“What’s that?”
“Baxter. Did he have a big house or apartment?”
What was this about? He thought back to the case. “I suppose he did. Worth over a million. Nowadays, how much big does that buy you? Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering why he needed a storage unit in Long Island City—where the gun was found. You’d think he could store things in his house. Or at least in a storage place closer to home. Well, just a thought. Good night now.”
“Night,” he said.
“And don’t forget our riddle: eternity and time and space.”
She wheeled from sight.
Computers saved my life.
In several ways. In high school, I could excel at something not sports (tall is good for basketball but skinny bean isn’t). Computer club. Math club. Gaming. Role-playing online—I could be whoever I wanted to. Appear however I wanted to appear, thank you, avatars and Photoshop.
And now: Computers make my career possible. True, I don’t really look a lot different from many people on the street. But just some different can be enough. People say they like different but they don’t really—unless it’s to look at and laugh at and boost themselves up. So, running a business online, in the safety of my Chelsea womb, is perfect for me. I don’t have to see people, talk to them in person, endure the gawking, even if it’s with a smile on their faces.
And I make a tidy living to boot.
I’m now sitting at—yes—my computer, smarting from the loss of my White Castle. At the kitchen table, I type some more. Read the results of my search. Type another request. Zip, zip, I get more answers. I like the sound the keys make. Satisfying. I’ve tried to describe it. Not a typewriter, not a light switch. Closest I can come is the sound of fat raindrops on a taut camping tent. Peter and I went camping a half-dozen times, twice with our parents (not as much fun then; father listened to a game, mother smoked and turned magazine pages). Peter and I had fun, though, especially in the rain. I didn’t have to be embarrassed going swimming. The girls, you know. And the boys in good shape.
Tap, tap, tap.
Funny how time seems to work to your advantage. I heard some people say, oh, wish I’d been born in this time or that time. Romans, Queen Victoria, the ’30s, the ’60s. But I’m lucky for the here and now. Microsoft, Apple, HTML, Wi-Fi, all the rest of it. I can sit in my room and put bread on my table and a woman in bed occasionally and a bone-cracking hammer in my hand. I can outfit the Toy Room with everything I need for my satisfaction.
Thank you, computers. Love your raindrop keyboards.
More typing.
So. Computers saved my life by giving me a business of my own, safe from the Shoppers out there.
And they’ll save my life now.
Because I’m learning all I can about Red, Amelia Sachs, detective third-grade with the New York City Police Department.
I almost solved the problem of her earlier. Almost cracked her skull to splinters. I was following her near the White Castle, hand in my backpack, on the lovely hammer handle, smooth as a girl’s ankle. Moving close. When some other man showed up, who knew her. A cop, I had a feeling, one who worked for her, it seemed. Little white boy, skinny as me, okay, not quite, and shorter but he looked like trouble. He would have a gun and radio, of course.
I settled for getting Red’s license plate from that sexy car of hers.
All the helpful information I’m learning about her is pretty neat. Daughter of a cop, partner of a cop—well, former cop. Lincoln Rhyme, a famous guy. Disabled, which is what they call it, I’ve learned. In a wheelchair. So we have something in common. I’m not disabled exactly. But people look at me the way they look at him, I imagine.
Typing and typing hard. My fingers are long and big, my hands are strong. I break keyboards once every six months or more. And that’s not even when I’m angry.
Type, read, jot notes.
More and more about Red. Cases she’s closed. Shooting competitions she’s won (I’m keeping that in mind, believe me).
Now I am growing angry . . . Yes, you can buy White Castle burgers at grocery stores. I will do that. But it’s not the same as going into the place, the tile, the smell of grease and onions. I remember going to one near where we grew up. A cousin, Lindy, was visiting from Seattle. Middle schooler, like me. I’d never been out with girl before and I pretended she wasn’t a relative and I imagined kissing her and her kissing me. Went to lunch at White Castle. Gave her a present, for her shiny blond hair, to keep it dry: a clear plastic rain scarf, all folded up tight like a road map in a little pouch, deep blue and embroidered in a Chinese design. Lindy laughed. Kissed my cheek.
A good day.
That was White Castle to me. And Red has taken it away.
Mad, mad . . .
I come to a decision. But then: It’s not a decision if you don’t decide. I have no choice in the matter. As if on cue, the door buzzer blares. I jump at the sound. Save the file on the computer, slip the hard copies away. I click the intercom.
“Vernon, it’s me?” Alicia says/asks.
“Come on up.”
“You’re sure it’s okay?”
My heart is slamming, at the prospected of what’s coming. For some reason I glance back at the Toy Room door. I say into the intercom box, “Yes.”
Two minutes, here she is, outside the door. I check the camera. She’s alone (not brought here at gunpoint by Red, which I actually imagine happening). I let her in and close and lock the door. I think involuntarily of a stone closing onto a crypt.
No turning back.
“Are you hungry?” I ask.
“Not really.”
I was, not any longer. Considering what’s about to happen.
I stat to reach for her jacket, then remember, and let her hang it up. Tonight she’s in her thick schoolteacher blouse, high neck. She looks at the darting fish.
Red and black and silver.
The question is a knob, throbbing prominently in my brain, right where I would crack the bone of someone I wanted to kill.
And I think: Do I really want to do this?
My anger at Red oozes out to my skin and burns.
Yes, I do.
“What?” Alicia asks, looking at me with that wariness in her eyes. Must have said the word aloud.
“Come with me.”
“Uhm. Are you all right, Vernon?”
“Fine,” I whisper. “This way.”
We walk to the door of the Toy Room. She looks at the complicated lock. I know she’s seen it. And is curious. What would he want to hide? she’d be wondering. What’s in the den, the lair, the crypt? Of course she doesn’t say a word.
“Close your eyes.”
A hesitation now.
I ask, “Do you trust me?”
She doesn’t. But what can she do? She closes her eyes. I grip her hand. Mine is trembling. She hesitates and then grips back. Sweat mixes.
Then I’m guiding her through the door, the halogens shooting off the steel blades and blinding me. Not her. True to her word, Alicia keeps her eyes closed.
Lincoln Rhyme, lying in bed, near midnight, hoping for sleep.
He’d spent the last hour reflecting on Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance. Whitmore had called and in his somber, well, dull, voice reported that he’d discovered no other potential defendants. Attorney Holbrook was right. The cleaning crews could not possibly have done anything to cause the access panel to open, and the attorney’s private eye had tracked down the crew that had dismantled the escalator for the Department of Investigations. The worker had confirmed that the door covering the access panel switch had indeed been closed and locked, confirming what Sachs had learned: that no one could, accidentally or on purpose, have opened the panel and caused the accident.
So the case was officially dead.
Now Rhyme’s thoughts eased to Amelia Sachs.
He was particularly aware of her absence tonight. He could not, of course, feel much of her body beside him when she was here, but he found comfort in her regular breathing, the layered smells of shampoo and soap (she was not a perfumista). Now he sensed an edge to the silence in the room, somehow accentuated by the aroma of inanimate cleansers and furniture polish and paper from the rows of books against the wall nearby.
Thinking back to their harsh words earlier, his and Sachs’s.
They had always argued. But this had been different. He could tell from her tone. Yet he didn’t understand why. Cooper was his preferred tech, yes, and truly gifted. But the New York Police Department Crime Scene Unit was filled with brilliant evidence collection technicians and analysts, with expertise in hundreds of fields, from handwriting to ballistics to chemistry to remains reconstruction . . . She could have had any one of them. And, hell, Sachs herself was an expert at forensic analysis. She might need somebody to man the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer or scanning electron microscope, but Rhyme himself didn’t run those. He left that to the technical people.
Maybe there was something else on her mind. Her mother, he supposed. Rose’s operation would be weighing on her. A triple heart bypass in an elderly woman? The medical world was nothing short of miraculous, of course. But considering the massively complex and vulnerable machine within our skin, well, you couldn’t help but think every one of our hours was borrowed.
Since Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance no longer existed, tomorrow Mel Cooper would be back in the CSU fold. And she could use him to her heart’s content.
Sleep crowded in, and Rhyme now found himself thinking of Juliette Archer, wondering about her life in the future. She seemed to have what it took to be a solid forensic scientist but at the moment his musings were about something else: her coping with disability. She still had not fully accepted her condition. She would have a long and dark way to go before she beat it. If, in fact, she chose to do so. Rhyme recalled his own early battle, which culminated in a fierce debate about assisted suicide. He’d faced that choice and chosen to remain among the living. Archer was nowhere near that confrontation yet.
How would she choose?
And what, Rhyme wondered, would he think about her decision? Would he support it or argue against finality?
But any debate within her was years off; most likely he wouldn’t even know her then. These ruminations, grim though they were, had the effect of lulling him to sleep.
It was perhaps ten minutes later that he started awake, his head rising as he heard, in his thoughts, Archer’s low, alto voice. What one thing do we find at the beginning of eternity and the end of time and space?
Rhyme laughed out loud.
The letter “e.”
THURSDAY III
EXPLOIT
CHAPTER 16
Morning, a Chelsea morning. Chelsea light streams through the open shutters.
I’m in the Toy Room, transcribing the diary once again. Sister Mary Frances’s diligence is revealed in the perfectly scripted words I form on the thick paper.
We played Alien Quest today. Long time, the three of us. Sam and Frank and me. The popular boys and me! Sam’s dad has money. He sells things, medical stuff I don’t know what it is but the company pays well and even gives him a car! So Sam has all the games and all the platforms.
Funny, even before I ran into them that day outside of Cindy’s house, coming home a different route, the safe route, they never gave me any shit. But that didn’t mean they’d be interested in hanging out. But they ARE. They’re A Team, ha, don’t mean on teams even though they are. Mean the top crowd, the clique crowd, the A Team crowd. Handsome, cool, have any girl, any time. But they want to hang with me.
It’s Tye Butler, Dano, their friends, sort of goth sort of redneck, yeah even in Manhasset, Long Island. It’s them who push and gawk and say, Bean Pole and Dick Freak. Stuff like that. Sam heard about Butler saying something and he went to find him and said, Leave Griffith alone. And Butler did.
Don’t see them real often. Sam and Frank. The teams, the girls. But that’s what makes it real. They’re like, Hey, Griffith, what’s going on? And it’s epic cause they use my last name, what the in people do. Hey, Griffith, you want a Coke? Then we go separate ways for a few days or a week.
Can’t talk to them serious. Of course. I’d like to, talk about being/feeling different. Can’t talk to anybody, really. Dad, yeah right. In between games. Which is never. Mom, sometimes. But she doesn’t get it. She has baking and her friends and her crafts and her food and after six thirty, forget it. My brother’s okay but off doing other things.
But talking to Sam and Frank?
I decided no. Might break something is how I feel.
I put the diary and the recorder away. I stretch and stand up and walk to the futon, look down, scanning Alicia’s body. Pale, really pale. Mouth kind of open, eyes kind of shut.
Pretty, even in the messy clothes, the twisted sheets.
Beside the bed is a band saw, which is really quite a wicked piece of machinery. If they had one during the Middle Ages, imagine how many people would have renounced the devil. Slice, slice, off with a finger.
Off with whatever.
A voice makes me jump. “Vernon.”
I turn. Alicia is stirring. Blinking against the halogen lights.
She sits up, blinking and stretching too. “Morning,” she says, shy and cautious.
This is a word she’s never said to me before. A first, staying over.
A first, her seeing the Toy Room. Which no one else has ever done—and which I thought would never, ever happen.
Letting someone into my sanctuary, letting someone see the real me was hard to do, so very hard. I could never explain it right but it was like risking everything to let her in. One-night stands, fucking to exhaustion, that’s easy. But taking a woman to a gallery exhibition showing paintings you’re hopelessly passionate about—that’s a chance that’s so risky. What if she laughs, what if she looks bored, what if she decides you miss her mark completely?
And wants to go away.
But last night, walking into the Toy Room and, on my command, opening her eyes, Alicia was as delighted as I’ve ever seen her. She gazed over the workbench, the saws, the tools, the hammers, the chisels. My new implement, the razor with the tiny teeth, my favorite. My child. I loved seeing her pale brow and cheeks, lit by the blue-white reflections shooting from all the steel surfaces.
But what really entranced her was what I constructed with those tools.
“You made these?” she asked last night.
“Did,” I told her uncertainly.
“Oh, Vernon. They’re works of art.”
And, hearing that, my life was about as perfect as it could be.
A good day . . .
But just after that, last night, we grew very, very busy and, after, fell fast asleep. Now this morning she wants to see more of my handiwork.
Before I can turn away or hand her a robe she’s out of bed, and Alicia does in her way what I have done by sharing the room with her. Because now, in the light, she remains naked and I can see her scars clearly. This is the first time she’s allowed me to view them full. The high-necked dress or blouse covers them when she’s clothed. The thick sheltering bra and high panties when she’s half naked. And when we’re in bed, the lights are always low to nonexistent. Now, though, here’s every inch of her body to see in sun-splayed clarity: the slashed breast and thigh, the burned groin, the patch where her arm bone poked through her pale skin after being so fiercely bent.
