Jeffery Deaver: The Deliveryman

Her phone hummed and she took a call, stepped aside to speak for a moment. Her face was grim. Rhyme deduced, though he wasn’t certain, that the call was personal. Her mother had been having serious health issues lately — cardiac surgery loomed — and Sachs, both his professional and romantic partner, had been preoccupied with the woman’s condition lately.

She disconnected. He glanced at her and received a noncommittal shake of the head in response. Meaning: Later. Now, the case. Let’s move on.

He said to her, “Rinaldo? The details?”

“He was driving a panel truck, a sixteen footer. Six p.m. he parked outside a bodega on West Three-one, for cigarettes. When he came out there was some altercation. Not sure what, exactly. Argument. Shouting. The witness couldn’t hear the words.”

“Witness.” This didn’t encourage Rhyme much. He believed in the cold science of evidence and deeply distrusted accounts of those present at a crime, whether participants or observers.

“His son. Eight years old. He was in the truck, waiting.”

“So he saw it happen.” Rhyme could reluctantly accept that an eyewitness to the actual incident might make some contributions to investigators — if they remained suitably skeptical.

But Sachs said, “No. The killing happened in the back of an alley beside the store. The boy never got out of the cab of the truck. He says he saw a form — a man, he thinks, in a hat, but no other ID — run from the alley into the street, behind the truck. He flagged a cab. The boy said it was a regular car that pulled over. So, a gypsy.”

“Any leads?”

“Not so far. Some detectives’re canvassing but I don’t hope for much more.”

Gypsy, or unlicensed, taxi companies kept few records and the owners and drivers were reluctant to assist the police, since they operated just below the surface of the law. “But the boy — his name is Javier — thinks he heard the perp tell the driver ‘the Village.’ He didn’t hear anything else. Then the car took off.”

Greenwich Village embraced many blocks and hundreds of acres. Without more to narrow down his destination, the killer might have said “Connecticut.” Or “New England.”

“Funny, though,” Sachs said, “with Rinaldo’s job — deliveryman for the crews? What was the perp’s connection with the Village?”

The colorful and quirky neighborhood was not — had never been — known for gang activity. Although the Village had been settled largely by Italian immigrants, the organized crime families did not live or work there; they were centered in Little Italy — south of the East Village — and in Brooklyn and, to some extent, the Bronx. Today the only “underworld” crew living on Bleecker and Greenwich and West Fourth worked on Wall Street and represented too-big-to-fail-whatever-nonsense-we-get-up-to banks and brokerage houses.

Rhyme glanced at the evidence bags and jars Sachs had collected. The items inside might possibly tell them something about where exactly in the Village they had gone — if in fact he had a professional or personal connection with the place and wasn’t just after a trendy meal or mixologist’s signature cocktail; even murderers read the Wednesday food section of the New York Times .

“Not a hijacking or robbery?”

“No. The padlock on the back of the truck was intact, and the key was still in Rinaldo’s pocket. And his wallet and cash — a few hundred — weren’t touched. If he had anything else with him, why would the perp take that and leave the money?”

“Anything inside the truck?”

“No, empty. And there was no manifest or delivery schedule. Whatever he was supposed to deliver that day got delivered. The bodega clerk — who didn’t see the perp, he claims — says there was another witness, a woman across the street. But I couldn’t find her. Canvassing for her too.”

“Where the hell is Mel Cooper?” Rhyme grumbled. He’d called the evidence technician to come in and assist in the analysis. That had been a half hour ago and though Cooper had said it would take him sixty minutes or so to arrive Rhyme’s impatience was swelling.

Sachs didn’t bother to respond. She pinned her hair up and stuffed it under a surgical bonnet. Then she pulled on latex gloves, goggles and face mask. She ordered the evidence according to, Rhyme instructed, the location where it had been collected at the scene.

My, there was a lot of it.

As she sorted the items she said, “Javier. He was pretty upset.”

“Who?”

“The son, Rinaldo’s son.”

“Sure. Guess he would be.” Rhyme asked absently, “He’s with his mother?”

“No mother.” She may have smiled — he couldn’t tell with the mask — as she added, “I asked him if he had a mother. He said, ‘Everybody’s got a mother.’ Then he said she’d left years ago. I got him to Child and Family Services for tonight. Tomorrow he’ll go into emergency foster care. I said I’d take him.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to. There’s an aunt somewhere he hasn’t seen in years but he remembers her and liked her. CFS is looking. But no hurry. I don’t want him with relatives until we find out more about what dad was up to and who took him out. And the perp himself might think he was more of a witness than he was.”

She stood back, beside Rhyme, and, with hands on her slim hips, regarded the evidence.

“My sense is it was just random. Not a professional hit.”

Rhyme supposed he agreed. But he wasn’t much interested in the line of inquiry that sought to answer why someone was killed. The motive underlying a crime was far less important to him than the physical consequences produced by it. That is, the evidence.

Which he wheeled forward to examine now.

Friday, 9 a.m.

The delivery had been shipped without problem. It had avoided detection by Customs, Immigration, Border Patrol, Coast Guard, FBI, Interstate Commerce Commission weigh stations... even state police, and local speed trap cops.

It had arrived in the borough of Manhattan.

But then...

The glitch.

And a major one it was.

The delivery was missing. The delivery he had spent $487,000 for (currency exchange issues, otherwise the purchase price would have been an even half million).

This cool spring morning Miguel Ángel Morales sat in his brownstone, on East 127th Street. He owned the whole building — and those on either side as well, as much for security as for rental income. Well, more for security; a wealthy man, he was more worried about losing his life, or those of his wife and sons, than his money. Morales ran the 128 Lords, a nondenominational crew numbering about fifty strong in Spanish Harlem. It was a blend of Mexican (the majority), Honduran and Guatemalan, some papered, some not. Whites too. They could be helpful — for instance, if you didn’t want your man stop-and-frisked while out on a job, even though the cops weren’t doing that any more, absolutely not. Civil liberties rule. Hilarious thought.

Anglos were as far as Morales’s open arms extended, however, and Jamaicans, Cubans, Colombians, blacks, Chinese, Vietnamese could apply elsewhere.

The handsome man, compact and strong, sat by the window and looked out over the dark street, sipping coffee (Cubano — he was happy to embrace the food and culture from what he believed to be an overly self-important island, if not the people themselves). The brew, sticky and sweet, tickling the intersection of upper and lower jaw, normally brought him comfort. Now it did nothing.

His buy money was gone. And his deliveryman had not delivered. He waited at the agreed meeting place, no show. He’d called the man’s burner five times — the maximum he allowed — and when there was no answer, he threw his Nokia out and left the restaurant fast. Just because you didn’t buy a phone with a credit card didn’t mean it was untraceable. At forty-five, Morales was not as tech savvy as some in his crew — or even his ten-year-old twins — but he was well aware of pings and cellular towers.