While the mental makeup of a perp was largely irrelevant to Rhyme, he now had to admit to himself that Vernon Griffith was one of the more complex suspects he’d ever been up against.
“Not unsympathetic,” Sachs offered.
Stealing the very words Rhyme had been about to offer.
She explained that there would probably be a plea deal. “He admitted we got him dead to rights. He doesn’t want to fight it.” A smile. “He asked if I thought they’d let him make furniture in prison.”
Rhyme wondered if that was a possibility. It seemed that felons incarcerated for murder might not be allowed access to saws and knives and ball-peen hammers. The man might have to settle for making license plates.
Then he was gazing at the evidence boards, reflecting how the two cases that had seemed so different were in fact as genetically linked as twins. Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance and The People of the State of New York v. Griffith and, now, v. Alicia Morgan.
Sachs “deweaponed” herself (the verb had been in an NYPD memo on firearm safety that she’d shared with Rhyme; they’d had a good laugh). She poured coffee from a service Thom had set up in the corner. She sat. Just as she took her first sip her phone sang out. She read the text and gave a laugh. “CSU in Queens found the missing napkins. The White Castle napkins.”
“I’d forgotten about those,” Archer said.
Rhyme: “I hadn’t, though I had given up on them. And?”
Sachs read: “ ‘Negative for friction ridges, negative for DNA. Positive for confectionary beverage in proportions that suggest source was White Castle restaurant chain.’ ”
“But didn’t the—” Archer began.
“—napkins have White Castle printed on them? Yep, they did.”
Rhyme said, “Nature of our profession—yours now too, Archer. Every day we deal with missing evidence, evidence never properly identified, evidence contaminated. Deductions botched completely. And deductions made that don’t need to be. Missed clues. Happens in epidemiology, I would imagine.”
“Oh, yes. Myopic children, remember?” She told Amelia Sachs the story of the study that incorrectly asserted causation between children’s sleeping with lights on and vision problem.
Nodding, Sachs said, “Heard this story on the radio—people used to believe that maggots spontaneously generated from meat. Don’t remember the details.”
Archer said, “Sure, famous story. Francesco Redi, seventeenth-century scientist, was the one who disproved that. It was because fly eggs were too small to be seen. Father of experimental biology.”
Sachs glanced at the evidence boards, apparently at the section about the civil suit. She asked, “Your case, the original one, Mrs. Frommer’s? Can she recover anything?”
“Very doubtful.” Rhyme explained that the only cause of action would be against Alicia and Griffith for the wrongful death of Greg Frommer. Whitmore was looking into their finances, but neither of them seemed very wealthy.
Archer’s phone rang. She commanded, “Answer.”
“Hey, Jule. Me.”
“Randy. You’re on with Lincoln and Amelia.”
Her brother.
Greetings shot back and forth.
“Be there in ten.”
She said, “We closed the case.”
“Seriously? Well, I’m impressed. Billy’ll love to hear all about it. Between you and me, he loves the idea of Cop Mom. He’s doing a graphic novel. You’re the heroine. But you didn’t hear me say that. It’s going to be a surprise. Okay. I’m in traffic without a hands-free. Don’t tell the police. Ha!”
They disconnected.
Archer was looking not at Rhyme but toward Sachs. “When I signed up for Lincoln’s course, I knew about you, of course, Amelia. Anybody who follows New York crime knows about you. You’re epic, as my son would say. I’d go with ‘famous’ but, well, ‘epic’ seems to fit better. And I knew you worked with Lincoln and that you were his partner but I didn’t know you were that kind of partner too. Seeing you the past few days, I found out.”
“We’ve been together for a long time. Both ways,” Sachs said with a smile.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect. But you’re just like any other couple. Happy, sad, irritated.”
Rhyme chuckled. “We fight, sure. We’ve been having one for the past few weeks.”
Sachs wasn’t smiling when she said, “I’m mad he resigned.”
“And I’m mad she’s mad that I resigned.”
She added, “And mad he stole my lab tech.”
“You got him back in the end,” Rhyme groused.
Archer said, “When I was diagnosed I decided that I’d live alone. Oh, with Billy part of the time, under the custody agreement, and with a caregiver, of course—somebody like Thom. Though I don’t know if I can find somebody like him. He’s a gem.”
Rhyme glanced at the doorway. “None better. But that goes no farther than this room.”
Archer gave a coy smile. “As if he doesn’t know.” She continued, “I decided that I’d never be in a relationship, never even think about that. Get my new profession, one that was fulfilling, challenging. Raise my son as best I could. Have friends who could deal with quadriplegia. Not the life I’d planned on or wanted but a decent life. Then—don’t you love the way fate works?—then I met somebody. It was about three months ago, just after the neurologist confirmed that the disability would probably be as severe as they’d thought. Brad. That was his name. Met him at my son’s birthday party. Single father. An MD. It really clicked between us. I told him right up front about the tumor, the surgery. He’s cardio but knew generally about the condition. He didn’t seem to care and we went out for a while.”
Sachs said, “But you broke it off.”
“I did, yes. I was probably going stone-cold gimp in a year. He was a jogger and a sailor. Now, that is a combination you don’t really find in the same column on Match Dot Com or eHarmony, do you? Brad was pretty upset when I told him. But I knew it was best. For both of us.” She gave a wisp of a laugh. “Can you see where this is going?”
Rhyme didn’t. Not at all. But he noticed Sachs had a faint smile on her face.
Archer continued, “Then I saw you two together. Began to think maybe I’d made a mistake. I called him back last night. We’re going out this weekend. Who knows? Maybe in six months we’ll be engaged. Like you two. Have you set a date yet?”
Sachs shook her head. “Not yet. Soon.”
Archer smiled. “Did he propose romantically?”
“Hardly got down on one knee, now, did I?” Rhyme muttered.
Sachs said, “I think it was, ‘There seems to be no objective or practical reason for not getting married. What’s your input on the subject?’ ”
Archer laughed.
Rhyme frowned. “Nothing funny about that. I gave an accurate assessment of the situation, coupled with a request for further data that might be helpful in reaching a conclusion. Made perfect sense to me.”
Archer was glancing at Sachs’s left hand. “I was noticing your ring. Beautiful.”
Sachs held up her ring finger, displaying the two-carat blue stone. “Lincoln picked it. It’s from Australia.”
“Sapphire?”
“No, a diamond.”
“Not particularly valuable,” Rhyme said analytically. “But rare. A class two-b. I was intrigued by the color. Blue because of scattered boron in the matrix. A semiconductor, by the way. The only diamond that has that characteristic.”
“You having a honeymoon?”
Rhyme said, “I was thinking Nassau. The last time I was in the Bahamas I was almost shot and almost drowned. Both within five minutes. I’d like to go back and have a more peaceful time of it. And there’s friend I’d like to see. His wife makes excellent conch fritters.”
“I expect an invite to the wedding.”
Sachs tilted her head. “There’re some openings for the wedding party.”
“Just ask, I’ll be there.”
The doorbell buzzed. Rhyme glanced at the screen. Archer’s brother had arrived to pick her up. Thom let Randy into the room. He greeted Rhyme and Sachs with a nod and hurried to his sister. “You all right, Jule? Your face!”
“No, no, it’s okay. A little bruised.”
Archer turned her chair to Rhyme. “I’m going out of character again.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
She rose from the chair, walked to Rhyme and put her arms around him, hugged hard. At least, that was his deduction, since he couldn’t feel the pressure. A similar embrace for Sachs, then she dropped back into the Storm Arrow and, with her brother behind, wheeled out.
“Back tomorrow early,” Rhyme called.
He laughed as she lifted her left arm and gave a thumbs-up.
When they’d left Rhyme said, “I talked to your mom. She’s in good spirits. When’s the surgery?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
He observed her wan face, peering out the window. “The other situation?” He was referring to Nick. The other night she’d told him everything about his reappearance—and her suspicion of him, that she’d spent the night at Nick’s to place a tracking app on his phone.
A preface like that, Sachs? Pray continue . . .
No reaction for a moment. She was immobile, looking out over Central Park.
“Turned out the way I was afraid it would. Worse, actually. He tried to order a hit on somebody.”
Rhyme grimaced and shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Fred’ll run him for a while. We’ll get half-dozen others, high-ups in the OC chain. Then cut him loose.”
“One thing you never told me, Sachs.”
The rattan chair she sat in gave its unique caw as she turned his way. She tilted her head, brushed her hair back. Rhyme liked her wearing it down, rather than in a bun.
“What’s that?”
“Why did you get suspicious of Nick? Everything he told you, how he acted . . . it sounded credible. To me, at least.”
After a moment she said, “Intuition. How you hate that word, I know. But that’s what it was. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something was off about him. It was Mom who brought it into focus. Nick said he took the fall for his brother. But she said that if he’d really cared for me, he never would’ve done that. Nick was a decorated cop; he had cred all over downtown. His brother gets busted, he could’ve worked with the DA on sentencing, helped Donnie get into a program in prison. Organized an operation to nail Delgado—that was all a lie, by the way, but I didn’t know it at first. But he wouldn’t have taken the fall.” She smiled, her full lips, free of color, forming a mild crescent. “Didn’t have a splinter of evidence, just a gut feel.”
“No,” Rhyme said. “Not gut. Heart. Sometimes that’s better than evidence.”
She blinked.
“But you didn’t hear me say that, Sachs. You never heard me say that.”
“I better get to Mom.” She kissed his mouth hard. “That woman’s got to get well fast. I miss sleeping here.”
“I miss that too, Sachs. I really do.”
CHAPTER 60
Rhyme looked up from his monitor, on which he was engaged in a chess match against a smart, but largely unimaginative computer program.
He said to the visitor dawdling in the parlor doorway, “Come on in.” And to the microprocessor: “White queen to e-seven. Check.”
Rhyme let the software cogitate on that move and wheeled away from the work station, facing Ron Pulaski. “Where’ve you been, Rookie? You missed the climax, the crescendo, the denouement of the Griffith case. Here you are, arriving for the coda. How dull.”
“Well, that other case. I was multitasking.”
“Do you know how much I detest that word, Pulaski? Using ‘task’ as a verb is as mortifying as using ‘ask’ as a noun. Unacceptable. And tacking on the prefix ‘multi’ is unnecessary. ‘Tasking,’ if you’re going to accept it as a predicate, includes a single endeavor or a dozen.”
“Lincoln, we live in the era of the—”
“If you say ‘sound bite,’ I will not be happy.”
“—the, uhm, era of the frequent use of a contracted phrase or single word to convey a complex concept. That’s what I was going to say.”
A stifled laugh and he reminded himself not to sell the kid short. Rhyme needed someone to ground him.
But through the repartee Rhyme could see he had something important on his mind. “You heard from Amelia? About Griffith?” Rhyme asked.
A nod. Ron sat in the rattan chair. “Sad character. Sad story.”
“Was, yes. But in the eyes of the law, revenge is no more acceptable as a motive than sexual lust or terrorism. Now I’m tired of being pretentious. Since the case is over, there’s no reason for you to be here. So. What’s up?”
The young officer’s eyes remained on a miniature dresser of Griffith’s. Then he looked at a kitchen table. He studied this until, apparently, it was time to talk.
“The other case.”
“Gutiérrez.”
Pulaski looked at him. “The way you said that, Lincoln. You know it wasn’t Gutiérrez.”
“I made the supposition. Wasn’t hard.”
“Jenny calls me transparent.”
“A bit of that in you, Rookie, yes. Not that it’s bad.”
Pulaski didn’t seem to care if it was good or bad. “The other case?”
“Go on.”
“It was the Baxter case.” Accompanied by an unnecessary glance at the whiteboard in the corner, whose back was turned to them. Like an angry spouse.
This revelation Rhyme had not guessed. Ideas formed, but it was his colleague, not Rhyme, who had center stage.
“I went through the case files. I know it was closed but I went through them anyway. And I found some loose ends.”
Rhyme recalled Archer’s questioning observations: Why the outside storage space that Baxter had neglected to tell investigators about. But again Pulaski was the player at bat. Rhyme asked, “Which were?”
“Well, one was pretty interesting. I looked over the detectives’ notes and got the names of everybody Baxter met with over the past year or so. One in particular seemed interesting. Someone named Oden.”
“Never heard of him.”
“The name was in a transcription of a witness’s statement so they wrote O-D-E-N. Turns out the name was actually O apostrophe D-E-N-N-E.”
“Irish not a misspelled Norse deity,” Rhyme observed.
“I asked around, checked more notes. There wasn’t much. But I did find this O’Denne had some connection to the drug world in Brooklyn. He was behind some kind of new drug people were talking about it on the streets. Synthetic. Seemed like the name was Catch. But detectives on the case never pursued the lead. I guessed it was because Baxter . . .”
“You can say it, Rookie. Died.”
“That’s right. But I did. I followed up.”
“Unofficially?”
“Sort of.”
“She’s sort of pregnant.”
“Finally got an ID. O’Denne was in East New York. Why would Baxter—a financial bigwig—have anything to do with this gangbanger in East New York? I went to talk to O’Denne and find out—”
“—if Baxter was more than just a scam artist.”
“Exactly. I wanted to prove he was bankrolling this new drug. That he’d actually used the gun you found—that he’d killed people. The evidence was ambiguous, remember, Lincoln. There were questions. Maybe he was dangerous.”
Rhyme said softly, “So then it would have been proper procedure for him to go into Violent Offender Detention.”
Pulaski nodded. “So you wouldn’t’ve been responsible for an innocent man’s death; you’d’ve put a dangerous perp away. And if I could show you that, then you’d give up this bullshit about retirement. Which it really is, Lincoln.”
