The couple regarded each other and it was she who nodded their collective assent.
Then Rhyme said to her, “Check NCIC, Interpol and our own databases.”
With a parting glance at Annabelle — Rhyme had forgotten her last name — Sachs exited that page and logged on to a secure NYPD server. Her fingers, tipped in uncolored, close-cut nails, pounded hard. A moment later. “No references to ‘Locksmith’ as a proper name or nick or aka. Some perps were locksmiths by profession but picking skills had nothing to do with the crimes and they’re either long gone or nowhere near here.”
Rhyme mused, “So he’s created himself from whole cloth. Interesting.”
Sachs logged out of the server. “Did the page of the newspaper he left mean anything to her?”
“I don’t know,” Sellitto said. “They declared a crime scene and backed out, the uniforms did.”
Sachs asked, “The picture he posted, could Computer Crimes trace it?”
“No, it went to an underground image board — there’s no trail.”
Rhyme said to Sachs, “Okay, get to her apartment. Walk the grid.”
“I’ll interview her too and get some uniforms for a canvass.”
“Video in the building?” Rhyme asked.
Sellitto told him no.
Rhyme reflected: a canvass wouldn’t do much good then since the officers would have no description. All they could ask neighbors was if they’d seen anyone “suspicious” — a line out of a shamus movie from the ’40s. He didn’t care much, though. He was distrustful of witnesses and their accounts anyway.
He wanted the evidence.
Sachs asked, “Where’s Annabelle now?”
Sellitto said, “At her neighbors’. She won’t go back to the apartment alone.”
“Hardly blame her there.”
Rhyme said, “I’ll call Mel. Lon, can you get me Pulaski? Is he free?” Rhyme added, “I want him free.”
“He’ll be free.”
“Let’s get a board going.”
Sachs moved aside the Buryak and the Gregorios whiteboards and positioned a blank one in the middle of the room. She picked up a dry marker. In every case in which the real identity of the perp was not known, Rhyme and the team would assign him or her a code name, usually “unsub” — unknown subject — followed by numbers representing the month and day of the crime. In this case, though, they didn’t have to go to the trouble.
The perp had named himself.
She wrote The Locksmith at the top of the board, perfectly centered and in fine, elegant script.
11
Returning to my workshop, from the surveillance at darling Carrie Noelle’s, I look up and down the scuffed and littered street. Two people with their backs to me, a couple. No worries there. I recognize them as residents, hipsters, if they still have hipsters now. The man has an elaborate beard. I’m always clean shaven. Fewer hairs for me to shed and for the police to find.
I step to the front door of the old Sebastiano Bakery Supply Company building, which is a judicious distance from my apartment.
At the door I extract my red and black keychain, a tacky souvenir, but one I have quite the affection for: it depicts the Tower of London. On it are a half-dozen keys, most of which are unusual. One of them is Swiss, and the titanium blade is rounded, and the bitting — the ridges to push up the pins in the tumbler lock — are inside the tube so it cannot be duplicated by someone taking a photograph or making an impression. This key opens the top lock.
The two below it require other keys on my chain: a dimple key and a chain key, whose shaft dangles in links, as the name suggests, making the lock it opens virtually impossible to pick. By everyone else, I mean. I cracked it in two minutes and seven seconds.
I step inside and re-secure the locks, set a steel bar from a metal bracket in the floor to one in the door, a forty-five-degree angle. One who picks locks appreciates that locks can be picked. Metal bars cannot.
On a table by the door I set the keys and my brass folding blade knife that I’m never without. I shed my jacket and hat and check the news on my phone. I’m curious what they have to say about my Visit to the pretty — no, beautiful — influencer Annabelle Talese. Oh, I’m quite the celebrity, apparently. The whole town is in a tizzy. The Locksmith this, the Locksmith that. I wondered how long it would take for the picture, once posted on one of the forums, to migrate to the popular media.
Record time, it seems.
I spend some time looking over my tools, cleaning and oiling the ones that need it. I have quite the collection: two-piece bypass lock shanks, small keyway finger lock rakes, other mini rakes, heat-shrink lock pick sleeves, glasspaper, pick handles, bump keys, bump hammers, top of keyway tension wrenches, circular tension tools, cylinder lock jigglers, skeleton keys, wafer lock rakes, picks for double-sided locks, standard rakes, dimple rakes, wave rakes, pen-style lock pick, on and on...
And in boxes neatly arrayed: snap guns and electric pick guns, the EPGs looking like stainless-steel electric toothbrushes with dozens of needle tips. Efficient and fast. To be used sometimes, but artless.
Also, practice locks (made of clear plastic so you can see your progress in picking).
Now I sit in the chair I will someday replace and scoot forward, greeting my opponent for tonight.
The lovely and infuriating SecurPoint Model 85. It’s mounted in a slab of wood, like a doorframe, which is in turn bolted to a stand. Though I’ve seen it a hundred times in person, and a thousand in my mind, I look over the lock once more, perhaps the way a chess player regards his opponent before the first move.
I look at the SecurPoint as an astonishingly beautiful and coy woman whose mind is impossible to fathom and who has her own secret agenda for granting you access to her heart and her body. Or not.
Inhaling slowly, exhaling.
I pull the lock closer yet. Then pick up my tension tool and rake and slip them inside.
12
Amelia Sachs had never seen a victim looking so upset.
She and Annabelle Talese were sitting in the front seat of the detective’s ruddy Ford Torino, outside the woman’s apartment building.
She fidgeted — even more than Sachs herself would do when stressed, and Amelia Sachs was quite the fidgeter.
Talese would twine her pale lemon hair around her fingers, pull it back over her shoulders, release it then twist some more. Her face was fraught with worry and she examined every passerby on the sidewalk. In her eyes, suspicion vied with fear.
She had agreed to assist Sachs when she walked the grid, by gowning up herself and pointing out where the Locksmith had been and what he’d touched, though it had taken her some minutes to work up the courage.
Once the search was done, samples collected and photos taken, the woman had wanted to leave, and so the interview was conducted here, in the safe confines of a solid Detroit-built vehicle.
At one point, when Sachs adjusted her jacket, she inadvertently revealed her pistol; Talese noted the weapon and relaxed a touch.
Sachs produced a pad of paper and a pen. And a digital recorder, which she set on the dashboard. “You okay with this?” Indicating the slim Sony.
“Yes, anything.”
Sachs pushed the button and a cyclops eye glowed red.
“Now you’re absolutely certain no one could have keys?”
“Positive.”
It wasn’t an apartment, but a co-op; she owned the place and was able to put her own locks in, which she’d done about six months ago.
“Who installed them?”
She gave the name of the company.
The recorder sucked up decibels, while Sachs took notes.