And in many ways the most difficult to solve.
It was then that a man in an expensive suit — no overcoat — came hurrying up to them, oblivious to the sleet and cold. He was in his fifties, tanned, hair carefully cut. He wasn’t tall but was quite handsome and well proportioned.
‘Mr Clevenger!’ one of the women cried and hugged him. Samantha’s co-worker. He gripped her hard and greeted the others in Samantha’s party with a somber nod.
‘Louise! Is it true? I just heard. I just got a call. Is she, Samantha? Is she gone?’ He stepped back and the woman he’d been embracing said, ‘Yes, I can’t believe it. She’s … I mean, she’s dead.’
The newcomer turned to Sachs, who asked, ‘So you knew Ms Levine?’
‘Yes, yes. She works for me. She was … I was talking to her a few hours ago. We had a meeting … just a few hours ago.’ He nodded at the glossy building beside the restaurant. ‘There. I’m Todd Clevenger.’ He handed her a card. International Fiber Optic Networks. He was the company’s president and CEO.
Sellitto asked, ‘Was there any reason anybody would want to hurt her? Anything about her job that was sensitive? That might’ve exposed her to threats?’
‘Can’t imagine it. All we do is lay fiber optic for broadband Internet … just communications. Anyway, she never said anything, like she was in danger. I can’t imagine. She was the sweetest person in the world. Smart. Really smart.’
The woman named Louise said to Sachs, ‘I was thinking about something. There was that woman killed the other day. In SoHo. Is this the same psycho?’
‘I can’t really comment. It’s an ongoing investigation.’
‘But that woman was killed underground too. Right? In a tunnel. It was on the news.’
The scrawny young artistic-looking man, who’d identified himself as Raoul, Samantha’s roommate, said, ‘That’s right. It was the same thing. The, you know, MO.’
Sachs again demurred. She and Sellitto asked a few more questions but it was soon clear there was nothing more these people could help them with.
Wrong place, wrong time.
A happenstance victim …
Ultimately, in cases where the victim had been alone with the perpetrator, no witnesses, the truth would have to be revealed through the evidence.
And this was what Sachs and the other Crime Scene officers now packed carefully into the trunk of her Torino.
In five minutes she was racing up the West Side Highway, blue light on the dash pulsing madly, as she skidded around cars and trucks — the slaloming more a function of her powerful engine and her comfort in high revs than the inclement weather.
CHAPTER 31
At close to eleven p.m. Rhyme heard Sachs enter the hallway, her arrival announced by the modulating hiss of sleet-filled wind.
‘Ah, finally.’
She stepped into the parlor a moment later, holding a large milk crate containing a dozen plastic and paper bags. She nodded a greeting to Mel Cooper, who sagged with fatigue but seemed game to start on the analysis.
Rhyme asked quickly, ‘Sachs, you said you thought he might be around the scene?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What came of that?’
‘Nothing. Bo sent a half-dozen ESU boys and girls after him. But he was gone. And I didn’t get a good look at him. It was maybe nothing. But my gut told me it was him.’ She called up a map of Hell’s Kitchen on the main computer monitor and pointed out the restaurant, Provence2, and on the corner an office building. ‘He went down there but, see? It’s only a few blocks from Times Square. He got lost in the crowd. Not sure it was him but it’s too much of a coincidence to ignore completely. He seems curious about the investigation; after all, the perp did come back to Elizabeth Street and spied on me through the manhole cover.’
Eye-to-eye …
‘Well, let’s get to the evidence. What do we have, Sachs?’
Thom Reston said firmly, ‘Find out — what she has, that is — but find out quickly. You’re going to bed soon, Lincoln. It’s been a long day.’
Rhyme scowled. But he also accepted that the caregiver’s job was to keep him healthy and alive. Quadriplegics were susceptible to a number of troublesome conditions, the most dangerous of which was autonomic dysreflexia — a spike in blood pressure brought on by physical stress. It wasn’t clear that exhaustion was a precipitating factor but Thom had never been one to take anything for granted.
‘Yes, yes, yes. Just a few minutes.’
‘Nothing spectacular,’ Sachs said, nodding at the evidence.
But then, Rhyme reflected, there rarely were any smoking guns. Crime scene work was incremental. And obvious finds, he felt, were automatically suspect; they might be planted evidence. Which happened more than one might suspect.
First, Sachs displayed the photographs of the tattoo.
Surrounded by the scalloped border that, according to TT Gordon, was in some way significant.
Which made its cryptic nature all the more infuriating.
‘First “the second” and now “forty”. No article preceding this one but, again, no punctuation.’
What the hell was he saying? A gap of thirty-eight from two to forty. And why the switch from ordinal to cardinal? Rhyme mused, ‘Smells like a place to me, an address. GPS or longitude and latitude coordinates. But not enough to go on yet.’
He gave up speculating and turned back to the evidence she’d collected. Sachs selected a bag and gave it to Cooper. He extracted the cotton ball inside.
‘The poison,’ Sachs said. ‘One sample’s gone to the ME’s Office but I want a head start. Burn it, Mel.’
He ran the materials through the chromatograph and a few minutes later had the mass spectrum. ‘It’s a combination of atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine.’
Rhyme was staring at the ceiling. ‘That comes from some plant … yes, yes … Hell, I can’t remember what.’
Cooper typed the cocktail of ingredients into the toxin database and reported a moment later, ‘Angel’s trumpet: Brugmansia.’
‘Yes,’ Rhyme called. ‘Of course that’s it. But I don’t know the details.’
Cooper explained that it was a South American plant, particularly popular among criminals in Colombia, who called it devil’s breath. They blew it into the faces of their victims and the paralyzing, amnesiac drug rendered them unconscious or, if they remained awake, unable to fight their assailants.
And with the right dose, as with Samantha Levine, the drug could induce death in a matter of minutes.
Coincidentally, at that moment, the parlor landline rang: the medical examiner’s office.
Cooper lifted an eyebrow, looking toward Sachs. ‘Must be a slow night. Or you scared them into prioritizing us, Amelia.’
Rhyme knew which.
The ME official on call confirmed that devil’s breath was the poison that had been used on Samantha Levine’s abdomen in the tattooed message. He added that it was a highly concentrated version of the toxin. And there was residue of propofol in her bloodstream. Cooper thanked him.
Sachs and the tech continued to examine the trace she’d collected. This time, though, they found no variation from the control samples, which meant the residues found on her body and where the unsub had walked in the crime scene had not been tracked in by him; they were all indigenous to the underground stockyard pen.
That, in turn, meant the substances wouldn’t lead to anywhere the perp might have been.
‘Ergo,’ Rhyme muttered, ‘fucking useless.’
Finally, Sachs used tongs to pick up a plastic bag containing what seemed to Rhyme to be a purse. ‘Thought it was a rat at first. Brown, you know. And the strap seemed to be the tail. Be careful. There’s a booby trap inside.’ A glance at Cooper.