Джеффри Дивер - The Cutting Edge

She speculated: The unsub could have been in or near the building when S arrived or left, and he could have been worried that S had seen his face. He needed Patel to tell him S’s name to find and eliminate him. The same with VL.

She thumbed through other pages of the day planner. Along with notations of hundreds of meetings and apparent assignments over the past month, there were two references to appointments with S in the past ten days. VL appeared regularly, three or four times a week. So VL was possibly an employee or associate; this meant he would know the door code and so might walk into the robbery in progress, surprising the robber, who shot him.

Who are you, both? S? And VL?

And where are you?

Then a thought occurred.

If he was the one who’d walked in on the robbery, gotten shot and fled... how had he escaped?

The unsub had shot him. But then he would have chased after the man immediately. Given five or six seconds to step around the bodies and avoid slipping in the blood, the killer still would have had a good chance at catching up with the fleeing witness.

Sachs studied the hall once more. She’d assumed the killer had entered via the elevator, particularly because he’d spray-painted the camera just outside it. Or perhaps he’d taken the stairs, next to the elevator.

But there was another door on this floor, next to Patel’s office, a fire exit. Sachs had noticed it but had noted too the sign that warned: Fire Exit. Alarm Will Sound When Opened.

Since no one in the building had reported an alarm and the door was closed, she assumed the perp hadn’t used it. And he wouldn’t have thought that VL had escaped that way.

The actual site of the murder, or robbery, is the primary crime scene but there are others, of course. The perp has to get there and then get away and each of the secondary scenes can be a source of delightfully incriminating evidence. In fact, those scenes often yield more helpful clues than the primary scene since the perps might be more cavalier on the way to a job and more careless fleeing afterward.

She walked to the door. Pulling her weapon, Sachs pushed it open. No alarm.

Entering the dim, musty stairwell, Sachs played her flashlight beam upward and then down to the landing below. She paused and listened. There were creaks and grinds, and the wind, this cold ugly March wind, moaned through ancient seams in the building. But she heard no sound of footsteps. Of weapons chambering rounds.

The evidence had not given any indication that the perp had remained behind but there was no evidence suggesting he hadn’t.

Crouching, she swept her Maglite beam once more into the darkness.

She continued slowly down the stairs and there, on the landing between the second and third floors, she found a small scattering of objects.

It was similar to what she’d found inside the doorway of Patel’s office, chips and grains and dust of dark gray stone. She’d thought it might be gravel tracked in by someone, though none of the victims’ shoes revealed similar traces. But apparently not. In addition were shreds of brown paper — the shade of a grocery or lunch bag. And, explaining a lot, there was a bullet. It was deformed and flattened, and on the mushroomed nose were bits of the same gray rock. Several of the shards of stone were bloody, though the slug was not.

A logical scenario presented itself. The unsub breaks in, steals the Grace-Cabot stones, kills the engaged couple, then tortures Patel to get S’s name, thinking he might be a witness. He kills Patel. He’s about to leave when VL enters the office, using the door code. The killer’s surprised and shoots at him. The vic is carrying a bag containing stones to be carved and polished into jewelry. The bullet hits the stone and he’s wounded by some shards. He flees through the fire door, which the killer ignores, thinking he can’t have gone that way because of the alarm bar.

So there are two witnesses whom the perp is presumably aware of: S, whose name and address Patel might have given up under torture. And VL, who might have seen only the ski mask but may know something else the unsub does not want to come to light.

Whoever VL is, he’d be at risk too, of course. One concern might be that a stone splinter had lodged in or near a vital organ. He might be bleeding severely.

That risk might or might not be the case.

The other, though, was certain. Sachs assumed that the unsub had looked at Patel’s diary and knew that not only S but VL was a potential threat.

Of course, the unsub might flee the area with his spectacular diamond windfall.

But Sachs’s few moments of channeling him earlier suggested otherwise. She believed, she knew that he was staying put for the time being; a man who would so casually orchestrate a bloody crime scene like this was absolutely not the sort to leave witnesses alive.

The Port Authority, of all things, brought him comfort.

The sprawling, scuffed complex at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue was, in reality, a massive bus terminal, despite a name that suggested ocean liners from exotic locations were queuing to dock.

The place was a churning tub of harried suburban commuters, of travelers bound for, or journeying from, the region’s airports, of tourists. Here you’d also find energized young hopefuls from all over the world, carrying gym bags and backpacks stuffed with jeans, sweats, plush animals, condoms, sheet music, sketchbooks, good-luck theater programs and plenty of dreams sturdy, and dreams fragile.

Here too, hustlers, dealers, scam artists, chicken hawks — not particularly clever ones. But then you didn’t need to be a keen tactician when the herd you preyed upon was made up of naïve and enthusiastic kids from Wheaton, Illinois, or Grand Rapids. The Port Authority saw fewer of these sly players than in the past but that wasn’t due to a moral surge in looking out for our youth; terrorism had kept the police population on the Deuce high.

Vimal Lahori knew a lot about this — or speculated much upon it — because the Port Authority was a home away from home.

He would slip over here to have some fast food for lunch; it was a short walk from his job at Mr. Patel's, on 47th. To watch the people, their expressions, their gestures and emotions — to find inspiration he would take home with him and, in his workshop, try to render that vision into three dimensions.

He sat on a waiting area bench and enwrapped his throbbing torso with his arms. He squeezed hard. The pain subsided a bit but then returned. Spread, in fact, as if he’d broken a thin sack of acid and the discomfort now flowed to places where it hadn’t been. The worst was in his right side, where, at elbow level, he felt a large lump beneath the skin. As the killer had raised the gun, Vimal had instinctively turned away. Either the bullet or part of it or a fragment of stone had ripped through his clothes and lodged. He’d heard if you went to the emergency room and either told them you’d been shot or they deduced it the medical workers had to call the police.

And that, of course, would not work.

Reaching under his jacket and up under the Keep Weird sweatshirt, he probed with his left hand — the only one that could reach the site. He withdrew his fingers and saw blood. A lot of it.

Vimal closed his eyes momentarily. He was at a complete loss, paralyzed. Mr. Patel dead — the vision of his feet angling toward the dim ceiling of the shop wouldn’t go away. That couple too. William Sloane and his fiancée, Anna. And the man in the mask, walking into the doorway, eyes squinting in surprise to see him. Lifting the gun and the two sounds almost simultaneous: the explosion then the snap of the bullet striking the bag in his hand.