Sellitto hulked off, gesturing Patrol Division officers to join him and they huddled to arrange for canvass teams.
Sachs opened a vinyl bag and withdrew a high-def video camera rig. As she’d done with her weapon, she wiped this down, too, with the alcohol swabs. She slipped the lightweight unit over the plastic cap encasing her head. The small camera sat just above her ear and a nearly invisible stalk mike arced toward her mouth. Sachs clicked the video and audio switches and winced when loud static slugged her eardrum. She adjusted it.
“Rhyme, you there?”
A moment of clatter. “Yes, yes, you there, you at the scene? Are you on the grid, Sachs? Time’s wasting.”
“Just got here. I’m ready to go. How are you feeling?”
“Fine, why wouldn’t I be?”
A three-hour microsurgery operation a couple of days ago?
She didn’t answer.
“What’s that light? Jesus, it’s bright.”
She’d glanced at the sky and a slash of morning sun would have blasted into the video camera and onto the high-def monitor Rhyme would be looking at. “Sorry.”
In a gloved hand Sachs picked up the evidence collection bag — a small suitcase — and a flashlight and began walking down the ramp into the garage.
She was glancing at her feet. Odd.
Rhyme caught it, too. “What’m I looking at, Sachs?”
“Trash.” The ramp was filthy. A nearby Dumpster was on its side and the dozen garbage bags inside had been pulled out and ripped open. The contents covered the ground.
It was a mess.
“Hard to hear you, Sachs.”
“I’m wearing an N95.”
“Chemical, gas?”
“That first responding told me it was a good idea.”
“It’s really dark,” the criminalist then muttered.
The video camera automatically went to low-light mode — that greenish tint from spy movies and reality TV — but there were limits to how much bits and bytes could convey.
Eyes, too, for that matter. It was dark. She noted the bulbs were missing. She paused.
“What?” he asked.
“The bulbs aren’t just missing, Rhyme. Somebody took them out and broke them. They’re shattered.”
“If our doer’s behind it, that means he probably isn’t from the building. He doesn’t know where the switch is and didn’t want to take the time to find it.”
Count on Rhyme to come to conclusions like that…from a mere wisp of an observation.
“But why broken?”
“Maybe just being cautious. Tough to get prints or lift other trace from a shattered bulb. Hm, he could be a smart one.”
Rhyme, Sachs was pleased to note, was in a good mood. The medical treatments — complicated, expensive and more than a little risky — were going well. He’d regained significant movement in both arms and hands. Not sensation; nothing would bring that back, at least not as medical science stood nowadays, but he was far less dependent than he had once been and that meant the world to a man like Lincoln Rhyme.
She finally had to resort to her flashlight. She clicked on the long Maglite and continued past a dozen parked cars, some of whose owners were undoubtedly furious that they had not been allowed to use their vehicles, because of the minor inconvenience of a murder near where they’d parked. But, on the other hand, there’d also be plenty who’d do whatever they could to help nail the suspect.
Nothing teaches you human nature like being a cop.
Sachs felt a ping of the arthritis pain that plagued her in her knees and slowed. She then stopped altogether, not because of joint discomfort, but because of noises. Creaks and taps. A door closed — an interior door, not a car. It seemed a long ways off, but she couldn’t tell. The walls muffled and confused sounds.
Footsteps?
She turned suddenly, nearly swapping flashlight for Glock.
No, just dripping water, from a pipe. Water dribbled down the incline, mixing with the papers and other trash on the floor; there was even more garbage here.
“Okay, Rhyme,” she said. “I’m almost at the bottom level. She and her car’re around that corner.”
“Go on, Sachs.”
She realized she’d stopped. She was uneasy. “I just can’t figure out all this garbage.”
Sachs began walking again, slowly making her way to the corner, paused, set down the suitcase and drew her gun. In the flashlight beam was a faint haze. She lifted the mask off, inhaled and coughed. There was pungency to the air. Paint maybe, or chemicals. And smoke. She found the source. Yes, some newspapers were smoldering in the corner.
That’s what Marko had been referring to.
“Okay, I’m going into the scene, Rhyme.”
Thinking of Marko’s words.
The worst…
Weapon up, she turned the corner and aimed the powerful wide-angle beam of the flashlight at the victim and her vehicle.
Sachs gasped. “Oh, Jesus, Rhyme. Oh, no…”
2
At 4 P.M. Amelia Sachs walked into Lincoln Rhyme’s townhouse on Central Park West.
Rhyme found himself glaring toward her — partly because of the powerful autumn light streaming in from the open door behind her, partly because of his impatience.
The crime scene search had taken forever, six and a half hours to be precise, the longest for a single scene he could remember.
Sachs had told him that the young officer who’d been first response reported it was the worst scene he’d ever come across. Partly, he meant that the victim had died a horrific, sadistic death. But equally he was referring to the complete contamination of the scene.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sachs had told Rhyme through the microphone. And gazing at the high-def screen, he had to admit that he hadn’t either. Every square inch of the area — from the ramp to the garage floor to the victim’s car and surrounding area — was obliterated, covered with trash. And painted, powdered, coated with liquids, dusted with dirt and powders.
It was actually hard to locate the victim herself for all the mess.
Rhyme now piloted his red Storm Arrow wheelchair to the front door, through which Sachs was carrying a large carton filled with evidence collection bags. She explained that the first responder, a Crime Scene officer named Marko, and she had sped here in their private vehicles — his an SUV. Rhyme noted that the vehicle was loaded to the gunwales with cartons of evidence. Young man, picking up a massive carton, had a military air about him. He did a double take when he saw Rhyme. He nodded.
Rhyme ignored him, focusing on the astonishing quantity of evidence. Sachs’s ancient Ford was filled, too. He didn’t see how she’d been able to drive it.
“Christ,” he muttered.
Lincoln Rhyme had a handsome face, hair a bit long for NYPD regulation but that mattered not at all since he was no longer NYPD. His nose was prominent, his lips full, though they grew thin quickly, like irises dilating in light, when he was displeased, which occurred with some frequency, given his impatience and pole-vault high standards for crime scene work. A pink scar was visible at the base of his throat; it resembled a bullet wound but in fact it was from the ventilator tube, which had kept him alive after the accident.
A breath of autumn wind blew through the open door and a comma of black hair tickled his forehead. He clumsily lifted his right hand to brush it away, a gesture that would have been impossible several years ago, when he’d been completely paralyzed below the neck. Those little things — the inability to scratch an itch, the impossibility of feeding oneself, the incessant nag of the condition — were what wore you down, more than the broader consequences of cataclysmic injury. At the moment, his left arm was bandaged to his body; he’d had additional surgery to give that limb the same awkward, but miraculous, skill as the right.