More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II

by Jeffery Deaver

  He’d returned back home, desperately trying to figure out how to return for the damning evidence. While Sandra slept, he’d stayed transfixed to the TV all night, watching the coverage about Tunnel Girl, praying that they wouldn’t get into the tunnel before he had a chance, somehow, to beat them to it. Praying too that she wouldn’t die — his only hope to get to the workroom was to pretend he was trying to rescue her himself.

  Then, after a tortured, sleepless night, the police arrived at his doorstep (his alarm at seeing Detective Perillo had nothing to do with the possibility of a fire-damaged office, of course).

  Despite this scare, though, it worked out for the best that they’d asked for his help; it was through Knoblock and the city engineers that he learned that there might be another way to get back into the tunnel and collect what he’d left behind last night. After working his way through the drain and knocking Langley out, he’d managed to get all his gear, obliterate his foot- and fingerprints and slip out of the tunnel without Tonya’s hearing him. On the way back down the sluice he’d disposed of the weapons, ropes and camera by pitching them down fissures in the drain and filling in the spaces with dirt and mud. (He did, of course, keep the videotape of the student he’d last killed; it was one of his better ones.)

  Oh, he was a bit sorry he couldn’t be the one to rescue the girl and collect the reward. But, if he had, the press might’ve looked into his life and learned a few interesting things — for instance, the fact that he’d always chosen to live or work near colleges from which coeds had disappeared over the years.

  Besides, he’d been honest with Sandra regarding one other thing: That he had values other than making money. The reward meant little. There was indeed, as she’d observed, another side to him, a more important side.

  I need to follow my creative spirit. I have to be true to myself.…

  Of course, that creative spirit didn’t involve graphic design; it centered around ropes and knives and beautiful college girls.

  “I’ve got to say,” Sandra said, “I’m still not convinced that everything was the way it seemed to be.”

  Ron eyed his wife cautiously. “No?” He hoped she wasn’t on to him; he loved her, and he’d prefer not to kill her.

  “It was just odd, Langley calling right after the accident. You know, I actually wondered if maybe he was behind the whole thing.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah, maybe he travels around and booby-traps buildings and oil rigs, then after somebody’s trapped he calls and gets a reward or a fee to rescue the victims.” She gave a soft giggle. “And you know what else I thought?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That maybe Tonya and Langley were in on it together.”

  “Together?” Seeing that his wife’s suspicions were headed in a harmless direction, he could laugh.

  “I mean, she and her father were having problems — he wouldn’t pay to fix her car, remember? She might’ve wanted to get even with him. Oh, and did you see that she was a hiking guide on the Appalachian Trail? Maybe she met Langley when he was rescuing somebody at the park. I mean, she wasn’t very badly hurt. Maybe they staged the whole thing together, Tonya and Langley, to split the reward.”

  Ron supposed this might make sense to an outside observer. Of course, now that he thought about it, that same observer might also speculate that Sandra herself could’ve been in collusion with Langley, whom she might’ve met through her work for an oil company and, as an engineer, rigged a trap for the girl after she’d noticed the building during Ron’s move.

  Interesting takes on the incident, thought an amused Ron Badgett, who was, of course, the only one in the world who knew exactly what had happened to the girl.

  “Could be,” he said. “But I guess that’s between Gilbert and Langley now.”

  Ron steered the car into the driveway and, leaving the engine running, climbed out and opened the door for his wife. “I’m going to head back to the office, see how they’re coming with the basement wall.” The city was paying to have the hole in his cellar repaired.

  Sandra kissed him good-bye and said she’d have dinner ready when he got back home.

  Ron climbed back into the driver’s seat and drove eagerly to NeDo. In truth, he couldn’t care less about the basement wall. The last daytime classes at City College were over in twenty minutes and he wanted to be at his desk by then, in front of his window, so he could watch the coeds leaving the school on their way home.

  Tunnel Girl had been saved; Ron Badgett needed someone new.

  LOCARD’S PRINCIPLE

  “It’s politically sensitive.”

  “Politics.” Lincoln Rhyme offered a distracted grunt to the heavyset, disheveled man who was leaning against a dresser in the bedroom of the criminalist’s Upper West Side town house.

  “No, it’s important.”

  “And sensitive,” Rhyme echoed. He wasn’t pleased with visitors in general; was much less pleased with visitors at eight-thirty in the morning.

  Detective Lon Sellitto pushed away from the dresser and took the coffee Rhyme’s aide, Thom, offered. He sipped.

  “That’s not bad.”

  “Thanks,” Thom said.

  “No,” Sellitto corrected. “I mean his hand. Look.”

  A quadriplegic, injured while running a crime scene some years ago, Rhyme had been undergoing therapy and had regained some slight movement in his right hand. He was immensely proud of the accomplishment but it was against his nature to gloat — about personal achievements, at least; he ignored Sellitto and continued squeezing a soft rubber ball. Yes, some movement in his hand had indeed returned but the feelings were haywire. He felt textures and temperatures that didn’t match the properties of the sponge rubber.

  Another grunt. He flicked the ball away with his index finger. “I’m not really crazy about drop-ins, Lon.”

  “We got a crunch, Linc.”

  A politically sensitive one. Rhyme continued, “Amelia and I’ve got a few other cases going on at the moment, you know.” He sipped the strong coffee through a straw. The tumbler was mounted on the headboard to his right. To his left was a microphone, connected to a voice recognition system that in turn was hooked into an environmental control unit, the central nervous system of his bedroom.

  “Like I said, a crunch.”

  “Hmm.” More coffee.

  Rhyme carefully examined Sellitto — the Major Cases detective with whom he used to work frequently when Rhyme had run NYPD’s crime scene unit. He seemed tired. Rhyme reflected that however early Rhyme had wakened, Sellitto had probably been up several hours before, responding to the 10–29 homicide call.

  Sellitto explained that the entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronald Larkin, fifty-five, had just been shot to death in the bedroom of his Upper East Side town house. The first responders found a dead body, a wounded and sobbing wife, very little evidence and no witnesses whatsoever.

  Both the feds and the NYPD upper echelons wanted Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, to work the scene, with Sellitto as lead detective. Rhyme was often the choice for big cases because, despite his reclusive nature, he was well known to the public and his presence suggested the mayor and brass were serious about a collar.

  “You know Larkin?”

  “Refresh my memory.” Unless facts had to do with his job — consulting forensic scientist, or “criminalist” — Rhyme didn’t pay much attention to trivia.

  “Ronald Larkin, come on, Linc. Everybody knows him.”

  “Lon, the sooner you tell me, the sooner I’ll be able to say no.”

  “He’s been in that kind of mood,” Thom told Sellitto.

  “Yeah, for the last twenty years.”

  “Onward and upward,” Rhyme said with cheerful impatience, sipping more coffee through the straw.

  “Ronald Larkin hit it big in energy. Pipelines, electricity, water, geothermal.”

  “He was a good guy,” Thom interjected, feeding Rhyme a breakfast of eggs and a bagel. “
Environmentally conscious.”

  “Happy day,” Rhyme said sourly.

  Sellitto helped himself to a second bagel and continued, “He’d retired last year, turns the company over to somebody else and starts a foundation with his brother. Doing good things in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He lives in LA but he and his wife have a place here. They flew into town last night. Early this morning they’re in bed and somebody fires through the window, takes him out.”

  “Robbery?”

  “Nope.”

  Really? Rhyme grew more intrigued. He turned quickly away from the incoming bagel, like a baby avoiding a spoon of mashed carrots.

  “Lincoln,” Thom said.

  “I’ll eat later. The wife?”

  “She got hit but rolled onto the floor, grabbed the phone, called nine-one-one. The shooter didn’t wait around to finish the job.”

  “What’d she see?”

  “Not much, I don’t think. She’s in the hospital. Haven’t had a chance to talk to her more than a few words. She’s hysterical. They only got married a month ago.”

  “Ah, a recent wife…. Even if she was wounded, that doesn’t mean she didn’t hire somebody to kill hubby and hurt her a little in the process.”

  “You know, Linc, I’ve done this before…. I checked already. There’s no motive. She’s got money of her own from Daddy. And she signed a prenup. In the event of his death all she gets is a hundred thousand and can keep the engagement ring. Not worth the needle, you know.”

  “That’s the deal he cut with his wife? No wonder he’s rich. You mentioned politically sensitive?”

  “Here’s one of the richest men in the country, way involved in the Third World, and he gets offed in our backyard. The mayor’s not happy. The brass isn’t happy.”

  “Which means you must be one sad puppy.”

  “They want you and Amelia, Linc. Come on, it’s an interesting case. You like challenges.”

  After the accident at the subway crime scene that left him disabled, Rhyme’s life became very different from his life before. Back then he would prowl through the playground that is New York City, observing people and where they lived and what they did, collecting samples of soil, building materials, plants, insects, trash, rocks… anything that might help him run a case. His inability to do this now was terribly frustrating. And, always independent, he detested relying on anyone else.

  But Lincoln Rhyme had always lived a cerebral life. Before the accident, boredom had been his worst enemy. Now, it was the same. And Sellitto — intentionally, of course — had just teased him with two words that often got his attention.

  Interesting… challenge…

  “So, what do you say, Linc?”

  Another pause. He glanced at the half-eaten bagel. He’d lost his appetite altogether. “Let’s get downstairs. See if we can find out a little more about Mr. Larkin’s demise.”

  “Good,” said Thom, sounding relieved. He was the one who often took the brunt of Rhyme’s bad moods when he was involved in uninteresting, unchallenging cases, as had been the situation lately.

  The handsome blond aide, far stronger than his slim physique suggested, dressed Rhyme in sweats and executed a sitting transfer to move him from the elaborate motorized bed into an elaborate motorized wheelchair, a sporty red Storm Arrow. Using the one working finger of his left hand, the ring finger, Rhyme maneuvered the chair into the tiny elevator that took him down to the first floor of the Central Park West town house.

  Once there, he steered into the parlor, which bore no resemblance to the Victorian sitting room it had once been. The place was now a forensic lab that would rival those in a medium-size town anywhere in America. Computers, microscopes, chemicals, petri dishes, beakers, pipettes, shelves containing books and supplies. Not a square inch was unoccupied, except for the examination tables. Wires like sleeping snakes lay everywhere.

  Sellitto clomped down the stairs, finishing the bagel — either his or Rhyme’s.

  “I better track down Amelia,” Rhyme said. “Let her know we’ve got a scene to run.”

  “Oh, kinda forgot to mention,” Sellitto said as he chewed. “I called her already. She’s probably at the scene by now.”

  * * *

  Amelia Sachs never got over the somber curtain that surrounded the site of a homicide.

  She believed this was good, though. To feel the sorrow and the outrage at intentional death pushed her to do the job that much better.

  Standing in front of the three-story town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the tall, redheaded detective was aware of this pall now, and perhaps felt it a bit more than she normally would have, knowing that Ron Larkin’s death could affect many, many needy people around the world. What would happen to the foundation now that he was gone?

  “Sachs? Where are we?” Rhyme’s impatient voice cut through her headset. She turned the volume down.

  “Just got here,” she replied, worrying her fingernail. She tended to hurt herself in small, compulsive ways — particularly when she was about to search a scene where a tragedy like this had occurred. She felt the pressure of getting it right. To make sure the killer was identified and collared.

  She was in working clothes: not the dark suits she favored as a detective, but the white hooded overalls worn by crime scene searchers, to make certain that they didn’t contaminate the scene with their own hair, sloughed-off epidermal cells and any of the thousands of bits of trace evidence we constantly carry around with us.

  “I don’t see anything, Sachs. What’s the problem?”

  “There. How’s that?” She clicked a switch on her headset.

  “Ah, perfect. Hmm. Did that used to be a geranium?”

  Sachs was looking at a planter containing a shriveled plant beside the front door. “You’re talking to the wrong girl, Rhyme. I buy ’em, I plant ’em, I kill ’em.”

  “I’m told they need water occasionally.”

  Rhyme was in his town house about a mile and a half away, across Central Park, at the moment but was seeing exactly what Sachs saw, thanks to a high-definition video feed, running from a tiny camera mounted on her headset to the CSU’s rapid response vehicle. From there it continued its wireless journey onward, ending up on a flat-screen monitor two feet in front of the criminalist. They’d worked together for years, with Rhyme generally in his lab or bedroom and Sachs working the crime scenes herself, reporting to him via radio. They’d tried video in the past but the resulting image wasn’t clear enough to be helpful; Rhyme had bullied the NYPD into paying some big bucks for an HD system.

  They’d tested it before but this was the first time it would be used on a case.

  Carrying the basic crime scene equipment, Sachs started forward. She glanced down at the doormat, which contained a lightning bolt above the letters LES, for Larkin Energy Services.

  “His logo?”

  “I’d guess,” she replied. “You read the article about him, Rhyme?”

  “Missed it.”

  “He was one of the most popular bosses in the country.”

  Rhyme grunted. “All it takes is one disgruntled employee. I always wondered about that word. Is a happy employee ‘gruntled’? Where’s the scene?”

  She continued into the town house.

  A uniformed officer stood downstairs. He looked up and nodded.

  “Where’s his wife?” Sachs asked. She wanted to get the chronology of events.

  But the woman, the officer explained, was still at the hospital being treated for a wound. She was expected to be released soon. Two detectives from Major Cases were with her.

  “I’ll want to talk to her, Rhyme.”

  “We’ll have Lon get her over here after she’s released. Where’s the bedroom. I can’t see it.” His tone suggested he was struggling not to be impatient.

  Sachs sometimes thought that his gruffness was a means to shelter himself from the emotional dangers of police work. Sometimes she believed that it was simply his nature to be gruff.
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br />   “Bedroom?”

  “Upstairs, Detective.” The patrolman nodded.

  She went up two flights of steep, narrow steps.

  The site of the murder was a large bedroom decorated in French provincial style. The furniture and art were undoubtedly expensive but Sachs found that there were so many flourishes and scrolls and draped cloth — in gaudy yellows and greens and golds — that the room set her on edge. A designer’s room, not a homeowner’s room.

  Near the far window was the bed, ironically underneath an old painting of shot birds on a kitchen table. The bedclothes were on the floor, flung there by the medical crews attending to Ronald Larkin, she supposed. The sheet and pillows revealed a large brown bloodstain.

  Sachs stepped closer and wondered if there’d been—

  “Any slug penetration?” Rhyme asked.

  She smiled. Those words were going to be the next in her thoughts. She’d forgotten he was seeing exactly what she was.

  “Doesn’t seem to be.” She could find no bullet holes on Larkin’s side of the bed. “We’ll have to check with the medical examiner.”

  “Tells me he might’ve used fragmenting bullets.”

  Professional killers sometimes bought or made rounds that broke apart when they hit flesh — to cause more damage and be more likely to inflict fatal wounds. Fired from this close — about six feet away — you would have expected a normal slug to continue through the skull and exit.

  “What’s that?” Rhyme asked. “To your left.”

  “There we go.” She was looking at a bullet hole in the side of a gilded bedside table, bits of fiber protruded. Sachs picked up the pillow. The slugs had pierced it and continued on. She found another hole in the wall. And on the floor a smaller bloodstain, from the wife’s wound, she supposed. There were bits of dull lead on the floor. “Yep. Frags.”

  She shook her head.

  “What’re you doing, Sachs? You’re making me dizzy.”