The Cutting Edge

by Jeffery Deaver

  This would be in an effort to shed whatever still clung to her from the crime scene. What the shower had not been able to remove: the gut-clenching horror she’d undoubtedly experienced.

  If anything could distract her, it was the act of downshifting out of a hairpin, fourth to second, then skidding onto a straightaway and urging the screaming engine to push the needle of the speedometer into three digits.

  Rhyme knew and accepted without qualification that she was a risk taker. But speed was a diversion, not a remedy.

  “Sachs?” he asked. And he said this in a certain tone, rare for him. She would understand: It was an invitation to talk to him about what had happened at the site. He wasn’t going to offer advice, probably not even solace. Just give her a chance to talk.

  But the invitation was declined.

  Amelia Sachs said only, “Night. See you in the morning.” She said this to everybody.

  Pulaski and Cooper left. Ackroyd pulled his raincoat on. He was hesitating to leave, Rhyme noted.

  In a soft voice, the Brit said, “It’s hardly my business. But…is she all right?”

  “Not really,” Rhyme said. “She has some issues.” His face wrinkled. “If that isn’t the most useless of assessments. Amelia needs to move, to be free, all the time. I think she was in a cave-in, or got trapped. Wouldn’t be a firefight, wouldn’t be a pursuit, sniper. Anything like that. She lives for moments like those. But being trapped, caught, not moving: That’s hell.”

  “I could see her eyes. It must’ve been bad.”

  “I think it was.”

  “She’ll tell you about it, sooner or later.”

  “Probably not. And I know because we’re similar that way.” He gave a smile as he realized he was sharing more of himself than usual. “A magnet. Opposites attract? Well, in most ways, we’re opposite. This, keeping things inside? We’re the same pole.”

  Ackroyd laughed. “Just like a scientist to couch matters of the heart in terms of electrical polarity…Well, if there’s anything I can do, please, let me know.”

  “Thank you, Edward.”

  The man nodded and left the town house. Soon Thom appeared and said, “And time for bed for you, Lincoln. Late.”

  Exertion and fatigue could adversely affect someone with quadriplegia, a condition where stress can sometimes play havoc with blood pressure.

  Still, he had one more task tonight.

  “Five minutes,” he told Thom, who began to protest. Then Rhyme said, “Barry Sales.”

  The aide dipped his head. “Sure. I’ll get things ready upstairs.”

  Rhyme instructed the phone to dial Sales. He’d been discharged from the hospital and was now at home. Rhyme had a brief conversation with his wife, Joan, who then put Sales on the line. They started chatting immediately and Rhyme supposed that an observer would have been surprised, to put it mildly, to see the criminalist this loquacious. He wasn’t taciturn but he typically had no time for idle conversation.

  Tonight, though, idle conversation was the game. His and Sales’s words ranged far and wide. He’d called the rehab specialist Thom had recommended. They hadn’t met yet, but Sales would update Rhyme about the appointment afterward.

  Rhyme had to report to Sales that his intelligence revealed that the trial of the man who’d allegedly shot him was moving slowly. Clever lawyering, technicalities, bullying witnesses.

  After they disconnected, Rhyme turned briefly to the evidence charts and memorized some of the more enigmatic entries. When this was done he swung around and followed Thom to the elevator. In bed he would use the netherworld, between deciding to sleep and succumbing, to wrestle a little longer with the knottier issues presented by the investigation.

  Smiling to himself, he thought suddenly of a line that seemed to define the clues in the Unsub 47 case, words that Edward Ackroyd had spoken earlier, about cryptic crossword puzzles.

  They can lie and be completely honest at the same time…

  Chapter 30

  Listening to the raucous sound from his son’s workroom—the grinding tools shaping the sculpted stone—Deepro Lahori slipped downstairs.

  He stood in the hallway outside the studio, in the basement.

  It was late—bedtime—but the boy continued to grind away. They had ended their conversation on a somewhat positive note earlier in the evening. But Vimal was, of course, now being passive aggressive—the grinder shouting a message of defiance to his father.

  How foolish, this sculpture nonsense. What a waste of time. And of his talent. If it were only a hobby, fine. In fact, sculpting might enhance his son’s skill as a cutter. Better than video games, better than dating girls. But he knew Vimal wanted a career as an artist. Stupid boy. Lahori guessed the percentage of professional artists who made enough money to live on probably hovered around 1 percent. How could he get an Indian woman for a wife, someone who wanted to be taken care of, someone who would show respect only to a man who provided for her?

  Apart from the impracticality of devoting his life to sculpture, the truly troubling, truly painful, aspect of his son’s behavior was the insulting rejection of his father’s—and the Lahori family’s—history in the diamond-cutting business. This was a sin, for Vimal was the only one in the family to carry on that tradition. Sunny would have gone into the business—but he had no talent on the scaife; he was embarrassing to watch. Yes, he would be following his mother into health care (though he would be a doctor, of course, not a mere nurse, like Divya). But that was a maternal tradition. Lahori needed a son to follow in his footsteps.

  Downstairs, he approached the door of the studio, pausing as the grinder went silent.

  Was he finished for the night?

  No, the clatter started up again. Which meant Vimal couldn’t hear what was coming next. Lahori took a key from his pocket in a trembling hand and, after some effort, locked the door to the studio. He then placed a security bar, which ran at a forty-five-degree angle from an indentation above the doorknob to a similar hole in the floor. He affixed this too with a key lock. The bar was three-quarter-inch tempered steel, and the manufacturer assured the world, in its advertising, that only a cutting flame of two thousand degrees Celsius would slice through it. (Though, of course, a flexible disk saw embedded with diamonds would do the trick too, he thought. Just for the record.)

  Vimal was now in prison. The door was sealed—and, because this had been a diamond workshop years ago, the low window was barred with thick iron rods.

  Lahori congratulated himself silently for the ruse of putting his son at ease, agreeing to some “compromise.” Had Vimal been the least suspicious that he’d be locked up here, he never would have gone into the room. The insubordinate boy would have sprinted out the door in an instant and been gone, no matter that he had no money and no ID.

  Going to California? A state whose only claim to fame, in Lahori’s opinion, was the billions of dollars in diamond sales from stores like the ones on Rodeo Drive?

  He slipped the keys into his pocket.

  What a child Vimal was! He could have been one of the greatest diamantaires of the twenty-first century…why, look at the parallelogram cut! Genius, pure genius.

  Deepro Lahori had no particular plan, other than to keep Vimal here, locked downstairs, for the next month or so. He was sure the police would catch the killer and the boy would come to his senses. It would be the horror of the robbery, getting shot at, and seeing his mentor die that had upset him so, had unbalanced him. He was, Lahori decided, temporarily insane. A month in captivity would also get his mind off any non-Hindu girls he was vulnerable to.

  A touch of guilt. But Lahori reminded himself he was hardly inhumane, certainly not with his son, whom he loved deeply, of course. The boy would find a comfortable sleeping bag in the closet, along with plenty of food and snacks and water and soft drinks. He suspected his son drank so he’d included some lite beer. There was a TV. No Internet or phone of course. The boy might grow even more unstable and call a friend to come b
reak him out. Or the police, claiming he’d been kidnapped.

  There would be some tension between them, because of what Lahori had done. But sooner or later the boy would come to understand that his father knew what was right for him. He would thank him, though Lahori honestly did not want thanks, or even an acknowledgment that he was right. He simply wanted the boy to come to the realization that this was the life he was destined for…and to embrace it.

  He gripped the bar against the door and tried to shake it. The rod didn’t move a millimeter.

  He was satisfied. And at last more or less happy…after these past few days, when events had tried him so sorely. And unfairly.

  He climbed the stairs.

  Deepro Lahori was in the mood for that game of Scrabble, and he knew his wife and his other son—his good son—would indulge him.

  Monday, March 15

  III

  Sawing

  Chapter 31

  Now, where is my kuritsa?

  Where are you, my little hen?

  Aren’t you tired of working, aren’t you hungry for some curry, some vindaloo shrimp, some basmati rice? And who doesn’t love that wonderful raita?

  The young man that Vladimir Rostov was waiting for was working in a jewelry store that specialized in wedding bands and engagement rings. It was lunchtime and the fucking kid better take a break soon. Rostov had enjoyed his time with the lovebirds—especially the ring swallowing! But now to work. Finding VL and slicing his throat.

  That’s why he was here in this greasy Irish bar, where he sat on a stool, having a bourbon and studying the building across the street.

  Come on, my little kuritsa…Your Vladimir is getting impatient and you won’t like him that way. His knife is sitting heavy in his pocket. The razor blade is lonely.

  His Persian, no, Iranian, kuritsa, Nashim, had come through for him, and delivered the name of a young man who had worked for Patel a year ago and stayed in touch with the diamond cutter and those who worked for and with him. His first name was Kirtan, and Nashim didn’t know his home address but he did know where he worked: the store that Rostov was staring at right now. He had a passing regret that because of the Persian’s success, Rostov had no excuse to visit Nashim’s plump daughters, Scheherazade and Kitten.

  Ah, families, families, families…

  After his parents had gone their separate ways and fled the suburbs of Moscow, twelve-year-old Vladimir had found himself in Mirny, a town of about twenty thousand at the time, smack in the middle of Siberia. If Hell had been ice, rather than fire, Mirny could be the Underworld.

  The village had sprung from the frozen steppes seventy or so years ago when a vast diamond pipe was discovered. Mir means “peace” in Russian. The geologist who found the lode sent a coded message to Moscow that he was about to “smoke the pipe of peace,” which meant he’d made an amazing find. The town was called Mirny, the mine Mir, and in its heyday it produced two thousand kilos of diamonds a year, 20 percent of them high-quality. Upon its discovery, Mir sent shivers of panic through the staid halls of De Beers, which knew that its output could cause the price of diamonds to plummet. (Still, ever conscious of controlling the market, the Russians manipulated output and bought up reserves—De Beers’s included—to keep prices sky-high.) The mine began as an open pit, ultimately seventeen hundred feet deep, and when that was played out the state company began digging tunnels.

  It was in these unforgiving shafts that Gregor Rostov insisted his nephew work, when he wasn’t studying in high school and, later, the polytechnic college. Gregor claimed he used his “pull” to get the boy a job, when in reality the mine was begging for workers mad enough to descend into the shafts.

  Digging the open pit had been an engineering challenge—jet engines to heat the ground and soften it enough to dig—but tunneling was a nightmare. Workers were often drowned or crushed, stone dust destroyed lungs faster than three-pack-a-day smoking habits, chemical fumes burned out eyes, tongues and noses. Unstable explosives neatly removed other parts of the body.

  It was far warmer down there than at the gray, skin-cracking surface, of course. But more important to Vladimir, it was populated only with rock and dust and diamonds—not the crew-cut youths who leered and bullied the outsider from Moscow, the girls who ignored him, the glum aunt and uncle who resented having to share the tiny apartment with the boy.

  Because he was younger, he wasn’t expected to heft the loads of the adult laborers and was treated as something of a mascot. He was safe here. With his stone. Working double shifts. Sometimes staying for days at a time. Wandering the shafts.

  Once, he was discovered without his pants, which lay in a pile near him in a deserted shaft. A supervisor had made an unexpected visit to the location. As Rostov dressed hastily the man noted what the boy had been up to. He chose not to reprimand him but firmly told him to confine such activities to his bedroom at home; more deviance would not be tolerated.

  Vladimir frequently ignored the warning. He just made sure that he would find long-abandoned nooks and rock faces where there was no chance of discovery.

  Gone to the stone…

  But staying in the mine forever was not an option. He had to surface and return home to the fourth-floor walk-up apartment.

  Uncle Gregor…

  He was, by appearances, the meekest of men. A skinny man, as thin as his fiercely strong Belomorkanal cigarettes—the brand named after the infamous White Sea canal dug by gulag prisoners in the 1930s, with more than a hundred thousand perishing during the work. Gregor’s angular face was like Vladimir’s, protruding brows, broad lips tending toward purple, shoulders bony. His work in the mine involved instruments and clipboards. He had probably never lifted a shovel in his life. Vladimir thought his fingernails were remarkable. They were long and pale and perhaps sharpened. At least, so they seemed; in the games that were played almost nightly in the dim, cluttered apartment, the nails left red, painful trails along Vladimir’s spine.

  Aunt Ro was the opposite, physically, of her husband. She was as sturdy as the cinder-block building they lived in. When the boy first met her, his impression was of a globe. At five two, she was formidable and, when she wanted something, that desire was all that existed in the universe.

  Impatient too. And if Vladimir didn’t please her, she too left angry marks—though not with her nails. She would turn her engagement ring around as she lay into him. The diamond, which had come from the Mir mine, occasionally drew blood.

  The years passed and at twenty he found himself a supervisor (you found few old men in the mines). After his uncle, and then aunt, died, he lived in the apartment attending school part-time, halfheartedly. He finally attained a degree in geology, barely passing.

  His passion for the mine, the sensuous shafts, the warmth, the water, remained as strong as ever but Rostov the young man had hungers that he doubted could be satisfied in Mirny.

  In any event, the decision was made for him. The mine closed, the lodes largely depleted.

  Russia was one of the biggest producers of diamonds in the world and he might have found work elsewhere. But, he decided, no. He wanted more.

  Hungers…

  It was around then that Vladimir Rostov came to accept that he wasn’t right. The time in the mine, the time on the living room floor—the bed of rocks his uncle and aunt had strewn out for him to lie on…All those times had turned him into something as hard as a diamond. And just plain off.

  Where to go?

  The Chechnyans were misbehaving then. So why not the army?

  Being gone to the stone was perfect training.

  For the army and for what came later.

  The life that had brought him now, to glorious, fucking America.

  Another sip of bourbon in the Irish bar…

  Come along, Rostov thought angrily.

  Then he brightened. Inside the store, Kirtan shook a customer’s hand, a farewell gesture, and pulled on his jacket.

  Rostov finished his drink—an
off brand but not bad, and cheap. He wiped the glass with a napkin to remove his prints. This was a bit paranoid but Vladimir Rostov was still alive and not in prison when, by rights, he should have been jailed or more likely killed long ago.

  One fond glance back at the waitress’s fine ass, then he was out the door into the cold, damp air. A diesel truck went past, spewing exhaust, reminding of home. No city on earth did exhaust better than Moscow. Beijing maybe, but he’d never been there.

  He stayed on this side of the street—too many cameras in the windows of the ancient, ten-story structure, part of whose ground floor was occupied by Kirtan’s employer, Midtown Gifts. This, like many jewelry stores and diamond factories, avoided any mention in the name that gems were involved. A practice that, while it made sense for security, made tracking down Mr. VL fucking hell.

  The building would have had a nice basement—nice and silent, that is—but he couldn’t have his chat with the kuritsa down there because of the cameras, as well as the armed guard in the arcade; there were two other jewelry stores on the first floor and a furrier that sold, wholesale only, mink, chinchilla and fox. The African American guard was fat and looked bored and seemed to be the sort who didn’t like wearing—much less using—his pistol, which was an old-style revolver.

  His plan was to follow the boy and approach him somewhere deserted. An alley would be good but Manhattan seemed to have no alleys, at least none that he could find. Queens, yes, Brooklyn, yes. But not here. Manhattan had sexy women, cheap liquor, wonderful diamonds and plenty of magnificent shopping districts…but no fucking alleys.

  He wondered how far he would have to follow the boy before he got him alone. He hoped it was near and he hoped it was soon. If not, he’d have to trail him home, after work. And Rostov was impatient. He needed VL and needed him now. There weren’t a lot of other options. None of his other sources had yielded up what he needed. And Nashim had been able to come up with only Kirtan’s name.