“When I said no, I wouldn’t go away, he snapped. He started to beat me, and then got a hammer. He wanted to kill me with it! Sal showed up just in time. He had a baseball bat. He saved my life.”
Sachs noticed some scars on the woman’s neck and her arm was slightly deformed, as if from a bad break. Maybe the victim of an assault some time ago. Domestic abuse? she wondered.
“Does Vernon own or have access to a car?” Griffith didn’t have one registered in New York.
“No, he uses cabs mostly.” Wiping tears again.
“And no idea about places he’d go?”
Her wide eyes stared at Sachs. “He was so nice to me. He was so gentle.” More tears. “I—”
“Alicia, I’m sorry,” Sachs said, pressing. “I need as much information as you can give us. Any other residences or places he’d go?”
“He had a house on Long Island. Manhasset, I think. But I think he sold it. He never mentioned anyplace else. No, I don’t know where he’d go.”
They arrived at the ambulance. “Detective, we better get her in now.”
“Which hospital?”
“We’ll do Bellevue.”
Sachs took out one of her cards, circled her number and added Rhyme’s, as well as his address on the back. She gave it to Alicia. “When you feel up to it we’ll need to talk to you some more.”
“Okay,” she whispered. Breathed deeply. “Sure. Okay.”
The ambulance doors shut and a moment later the vehicle took off through traffic, the siren pulsing urgently.
Sachs walked up to Bo Haumann and reported what she’d learned—which wasn’t much. He in turn told her that canvassing had revealed no sightings. “He had a fifteen minute lead,” the ESU man said. “How far does that buy you in the city?”
“Pretty damn far,” she muttered.
And Sachs walked to the superintendent, Sal, sitting on the stoop, to interview him. He was a good-looking Italian American, thick black hair, solid muscles, clean-shaven. Reporters were shooting pictures and asking him to hold up the baseball bat with which he’d driven off the killer. Sachs could picture the punning headline already: “Hero-super” Bats a Thousand.
CHAPTER 50
Rhyme watched Amelia Sachs cart in the evidence from Vernon Griffith’s apartment. She had yet to search Alicia Morgan’s and the warehouse where Griffith had bludgeoned to death his neighbor, Boyles, but Rhyme wanted to get started on the clues from what was probably the most fruitful scene that would lead to his whereabouts: his apartment in Chelsea.
She walked to the evidence tables and, pulling on blue gloves, began to organize the evidence she and the ECTs had collected.
Juliette Archer too was here, though Cooper was absent. Rhyme said to Sachs, “Mel’s going to be a couple of hours—some terrorist thing the FBI wanted him to look in on. But we can get started. Any more word on Alicia?”
“She should be released soon. A fractured cheekbone, loose tooth, concussion. She’s shaken up but willing to talk.”
As one would expect when your boyfriend tries to beat you to death with a hammer.
Rhyme examined the evidence collected at Griffith’s apartment. Unlike from the earlier scenes, here was a trove.
“But first, the documentation,” Rhyme said. “Any luck with real property, tickets to anywhere regularly, plane or train?”
Sachs reported that the findings were negative, so far. “I’ve looked over banking and financial information. Alicia said he’d sold the house on Long Island, but there was no record of him buying another place. Banks and credit card companies, insurance, taxes—they all sent statements and correspondence to a P.O. box in Manhattan. He had a business—selling his miniatures and dollhouse furniture. But it was handled out of his apartment, not from an office or workshop.”
Archer noted a slip of paper in a clear plastic envelope. “This could be another potential victim. In Scarsdale.”
The upscale suburb north of New York City was undoubtedly filled with many high-end products equipped with DataWise5000 controllers and owned by the rich consumers that Vernon Griffith despised.
Archer was reading from the note, “ ‘Henderson Comfort-Zone Deluxe water heater.’ ”
And Rhyme cross-referenced the list of products that had DataWise controllers inside; yes, the water heater was one of them.
“Who lives there?”
“No indication from the note. Just have the address at this point. Griffith’s been ID’d so I doubt he’ll go for another attack but, on the other hand, he’s pretty fanatical. So who knows?” Rhyme asked Sachs to call Westchester County and have troopers stake out the house.
“And find out who lives there, Sachs.”
She did so, searching records and DMV. A moment later she had the answer. William Mayer, a hedge fund manager. He was a friend of the governor and there were a few articles about him that hinted at political aspirations.
Archer said, “Water heater? What was he going to do, do you think? Turn the heat up and scald somebody to death in the shower? Todd Williams blogged about something like that, remember? Or maybe build up the pressure and close a valve, so that when somebody goes down to see what’s wrong, it blows up? Gallons of two-hundred-degree water? Jesus.”
She wheeled closer and looked over the half-dozen plastic bags of miniatures. Furniture, baby carriages, a clock, a Victorian house. They were very well made.
Rhyme too studied them. “He’s very good. Let’s see if he took classes anywhere.”
Sachs had thought of this, it seemed. “I’ve got a body at One PP checking out Griffith’s bio in depth. They might turn up a workshop or two he went to. School he studied at recently.” Then Sachs was frowning. She picked up a small toy. “Something familiar about this. What is it?”
Rhyme squinted at the toy. “Looks like a caisson. A wagon artillery soldiers tow along with the cannon. Holds the shells. The song, that line: ‘And the caissons go rolling along.’ ”
Sachs studied it closely. Rhyme said nothing more. He let her thoughts play out on their own. Archer, too, he noted, held back any questions he suspected she had about the train of Sachs’s thought.
Finally Sachs, still studying the caisson, said, “It’s connected to a case. The past couple of months.”
“But not Unsub Forty?”
“No.” It seemed that a thought hovered. And flitted away. A hiss of breath at the frustration. “Might’ve been one of mine, might’ve been another in Major Cases and I saw the file. I’ll check.” In a gloved hand she lifted the delicate creation out of the plastic bag and set it on an examination sheet. With her phone she took a picture and sent it off. “I’ll have somebody in Queens look through the logs of evidence collected in the past few months, see if anything shows up. Let’s hope they do better with that than our missing White Castle napkins.”
She rebagged the toy. “Okay, you two keep going here. I’ll get to Alicia’s now. And the warehouse where he killed Boyle. Walk the grid.” Then she was out the door. A moment later the powerful chug of her Ford’s engine resonated along Central Park West. He believed it shook one of the large plate-glass windows in the parlor. A falcon looked up from its nest on the window ledge, peeved at the sound, which seemed to have disturbed the fledglings.
Rhyme turned once more to the miniatures. He thought: Why would somebody so talented, who could make such beautiful things, who had such skill, turn to homicide?
Archer too, close to Rhyme, was looking over Vernon Griffith’s creations. “So much work. So fastidious.” Silence between them momentarily. She continued her examination, eyes on a tiny chair. Absently Archer said, “I used to knit.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond to that. After a beat: “Sweaters, things like that?”
“Some. More art, hangings. Like tapestries.”
Rhyme was glancing at the photos of Griffith’s apartment. “Landscapes?” he asked.
“No, abstract.”
He observed a softening of her facial muscles. Wistfulness, sadness. He fought to find something to say. He finally settled on: “You could do photography. Everything’s digital now anyway. Just pressing buttons. Or voice-commanding buttons. Half the young people out there are as sedentary as we are.”
“Photography. It’s a thought. I might.”
A moment later Rhyme said, “But you won’t.”
“No,” she said with a smile. “Like if I have to give up drinking I won’t switch to fake wine or beer. I’ll take up tea and cranberry juice. All or nothing. But it’ll be the best tea or cranberry juice I can find.” A pause and she asked, “You ever get impatient?”
He laughed, a sound that contained his stating-the-obvious grunt.
She continued, “It’s like . . . tell me if this is what’s it’s like: You don’t move, so your body isn’t bleeding off the tension, and it seeps up into your mind.”
“That’s exactly what it’s like.”
“What do you do?” she asked.
“Stay busy. Keep your mind going.” He tilted his head toward her. “Riddles. Make your life about solving riddles.”
A deep breath and a look of pain, then one of panic crossed her face. “I don’t know if I can handle it, Lincoln. I really don’t.” Her voice caught.
Rhyme wondered if she’d start to cry. She wasn’t the sort for whom tears came easily, he guessed. But he knew too that the condition she was facing pushed you to places you couldn’t imagine. He’d had years to build up a sinewy guard around his heart.
New to the game . . .
He turned swiveled his chair to face her. “Yes. You. Can. I’d tell you if it wasn’t in your core. You know me by now. I don’t sugarcoat. I don’t lie. You can do it.”
Her eyes closed and she inhaled deeply once. Then she was looking at him again, her remarkable blue eyes driving into his, which were far darker. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“You have to. You’re my intern, remember? Now. Let’s get to work,” he said.
The moment passed and together they began to catalog what Sachs had recovered at Griffith’s apartment: hairs, toothbrush (for the DNA), reams of handwritten notes, books, clothing, printouts on hacking and technical details about breaking into secure networks. Even pictures of fish in an aquarium (Sachs had sifted in the sand at the bottom for buried clues—this was a common hiding place—but found none). Many items were from what turned out to be his profession—making and selling the miniatures: stores of wood and metal, tiny hinges, wheels, paint, varnish, pottery. Many, many tools. Had they been sitting on the shelves of Home Depot or Crafts 4 Everyone, they’d be benign; here the blades and hammers took on a sinister air.
The Steel Kiss . . .
Since the documentation offered no leads to Griffith’s whereabouts Rhyme and Archer concentrated on the trace evidence from his apartment and the Edwin Boyle crime scene, near the dead man’s printing company, to see if they might find hints as to where he’d been before, which might be the place where he was now.
But after a half hour of “dust work,” as Archer rather charmingly dubbed their efforts, referring to Edmond Locard, she wheeled back from the envelopes and bags and slides. She glanced at Griffith’s notebook, the manifesto. He noted she’d braked to a stop and was staring out the window. Finally she turned back to him. “You know, Lincoln, part of me doesn’t believe it.”
“What’s that?”
“Why he’s doing this. He’s against consumerism. But he’s a consumer too. He had to buy all these tools and the supplies for his work. He buys food. He special-orders his shoes for his big feet. He benefits from shopping. And he makes his living selling things. That’s consumerism.” She turned her chair to face him, her beautiful eyes sparkling. “Let’s try an experiment.”
Rhyme looked at the evidence bags.
“No, I don’t mean a physical experiment. A hypothetical. Let’s say there is no evidence in the case. An exception to Locard’s Principle. Imagine a case where there isn’t a single lick of PE. How’s this? A killing on the moon. We’re on earth and we have no access to the evidence at all. We know the victim was murdered up there. There are suspects. But that’s it, no trace, no physical evidence. Where do we go from there? The only approach is to ask, why did the perp kill the victim?”
He smiled. Her premise was absurd, a waste of time. But perhaps he found her enthusiasm charming. “Go on.”
“If this were an epidemiologic investigation, and you and I were presented with unidentified bacteria killing some people but not others, we’d ask: Why? Is it because they’ve been to some country and contracted it? Is it because there’s something about the victims physically that makes them and not others vulnerable to the disease? Have they engaged in certain behaviors that have exposed them to the bacteria? So let’s look at Vernon’s victims. I’m not buying the theory they were targeted because they were rich consumers, buying expensive stoves or microwaves. What else is common among them? Why he killed them might lead to how he knew them might lead to where he met them . . . and to where he’s sitting right now. You with me?”
The criminalist within him was resistant, but Lincoln Rhyme had to admit the logician was intrigued. “Okay. I’ll play along.”
CHAPTER 51
Juliette Archer was saying, “Who were the people that Griffith targeted? Other than Amelia’s mother and the drivers of the cars he took control of—those were to stop us from catching him. The victims. Greg Frommer, Abe Benkoff, Joe Heady. And the potential victim in Scarsdale, the hedge fund manager, William Mayer.”
“Well, what about them?” Rhyme was happy to cooperate but he was compelled to add a spoonful of devil’s advocacy into the stew.
“Okay . . .” Archer wheeled to a spot in front of the charts. “Frommer was a store clerk in Brooklyn and a volunteer at a homeless shelter, among other charities. Benkoff was account manager for an ad agency in New York. Heady is a carpenter for a Broadway theater. Mayer is into finance. None of them seems to know the others. They don’t live near each other.” She shook her head. “No connection.”
“Oh, well, that’s not enough to ask,” he said softly. “You have to go deeper.”
“How do you mean?”
“You’re looking at the surface. Pretend those people you mentioned are bits of trace evidence . . . No, no,” he chided, seeing her scowl. “You play along with me now. The people aren’t people but bits of trace evidence. On the surface one’s gray metal, one’s brown wood, one’s cloth fiber, one’s a fragment of leaf. What do they have in common?”
Archer considered this: “Nothing.”
“Exactly. But, with evidence, we keep digging. What kind of metal, what sort of wood, what type of fiber, what plant is the leaf from? Where did they come from, what’s the context? You put them altogether and, bang, you’ve got an upholstered lawn chair sitting under a jacaranda tree. Different is suddenly the same.
“You want to analyze the victims, Archer, good, but we need to approach your inquiry the same way. Details! What’re the details? You have present careers. What about the past? Look at the raw data Amelia collected. The charts are only summaries. Residences and careers, anything that seems relevant.”
