Джеффри Дивер - A Textbook Case

Rhyme was furious with her for not waiting for the Bomb Squad.

“It’s their fucking job,” he muttered, drawing a quizzical glance from his aide, who would, of course, have no idea whom he was fighting with.

He made a mobile call. But Lon Sellitto didn’t pick up.

“Goddamn it!”

Police and fire reports tumbled their way.

Oh, Jesus Christ…

And then, at last, “Rhyme…”

“Sachs! Where are you? What happened?”

“Wait one—”

“I don’t want to wait one anything. What the hell happened?” He nodded at Thom, who hung up his own on-hold call.

“We’re fine. The vic and I got out the back. We just made it to the corridor before it blew.”

She went on to describe what he’d rigged.

“I wanted to collect some of the evidence, Rhyme. Anything. This time there wasn’t any contamination. But I didn’t have the chance.”

“You’re all right?”

“Yeah, dizzy from the fumes, smoke.”

“The vic?”

“Same, dizzy, she’s on oxygen. She breathed ‘em for longer than I did.”

“She see anything?”

Sachs explained that, as in the homicide on Twenty-sixth Street, the perp had hit her from behind and duct-taped her, then rigged the bomb.

“Same thing, Rhyme. It was slow. Like he wanted her to think about the death she was facing. Lon’s interviewing her.”

“Come on back here right away, Sachs. We just handed our unsub his first defeat and he’s probably not very happy about it. And that young guy, Marko? Is he there?”

“He came over from the academy. He and I’re going to walk the grid. Not that there’s much to collect.”

“Well, tell him he did a competent job,” Rhyme said and disconnected.

Though it sounded like damning with faint praise, in fact, coming from Lincoln Rhyme, it was a stellar compliment.

At midnight, Sachs, Sellitto and Cooper were in the parlor.

The opposite of the earlier scene, the site of the attempt on Tenth Street had yielded Evidence Lite; Sachs could carry all of it herself in one milk carton.

Sellitto had interviewed the victim, Simone Randall, at length. Like Jane Levine at the first crime scene, she had no enemies, certainly none who’d do something like this. She worked as an assistant in the entertainment field. She and her boss had just gotten back from a meeting on the West Coast. Simone had no clue why someone would do this to her and hadn’t seen any threats when she’d arrived. She told Sachs about the other people on the street as she’d gotten out of the taxi: two guys making out and a homeless woman. Patrol officers canvassed but didn’t come up with anybody. He also contacted Simone’s boss, who’d dropped her off in front of her apartment, but he hadn’t seen anything either, except the three people that Simone had mentioned.

The victim added that she thought she’d seen somebody watching the building with binoculars off and on for the past month, from the garden in the city park across the street, but he might just have been bird-watching.

“Where our unsub picked up his vegetative evidence and soil,” Rhyme noted.

But Simone had not seen the person clearly.

Sellitto said, “That’s it. Zip. Zilch.”

“Hell,” Rhyme muttered, wheeling back and beaching his chair on a pile of evidence envelopes containing plastic utensils. With the bits of food and drink beginning to decay, the parlor was taking on an unhealthy smell.

He didn’t know when a case had frustrated him so much.

Thom surveyed his boss and said, “I’m going to want you to get some sleep.”

“Fine,” Rhyme snapped, “if you’re ‘going to’ want that, it means you don’t want it yet.”

“Lincoln.” Thom was placid but firm, in his caregiver/mother-hen mode. The criminalist didn’t feel like arguing. Besides, Thom was usually right about Rhyme’s physical state, even if the criminalist didn’t want to admit it. The life expectancy for those with his level of quadriplegia can be less than that of the general population, and Rhyme had Thom to thank for the fact he was still on earth… and relatively healthy.

And he was exhausted.

“Twenty minutes, please.”

“ ‘Please,’ ” Thom said with mock shock. “That didn’t sound sincere.”

It wasn’t.

Though as things turned out, even twenty minutes was too much.

There virtually was no evidence, nothing to analyze, no conclusions to be drawn.

And yet the unsub had been just as clever as at the earlier scene.

The fire meant there was nothing left to trace back to his home, place of work or future attacks. The fire had turned nearly everything to ash and the water from the fire department had blended clues with extraneous materials and produced a useless black sludge. He was sure, too, that the few recognizable remnants — the Frappuccino bottle, the duct tape, the matches — would have come from the trash.

Even an analysis of the accelerant gasoline revealed it was an unbranded generic — and could have been bought in any of five hundred stations in the area.

Ah, fire, Rhyme reflected cynically.

As he’d written in his textbook:

Arson is one of the best ways to destroy trace evidence, friction ridge prints and shoe and boot prints. Investigators have to rely on evidence from entrance and exit routes and chemical analysis of the accelerant and ignition device for clues.

As for the things that might have helped — footprints along the perp’s entrance and exit routes? And tool marks where he’d picked the locks? Of course, he’d worn booties and gloves — and had figured that any telltale clues would be destroyed by the firemen charging into the building, swinging axes and knocking down doors.

Which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Thom said, “Lincoln.”

The grace period was up. It was time for bed.

Maybe something would occur to him in the morning.

But the dawn arrived with no brilliant insights regarding Unsub 26.

And none at midmorning… nor late afternoon.

They were no longer able to enlist the numbers-crunching forces from the police academy, to review the massive amounts of evidence from the scene on Twenty-sixth Street, though the head of the Crime Scene Unit agreed to dedicate some extra technicians. Marko had taken the bulk of the collected materials from Rhyme’s to the labs in Queens.

But the hours rolled by and all the updates included variations on: “There’s just too much evidence.”

Clues had never failed Rhyme so badly as in this case. He’d built his whole professional life on finding the truth because of physical evidence. In fact, he was contemptuous of other forms of investigation. Witnesses lied, motives were fishy, vivid memories were completely wrong.

Locard’s Principle…

At 6:00 p.m. Mel Cooper, Sachs and Rhyme were still laboring away, doing what they could with the several hundred samples that remained here in his parlor but not making any headway.

There’s just too much…

Rhyme reached for one of the hair sample bags. “Let’s keep going with follicles and CODIS.” The consolidated database that contained DNA samples from tens of thousands of perpetrators.

But he set it down and wheeled back from a work table. His expression must have been particularly troubled. Sachs, too, stopped her analysis of a sheet of paper, walked behind him and massaged his shoulders, which were tense as stone.

It felt nice…

But didn’t take away the frustration.

Rhyme gazed at the largely useless evidence, trying desperately to think of a different approach. It was clear that the classic textbook procedure for running a case forensically wasn’t going to work.