Terry Dobyns was gone – after offering some acerbic psychological insights about narcissism and those employed by the federal government. Jerry Banks had left too. Mel Cooper continued to painstakingly disassemble and pack up his equipment.
“This is good, Lincoln.” Sellitto sipped his Scotch. “Goddamn. I can’t afford this shit. How old’s it?”
“I think that one’s twenty.”
The detective eyed the tawny liquor. “Hell, this was a woman, she’d be legal and then some.”
“Tell me something, Lon. Polling? That little tantrum of his. What was that all about?”
“Little Jimmy?” Sellitto laughed. “He’s in trouble now. He’s the one ran interference to take Peretti off the case and keep it out of the feds’ hands. Really went out on a limb. Asking for you too, that took some doing. There were noses outa joint over that. I don’t mean you personally. Just a civilian in on a hot case like this.”
“Polling asked for me? I thought it was the chief.”
“Yeah, but it was Polling put the bug in his ear in the first place. He called soon as he heard there’d been a taking and there was some bogus PE on the scene.”
And wanted me? Rhyme wondered. This was curious. Rhyme hadn’t had any contact with Polling over the past few years – not since the cop-killer case in which Rhyme had been hurt. It had been Polling who’d run the case and eventually collared Dan Shepherd.
“You seem surprised,” Sellitto said.
“That he asked for me? I am. We weren’t on the best of terms. Didn’t used to be anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“I 14-43’d him.”
An NYPD complaint form.
“Five, six years ago, when he was a lieutenant, I found him interrogating a suspect right in the middle of a secure scene. Contaminated it. I blew my stack. Put in a report and it got cited at one of his IA reviews – the one where he popped the unarmed suspect.”
“Well, I guess all’s forgiven, ’cause he wanted you bad.”
“Lon, make a phone call for me, would you?”
“Sure.”
“No,” Thom said, lifting the phone out of the detective’s hand. “Make him do it himself.”
“I didn’t have time to learn how it works,” Rhyme said, nodding toward the dialing ECU Thom had hooked up earlier.
“You didn’t spend the time. Big difference. Who’re you calling?”
“Berger.”
“No, you’re not,” Thom said. “It’s late.”
“I’ve been reading clocks for a while now,” Rhyme replied coolly. “Call him. He’s staying at the Plaza.”
“No.”
“I asked you to call him.”
“Here.” The aide slapped a slip of paper down on the far edge of the table but Rhyme read it easily. God may have taken much from Lincoln Rhyme but He’d given him the eyesight of a young man. He went through the process of dialing with his cheek on the control stalk. It was easier than he’d thought but he purposely took a long time and muttered as he did it. Infuriatingly, Thom ignored him and went downstairs.
Berger wasn’t in his hotel room. Rhyme disconnected, mad that he wasn’t able to slam the phone down.
“Problem?” Sellitto asked.
“No,” Rhyme grumbled.
Where is he? Rhyme thought testily. It was late. Berger ought to be at his hotel room by now. Rhyme was stabbed with an odd feeling – jealousy that his death doctor was out helping someone else die.
Sellitto suddenly chuckled softly. Rhyme looked up. The cop was eating a candy bar. He’d forgotten that junk food’d been the staple of the big man’s diet when they were working together. “I was thinking. Remember Bennie Ponzo?”
“The OC Task Force ten, twelve years ago?”
“Yeah.”
Rhyme had enjoyed organized-crime work. The perps were pros. The crime scenes challenging. And the vics were rarely innocent.
“Who was that?” Mel Cooper asked.
“Hitman outa Bay Ridge,” Sellitto said. “Remember after we booked him, the candy sandwich?”
Rhyme laughed, nodding.
“What’s the story?” Cooper asked.
Sellitto said, “Okay, we’re down at Central Booking, Lincoln and me and a couple other guys. And Bennie, remember, he was a big guy, he was sitting all hunched over, feeling his stomach. All of a sudden he goes, ‘Yo, I’m hungry, I wanna candy sandwich.’ And we’re like looking at each other and I go, ‘What’s a candy sandwich?’ And he looks at me like I’m from Mars and goes, ‘What the fuck you think it is? Ya take a Hershey bar, ya put it between two slices of bread and ya eat it. That’s a fucking candy sandwich.’ ”
They laughed. Sellitto held out the bar to Cooper, who shook his head, then to Rhyme, who felt a sudden impulse to take a bite. It’d been over a year since he’d had chocolate. He avoided food like that – sugar, candy. Troublesome food. The little things about life were the biggest burdens, the ones that saddened and exhausted you the most. Okay, you’ll never scuba-dive or hike the Alps. So what? A lot of people don’t. But everybody brushes their teeth. And goes to the dentist, gets a filling, takes the train home. Everybody picks a hunk of peanut from out behind a molar when nobody’s looking.
Everybody except Lincoln Rhyme.
He shook his head to Sellitto and drank a long swallow of Scotch. His eyes slid back to the computer screen, recalling the goodbye letter to Elaine he’d been composing when Sellitto and Banks had interrupted him that morning. There were some other letters he wanted to write as well.
The one he was putting off writing was to Pete Taylor, the spinal cord trauma specialist. Most of the time Taylor and Rhyme had talked not about the patient’s condition but about death. The doctor was an ardent opponent of euthanasia. Rhyme felt he owed him a letter to explain why he’d decided to go ahead with the suicide.
And Amelia Sachs?
The Portable’s Daughter would get a note too, he decided.
Crips are generous, crips are kind, crips are iron…
Crips are nothing if not forgiving.
Dear Amelia:
My Dear Amelia:
Amelia:
Dear Officer Sachs:
Inasmuch as we have had the pleasure of working together, I would like to take this opportunity to state that although I consider you a betraying Judas, I’ve forgiven you. Furthermore I wish you well in your future career as a kisser of the media’s ass…
“What’s her story, Lon? Sachs.”
“Aside from the fact she’s got a ball-buster temper I didn’t know about?”
“She married?”
“Naw. A face and bod like that, you’da thought some good-lookin’ hunk woulda snagged her by now. But she doesn’t even date. We heard she was going with somebody a few years ago but she never talks about it.” He lowered his voice. “Lipstick lesbos’s what the rumor is. But I don’t know from that – my social life’s picking up women at the laundromat on Saturday night. Hey, it works. What can I say?”
You’ll have to learn to give up the dead…
Rhyme was thinking about the look on her face when he’d said that to her. What was that all about? Then he grew angry with himself for spending any time thinking about her. And took a good slug of Scotch.
The doorbell rang, then footsteps on the stairs. Rhyme and Sellitto glanced toward the doorway. The sound was from the boots of a tall man, wearing city-issue jodhpurs and a blue helmet. One of NYPD’s elite mounted police. He handed a bulky envelope to Sellitto and returned down the stairs.
The detective opened it. “Lookit what we got here.” He poured the contents onto the table. Rhyme glanced up with irritation. Three or four dozen plastic evidence bags, all labeled. Each contained a patch of cellophane from the packages of veal shanks they’d sent ESU to buy.
“A note from Haumann.” He read: “ 'To: L. Rhyme. L. Sellitto. From: B. Haumann, TSRF.' ”
“What’s 'at?” Cooper asked. The police department is a nest of initials and acronyms. RMP – remote mobile patrol – is a squad car. IED – improvised explosive device – is a bomb. But TSRF was a new one. Rhyme shrugged.