‘What exactly do you do, Mr Walesa?’
Pulaski’s gaze began at the lawyer’s bald head and ended at his shoes, which were nearly as shiny. ‘Have a good day, Mr Weller.’
And, with an oblique glance at the box containing the Watchmaker’s ashes, Pulaski headed for the door.
Pulaski, thinking: Yes, nailed it!
CHAPTER 49
The unsub, however, had not left as much evidence in the town house as Rhyme had hoped.
And there were no other solid leads.The phone call about the intruder had come from an anonymous source. A canvass of the area, to find witnesses who’d seen the intruder, had yielded nothing. Security video cameras in two nearby stores had recorded a thin man in dark coveralls, walking with his head down and carrying a briefcase. He’d diverted suddenly into the cul-de-sac. No image of his face, of course.
Mel Cooper had run an analysis on the bottle and found, naturally, only Rhyme’s and Thom’s fingerprints, not even those of a liquor store stocker or a Scottish distiller.
No other trace was on the bottle.
Sachs was now telling him, ‘Nothing significant, Rhyme. Except he’s an ace lock picker. No tool marks. Used a pick gun, I’m sure.’
Cooper was checking the contents of the evidence collection bags. ‘Not much, not much.’ A moment later, though, he did make a discovery. ‘Hair.’
‘Excellent,’ Rhyme said. ‘Where?’
Cooper examined Sachs’s notes. ‘It was by the shelf where he spiked the whisky.’
‘And very good whisky it used to be,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘But a hair. Good. Only: Is it his, yours, mine, Thom’s, a deliveryman’s?’
‘Let’s take a look.’ The tech lifted the hair from the tape roller and prepared a slide for visual observation in the optical microscope.
‘There a bulb?’ Rhyme asked.
Hair can yield DNA but generally only if the bulb is attached.
But this sample, no.
Still, hair can reveal other facts about the perp. Tox and drug profiles, for instance (hair retains drug-use info for months). And true hair color, of course.
Cooper focused the microscope and hit the button that put the image on the high-def monitor nearby. The fiber was short, just a bit of stubble.
‘Hell,’ Rhyme said.
‘What?’ Sachs asked.
‘Look familiar, anyone?’
Cooper shook his head. But Sachs gave a soft laugh. ‘Last week.’
‘Exactly.’
The hair hadn’t come from the unsub but from the City Hall murder case of the week before, the worker killed fighting with the mugger. The beard stubble. The victim had shaved just before he’d left the office.
This happened sometimes. However careful you were with evidence, tiny samples escaped. Oh, well.
The mass spectrum computer screen came alive. Cooper focused and said, ‘Got the toxin profile: tremetol. A form of alcohol. Comes from snakeroot. There wasn’t enough to kill you, unless you drank the whole bottle at once.’
‘Don’t tempt me,’ Rhyme said.
‘But it would have made you very, very sick. Severe dementia. Possibly permanent.’
‘Maybe he didn’t have time to inject the whole dosage into the bottle. You know, it’s the dosage that’s deadly, not the substance itself. We all ingest antimony and mercury and arsenic every day. But not in quantities that do us any harm. Hell, water can kill you. Drink enough too quickly and the sodium imbalance can stop your heart.’
That was it, Sachs reported. No fingerprints, no footprints, no other trace.
Nor had any leads been discovered at or near the Belvedere apartment building. No one had seen a man impersonating a fireman, handing out poisoned coffee. A team sent to check the trash cans in the area had found no other containers of tainted beverage. Security videos were not helpful.
Lon Sellitto was still in critical condition and unconscious — and therefore unable to give them any more information about the unsub, though Rhyme doubted that he’d have been so careless as to reveal anything about himself, as he’d handed out the tainted coffee.
Mel Cooper checked with the research team that Lon Sellitto had put together and learned they had not been able to find anything having to do with the numeric message. They did receive something, though. A memorandum had come in from other Major Cases officers Sellitto had ‘tasked’, his verb, with researching the centipede tattoo.
From: Unsub 11-5 Task Force
To: Det. Lon Sellitto, Capt. Lincoln Rhyme
Re: Centipede
We have not had much luck in finding connections between specific perpetrators in the past and the unsub in this case, regarding centipede tattoos. We have learned this:
Centipedes are arthropods in the class Chilopoda of the subphylum Myriapoda. They have one pair of legs per body segment but don’t necessarily have one hundred legs. They can have as few as two dozen, as many as three hundred. The largest are about a foot long.
Only centipedes have ‘forcipules,’ which are modified front legs, just behind the head. These legs grab prey and through needle-like openings deliver venom that paralyzes or kills. They have venom glands on the first pair of legs, forming a pincer-like appendage always found just behind the head. Forcipules are not true mouthparts, although they are used in the capture of prey items, injecting venom and holding on to captured prey. Venom glands run through a tube almost to the tip of each forcipule.
Culturally, centipedes are depicted for two purposes: One, to intimidate enemies. The image of a walking snake, armed with venom-delivering fangs, taps into root fears of humans. We came across this quotation from a Tibetan Buddhist: ‘If you enjoy frightening others, you will be reincarnated as a centipede.’
Two, centipedes represent invasion of apparently safe places. Centipedes will make their homes in shoes, beds, couches, cradles, dresser drawers. The theory is that the insect represents the idea that what we think is safe really isn’t.
Note that some people have tattoos based on The Human Centipede, a particularly bad gross-out film in which three people are sewn together to form what the title suggests. These tattoos have nothing to do with the centipede insect.
‘Reads like a bad term paper,’ Rhyme muttered. ‘Mumbo-jumbo but print it out, tape it up.’
The door buzzer sounded and he was amused to notice everyone else in the room start. Cooper and Sachs dropped their hands near their weapons — the aftershock of the attempted attack earlier today. Though he doubted their unsub would return, much less announce his arrival with the bell.
Thom checked the door and let Ron Pulaski into the town house.
He walked in, noticed everyone’s troubled faces and asked, ‘What’s up?’
He was told about the attempted attack.
‘Poison you, Lincoln? Oh, man.’
‘It’s okay, rookie. Still here to torment you. How did the undercover job go?’
‘I think I did okay.’
‘Tell us.’
He explained how the trip to the funeral home had gone, meeting the lawyer, the man’s reluctance to say much or reveal his clients.
A lawyer. Interesting.
Pulaski continued, ‘I think I won him over. I called you a son of a bitch, Lincoln.’
‘That work for you?’
‘Yeah, felt good.’
Rhyme barked a laugh.
‘Then I did what you told me. I suggested — didn’t say anything exactly — but I suggested that I’d worked with Logan. And that I’d been in touch recently.’
‘Did you get a card?’
‘No. And Weller didn’t offer. He was keeping his cards close to his chest.’