“If it’s shown up twice it’s significant. What’s that used for?”
Pulaski called up a profile of the chemical. “Phenol. A precursor in making plastics, like polycarbonates, resins and nylon. Also in making aspirin, embalming fluid, cosmetics, ingrown toenail cures.”
He has big feet. Maybe nail problems.
“Then this.” He was transcribing a long list of other chemicals onto a whiteboard evidence chart.
“Mouthful,” she said.
“Profiles as makeup. Cosmetics. No idea of the brand.”
“Need to know who makes it. Have somebody in HQ track it down.”
Pulaski sent the request.
Then they returned to the evidence. He said, “Have a tiny shaving of metal. From the footprint in the hallway leading to the loading dock.”
“Let me see it.”
Pulaski called up the photos.
Hard to make out to the eye—whether naked or stylishly covered with drugstore-bought reading glasses, which Sachs had had to resort to lately.
She cranked up the magnification and studied the shiny bit. Then turned to the second laptop, typed her way into an NYPD database of metal trace, which, as it turned out, Lincoln Rhyme had established several years earlier; a recollection snapped its figurative fingers within her mind.
Together they scanned the database. “Something similar there,” said Pulaski, standing over her shoulder, as he pointed at one of the photos.
Yes, good. The tiny fleck was from the process of sharpening a knife, scissors or razor.
“It’s steel. He likes a sharp blade.” He’d beaten the victim to death outside 40° North but that didn’t mean he wasn’t interested in dispatching victims with other weapons as well.
On the other hand, he might recently have done nothing more than carved up the family’s chicken dinner with a knife he’d just dramatically edged first, tableside.
Pulaski continued, “And some sawdust. Want to see?”
She looked at the microscopic images. The grains were very fine.
“From sanding, you think?” she mused. “Not sawing?”
“I don’t know. Makes sense.”
She clicked a finger against a thumbnail. Twice. Tension rippled through her. “The analyst in Queens didn’t tell us the type of wood. We need to find that out.”
“I’ll request it.” Rubbing his forehead with one hand, Pulaski scrolled through more analyses with the other. “Looks like hammers and bombs aren’t enough. This guy wants to poison people too? Significant traces of organochlorine and benzoic acid. Toxins. Typical of insecticides but they’ve been used in homicides. And more chemicals that . . .” He regarded a database. “. . . profile as varnish.”
“Sawdust and varnish. He’s a carpenter, construction worker? Or somebody putting his bombs in wooden boxes or behind paneled walls.”
But since there’d been no reports of improvised explosive devices in the area, encased in wood or otherwise, Sachs put this possibility low on the likelihood scale.
“I want the manufacturer,” Sachs said. “The varnish. The type of sawdust too.”
Pulaski said nothing.
She glanced his way and noted that he was looking at his phone. A text.
“Ron?”
He started and slipped the phone away. He’d been preoccupied lately. She wondered if there was an illness in the family.
“Everything okay?”
“Sure. Fine.”
She repeated, “I want the manufacturer.”
“Of the . . . oh, the varnish.”
“Of the varnish. And wood.”
“I’ll get on it.” He sent another request to the crime lab.
They turned to the secondary category of evidence—that which might or might not have come from the unsub. The ECTs had collected the entire contents of the bin where they found the Starbucks trash, on the theory that the rubbish from the coffee chain might not have been the only things the perp discarded. There were thirty or forty items: napkins, newspapers, plastic cups, used Kleenex, a porn magazine probably ditched before hubby returned home to the family. Everything had been photographed and logged, but nothing, the analysts in Queens reported, seemed relevant.
Sachs, however, spent twenty minutes looking at each item, both individual shots of the evidence in the bin and wide-angle images before the bin’s contents were collected by the ECTs.
“Check this out,” she said. Pulaski walked closer. She was indicating two napkins from a White Castle fast-food restaurant.
“Home of the slider.” Pulaski added, “What is that, by the way?”
Sachs knew it was a small hamburger. No idea where the name had come from. One of the earliest fast-food franchises in America, White Castle specialized in burgers and milk shakes.
“Any friction ridges?”
Pulaski read the report. “None.”
How hard did they try? she wondered. Recalling that Rhyme’s two nemeses were incompetence and laziness, Sachs stared at the napkins. “Odds they came from him?”
Pulaski enlarged the wide-angle shots. The rumpled White Castle napkins were directly beside the Starbucks discards.
“Could be. Our boy likes chain food, we know.”
A sigh. “Napkins’re one of the best sources for DNA. The analyst could’ve run them, compared it with Starbucks.”
Lazy, incompetent . . .
Then she relented.
Or he was just overworked? The story of policing.
Sachs called up the images of the opened napkins. Each contained stains.
“What do you think?” Sachs asked. “One’s brown, the other reddish?”
“Can’t tell. If we had our hands on them ourselves, we could do a color temperature to be sure. At Lincoln’s, I mean.”
Tell me about it.
Sachs said, “I’m thinking, on one napkin, chocolate and strawberry milk shakes. Reasonable deduction. And the other? That stain is definitely chocolate. Another stain too, less viscous, like a soft drink. From two different visits. One, he has two shakes. The other, a shake and a soda.”
“Skinny guy but he can sure pack the calories away.”
“But more important, he likes White Castle. A repeat customer.”
“If we’re lucky, he lives nearby. But which one?” Pulaski was online, checking out the restaurant chain in the area. There were several.
A click in her thoughts: the motor oil.
“Maybe the oil’s a bomb or maybe he goes to the White Castle in Queens,” she said. “It’s on Astoria Boulevard, Automotive Row. My dad and I used to buy auto parts there Saturday morning, then go back home and play amateur mechanics. Maybe he picked up the oil trace getting lunch. Long shot, but I’m going to go talk to the manager there. You call the lab in Queens and have somebody go over those napkins again. Fine-tooth cliché. Friction ridges. DNA too. Maybe he ate with a friend and the buddy’s DNA is in CODIS. And stay on the sawdust, I want the type of wood. And keep after them for the manufacturer of the varnish. And I don’t want the analysts who did this report. Call Mel.”
Quiet, self-effacing Detective Mel Cooper was the best forensic lab man in the city, perhaps in all of the Northeast. He was also an expert at human identification—friction ridge prints, DNA and forensic reconstruction. He had degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry and was a member of the prestigious International Association for Identification and the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts. Rhyme had hired him away from a small-town police department to work the NYPD Crime Scene Unit. Cooper was always a part of the Rhyme team . . . when they were working criminal cases.
As Sachs pulled on her jacket and checked her weapon, Pulaski made a call to the CSU to request Cooper’s assistance.
She was at the door when he disconnected and said, “Sorry, Amelia. Have to be somebody else.”
“What?”
“Mel’s on vacation. All week.”
She exhaled a fast laugh. In all the years they’d worked together she’d never known the tech to take more than a day off.
“Find somebody good then,” she said, walking briskly into the hallway and thinking: Rhyme retires and everything goes to hell.
CHAPTER 8
Is that . . . That’s an escalator. Yes, it is. Well, a portion of one. The top part. Sitting in your hallway. But I guess you know that.”
“Mel. Come on in. We’ve got work to do.”
Cooper, diminutive, slim and with a perpetual faint smile on his face, walked into the parlor of Rhyme’s town house, shoving his dark-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. He moved silently; he wore his standard footgear, Hush Puppies. The men were alone; Whitmore had returned to his Midtown law firm.
When no immediate explanation for the partial escalator, which was encased in a scaffolding, was forthcoming, he slipped off his brown jacket, hooked it and set down a gym bag. “I wasn’t really planning on a vacation, you know.”
Rhyme had suggested—in Lincoln Rhyme’s inimitable way—that Cooper take some time off. That is, time off from his official job at Crime Scene headquarters and come in to help on the civil case of Frommer v. Midwest Conveyance.
“Yes, well. Appreciate it.” Rhyme’s thanks were subdued, as always. He didn’t have much interest in, or skill at, social niceties.
“Is it . . . I mean, I thought I should check. Are there any ethical problems with me being here?”
“No, no, I’m sure there aren’t,” Rhyme said, eyes on the escalator, which reached to the ceiling. “As long as you don’t get paid.”
“Ah. So. I’m volunteering.”
“Just a friend helping in a good cause, Mel. A noble cause. The victim’s widow has no money. She has a son. Good boy. Promising.” Rhyme assumed this was likely. He didn’t know a thing about young Frommer, whose name he’d forgotten. “If we can’t get her a settlement, she’ll be living in a garage in Schenectady for the immediate future. Maybe the rest of her life.”
“Nothing so terrible about Schenectady.”
“The operative word is ‘garage,’ Mel. Besides, it’ll be a challenge. You like challenges.”
“To a point.”
“Mel!” Thom said, stepping into the parlor. “What’re you doing here?”
“Abducted.”
“Welcome.” Then the aide scowled. “Can you believe it. Look at that.” A disappointed nod toward the scaffolding and escalator. “The floors. I hope they’re not ruined.”
“They’re my floors,” Rhyme said.
“You charge me with keeping them pristine. Then undermine it with two tons of mechanical device.” To the forensic tech: “Food, drink?”
“Tea would be lovely.”
“I’ve got your favorite.”
Cooper liked Lipton’s. He had simple tastes.
“And how’s your girlfriend?”
Cooper lived with his mother but had a tall, gorgeous Scandinavian paramour, a professor at Columbia. She and Cooper were champion ballroom dancers.
“She’s—”
“We’re just getting to work here,” Rhyme interrupted.
Thom lifted an eyebrow to the tech, ignoring his boss.
“Fine thanks,” Cooper replied. “She’s fine. We have the regional tango competition next week.”
“And speaking of beverages.” Rhyme looked at the bottle of single-malt scotch.
“No,” Thom said bluntly. “Coffee.” And returned to the kitchen.
Rude.
“So. What’s the caper? Love that word.”
Rhyme explained about the escalator accident and the suit that would be filed by Evers Whitmore on behalf of the widow and her son.
“Ah, right. In the news. Terrible.” Cooper shook his head. “Never felt really comfortable getting on and off those things. I’ll take the stairs, or even an elevator, though I’m not so crazy about them either.”
He walked to the computer monitor, on which were dozens of photographs of the accident site, taken by Sachs, unofficially, since she hadn’t been involved in the mishap investigation. They were of the open access panel to the pit, showing the motor and gears and walls, all covered with blood.
“Died from hemorrhaging?”
“And trauma. Cut mostly in half.”
“Hm.”
“Is that the actual unit?” Cooper returned to the scaffolding and began examining it closely. “No blood. It’s been scrubbed?”
“No.” Rhyme explained about the impossibility of getting access to the actual escalator for several months. But he hoped they could determine a likely cause of the failure from this mock-up. Rhyme’s idea was to pay to borrow a portion of an identical model from a contractor in the area. Thom had found the tape measure Rhyme had requested and they’d determined there was enough clearance to get the machinery through the front door, disassembled, and put it back together in the hallway. The price for the rental was five thousand, which Whitmore would add to his legal fee and deduct from whatever they recovered from the defendant.
Workers had built a scaffolding and mounted the top plate—the access panel that had opened to swallow up Greg Frommer—along with its supporting pieces, hinges, and portions of the railing and control switches. On the floor were the motor and the gears, identical to those that had killed the victim.
Cooper was walking silently around the device, looking up, touching pieces. “Won’t be evidentiary.”
“No. We just need to find out what went wrong, why the panel at the top opened when it shouldn’t have.” Rhyme wheeled closer.
The tech was nodding. “So, I deduce that the escalator was going up at the time and just as the victim got to the top floor panel it popped up. How far open was it?”
“Amelia said about fourteen inches.”
“She ran the scene?”
“No, she just happened to be there at the time, tracking an unsub. She lost him when the accident happened and she tried to save the vic. Couldn’t.”
“And the perp got away?”
“Yes.”
“She wouldn’t have been happy about that.”
“She went to see the widow and found out she’s in a pretty bad way. Had the idea to hook her up with a lawyer. That’s how it all ended up in our laps.”
“So, the access panel pops up—yes, I see it’s on a spring. Must be heavy. The vic gets dragged underneath and then falls onto the motor and gears.”
“Right. The teeth on the front edge of the panel cut him too. That’s all the blood on the walls in the pictures.”
“I see.”
“Now I want you to get inside, poke around, find out how the damn thing works. How the access panel at the top opens, switches, levers, hinges, safety mechanisms. Everything. Get pictures. And we’ll try to piece together what happened.”
Cooper looked around. “The place hasn’t changed much since you resigned.”
“Then you know where the camera equipment’s located,” Rhyme said, his voice taut with impatience.
The tech chuckled. “And you haven’t changed much either.” He went to the shelves on a back wall of the parlor and selected a camera and flashlight with a headband. “Coal miner’s son,” he joked, mounting it on his forehead.
“Shoot away. Go!”
Cooper climbed up inside the mockup. Silent flashes began to flare.
The doorbell sounded.
Who could this be? The stiff attorney, Evers Whitmore, was back in his office talking to friends and family of Greg Frommer. He was trying to marshal evidence to prove that, although presently underemployed, Frommer would have gone back to being a successful marketing manager in the near future, allowing the damage claim to be much higher than one based on his recent income.
