Stepping forward fast, I grab his collar and yank him into the shadows of the loading dock.
“Oh, Jesus . . .” He turns toward me, eyes wide. “You! From up the hall! What the hell?”
We’re neighbors, two apartments away, or three, though we don’t say much to each other. Just a nod hello occasionally.
I don’t say anything now. What’s the point? No quips, no chance for last words. People can get snaky at times like that. I just bury the round end of the ball-peen hammer in Edwin’s temple. Like with Todd Williams while we were on our way to have a drink commemorating our joint venture in making the world safe from smart products too smart for our own good.
Crack, crack.
Bone separates. Blood appears.
On the ground, he’s squirming, eyes unfocused. Pull the hammer out—it’s not easy—and do the same thing again. And again.
The squirms stop.
I look onto the street. No pedestrians. A few cars but we were deep in obscuring shadow.
I drag poor Edwin to a supply cabinet of the abandoned warehouse’s abandoned loading dock and open the warped plywood door. Muscle him inside. Then crouch down and get his phone. It’s passcode-protected but that doesn’t matter. I recognize it from last night. Alicia and I were making love on the couch, beside the fish tank. I glanced up at the security monitor and saw Edwin, returning home drunk, like most nights, outside my door, recording the sounds. Didn’t tell her, didn’t say anything. It would upset her, a woman whose resting state is upset.
But I knew I’d have to crack Edwin’s bones for what he did. Just knew it. Not that there was any evidence that could be used to track me down. Just because doing that—recording us—was cruel. It was the act of a Shopper.
And that was reason enough for the man to die. Wish it had been with more nociceptive pain but you can’t have everything.
Crack the bones of his mobile too—can’t take the battery out very easily on these models—and I’ll dispose of it later.
I notice a few intrigued rats nearby. Cautious but sniffy. Nice way to eliminate evidence, it occurs to me, hungry rodents, digesting trace evidence from the corpse.
Stepping out onto the sidewalk, I inhale deeply. Air is a bit ripe, this part of town. But invigorating.
A good day . . .
And soon to get better. It’s time for the main event.
“Stand up,” Jon Perone said, smoothing his jet-black hair. Was a bottle involved? Probably.
Nick knew the drill. Pulled up his shirt and spun around slowly. Then dropped his pants too. And underwear. Perone glanced down. Impressed, dismayed? A lot of men were.
Nick buttoned and zipped and tucked.
“Shut your phone off. And battery out.”
Nick did this too. Set them on Perone’s desk.
He glanced at the door. The man in suspenders was there. Nick wondered how long he’d been present.
“It’s okay, Ralph. He’s clean.”
Nick stared into Ralph’s eyes until the man turned and left the room. Back to Perone. “Just to connect the dots, Jon. A friend of mine tracked down a friend of yours—Norman Ring, presently guest of the state, doing five to eight up in Hillside. He earned himself serious time because he agreed to keep quiet when he could’ve rolled over on you. I’ve got enough, though, to put you two together.”
“Jesus, man. Fuck.” Perone’s complexion, ruddy from weekend golf and vacationing, Nick guessed, grew ruddier yet under the painted hair.
“It’s all in a letter to my lawyer, to be opened in the event of my getting fucked. You know the rest of it, right? So let’s not get indignant here. Or blustery. Or trigger-happy. Let’s just talk business. Didn’t you ever wonder where the merch you stole came from?”
“Algonquin?” Perone was calmer now. “I kept waiting for somebody to come out of the woodwork. But nobody did. What was I gonna do, take out an ad? Found: two million bucks’ worth of Oxy and Perc and propofol. Call this number.”
“No harm done. But time for my money.”
“You didn’t need to come on like the fucking Godfather.”
Nick screwed up his face. “All respect, Jon. What happened to the owner of the warehouse where I stored the shit? Stan Redman?”
Perone hesitated. “Accident. Construction site.”
“I heard you buried him alive after he tried to move the merch himself.”
“I don’t recall any such occurrence.”
Nick shot him a wry glance. “Now the money. I earned it. I need it.”
“I’ll go six.”
“We’re not negotiating, Jon. Even you went to the hardest-ass fence in the city, you cleared fifty-five points. That’s over a million. And I’ll bet you didn’t. You’re not a discount kind of guy at all. You sold it on the street. You probably walked away with three M. Pure profit.”
Perone shrugged. The equivalent of: Yeah, pretty much.
“So here’s the deal. I want a million. And I want paperwork shows it as a loan—from a company that can’t be traced to you or anybody with a record. Only we have a side agreement, written, that the debt’s forgiven. I’ll worry about the IRS if it comes to that.”
Perone’s grimace was more reluctant admiration. “Any other fucking thing you want, Nick?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah, there is. The Algonquin ’jacking, the Gowanus? I want you to put the word out on the street that it wasn’t me did it. It was my brother. Donnie.”
“Your brother? You’re diming him out?”
“He’s dead. He won’t give a shit.”
“Whatever people hear on the street, nobody’s reversing a conviction.”
“I know that. I just want some people who’re in the loop to hear it.”
Perone said, “I knew that merch’d come back to haunt me. Are we through?”
“Almost.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Now, there’s a guy named Vittorio Gera. Owns a restaurant in BK. The place is his name. Vittorio’s.”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to have somebody visit him, tell him he’s going to sell the place to me. For half of what he’s asking.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Have that somebody lean on his wife and daughters. I think he’s got grandchildren too. Just get some pictures of them in the park and send them to him. That should do it. If not, have somebody visit his youngest daughter. Hannah. She’s the one looks like a slut. Just take her for a ride around the block.”
“You do have a style, Nick.”
“You robbed me, Perone. I don’t need any shit from you.”
“All right. I’ll get the paperwork put together.” Then Perone was frowning. “How’d you tip to me, Nick? Couldn’t’ve been that easy. I cover tracks real good. Always have.”
“A file from back in the day. Closed case. Don’t worry.”
“But there had to be something more recent. I been through four separate companies, five, since you went away.”
“A guy I know made inquiries. Freddy Caruthers.”
“So he could put me together with the Algonquin heist merch. And put you and me together.”
Nick said, “Which brings me to my last request.”
Perone was nodding slowly. His eyes remained on something behind Nick, on a hat on the coatrack or on a grease spot on the wall or a photo of him playing golf at Meadowbrook.
Or maybe on nothing at all.
“Freddy drove me partway today. I told him I was worried there was a cop after me and we ducked into the garage at Grand Central Center, the mall. I took a cab the rest of the way.”
“Cop?”
“No, no, I made it up. I just wanted Freddy to cool his heels.” Nick’d had an idea this was how it was going to shake out.
Perone said softly, “We can take care of that.” He made a call. A moment later Ralph, of the solid chest and flamboyant suspenders and icy glare, was back.
“Nick Carelli, Ralph Seville.”
A moment of mano eye lock, then hands were shaken.
“Got a job for you,” Perone said.
“Sure, sir.”
Nick pulled out his phone, slipped the battery in, turned it back on. He texted Freddy; he didn’t want to hear the man’s voice.
On way back. Any sign of Kall?
There wouldn’t be, of course.
Nope.
Nick typed and sent:
Where R U?
The reply was:
Purple level near Forever 21 door.
Nick’s next message was:
C U in 15.
From Freddy:
All good?
Nick hesitated then typed.
Gr8
Nick gave Ralph the information about Freddy’s location. “He’s in a black Escalade.” He then cut a glance toward Perone. “No buried-alive shit. Fast, painless.”
“Sure. I don’t need to send messages. This is just loose ends.”
“And I don’t want him to know it was me.”
Ralph gave a grimace. “I’ll do what I can. But.”
“Just try. The phone’s got my texts. And my prints’re in his SUV.”
“We’ll take care of everything.” Ralph nodded. And left the office. Nick caught sight of a large, nickel-plated automatic pistol in his waistband. Thinking one of those bullets would be in his friend’s brain in a half hour.
Nick rose and he and Perone shook hands. “I’ll get a cab back to the city.”
“Nick?”
The man paused.
“You interested in doing some work with me?”
“I just want to open my business and settle down and get married. But, sure, I’ll think about it.” Nick walked out of the office, lifting his phone and dialing a number.
CHAPTER 43
Rhyme was looking at Amelia Sachs when her phone rang.
She glanced away from him and stepped to the recesses of the parlor to take a call. Her back was to the room. He wondered if it was her mother. Her shoulders were slumped. Was all okay? He knew the troubled history of mother and daughter but also knew that it had improved with the years. Rose had mellowed. Sachs had too, with regard to her mother. Years go by, edges dull. Entropy. And now, of course, the woman’s illness. Someone’s physical condition, as he well knew, can change all.
He couldn’t hear or deduce much. Finally: “restaurant” and “worked out” and “congratulations.” She sounded enthusiastic. Then, after she’d listened for a time: “I have faith in you.”
Not Rose. Then who?
He turned back to the evidence charts, wheeled closer. His meditation was interrupted by Lon Sellitto. “Anything close in NCIC?”
“No,” Rhyme said. The fourteen people files and the seven property files in the National Crime database were geared toward individuals with outstanding warrants or who were otherwise suspects and toward stolen property; it was possible to run a profile of a crime or pattern of crimes and shoot out a few names but that wasn’t what the FBI’s system was designed for.
Juliette Archer said, “In the media and academic sites I found plenty of stories or reports of instances of hacking smart systems. Mostly for the sake of hacking. Nature of the hobby, my son tells me. The challenge. Nobody’s intentionally weaponized an appliance, though some hackers’ve taken control of cars and stoplights.”
“Stoplights. That’s a scary thought.” From Sellitto.
She continued, “It’s cheaper to use wireless controls in them—public works doesn’t have to dig and lay cables.”
Sellitto said, “Solid backgrounding. You’d make a good cop.”
“Passing the physical’d be a problem.”
Sellitto muttered, “Linc sits on his ass all day long. You can consult. Give him some competition. Keep him sharp.” The rumpled detective was once more scanning the charts. “The hell’s his profile? Maybe explosives but we ain’t had any bangs lately. Toxins but nobody’s been poisoned. He’s a fine woodworker. What’s he build, do you think? Cabinets or bookshelves? With the glass, maybe that’s it.”
“No,” Rhyme said, “the glass fragments were old. And Amelia found glazing compound. I don’t think furniture glass is mounted with glazing. That’s for residences. Besides, see the rubber? It was found with the ammonia. That told me he replaced a broken window and cleaned the new one with a squeegee and paper towel.” His voice faded as he looked at the chart. “Window.”
Pulaski said, “Even psycho killers need to do home repairs. Probably it’s not related to the case.”
Rhyme mused, “But he’d just recently repaired it. The trace was fresh and found with other evidence from the scene. Just speculating here but if you were going to break into somebody’s house or an office—”
“You could front you were a repairman,” Sellitto said.
Sachs “Put on coveralls. Carry a new piece of glass with you. Break in, get what you need inside, then replace the glass, clean it and leave. Anybody looking would think you were the super or’d been hired to do repairs.”
Archer added, “And he pretended to be a workman once before—in the Theater District.”
Sellitto said, “Maybe he broke in somewhere to find out if there was some device that had one of those controllers in it. That DataWise thing.”
“He doesn’t need to,” Archer pointed out. “His first vic, Todd Williams, downloaded the list of products with controllers and the people or companies who bought them.”
Did she actually say “vic”? Rhyme was amused.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sellitto said. “That’s right.”
Rhyme said, “I could see it if the shards of glass we found were frosted—he’d replaced the glass with clear so he could see his kill zone. But the broken pane was clear. Old or cheap but clear. I want to work with this. Assuming our window repairman scenario is valid and—let’s be bold here—he’s planning another attack, then it’s because there’s no embedded product at the target location.”
Sachs quickly said, “And that’s because he’s going after somebody who’s not on the list. A specific person, rather than a random consumer.”
“Good,” Rhyme said. “Let’s work with that.”
“But why?” From Archer.
Rhyme’s eyes closed momentarily. Then opened fast. “Somebody who’s a threat. What Lon was just suggesting. It’s his second mission. To stop those who’re after him or a threat to him. Us. Maybe a witness, somebody who knows him and might be growing suspicious. Anything on the charts that might suggest a victim unrelated to the products, nothing to do with his manifesto against consumers?”
He scanned the charts. Although the source for some items had not been isolated (Queens ), everything had been identified—except one thing.
“Damn it, Mel. What the hell is the plant? We asked the Horticultural Society ages ago.”
“It was yesterday.”
“Ages, like I said,” Rhyme snapped. “Call. Find out.”
Cooper looked the number up once more and placed the call. “Professor Aniston? This is Detective Cooper. NYPD. I sent you that sample of vegetation trace evidence we found at a crime scene. Have you had any luck? We’re under some time pressure . . . Sure.” Cooper glanced toward them. “He’s looking it up now.”
“Which suggests it wasn’t a particularly burdensome request in the first place,” Rhyme muttered, probably louder than he should have.
Cooper’s body language changed as the call resumed. He wrote on a pad beside him. “Got it, thanks, Professor.” He disconnected. “It’s rare. You don’t find it very often.”
“That’s what rare means, Mel. What the hell is it?”
“It’s a fragment of leaf from a hibiscus. But what’s rare is that it’s a blue one. There’ll be limited sources—”
“My God!” Sachs pulled her phone out, hit speed dial. “This is Detective Five Eight Eight Five. Sachs. I need officers at Four Two One Eight Martin Street, Brooklyn. Possible ten thirty-four in progress. Suspect is white male, six two to six four, weight one fifty. Possibly armed . . . I’m en route.”
