Rhyme was already thinking of how to proceed. “First, I’ll need to have someone inspect the escalator, the controls, the crime scene photos, trace, and—”
“Ah. Now, I must tell you our situation has a slight wrinkle. Well, several wrinkles.”
Rhyme’s brow rose.
Whitmore continued, “Any accident involving an escalator, elevator, moving sidewalk, et cetera, is investigated by the Department of Buildings and the Department of Investigation.”
Rhyme was familiar with the DOI. One of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the country—going back to the early nineteenth century—the division was charged with overseeing government employees, agencies and anyone who contracted or worked with the city. Because he himself was rendered a quad while investigating a crime scene in a subway construction site, the DOI was involved with the investigation into how that accident happened.
Whitmore continued, “We can use the findings in our suit, but—”
“It’ll take months to get their report.”
“Exactly the problem, Mr. Rhyme. Six months, a year more likely. Yes. And we can’t wait that long. Mrs. Frommer will be homeless by then.”
“Wrinkle one. And two?”
“Access to the escalator. It’s being, removed and impounded in a city warehouse, pending investigation by the DOI and DOB.”
Hell, already major evidence contamination, Rhyme thought instinctively.
“Get a subpoena,” he said. This was obvious.
“I can’t at this point. As soon as I file suit—that’ll be within the next few days—I can serve a duces tecum. But a judge will quash it. We won’t get access until DOI and DOB have finished their investigation.”
This was absurd. It was the evidence, possibly the only evidence, in the case and he couldn’t get his hands on it?
Then he remembered: Of course, it’s a civil, not a criminal, matter.
“We can also subpoena design, manufacturing, installation and maintenance records from the possible defendants: the mall, the manufacturer—Midwest Conveyance—the cleaning company, anyone else with any connection to the unit. Those we might get copies of but it’ll be a fight. And the motions’ll go back and forth for months before they’re released. Finally, the last wrinkle. I mentioned that Mr. Frommer wasn’t working full-time any longer?”
“I recall. A midlife crisis or some such.”
“That’s correct. He quit a high-pressure corporate position. Lately he worked jobs that he didn’t have to take home at night—deliveryman, telemarketer, order taker in a fast-food restaurant, a shoe salesman at the mall. Most of his time was spent volunteering for charities. Literacy, homelessness, hunger. So for the past few years he’s had minimal income. One of the hardest parts of our case will be convincing a jury that he would have gotten back into the workforce in a job like the one he had.”
“What did he used to do?”
“Before he quit he was director of marketing. Patterson Systems in New Jersey. I looked it up. Very successful company. Number one fuel injector maker in America. And he made solid six figures. Last year his income was forty-three thousand. The jury awards wrongful death damages based on earnings. The defendants’ attorneys will hammer home that, even if their clients are liable, the damages were minimal since he was making basically minimum wage.
“I will be trying to prove that Mr. Frommer was going through a phase. That he was going to get back into a high-paying job. Now, I may not succeed at that. So this is your second task. If you can make the case that the defendant, whoever it or they turn out to be, engaged in wanton or reckless behavior in building the escalator or a component part, or in failing to maintain the device, then we’ll—”
“—add a punitive damage claim. And the jury, which feels bad that they can’t award the widow much by way of future earnings, will compensate with a big punitive award.”
“Well observed, Mr. Rhyme. You should have gone to law school. So, there we have our situation in a nutshell.”
Rhyme said, “In other words, find out how a complex device failed and who’s responsible for that failure without having access to it, the supporting documentation or even photographs or analysis of the accident?”
“And that is well put too.” Whitmore seemed to be debating a matter. He added, “Detective Sachs said you were rather creative when it came to approaching a problem like this.”
How creative could one be without the damn evidence? Absurd, Rhyme thought again. The whole thing was completely . . .
Then a thought occurred. He turned toward the doorway. “Thom! Thom! Where are you?”
Footsteps and a moment later the aide appeared. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine, fine, fine. Why wouldn’t it be? I just need something.”
“And what’s that?”
“A tape measure. And the sooner the better.”
CHAPTER 7
Ironic.
One Police Plaza is considered to be among the ugliest government structures in New York City, yet it offers some of the finest views in downtown Manhattan: the harbor, the East River, the soaring “Let the River Run” skyline of New York at its most muscular. By contrast, the original police headquarters on Centre Street is arguably the most elegant building south of Houston Street, but, in the day, officers stationed there could look out only on tenements, butchers, fishmongers, prostitutes, ne’er-do-wells and muggers lying in wait (police officers were, at the time, prime targets for thieves, who valued their wool uniforms and brass buttons).
Walking into her office now in the Major Cases Division at One PP, Amelia Sachs was gazing out the speckled windows as she reflected on this fact. Thinking too: She couldn’t have cared less about either the building’s architectural aesthetics or the view. What she objected to was that she plied her investigative skills here and not from Lincoln Rhyme’s town house.
Hell.
Not happy about his resigning from the police consulting business, not happy at all. Personally she missed the stimulation of the give-and-take, the head-butting, the creativity that flourished from the gestalt. Her life had become like studying at an online university: The information was the same but the process of loading it into your brain was diminished.
Cases weren’t progressing. Homicides, in particular, Rhyme’s specialty, were not getting solved. The Rinaldo case, for instance, had been on her docket for about a month and was going nowhere. A killing on the West Side south of Midtown. Echi Rinaldo, a drug dealer in a Latino Harlem crew, had been slashed to death, and slashed vigorously. The street had been filthy, so the inventory of trace was voluminous and therefore not very helpful: cigarette butts, a roach clip with a bit of pot still clinging, food wrappers, coffee cups, a wheel from a child’s toy, beer cans, a condom, scraps of paper, receipts, a hundred other items of effluvia common to New York City streets. None of the fingerprint or footprint evidence she’d found at the scene had panned out.
The only other lead was a witness—the deceased’s son. Well, witness of sorts. The eight-year-old hadn’t seen the killer himself but had only heard the assailant jump into a taxi or gypsy cab and give an address, which included the word “Village.” A male voice. More likely white than black or Latino. Sachs had exhausted her interview skills to get the boy to recall more but he was, understandably, upset, seeing his father stagger from the alley, cascading with blood. A canvass of cabs and gypsy drivers revealed nothing. And Greenwich Village covered dozens of square miles.
But she was convinced that Rhyme could have reviewed the mass of evidence and come to a conclusion about where, in that quaint portion of Manhattan, the perp had most likely gone.
He’d said no. And had reminded coolly that he was no longer in the criminal business.
Sachs smoothed her charcoal-gray skirt, just past the knees. She’d thought she’d selected a lighter-gray blouse, to complement, but had realized on the sidewalk in front of her town house as she left that it was the taupe one. Those were her typical mornings. Much distraction.
She now reviewed emails and phone messages, decided they were neglectable and then headed up the hall, toward the conference room she’d commandeered for the Unsub 40 case.
Thinking again about Rhyme.
Resigned.
Hell . . .
She glanced up and noted the head of a young detective, walking the opposite way, turn toward her suddenly. She realized she must have uttered the word aloud.
She gave him a smile, to prove she wasn’t deranged, and dodged into her war room, small, set up with two fiberboard tables, twin computers, one desk and a whiteboard on which details of the case were jotted in marker.
“Any minute,” said the young blond officer inside, looking up. He was in dark-blue NYPD uniform, sitting at the far table. Ron Pulaski was not a detective, as were most officers in the Major Cases Division. But he was the cop Amelia Sachs had wanted to work the Unsub 40 case with. They’d run scenes for years, always—until now—from Rhyme’s parlor.
Pulaski nodded at the screen. “They promised.”
Any minute . . .
“How much did they get?”
“Not sure. I wouldn’t expect his address and phone number. But the ECT said they had some hits. It was a good call, Amelia.”
After the disaster—the word applied in several senses: the victim’s death as well as losing Unsub 40—at the mall in Brooklyn, Sachs had methodically examined the area behind the loading dock and debated where to send the Brooklyn Evidence Collection Teams; you can’t search everywhere. One place that particularly intrigued her was a cheap Mexican restaurant whose back door opened onto a cul-de-sac near the loading dock. It was the only food venue nearby. There were other, faster ways for their unsub to have fled but Sachs concentrated the canvassing there, on the perhaps far-fetched theory that the restaurant would be more likely than other stores to have undocumented employees who’d be less cooperative, not wanting to give their names and addresses as witnesses.
As she’d guessed, no one, from manager to dishwasher, had seen the rather recognizable suspect.
Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been there, however; in the refuse bin for customers the search team had found the Starbucks cup, along with cellophane sandwich wrappers and napkins from the chain, which he’d been seen carrying as he fled.
They’d collected all the trash from that container at La Festiva, which may or may not have been a real Spanish word.
The analysis of this evidence was what they were presently awaiting.
Sachs dropped into the chair she’d wheeled here from her minuscule office. Reflecting that if they had been working out of Rhyme’s parlor, the data would have been in their hands by now. Her phone sang with an email tone. It was good news from the captain at the 84, Madino. He said there was no hurry on her shooting incident report; it was taking some time to get the Borough Shooting Team together. He added that, as she and Rhyme had discussed earlier, a few reporters had called, inquiring about the wisdom of firing a weapon in a crowded mall but Madino deflected them by saying the matter was being investigated according to department procedures and didn’t release her name. None of the journalists followed up.
All good news.
Now Pulaski’s computer offered up a ship’s-bell ding. “Okay, here it is. Evidence analysis.”
As he read, the young man’s hand went to his forehead and rubbed briefly. The scar wasn’t long but it was quite obvious today, from this angle, in this light. In the first case that he’d run with Sachs and Rhyme he’d made a mistake and the perp, a particularly vicious professional killer, had clocked him in the head. The resulting injury, which had affected his brain as well as his pride and appearance, had nearly ended his career. But determination, encouragement from his twin brother (also a cop) and Lincoln Rhyme’s persistence had kept him in blue. He still had moments of uncertainty—head injuries poison self-confidence—but he was one of the smartest and most dogged officers Sachs knew.
He sighed. “Not a whole lot.”
“What is there?”
“Trace from the Starbucks shop itself, nothing. From the Mexican restaurant: DNA from the rim of the Starbucks cup but no CODIS match.”
It’s rarely that easy.
“No friction ridges,” Pulaski said.
“What? He wore gloves in the Starbucks?”
“Looks like he used the napkin to hold the cup. The tech at CSU used vacuum and ninhydrin but only a partial showed up. From the tip. Too narrow for IAFIS.”
The national fingerprint database was comprehensive but could analyze only prints that came from the pads of fingers, not the very end.
But again she wondered: Had the evidence gone to Rhyme for analysis and not to the CSU lab in Queens, would he have been able to raise a fingerprint? The lab facility at headquarters was state-of-the-art but it wasn’t, well, it wasn’t Lincoln Rhyme’s.
“Shoeprint from Starbucks, probably his,” Pulaski read, “since it was superimposed over others and matched one on the loading dock and at the Mexican restaurant. Similar trace found in tread from the dock and restaurant. It’s a size thirteen Reebok. Daily Cushion Two Point Oh. The trace chemical profile’s here.”
She looked at the screen and read out a list of chemicals she’d never heard of. “Which is?”
Pulaski scrolled down. “Probably humus.”
“Dirt?”
The blond officer continued to read the fine print. “Humus is the penultimate degree of decomposition of organic matter.”
She recalled an exchange between Rhyme and Pulaski years ago when the rookie had used “penultimate” to mean “final,” as opposed to the proper meaning—next to last. The memory was more poignant than she wished.
“So soon-to-be dirt.”
“Pretty much. And it came from somewhere else. It doesn’t match any of the control samples that you or the ECT collected in and around the mall, loading dock and restaurant.” He continued to read. “Well, not so good here.”
“What’s that?”
“Dinitroaniline.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Number of uses, dyes, pesticides, for instance. But the number one: explosives.”
Sachs pointed to the chart from the murder scene itself, the construction site where Unsub 40 beat Todd Williams to death near the club a couple of weeks ago. “Ammonium nitrate.”
Fertilizer—and the major explosive ingredient in home-made bombs, like the one that destroyed the Oklahoma City federal building in the ’90s.
“So,” Pulaski said slowly, “you think there’s more to it than a robbery? The unsub was, I don’t know, buying bomb ingredients near Forty Degrees North or the construction site and Williams saw it?” He tapped the computer screen. “And look at this.” In trace collected near a footprint at the mall loading dock was a small amount of motor oil.
The second ingredient in a fertilizer bomb.
Sachs sighed. Were there terrorist dimensions to this unsub? “Keep going.”
“More phenol. Like we found at the first murder scene.”
