What... What is that?
She cocked her head and made out the faint notes tinkling from the second bedroom.
It was Brahms’s “Lullaby,” and the tune was coming from the mobile above the baby crib.
Son of a bitch, she thought. Now more angry than scared. She ran into the kitchen for a weapon and stared at the countertop.
The butcher block knife holder was there.
All of the knives were gone.
Glancing at the second bedroom, she noted that the door was open — it had been closed when she went to bed. That she remembered clearly.
Jesus, he was in there now, with the knives!
It was then that she remembered the toolbox, which rested in the bottom of the bathroom closet. No knives inside but there was a hammer. It was the only weapon she could think of so it would have to do. She turned and stepped into the bathroom fast, closing and locking the door.
Thinking, fat lot of good that’ll do. If he got through a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deadbolt, how long would the knob lock stop him?
As she flung the closet door open and dropped to her knees to dig for the tool kit, she paused and looked up.
The shower curtain, which she’d left open last night, was drawn closed.
22
Amelia Sachs finished walking the grid at the crime scene, Apartment 4C, 501 East 97th Street.
She’d done the Bechtel Building, the Locksmith’s entry and exit routes into and out of Carrie Noelle’s building and had just completed her apartment itself.
Wearing white Tyvek overalls and other standard crime-scene gear, she carried a dozen paper and plastic bags out into the hallway, and handed off to an evidence collection tech — a young, talented Latina, whom Sachs had wanted to recruit to work regularly with her and Rhyme — a plan put on hold now that her husband had been summarily fired.
She tried to quash the anger she felt at the brass’s foolishness. No, that was too mild. Their idiocy.
This she was not able to do.
Politics...
“Terrible,” Sonja Montez said, somber faced, as she looked at a large plastic bag containing a baby’s rotating mobile of angels. She had a four- and a six-year-old at home.
“Do the CoCs and get them into the bus.”
“Sure, Detective.” She put the bags, from which chain-of-custody cards dangled, into a large plastic tub and walked to the elevator.
Sachs spent another fifteen minutes in the apartment, then she too left and descended to the main floor. Outside, she noted the large crowd, staring at the police activities.
Reporters too. As always, the press hovered, and... pressed.
“Is this the Locksmith?” one called.
“Detective Sachs!”
“Was there a Daily Herald page here too?”
She said nothing and began stripping off the overalls.
Ron Pulaski approached. The young officer ran a hand through his short blond hair and absently worried the scar on his forehead. He’d suffered a head injury on the job years ago, and it had been a long slog back to full health.
“Sucks about Lincoln.”
“Yeah. Any luck with locksmithing shops?”
“No. Just that they were all impressed at the perp’s skill.”
Sachs scoffed. “Not helpful.”
“No.”
She glanced up toward the window that would be Noelle’s. “He was drinking her wine. Just like he ate Annabelle Talese’s cookies. Sitting on the couch with his feet up on her coffee table.”
“Drinking?” Pulaski was frowning. “He’s careful about friction ridges. But careless about DNA?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll have to see.”
“Brother. What’s the guy about?” He thought for a moment. “I think he’s flaunting. Home invasion, sitting there, throwing the intrusion into the victims’ faces.”
“Throwing it in our faces too.” Sachs had run serial perp cases before. Narcissism was a key component to their personalities. They believed they were special; they could play God.
Her eyes slipped to the reporters.
She happened to glance behind the throng and notice a gray Cadillac, one of the newer ones. It was stopped in a traffic lane, which wasn’t odd, since there were other curious drivers slowing or pausing as they or their passengers eyed the police action. Given the dark windows, she wasn’t one hundred percent certain but it appeared that the driver — in shades and a black hat — was videoing or photographing her. While others in the crowd were filming the ambulance, the crime scene van, the police cars and the white-gowned techs, his phone was aimed directly her way. She knew that it was not uncommon for the perp to return to the scene during an investigation. Sometimes this was to glean what the cops were discovering. Other times, it was to bask in their handiwork.
Narcissism...
When he seemed suddenly aware she was observing him, he set the phone down, put the car in gear and sped on. Sachs stepped into the street but caught only the tag’s state — New York — not the number, before it disappeared around the corner.
“Something?” Pulaski asked.
“The gray Caddie. More interested in us than I would’ve liked.”
“You think our perp drives a Cadillac?”
“Why not? Locksmithing’s just a hobby, according to Benny Morgenstern. Who knows what he does for a living? You find anything here?”
Pulaski said, “We’ve talked to a couple dozen neighbors, businesspeople, deliverymen. Nobody’s seen anything.”
He and a half-dozen officers from local precincts had checked escape routes the Locksmith might have taken. It appeared that he’d broken a window in the back of the building and dropped into an alley to escape. The fact that he hadn’t used either the front entrance or the service door meant he’d left just minutes earlier — the police presence would have surprised him.
“Security cameras?”
“None that’re working.”
Half the cams one sees in stores and on the street are fake or not hooked up. Recording security video is a time-consuming and complicated job. And cameras and boxes can be expensive.
“What we talked about before,” she whispered. “You okay helping?”
“Absolutely, Amelia.”
“Fourth floor. East stairwell.” Sachs nodded at Noelle’s. “Then the Bechtel Building. Front lobby.”
“Got it.” The young officer walked off.
Her eyes scanned once more for the gray Cadillac. No sign of it. Sachs stepped to her Torino, from which she retrieved her dark blue sport coat, pulling it on over the black sweater. She also wore black jeans and boots. Then she walked to a nearby blue-and-white and sat down in the backseat.
“How are you doing?” Sachs asked Carrie Noelle.
“Okay, I suppose.” The woman returned Sachs’s phone and thanked her for its use. Her own, which Sachs had retrieved from the aquarium, would be going into evidence on the off chance that the Locksmith had touched it without gloves.
Noelle said, “I have to ask. How’d you get here so fast? My neighbors heard me calling for help and they said you were downstairs in seconds. How on earth did that happen?”