A Textbook Case

by Jeffery Deaver

  "Linc--"

  Rhyme lifted his right arm and waved Sellitto silent as he continued to stare.

  Finally the criminalist said excitedly, "Think about this. This person knows evidence. And that means he knows there's a good chance he's got some trace or other clue on him that could lead us to his identity or to the next victim he's got in mind."

  "Right," Lon Sellitto said. "And?"

  Rhyme was peering at the charts. "So what did he use the most of to contaminate the scene?"

  Sachs said, "Trash--"

  "No, that was a general smokescreen. It just happened to be there. Something specific, I'm looking for."

  Cooper shoved his Harry Potter glasses higher on his nose as he read the charts. He offered, "Fibers, hair, general trace--"

  "Yes, but those are givens at every crime scene. I want to know what's special?"

  "What's the most unique, you mean?" Sellitto offered.

  "No, I don't mean that, Lon," Rhyme said sourly. "Because something is either unique or not. You don't have varying degrees of one-ness."

  "Haven't had a grammar lesson from you lately, Lincoln. I was wondering if you'd quit the schoolmarm union."

  Drawing a smile from Thom, who was delivering coffee and pastries.

  Sachs was studying the chart. She said, "Dirt and... vegetation."

  Rhyme squinted. "Yes, good. That could be it. He knew he picked up some trace either where the perp lives or works, or where he's been scoping out another victim, and he had to cover that up."

  "Which means," Sachs said, "a garden, park or yard?"

  "I'd say, yes. Soil and the greenery. That could hold the clue. It cuts the search down a bit.... We should start there. Then anything else?" Rhyme reviewed the chart again. "The detergent and cleansers--why'd he sprinkle or pour so many of those in the scene? We need to start working our way through those, too." Rhyme looked around. "That kid, Marko? Why isn't he here?"

  Sachs said, "He called. He had something he had to do back in Queens, HQ. But he'd still like to help us out if we need him. You want me to call him?"

  "I do, Sachs. Fast!"

  # # #

  An exhausting time.

  A business trip with her boss to California and back in under twenty-four hours.

  Productive, necessary, but stressful.

  They were now cabbing it into the city from JFK, where their flight had landed at 6:00 p.m. She was exhausted, a bit tipsy from the two glasses of wine and mildly resenting the three hours that you lost flying east.

  Her boss, late forties, tanned and trim, now slipped his iPhone away--he'd been making a date for tomorrow--and then turned to her with a laugh. "Did you hear them? They really used the word 'unpack.' "

  As in "unpack it for us," meaning presumably explain to the network the story they'd come to pitch.

  "Since when did 'explain' fall off the A-list of words?"

  Simone smiled. "And the net executive? She said the concept was definitely 'seismic.' You know, you need a translator app in Hollywood."

  Her boss laughed and Simone eyed him obliquely. A great guy. Funny, smart, in great shape thanks to a health club regimen that bordered on the religious. He was also extremely talented, which meant extremely successful.

  Oh, and single, too.

  He sure was a big helping of temptation, you bet, but Simone, despite being in her mid-thirties and sans boyfriend at the moment, had successfully corralled the baby and the lonely hormones; she could look at her boss objectively. The man's obsessive craving for detail and perfection, his intensity would drive her crazy if they were partners. Work was everything. He lived his life as if he were planning out a production. That was it: life as storyboard, preproduction, production and post. This was undoubtedly a reason his marriage hadn't worked out and why he tended to go out with somebody for only a month or two at the most.

  Good luck, James, she thought. I wish you the best.

  Not that he'd ever actually asked you out, Simone reflected wryly.

  The cab now approached her neighborhood--Greenwich Village. For Simone, there was no other place to live in New York City. It was, truly, a village. A neighborhood.

  The cab dropped her at Tenth Street. "Hm," her boss said, looking out the window at two men, constructed like bodybuilders, kissing passionately as they stood on the steps of the building next to hers.

  He said, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." The famous line from Seinfeld.

  Simone smiled, then looked at the main kisser. What a waste.

  Then she said good night to her boss and stepped out of the cab, grabbed her suitcase from the trunk. She paused to let a stocky homeless woman wheel her packed grocery cart past--filled with everything but groceries, of course. Simone thought about giving her some change. But then she reflected, why do I think the woman's homeless? Maybe she's an eccentric millionaire.

  She climbed the stairs to her apartment, smelling that odd aroma of the building, which defied description, as did many of the buildings here. What on earth was it?

  Eau de Old New York Apartment.

  Insecticide, takeout Chinese, takeout curry, ancient wood, Lysol, damp brick, cooked onions.

  Her cat more or less forgave her, though he didn't have much to complain about. The kibble dish, tended to by her neighbor, was filled with manna from heaven. The water, too, was full and the radio was playing NPR, which was Ruffles's favorite. He seemed to enjoy the pledge drives as much as This American Life.

  Simone checked messages--nothing urgent there, though she noted no caller-ID-blocked numbers. She'd had a lot of those recently. Telemarketers, of course.

  She then unpacked and assembled a laundry pile. Simone had never returned from a trip without doing her laundry the night she was back.

  Clothes cooties, she called it.

  Thanks, Mom.

  Simone pulled her sweats on, gathered up the clothes and a cheerful orange bottle of Tide. She took the back stairway, which led to the basement laundry and storage rooms. Simone descended from the second floor to the first and then started down the steps that would take her to the basement. This stairwell was dark, though there was some illumination from downstairs, the laundry room presumably, or maybe the storeroom. She flicked the switch several times. Then squinted and noted that the bulb was missing and not just--it had fallen to the stairs and shattered.

  It was at this point that Simone started feeling uneasy.

  But she continued, walking carefully to avoid as much of the broken glass as she could in her Crocs. On the basement level, another bulb was broken, too.

  Creeping me out.

  Okay, that's it. Hell with OCD issues. I'll do the laundry tomorrow.

  Then squinted and saw, with some relief, that she'd have to wait anyway. There was a sign on the laundry room door. Out of Order. The sign was battered and torn. She'd never seen it before; when the washer or dryer weren't working, Henry had always just hand-written a sign, informing the tenants when they could expect the machines to be up and running again.

  She turned and, eager to get the hell back to Ruffles and her apartment, took one step toward the stairs.

  She felt two things in serial. First, a faint chill as the door leading to the storeroom and, eventually, to the alley, opened.

  And then a searing explosion of pain as the rock, the bottle, the weight of the world slammed into the back of her head.

  4

  Amelia Sachs skidded her maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, to a stop at the curb in this idyllic section of Greenwich Village.

  There were six blue-and-whites, mostly from the nearby Sixth Precinct, and about fifteen uniforms canvassing house to house.

  In the long-odds search for Unsub 26's next victim.

  She leaped out, wincing slightly at the arthritic pang. "Hi, how're we doing?" she asked one of the detectives she knew, a tall African-American named Ronald Simpson, just ending a radio transmission.

  "Amelia. We're deploying. We make
it forty-eight locations in the perimeter that you and Detective Rhyme gave us. If we don't find anything, we'll expand it."

  "Sachs!" Rhyme's voice burst through her headset. No video camera--just a standard-issue Motorola with an earpiece and stalk mike. It was voice activated. Sachs needed both hands free to drive; she'd hit close to eighty on the way down here from Rhyme's townhouse. The Torino boasted 405 bhp and with an impressive 447 foot pounds of torque. And Amelia Sachs made use of every bit of those specs.

  "I'm here, Rhyme. With Ron Simpson from the Sixth." She relayed the information the man had given her.

  "Forty-eight? Hell."

  They'd hoped the two-block area would include a lot fewer apartment buildings to search than that.

  But at least it was something. And it could be a lot worse. In looking for a way to narrow down the hunt for Unsub 26 or his next victim, Rhyme had come up with an interesting strategy.

  Theorizing that the soil/vegetation and cleaning materials evidence held valuable leads, the question became how to analyze them quickly, given the sheer number of samples?

  Hence, the call to Marko.

  Who had connections in the forensic science department at the police academy. Rhyme had asked the young man to get his professors' okay to enlist the rookies to help, with Marko supervising. Although there were hundreds of samples, because so many students were helping, each one had no more than five or ten. They were to look for the smallest samples, on the assumption that the largest quantities were materials that the unsub had intentionally flooded the scene with.

  For hours there'd been no discoveries. But an hour ago Marko had called the townhouse.

  "Detective Rhyme, sir?"

  Rhyme didn't bother to correct him on the appellation. "Go on."

  "We might've found something. We did what you said and prioritized everything according to quantity, then concentrated on the smallest trace. The least common was some vegetation that contained traces of urushiol."

  "The toxin in poison ivy or sumac," Rhyme had blurted.

  Sachs had wondered, as she often did, How does he know that?

  "Yessir. And it's in poison oak, too."

  "No, forget that. You don't see it much in Manhattan. We'll stick with ivy and sumac."

  Marko had added that that vegetation was attached to bits of flower petals. They'd absorbed small amounts of glyphosate--"

  "An herbicide used to kill poison ivy and sumac."

  "Yessir," Marko said again. "So the perp might've spent time in a flower garden that was recently treated for the toxic plants."

  He added another discovery: "They also found trace fragments of bovine bone dust in the soil attached to the vegetation."

  "West Village," Rhyme had pronounced. "Runoff, rains, rats... they carry all sorts of goodies from the meat-packing district, including beef bone dust."

  He'd had Sellitto start a hunt in city parks in the western part of Greenwich Village, any that had flower gardens. "But only the ones that'd been recently treated for poisonous plants."

  And the results of that search led here, to where Sachs was now standing, on West Tenth Street. The small park, about three blocks from the meat-packing district, was surrounded by three-, four-and five-story townhouses and brownstones, nearly all of them apartments.

  Rhyme had explained their find to Sellitto, who'd ordered the sweep in the area, telling the patrol officers to pay attention to laundry rooms, kitchens and storerooms, since the other category of evidence in play was domestic cleaning supplies.

  "Long shot," the detective had muttered.

  "It's the only shot we've got."

  It was now 10:30 p.m. and the officers had been canvassing for half an hour.

  Many citizens were reluctant to open their doors, even for police, or someone claiming to be police. Language was always a barrier and, even once they were admitted, the officers often had to try to survey individual units, since some buildings did not have communal laundry rooms.

  Sachs watched a team storm into a brownstone. She stared; was this the site?

  They came out a few minutes later, shaking their heads.

  "Anything?" Rhyme asked her urgently.

  "No."

  Sachs's fingers disappeared into her mass of hair and dug obsessively into her scalp. Stop it, she told herself.

  Deal with the tension.

  She dug some more.

  The lead would only be helpful if it led to another crime in progress. If the trace led to Unsub 26's apartment and the police knocked on the door, he might open it, smile and say, "No sir, I never heard of a Jane Levine. You have a nice night now."

  Sachs looked past the flashing lights and saw Marko, in jeans and a dress shirt, running shows. He caught her eye, gave a brief nod of recognition and then turned back to the scene, as if studying it intently for future reference. He was holding a scene suit bag. Let's hope he gets a chance to use it, she thought.

  Then her radio crackled, a woman's voice. "Portable seven-six-six-three. I've got something."

  "Go ahead," Sachs said, identifying herself as a detective.

  The patrol officer explained she was at an address a block away, on West Tenth. "We've got an incendiary IED and victim nearby, immobilized. We need the Bomb Squad."

  "I'm on my way," Sachs told her and began to run. Then into her mouthpiece radio: "Got a hit, Rhyme," she told him and, struggling to ignore the pain in her knees, sprinted faster. Marko was following, as were several other officers.

  "Tell me," Rhyme said.

  "I'll know soon," she gasped, her feet thudding on the concrete.

  She was at the building in two minutes. Sellitto joined her. They met the patrol officer who'd called it in, a round Latina, on the stairs in front. The woman was visibly shaken.

  "Vic down in the laundry room. There's gas fumes all over the place. I was going for her, but I was afraid I'd set off the device."

  "What kind of gas?" Rhyme asked, having heard her through Sachs's microphone.

  She repeated the question for the patrolwoman.

  "Gasoline. He--"

  "I'm going in," Sachs said.

  "Sachs, wait--"

  "It could blow at any minute," the patrolwoman said. "I'd wait for the Bomb Squad."

  Sellitto said, "I've called them. They'll be here in five minutes." The squad was based in the Sixth Precinct.

  But five minutes was too long. Sachs said, "I'm taking off the headset, Rhyme. I don't know if it could spark or not, but I'm not taking the chance."

  "Sachs, wait--"

  "I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

  "Amelia," Sellitto began.

  She ignored him, too. She was debating the Tyvek suit. At the moment she had to assume the vic was still alive and could be burned to death at any minute. Forget the suit. There was no time to wait. She said to Sellitto, "If anything happens." She glanced toward Marko, who was running toward the brownstone. "Have him run the scene. He's good."

  "Amelia," Sellitto barked. "Let the Bomb Squad handle it."

  "Can't, Lon. We're out of time."

  Sachs looked down at her clothes. A wool jacket. Did that create more static sparks than any other cloth? Or less? She didn't know but took it off anyway. "Where's the vic?" she asked the Latina officer.

  "In the back there's a stairway. The laundry room's in the basement off the hallway to the right. But--"

  Sachs sprinted into the building, calling, "Everybody back fifty feet."

  Then she was in the dim recesses of the old building and starting down the stairs, which, unlike those at the other scene, were relatively clean, though the bulbs in the stairwell overheads were broken as well.

  Her hand on her Glock, she surveyed the narrow corridor, off which were two doors: one, the laundry room where the victim was, and the other straight ahead, leading to a storeroom or the alley behind the building, Sachs guessed.

  Normally she would have cleared the entire basement first, but the smell of gasoline was overwhe
lming--and the risk of fire imminent. She had to move fast.

  Into the laundry room quickly, swinging her weapon back and forth. In the back, ducttaped to a water pipe, was a woman in her thirties, wearing sweats, the shoulders of which were covered with blood, from some wound to her head. Strands of her dark blond hair were clotted crimson. Her face was red from crying and her eyes wide with terror.

  Unsub 26 had planned another prolonged killing. In this case, terror first and then pain... of dying from being burned to death.

  On a high shelf against the wall, over her, was a plastic pail. A hole had been cut in the side and gasoline trickled out, running down the wall and pooling on the floor. The puddle was making its way to the door. And was just about to reach the hot water heater. Sachs noted it was a gas model, which meant that it had a pilot light. Any minute the gas would flow beneath it and the fumes would ignite. The resulting fireball would ignite everything and melt the plastic pail; the five or so gallons of inflamed gasoline would flow throughout the room.

  She eased forward slowly. Shuffle or not? Would that create a static spark? She couldn't worry about it. She hurried to the water heater. Surveying the system, she reached up carefully and slowly. The taped woman shook her head and gave an unearthly scream. But Sachs ignored her and pulled the gas cutoff lever down.

  There was a hiss and a quiet plop.

  The pilot was out.

  Sachs thought about removing the bucket of gas, but it was big and heavy. Moving it would surely spill some of the liquid, which might slosh onto a part of the water heater that was hot enough to ignite it.

  The immediate threat was gone.

  Still, though, the victim's head was shaking madly. Her eyes were wide and from her throat came high-pitched sounds, half screams, half words.

  With her switchblade Sachs carefully cut the tape binding the woman to the pipe. She turned her around to look at the nasty wound on her head, looking around for something to stop the bleeding.

  Another keening sound of desperation from the victim's throat. Her head waved more frantically yet.

  Ah, maybe she was suffocating.

  Sachs carefully eased the duct tape off her mouth and set it aside to be collected later for evidence. The victim sucked in air desperately, starting off a jag of coughing. Finally she managed, "We have to leave! Fire!"

  "It's okay, the pilot light--"

  "Not that. There!" she pointed.

  The pendulum of Sachs's gaze swung to the left.