“More people on site,” she repeated to the patrolman and disconnected. Then said into the mobile: “Call Rhyme.”
He answered immediately. “Sachs. Where are you?”
“Just onto the Brooklyn Bridge . . . Hold on.”
She veered around an idiot on one of those low bicycles you recline upon, a flag fluttering over your head. It wasn’t much of a skid; the surface of the bridge gripped her tires well, and she turned sharply into it. The Ford righted itself. Then she had a clear field ahead of her and sped up again.
“Lon’s already called COC. Nothing yet. Checking subways too.”
“Good. And . . . Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Clutch in, brake full, shift to second just in case you need it, hand brake up, take a skid to buy some space . . .
“Sachs!”
The Torino stopped two feet behind a taxi, forty-five degrees in the lane—well, lane and a half, since she was, yes, at an angle. A massive traffic jam extended past the cab she’d nearly slammed into.
“Traffic’s stopped, Rhyme. Damn it. Completely stopped. And I’m in the middle of the bridge. Can you have Mel or Ron get me a route once I get off? One without traffic?”
“Hold on.” Rhyme shouted, “Lon, I need traffic from the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge to Amelia’s mother’s place.”
She climbed out of the car and peered ahead. A sea of vehicles. Motionless.
“Why now?” she muttered. “Why the hell now?”
Her phone hummed with a number she recognized. The patrolman she’d been speaking with not long before. She put Rhyme on hold and took the call. “Officer, what’ve you got?”
“I’m sorry, Detective. Got a dozen RMPs en route and ESU’s sending a truck. Only weird. Traffic’s totally fucked up. Sorry. Totally screwed up. The Heights, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill. Nobody’s moving.”
She sighed. “Keep me posted.” She flipped back to Rhyme’s call.
. . . you there, Sachs? Can you—?”
“I’m here, Rhyme. What’s the story?”
“You’re going to be stuck for a while. Looks like five bad accidents all around the same time. Near your mom’s place.”
“Shit,” she spat out. “I’ll bet it’s him. Unsub Forty. Remember what Rodney said? He can fuck up cars with the controller. That’s what he did. I’m parking here and getting a train. Tell Lon to have a crew pick up my wheels. Keys’ll be under the back floor mat.”
“Sure.”
Not bothering with the walkway, Sachs started east along the bridge. Two trains and a jog later—a half hour—she was at her mother’s town house, charging into the living room, nodding to the officers, the medics. Then she paused.
“Mom.”
“Honey.”
The women embraced. The mother’s flesh and bones troublingly frail under the daughter’s grasp.
But she was all right.
Sachs stepped back and examined her. Rose Sachs was pale. But that was probably from the fright. She’d suffered no physical harm from Unsub 40—the medics were here because of her heart condition. A precaution.
It had been, however, such a very close call. Rhyme had explained to Sachs that when they’d realized Rose was a possible target, he and the team had speculated that the unsub had—possibly—rigged some kind of electrical trap in her house since they’d found evidence of stripped electrical wires.
At first they hadn’t known how to handle it—other than telling Rose to get out. But the woman still wasn’t picking up the phone. And the neighbor Sachs had called wasn’t home. They’d been trying to guess exactly what the perp had done to attack Rose, when Juliette Archer had blurted, “We have to do what Amelia did with that saw in the Theater District. Cut the power. The grid! Just cut the entire grid for her block.”
Rhyme had ordered Lon to do just that.
And they’d been in time—but barely. The respondings found that the unsub had sabotaged the circuit breaker box, which Rose had been reaching for at the instant the grid went down. The power was back on in the neighborhood now—Sachs didn’t want to think of the complaints, lost computer data and communications. But they’d have to deal with it; her mother was alive.
“I’m sorry this happened, Mom.”
“Why would he want to hurt me?”
“To get to me. I’m the one. It’s become like a chess game between us. Move for move. He must’ve thought we wouldn’t consider you’d be a target. Now one of these officers is going to take you to my house and stay with you. I’ve got to run the scene here, in the basement, where he broke in. Maybe he was in the rest of the house too. Will you be okay without me for a while?”
Rose took her daughter’s hands. The woman’s fingers were not, Sachs noticed, trembling in the least. “Of course, I’ll be fine. Now get going. Catch that son of a bitch.”
Drawing smiles from both Sachs and one of the patrol officers present. Daughter embraced mother, and Sachs walked outside to see her into a squad car and await the arrival of the CSU bus.
Back in the Toy Room now. For the comfort of it. Working on the Warren skiff for my brother.
I’m making it of teak, a difficult wood. Therefore it’s more challenging. Therefore the end result will make me particularly proud.
The news is on and I’ve learned that I did not in fact incinerate Red’s mother. I know this not because she was mentioned but because of the story that the electric grid in that part of Brooklyn went down briefly. Of course Red the Shopper did that. She or her police friend figured out what I was going to do and pulled the plug.
Smart. Oh, they are so very smart.
The other story, being reported to death (I call TV news Humpty Dumpty; every report is “breaking”), was about a string of serious car accidents, surely a co-inkydink—one of my brother’s favorite words—that had nothing to do with the grid glitch; the accidents weren’t related to the stoplights going out. No, the carnage was thanks exclusively to moi and the lovely DataWise5000s.
I’m surprised no clever reporters have brought up everybody’s favorite target: the smart controller.
I wasn’t sure my escape plan would work. I’d never tried hacking a car. Todd taught me how but it wasn’t helpful for my mission at the time. I’d thought the cloud system in vehicles was used just for diagnostics—or you lose your key and need to start it, you call an 800 number the car company provides and tell them what happened, give them a code. They can start your car and disable the steering wheel lock. But, oh, no, you can do all sorts of wonderful things. Cruise control, brakes.
The problem was that I had no way of knowing which cars in Brooklyn had a DataWise. Maybe a lot, maybe few.
Few, it turned out. Walking quickly away from Rose’s town house, hearing sirens, I decided they might signal visitors coming just for me. So I began running the automotive controller software. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Until finally: From about a block away from where I was I heard the huge roar of an auto engine revving high followed ten seconds later by a massive crunch.
Traffic began backing up immediately.
Wonderful. I’m actually smiling.
A few blocks farther along I heard another hit—literally! It turned out to be a lovely rear-ender. I stopped a car mid-block. One Japanese import versus one cement truck. Guess who won?
A quarter mile east, one more.
Nothing for a few minutes but finally another car on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. A stretch limo, I later learned.
So. A nice new trick I’ve learned. A shame Red drives such an antique car. Would be fitting for her to break her bones in an auto crash. Well, there’ll be other options for my friend.
Now, peering through the loupe, I examine the Warren skiff. The boat is done. I wrap it carefully. And set it aside. Then I turn back to the diary—working up the courage to transcribe a passage that has been radiating pain the way a loose tooth does.
I click on the recorder, then hesitate and begin to transcribe.
There’s nothing to do but say it.
The graduation party. Frank and Sam’s and mine.
Maybe forty people there. The sports crowd, pretty nice most of them. A few look at me like, him? But mostly nobody stares. Nobody whispers.
And I’m playing music—took me like ages to try to figure out what to play, what everybody’d like—and Sam says come on back here. And in the parlor or den there’s Karen DeWitt, who smiles at me. I’ve seen Karen, she’s a junior and is sort of pretty, skinny too but not like me. Her nose is big but who am I to talk? The parlor’s dark and she starts touching me on the shoulder and arm. And I’m like, what is this? Only I know of course what it is, even though I never thought this would happen, at least not for years, even though half the guys in the class have been laid.
And she unzips me and does what she does with her mouth.
Then some other people come into the parlor and Karen says let’s get out of here, there’s a bedroom over there. She’s going to pee and then I’ll meet her and we can do it. So I wait a few minutes and she calls me into the room and it’s dark and there she is, no clothes, bent over the bed and I start to do it. I’m inside her and everything.
And then. No, no, no—Lights come on. And there’s Sam and Frank and Karen only she’s not the one on the bed. The person bent over the bed is Cindy Hanson, with her jeans down and panties down. And she’s passed out, sheet around her mouth all wet, she’s been drooling.
And Sam is taking pictures of me and Cindy with a Polaroid. Getting her drugged sleepy face and my string-bean body and my you know. Other people too are there. Laughing and laughing.
I’m grabbing clothes and putting them back on and crying. “What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?”
Frank and Sam are looking over the pictures and laughing ever harder and one of them says, Hey, you’re a natural born pornstar, String Bean!
Frank still laughing hard lifts up Cindy’s head by her hair, “You like it after all, bitch?”
I got it then. Remembering them coming out of Cindy’s house a month ago, seeing them on my secret route home, talking to them for the first time. Cindy had told them no. No fucking, no blow job, get out of my house. Or something.
And that’s when they’d thought of it. Seeing me. How to get even with Cindy Hanson.
The “Epic” was a lie. The Alien Quest was a lie. Music at the party was a lie.
All of it, a lie.
CHAPTER 46
Amelia Sachs entered the parlor, set down the evidence cartons gathered at her mother’s town house, and walked straight up to Juliette Archer. Threw her arms around the surprised woman, nearly dislodging the wrist strapped to the Storm Arrow’s armrest.
“I—” the woman began.
“Thank you. You saved my mother’s life.”
“We all did,” Archer said.
“But,” Rhyme said, “she’s the one who came up with the blackout strategy.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
A shrug, similar to the ones Rhyme was capable of.
Sachs looked from the intern to Rhyme. “You two make a good team.”
Rhyme, with typically little patience for the sentimental, or the irrelevant, asked Mel Cooper, “What’s the latest?” The tech was just hanging up the phone from a conversation with someone in the Traffic Division.
He explained that there had been no fatalities. The closest brush with death had been a doctor whose sedan crashed into the rear end of a Toyota and ruptured the gas tank. He and the other driver were inundated with fuel but pulled out by a passersby before the two cars vanished in flames. (To be doubly safe the doctor had stripped naked in the middle of the street, flinging his incendiary clothing away.)
A half-dozen people, however, had been badly injured.
Rhyme now called Rodney Szarnek to ask about the incident. “Any way to trace the signal?”
The computer cop went into a long explanation about cell towers, public Wi-Fi and VPNs.
“Rodney.”
“Sorry. The answer’s no.”
He disconnected. “One hell of a weapon,” Sachs said to Rhyme and Archer.
Sellitto, downtown, called and reported that everyone on the team—and their family members—was now under protective detail. “It’s UAC-prioritized,” he muttered.
Rhyme had given up trying to stay on top of New York City Police Department shorthand. “Which is?”
“It’ll be in place Until the Asshole is Caught,” Sellitto said.
Archer laughed.
Sachs and Cooper were unpacking evidence she’d collected from her mother’s house—the garden, the house itself and the steps across the street, where witnesses had seen a skinny worker taking a break, reading the paper, sipping coffee.
Rhyme looked around the parlor. “Where the hell’s the rookie?” he grumbled. “That other case?”
“That’s right.” Sachs was nodding. But offered nothing more.
“Somebody just find this Gutiérrez and shoot him, please.”
For some reason Sachs smiled at this. Rhyme was not amused.
Sachs itemized the evidence. “Not much. Wire, electricians’ tape on the circuit breaker panel. He rigged a lamp with this.” She held up a plastic bag with a small electric circuit board inside. “When he triggered it, two wires in the lamp crossed and that blew the breaker. It was to get Mom downstairs to the box. Ambient trace. Naturally, no friction ridges or hairs other than mine or Mom’s. Some fibers. He’s wearing flesh-colored cotton gloves.”
“You found copper bits earlier but now we have the actual wire,” Cooper said.
It was eight-gauge, according to the American wire gauge standard, about 0.128 inch in diameter.
Rhyme said, “Can carry pretty high voltage. What, Mel? Forty amps?”
“That’s right, at sixty degrees Celsius.”
“What about the manufacturer?”
There were, Rhyme could see, letters on the black insulation.
Cooper looked up the initials. “Hendrix Cable. Popular brand. Sold a lot of places.”
Rhyme scoffed. “Why don’t perps shop at unique stores? . . . And he used a razor knife again to strip it?”
“Right.”
“And electricians’ tape?”
“Probably good quality,” the tech said, touching part of it with a steel needle probe. “Good adhesive, strong. Cheaper tape tends to have uneven coverage and it’s thin.”
“Burn a bit. See if we can get a brand name.”
After the gas chromatograph worked its magic, Cooper looked over the results and displayed them to the room on a monitor.
Archer said, “They seem generic. Aren’t those ingredients found in every brand of electrical tape?”
“Quantity,” Rhyme said. “Quantity is everything.”
Cooper explained further, “I’m running the amounts of each of those substances through a database. Micrograms make all the difference. It should give us an answer in . . . Ah, here we go now. It’s one of these.”
On the screen:
Ludlum Tape and Adhesive
Conoco Industrial Products
Hammersmith Adhesives
“Good, good,” Rhyme muttered.
Sachs was examining the bag she’d held up earlier. The remote relay that had shorted out Rose’s lights. Cooper mounted the device on the reflecting stage of a low-power microscope. They examined the monitor. He said, “Antenna here.” He pointed. “Signal comes in and closes the switch here. It’s not an off-the-shelf switch. It’s a component part of something else. See? The base? He fatigued through the circuit board. Got a code number on it,” he announced. Rhyme hadn’t been able to see it.
