“You competing now?” Rhyme nodded to the phone.
“Oh, no, we’ll have to wait on the tournaments until I’m back home. They’re held in proper venues. Like chess matches. Supervised. So there’ll be no cheating: dictionaries, the Internet. There’ve been scandals, I will tell you. Quite the controversies.” He regarded the screen. “This’s just a way for us to stay in touch. We compete mostly with cryptic crosswords. You familiar?”
“Not really.”
That is, not at all.
“They’re largely a British creation and have appeared in our newspapers for hundreds of years. The creators—we call them ‘setters’ in cryptic crosswords—have a nearly mythical status. They go by one-word pseudonyms like Scorpion or Nestor—two quite famous ones, by the way. The most famous and the one who wrote the rules on cryptics is Derrick Somerset Macnutt, who went by Ximenes.
“Let me explain how they work—you might enjoy this, Lincoln. Cryptics have a grid, similar to regular crosswords, but the clues are word puzzles you have to solve to get the answer, as opposed to just a straightforward clue like ‘wife of George the Third.’ The best setters create clues which are both bloody complicated and absurdly simple.”
Ackroyd’s enthusiasm radiated from his otherwise staid face.
“Now, the clue’s a puzzle, remember. It contains a definition of the answer and other words or phrases to guide you, including letting you know what kind of puzzle it is: Maybe you have to solve an anagram, find a hidden or reversed word, work out what sound-alike words—homophones—mean.” He laughed. “I’m sure this makes no sense. Let me give you an example. Here’s a classic from the Guardian a few years ago, created by a setter named Shed. I’ll write it down because it’s much easier to find the answer by seeing, rather than hearing.”
Ackroyd jotted:
Very sad unfinished story about rising smoke (8)
“Now, the answer will appear on the crossword grid at fifteen down. All right? Good. Let’s get to work. What are we trying to find? See the number eight? That means the answer is an eight-letter word. And the first two words in the clue are the definition of that answer. So, what we need to write on the crossword grid at fifteen down is an eight-letter word meaning ‘very sad.’”
Rhyme had slipped his impatience away and was paying attention. Mel Cooper too had turned and was listening.
Ackroyd continued, “The next word, ‘unfinished,’ modifies the word after it. ‘Unfinished story.’ With cryptics you’re always mistrusting the literal. If the setter says ‘story,’ he means something else, possibly a synonym for ‘story.’” Ackroyd smiled again. “Obviously, I know the answer so I’m short-circuiting the process a bit. I’ll pick the synonym ‘tale.’ And ‘unfinished’ means the last letter is missing. That gives us the letters ‘T-A-L.’ So part of the answer for the clue ‘very sad’ are those letters. You with me?”
“Yes,” Rhyme said, his mind already trying to process the remaining clues.
Cooper said uncertainly, “Uhm, keep going.”
“Let’s go to the last words in the clue, ‘rising smoke.’ That could be any number of things but—trial and error again, and given my foreknowledge—let’s settle on ‘cigar.’ And since this clue is fifteen down, that means ‘rising’ would find the word written backwards: ‘ragic.’ So another part of our answer is the letters ‘R-A-G-I-C.’ Finally—”
Rhyme blurted, “The word ‘about’ means that the letters in one of the clues would be split and put on either side of another clue.”
Cooper said, “If you say so.”
Ackroyd said, with a grin, “No, no, he’s onto it. Brilliant, Lincoln. What’re your thoughts?”
“It’s obvious: Split T-A-L. Put the T before R-A-G-I-C and the A-L after. The answer’s ‘tragical.’”
“Congratulations!” Ackroyd said, beaming. “You’ve never done this before?”
“No.”
The Englishman offered, “Some people think it’s a waste of time.”
Rhyme tried not to smile.
“But I hardly agree. You know the Enigma machine?”
Cooper answered, “Yes, the code device that the mathematicians at Bletchley Park cracked. Alan Turing and crew.”
This sounded somewhat familiar but unless information helped with a present, or future, investigation Rhyme tended not to keep it in storage.
Apparently his blank expression showed. The tech said, “Nazi encryption device during World War Two. The Allies couldn’t crack German messages and tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians died.”
Ackroyd said, “In January nineteen forty-two, the Daily Telegraph had a speed cryptic competition—you had to complete a very complicated puzzle in twelve minutes or under. They published the results, and the War Office took notice. It recruited some of the best competitors to come to Bletchley Park and they helped crack Enigma.” He added, “One thing I love about cryptic puzzles: They can lie and be completely honest at the same time. It’s all about misdirection. Up for one more?”
“Yes,” Rhyme said.
Ackroyd wrote:
Location in Romania rich in oil (4)
Cooper turned back to his equipment. “Think I’ll stick to Sudoku.”
Rhyme stared for a moment. “A four-letter word that’s a location.”
Romania was a nation of which he knew nothing. “There’re thousands of towns and regions and parks in Romania. And someplace rich in oil. Maybe not oil wells. Maybe ports for shipping oil. Maybe banks that specialize in oil industry lending.” He shook his head.
“Remember,” Ackroyd said, “in cryptic puzzles, you’re often looking right at the answer. The problem is that you’re not seeing it.”
But then he did. Rhyme laughed. “Yes, the answer is a location in Romania—but not the country. It’s in ‘Romania,’ the word. The answer’s ‘Oman’: r-O-M-A-N-i-a. The Middle Eastern country with oil reserves.”
“Well done, Lincoln.”
Pleased with himself, he had to admit.
Rhyme noticed motion on the front-door monitor and observed Sachs climbing stairs and pulling her keys from her bag. She’d returned from the jobsite where Unsub 47 had, possibly, met with a worker for reasons as yet undetermined.
The time for diversion was over.
Chapter 29
Rhyme regarded Amelia Sachs carefully as she entered.
Hair damp—she’d taken a shower; the skies were gray but there’d been no rain.
I want to clean up first…
Her eyes were distant. Her thumb worried a finger, then the digits swapped roles. He could see a bloody cuticle.
She nodded a greeting to Ackroyd, who smiled his modest smile in return.
Rhyme told her, “Another one. You hear?”
Sachs asked quickly, “Earthquake?”
“What? No, attack.”
“The Promisor?”
He nodded. And observed that she seemed oddly distracted. Even troubled. He wondered too why it had taken her so damn long to get here.
But he said nothing about it. “Vic’ll live. Made her swallow her ring.”
“Jesus. How is she?”
“I don’t know. Ron’s walking the grid and getting details. He’ll do an interview when she’s out of surgery. The shield I talked to at the One-Nine asked a few questions. Didn’t add anything—same story you heard: protecting diamonds. And the canvass in the neighborhood didn’t turn up anyone. They’re still at it.”
Rhyme glanced to Edward Ackroyd, who told her what he’d found—the Amsterdam dealer lead had not paid off but it was likely that the unsub was Russian and probably had come only recently to the city.
Sachs looked thoughtful. “So, with the kids in Gravesend, he was trying to obscure the accent. Russian. Is that helpful?”
“I’m following up,” Rhyme said, thinking of the text he’d sent.
Sachs grimaced. “I’ve never known a perp to be so damn persistent about taking out witnesses. Hell. Have we had any lu
ck finding the boy?”
“Ron hasn’t. Like with Edward, nobody’s talking to him. Computer Crimes is pulling Patel’s phone records. Let’s hope Patel and VL talked regularly.” Rhyme’s eyes swayed to Sachs. “So, what happened at the jobsite?”
Sachs blinked. “Happened?”
“Yeah. What was Forty-Seven doing there?”
“Oh.” She told them he probably hadn’t used the site as a shortcut. Yes, there were lots of CCTV cameras on the government building side of the construction area but the limited entrances to the site suggested the shortcut theory was unlikely.
Then she explained about her conversation with the foreman of the geothermal operation. She said that, yes, the unsub had been in the construction site and had met with somebody, identity unknown, for reasons unknown. She could get no better description than what they already had. “The scene wasn’t good—gravel and lots of contamination. Found this.” She handed over two small bags of earth and stones to Mel Cooper. “It’s probably from where he was standing but I don’t know for sure.”
The tech took the bags and got to work examining what had been uncovered.
Rhyme noticed that her eyes remained distant, her posture tense. She tugged at her hair, then dug the index finger of her right hand into the thumb of that hand once more. An old habit. She tried to control the self-harm. Sometimes she didn’t care. Amelia Sachs lived on the edge, in many senses.
He noticed her hand drop to her knee. She winced.
“Sachs?” Rhyme asked.
“I fell. That’s all. Nothing.”
No, it wasn’t nothing. Whatever had happened had shaken her. And now she had a brief coughing fit. Cleared her throat. He felt an urge to ask if she was okay but she didn’t like that question any more than he did.
Rhyme said, “Any indication Forty-Seven was picking up that new weapon of his?”
“No, but I didn’t get very far. We’ll have to keep canvassing.” She turned to Cooper. “Speaking of the weapon: Ballistics?”
He explained that the gun used at Gravesend was a .38 special. Probably the Smittie 36 or the Colt Detective. Both, classic snub-nose. Five rounds. Not very accurate and punishing on the shooting hand. But at close range as wicked as any other firearm.
Cooper added, “And I heard from the evidence collection techs out of Queens. No sign of the Glock—or anything else—in the storm drains or Dumpsters near Saul Weintraub’s.”
Sachs shrugged. “I was going back to the construction site tomorrow to keep up the canvassing but there’s a problem. I met a state inspector down there. Works for the Division of Mineral Resources. He said the city’s shutting down construction at the geothermal site until they can see if the drilling’s caused the quake.”
Ackroyd said, “Oh, it’s a geothermal plant they’re building?”
“Right.”
“How deep?”
“I think five, six hundred feet.”
“Yes, I’d guess that could do it. My company used to insure against damage from fracking and high-pressure water mining. Those’ve definitely caused earthquakes and undermined buildings and homes. But we gave up issuing policies. It was costing us too much. And I have heard of geothermal drilling leading to earthquakes too. In one case a school was destroyed in a fire from a broken gas line. Another one, two workers were buried alive.”
Sachs once more dug an index nail into the thumb cuticle. Deep. The flesh went pink. Rhyme believed he now understood what had happened at the geothermal site.
She continued, “Northeast is appealing the shutdown but until that’s resolved, there won’t be any workers on-site. We’ll have to interview them at home.”
“How many?”
“About ninety. I told Lon. He’ll recruit uniforms. Pain in the ass. But there’s no other way.”
Cooper looked up from a computer monitor. “Got the results from the construction site, Amelia. Same mineral trace as at Patel’s and Weintraub’s, so he was definitely there. But nothing new, other than diesel fuel. And mud. Was there a lot of mud down there?”
A pause. “Some. Yeah.”
“Nothing else.”
The door buzzer sounded and Thom let Ron Pulaski into the parlor.
The young officer nodded to those present and introduced himself to Edward Ackroyd; the two had never met. The young officer then handed off to Mel Cooper the evidence bags he’d collected on the Judith Morgan assault on the Upper East Side. The tech got to work, as Pulaski explained to the others what had happened in the latest Promisor assault. Morgan, twenty-six, had been in a bridal boutique, getting some final adjustments to her wedding dress. A man who’d been outside the shop followed her to her apartment and forced her into an alcove on the ground floor.
“He was rambling on and on about how she’d ruined a beautiful diamond by cutting it into a ring. He was going to kill her, she thought. Or cut her ring finger off. But then he changed his mind. He told her that since she’d treated the ring like shit, that’s where it was going to end up.”
Sachs asked, “Did he say anything that’d give us a clue where he lives? Works?”
“No. But said she could smell aftershave, alcohol, cigarette smoke residue, very foul. And onions. He has blue eyes.”
Sachs said, “Same as earlier.”
“And that he was foreign but she couldn’t tell his accent.”
Rhyme told Pulaski they were pretty sure he was Russian and new to the city.
“She thinks the gun was a revolver—I showed her pictures. And the utility knife was gray metal. That’s about it.”
Sachs wrote these finds up on the chart.
Cooper returned to give them the results of the Judith Morgan crime scene search. “Not much. Too many footprints to find anything more about his shoes. Some black cotton fibers—ski mask, I’d guess. General trace but all typical of that neighborhood. No kimberlite this time.”
Sachs sat down in a wicker chair. She tapped her knee with an index finger, as if she were testing a melon. She was staring at the TV screen. The news was on. Though the set was muted, the closed captioning was telling the story in its own form of clumsy English.
That story was about the earthquake.
Sachs was frowning, Rhyme noted, and she whispered, “Oh, no.”
He turned his full attention to the story. The anchor was announcing that one of the two fires believed to have started when the tremor snapped gas lines, had taken two lives.
A couple in their sixties, Arnold and Ruth Phillips, residents of Brooklyn, had died of smoke inhalation. They had escaped the flames and made it to the garage but there was no electricity in the house to power the opener. Weakened by the smoke and injuries, they couldn’t lift the door themselves.
Soon two talking heads were on the split screen, along with a dark-haired male anchor. One of the guests was a middle-aged man in a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was a bit pudgy and his head was crowned with trim black hair. He was Dennis Dwyer, the CEO of Northeast Geo Industries, the company building the plant.
The other interviewee was a twitchy disheveled man in his mid-fifties. He wore a blue work shirt with sleeves rolled up. His gray hair and beard were wild. He was Ezekiel Shapiro. The type on the screen identified him as Director of the One Earth movement.
“I saw him down there today,” Sachs said. “They’ve been harassing the workers. He’s a bit of a—” She turned to Ackroyd. “What did you say? Crazy guy?”
“Nutter.”
“Good word.”
The two men on-screen were engaged in a fierce verbal duel. The wide-eyed and broadly gesticulating Shapiro was positive that the earthquake had resulted from the geothermal drilling. And apart from gas line breakage and the risk of buildings collapsing from quakes during construction, the finished plant could lead to groundwater pollution and other environmental risks. He praised the city for stopping the drilling but criticized the mayor and city council for allowing the project in the first place.
Dwyer
, much calmer, said the ban was a huge mistake, asserting that drilling could not cause earthquakes. The New York area was far more seismologically stable than most parts of the country, certainly nothing like California. And Shapiro was misinformed about the geothermal process if he thought there was a risk of contaminating groundwater; the system was self-contained, and even a crack in a pipe would result only in a release of inert solution. Shapiro countered that the technology was still unknown.
The anchor added gasoline to the discussion by inviting a third interviewee. He was an even more perfectly assembled businessman than Dwyer. His name was C. Hanson Collier and he was the CEO of Algonquin Consolidated Power—the big electricity provider in the New York area. You would think he’d be against the geothermal project—it seemed to make Northeast Geo a competitor to Algonquin. But Collier was pro. He was saying that near-surface drilling, like Northeast’s Brooklyn project, was far safer than deep drilling in volcanic regions to tap steam and high-temperature reserves for the generation of electricity. “We have to embrace all forms of energy the earth provides,” he said.
As the debate grew increasingly testy and, to Rhyme, uninteresting, the image on the screen switched to the Northeast Geo construction site in Brooklyn, depicting a number of green-fenced rectangular pens. Apparently these were where the shafts were located.
Sachs took one look and rose. “I’d better go. I need to check on Mom.”
Rose Sachs, who’d had heart surgery recently, was doing fine. Rhyme knew this for a fact since he and the funny, and feisty, woman had had a conversation just a few hours ago. Her reluctance at her daughter’s dating a disabled man had faded years ago and she and Rhyme had become good friends. He couldn’t ask for a better mother-in-law.
But there was more. Rhyme knew that while Sachs might end up at her mother’s house—it was in Brooklyn—she would first take to the road. She was going to jump into her Torino and find an appropriate roadway, out in the burbs, to muscle the car up to eighty or ninety.
The Cutting Edge Page 19
