The Steel Kiss

Chapter 61

The door buzzer sounded and Rhyme glanced at the screen. Lon Sellitto and his cane.

Thom walked to the entry hall and let the detective in. He noted that Sellitto stayed on course toward Rhyme, not diverting to the tray of cookies that Thom had made earlier, the air still redolent of hot butter and cinnamon. But the glance toward the pastry revealed regret; maybe he’d gained a pound or two in the past few days and the old Lon Sellitto — Let the Dieting Begin — was back.

“Hey.” A nod to Thom, then moving stiffly to the chair, the shoes tapping, the cane silent on its worn rubber tip. “Linc, Amelia.”

Sachs nodded. She’d come here to drop off the evidence from the early part of the Unsub 40 case — that had been stored in Queens. She’d been concerned that, like the White Castle napkins, some of it might go missing. So she had personally collected the evidence early this morning and delivered it to Rhyme’s.

Her stay here wouldn’t be long; she was taking Rose to the hospital for her surgery in a few hours.

“Nothing?” Thom asked the detective. “Coffee?”

“Nup.” Looking up, avoiding their eyes.

Hm. Rhyme scanned the man’s face. Something was up.

“That escalator. You oughta leave it, Linc. Good conversation starter.”

And good conversation deflector, Rhyme thought. He was impatient. There was evidence to organize. He was meeting with the prosecutor in the cases against Griffith and Morgan, and Mel Cooper would be arriving soon.

“What’s up, Lon?”

“Okay, gotta tell you.”

Rhyme looked toward him. But Sellitto’s eyes were on Sachs.

She finished assembling the evidence and then peeled off the tight latex gloves. Blew on her fingers. For years Rhyme had not experienced the relief that a small act like that brought, after hours of being gloved, but he remembered the sensation clearly.

“Go ahead, Lon.” Amelia Sachs wanted her news straight and fast — bad news, at least. He reflected that she never seemed to have much use for the good.

“You’ve been suspended.”

“What?”

“The fuck is this about?” Rhyme snapped.

“A problem at One PP.”

Sachs was closing her eyes. “I leaked the story, right? About the smart controllers? And didn’t tell the brass. But I had to, Lon.”

Rhyme said, “This is bullshit. She probably saved lives. Companies shut down their servers and Griffith wasn’t able to hack in.”

Sellitto’s doughy face registered confusion. “What’re you talking about?”

Sachs explained about her clandestine meeting with the reporter, who broke the story that some companies were hesitant, for financial reasons, to go offline to upgrade their cloud servers with the new CIR security updates.

Sellitto gave a sour look. “Whatever. But that ain’t it. Sorry, Amelia. It’s Madino.”

Rhyme recalled. The captain from the 84th Precinct, who’d convened the Shooting Team after Sachs had shot a round into the escalator motor to save Greg Frommer’s life.

“Turns out there were some reporters got on the case.”

“And he told me they went away.”

“Well, they didn’t go very far. It’s a big deal now, police firing weapons.”

“At unarmed kids, yeah,” Rhyme snapped. “Not at industrial machinery.”

Sellitto held up two palms. “Please, Linc. I’m the messenger is all.”

Rhyme recalled his exchange with Sachs a few days ago.

As long as there’re no reporters trying to make their careers with stories on cops shooting guns in malls, I’ll be cool.

I don’t think that’s much of a journalistic subspecialty...

It had seemed funny at the time.

Sachs said, “Go on.”

“The reporters, they kept at him about what happened, who was involved. They threatened to go over his head.”

She smirked. “And he was afraid that’d jeopardize his plush new office in One PP if he didn’t throw me to the wolves.”

“In a nutshell, yep.”

“Bottom line?” she muttered.

“Three months, no pay. Sorry, Amelia. I gotta do the weapon and shield thing. Just like the fucking movies.” He appeared genuinely disgusted by the whole affair.

A sigh, then she handed them over. “I’ll fight it. Talk to the PBA lawyer.”

“You can. Sure.” His tone was like quicksand.

She eyed him closely. “But?”

“My advice. Take the wrist slap and move on. Madino could make it bad for you.”

“I’ll make it bad for him.”

Silence for a moment. Then the reality of NYPD politics — well, every governmental body’s politics — appeared to seep in, and a look of resignation stilled her face.

Sellitto continued, “Everybody’ll forget about it in a few months. You’ll be back on track. You fight, it’ll drag out. Make more press. They do not want that. Could sideline you for a long time. You know how the system works, Amelia.”

Rhyme said contemptuously, “This is bullshit, Lon.”

“I know it, you know it, they know it. The difference is they don’t care.”

She said, “But we’ve got the Griffith/Morgan case to wrap up.”

“Effective immediately.”

She pulled off her lab jacket, swapped it for her sport coat, the dark-gray one, cut to accommodate both her figure and her Glock 17. A tricky job of tailoring, Rhyme had always thought.

Her voice contained a shrug, as she said, “Not the worst timing, I guess. Gives me a chance to take better care of Mom over the next couple of weeks. Maybe it’s a blessing.”

But it wasn’t, of course. And Rhyme could easily see she didn’t feel that way at all. She was facing an empty, and edgy, quarter year and mad as hell about it. He was certain of this because it was how he would have felt under these circumstances. Working is what we’re made for — dogs, horses, humans. Take that away and we’re diminished, sometimes irreversibly.

“I have to get her to the hospital now.” She strode out and left the town house.

Rhyme heard the front door shut and not long after that the big engine of her Torino fire up. He wasn’t surprised that the acceleration was modest. For Amelia Sachs, unleashing her vehicle’s horses was done out of joy, never anger.

Chapter 62

At first Lincoln Rhyme didn’t recognize the man who stepped into his parlor.

He glanced at Thom, irritated. Why no warning that a stranger had arrived?

But in a few seconds he realized: This was Evers Whitmore, Esq., the stiff, understated attorney with the precise handwriting and more precise mannerisms.

The reason for the missed identification was that the man was incognito: wearing gray wool slacks, a blue plaid shirt sans tie, and a green sweater (he should have tipped immediately; the sweater was a cardigan, all three buttons done in the best style of a 1950s sitcom father, patiently enduring his children’s mischievous but benign antics). On the man’s head was a Titleist golf cap, bright green and yellow

“Mr. Rhyme.”

“Mr. Whitmore.” Rhyme had, as he put it to himself, given up on given names.

The lawyer was aware of Rhyme’s scan of his outfit. “I’m coaching a soccer game in an hour. My sons.”

“Oh, you have a family. I didn’t know.”

“I choose not to wear my wedding ring most of the time because it tends to give away a fact about me to opposing counsel. I myself would not use another attorney’s personal information tactically but there are some who don’t feel the same. As I’m sure will be no surprise to you.”

“You said sons?”

“I also have daughters. Three of each.”

Well.

“The boys are triplets, and they’re all on the same soccer team. It tends to confound the opponents.” A smile. Was this his first? In any event, it was small and brief.

Whitmore looked around. “And Detective Sachs?”

“At the hospital. Her mother’s having surgery. Bypass.”

“My. Any word?”

Rhyme shook his head. “But she’s a feisty one. If that’s indicative of a good prognosis.”

The literal-minded attorney didn’t seem to comprehend. “When you talk to Detective Sachs, wish her my best. And to her mother, as well.”

“I will.”

“I understand that you had a run-in with the suspect. A firsthand run-in.”

“That’s right. I wasn’t injured. Juliette Archer was, but it’s not serious.”

Without unbuttoning his sweater, the man sat pristinely in a chair and hoisted his briefcase to his lap. A double click of the spring clasps and then he lifted the lid.

“I’m afraid I have bad news. I’m sorry to report that I’ve had my investigator take a thorough look at the finances of both Alicia Morgan and Vernon Griffith. She had a savings account worth about forty thousand dollars and he had about one hundred and fifty-seven thousand in assets, plus a retirement plan — but that’s protected against creditors.”

“So a total of about two hundred thousand.”

“I’ll pursue it but, if there are other plaintiffs, and there will be, I assure you, that will have to be divided among all the other survivors and family members. Abe Benkoff’s wife. Todd Williams’s survivors. Even the carpenter who was injured at the Broadway theater.”

“And the people ruined forever because they can’t take escalators,” Rhyme added, referring to the bandwagon clients Juliette Archer had initially mentioned and that Whitmore had assured them will be standing in line, hat in hand.

The lawyer continued, “And there’ll be my contingent fee. Mrs. Frommer will collect perhaps twenty thousand at most.”

The check to be delivered to a garage in Schenectady.

Whitmore was setting documents on a nearby rattan coffee table, probably his investigator’s financial analysis of the two perpetrators, carefully ordered. Rhyme didn’t know why he was delivering them. He believed the lawyer’s PI had done his homework and that the results were accurate. There was no need for proof.

“So,” Whitmore said, ordering the paperwork even more precisely. “We’ll have to go with Plan A.”

“Plan A.”

The team hadn’t established any alphabetized contingencies that Rhyme was aware of, but after the Midwest Conveyance bankruptcy and the absence of any culpability by CIR Microsystems, he’d assumed that the only recourse was to target the conspirators’ own assets, a strategy that was now defunct.

Rhyme mentioned this. And Whitmore regarded him through a thin gauzy veil of confusion. “No, Mr. Rhyme. That was Plan B. Our first approach — product liability against the manufacturer — has always been viable. Here.” He pushed forward one of the documents he’d just off-loaded and Rhyme wheeled closer to the table to read it. He saw it was not, in fact, a financial analysis.

With his right hand Rhyme clumsily flipped through the lengthy complaint. There was a second batch of documents, similar, in the name of her son, for wrongful death, and a third in the name of Greg Frommer himself for the pain and suffering in his last fifteen minutes on earth. And many, many adjunct documents.

The demand for judgment — the ad damnum clause — was for fifty million dollars.

Rhyme looked up from the documents. “But... I assumed there was no suit against the controller manufacturer. I thought the DataWise wasn’t defective.”

“Why would you think that?”

Rhyme shrugged. “Vernon Griffith was—”

“An intervening cause?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, but a foreseeable intervening cause, one they should have guarded against. Negligence is determined by multiplying the likelihood of injury by the severity of that injury and comparing that against how much it would have cost to prevent it. Learned Hand. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. United States v. Carroll Company.

“Applying that rule, I take the position that, one, the probability of hacking a smart product is extremely high, given the number, ingenuity and motivation of hackers today. Two, the gravity of the injury can be extremely high. Mr. Frommer and Abe Benkoff are dead. Res ispa loquitur. And, three, the burden of adequate precautions is minimal. CIR could easily have provided for automatic security updates, as they themselves admitted and, indeed, are doing just now. They should have foreseen that a hacker would cause serious injury and it would have been a simple fix for them. So, CIR is negligent in the deaths.

“I’ll also claim the controllers are defective under the law of strict products liability. Your associate told me — and I have experts researching this further — that the software in embedded products is antiquated.”

True. Rodney Szarnek had told them that it was cheaper and easier for the smart controller companies to use old, easily hacked software, stripped of certain functions, than write new code, to save money and get the products to market sooner.

The spamming refrigerators...

“So, negligence and strict liability. I’ll probably add a breach of warranty claim too. There’s nothing wrong with the kitchen sink strategy when suing a wealthy defendant.”

“You’ll try for a settlement, of course.”

“Yes. They know I’d bring into evidence all of the other incidents — Mr. Benkoff’s stove, the microwave in the theater, the cars taken control of. It would be a public relations nightmare for CIR to fight it in court. And I could get a jury to bleed them anemic, if not dry, with punitive damages. Like a vampire.”

Ah, the somber lawyer had a sense of humor after all.

“I won’t get fifty million but I’ll negotiate a reasonable amount. Which brings me to why I’m here. There are some evidentiary issues that you’ll have to address before I send the complaint to Mr. Frost, the CIR attorney, and begin the horse trading.”

A pause.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you with that.”

“No? May I ask why not?”

“I’m helping the DA prepare the criminal case. There’d be a conflict of interest if I were to continue helping you.”

“I see. Of course. I’m sorry to hear that. True, I don’t want to jeopardize the civil trial.”

“No.”

“I must say, though, it’s important to marshal our case as formidably as we can. There cannot be any gaps in the case we present to the defendant. And the evidence is vital to that. I need an expert. Is there anyone you can think of, Mr. Rhyme? Anyone at all?”

“Hello, Rose.”

The elderly woman opened her eyes. “Lincoln. You came for a visit. Good to see you.”

With her non-IV’d arm she brushed at her hair, though it was perfectly well assembled. Amelia Sachs had fixed her sleeping mother’s coiffure when she and Rhyme had arrived in the recovery room not long before.

“Where’s Amie?”

“Talking to the doctor about when you get to go home. What you can do and can’t.”

“I’m supposed to start walking tomorrow. Who would have thought? Cut you open, fix your ticker... and start you on marathons. Hardly fair.”

Rose didn’t look as pale as he’d expected. In fact, she looked healthier. The improved circulation, Rhyme supposed. He thought momentarily of Alicia Morgan. A small, obscure object, a product within the family car, had changed her life for the worse, forever. And small obscure objects here, in a hospital, had just added years to a life that, otherwise, could have ended abruptly at any minute. In the same way a variety of things kept Rhyme himself alive and functioning.

Then he chuckled at the overwrought thinking. He was here to visit his future mother-in-law. Rose’s room was a good one, and happened to look out over a park across the street, a portion of it at least. He commented on the view.

She glanced through the window. “Yes, it is. It is. Though I must say I was never one of those people who went for a room with a view. What occurs in rooms is far more interesting, don’t you think?”

He couldn’t have agreed more.

No questions about how she was feeling, the hospital food, the trivia that visitors ask patients by rote. Rhyme had noted on the nightstand one of Stephen Hawking’s books. He’d read it some years ago. They fell into a lively discussion about the big bang theory.

A nurse arrived, a handsome man, solid, with a rich Caribbean accent.

“Mrs. Sachs. Ah, you have a famous visitor.”

Rhyme was inclined to offer a dismissive grimace but for her sake simply nodded and smiled.

The man looked her over, the incision site, the IVs.

“Looking good, looking very good.”

Rose said, “And Mr. Herrando knows what he’s talking about. Now, Lincoln, I think I’ll get some rest.”

“Sure. We’ll be back tomorrow.”

Rhyme left the room and headed up to the nurse’s station, where Sachs was finishing a call.

He said, “She’s good, getting some sleep.”

“I’ll peek in.”

Sachs stepped into her mother’s room and returned to Rhyme a moment later.

“Like a baby.”

Together Sachs and Rhyme walked and wheeled down the corridor. Not that he cared much, but Rhyme noted that he received not a single glance his way, unlike on the streets of the city. Here, of course, one would expect to find someone in a fancy wheelchair. Nothing extraordinary, nothing worth staring at. Indeed he was mobile and moving breezily down the hall beside a companion, far more fortunate than many of the people in the dim, silent rooms they passed.

In regione caecorum rex est luscus, he thought.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Side by side, they negotiated the crowded lobby and headed out into the overcast spring afternoon, turning toward the van, which was sitting in the disabled zone.

“So,” Rhyme asked Sachs. “Any more thoughts on what to do during your three-month retirement?”

“Aside from being pissed off?”

“Aside from that.”

“Taking care of Mom. Working on the Torino. Shoot a hell of a lot of lead through paper out on the range. Take up cooking.”

“Cooking?”

“Okay, not that.”

As they approached the van she said, “I have a feeling you’re agendizing something.”

Rhyme chuckled. Ah, Lon Sellitto... what would we do without you?

“Evers Whitmore came to see me, the lawyer. You know I’m not working for him anymore on the Frommer case. Conflict of interest, now that I’m handling the criminal side.”

“What’s this about, Rhyme?”

“I need a favor, Sachs. You’re going to want to say no, but just hear me out.”

“This sounds familiar.”

His eyebrow rose. “Hear me out?”

Sachs put her hand on Rhyme’s and said, “Deal.”

Acknowledgments

With undying gratitude to: Will and Tina Anderson, Sophie Baker, Giovanna Canton, Jane Davis, Julie Deaver, Jenna Dolan, Kimberly Escobar, Jamie Hodder-Williams, Kerry Hood, Mitch Hoffman, Cathy Gleason, Emma Knight, Carolyn Mays, Claire Nozieres, Hazel Orme, Abby Parsons, Seba Pezzani, Michael Pietsch, Jamie Raab, Betsy Robbins, Katy Rouse, Lindsey Rose, Roberto Santachiara, Deborah Schneider, Vivienne Schuster, Ruth Tross, Madelyn Warcholik. You’re the best!