“I’m serious, Linc. There’re people who want heads to roll.”
“As quickly as clichés.”
Sachs said, “We’re being careful.”
Sellitto scoffed, “You know what’s inevitable?”
“Death and taxes is always a good answer, though, of course, that’s a cliché too.”
“If we collar the Locksmith, the question’s going to come up how we did it. And since Queens isn’t giving me squat, the whole world’ll be looking right at you, Linc.”
“Allow me one more hackneyed turn of phrase: we’ll cross that bridge when.”
“Well, let me just say, forewarned is forearmed.”
“Touché, Lon.”
They disconnected.
Sellitto was right. But what choice did they really have? This man had to be stopped before he put to use one of those knives he was so fond of.
Sachs took a call and jotted some notes. She edited an entry note on the whiteboard, replacing the number 22 with 26.
R. Pulaski, canvass of locksmiths/locksmith schools in tri-state area.
26 canvassed, no connection to anyone fitting profile of Locksmith.
Rhyme asked, “Mel? That graphite on the Jolly Rancher wrapper? You ever run it?”
The tech had not, other than to confirm it was professional grade, and he did so now.
Rhyme then was looking at some pictures of trace on the flat-screen monitor. The tiny slivers of deep yellow metal had taken his attention.
“What?” Sachs noted his gaze.
“That brass. We know it’s been machined. Metals don’t shed.”
She snapped her fingers. “Key-making machine.”
“He might work at a home improvement or hardware store. That’s one lead but we don’t have the manpower to survey them all. We’ll keep it in mind if we find something to narrow down the geographic field. But another lead is that he might privately own one himself. Are they rare, Sachs? Are they expensive? Let’s hope so. I want to know how many key-machine manufacturers there are and what their records of private sales are like.”
She called Lon Sellitto back with this request, and, after a conversation, she disconnected. Rhyme knew that the detective would assign canvassers right away.
He turned back to the chart.
The Locksmith was intelligent, given to planning, careful, and he was aware of, and he studied, his pursuers.
Rhyme thought again of the Watchmaker. The Locksmith was truly his heir... But then he corrected the notion, which suggested that their present perp had somehow replaced the earlier. But that wasn’t the case at all. Oh, yes, the Watchmaker might have met his fate in one of his enterprises gone wrong. Rhyme, however, couldn’t believe that. He had a feeling that the man was very much alive... and very much involved in other plots.
He wondered again if one of which might have to do with the intelligence from the UK, relayed to Rhyme by the FBI. The gist was that unknown Person X had hired unknown Person Y to kill Person Z.
Person Z’s identity was quite well known, according to the report. Lincoln Rhyme himself.
Sachs, reading a text, said, “Bad news about the key-cutting machine.”
“You can buy them for a thousand dollars and they’re sold at dozens of retail locations so he could pay with nice tidy untraceable cash,” Rhyme guessed.
“More or less.”
“Hell.”
Sachs scrolled through her phone and apparently found a number. She placed a call. And hit the Speaker button. Rhyme heard it ringing.
“Hello?”
“Lyle?”
“Amelia,” Spencer said.
“I’m here with Lincoln and Mel Cooper.”
“Any breaks in the case?”
“Nothing much. None of the complaints Legal found panned out. The lead detective’s focusing on the Apollos, but nothing solid. I’m calling to see if anybody’s heard anything from Whittaker’s son.”
“I’m with Mr. Whittaker and his niece right now.”
They heard him pose the question. And the answers from both Whittaker and Joanna and her fiancé, Martin Kemp, were negative.
“I’d like to take a look at his apartment. Does anybody there have a key?”
No one in the family did.
“The building have a super?” Sachs asked.
Joanna said, “Yes. Lives there.”
Sachs told them, “I can get a warrant for a welfare check. Spencer, you free tomorrow morning?”
“What time’s good?”
“Make it nine.”
“See you then.”
They disconnected.
She shook her head. “Hope nothing’s happened to him. They had a fight and his father wanted to reconcile, then he goes missing.”
“What did they fight about?” Rhyme asked absently.
“Seems he didn’t like his father’s muckraking and running a media empire that was light on women on executive row and heavy on them in short skirts in front of the camera. Well, you saw the complaints.” She nodded at the file folder the WMG legal department had provided.
But Whittaker Media’s policies and practices didn’t interest Rhyme much. He was gazing at the chart, gazing at the crime scene photos on the monitor, gazing at the evidence bags in the sterile portion of the lab, lined up in a way that for some reason suggested to Lincoln Rhyme cattle at a slaughterhouse.
Something had to be there.
Something...
His eyes then turned toward the photographs, once more, in particular the ones she had taken at the Bechtel Building crime scene.
“Mel,” Rhyme called sharply. “I’ve got a job for you.”
“What?”
“An autopsy.”
Cooper paused and cleared his throat. “Well, Lincoln, I don’t do postmortems.” The tech was uneasy.
“You need to rise to the occasion,” Rhyme said solemnly. “Just this once.”
44
I’m in my workshop.
And staring at my Tower of London keychain, a prized possession.
The Tower has always been special for me because of the Ceremony of the Keys:
In the Tower, every night at 9:53, the chief yeoman warder — a Beefeater — locks the outer and tower gates, then marches to the Bloody Tower. A sentry challenges him and he tells the sentry he’s got the Queen’s keys and is allowed to pass. The ceremony ends at exactly 10 p.m. In hundreds of years it’s never been canceled.
I am lying on the firm futon, thinking of Taylor Soames.
And her pain.
Oh, not physical.
No, a subtler kind.
And much more enduring. You gut someone with a brass knife and the agony is fleeting.
What I did was much more satisfying.
After I dropped them off at her building Taylor would have trekked upstairs with her Roonie, euphoric at the wonderful turn of events.
So damn hard to meet decent men in this city, but she’d pulled it off!
Ben Nelson ticked all the right boxes. Divorced five years, so the domestic drama was largely a thing of the past. He had a daughter close in age to that of her own child. A gentleman. No beer gut. A pelt of natural hair — to which I’d added a little gray makeup, because I know she likes that in a man. Resources (the Brooks Brothers suit — and any woman who says she doesn’t want a man with money? Liar!). Humor. And, on first blush, not a perv. I didn’t examine boob or leg. Well, once — the former — but she was looking away and didn’t catch me. We’re all human.
And chivalrous. Walking them back home, protecting them from that stalker! And even carrying slim Roonie’s backpack.
Ben was just the man for the job.
But soon that anticipatory joy would begin to evaporate.