Waste of time, playing the fate game.
View of Death Number One, View of Death Number Two.
‘You know the funeral home?’ Sachs asked.
‘Not yet.’
Not knowing he was about to be arrested, and believing he was minutes away from murdering Rhyme, Logan had made a promise that he would spare Sachs’s life. Perhaps this clemency was another of the reasons for Rhyme’s mourning the man’s death.
Thom nodded to Sachs. ‘Coffee? Anything else?’
‘Just coffee, thanks.’
‘Lincoln?’
The criminalist shook his head.
When the aide returned with the cup, he handed it off to Sachs, who thanked him. While the nerves throughout most of his body were insensate, Rhyme’s gustatory cells, aka taste buds, worked just fine and he appreciated that Thom Reston made a very good cup of coffee. No capsules or pre ground, and the word ‘instant’ was not in his vocabulary.
With a wry smile the aide said to her, ‘So. What do you think of Lincoln’s emotional side?’
She warmed her hands around the coffee. ‘No, Thom, I think there’s method to his sentiment.’
Ah, that’s my Sachs. Always thinking. This was one of the reasons he loved her. Their eyes met. Rhyme knew that his smile, minuscule though it was, probably matched hers muscle for muscle.
Sachs continued, ‘The Watchmaker was always an enigma. We didn’t know much about him – he had California connections was about all. Some distant family we could never track down, no associates. This might be the chance to find people who knew and worked with him – legitimately or in his criminal projects. Right, Rhyme?’
One hundred percent, he reflected.
Rhyme said to Pulaski, ‘And when you find out the funeral home, I want you there.’
‘Me?’
‘Your first undercover assignment.’
‘Not first,’ he corrected.
‘First at a funeral.’
‘That’s true. Who should I be?’
Rhyme said the first thing that came to his mind. ‘Harold Pigeon.’
‘Harry Pigeon?’
‘I was thinking of birds.’ A nod toward the nest of peregrine falcons on Rhyme’s window ledge, huddled down against the storm. They tended to nest lower in bad weather.
‘Harry Pigeon.’ The patrolman was shaking his head. ‘No way.’
Sachs laughed. Rhyme grimaced. ‘I don’t care. Make up your own damn name.’
‘Stan Walesa. My mother’s father.’
‘Perfect.’ An impatient look at a box in the corner of the room. ‘There. Get one of those.’
‘What’s that?’
Sachs explained, ‘Prepaid mobiles. We keep a half dozen of them here for ops like this.’
The young officer collected one. ‘A Nokia. Hm. Flip phone. State of the art.’ He said this with consummate sarcasm.
Before he dialed, Sachs said, ‘Just be sure to memorize the number first, so if somebody asks for it you don’t fumble.’
‘Sure. Good.’ Pulaski used the prepaid to call his personal phone and noted the number then stepped away to make the call.
Sachs and Rhyme turned to the crime scene report on the City Hall mugging case and made some edits.
A moment later Pulaski returned. ‘The hospital said they’re waiting to hear about where to send the body. The morgue director said he’s expecting a call in the next few hours.’
Rhyme looked him over. ‘You up for this?’
‘I suppose. Sure.’
‘If there’s a service, you’ll go. If not, you’ll get to the funeral home at the same time as whoever’s picking up the remains. The flowers from me’ll be there. Now, that’ll be a conversation starter – the man Richard Logan tried to kill and who put him in jail sends flowers to his funeral.’
‘Who’s Walesa supposed to be?’
‘An associate of Logan’s. Exactly who, I’m not sure. I’ll have to think it through. But it should be somebody inscrutable, dangerous.’ He scowled. ‘I wish you didn’t look like an altar boy. Were you one?’
‘My brother and I both.’
‘Well, practice looking scruffy.’
‘Don’t forget dangerous,’ Sachs said, ‘though that’s going to be tougher than inscrutable.’
Thom brought Rhyme some coffee in a straw fitted cup. Apparently the aide had noticed him glancing at Sachs’s. Rhyme thanked him with a nod.
Old married couple …
Thom said, ‘I feel better now, Lincoln. For a minute I really did think I was seeing a soft side. It was disorienting. But knowing that you’re just setting up a sting to spy on the family of a corpse? It’s restored my faith in you.’
Rhyme grumbled, ‘It’s simply logical. You know, I’m really not the cold fish everyone thinks I am.’
Though ironically Rhyme did want to send the flowers in part for a sentimental reason: to pay his respects to a worthy adversary. He suspected the Watchmaker would have done the same for him.
Views of Death Number One and Number Two were not, of course, mutually exclusive.
Rhyme then cocked his head.
‘What?’ Sachs asked.
‘What’s the temperature?’
‘Right around freezing.’
‘So there’s ice on the steps outside?’ Rhyme’s town house sported both stairs and a disabled accessible ramp.
‘There was in the back,’ she said. ‘Front too, I assume.’
‘We’re about to have a visitor, I think.’
Though the evidence was largely anecdotal, Rhyme had come to believe that, after the accident that deprived him of so many sensations, those that survived grew more discerning. Hearing in particular. He’d detected someone crunching up the front steps.
A moment later the buzzer sounded and Thom went to answer it.
The sound and pacing of the footsteps as the visitor entered the hallway and made for the parlor revealed who’d come a callin’.
‘Lon.’
Detective First Grade Lon Sellitto turned the corner and strode through the archway, pulling off his Burberry overcoat. It was tan and vivid with the creases that characterized most of Sellitto’s garb, thanks to his portly physique and careless posture. Rhyme wondered why he didn’t stick with dark clothing, which wouldn’t show the rumpling so much. Though once the overcoat was off and tossed over a rattan chair, Rhyme noted that the navy blue suit displayed its own troubled texture.
‘Bad out there,’ Sellitto muttered. He dusted his thinning gray black hair, and a few dots of sleet bailed. His eyes followed them down. He’d tracked in muck and ice. ‘Sorry about that.’
Thom said not to worry and brought him a cup of coffee.
‘Bad,’ the detective repeated, toasting his hands on the mug the way Sachs had. Eyes toward the window, on the other side of which, beyond the falcons, you could see sleet and mist and black branches. And little else of Central Park.
Rhyme didn’t get out much and in any event weather meant nothing to him, unless it was a factor in a crime scene.
Or it helped his early warning system detect visitors.
‘It’s pretty much finished,’ Rhyme said, nodding at the City Hall mugging/murder crime scene report.
‘Yeah, yeah, that’s not why I’m here.’ Spoken nearly as one word.
Rhyme’s attention hovered. Sellitto was a senior officer in Major Cases and if he wasn’t here to pick up the report, then maybe something else, something more interesting, was on the horizon. More propitious was that Sellitto had seen a tray of pastry, homemade by Thom, and had turned away as if the crullers were invisible. His mission here had to be urgent.
And, therefore, engaging.
‘We got a call, a homicide down in SoHo, Linc. Earlier today. We drew straws and you got picked. Hope you’re free.’
‘How can I get picked if I never drew a straw?’
A sip of coffee. Ignoring Rhyme. ‘It’s a tough one.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Woman was abducted from the basement of the store where she worked. Some boutique. Killer dragged her through an access door and into a tunnel under the building.’