“Trudie’s wasn’t that high but it was a hell of a lot more than insurance and what I could scrape together from friends and family — and refinancing. Then came Geiger’s money. From heaven. It covered the treatment — and helped with her lifestyle. She was active, athletic. We’d bike together and rock climb. The disease caused muscle atrophy. But we could afford good PT.”
“You laundered the money?”
“Eight banks, invested in a couple of quote ‘businesses.’” Spencer rocked his neck from side to side. He winced, this man who had just climbed a hundred feet straight up into the air.
“I mentioned no surprise endings.”
“The skel you let go got busted for something else and dimed you out.”
He nodded. “I didn’t do the one thing that anybody serious would have done: claimed he went for a weapon and took him out. Couldn’t do that, of course.
“If there was any good news, it was that my daughter died a month before I got busted. She never knew what I’d done.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I cut a deal. I pled guilty and the state waived restitution. They could have taken our house, car, pension, everything. See, I didn’t technically steal from Geiger: I stole from us. Confiscated money goes into the police budget, or somebody’s budget in Albany. I was never too clear on that. Anyway, the prosecutors thought it’d look bad with our daughter dying to penalize my wife too.
“I got thirteen months. Medium security upstate. My wife divorced me, married a nice guy and they’ve got a kid, his.”
“Amelia said you talked about a family.”
“Technically. They’re just not mine. I needed the security job to give them something every month. They don’t have a lot of money.” He looked Rhyme in the eyes. “So if it seemed like an ex-cop — a disgraced but decorated ex-cop — died saving another cop from a burning building the insurance company wouldn’t say suicide and deny the claim. That’s what you spotted when I was up in the window.”
“I could tell.”
“Amelia didn’t. She lit me up in the Bechtel Building and this thought came over me. Fuck it. That’d be it. I had the pipe. I could’ve gone for her. And that would be it.” A shake of his head. “I remember her eyes. She was wondering why I was hesitating. She didn’t get it.”
“No. That’s not something that would occur to her.”
Amelia Sachs might dig a nail into her skin, she might drive on the edge, she might be first through the door in a dynamic entry, but Rhyme knew she had never asked the to-be-or-not-to-be question.
Spencer continued, “It wouldn’t’ve been right under those circumstances. Not for her. And the insurance company would probably’ve balked. Suicide by cop. They know about that.”
Rhyme nodded.
Spencer asked, “But you... you got it.”
“I knew, yes.”
“Because of what happened?” A nod at the wheelchair.
“That’s right. I’ve been there.”
“Why’d you change your mind?”
Rhyme sipped the scotch. “Funny thing happened. A while ago there was a serial kidnapper here in the city. The Bone Collector.”
“I know about him.”
“He was targeting me because of a mistake I made at a crime scene. I cleared it too soon. A perp was still there. When he tried to escape he killed the wife and the child of the man who’d become the Bone Collector. He decided to come after me. Revenge. But then he discovered I was planning on killing myself.”
“Put a crimp in his plans, didn’t it?”
Rhyme chuckled. “How do you get revenge by killing someone who wants to die? You’re doing them a favor. So, he planned a series of crimes.”
“The kidnappings?”
A nod. “And ones that I was particularly suited to run. And so I ran them.”
“And, because of that, you changed your mind about killing yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“And then he tried to kill you.”
“Exactly. That plan didn’t work either.”
Spencer eased back in the chair. Rattan is noisy to start with and under his weight the piece of furniture groaned. “I lost the three things that mattered to me. My daughter. My wife. My cop job. That’s why I’m always a footstep away from rappelling without a rope.”
It was odd to hear the voice of a man so big, so imposing, crack.
“Sometimes it’s tough,” Rhyme said softly. “I can’t say I never think about it anymore. But I always end up with: What the hell — why not enjoy a meal or conversation with Amelia for a little longer? Why not bicker with Thom for a little longer? Why not watch the peregrines and their nestlings on the ledge outside my window a little longer? Why not put some despicable perps in prison? Life’s all about odds, and as long as the needle’s past the fifty percent mark, being here is better than not.”
The big man nodded, retrieved his glass then held it up like a toast.
Rhyme had no idea if his words, every one of them as true as the periodic table of the elements, registered. But he could do nothing more, or less, than tell Lyle Spencer what had saved him — and what continued to do so.
Spencer had a brief coughing fit. He rose and walked to a table near the sterile portion of the room where he’d left his water bottle. He drank from it, as he absently looked over the evidence chart.
“Rhyme,” came Sachs’s voice from the sterile part of the parlor. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed that there was an urgency to it. “I’ve got the results of that carpet sample in Kitt’s apartment. You’re going to want to see this.”
58
I do love my workshop.
Yes, there are echoes of the imprisonment in the Consequences Room, but most of the time the anger is more than compensated for by all of my friends here: the 142 locks, the keys, my tools, my devices, my machinery.
It’s especially nice when I’m engaged in a project, as now. I’m making pin tumbler keys that will open a knob lock and deadbolt.
Working with a sharp file and steel brush.
Pin tumbler keys are the most common of them all, those little triangular pieces of metal that jangle from all our keychains, the ones virtually no different from those that opened the lock created by Linus Yale and son.
I have a blank in my vise and I’m bitting by hand with a file, leaving tiny brass shavings on the workbench.
I’m engaged in the art of duplicating a key when you don’t have the original... or the all-powerful code. Every key has a code that will allow it to open the lock that has the corresponding one. There are two layers of coding. The blind code is gibberish, KX401, for instance. You can announce that code to the world but no one can cut a key from it. The blind code has to be translated, via esoteric charts or software, into the bitting code, like 22345, which together with depth and spacing numbers allows you to cut the appropriate key, even if you’ve never seen the original.
But there’s another way to copy a key, and that’s what I’m doing now. You can work from a photograph and if you’ve had experience, of course, like me, it’s possible to create a working duplicate. (A big scandal recently: On TV, an election official unwisely displayed the key to his county’s voting machines, to assure voters of the security of the devices. Within hours lockpickers re-created the key — not to alter any votes, but to simply fulfill what God put them on this earth to do: open what was closed.)
I compare my work every ten or twenty seconds with the photos I took of the keys in the ignition at the Sandleman blaze. It takes some time but finally, I know that these are perfect duplications.