Capt. Rhyme turned down lucrative offers to work in the private sector or in colleges and chose instead to specialize in crime scene work.
He said in an interview that theoretical science had no interest for him. He wanted to put his talents to practical use. “I couldn’t be a karate expert who spends all his time in the monastery or practice hall. I’d be itching to get out on the street.”
Some friends believed an incident in his past, possibly a crime of some sort, steered him to law enforcement but none was able to say what that might have been.
Capt. Rhyme attended the NYPD Police Academy in Manhattan and joined the force as an officer in the Crime Scene Unit. He quickly rose through the division and was eventually named commanding officer of the division overseeing the unit while still a captain, usually a position held by an officer with the higher rank of deputy inspector.
Capt. Rhyme took forensic science to a new level in New York City. He fought for budget increases to buy state-of-the-art equipment, evidence collection gear and computers. He personally created a number of databases of “samplars,” such as motor oils, gasoline, dirt, insects, animal droppings and construction materials, against which his officers could compare trace evidence from crime scenes and thus identify and locate the perpetrator with unprecedented speed. He would wander throughout the streets of the city at all hours and collect such materials.
He developed new approaches to searching crime scenes (for which he coined the now-common term, “walking the grid”). He instituted the practice of using a single officer to examine scenes, believing that a solo searcher could achieve a better understanding of the crime and the perpetrator than when a group of officers was involved.
FBI Special Agent Frederick Dellray, who worked with Capt. Rhyme frequently, said, “When it came to physical evidence, there was not a single, solitary soul in the country who was better. No, make that the world. I mean, he was the one we brought in to set up our Physical Evidence Response Team. Nobody from Washington or Quantico, nope. We picked him. I mean, this’s a guy solved a case ’cause he found a fleck of cow manure from the eighteen hundreds. He couldn’t tell you who Britney Spears is or who won American Idol, but, it came to evidence, that man knew f***ing everything.”
Although most senior Crime Scene officers are content to leave the actual searches and lab work to underlings, Capt. Rhyme would have none of that. Even as a captain, he searched scenes, gathered samples and did much of the analysis himself.
“When we were partnered,” said Lt. Lon Sellitto, “he was a lot of times first officer at the scene and would insist on searching it himself, even if it was hot.”
A “hot” crime scene is one at which an armed and dangerous perpetrator might still be present.
“I remember one time,” Lt. Sellitto recalled, “he was running a scene and the perp comes back with a gun, starts shooting. Lincoln dives under cover and returns fire but he was mad about the whole thing — every time he fired, he said, he was contaminating the scene. I told him later, ‘Geez, Linc, you shoot the guy, you’re not gonna have to worry about the scene.’ He didn’t laugh.”
When asked once about his fastidious approach to forensic work, Capt. Rhyme cited Locard’s Principle, which was named after the early French criminalist, Edmond Locard, who stated that in every crime there is some exchange between the criminal and the victim, or the criminal and the scene, though the trace might be extremely difficult to find.
“Often the only thing that will stop a vicious killer is a microscopic bit of dust, a hair, a fiber, a sloughed-off skin cell, a coffee stain. If you’re lazy or stupid and miss that cell or fiber, well, how’re you going to explain that to the family of the next victim?”
He insisted on employees’ total devotion to their job and once fired an officer for using the toilet beside the bedroom where a murder had occurred.
Still, he rewarded hard work and loyalty. A former protégé reported that on more than one occasion Capt. Rhyme would berate senior police officials to secure raises or promotions for his people or adamantly, and loudly, defend their judgments about handling cases.
In several instances Capt. Rhyme himself ordered senior police officials, reporters and even a deputy mayor arrested when their presence threatened to contaminate or interfere with a crime scene.
In addition to gathering and analyzing evidence, Capt. Rhyme enjoyed testifying in court against those whose arrests he had participated in.
Bernard Rothstein, a well-known criminal defense lawyer who has represented many organized crime figures, recalled several cases in which Capt. Rhyme testified. “If I saw that Rhyme had done the forensic work in a case against one of my clients, I’d think, brother, I am not looking forward to that cross-examination. You can punch holes in the testimony of a lot of Crime Scene cops when they get up on the stand. But Lincoln Rhyme? He’d punch holes in you.”
After his accident at the subway crime scene, he converted a parlor in his Central Park West townhouse into a forensic lab, one that was as well equipped as that in many small cities.
Det. Melvin Cooper, an NYPD Crime Scene officer who often worked with Capt. Rhyme and did much of his laboratory work for him, recalled one of the first cases run out of his townhouse. “It was a big homicide, and we had a bunch of evidence. We cranked up the gas chromatograph, the scanning electron microscope and the mass spectrometer. Some other instruments, too. Then I turned on a table lamp and that was the last straw. It blew out the electricity. I don’t mean just his townhouse. I mean the entire block and a lot of Central Park, too. Took us nearly an hour to get back on line.”
Despite his injury, Capt. Rhyme was not active in disability rights organizations. He once told a reporter, “How would you describe me? Six feet, white, one hundred eighty pounds, black hair, disabled. Those are all conditions that have, to a greater or lesser degree, affected my career as a criminalist. But I don’t focus on any of them. My purpose in life is to find the truth behind crimes. Everything else is secondary. In other words, I’m a criminalist who, by the way, happens to be disabled.”
Ironically, largely because of this attitude, Capt. Rhyme has been held out by many advocates as an example of the new disabled movement, in which individuals are given neither to self-pity nor to exploiting or obsessing over their condition.
“Lincoln Rhyme stood for the proposition that the disabled are human beings first with the same talents and passions — and shortcomings — as everyone else,” said Sonja Wente, director of the Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Center. “He avoided both the pedestal and the soapbox.”
Capt. Rhyme himself observed in a recent interview, “The line between the disabled and the nondisabled is shrinking. Computers, video cameras, high-definition monitors, biometric devices and voice recognition software have moved my life closer to that of somebody who’s fully able bodied, while the same technology is creating a more sedentary, housebound life for those who have no disability whatsoever. From what I’ve read, I lead a more active life than a lot of people nowadays.”
Nonetheless, Capt. Rhyme did not simply accept his disability but fought hard to maintain his ability to live as normal a life as he could and, in fact, to improve his condition.