The Cutting Edge

by Jeffery Deaver

  He lit up the Greyhound, which was on its way to Indianapolis. There, according to the ticket the witness, one Vimal Lahori, had bought, he would transfer to a bus for St. Louis. And onward and onward to Los Angeles. They knew his itinerary because they had tracked the phone to the Port Authority bus station in New York and run a scan of the CCTVs in the ticket seller’s cubicles, noting that a young man who fit the description of Vimal had bought such a ticket.

  Except he wasn’t going to get any farther than the county lockup ten miles from here. Solely for his own protection. This Promisor knew about him and had already killed one witness. Though Trooper Boyle had to admit that the odds of the suspect getting all the way out here were pretty slim.

  The bus eased to the side of the road and Boyle climbed out of his car. He wore the standard PSP trooper outfit: dark slacks, gray shirt, black tie. He pulled on his gray Smokey-Bear hat, with chin strap, and strode to the bus.

  The door sha-hushed open.

  Eyes scanning the passengers. No obvious threats. Not that he expected any. “Looking for somebody you got on board,” he said softly to the driver, a slim African American whose face registered concern. The decision had been made by the NYPD to not radio or call him earlier; they didn’t know what kind of actor he was and were concerned that the boy would catch any wary behavior, jump off the bus and flee. “He’s not armed. There’ll be no issue there.”

  “’Kay. Feel free.”

  At least the New York detective, a gruff-sounding guy, said he wasn’t armed. Witnesses generally weren’t but sometimes they were. This kid seemed like he fell into the unarmed category. Besides, he was Indian, as in overseas Indian, and in Boyle’s admittedly limited experience there didn’t seem to be a lot of firepower packed by people of that extraction.

  Boyle had memorized the picture of Vimal, and he now made his way through the bus, looking, with a neutral expression, at the faces of the passengers he passed. Terrorism would be on everyone’s mind, of course. A bomb on the bus. Someone with a gun ready to blast away in the name of Allah or for no reason at all.

  He nodded when smiled at, and answered questions like “What’s wrong?” and “Is there a problem?” with a noncommittal “Won’t keep you long, folks.”

  But darn. He didn’t spot the boy. There were a couple of darker-skinned men but they were all much older and seemed Latino, not Indian.

  He returned to the front of the bus and called that detective in New York.

  “’Lo?” Lon Sellitto asked.

  Unprofessional. But then again these were New Yorkers he was dealing with, whole different kettle of fish.

  But by way of object lesson he said, “Sir, this is Trooper J. T. Boyle again. I’m on board the bus and’ve taken a look at all passengers. I don’t see him.”

  “Did you—”

  “Checked the john too, yessir.”

  “—ask the driver if anybody got off at any stop?”

  Boyle hesitated. He turned to the driver and asked if anybody’d gotten off at any stop.

  “No, sir.”

  “No, Detective, nobody got off,” Boyle said, then added, “Detective. Can you call it?”

  “What?”

  “Can you call the boy’s phone?”

  “Oh. Hm. Good plan. Hold on.”

  There were some clicks and then Sellitto said, “I’ve got that detective at Computer Crimes who’s been tracking it. Trooper? You’re on with Detective Szarnek.”

  “Hey,” came the voice. Boyle heard rock-and-roll music.

  These New York folks simply were not to be believed.

  “Detective…” He didn’t try the name. “This is Trooper J. T. Boyle, state police.”

  “Hi, Trooper.”

  “Uhm, hi. Could you call the phone?”

  “Sure. I’ll activate it.”

  A moment later, the default ringtone of an iPhone bleated. The sound was coming from a row three back from the front. Boyle walked forward to find a passenger reaching into the side compartment of her bag, a frown on her face, and pulling the phone out, staring at it.

  “Miss, am I right in figuring that’s not your phone?”

  She looked up at him. Her face, surrounded by blue and green hair, was pretty, though in the trooper’s opinion spoiled by the nose studs and the ring in her eyebrow. She said, “No, sir. And I have no idea how it got here.”

  * * *

  Ron Pulaski entered the lab and Rhyme knew immediately two things: He’d had some success and he was as uneasy as hell about it.

  “Rookie?”

  He nodded, broadly and furtively, if doing both simultaneously were possible. He would have made an absolutely terrible spy.

  “The den,” Rhyme said. He glanced back.

  What would they say if they knew…?

  The men crossed the hall and stepped, and wheeled, inside.

  “What do you have?”

  “I’m not feeling great about this, Lincoln.”

  “Ah, it’s all good.”

  “‘All good.’ You know, that sort of rates with that other phrase, ‘No worries.’ You notice people say them when all is not good and when there is something to worry about. I mean, you didn’t just break the law.”

  Pulaski had been out to the warehouse where the shoot-out had occurred involving Eduardo Capilla—El Halcón.

  “I doubt you did either.”

  “Doubt? The place was sealed. You know it was sealed.”

  “It’s a crime scene. I would assume it was sealed. Nobody was there, though?”

  “No. Just the tape. And the notice that said not to enter. Oh, it also shared that entering was a federal offense.”

  “Oh, you don’t take those things seriously, do you, Rookie?”

  “Those things? Federal offenses. Of all the things I take seriously, federal offenses hover near the top.”

  Rhyme was amused. He’s sounding more and more like me.

  “Let’s get going. Where are we?”

  From his bag Pulaski extracted a sheaf of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch pages. “The ballistic and trace analysis from the prosecution and defense reports. Scene photos, diagrams.”

  “Good. Spread them out.”

  He did, filling the old, walnut coffee table, whose legs ended in carved claws. Rhyme studied them. He then said, “And samples from Long Island?”

  In the interest of keeping the El Halcón mission on the down-low, Rhyme had retained a private forensic lab to analyze the new trace Pulaski had collected from the warehouse and had dropped off there earlier. Pulaski opened an envelope from the service and displayed the results.

  “Turn the pages, if you would be so kind, Rookie.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Rhyme read the dense type.

  “Now the files from PERT.”

  “Not enough that I break into a crime scene. You’ve got me stealing from the FBI headquarters.”

  “You didn’t steal a thing, Pulaski. Don’t exaggerate. You took pictures. That’s all.”

  “Sounds like a fellow saying he only borrowed that watch from the jewelry counter at Macy’s. I’m just saying.”

  The box delivered to his door by the lawyer’s driver wouldn’t have all of the crime scene and agents’ reports, merely what was going to be presented at trial. Rhyme needed to see everything.

  From another envelope Pulaski pulled out a dozen more sheets of paper. He’d printed out the images taken at the FBI’s evidence room on his phone’s camera. He set these too in front of Rhyme and, like flipping pages of the score for a pianist, he lifted a page away once Rhyme had finished reading it, exposing the one below.

  All right. Good. Taken together, all the paperwork detailed many things that he was interested in: the gunshot residue and other trace found on El Halcón’s hands and clothing, the trace on the floor of the warehouse, the location of the many bullets that had been fired—in the walls and ceiling and floor and the victims’ bodies. The data confirmed that El Halcón’s prints were not
on the weapon in question, as Carreras-López had said, though his cuff contained gunshot residue—just where the drug lord had said the arresting officer had smeared a rag or piece of cloth containing the GSR.

  Rhyme read everything again.

  “What is it, Lincoln?”

  Was he being that transparent? He was dismayed by what he’d found.

  A failing like this? At least he could be grateful for El Halcón’s attorney—for coming to him and raising the falsified-evidence question. If not for the round, mild-spoken Mexican, the damage would never have come to light.

  Pulaski persisted, “Is there a problem?”

  “No, no. You’re a godsend, Rookie.”

  “You’re being sarcastic.”

  “No, I mean it. My delivery doesn’t always match my intent. That’s a quality for us all to guard against.”

  “All right. Acknowledged. But come on, tell me. Am I going to get into trouble for this?”

  “How much trouble can you get into when your mission is a higher cause?”

  Pulaski pulled a tight grimace. “You know, Lincoln, my father always said you can never trust anybody when they answer a question with a question.”

  Chapter 42

  Hank, there’s a problem.”

  The man uttering these words, a slim, baby-cheeked young assistant prosecutor, had not sounded too alarmed when he’d uttered the “P” word. Henry Bishop, the senior federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of New York, remained in high spirits. The case against El Halcón was proceeding well. The groundwork had been laid, and they were just getting to the rock-solid forensics that the experts would present.

  Bishop himself was slim, though at six feet, five inches, he appeared far more willowy than he really was. The blond, clean-shaven man worked out daily, and beneath his Brooks Brothers suits lurked muscle. He ticked off a notation on a list—on which many more notations required death by ticking—and looked up. “Yes?”

  Larry Dobbs—whom Bishop thought of as First Assistant—continued, “I just got a call from somebody at PERT.”

  The FBI’s physical evidence response team.

  To Dobbs, Bishop said in a cool voice, “Let’s be clearer. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. Now. Specifics.” Bishop was sitting in his office, overlooking the borough of Brooklyn. He noted a haze of smoke on the horizon. From the fire after that earthquake, which had not been far away. He’d felt the tremor in his office.

  The young, buttoned-up assistant prosecutor said, “NYPD officer, a uniform, had some questions about the case.”

  “Our case?”

  “Right,” Dobbs confirmed.

  “Well, say, the El Halcón case.”

  “Sorry, Hank. The El Halcón case.”

  “Not ‘the case.’ There’re a lot of ‘the cases.’”

  Dobbs, standing across the bulky desk, said, “El Halcón.”

  Bishop mused, “So New York City cop. Questions. Hm.”

  The El Halcón investigation involved federal crimes and state crimes but New York had deferred to the feds. Yes, after Bishop got his convictions of El Halcón, the man would also be charged under the state penal code. But that prosecution would be icing on the cake and largely irrelevant, since the Mexican would never get out of federal prison to serve time in the state pen. So why would NYPD get involved? El Halcón had no city nexus.

  Dobbs said, “The uniform comes into PERT. He knows all the codes, knows the case numbers, knows the people, knows the filing system. He asks to see the evidence logs. The gatekeeper lets him see everything. ’Cause he was in uniform and he knew everything about the case.”

  “You said ‘gatekeeper.’ The way you phrased it, using that word. Assigning blame, are we?”

  Dobbs swayed back and forth slowly. Skinny, a live wire of energy. “Occurred to me. Evidence room supervisor lets in a patrol officer whose name isn’t on the official roster and turns over records.” Dobbs added, “Tsk-tsk.”

  The man actually said that? Bishop then asked, “Who was running the room? A special agent?”

  “No. A civilian with Justice.”

  “Oh, good. Heads can roll. And they will. But please. Keep up the narrative.”

  “Anyway, the uniform said it was an allied case.”

  “Allied case, NYPD? Makes no sense. Nassau County maybe. But not New York City. No NYPD jurisdiction on this one, period. What did he say?”

  Dobbs offered, “He didn’t. Just asked for the files. Asked to take copies but the gatekeeper wouldn’t let him. It’s pretty likely, though, the uniform took cell phone shots.”

  “The shit, you’re saying,” Bishop barked.

  “Once he was finished he made a call. And the gate—”

  “Got it, just say ‘civie.’ Fewer syllables.”

  Dobbs seemed pleased to deliver the next bit of information. “The civie, she heard him say, ‘Lincoln, I got everything you wanted. Anything else?’”

  Oh. The civie gatekeeper was a she. Harder to roll a female head, though it could be done.

  Then he focused.

  The assistant continued, “‘Lincoln.’ As in Lincoln Rhyme, I’d think. Rhyme works with NYPD a lot and knows PERT. He helped set it up. The guy wrote the book on forensics and crime scene. He’s in a wheelchair, you know.”

  “Wheelchair,” Bishop mused. “What the hell did he want our evidence for? And unauthorized copying?” He tried to figure this out. He couldn’t make any headway. He waved Dobbs into a chair—he’d been hovering—and called a friend, a dep inspector at NYPD, and asked if he knew anything about it. But he learned that, no, the NYPD wasn’t pursuing a case against El Halcón. They thought the Mexican was a turd, who didn’t? But the only deaths he’d caused in New York City were from overdosing on his product; the shootout was outside the city limits.

  He hung up, staring out the window. Dark-gray smoke still rose. The fire had been bad.

  Mentally he kicked around several theories about Rhyme’s involvement. If, in fact, he had been involved.

  “Rhyme’s off the force, right? The wheelchair thing, you mentioned.”

  “Oh, yeah, Hank. For years. He consults.” Dobbs was really quite a bundle of eager.

  “For NYPD. Us too, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Has he ever done any consulting for a defense team?”

  “I don’t know. He could. Lot of people do.”

  “We’ve got a team on El Halcón’s attorney and the rest of his entourage, right?”

  Dobbs said, “To the extent we can, Hank. There’re a lot of them. A dozen came up from Mexico City.”

  “Find out if any of ’em ever went to Rhyme’s home or office.”

  “Sure.”

  “Now.”

  “Sure.” The assistant made a phone call, had a conversation and a few moments later disconnected. “Well. Try this on, Hank.”

  Oh, please. But he just lifted a querying eyebrow.

  More eager than ever now. “Tony Carreras-López, El Halcón’s main lawyer from Mexico—we’re on him twenty-four/seven. He was at Rhyme’s place, Central Park West, today. Before that, just before that, he stopped at a bank. Chase. He was inside for fifteen minutes. Then to Rhyme’s, then back to his hotel.”

  “Money? Withdrawal? Wire transfer?”

  “Don’t know. No probable cause for a warrant, of course, so we couldn’t get any details.”

  Was Carreras-López hiring Rhyme as a consultant for the defense to look for holes in the case?

  Our case.

  My case.

  Bishop paused and closed his eyes momentarily. He couldn’t imagine what holes there might be. Of course, no crime scene officer was perfect, no lab analyst was perfect. And someone like Rhyme could very well find something that might derail the entire investigation.

  And help that horrific piece of murdering shit, El Halcón, escape justice.

  After a moment or two of thought, Bishop decided he had a way to ma
ke sure that wasn’t going to happen.

  He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  “Yessir?”

  “Come into my office.”

  “Right away.”

  A moment later a clean-cut, gray-suited man of thirty-five stepped into Bishop’s office. He nodded to Bishop and Dobbs.

  “Have a seat.”

  The man did and Bishop continued, “I need you to start a criminal investigation. Immediately. Tonight.”

  “Yessir, of course,” said FBI Special Agent Eric Fallow, withdrawing a notebook from his pocket and uncapping his pen.

  Chapter 43

  Daryl Mulbry from Alternative Intelligence Service was calling back.

  “Hello. Lincoln, this just keeps getting better and better! First, your unsub—what were you calling him?”

  “Unsub Forty-Seven.”

  “First, Mr. Forty-Seven is a brilliant diamond thief, then it seems he’s a psychotic serial killer who dubs himself the Promisor, and now we see he’s actually a mercenary hired to do some nasty deeds in Brooklyn. Though still a psycho, by the looks of it. Never a dull moment.”

  “Daryl?”

  A chuckle. “I know, you want to get down to business. First, here’s what I’ve got about your Russian. Or a Russian. Or some Russian. Probably yours. First, some background. There are known routes that operatives and assets take when they leave certain countries, Russia, for instance, and want to come into the U.S. We call it ‘purging,’ as in they purge their background by flying to three or four different cutout locations. One pattern is pretty common: Moscow to Tbilisi to Dubai to Barcelona to Newark. Four separate tickets, four separate identities. And that’s what we think this Russian did. There was no one individual on all of those flights—the separate tickets, separate names. But we took a peek at flight manifests—shhh, it’ll be our secret—and found there was one constant with all of them.”

  “The luggage,” Rhyme interrupted.

  Sachs was nodding. “He checked the bags separately on each flight but they weighed the same.”

  Mulbry laughed with delight. “See, Lincoln, Amelia, I told you you’re just the material we need at AIS! Exactly. What’re the odds that four different men on four different flights would check luggage weighing exactly twelve point three kilos? Nonexistent. Pictures would prove it, and I’m sure you’d love one of his mug but we can’t get those from Passport Control. That would involve the NSA and, well, getting you data for a domestic case would be so…‘illegal’ is the word that trips into my mind. But we’re convinced it’s your boy.