Джеффри Дивер: A Textbook Case

At 4:00 p.m. Amelia Sachs walked into Lincoln Rhyme’s townhouse on Central Park West.

Rhyme found himself glaring toward her — partly because of the powerful autumn light streaming in from the open door behind her, partly because of his impatience.

The crime scene search had taken forever, six and a half hours to be precise, the longest for a single scene he could remember.

Sachs had told him that the young officer who’d been first response reported it was the worst scene he’d ever come across. Partly, he meant that the victim had died a horrific, sadistic death. But equally he was referring to the complete contamination of the scene.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sachs had told Rhyme through the microphone. And gazing at the high-def screen, he had to admit that he hadn’t either. Every square inch of the area — from the ramp to the garage floor to the victim’s car and surrounding area — was obliterated, covered with trash. And painted, powdered, coated with liquids, dusted with dirt and powders.

It was actually hard to locate the victim herself for all the mess.

Rhyme now piloted his red Storm Arrow wheelchair to the front door, through which Sachs was carrying a large carton filled with evidence collection bags. She explained that the first responder, a crime scene officer named Marko, and she had sped here in their private vehicles — his an SUV. Rhyme noted that the vehicle was loaded to the gunwales with cartons of evidence. Young man, picking up a massive carton, had a military air about him. He did a double-take when he saw Rhyme. He nodded.

Rhyme ignored him, focusing on the astonishing quantity of evidence. Sachs’s ancient Ford was filled, too. He didn’t see how she’d been able to drive it.

“Christ,” he muttered.

Lincoln Rhyme had a handsome face, hair a bit long for NYPD regulation but that mattered not at all since he was no longer NYPD. His nose was prominent, his lips full, though they grew thin quickly, like irises dilating in light, when he was displeased, which occurred with some frequency, given his impatience and pole-vault high standards for crime scene work. A pink scar was visible at the base of his throat; it resembled a bullet wound but in fact it was from the ventilator tube, which had kept him alive after the accident.

A breath of autumn wind blew through the open door and a comma of black hair tickled his forehead. He clumsily lifted his right hand to brush it away, a gesture that would have been impossible several years ago, when he’d been completely paralyzed below the neck. Those little things — the inability to scratch an itch, the impossibility of feeding oneself, the incessant nag of the condition — were what wore you down, more than the broader consequences of cataclysmic injury. At the moment, his left arm was bandaged to his body; he’d had additional surgery to give that limb the same awkward, but miraculous, skill of the right.

His brown eyes squinting at the curbside, Rhyme lost count of the boxes Marko was unloading. He spun around in his chair and steamed back toward the townhouse’s parlor. “Thom! Thom!”

The man he was shouting for was practically in sotto voce distance, ten feet away, though not quite in sight. “I’m right here, you don’t need to—”

“We have to do something with this,” Rhyme said, as his caregiver appeared. The young man was today wearing what he usually did on the job — dress slacks, tan today, and dark blue shirt and a floral tie.

“Hi, Amelia.”

Sachs was coming through the front door.

“Thom.” He took the box from her and she headed out for another shipment.

Rhyme glanced from the carton to Thom Reston’s face. “Look at that! And look outside. We need to find places to organize it. Everything in the den… it has to go!”

“I’ll clear some space.”

“We can’t clear it. We have to empty it. I want everything gone.”

“All right.” The aide took off the yellow kitchen gloves he was wearing and began sliding furniture out of the room.

The den was what served as the living room for the townhouse; the other room that had been intended for social liaisons in the Victorian era, the parlor, Rhyme had converted to a forensics lab, as extensive as those in many medium-sized towns. Rhyme was by no means wealthy, but he’d received a good settlement when he’d been injured and he charged a lot for his forensic consulting activities. Much of the income went right back into his company and he had bought as many forensic “toys” as he could afford (that’s how Amelia Sachs had referred to them, after seeing his eyes light up when there’d been a new acquisition; to Rhyme they were simply tools).

“Mel!” Rhyme was shouting again.

This time he was speaking to his associate, who was at an evidence examination station in the parlor. NYPD Detective Mel Cooper, blond though balding and nerdish, was Rhyme’s number-one lab man.

Cooper had arrived three hours ago from Queens, where he both worked, at the police department’s crime scene headquarters, and lived. He would handle much of the lab work in what was being called the Unsub 26 homicide case, so named because the killer, an unknown subject, had killed the victim on East Twenty-sixth Street. Cooper had ready sheets of sterile examination paper covering work surfaces, friction ridge equipment to find latent prints, microscopes, scales, the density gradient unit and the dozens of other tools of the trade needed for forensic analysis.

He, too, was staring at the increasing piles of collection bags, boxes and jars that Sachs, Marko and now Thom were carting in and trying to find a place for.

“This is from one scene?”

“Apparently,” Rhyme said.

“And it wasn’t a mass disaster?” This was the quantity of evidence that resulted from plane crashes and bomb blasts.

“One unsub, one vic.”

Cooper glanced around the parlor and into hallway in dismay. “You remember that line in Jaws , Lincoln? They’re after the shark.”

“Shark,” Rhyme said absently.

“The big shark. They get their first glimpse of it — it’s really big — and one of them says, ‘I think we’re going to need a bigger boat.’ That’s us.”

“Boat?”

“ Jaws . The movie.”

“I never saw it,” Rhyme muttered.

The murder weapon was about the only easy part of the analysis: It was the victim’s car.

The killer had snuck up behind and hit her, probably with a piece of rock or cinderblock, hard enough to stun, but not kill, her. He’d then taped her eyes, mouth, feet and arms and dragged her behind the car. Then Unsub 26 had started the Prius and backed it onto her abdomen, leaving it there. The Toyota is front heavy, with the rear weight about 530 kilos, Rhyme had learned. Only one wheel was resting on the victim, which would have cut down some of the pressure, but the medical examiner said the internal damage was devastating. Still, it took her close to an hour to die — mostly from shock and bleeding.

But apart from the COD determination Rhyme and his team had made no other evidentiary discoveries. In fact, all they’d been able to do was catalog the evidence, everyone chipping in: Sachs, Cooper and Marko. Even Thom was helping.

Lon Sellitto arrived.

Oh, Lord no…

Rhyme had to laugh, though bitterly, seeing that the big detective was carrying yet another massive box of evidence collection bags.

“Not more?” asked a dismayed Mel Cooper; usually he was the epitome of detached calm.

“They found another exit route.” The big detective handed off the box to Marko. “But this should be the end of it.” Then he frowned as he looked around at the hundreds of collection and sample bags lining the walls throughout the first floor of the townhouse. “I don’t have any idea what the fuck’s going on here.”