and shape — the thicker, with larger teeth, were meant for rough frames, the thinner and finer for finishing work. These wicked disks spun at nearly two thousand RPM and screamed as loudly as a jet plane’s engines.

Heady loved the saw. It would slice through the thickest wood like tearing newsprint and featured a computer chip that remembered setting and dimensions for the past fifty jobs.

To cut the two-by-four pieces for the base of the maze, Heady got a heavy, rough-cut blade from a rack on the wall. Before removing the blade presently mounted to the Ayoni, however, and replacing it with this one, he’d have to shut the power off. The unit was hardwired into the theater’s electrical system, since its motor — running at a gutsy eight horsepower — drew 220 volts and many amps.

The manufacturer recommended that you shut off the power to the entire facility at the main circuit breaker before replacing blades, but here at the theater no workers ever did, since the breaker was in the basement. But perhaps because the Ayoni Corporation knew that purchasers might not always cut the main juice, the saw itself had two power cutoffs. One was the device’s own circuit breaker. The second was the on/off switch that started the blade spinning. It was a bit inconvenient to reach down, to the base of the machine, find the circuit breaker and click it off, but no way was Heady going to swap blades without doing so. The tool was as dangerous as a guillotine. (He’d heard about an accident in which an assistant had fallen next to an Ayoni as it ran and instinctively reached out to steady himself. His forearm hit the blade and was severed halfway between wrist and elbow in an instant. The poor man had felt not a bit of pain for a good ten seconds, so fast and clean was the cut.)

So he now reached down and popped the breaker.

Then, just to double-check, he flipped on the power switch; nothing. He returned it to the off position. Heady now gripped the blade with his left hand and held it steady while, with a socket wrench in his right, he began to loosen the nuts fixing the disk to the shaft. He was glad that he’d taken the redundant precautions; it occurred to him that should the unit happen to start, not only would he lose the fingers of his left hand but the wrench would crush his right to a pulp.

Two thousand RPM.

But in five minutes the blade was changed safely. The power was back on. And he readied the first piece to cut.

There was no doubting the saw’s efficiency; it made all the carpenters’ lives so much easier. On the other hand, Healy had to admit he wasn’t looking forward to spending the next few hours changing blades and slicing up the wood for the maze.

Fact was, the thing scared the hell out of him.

The waitress offered a flirt.

Mid-thirties, Nick guessed. With a pretty, heart-shaped face, black hair, black as oil, tied up tight, the curls just waiting to escape. Tight uniform too. Low cut. That was one thing he’d change if he became owner of the restaurant. He’d like a little more family-friendly staff. Though maybe the old farts in the neighborhood liked the view Hannah offered.

He smiled back, but a different smile from hers, polite and formal, and asked for Vittorio. She stepped away, returned and said he’d be out in a few minutes. “Have a seat, have some coffee.”

She tried another flirt.

“Black please. One ice cube.”

“Iced coffee?”

“No. A cup. Hot coffee but an ice cube in it.”

Sitting down in the window booth she took him to, Nick looked around at the place. Nice, he assessed. He liked it right away. The linoleum would have to go — too many heel marks — and he’d lose the wallpaper and paint the place. Maybe dark red. The place had plenty of windows and good lighting. The room could handle walls that color. And he’d put up some paintings. Find some of old Brooklyn, this very neighborhood if he could.

Nick loved the borough. People didn’t know that BK had been a city unto itself until 1898, when it got absorbed and became a part of New York. In fact, Brooklyn had been one of the biggest cities in the country (was still the biggest borough). He’d find some prints of the waterfront and Prospect Park. Maybe portraits of some famous Brooklynites. Walt Whitman. Sure, had to have him. “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” the poem — good, he’d get a ferry print. And Amelia’s father — also from BK — had told him that George Washington and the colonial troops had fought the British here (and lost, but retreated safely to Manhattan, thanks to a frozen river). George Gershwin. Mark Twain supposedly named his character Tom Sawyer after a heroic firefighter from Brooklyn. He’d get pictures of them all. Maybe those pen-and-ink drawings. They were cool. They were classy.

Definitely not one of native son Al Capone, though.

A shadow over him and Nick rose.

“Vittorio Gera.” A thick man, both olive-skinned and ill-colored at the same time. His suit was one size too big and Nick wondered if the reason the restaurant was on the block was his poor health. Probably. The perfect hair, gray, was a piece.

“Nick Carelli.”

“Italian. Where’s the family from?”

“Flatbush.”

“Ha!”

Nick added, “Long time ago, Bologna.”

“We’ve got Italian on the menu.”

“The lasagna’s good, I hear.”

“It is.” Gera sat. “But have you ever had bad lasagna?”

Nick smiled.

The waitress brought the coffee. “Anything for you?” she asked Gera.

“No, I’m fine, Hannah. Thank you.” She turned and left.

The man brought his weathered hands together and lowered his head. “So, I’m Vito.”

“Well, Vito, I’m interested in your place.”

“You ever done restaurants?

“Eaten in them. All my life.”

Well, most of my life...

The large man laughed. “It’s not for everybody.”

“It’s the sort of thing I’d like to do. Always have. A neighborhood place, you know. People can hang out here. Friendly. Socialize. And whatever happens to the economy, people still have to eat.”

“That’s all true. But hard work. Hard work.” Looking him over. “Though you don’t seem to be the sort of man who’s afraid of work.”

“No, I’m not. Now, I’ve gotten the deal sheet from my lawyer and I’ve looked it over. Seems good. And the asking price? I’ve got some money I inherited from my mother when she passed—”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. And I’m talking to a couple of banks. Now, we’re in the ballpark. About the price. A little horse trading and I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”

“Sure — you pay what I’m asking and it’s an agreement.” The man was sort-of joking, sort-of not. This was business.

Nick leaned back and said confidently, “Before we go any farther I have to tell you something.”

“Sure.”

“I’m an ex-con.”

Vito leaned forward and regarded Nick closely, as if he’d just said that he had plastic skin, take a look.

Nick kept his eyes on Vito’s and a sincere smile on his face. “The charges were armed robbery and assault. I didn’t do it. I’ve never done any crime. And I’m working to prove my innocence and I think I’ll be exonerated. Maybe I can show you that proof in a few days, maybe it’ll take a little longer. But I’m really hoping we can go forward with this anyway.”

“You didn’t do it.” Not a question. But an invitation to continue.

“No. I was trying to help somebody and I got caught up in the system.”

“You can’t get a liquor license. That’s a third of our income.”

“My lawyer’s working on a waiver with the city. He thinks it’ll go through. With an exoneration, there’s no problem.”

“I don’t know, Nick. This is a whole ’nother thing. I been here, I’ve been the owner for twenty years. Reputation, you know.”

“Sure. I understand.” Nick was sounding confident because he was confident. “But my lawyer says I can get a court to issue a pardon, complete vindication.”

“I’ve gotta sell soon, Nick.” Vito’s hands rose, palms up. “Have some issues. Health.” He looked across the room, populated by about thirty patrons. One man wanted his check. Gera called to a waiter and pointed it out.

“Help is the problem,” he said. “People come and go and don’t show up or’re rude to customers. They steal. You have to let them go. You’re like a father and schoolmaster, you know, headmaster, all the time. And they’ll try to rob you.”

“I’m sure. A business like any other. You got to be on top of it. I was thinking maybe I could hire you to be a consultant for a while.”

“I don’t know about that. The health thing. My wife and our daughter’re taking care of me. She’s moving back into the house. My older daughter. I’ll have to take it easy. There’re pros out there, you know. Consultants. Food industry consultants. They’re pricey but it’d be a good idea in your case.”

“I know. But think about it, Vito. I’d be happy to pay you. You wouldn’t even have to come in. I could come see you twice a week or something.”

“You seem like a nice guy, Nick. And you didn’t have to tell me about your past. Not like you’re applying to be a fry cook and I check out your references. We agree and you show up at the closing, all I care about is you have a check. But you were straight with me. I gotta tell you, though, I need to think about it.”

“I don’t expect anything else. And, Vito — the asking price?”

“Yeah?”

“I could go there.”

“You’re not much of horse trader.”

“I know something good when I see it. Okay, think about it. But a favor?”

“What’s that?”

Nick said, “Don’t sell it to anybody else without giving me a chance to pitch my case again. Just give me that chance.”

A close examination. “All right. I’ll let you know. Oh, and Nick?”

“Yeah, Vito?”

“I liked it you didn’t hit on Hannah. My younger daughter.” He nodded to the black-haired waitress in the tight uniform. “You scored points there. I’ll think about it, Nick, talk it over with my family. Let you know.”

The men shook hands. “Now, I got one other question, Vito.”

“Sure, son. What’s that?”

Nick leaned back and smiled.

Chapter 30

Idon’t know, Amie.”

Sachs poured some Twinings black tea and gave an inquiring glance to her mother.

They had returned from Rose’s X-ray and EKG appointment — everything was on track for the surgery in a few days — and were sitting in the sunny kitchen of Sachs’s Carroll Garden town house. Rose was living both here and in her own home, six blocks away. When the woman had appointments it was easier for her to stay here, since her doctor and the hospital where the bypass surgery would occur were nearby. And she’d recover here, after the operation.

“I don’t know about Nick.” Rose took the NYPD souvenir mug, containing the tea, and added a shot of half-and-half. Sachs was working on a half-empty Starbucks. Tepid, like Nick’s. She nuked it back to steaming and sat down across from Rose.

“Was a shock to me. Him showing up.” Sachs examined her mother, wearing a skirt and blouse, hose, a thin gold chain, as befit a thin neck. As always, she’d dressed up for her doctor’s appointment as if going to church. “I’m still not sure what to think.”

“How was it for him, inside the joint?” Rose could have a sense of humor. This had developed later in life.

“We haven’t talked about it. No reason to. We don’t have anything in common anymore. He’s like a stranger. I don’t talk to store clerks or somebody I meet on the street about personal things. Why would I talk to him?”

Sachs sensed she was explaining too much, and too quickly. Rose seemed to make this observation too.

“I just hope it works out for him,” Sachs said, ending the conversation. “I should get back to Lincoln’s. Never had a perp like this one.”

“He’s a domestic terrorist? That’s what the press is saying. And did you hear that story on MSNBC? People aren’t taking escalators or elevators. A man had a heart attack in an office building in Midtown, walking up ten flights. He didn’t trust the elevator.”

“No. I missed that. Did he die?”

“No.”

Another victim to rack up for Unsub 40.

She asked, “What do you want me to pick up for dinner? Wait, is Sally coming over?”

“Not tonight. She has bridge.”

“You want to go? I can run you over to her place.”

“No, not feeling like it.”

Sachs thought back to the time when her mother and father had been queen and king of a neighborhood bridge club. What a time that was... Cocktails flowed, half of the crowd smoked like a tire fire, and the play for the last few hands was laughably inept, thanks to outrageous strategies concocted in gin and rye hazes. (Sachs had relished those party nights; she could sneak out and hang with the other kids in the neighborhood and even go for a joyride or set up a drag race or two. Amelia Sachs had been, her own admission, a bad girl.)

The doorbell rang. Sachs walked to the door and looked out.

Well.

Eased the door open.

“Hi,” she said to Nick Carelli. Her voice must’ve sounded cautious. He smiled uncertainly.

“Took a chance and drove by. Saw your car.”

She eased back and he stepped into the hallway. He was in black jeans, a light-blue dress shirt and navy sport coat. This was dressing up for Nick Carelli. He was carrying a large shopping bag and she smelled garlic and onions.

“I can’t stay,” he said, handing the bag over. “I brought you and Rose lunch.”

“You didn’t call.”

“No. I wasn’t far away. At a restaurant.”

“Well.” Sachs looked down. “Thanks, but—”

“Best lasagna in the city.”

The “but” hadn’t referred to the food. She wasn’t sure what it was meant to aim at. She glanced down at the bag.

Nick lowered his voice. “I had a breakthrough last night. In the files you gave me. I found a lead. A guy I think can confirm I didn’t have anything to do with the ’jacking.”

“Really? It was in the files?” Treading water verbally here. His unexpected arrival had shaken her.

“Still need to do some digging. Like being a cop all over again.”

Then she frowned. “Nick, is he connected?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. But what I told you before. I’m using a buddy from school to get the particulars. He’s fine, he’s clean. Never any trouble with the law.”

“I’m glad, Nick.” Her face softened.

“Uhm, Ame... Amelia, look, is your mother here?”

A pause. “She is.”

“Can I say hi?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. I told you she hasn’t been feeling well.”

A voice from the hallway called, “I’m well enough to say hello, Amie.”

They turned to see the wiry figure in the hallway, backlit by the large bay windows against the far wall.

“Hello, Rose.”

“Nick.”

“Mom—”

“You brought lunch?”

“Just for you two. I can’t stay.”

“We’re not ladies who lunch,” Rose said slowly. And Sachs wondered if Rose was about to go on the assault. But her mother added, “We’re ladies who dine. We’ll save it for tonight.” Rose was looking at the logo on the bag. “Vittorio’s. I know it. Good place.”

“Lasagna, veal piccata, salad, garlic bread.”

Another glance at the heavy bag. “And, Nick, where are the five people coming to join us?”

He laughed. Sachs tried to.

“Come into the living room. I have the strength to converse but not to stand for very long.”

She turned.

Oh, brother. This is just plain strange. Sachs sighed and followed the other two into the living room. She diverted to the kitchen, refrigerated the food and debated getting Nick some coffee. But decided it would take too long to brew and then cool to his taste. She wanted this to be a brief visit. She returned and found Rose in her lounger, Nick on an ottoman in front of the couch, as if sitting on a backless piece of furniture testified to the temporary nature of his stay. Sachs stood for a moment and then pulled a chair from the dining table, set it near her mother and sat down. Upright, leaning forward slightly. She wondered what her California friend Kathryn Dance, an investigator with skills in body language analysis, would have about her posture and the messages it was telegraphing.

“Amie told me about your brother, you taking responsibility for the crime. Your trying to prove your innocence.”

Rose was never one to withhold any stories she’d been told. Sachs had often thought it was a good thing that her mother was largely ignorant of social media. She would have been the hub of a million rumors zipping through the Internet.

“That’s right. I found some leads. I hope they’ll pan out. Maybe not, but then I’ll still keep trying. Rose, Amelia told me you’d been staying with her off and on. That’s why I took the chance of coming by today, not just to play delivery boy. I wanted to apologize to you. Both of you.”

The woman’s eyes drilled into his. To Nick’s credit, he didn’t look away. Sachs believed he was the picture of calm, somebody at last getting something heavy and painful off his chest.

“It was the hardest thing I ever did, cutting things off with Amelia... and you. Not telling you the truth about Donnie. But I couldn’t risk word getting out that he’d been involved and I hadn’t. Amelia can give you the details, if you want them, but I know in my heart this guy Donnie got involved with, this guy who ran a crew — a gang—”

“I know what a crew is. My husband was a police officer all his life.”

“Sure. Sorry. Well, this guy? He would’ve killed Donnie if I hadn’t taken the fall. There was virtually no evidence against me. I was afraid if I told anybody what really happened, Internal Affairs or a prosecutor’d put two and two together and get the idea I was faking it. They wouldn’t have to look very far to find Donnie. He was...” Nick’s voice caught. He cleared his throat. “He was just a kid, who couldn’t take care of himself. Oblivious, you know. He stumbled into the whole mess and got caught up with some bad people.” Nick’s eyes seemed damp.

“He was a good boy,” Rose said slowly. “I didn’t realize he had problems.”

“He wanted to get straight, but... addiction’s tough. I should’ve done more. I got him into a few programs but I didn’t follow up the way I should have.”

Rose Sachs was never one to pat hands. There, there, you did the best you could. She simply nodded, her lips tight. Saying, in effect: Yes, Nick, you should have. Then you wouldn’t’ve gone to prison. And Donnie might still be alive. And you wouldn’t have broken my daughter’s heart.

“Rose, you might not want to have anything to do with me.” A wan smile, a glance at Amelia. “I imagine neither of you do. And I completely understand. I just wanted to tell you I had to make a decision and I chose my brother over Amelia and you and dozens of other people. I almost didn’t. I almost threw him to the wolves but I went the other way. I’m sorry.” He rose and extended his hand.

Slowly Rose took it and said, “Thank you, Nick. Apologies are very difficult for some people. Now, I’m feeling a little tired.”

“Sure. I’ll be going.”

Sachs walked him to the door.

“I know you didn’t expect this. Just something I had to do. Like Donnie? In the Twelve Steps? He had to make the rounds and say he was sorry.” A shrug. “Or he would have if he’d gotten that far.”

He gave her a spontaneous embrace. Brief. But she felt his hand trembling as it pressed against her neck — her upper spine, she reflected, exactly where Lincoln Rhyme’s vertebrae had been snapped. She stepped back. And for a moment debated asking him to tell her what he’d found — this mysterious lead. But she didn’t.

Not your issue, she reminded herself.

She closed the door behind him. Then returned to the living room.

“That was odd,” Rose said. “Speaking of the devil.”

The daughter wondered about the mother’s choice of word. Sachs re-nuked her coffee, sipped and threw out the cardboard cup.

“I don’t know.” The older woman shook her head.

“I believe him, Mom. He’s not going to lie to me.”

“Oh, I think I believe him too. I think he’s innocent. That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what is it?”

“Nick’s decided he made a mistake back then. You should have come first.”

“He’s making amends, sure. Why is that a problem?”

“Why did he contact you for help?”

A leading question. Sachs hadn’t told her that he’d done that. Nor had she shared with her mother that she’d engaged in the legal, but morally murky, effort to download and give him his case files. She’d told her only that he claimed he was innocent, that Sachs believed him and that he was working to prove it.

“Isn’t there a procedure — lawyers, review boards — for vindicating yourself?”

Sachs addressed what her mother was really asking: “Mom. Nick’ll get on with his life. I’ll get on with mine. That’s the end of it. I probably won’t ever see him again.”

Rose Sachs smiled. “I see. Could I please have some more tea?”

Sachs stepped into the kitchen and returned a moment later with a fresh mug. Just as she handed it to her mother, her phone hummed. She pulled it from her pocket, regarded caller ID and answered, “Rhyme.”

“We have a positive hit, Sachs. Real time. Unsub Forty’s in Times Square. Maybe going after a target right now. Get moving. I’ll tell you more on the way.”

Chapter 31

Sachs was speeding toward Times Square. In Manhattan on the FDR expressway, racing north.

The traffic wasn’t terrible... but the drivers were.

They wove; her Torino wove. The consequences of an error in this mutual ballet would have been steel on steel at a speed differential of about forty miles per hour. Potentially bloody and fracturing, if not fatal.

A phone call. She hit the speaker button. “Go ahead.”

“Here’s what we’ve got, Sachs. Are you there? What was that? That noise?”

“Downshift.”

The sound had been like a jet engine reversing on landing.

Lincoln Rhyme continued, “Here’s what we’ve got. Was looking over the trace. You found makeup at one of the scenes. We isolated the brand. StarBlend theatrical makeup. And geologic soil from Connecticut, Long Island, Harlem and New Jersey, all from two of the unsub’s footprints. Diesel fuel. Soda in cups and cheap wine or champagne.”

“Tourists in the Theater District: buses from out of town and intermission drinks!”

“Ex-actly. Either he lives or works in Times Square, likes plays... or was planning another attack there when he picked up the trace.”

“What’s the hit?”

“As soon as Archer and I figured that out—”

“Archer?”

“Juliette. The intern.”

“Oh.” The wheelchair woman with the beautiful eyes — and God-given nails. Referring to her by last name had confused Sachs.

Traffic cleared and she was cruising again.

“As soon as we figured out it was the Theater District I called COC.”

In the Community Observation Center of the NYPD, based in a cavernous, windowless room at One PP, dozens of officers scanned monitors fed by two hundred thousand CCTVs around the city. There were too many screens to monitor the entire city for a suspect, and algorithms weren’t helpful when you had no facial recognition points on your unsub — just “tall and skinny and probably wearing a baseball cap and carrying a backpack.”

But, Rhyme explained, with the evidence pointing to a fairly small area, highly concentrated with security cameras, an officer had focused on the Times Square district and spotted someone who profiled as Unsub 40 ten minutes ago.

“Where exactly?”

“Broadway and Forty-Two, going north. They lost him in a store at Four-Five Street, west. May have gone out the back entrance. Cameras’re sporadic west of Broadway. Haven’t picked him up again.”

Sachs skidded around a gas tanker changing lanes unexpectedly and righted the Torino. O-kayyy. The adrenaline bled out.

Rhyme was continuing, “Mel called Midtown North. Half-dozen bodies are on their way to the intersection. ESU too.” Rhyme was unable to deploy troops, but Mel Cooper, a detective, had the authority to do so, even if his specialty was forensic science. “And Pulaski’s on his way to Twelve and Forty-Four with a team.”

The MTN team would sweep west with Sachs; Ron Pulaski’s would head east, a pincer movement.

“From the evidence — any other idea where he might be headed? Specifically?”

No response.

He was talking to somebody else. Probably Cooper.

No, Sachs heard a woman’s voice. Juliette Archer.

Then there was a pause.

Sachs asked, “Rhyme?”

“What?”

“I was asking, anything from the evidence to narrow down where he is or where he’s headed?”

“Some things we haven’t been able to place. The broken glass, the glazing compound. Paper towels. That could be from anywhere. The humus is from Queens, or originated in Queens.” She wondered about the emphasis on the word. He continued, “We’ve got fertilizer and herbicides, too, but you don’t see rolling pastures on Broadway in Midtown. I don’t mind speculating but I’m not guessing. No, we’ll have to leave it up to a manhunt at this point.”

“Keep looking,” she said. “I’ll call you when I’m on scene.”

Sachs disconnected before he could respond and then veered off the highway and sped west onto surface streets.

Intersections... damn intersections.

Slamming down clutch and brake, squinting against the blue flashing light on the dash.

Sachs would hit the horn with one hand, downshift with the other, then grab the wheel rim again with both.

Clear right, clear left. Go! Go!

This process repeated a half-dozen times and only twice did the frantic Manhattan traffic drive her onto the curb, though three times or possibly four she came within inches of defendering a car gridlocked in her path.

Forty miles per hour wasn’t racing, not to Amelia Sachs, though it seemed so as she made her way, as best she could, through central Manhattan.

Interesting, she reflected as she hit a clear stretch. Unsub 40 was hanging out in her father’s beat. Herman Sachs had walked the streets of Times Square for years, concentrating mostly on the Deuce, 42nd Street, long before it morphed into the Disney theme park it was today. Fact was, Sachs missed the hood’s porn, skin-game, honky-tonk days, as she suspected her father would have too.

Her mobile buzzed.

Manual transmission, phone? She chose the Samsung over fourth gear and let the transmission complain. “Sachs.”

“Amelia. It’s Bobby Killow. Patrol. MTN. Captain Rhyme gave me your number. About your unsub.”

“I remember you, Bobby.”

Killow had been a cherubic, energetic young patrol officer in Midtown North whom she’d worked with occasionally back in her pre-detective days. He was probably much the same now, though the “young” wouldn’t apply as seamlessly. “What’ve you got?”

“I’m on Four-Six, been canvassing. A few people think they’ve seen him here. Last five minutes.”

Piercing the heart of the Theater District, 46th Street ran from river to river.

“Where exactly?”

“Few doors west of Broadway. Ducked into a souvenir store. Was looking suspicious, the wit said. Staring out the windows, like he was thinking he was being tailed. The clerk’s words. When it seemed safe or clear or something — the clerk again — he stepped outside and vanished west.”

“I... well.”

“What was that?”

That had been a scooter driver, as oblivious as those in Rome, zipping out into her lane to see who would win the contest between a Ford Torino and a tinny Vespa knockoff.

Sachs had controlled the skid rather well, though she nearly ended up under a garbage truck. Then, tires spinning, on the way again.

“Bobby, descrip of the perp?”

“Dark-blue or black windbreaker, no logo, jeans, baseball cap in red or green — that’s witnesses for you. Dark backpack.”

“K. I’m there in five.”

In fact, it took her three. She skidded to a stop at Broadway and 46th beside three Midtown North cruisers. Nodded to Bobby Killow. Yep, angelic as ever. She knew several of the octet of officers standing nearby too and greeted them.

Already the vultures were gathering: the tourists with mobile phones shooting away.

Hum of hers. Ron Pulaski was calling.

“’Lo, Ron. Where are you? In position?”

“Right, Amelia.” The young officer explained he was with a team of four patrol and six Emergency Service officers. They were at 46th Street, near the Hudson River.

“We’re at Broadway. Sweep east, toward us. We’ll move west.” She gave the description of the suspect and added that it was possible he lived or worked here. If so, his unique appearance meant neighbors or shopkeepers or waiters would most likely recognize him.

“If he’s here because he was stalking a victim, well, that’s something else. We’ll just hope we can stumble over him before it’s too late.”

They disconnected and Sachs briefed the officers in front of her. She explained that they couldn’t be sure who the unsub’s target was, other than someone using or near an “embedded” product, which he would sabotage from his smartphone or tablet.

Sachs continued, “We don’t know if he’s got a firearm. But he’s used a hammer in the past.”

“He’s the escalator killer, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What other kinds of products would he be targeting?”

She told them about Abe Benkoff’s stove. And recalled the lengthy list of products Todd Williams had downloaded for him, those with DataWise5000s in their hearts. “Could be appliances, water heaters, kitchen things, heavy equipment, tools, maybe vehicles. Medical equipment too. But he’s going for showy, to get attention. If you see something that could take off an arm or scald or crush you to death, assume it’s got a controller in it and our unsub’s about to push the button.”

“Jesus,” one of the officers whispered. “Your wife and kids’re in the kitchen baking cookies? And the stove could blow up?”

“That’s it. Let’s get started.”

As they began to sweep west, one officer muttered, “Wonder why he picked this area.”

The answer was obvious to Sachs. Here were hundreds of stores, restaurants and entertainment venues, all presided over by towering high-definition video billboards, bullying or enticing passersby and tourists to spend, spend, spend...

For anyone whose agenda was assaulting consumerism, Times Square was the best hunting ground in the world.

Chapter 32

Canvassing.

The officers with Sachs divided into two teams, each taking a different side of the street, and were moving west.

Nothing fancy about the technique, simply asking if anyone had seen a tall thin man in a baseball cap, dark jacket and jeans, carrying a backpack. Their progress was slow. The sidewalk dense with pedestrians and vendors.

And, of course, they were watching their backs.

On the lookout for anything that might turn on them. Could he rig this car’s engine to explode or catch fire? Could he command that garbage truck to lurch forward? What about the city infrastructure — a million volts and tons of superheated steam coursed inches below their feet.

Products were everywhere.

Distracting.

Sachs herself had no hits but one of the officers radioed and said he’d had a maybe — about ten minutes earlier a man fitting the unsub’s description had been standing at the edge of the sidewalk, looking down at his tablet. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. He’d done nothing other than that; the witness — the owner of a Theater District souvenir shop — had noted him simply because of his unusual appearance.

“Any idea where he went?”

“No, ma’am,” the officer said.

Looking around in frustration.

“Maybe that’s a target zone. Assemble there.”

In a few minutes, they’d gathered where the unsub had been spotted and continued searching. No one else had seen him. So they continued their progress west. Slowly. Looking in restaurants, shops, cars and trucks, theaters — front and stage doors. Nothing.

Ron Pulaski called from the west end of 46th Street and reported no sightings. He and his officers were continuing east. The two search teams were about a half mile from each other now.

Moving closer to Eighth Avenue, Sachs could see a theater and across from that a large construction site. An irritating noise shot toward them on the wind — a power tool’s whine. As she approached, it grew very loud, a shriek that stung her ears. She’d thought the sound was coming from the jobsite — a high-rise. There were dozens of workers welding and hammering the steel skeleton into place. But curiously, no, the sound was coming through two large open doors. It was the backstage area of a theater, a workshop where a carpenter was cutting wood, presumably to assemble a set for an upcoming play. Thank goodness the workman was wearing earmuffs — the sort that she wore when she went shooting. The huge scream of the circular saw could ruin unprotected eardrums. When the worker stopped cutting, she or one of the search team would ask if he’d spotted the suspect.

For the moment, though, Sachs and the officers with her walked through the gap in the six-foot plywood fence surrounding the construction site. The building going up was a thirty- or forty-story-high structure. Much of the steelwork and rough flooring had been done but few walls were in. The ground was typically congested with heavy equipment and stations for tools and supplies. Making her way farther inside, Sachs asked a scrawny worker, an unlit cigarette in his mouth, for the manager or foreman. He ambled off.

A moment later a big man in a hard hat waddled up. He was obviously displeased.

“Hello,” she said, nodding to the worker, who exuded an air of seniority. She showed her badge.

Rather than responding to her, he frowned and turned to another, younger worker, not the one who’d fetched him. “You call ’em? I didn’t say call ’em yet.”

“I didn’t call nobody, Boss.”

“Who called?” the man — Boss — shouted, looking over workers nearby and scratching his large belly, encased within a seriously stressed plaid shirt. Hairs protruded from the gaps between buttons.

Sachs could make a reasonable deduction. “Someone was going to call the police?”

“Yeah but,” he said, looking around for a culprit.

His assistant said to Sachs, as he nodded to Boss, “Iggy, he’s Iggy, wanted to make sure there was a reason, you know. Not a false alarm. The company don’t like cops, sorry, like officers on a jobsite. Looks bad, you know.”

“What did you think the problem was? Why would anybody have called?”

Iggy was mentally back with them now. “Trespass. Looks like some guy snuck in. We aren’t sure. Just wanted to check. Before we called. We woulda. Just, we wanted to check. Didn’t want to waste nobody’s time.”

“Was he very tall, very thin? In a dark windbreaker and jeans? Baseball cap?”

“Dunno. You looking for him? Why?”

With edgy impatience, Sachs said, “Could you find out if that’s who it was?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Yeah, you guess it was him. Or yeah you guess you can find out.”

“Uh-huh.”

Sachs stared. “This man is wanted in connection with a homicide, Iggy. Could you...?” A gesture with her open palm, impatient.

Iggy shouted, “Yo, Cly!”

Another worker walked up, hiding a cigarette behind his back. This one was lit.

“Yeah?”

“That asshole you saw walking around?”

Sachs repeated the description.

“That’s him.” His eyes swiveled momentarily to his boss. He was sheepish. “I didn’t call, Iggy. You didn’t want nobody to call. I didn’t call.”

Shit. Sachs pulled her radio off her belt and summoned her team and Pulaski’s to the site ASAP.

“Any idea where he went?” she asked Cly.

“Coulda been up. He was near the west elevator.” Gesturing at the soaring steelwork of the building.

“Are there people there to spot him?” Sachs asked. She couldn’t see any workers from the ground.

“We’re doing the ironwork,” the foreman said, meaning, she supposed, obviously there’d be people there.

“Call them and find out if he’s been spotted.”

Iggy ordered his second- or third-in-command to do so. The man hopped to the task, making calls on his walkie-talkie.

Sachs asked the foreman, “How else could he have gotten out of the site?” The walls were eight-foot plywood, topped with razor wire.

Iggy rubbed his hard hat as if scratching his head. “Entrances on Forty-Seventh. Or here, but this one, the main one, probably he would’ve been spotted. And nobody did or they woulda told me.”

She sent two officers in the direction of the 47th Street entrance. And said to Boss Iggy, “Oh, and tell your men not to use the elevators.”

“They can’t walk down—”

“He could have sabotaged them.”

His eyes went wide. “Jesus. For real?”

Iggy’s adjutant ended a transmission and said, “He mighta been up there, one of the lower floors. Tall guy. Nobody was sure he was working for a sub or whatever.”

This seemed like the most likely target. The elevator cars were flimsy and mounted on the outside of a scaffolding track. It wouldn’t take much, she guessed, for a DataWise controller to shut down the automatic brakes. Workers would slam to the ground at a hundred miles an hour.

Iggy called out, “Freeze the elevators. All of them. And tell the guys up there not to use them until they’ve been checked.”

Good. That would... But then Sachs reflected: Wait. No. Hell, what am I thinking of? No, no, got it wrong. Of course! Remember his MO. He’s not going to be sabotaging the jobsite; he’s here so he can watch where he’s going to attack. He needs the high-rise as a vantage point. Just like he wasn’t in Benkoff’s apartment; he was across the street to watch the victim. Just like he was in the Starbucks so he could watch the escalator when the access panel opened to swallow up Greg Frommer.

So. What could he see from the iron skeleton here?

Then Sachs was aware of silence.

The screaming table saw in the workshop of the theater across the street had stopped. Sachs turned and hurried to the opening in the fence surrounding the construction site. From there she could see that the carpenter in the set-building workshop was gripping the mean-looking blade with one hand and wielding a socket wrench with another. The saw looked new, state-of-the-art.

And it was surely embedded with a DataWise5000.

He was his target! Unsub 40 was waiting till the man had shut the saw off and was changing the blade and then — though the carpenter thought it was safe — the unit would come to life and sever his hand or send the unmounted blade spinning through his belly or groin, maybe into the street to hit passersby.

Sachs sprinted across the street, halting traffic with her palm, yelling toward the open theater doors, “Get back from the saw! Get back! It’s going to start up!”

But he couldn’t hear through the protective earmuffs.

Sachs arrived at the doorway of the workshop. “Stop!” No response.

The saw and the unsub’s victim were still forty feet away. She then noted that the power cord to the saw extended from a fixture in the wall right next to her, a few feet away. There was, however, no plug. The cable disappeared into the wall.

No time. The unsub, somewhere high on the construction site, would have seen her and would be hacking into the saw’s controller right now, to turn on the blade and slice away the hand of the oblivious carpenter. To her right was a workbench filled with hand tools, including a large pair of bolt cutters. The handle was wood — a good insulator, right? She wasn’t sure when it came to 220 volts, which was what the saw undoubtedly used.

But no choice.

She yanked the tool off the rack, fitted the sharp teeth on either side of the power cable and pressed the handles together, closing her eyes as the sparks fired into the air around her.

Chapter 33

Moving as fast as I can, through the crowded sidewalks, putting distance between me and the theater and those who wanted to stop me, put me in jail, take me away from Alicia. Away from my brother. From my miniatures.

Shoppers! Goddamn Shoppers.

And Red, of course.

The worst Shopper of all. I so regret giving her the benefit of the doubt. I hate her, hate her, hate her now.

I was, though, I must confess, not surprised, not totally surprised, to see her in the construction site as I stood on the third floor and scanned the kill zone — the workshop behind the theater.

Still: How? How did she guess about the attack at the theater?

Not a guess, of course.

Police are smart nowadays. All that scientific equipment. DNA and fingerprints and everything. Maybe they’d found some evidence I left somewhere, evidence from when I’d been here before, preparing for the attack today. Or maybe I got spotted. Distinctive appearance, one could say. Slim Jim. Sack of bones...

Hell.

Moving west now, head down, slouching away some of my height.

Keep on the disguise? I wonder. I stole a hard hat and Carhartt jacket in the jobsite before I climbed to the third floor to get to business. Don’t know if anybody saw Vernon the ironworker. But I decide: better to dump the outfit soon. Maybe a restroom in the subway. No — there’d be security cameras in the stations. The police would be watching them diligently. Go to Macy’s, a restroom there, and shove them into a wastebasket.

A new jacket. Hat of course. A fedora again maybe, hipster. My tight crew cut, blond, is pretty distinctive.

I’ll get back to the Toy Room as soon as I can. The womb. The zipping, colorful fish. I need comfort. Have Alicia come over. If I tell her to come over, she’ll come over.

It’s me, Vernon?

Looking behind. Nobody following. I—

Uh.

A pain in my side. I’ve collided with someone. Panic, at first, thinking it’s a cop, cuffs out, about to arrest me. But no. A well-built, handsome man — outfit crying Weekend Businessman — was stepping out of a Starbucks and talking into his Bluetooth earpiece.

He rages at me: “Jesus, you skinny fuck. Watch where you’re going.”

I can only stare at his face. Red with anger. “Apoplectic” is the word that blossoms in my head.

Handsome, he’s handsome. Small nose, nice brows, solid physique. He holds his precious Starbucks toward, not like a toast but like a gun about to fire. “You’d spilled this on me, it would’ve cost you big time, you Walking Dead asshole. This shirt cost more’n you make in a month. I’m a lawyer.” Then talking into his phone as he walked away. “Sorry, honey. Some skinny freak, AIDS patient, thinking he owns the sidewalk. I’m on my way home now. There in twenty.”

My heart is racing as it always does after an encounter with a Shopper. He’s ruined my day, ruined my week.

I want to scream, want to cry.

I don’t bother with the Macy’s restroom plan. Strip off the Carhartt, the hard hat. Toss into a bin. The flesh-colored cotton gloves too. Put the St. Louis cap back on. No, pick another, I tell myself. And fish in my backpack for a basic Nike black. On it goes.

Want to scream, want to cry...

But, eventually, those feelings go away, as they usually do, leaving in their place another desire.

To hurt. To hurt oh so badly.

The sparks had not been that impressive.

A quarter-inch flash of orange, accompanied by a modest puff of smoke. Had it been a scene in a movie the director surely would have called cut or redo or whatever they say and summoned the special effects pyrotechnician to multiply the cascade times ten.

What did happen, though, was the circuit breaker popped and the workshop, if not the entire theater, went dark. She herself didn’t get shocked or receive a single burn from a spark.

Sachs had then held up her shield and motioned the carpenter, who’d turned and was staring at her in dismay, out of the open doorway. The unsub was still unaccounted for. He pulled off the muffs and started asking questions. She held up a wait-a-minute finger and looked around the workshop carefully. Sachs reminded herself that she’d deduced the theater was probably, but not necessarily, the attack site so she directed the other officers in the search teams to continue the sweep along the street here, particularly in the construction site, where at least they knew he’d been.

A few minutes later her phone hummed. It was Killow, her rotund, good-natured patrolman friend. “Amelia. I’m in the jobsite. The foreman’s assistant found some workers who spotted our boy. He was here — third floor. South side. Somebody saw him leaving. K.”

Third floor, south side. A perfect view of the carpenter and the saw.

“Got it. Going where?”

“Hold on.” A moment later he came back on. “Four-Seven Street. Wearing brown Carhartt jacket and hard hat. Still canvassing. K.”

“Roger that. Keep me—”

Ron Pulaski’s voice sliced through the airwaves. “Sighting. Somebody spotted him on the corner, Four-Eight and Nine, headed north. We’re in pursuit. Nothing further. K.”

“Keep on him, Ron. He’ll’ve dumped the Carhartt and hard hat. I’m sure. Look for tall, look for skinny. He’ll have the backpack — it’s got his hammer or other weapons and whatever he controls the DataWise with. A phone or tablet.”

“Got it, Amelia. Sure. K.”

Hell. They’d been so goddamn close. So close. She felt her teeth grinding like millstones and found her left index finger probing her left thumb’s cuticle. She felt pain, told herself to stop. She didn’t stop. Damn nervous habits.

The carpenter disappeared downstairs. The lights in the theater came back on. And the man returned. She learned his name was Joe Heady. She asked if he’d seen anybody in or near the theater resembling the unsub.

He thought for a moment. Then: “No, never, ma’am. What’s this all about?”

“There’s a killer, somebody who’s using products to kill people. He’s sabotaged an escalator—”

“That story on TV?” asked the carpenter.

“That’s right. A stove too. Caused a gas leak and then ignited it.”

“Right. I heard about that. Oh, man.”

“He’s found a way to hack into smart controllers and take over the product. He was in the construction site, looking down at you. He was going to turn the saw back on while you were holding it, I think.”

Heady closed his eyes briefly. “That thing had started and my hand was on the blade? Jesus. Two thousand RPM. It cuts through wood like butter. I’d’ve lost the limb. Probably bled to death. This’s all very fucked up, pardon my French.”

“Sure is,” said Sachs.

As she was jotting notes, her phone rang once more. It was Pulaski. She said to Heady, “Excuse me, have to take this.” He nodded and walked to the kitchen area of the workshop. She watched him set a packet of instant Starbucks coffee on the counter and heat a mug of water in the microwave. His hands quivered as he performed these simple tasks. She could hardly blame him.

Pulaski said, “Lost him, Amelia. We’ve expanded the search up to Five-Two and down to Three-Four. Not a bite so far.”

She sighed. “Keep me posted.”

“Sure, Amelia. K.”

She disconnected and Heady turned to her. “But why me? I mean, is it a labor thing? I was in the Auto Workers, Detroit, for years and I’m union here. But nobody busts unions anymore.”

“It’s not you personally. He’s a kind of domestic terrorist. He’s injuring people who own or’re using fancy products to make a statement. He says we’re too reliant on them, spending too much money. That’s his message. Here? Who knows? Maybe all the self-indulgence of entertainment in Times Square.” She gave a faint smile. “Maybe price of Broadway tickets.”

“Did I say fucked up?” Heady looked at the timer of the microwave counting down. He turned back to Sachs.

“One thing?”

“Yes?”

He glanced at the saw. “You said he hacked into this controller or something?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, the thing is, with the saw, there’s just an on/off switch. You can’t operate it remotely.”

“But you can upload data for diagnostics, right?”

“No. There’s a chip in it to remember cutting specs. That’s all.”

The microwave dinged and Heady walked toward it, reaching for the door lever.

Sachs frowned.

No!

As he opened the microwave’s door, she dove forward and tackled him hard. They tumbled to the workshop’s concrete floor as the ceramic cup inside the microwave exploded, sending a hundred pieces of shrapnel flying outward amid a searing cloud of steam.

Chapter 34

You all right, man?” Freddy Caruthers was asking.

Nick returned to the couch after letting the little guy inside. Looking particularly toady at the moment.

Judge Judy was on the screen. Nick said, “Wouldn’t think I’d watch this, right? But I’m loving all the shows. Discovery Channel, A and E. I went in, there were fifty channels. Now, seven hundred.”

“Only ten’re any good. ESPN and HBO. All I watch. Big Bang Theory too. It’s funny.”

Nick shook his head. “Don’t know it.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“Answer you?”

“You all right?”

“Good days, shitty days. Everything in between. This’s a less-shitty-than-others one.”

“That’d be a good self-help book. The Less-Shitty-Day-Than-Others Guide to Life.”

Nick laughed hard. And let the subject go. He didn’t explain that the shittiest days were the ones when he couldn’t let go of the fact that life screwed him over; none of the shit that happened was his fault. Unfair. That was something he’d talked to the prison therapist about a lot. Dr. Sharana. “Life’s unfair.”

“Yeah, it can be. Let’s talk about how you can deal with it, though.”

He now explained to Freddy, “You never did time. It, what it does, is it resets you. Like you’ve got a clock in your gut or brain or somewhere and it turns a dial and life stops moving. Then you get out and, man, it’s chaos. The traffic, the people moving.” He nodded. “Just the TV programs. All those channels, I was saying. Everything. It can be too much. Like a mixture that’s too rich in the carb.”

But this gave him a moment’s pause, since it put in mind Amelia Sachs, who was an expert at setting carburetors and getting even the most troublesome choke to do what she wanted.

“A book I read when I was a kid,” Freddy was saying.

“A book?”

“When I was a kid. Stranger in a Strange Land. This alien comes to earth. Not like he’s invading or anything, shooting people with a ray gun. It wasn’t that kind of story. Anyway, this alien, he could change his sense of time. You go to the dentist, you speed things up and the visit goes by in seconds. You’re making love, you slow it down.” Freddy laughed. “I could use that, slow things down, I’m saying. Sometimes.”

“That was in the book?”

“Not the dentist or the sex. It was a classy book. Science fiction but classy.”

“Stranger—”

“—in a Strange Land.”

Nick liked the concept. “That’s just what it’s like, yeah. Everything speeding up now I’m out. Get freaked some. I read a lot inside. But never heard of that one. I’ll read it. Want a beer?”

Freddy was looking around the room. Nick had kept it as organized as his cell. Clean. Polished. Ordered. It was about as sparse as the cell too. He was going to borrow a car and go to Ikea. Inside, he’d dreamed about shopping there. Then Freddy glanced at his watch. “We should leave soon. But sure, one beer.” And he looked relieved that it seemed the serious conversation was on hold.

Nick got a couple of bottles of Budweiser. He church-keyed them, sat down and handed one over.

“You have booze inside?” Freddy asked.

“You could get ’shine. Expensive. Bad, real bad. Probably poison.”

“They call it moonshine?” Freddy asked. This seemed to tickle him.

“They did where I was. Most cons went for Oxy or Perc. Easy to smuggle in. Or just buy from a guard.”

“Stay away from them both.”

“I hear that. Got beat up once, some bullshit thing. Really hurt, broke a finger. Med center doc said he could get me a couple of pills. I said no. He was surprised. I think he wanted me to pay him.”

Judge Judy was harping about something. Nick shut the show off. “So who is this guy can help me out?” he asked.

“Name’s Stan Von. I don’t know him good. But he’s vouched for.”

“Von. What is he, German?”

Thinking of Amelia again.

“I don’t know. Maybe Jewish. Could still be German. Don’t know.”

“Where’re we meeting him?”

“Bay Ridge.”

“He’s got the names? J and Nanci?”

“I don’t know for sure. But he said what he’s got’ll point you in the right direction.”

“He’s not warranted, right?”

“Nope. I checked.”

“I can’t see him if he is.”

Freddy reassured, “He’s clean.”

“And no weapons.”

“I told him. Absolutely.”

Nick remembered life in prison and he remembered life on the streets. “So what’s he want out of this?”

“A meal.”

“A... Is that like code or something?” Thinking: “M” for a thousand bucks. Or “M” for megabytes, as in a shitload of money.

Freddy shrugged. “Dinner is what it means.”

“That’s all?” Nick was surprised. “I was thinking five bills.”

“No, I’ve done his boss some favors. So, no cash involved. Anyway, some guys, doing something for somebody, they just want a meal. It’s more, I don’t know, intimate or something.” Nick shot him a look and Freddy chuckled. “No, not that kind of intimate. I just mean it’s more like a good thing they’re doing.” The amphibian guy chugged the last suds of his beer. “Or, who knows, maybe he’s just hungry.”

“It’s not bad. A bit of burn. I was under the line of fire.”

In Rhyme’s parlor, Sachs was responding to Rhyme’s question about her condition.

She displayed her left arm, where the steam from the microwave had kissed the skin, which was now slightly reddish. For the treatment — ointment, it seemed — she’d removed her blue-stone ring. She now remembered it, fished the jewelry from her pocket and reseated it gingerly. Flexed her fingers. And nodded. “Fine.” The bandage on her forearm was modest.

“So what happened?” Sachs asked. The question was directed toward Juliette Archer, who had, by voice command, just disconnected a phone call. They knew, of course, that the unsub had turned the microwave power way up but neither Rhyme nor Sachs had guessed how that could create a virtual bomb.

The intern replied, “The consumer products specialist at the microwave manufacturer.” Nodding at the phone. “He said it looks like our unsub used the DataWise to override the control panel and up the power exponentially. He said it would be a lot — probably by forty or fifty times. Whatever he was making, tea or coffee, was superheated. When he opened the door, the air was a lot colder and it vaporized the liquid inside and the moisture in the porcelain mug itself — all ceramic absorbs liquids to some extent. The mug exploded like a hand grenade.”

Archer nodded to the screen. “Even with microwaves that haven’t been tampered with you get the same effect, if you overheat something. But that takes time. Our unsub? He basically caused fifteen minutes of high-power radiation to happen in about sixty seconds.”

Rhyme had no idea such a ubiquitous device could be so dangerous.

Sachs’s phone hummed and she read a text. “He’s published another message.” A few keystrokes and an email appeared on the high-def monitor near them.

Nothing to be drawn from the message, other than he was continuing to front he was more ignorant than he actually was, Rhyme concluded.

Yee...

Nothing that is, except the substance of the rant: that more attacks were planned.

Mel Cooper said, “An exploding microwave... That’s going to get attention.”

It already was.

Since the first story appeared, written up by the reporter Sachs had spoken to, a flurry of coat-tail articles and broadcast news stories had appeared, looking at the danger of Internet of Things products. A number of writers and talking heads speculated that sales of smart appliances and equipment would soon be slumping, returns rising, and people simply not using products that might turn on them.

Rhyme, Sachs and the team were perhaps protecting some potential targets but Unsub 40 was also winning battles in his war against consumerism.

Sachs and Rhyme had had a follow-up conversation with Vinay Chaudhary, of CIR Micro, and he told them that every one of its customers had again received the security patch that would stop anyone’s hacking into the network and taking control of the embedded product. The chief executive himself had personally sent a memo or called to remind them of the importance of updating.

In addition he was ordering that the code of all of his future products be modified to provide for automatic updates from CIR’s own server.

“What else do we have?” Rhyme asked, gazing at the evidence bags Sachs had brought from the Times Square scene.

“A rich contact site,” she told him. Referring to the place where their unsub had escaped from the jobsite, after reprogramming the microwave. This had been on the opposite side of the site, on 47th Street, where he’d had to use a crowbar to break through a padlock and chain. In crime scene work a rich contact is anywhere the perp engages in multiple or time-consuming activities, or those that involve hands-on efforts, which result in the shedding of more evidence than in a casual or brief encounter. A victim or police officer, for instance, wrestling with a perp, an unsub dismembering a body (it takes time and effort) or an escapee breaking through a well-protected door or window.

“Friction ridges?”

“A hundred,” Sachs said, but she’d already sent them through IAFIS. She’d gotten back a few hits but the prints belonged to individuals arrested for minor violations long ago — workers employed by the construction company or delivery people.

“Footprints?”

“Yes. One matches his. We got a bit of trace from the treads.”

“What was it?” Rhyme wheeled closer to Mel Cooper, who was on the optical microscope. A low magnification. One mistake Rhyme had found was common among newbies in crime labs: cranking the ’scope to 100 power. That kind of voyeurism generally got you nowhere. Examining a bit of trace at 5X or, at most, 10X was all you needed. If you wanted a more micro view there was always the scanning electron microscope.

Looking at the screen, Cooper said, “More sawdust.”

Sachs: “I got it at the jobsite, where he was standing, but it’s different from the rough-cut particles indigenous to the site. It’s much finer. Very similar to the mahogany at the earlier scene. Sanded again. Different wood, though.”

Rhyme looked it over. “Walnut, I’d guess. No, I’m sure. Cellular structure and color temperature. Five thousand Kelvin.”

Cooper agreed.

Archer asked Sachs, “Did you search the workshop at the theater?”

“No.”

Rhyme observed that Sachs glanced at her closely, eyes settling briefly on the gold Celtic bracelet encircling her left wrist, strapped to the armrest of the Storm Arrow wheelchair. Sachs’s gaze returned to the evidence chart.

A pause. Archer said, “He might’ve gone inside there to check out the brand of microwave before the attack. We know he was in the Theater District earlier.”

“I didn’t need to search it.” Sachs, studying the bits of sawdust, answered absently.

Archer looked from Sachs to Rhyme. “Don’t you think...” she began, implicitly questioning Sachs’s decision.

The detective replied, “The workshop has a two-day-looping security video. Lot of souvenir thieves in theaters in New York. I had the security company review it. The perp wasn’t inside on any of the existing tape... and the floors’re mopped every night.”

“Oh. I—”

Sachs said, “It was a reasonable question. And in a perfect world with unlimited resources I would have searched it. You play the odds.”

Rhyme would probably have had someone search the scene. But Sachs was right about resources. Besides, he wasn’t taking one woman’s side against the other.

Rhyme: “Mel? What else?”

Cooper found more trace and examined it. “More glass splinters, probably from the same batch as before, and more glazing compound.”

“What’s that? In that bag?” A tiny plastic one.

“A fleck of something...”

“Let me see.”

Cooper mounted it and projected the image onto the screen. It looked like a tiny opaque fish scale. A piece of the mahogany sawdust was stuck to it. Cooper said, “I can GC it. But there’s not enough to preserve for court.”

Rhyme said, “We’ll have plenty of evidence to make a case against him. But we have to find him first.” A nod toward Mel. “Burn it.”

Cooper ran the sample through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. A few moments later he scanned the computer screen. “Ammonium rhodanide and dicyandiamide, urea, collagen.”

Rhyme said, “Glue of some sort. I’ll bet used in woodworking.”

“That’s it,” Cooper said, after running the quantities of the found substances through a database. “Bond-Strong liquid hide glue. Mostly for musical instruments but woodworkers in any field use it.”

Archer leaned forward, stony-faced, staring at the evidence bags. “Instrument making? What do we think?”

Rhyme was doubtful. “That’s a rare hobby or profession. And if so he’d probably be a musician too. But we haven’t found any other trace that suggests that. No resin from strings, no horsehair from violin or cello bows — they shed hairs abundantly, by the way. No tuning gear lubricants. No felt from bridges. No callus skin cells sloughed off — from fretboard or fingerboard use.”

“You’re a musician, Lincoln?” Archer asked. “I mean, were a musician?”

“Never touched an instrument.”

“How do you know all that?”

“It ways to know the tools of the trade of potential perps and potential victims. Minimize the time you need to look up sources. It might make the difference between collaring the unsub and attending his next crime scene. So I’m leaning in favor of furniture making or fine carpentry. But: hobby or profession? Don’t know. And what exactly does he make with his varnish and glue and sandpaper and exotic woods? Keep going, Mel.”

“A bit of vegetation,” he called. “Stem or a leaf.”

Rhyme looked it over. He laughed. “Then sometimes, Archer, despite all your diligent homework, you don’t have a goddamn idea what you’ve found. Send a picture of the cellular structure and color temperature to the Horticultural Society Research Databank.”

Cooper emailed jpgs of the sample to the HSRD. “Should have it back within a day or so,” he said, reading the return email.

“Light a fire,” Rhyme snapped. “Urgent, life or death... Don’t care about John Doe’s doctoral thesis on Venus flytraps. This has priority.”

Cooper sent a follow-up and then turned back to the bags. “Okay, something else. A fragment of plastic with some printing on it. Too small to make out any letters.”

“Put it up.”

Gazing at the screen, Rhyme could see instantly that it was wire insulation. “Our boy’s done some electrical work. The wire’s cut with a razor knife. Don’t you think, Sachs?”

But she was looking at her phone, reading a text.

Archer said, “So he’s not a pro.”

“Why would you say that?”

“A pro would use a stripping tool, not a knife. Those plier-like things, I’d think.”

“Good. Yes. But let’s say probably not a pro. He might’ve had to leave his regular tool belt at home and found he had only a sharp blade to do some work with. Or, non-pro with two question marks?”

Archer smiled. Cooper started to write. Rhyme said, “That was a joke.”

He regarded the chart. Too many mysteries here. Rhyme decided to get some outside analysis from an expert and had the digitized files and photographs uploaded to a secure server, then sent the link to the man he had in mind. A moment later a text came back.

Amused at the irreverence but irritated that he had to wait, he texted back, “K. I guess.”

He thought: Well, beggars can’t be... But shot the cliché dead before he completed it. And turned his chair to the parlor doorway as he detected the footfall of Ron Pulaski, who’d just let himself in with a key.

“Where’ve you been, Rookie? You have Gutiérrez in custody yet?”

“Had to see somebody about a lead. Could’ve waited but I thought it was better to do it now, meet with this guy. Get it over with. And—”

“Fine, fine, fine. Amelia said you ran the canvass in Times Square. What’d you find?”

“The unsub, he got out through the far side of the jobsite.”

“We know that. Tell me something I’m ignorant of.”

“He was in a Carhartt jacket, one of those brown things contractors wear. And a hard hat. But he must’ve ditched ’em. We swept the area and didn’t find them. And nobody matching his descrip was seen.”

“That’s not a word. ‘Descrip.’ There’s ‘nondescript’ and there’s ‘description.’ But there’s no ‘descrip.’ ”

“Well, it’s in common usage on the street.”

“So is methamphetamine. That’s no reason to embrace it.”

“Now, nothing on the subway CCTVs or any of the cameras in the COC. My thinking is he got a bus north or south. His height wouldn’t be so prominent that way. I’ve sent a memo to Transit. Officers’ll canvass all the drivers to see if they saw somebody fitting the description. Some of the buses have video and they’ll look at those too.”

“Good. The jobsite workers?”

“A couple of people saw him but they just said tall and skinny. Had a tablet of some kind.”

“His weapon. That’s what he used to sabotage the microwave.” Rhyme backed up and continued to stare at the evidence chart. “Think, everybody. Speculate. The answer’s there.” His eye caught Archer’s; she was looking his way with a smile. He recalled that this was how he’d begun his lecture at the college the other day. “Let’s find it.”

Chapter 35

Acool spring evening.

Pleasant. Nick Carelli and Freddy Caruthers were walking down Fourth Avenue in Bay Ridge. Past a yoga store, past Rent-Your-Kilt, which drew a double take from Nick. Yep. That was the name.

From here you could see a bit of the Verrazano’s crown. One hell of a bridge. After he’d been arrested he’d thought about jumping off it. But thinking about and doing are two very different animals. Would’ve upset his brother and mother too much. After the mad urge had passed he was ashamed he’d even considered it.

“There.” Freddy pointed.

A block away. The Bay View Café. The diner looked pretty decent though the sign lied; there was no view of the bay. For one thing, it faced east, away from the bay. And it offered no view of any water — harbor or ocean or drainage canal or puddle.

“Should call it the Bay Somewhere Nearby Café.”

“Huh?” asked Freddy. Then he got it. “That’s good. Ha.”

The place was clean inside. Nick looked around, noting where the hostess station was, what kind of cash register they had, where the kitchen was located, the doors that opened into it, what the Daily Special board looked like, how many servers and busboys there were — and if they looked like they spoke English as a first, second or third language. Or didn’t speak it at all. Where the food was stored. Big cans of tomato sauce sat stacked against a back wall. Were they empty and just decorative?

Nick knew he had a lot to learn about the restaurant business. Still, he felt good about the prospect. He really hoped Vittorio Gera would come through and accept his offer.

Freddy tapped Nick’s arm and directed him to a booth in the back, where a skinny guy in jeans and a black T-shirt under a checkered brown sport coat sat sipping a Sam Adams from the bottle. He wasn’t using the frosted glass the waitress had brought and the empty mug was sweating.

“Stan. I’m Freddy.”

“Yo.”

“This’s Nick.”

Hands were shaken and Nick sat down opposite Von, who had thick black hair that could’ve used a shampooing and trim. His right palm, Nick had felt upon the clasp, was callused. Wondered what his job was. Knuckles red. Maybe he boxed; he had the muscles for it. Nick the cop made observations like this. Nick the prisoner had too. He wasn’t going to drop that instinct now that he was neither.

Nick scooted over so Freddy could join him on his side of the booth. But Freddy said, “I gotta make some calls. Be five, ten minutes. Leave you guys to it.”

“You know what you want to eat?” Nick called.

“I don’t care. Burger. You guys order. Don’t wait for me.” He fished his phone out and headed to the front of the restaurant, punching in a number. He smiled as he struck up a conversation with the person who’d picked up. Some people did that, smiled or frowned when talking, even though the guy on the other end of the line couldn’t see them.

“So, you and Freddy go way back?” Von was reading the menu like there’d be a test later.

“School.”

“School.” Von’s voice seemed to hint that that was a waste of time. “You drive cars, Nick?”

“I... You mean as a job?”

A laugh. “Naw, just you drive cars?”

“I can drive. I don’t have one.”

“Yeah?”

“Really.”

Von laughed once more, as if that were the funniest thing in the world.

“What’re your wheels?” Nick asked.

“Oh, whatever.” And Von went back to the menu.

Nick too looked it over, wondering what would be the fastest thing to order. He wanted this to be over soon. Wasn’t Von’s bizarre personality. Well, it was partly that. Mostly Nick’s gut told him that, despite what Freddy’s homework showed, Von might be connected or whoever he worked for was, and one or both of them might have a record. That was a no-fly zone for Nick, a violation of his parole. He didn’t want to ask Von because, if the answer was yes, then he’d know for certain. He wanted to tell his PO that he’d had no clue.

Best get the info about J and Nanci, buy the guy the best steak on the menu and shut up to let him eat it as fast as possible. Then get the hell out.

But even with the urgency there were the rituals that had to be obeyed, of course. The men chatted about sports, about the neighborhood, about business, even the goddamn weather. Von kept laughing at things that made no sense to laugh about. “There’s a high-rise going up where the Knights social club used to be. You believe it, son-o?”

That was worth a yuk or two.

Nick caught the waitress’s eye and she approached. “We’re ready.”

Von ordered a salad to start, extra Thousand Island dressing, and chicken Parmesan.

Nick got a burger. “Rare.”

Von gazed at him with grinning astonishment. “You’re not worried, worms and shit?”

Nick, gripping patience tightly, said, “I’m not worried.”

“Suit yourself.”

“No fries.” Nick said.

Von blinked, reared back. “You’re fucking crazy. They’re great here, the best. I mean, the best.”

“Then I’ll take ’em,” Nick said.

“You won’t be regretting it, son-o. Bring him a salad too. He needs a salad. Same dressing.” A grin as he turned to Nick. “They make their own here. You could call it Two Thousand Island, it’s so effing good.”

Nick smiled back coolly and ordered the same thing for Freddy. “Two beers.”

“And me, top her off, Lucy,” Von said, tapping the beer, even though the woman’s name tag read Carmella.

Nick said, “Thanks for doing this.”

“My boss owes Freddy. You notice?” Von’s voice dropped. “He looks like a frog?”

“Never did, no.”

“He does. Well, glad to help. Only I don’t know how helpful it’s gonna be.”

“You know Flannigan’s?”

“Did some work at the place last month. You handy?”

“Some. I can do electrical. Plumbing.”

“Plumbing?” A laugh. “I frame like a motherfucker. I was framing there, Flannigan’s. Old man Flannigan gave me a bonus. Pretty sweet. Said it was the best framing he’d ever seen. Anyway, I started to hang there. I got to know some people, the bartenders, the staff.” Von didn’t bother to lower his voice now. “They’re all right. They’re us, you know. Not from some other countries, like you see in a lot of places.” A nod toward Lucy/Carmella.

An urge to wash his hands lapped at Nick’s spine.

“I got to know people there, I was saying. People like to talk to me. I got the gift of gab. Got that from my father. So, I asked around, put two and two together. About what Freddy was asking. And put together this list, might be the guy you’re looking for. A bunch of guys named J. Nothing about a Nanci. But they all got bitches they’re married to or’re fucking. Ha, or both. Here.” He dug into his pocket to retrieve a slip of paper, pulling his jacket aside.

Oh, Jesus Lord. Nick actually gasped.

Von was carrying.

Nick saw the wood grip of something small. Probably a little.38.

Man, this was bad. Freddy’d said there was no way he’d have a gun on him.

Maybe Von’d forgotten. Or lied.

Nick took the grimy sheet of limp paper.

“You okay, son-o?”

Nick couldn’t say anything. He looked around. Nobody else had seen the piece.

“Yeah. Haven’t eaten all day. I’m starving.”

“Ah, well, here we go.” The salads arrived, both drenched in dressing. No appetite whatsoever.

Von peered at Nick and said in a loud voice, real loud: “What’s a four-letter word that ends in K and means intercourse?”

Carmella had heard; Nick knew the joke was for her benefit.

Nick said, “I don’t know.”

“How ‘bout you, Lucy?” Von asked the waitress, who blushed. He roared, “Ha! The answer’s ‘talk’! Get it?”

She nodded and gave a polite laugh.

Nick started to chow down fast. Breathless.

“Easy, son-o. You’ll choke to death.... You see that? She didn’t get it. She didn’t know ‘intercourse’ also means ‘talk.’ That’s what I’m talking about, with them.”

Lord, I’m sitting across from a man with a gun. No, an idiot with a gun.

Nothing to do but hope for the best.

Nick ate a few disgusting forkfuls as he scanned the names Von had brought him. Jackie, Jon, Jonny. There were ten altogether.

“Not much of a shortlist,” Von said, chewing. A bit of dressing launched itself tableward.

“No, man. It’s good. Appreciate it.” Names and some addresses, some businesses. Nothing jumped out. He would have to do more homework but he’d pretty much figured he’d have to.

Von continued, “According to my boys — and girls — these dudes hang at Flannigan’s some. Or used to. They’re all kinda quiet about what they do. You get what I’m saying. Quiet. Get it?”

“Great. Sure.”

More salad, wolfed down.

Von said, “You are one hungry son of a bitch.” That eerie giggle.

“Yeah, like I said.” Chewing, swallowing, trying not to puke. And a goddamn hamburger on its way.

Nick eased the list into his jeans pocket.

And that was when he saw the figure outside.

A guy, in a suit, one that didn’t fit so well. Gray. Blue shirt, button-down collar and a tie. Crew cut. He was walking past the restaurant, looking in, a neutral expression on his face. He stopped, squinted and leaned forward, peering through the window.

No... oh, no... Please.

Nick stared down at his salad.

Another plea.

Another prayer.

It wasn’t answered.

The door to the restaurant opened and closed and he felt, as much as heard, the big man make his way to the booth. Coming straight for them.

Shit.

Didn’t matter if Nick glanced at the newcomer or not; he was making a beeline for the two men. He decided it was probably better to glance his way — it’d look less guilty. He did this now and studied the face, keeping his own as emotionless as possible. He couldn’t summon the name. Not that it mattered. He knew what the guy did for a living.

“Well, if it ain’t my old buddy, Nick Carelli.”

He nodded.

Von looked him over.

“The hell you up to, Nick? They let your ass outa the system, did they? What happened? You stopped giving guards blow jobs with those pretty little lips of yours.”

Von swallowed his immense chew of salad and said, “Fuck off, asshole. We’re—”

The gold NYPD shield stopped about a foot from Von’s face. “Do what?”

Von, who would face a mandatory year in prison for the gun, even if he had no priors, shut up and looked back to his salad. “Sorry, man, I didn’t know. You’re just busting his chops. Whataya mean, let him outa the system?”

Von would know, of course. He just wanted to inflate his innocence preserver.

But Detective Vince Kall — Nick got the name — turned away from Von to his prey of choice. “So you didn’t answer me. What’re you doing here, Nicky Boy?”

“Come on, Detective. Give me a break—”

“Or I could give you a third chance to answer the question.”

“Having dinner with a friend.”

“Your PO know about it?”

Nick shrugged. “If he asks I’ll tell him whatever he wants to know. I always do. It’s just dinner. Why’re you busting my ass?”

“You reconnecting with your friends?”

“Look, I’m not hassling anybody. I did my time. I’m legit now.”

“No, bad cops’re never legit. Once bad, always bad. Like a whore. She may give up the business but she’ll always be somebody who got dicks up her ass for money. Am I right?”

“I just want to get a job, something going, get on with my life.”

“How’s the guy you beat the crap out of, Nick, you got busted for? I heard he had brain damage or something.”

“Come on, please.” Nick wasn’t going to give Kall the I’m-innocent speech. A shield like this’d never believe it and it’d only rile him up more.

Kall turned to Von, who was concentrating — way too much — on his salad.

“And who is your little friend here? What’s your name?”

Von swallowed, looking guilty as sin. “Jimmy Shale.”

“Whatta you do for a living, Jimmy?”

“Can you ask me that?”

“I can ask you what you beat off to at night. I can ask you where your boyfriend likes you to kiss him. I can ask—”

“General contracting and construction.”

“For who?”

“A bunch of companies.”

“Most guys I ask, they give me a straight answer. They say Helmsley or Franklyn Development. You say a bunch of people.”

“Well, Officer—”

“Detective.”

Von was leaning back and staring up coldly now, attitude flowing from his eyes. “Well, Officer Detective, the fact is I work for a lot of people. Because I’m good at my job and a lot of people want me. And I’m not real happy, the way you’re talking to me.”

“Really? And your happiness counts why, Jimmy?”

Nick’d been thinking the worst that could happen was that the cop would find Von’s gun, bust him and then word would get back to Nick’s PO that they’d been together and there’d be a hearing and Nick might very well get his ass kicked back inside for the violation. But there was one step past worse: Von would decide Kall had pushed him too far and would empty five blunt.38 slugs into the asshole detective’s body. No, four into his body and one into his face, just in case he was wearing a vest.

Nick tried, “Look, Detective, let’s just take this down a notch, okay? I’m—”

“Shut up, Carelli.” Leaning toward Von. “You, asshole. Lemme see some ID.”

“ID. ID. Sure.” Von, that weird grin on his face, wiped his fat lips with his napkin and placed it back in his lap. Then he started to reach for his pocket. “I’ll show you some fucking ID.”

Yes, he was going for his gun. Kall was dead.

And so was Nick.

He assessed angles. From the depth of the booth he couldn’t leap forward and wrestle the gun from Von’s hand. If he shouted to Kall that Von was armed, he’d be admitting he knew.

Von started to rise, hand near the piece.

“Detective!” Carelli started.

But just then a staticky voice crackled from Kall’s belt.

“All units. Ten thirty. Carjacking in progress. Four One Eight Fourth Avenue, Bay Ridge. Two black males, twenties, believed to be armed. Silver Toyota. Late model. No tags at this point.”

“Shit.” The cop was looking out the window. The address was virtually across the street.

He yanked the radio off his belt. “Detective Seven Eight Seven Five. At the scene of the ten thirty. Bay Ridge. Send backup. K.”

“Roger Seven Eight Seven Five. Two RMPs en route. ETA four minutes. K.”

Nick lost the rest of the transmission. The detective was headed outside, hand on his weapon. He pushed out the door, turned left and vanished from sight.

Freddy, head down, entered before the door closed. He stormed up to them. “Come on, you guys. Get out. Now!” He tossed two twenties on the table. Von leapt from the booth, Nick behind him, and they followed Freddy through the kitchen and out the back door into a pungent, trash-filled alley.

“This way.”

Nick said to Freddy, “You called it in? You did that?”

“Had to do something. Didn’t look good, whatever was going down. We gotta move, though. He’ll find out it was fake in about five minutes.”

“They’ll trace you,” Von said.

“A burner. Jesus, you think I was born yesterday?”

They walked into a backyard and kept going west. Freddy said, “Look for a gypsy cab. Not metered, a gypsy. The hell happened?”

“The shield recognized me,” Nick said. “Gave me some lip. Would’ve been okay... Only, only our boy here’s got a piece.”

“Yeah, so?” Von was defensive.

Freddy turned on him, furious. “What? I told Art: No weapons. Period. My man here just got out.”

“Art didn’t say nothing to me. I don’t know. I was meeting some stranger in the Ridge. I’m not stupid.”

“Well, you’re stupid enough to get mandatoried one year in Rikers, for the piece. How’d that sit with you?”

“All right, all right.”

“He get your name?” Freddy asked Von.

“No,” Nick said. “But he’ll come back, looking. And he does have your descrip, Von. And he knows me. Ditch the piece. And I mean now. In the water.”

“These things cost money.”

Freddy said, “No. I don’t trust you. Give it to me. I’ll do it myself.”

“Man...”

“You want me to call Art?”

“Shit.” He handed over the gun, which Freddy took in wad of tissue.

“It’s cold?” Freddy asked,

“Yeah, yeah, can’t be traced.”

Freddy asked, “You got the list, Nick?”

“Yeah.”

Freddy said, “Thanks for that, Von. But now, separate ways.”

“I didn’t get my meal.”

“Jesus.”

Von grimaced and started off along the dark sidewalk.

“I’m going to the bay, get rid of this.” Freddy tapped his pocket.

“Thanks, man... You’re the best.”

“The list look good?”

“It’s something. A good start. I’ll just have to do a little more detective work.”

“Hell, you were a detective. Piece of cake.”

“Thanks, Freddy. Man, I owe you. Big.” A faint smile.

Freddy touched his forehead, a half salute, then headed west, to the shore, where he’d pitch the gun into the Narrows. A few minutes later Nick found a gypsy cab; they were more plentiful in the outer boroughs since medallion cabs were harder to find. He settled into the seat and inhaled deeply. Then his phone hummed and he panicked, thinking the detective from the restaurant was following up and wanted him to come downtown. But he looked at caller ID.

Felt a thud in his gut all right. Though a different sort than the kind he’d just experienced.

He answered.

“Amelia. Hi.”

Chapter 36

Rhyme and Archer sat in their chairs before the evidence boards. They were alone.

The speculation, the guesswork, the suppositions had gone on for several hours — several extremely unproductive hours — before the team called it quits for the night. Pulaski and Cooper were gone. Sachs was in the hallway making a phone call. Her voice was low and he wondered whom she was speaking to. Her face looked grave. The shooting incident at the mall seemed resolved largely in her favor. What else could it be?

She ended her call and walked back into the parlor, offering nothing about the conversation. She didn’t remove her Glock — again she’d be staying in Brooklyn. Sachs pulled her jacket off a hook.

“Better go.”

She glanced at Archer then back to Rhyme and seemed about to say something.

Rhyme cocked an eyebrow. The equivalent of a taciturn man, which he was, saying, “Talk to me. What is it?”

A moment of debate within Sachs. Then she balked, snagged her purse, slung it over her shoulder and nodded farewell. “I’ll be back early.”

“See you then.”

“ ‘Night, Amelia,” Archer said.

“ ‘Night.”

Sachs strode into the hallway and Rhyme heard the front door as it opened and closed.

He turned back toward Archer. Had she fallen asleep? Her eyes were closed. Then they opened.

She said, “Frustrating.”

Looking at the board. “Yes. Loose ends. Too many of them. This riddle’s not that easy.”

“You figured it out? Ours?”

“The letter ‘e.’ ”

“You didn’t cheat? No, you wouldn’t. You’re a scientist. The process is the most important part of solving a problem. The answer’s almost secondary.”

This was true.

She added, “But I’m not speaking of the case. The frustration in general.”

The life of the disabled, she meant. And she was right. Everything takes longer, people treat you like pets or children, there’s so much in life that’s not accessible — in all senses, more than just second floors and restrooms: love, friendship, careers you otherwise would have been perfect for. The list goes on and on.

He’d noted her struggling with the phone not long before, trying to call her brother for a ride back to his apartment. The unit was on speaker but not recognizing her commands. She’d given up and used the controller with her right hand, angrily entering the digits. Her Celtic bracelet jangling with each number. Her jaw had been trembling by the time she got through.

“You fall into a rhythm,” he said. “And you learn, you plan ahead, you take the route where you minimize frustrations. You don’t need to make unnecessary challenges for yourself. Most stores are accessible but you learn which ones have narrow aisles and protruding endcaps and you avoid them. Things like that.”

“A lot to learn,” she said. Then seemed uncomfortable with the topic. She said, “Oh, Lincoln. You play chess.”

“I did. Haven’t for a long time. How did you know?” He didn’t own a physical chess set. When he played, he did so online.

“You’ve got Vukovic’s book.”

Art of Attack. He glanced at the bookshelf. It was at the far end, where the personal, not forensic, books were kept. He himself couldn’t read the spine from here. But he recalled that eyesight — and fingernails — were among her God-given strengths.

She said, “When we were together, my ex and I played quite a bit. We did bullet chess. It’s a form of speed chess. Each player has a total of two minutes to make a move.”

“Per move?”

“No, the entire game, first move to last.”

Well, she was an aficionado of an esoteric form of chess as well as being a riddle-mistress. Not to mention well on her way to being a damn good criminalist. Rhyme could not have asked for a more interesting intern.

He said, “I never played that. I like some time to strategize.” He missed the game. There was no one to play with. Thom had no time. Sachs had no patience.

Archer continued. “We also played a limited-move variant. Our goal was to win in twenty-five moves or fewer. If we didn’t, we both lost. Say, if you’d like to play sometime... I don’t know anybody who’s really into it.”

“Maybe. Sometime.” He was looking at the evidence charts.

“My brother won’t be here for fifteen minutes or so.”

“I heard that.”

“So,” Archer said, a coy lilt to her voice, “I can’t hold two pieces behind my back for you to pick black or white. But I won’t cheat: I’m thinking of a number one through ten. Even or odd?”

Rhyme looked her over, not understanding at first. “Oh, I haven’t played for years. Anyway I don’t have a board.”

“Who needs a board? Can’t you picture one?”

“You play in your head?”

“Of course.”

Well... He was silent for a moment.

She persisted. “Even or odd?”

“Odd.”

“It’s seven. You win the virtual toss.”

Rhyme said, “I’ll take white.”

“Good. I prefer defense... I like to learn as much about my opponent as I can. Before I trounce them.”

The gold Celtic bracelet clinked against the controller as her fingers maneuvered her chair close to his and faced him, about three feet away.

He asked, “No time limit, you said.”

“No. But the game has to result in a mate or draw — in which case black wins — in twenty-five moves or fewer. Otherwise...”

“We both lose.”

“We both lose. Now” — she closed her eyes — “I’m seeing the board. Are you?”

Rhyme continued to gaze at her face for a moment, the freckles, the narrow brows, the faint smile.

She opened her eyes. He looked away quickly and closed his, nestled his head back in the rest. The chessboard, fully loaded, was as clear as Central Park on a crisp spring afternoon, as today’s had been. He thought for a moment. “E2 pawn to e4.”

Archer said, “Black pawn e2 to e5.”

Rhyme imagined:

He shot back with, “White king’s knight to f3.”

Archer: “Black queen’s knight to c6. You’re seeing it clearly?”

“Yes.”

Well, she was certainly aggressive. Rhyme was pleased. No uncertainty. No hemming or hawing. He said, “White king’s bishop to c4.”

Archer snapped, “Black queen’s knight to d4.”

Her knight was now nestling between Rhyme’s bishop and pawn.

How many moves were they up to? he wondered.

“Six moves,” Archer said, unknowingly responding to his question.

He said, “White king’s knight takes black pawn on e5.”

“Ah, yes, yes.” Archer then said, “Black queen to g5.” Bringing her most powerful piece into the middle of the field. Vulnerable. Rhyme was tempted to open his eyes and see her expression. He opted for concentration.

Rhyme saw an opportunity. “White king’s knight takes black pawn on f7.” In position to take her rook. And safe from her king, because the piece was guarded by his bishop.

“Black queen takes white pawn on g2.”

Rhyme frowned. He’d have to abandon his tactics in the upper right-hand corner of the board. Her brash moves were bringing the assault to his home territory — with most of his pieces not even in play.

He said, “White king’s rook to f1.”

Archer’s buoyant voice said, “Black queen takes white pawn on e4. Check.”

Eyes still closed, Rhyme could clearly see where this was going. He chuckled. And said what he had to: “White king’s bishop to e2 to block the check.”

And there was no surprise when Juliette Archer said, “Black queen’s knight to f3. Checkmate.”

Rhyme studied the board tucked into his mind. “Fourteen moves, I think.”

“That’s right,” Archer confirmed.

“Is that a record?”

“Oh, no. I’ve won in nine. My ex in eight.”

“The game, it was elegant.” Lincoln Rhyme was a loser gracious on the surface but filled with knobby resolve not to be one again. “A rematch soon?”

After he’d practiced.

“Love to.”

“But now — the bar’s open! Thom!”

She laughed. “You’re teaching me forensics. You’re teaching me how to be a productive gimp. But I think you’re also teaching me some bad habits. I’ll pass.”

“You’re not driving,” Rhyme said. “Well, not exactly.” A nod at the Storm Arrow motor, which could propel her along the pavement at a zippy seven mph.

“Better keep a clear head anyway. I’m seeing my son tonight.”

Thom poured Rhyme’s Glenmorangie. The doorbell hummed. It was Archer’s brother, who, when Thom escorted him into the parlor, greeted them cheerfully. He seemed like a nice guy. “Fellow” was the word that fit. Rhyme wouldn’t want to spend much time with him, but he seemed the rock that his sister would need facing her life as a quad.

She wheeled toward the archway. “I’ll be back early tomorrow,” she said, echoing Sachs’s farewell.

He nodded.

She wheeled out the door, her brother behind her.

The door closed. Thom returned to the kitchen. And Rhyme was suddenly aware of the immense silence of the room. He had a curious feeling. “Hollowness” was the word that came to him.

Thom was in the kitchen. The sound of metal against metal, wood against ceramic, water filling pots, emanated from there into the parlor. But no sound of human voices. Unusual for him, he didn’t care for this manifestation of solitude.

A sip of the scotch. Rhyme was aware of the scent of garlic, meat and the perfume of vermouth, heated.

Something else too. A fragrant smell. Appealing, comforting. Ah, Sachs’s perfume.

But then he recalled that she didn’t wear any — why give the perp a clue as to your position in a potential firefight? No, the scent would have to be that, of course, of whatever Juliette Archer had worn that day.

“Dinner is served,” Thom said.

“On my way,” Rhyme said and left the parlor, instructing the controller to shut out the lights as he did so. He wondered if the voice-controlled lighting system in the town house happened to be embedded with a DataWise5000.

Chapter 37

Just a fast one.”

“Honey, no.”

Her husband persisted, “Twenty minutes. Arnie said he’s got a new scotch. From the Isle of Skye. Never heard of it before.”

If there was a scotch that Henry was unfamiliar with it must’ve been something.

They’d finished dinner, Ginnie surprised that he’d actually complimented her on the chicken fricassee (though there had been: “Good fix over last time, dear”), and she was rinsing dishes.

“You go,” Ginnie told him.

“Carole wanted you to come too. They’re starting to think you don’t like them.”

I don’t, Ginnie thought. While she and Henry were transplants to the Upper East Side, Arnie and Carole were natural products of the effete neighborhood. She found these neighbors up the hall arrogant and pretentious.

“I really don’t want to. I’ve got to clean up here. There’s that project for work.”

“Just thirty, forty-five minutes.”

Double what it had been a moment ago.

Of course there was more to this than a neighborly visit. Arnie was head of a small tech start-up and Henry wanted him as a client for his law firm. Her husband didn’t admit it but this was obvious to her. She knew too that he liked to have Ginnie accompany him as he tried to win over people like Arnie — and not because she smart and funny, but because of what she’d overheard him say once to a fellow attorney, when he didn’t know she was nearby: “Let’s face it, a potential client’s on the borderline, who’s he going to sign with? The partner with the wife he can fantasize about fucking.”

The absolute last thing that Ginnie wanted to do, go have drinks with the Bassetts. He’d probably make her try the scotch, which however expensive all tasted like dish soap to her.

“But we just got Trudy down.” The two-year-old could be a fitful sleeper and sometimes impossible to get to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. Tonight, the 7 p.m. target had been a bull’s-eye.

“We’ve got the Nanny.”

“But still, you know I don’t like leaving her.”

“Forty-five minutes, an hour. Just to say hi. Sip a little whisky. Did you know about the spelling. Whiskey with an ‘e’ is bourbon. Irish too. Without it is scotch. Who thought that up?”

Henry was oh-so good at deflecting.

“Really, can’t we take a pass, honey?”

“No,” Henry said, grit to his voice. “I told them yes. So. Go scoot and throw something on.”

“It’s just drinks,” Ginnie said. Glancing at her jeans and sweatshirt. Then realizing she’d caved.

Henry turned his handsome face toward her (yeah, yeah, they were the perfect-looking couple). “Ah, for me, honey? Please. That little blue thing.”

Gaultier. Thing.

He gave her a seductive wink. “You know I like it.”

Ginnie went into the bedroom and changed, peeked at their daughter, still asleep, an angel with golden ringlets of hair, and then walked silently to the window, which faced a quiet side street, one flight below. Made sure the window was locked — though she’d checked it earlier — and drew the shades. Curiously Trudy might wake up at the sound of a cooing pigeon on the sill but would sleep through a fire engine siren and blaring intersection horn. She wanted to kiss the girl or touch her cheek, cradled by blond curls. But that might wake her and disrupt the impromptu get-together. Henry wouldn’t be happy.

Of course, if the child were to wake, that would be an excuse for Ginnie not to go.

Yes, no?

But she couldn’t do it, use her daughter as a ploy against her husband. Still, she smiled to herself, thinking: It had been a good plan.

Five minutes later they were up the dimly lit hall, ringing the Bassetts’ doorbell. The door opened. Cheeks were bussed, hands gripped, pleasantries exchanged.

Carole Bassett was in jeans and T-shirt. Ginnie’s eyes dipped to the outfit then to Henry but he missed the telling glance and accompanying grimace of her thin glossy lips. The men veered to the bar, where the magic potion sat, and — thank goodness — Carole apparently remembered that Ginnie drank wine exclusively and thrust a Pinot Gris into her hand. They clinked, sipped and headed into the living room, which offered a partial view of Central Park. (Henry was resentful that the Bassetts, new to the building, had happened to decide to move to the neighborhood just as that particular unit became vacant. Henry’s and Ginnie’s faced 81st Street.)

The men rejoined their mates.

“Ginnie, you want to try some?”

“Sure, she will. She loves scotch.”

And Palmolive is my favorite brand. Right next to Duz. “Already have wine. Don’t want to spoil the experience.”

“You’re sure?” Arnie said. “Cost eight hundred a bottle. And that’s because my guy got me a deal. And I mean deal.”

Carole said in a low voice, eyes wide, “He got us a Pétrus for a thousand.”

Henry barked a laugh. “You are shitting me?”

“Cross my heart.”

Ginnie noted her husband glance at the spot on her body where Carole was doing just that. It was just a T-shirt, yes, but quite tight and made of thin silk.

Arnie: “The Pétrus? It was heaven. I nearly came.” He pretended to looked shocked at his own words. “Listen to this: We bribed the maître d’ to let us sneak it into Romanee. They don’t have a corkage policy, you know.”

“I didn’t,” Ginnie said with mock astonishment. “Oh, my God.”

Arnie added, “I know. A restaurant like that.”

The couples sat and conversation meandered. Carole asked about Trudy and the schools they had planned for her (not as outrageous as it seemed, Ginnie had learned; Manhattan parents must plan early for their offsprings’ education). The Bassetts were a few years younger — early thirties — and were just thinking about children now.

Carole added, “Next year sounds good. For conceiving, I mean. It’ll be a convenient time. The company’s putting a new maternity leave plan in place. A friend of mine in HR told me about it. He said he wasn’t supposed to say anything, but I should wait to get pregnant.” She laughed wickedly. “It’s sort of like insider trading!” and studied Ginnie’s face to see if she got the risqué joke.

Got it and stepped on it till it was dead.

“Have to give up the wine,” Carole had said. “That’ll be hard.”

“You won’t miss it. Only eighteen months.”

“Eighteen?” Carole asked.

“Breast-feeding.”

“Oh. That. Well. It’s pretty much optional nowadays, isn’t it?”

The men talked about business and Washington and all the while examined their glasses as if the amber liquid inside were unicorn blood.

Carole rose, saying she wanted to show off a new print she’d gotten from her “favorite” gallery in SoHo. Ginnie wondered: How many galleries did she have?

They were halfway across the living room floor when a man’s voice intruded.

“Hi, there, little one.”

Everyone froze. Looking around.

“Aren’t you a cute little petunia.”

The baritone words oozed from the speaker of Ginnie’s phone, sitting on the coffee table. Her wineglass tumbled to the floor and shattered into a hundred pieces and she lunged for the Samsung.

Arnie said, “Wasn’t the Waterford. Don’t worry—”

“What is that?” Carole asked, nodding to the phone.

It was what Henry and Ginnie called the “Nanny” — actually a state-of-the-art baby monitor. The microphone was next to Trudy’s crib and sensitive enough to pick up the child’s breathing and heartbeat.

And could also pick up the voices of anyone in the room.

“You’re coming with me, honeybun. I know somebody who wants to give you a whole new home.”

Ginnie screamed.

She and Henry bolted for the door, flung it open and sprinted down the hall, followed by the Bassetts. Henry raged at her, “Did you lock the fucking window?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

“Stay asleep, little one.”

Ginnie’s mind was a swirling tornado. Tears streamed and her heart vibrated in her chest. She lifted her phone and touched voice on the monitor app. She shouted into the microphone — it was a two-way system: “The police are here, you son of a bitch. Don’t you touch her. I’ll kill you if you touch her.”

A pause, as perhaps the intruder was noticing the monitor. He chuckled. “Police? Really? I’m looking out Trudy’s right window and there’s not a cop to be found. Better be going. Sorry, your little dear’s still snoozing; I’ll have to say goodbye for her. Bye-bye, Mommy. Bye-bye Daddy.”

Ginnie screamed again. Then: “Now! Now! Open the door!”

Henry fumbled the keys and Ginnie ripped them out of his hand, shoving him aside. She unlatched the door and pushed it in. She detoured into the kitchen to grab the first butcher knife in the block and charged to her daughter’s room, swung it open, flipped the overhead light on.

Trudy stirred slightly at the intrusion. But didn’t wake.

Henry pushed inside an instant later and they both scanned the small room. No one. The window was still locked. And the closet was empty.

“But...”

She handed the husband the knife and picked up and clutched her child.

Arnie and Carole were right behind them. Relief flooded their faces, seeing the baby girl.

“Is he here?” Carole asked in a tremulous voice, looking around.

But Arnie, the high-tech entrepreneur, was shaking his head, picking up the monitor near Trudy’s crib. “No, he’s not. He could be a hundred miles away. He hacked into the server.” He tossed the device back onto the table.

“So he could hear us now?” Ginnie cried, grabbing it from him and shutting it off.

Arnie said, “That doesn’t always cut the connection.” He unplugged it and added, “People do it just to mess with you. Sometimes if there’s a video monitor they do screenshots of the kids or videos and post them online.”

“What kind of sick fuck’d do that?”

“I don’t know what kind. I just know how many. A lot of them.”

Arnie asked, “You want me to call the police?”

“I’ll take care of that,” Ginnie said. “Just leave please.”

Henry said, “Honey, really.” Glancing at his friends.

“Now,” she snapped.

“Sure. Really sorry,” Carole said. She embraced Ginnie with what seemed to be true concern.

“And,” Arnie offered, “don’t worry about the wineglass.”

After they were gone, Ginnie took the knife once more and, carrying still-snoozing Trudy, checked every room, Henry with her. Yes, all the windows were locked. There could have been no physical intrusion.

Back in their bedroom, Ginnie sat on the bed, wiped tears and fiercely cradled her daughter. She glanced up and saw her husband dial three numbers on his mobile.

“No.” She half rose and took it from him. Hit disconnect.

“What’re you doing?” he snapped.

She said, “It’s going to ring in a minute. Nine one one’ll call back. You tell them you hit it by mistake.”

“The fuck would I do that for?”

“If I talk to them, a woman, they’ll think it’s a domestic and might send somebody anyway. You have to tell them it was a mistake.”

“Are you crazy?” Henry raged. “We want them to send somebody. We got hacked. That asshole fucked up our evening.”

“The police are not going to hear that we left our daughter alone to go drink some overpriced liquor with two idiots just because you want a new client. Do you really think that’s a good idea, Henry?”

The phone rang. No caller ID number. She handed the unit to him. Glared into his eyes.

He sighed. And hit accept call. “Hello?” he answered pleasantly. “Oh, I’m really sorry. Nine one one is first on my speed dial, I hit it by mistake, calling my mother. She’s number two... Yes, it’s Henry Sutter...” He gave the address, apparently in response to another question. “I’m really sorry... Appreciate your following up like this, though. Good night.”

Ginnie walked into Trudy’s nursery and, one-handed, pulled the crib after her into the guest room. “I’ll sleep here tonight.”

“I think we should—”

She closed the door.

Ginnie tucked her daughter into the crib, nearly — but not quite — smiling that the girl had managed to sleep through the excitement. She pulled off the thousand-dollar dress and angrily flung it into the corner of the room. Then she climbed into bed without moisturizing her face or brushing her teeth. She shut out the light, knowing that that, unlike for her daughter, sleep would be a long time in coming tonight. If at all.

But that was okay. She had lots to think about. Most important, what she would say to the lawyer tomorrow, the one she’d talked to a couple of times about the possibility of divorce. Until tonight she’d waffled. Tomorrow she would be telling him to proceed as quickly and as relentlessly and brutally as he could.

Chapter 38

Unprofessional, I guess.

But sometimes you do things for yourself. Because you have to.

I’m walking away from the Upper East Side coffee shop, near Henry and Virginia Sutter’s apartment, where I’ve been sitting for the past half hour. I was across the street. It was some building, I’ll tell you. Can’t imagine living in a place like that. Wouldn’t want to, probably. Beautiful people live there. I wouldn’t be welcome.

Doing things for yourself.

It was all pretty easy, visiting vengeance on the Shopper. I’d simply followed Henry home from the Starbucks in Times Square where we’d collided that afternoon.

You’d spilled this on me, it would’ve cost you big time, you Walking Dead asshole. This shirt cost more’n you make in a month. I’m a lawyer...

Once I found his address, I cross-referenced deeds with DMV pictures. And got his ID. Mr. Henry Sutter. Married to Virginia. I was stymied briefly — data mining records didn’t show they own anything with a CIR DataWise5000 inside. But then I peeked at Facebook. Henry and Ginnie, her preferred nic, had actually posted pictures of two-year-old Trudy? Fools... but good for me. Babies in the city equal baby monitors. And, yep, a simple scan of the house revealed the IP address and a brand name. I executed a handshake exploit with the network then ran Pass Breaker on my tablet and in no time at all, I was in. Listening to Trudy’s soft breath and coming up with a script for my conversation with the young ’un that was sure to destroy Mom’s and Dad’s peace of mind for the immediate future.

(Opens up a world of possibilities. After all, I’m not wedded to the DataWise5000 idea. Other options are good too.)

I keep walking, loping really. I pass by the subway entrance. It’s a long walk to Chelsea but I have to use shanks’ mare (my mother’s mother’s expression, even though I don’t think she ever saw a mare in the flesh or walked more than a few hundred feet from car to her Indiana Piggly Wiggly); I’m worried about getting recognized. Those damn CCTVs. Everywhere.

What about dinner? I wonder. Two, no three sandwiches tonight. Then I’ll work on my new miniature project, a boat. I don’t usually make them. There’s a whole world of seafaring model makers (like airplane and train people — something about transportation has bloated the field). But Peter said he liked boats. So I’m making a Warren skiff for him. A classic rowboat with reciprocating oars.

Then maybe Alicia will come over. She’s been upset lately, the past returning. The scars — the inside scars — more prominent. I’m doing what I can to make it better. But sometimes I just don’t know.

Then I’m thinking again of the fun I’ve just had, recalling his face earlier in the day, all sneery and handsome, after we collided outside of Starbucks.

Walking Dead...

Well, Henry, that’s a good line. Clever. But I’m thinking of better one:

It has to do with the last laugh.

“Hey.”

Amelia Sachs walked inside Nick Carelli’s apartment.

“Kind of like your old one.”

“The view’s brick here, not maple trees and lilacs. But all things considered, not bad.”

“You got a TV.”

When they were together, Sachs recalled, they’d never owned one. Too much else to do.

“I’ve been watching some of the cop shows. You watch those?”

“No.”

Too much to do now too.

“They ought to do a show about you and Lincoln.”

“He’s been approached. He’s said no.”

She handed him the big cardboard moving box she’d brought. It contained some of his personal effects from when they lived together: yearbooks, postcards, letters, hundreds of family photos. She’d called him to say she’d found these things in her basement, thought he’d want them.

“Thanks.” He opened it up, rifled through the contents. “I thought this stuff was gone for good. Hey, look.” Nick held up a photo. “Our first family vacation. Niagara Falls.”

The family of four, the classic cascade behind them and a rainbow from the particles of water. Nick was about ten, Donnie seven.

“Who took it?”

“Some other tourists. Remember pictures back then? You had to have them developed.”

“Always tense when you got them back from the drugstore. Were they in focus, the right exposure?”

He nodded. More foraging. “Oh, hey!” He picked up a program.

At the bottom was the date he’d graduated. The cover featured a seal: Training Bureau. Preparing the Finest.

His smile faded.

Sachs was recalling her own graduation ceremony. That had been one of the two times in her life when she’d worn white gloves. The other had been at the police department memorial honoring her father after his death.

Nick put the program back in the box, gazing at it fondly for a moment. He closed the carton up and asked, “Glass of wine?”

“Sure.”

He stepped into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine and a beer. He poured her a glass of Chardonnay.

Another memory, of the two of them, triggered by the smell and the tap of metal on glass and his fingers brushing hers.

Boom...

She shot the recollection dead. She’d been doing a lot of sniping like this lately.

They sipped the oaky wine and the beer and he showed her around the place, though there wasn’t much to see. He’d gotten some furniture out of storage. Picked up a few things, borrowed from cousins, bought on the cheap. Some books. Several boxes of documents. And then there were the case files of People of the State of New York v. Nicholas J. Carelli. The many documents were spread out on the kitchen table.

Sachs looked over the framed pictures of his family. She liked it that he had them on the mantelpiece for all to see. Sachs had spent a lot of time with his mother and father and had enjoyed their company. She’d been to the funeral when Nick’s dad passed. She thought too about Donnie. He’d lived in BK, not far from Nick. After he was arrested Sachs made an effort to keep up with the Carellis, Nick’s mother in particular. Eventually, though, the contact grew wispier and finally ceased altogether. As often happens when the fulcrum of common connection between two people vanishes — or one of them goes to prison.

Nick poured more wine.

“Just a little. I’m driving.”

“How do you like the Torino versus the Camaro?”

“Prefer the Chevy, but it got turned into a cube of metal.”

“Hell, how’d that happen?”

Sachs explained about the perp who worked for a data mining company and had invaded every part of his victims’ lives — including hers. Having the beautiful Camaro SS towed and pressed into scrap had been as simple for him as tying his shoes.

“You nailed him?”

“We did. Lincoln and I.”

There was a pause. Then: Can I say? I liked seeing Rose. I wasn’t sure she believed me. About my brother. What really happened.”

“No, we talked later. She believed you.”

“From what you said before, I thought she’d look sicker. She was pretty good.”

“There are women who won’t go out of the house without quote putting their face on. That’s her healthy complexion. Maybelline.”

Nick sipped the beer. “You believe me, don’t you?”

Sachs cocked her head.

“About Donnie and everything. You never said.”

Sachs gave him a smile. “I wouldn’t’ve given you the file if I didn’t. I wouldn’t be here now.”

“Thank you.” Nick looked down at the carpet, which was worn in a particular configuration that she attributed to heels of the shoes worn by a heavy person’s outstretched legs. She remembered when they would sit on the couch — yes, this very couch — it had a slipcover on it back then, but she could tell from the shape that it was the same. He put the carton of artifacts away. “How’s the case coming? The guy screwing around with the appliances? Which is pretty sick, by the way.”

“The case? Slow. He’s smart, this perp.” She sighed. “These controllers — they’re in everything now. Our Computer Crimes contact said there’ll be twenty-five billion embedded products in a few years.”

“Embedded?”

“Smart controllers. Stoves, refrigerators, boilers, alarm systems, home monitors, medical equipment. All of them, with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth computers in them. He can hack into a pacemaker and shut it off.”

“Jesus.”

“You saw what happened with the escalator.”

“I’m taking stairs now.” Nick wasn’t making a joke, it seemed. He added, “I saw a thing in the paper about what he’s doing. And how these companies should fix their servers or something. In the cloud. To keep him out. Not all of them’re doing it. You see that?”

She laughed. “I’m responsible.”

“What?”

“Well, I wasn’t playing journalist. I tipped a reporter off. There’s a security patch that’ll make it impossible for the unsub to hack into the controllers. But not everybody’s installing it, looks like.”

“I didn’t see a press conference from One PP.”

“Well, I didn’t exactly share I was doing it. Going through channels would’ve taken too long.”

“Some things in policing never change.”

She lifted her wineglass to that.

“Domestic terrorism? That’s his agenda?”

“The way it’s looking. Ted Kaczynski sort.”

After a moment, Nick asked, “How is he doing?”

“Who?”

“Your friend. Lincoln Rhyme.”

“Healthy as can be expected. There are always risks.” She told him about some of them, including potentially fatal dysreflexia, the rapid spike in blood pressure that can lead to stroke, brain damage and death. “But he takes good care of himself. He exercises—”

“What? How can he do that?”

“It’s called FES. Functional electrical stimulation. Electrodes in the muscles...”

“Fifty Shades of Grey... Oh, hell, sorry. That was way out of line.” He seemed to be blushing, not a typical feat for Nick Carelli.

Sachs smiled. “Lincoln doesn’t have pop culture on his compass much but if he knew what the book is, or the movie, he’d laugh and say, Hell yes. He’s got a sense of humor about his condition.”

“Hard for you?”

“Me? Yep. I didn’t read the book but I saw the movie with a girlfriend. It was pretty bad.”

Nick laughed.

She chose not to speak any more about Rhyme and herself. Sachs rose and poured more wine, sipped, feeling the warmth around her face. She looked at her mobile: 9 p.m. “What’ve you found?” Nodding at the case file.

“Some good leads. Solid. Still a lot of work to do. Funny, it’s just as hard to prove you’re innocent as it is to make a case against a perp. I thought it’d be easier.”

“You’re being careful?”

“Got my buddy, the one I told you about, to do most of the legwork. I’m bulletproof.”

What was said about him when he’d been on the force. Sachs remembered Nick being not only a good cop but a risk taker. Anything to save a victim.

They were a lot alike in that way.

“You want...” he began.

“What?”

“Some dinner? You eaten already?”

She shrugged. “I could use something.”

“Only problem. I didn’t get to Whole Foods.”

“You ever shop at Whole Foods?”

“Once. I felt the need to spend eight dollars for a fruit salad.”

She laughed.

He continued, “I’ve got frozen curry in the freezer. D’Agostino’s. It’s not bad.”

“No, but I’ll bet it’d be better if we heat it up.” And she poured herself another glass of wine.

What is that noise?

The sixty-six-year-old soon-to-retire printing press operator was in the hallway of his apartment building, a decades-old, work-a-day dwelling typical of this unglamorous part of New York City. He was walking unsteadily after a drink or two at Sadie’s. Nearly midnight. He’d been thinking that Joey, from the bar, was a dick, the politics and all, but at least he didn’t insult you, you said I’m voting this way or that. It’d been fun to argue with him.

But his recollection of the evening, and its four drinks or five, faded as he slowed to a stop and listened to the sound coming from the apartment he was now walking past.

Edwin Boyle stopped walking and leaned closer to the door.

TV.

Had to be TV.

But, even with the new sets, the new sound systems, TV sounded different from this. It wasn’t the same. Live was live. And this was live.

Besides, on TV and in movies, the sound of a couple making love was either short and sweet (and usually there was music) or it went on and on and on, like in porn.

This was the real thing.

Boyle was grinning. Fun.

He didn’t know the guy whose apartment this was, not very well. Seemed decent, if quiet. Wasn’t the sort to hang out at Sadie’s and get into talks about politics or anything else. Had that same kind of quiet you saw in private eyes. At least in the movies. The printer had never known a private eye.

Now the woman was whispering something. The rhythm was faster.

The man was saying something too.

And Boyle was wondering: If he made a recording who could he send it to?

Well, of course Dirty Old Tommy on the board cutter. Ginger in Accounting — she was always talking about sex and flirting. Jose in Receivables.

Boyle pulled out his phone and edged close to his neighbor’s door, then recorded the show. Smiling to himself.

Who else would appreciate it?

Well, he’d think about it. But he sure wouldn’t send the recording to anyone tonight — not after a few hours at Sadie’s. He might end up sending it to his ex or his son by mistake. Tomorrow, at work.

Finally his neighbor and whoever his squeeze was sped up and it was over with — a long sigh, which might’ve been him or might’ve been her or might’ve been his imagination.

Boyle shut the recorder of his iPhone off and slipped it away. Staggered up the hall to his apartment. He tried to remember the last time he’d been laid, and couldn’t — that’s what seven or eight drinks did to you — but he was sure it was sometime during the previous administration.