Джеффри Дивер: A Textbook Case

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.

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.