Jeffery Deaver: The Steel Kiss

She did this now: deftly dropped the magazine and ejected the chambered round, then collected it from the floor. She offered the weapon to him. He wrote down the serial. Handed the pistol back.

She added, “I’ll do the Firearms Discharge/Assault Report.”

“No hurry, Detective. It takes a while to convene the board, and it looks like you’ve got some other tasks on your plate.” Madino was looking down into the pit once more. “God bless you, Detective. Not a lot of people would’ve gone down there.”

Sachs rechambered the ejected round. Officers from the 84 had cordoned off both of these escalators, so she turned and hurried toward the elevators on her way to the basement, where she’d help search for Unsub 40. But she paused when Buddy Everett approached.

“He’s gone, Amelia. Out of the building.” His dark-red frames both enhanced and jarred.

“How?”

“Loading dock.”

“We had people there, I thought. Rent-a-cops if not ours.”

“He called, the unsub, he shouted from around the corner near the dock, said the perp was in a storage area. Bring their cuffs, Mace or whatever. You know rentals? They love a chance to play real cop. Everybody went running to the storeroom. He strolled right out. Video shows him — new jacket, dark sport coat, fedora — climbing down the dock ladder and running through the truck parking zone.”

“Going where?”

“Narrow-focus camera. No idea.”

She shrugged. “Subways? Buses?”

“Nothing on CCTV. Probably walked or took a cab.”

To one of the eighty-five million places he might go.

“Dark jacket, you said? Sport coat?”

“We canvassed the shops. But nobody saw anybody with his build buy anything. Don’t have his face.”

“Think we can get prints from the ladder? At the dock?”

“Oh, the vid shows he put gloves on before he climbed down.”

Smart. This boy is smart.

“One thing. He was carrying his cup and what seemed like some food wrappers. We looked but he didn’t drop ’em that we could find.”

Starbucks maybe. “I’ll get an ECT on it.”

“Hey, how’d it go with Captain White Tie? Oh, did I say that?”

She smiled. “If you said it I didn’t hear it.”

“He’s already planning how to redecorate his office in the governor’s mansion.”

Explained the posh outfit. Brass with aspirations. Good to have on your side.

God bless you...

“Fine. Looks like he’s backing me up on the weapons issue.”

“He’s a decent guy. Just promise you’ll vote for him.”

“Keep up the canvass,” Sachs told him.

“Will do.”

Sachs was approached by an inspector with the fire department and gave a statement on the escalator accident. Twenty minutes later the Evidence Collection Team assigned to the Unsub 40 case arrived from the NYPD’s massive Crime Scene complex in Queens. She greeted them, two thirty-ish African American techs, man and woman, she worked with from time to time. They wheeled heavy suitcases toward the escalator.

“Uh-uh,” Sachs told them. “ That was an accident. The Department of Investigations’ll be coordinating that with the Eight-Four. I need you to walk the grid at Starbucks.”

“What happened there?” the woman officer asked, looking over the coffee shop.

“A serious crime,” her partner offered. “Price of a frappuccino.”

“Our unsub sat down for a late lunch. Some table in the back, you’ll have to ask where. Tall, thin. Green checkered jacket and Atlanta baseball cap. But there won’t be much. He took his cup and wrappers with him.”

“Hate it when they don’t leave their DNA lying around.”

“True, that.”

Sachs said, “But I think he ditched the litter somewhere close.”

“You have any idea where?” the woman asked.

Looking over the staff in Starbucks, Sachs had, in fact, had an inspiration. “Maybe. But it’s not in the mall. I’ll check that out myself. You handle Starbucks.”

“Always loved you, Amelia. You give us the nice and fuzzy and you take the dark ’n’ cold.”

She crouched and pulled a blue Tyvek jumpsuit out of the case one of the ECTs had just opened.

“Standard operating procedure, right, Amelia? Bundle up everything and get it to Lincoln’s town house?”

Sachs’s face was stony as she said, “No, ship everything back to Queens. I’m running the case from downtown.”

The two ECTs regarded each other briefly and then looked back to Sachs. The woman asked, “He’s okay? Rhyme?”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Sachs said tersely. “Lincoln’s not working for the NYPD anymore.”

The answer is there.”

A pause as the words echoed off the glossy, scuffed walls, their color academia green. That is, bile.

“The answer. It may be obvious, like a bloody knife emblazoned with the perp’s fingerprints and DNA, inscribed with his initials and a quotation from his favorite poet. Or obscure, nothing more three invisible ligands — and what is a ligand? Anyone?”

“Olfactory molecules, sir.” A shaky male voice.

Lincoln Rhyme continued, “Obscure, I was saying. The answer may be in three olfactory molecules. But it is there. The connection between the killer and killee that can lead us to his door and persuade the jury to relocate him to a new home for twenty to thirty years. Someone give me Locard’s Principle.”

A woman’s voice said firmly from the front row: “With every crime there is a transfer of material between perpetrator and the scene or the victim or most likely both. Edmond Locard, the French criminalist, used the word ‘dust’ but ‘material’ is generally accepted. Trace evidence, in other words.” The responder tossed aside long chestnut hair framing a heart-shaped face. She added, “Paul Kirk elaborated. ‘Physical evidence cannot perjure itself. It cannot be wholly absent. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it can diminish its value.’ ”

Lincoln Rhyme nodded. Correct answers might be acknowledged but never praised; that was reserved for an insight that transcended the baseline. He was impressed nonetheless, as he had not yet assigned any readings that discussed the great French criminalist. He gazed out at the faces, as if perplexed. “Did you all write down what Ms. Archer said? It appears some of you did not. I can’t fathom why.”

Pens began to skitter, laptop keyboards to click and fingers danced silently over two-dimensional keys of tablets.

This was only the second class session of Introduction to Crime Scene Analysis and protocols had yet to be established. The students’ memories would be supple and in good form but not infallible. Besides, recording on paper or screen means possessing , not just comprehending.

“The answer is there,” Rhyme repeated, well, professorially. “With criminalistics — forensic science — there is not a single crime that cannot be solved. The only question is one of resource, ingenuity and effort. How far are you willing to go to identify the perp? As, yes, Paul Kirk said in the nineteen fifties.” He glanced at Juliette Archer. Rhyme had learned the names of only a few students. Archer’s had been the first.

“Captain Rhyme?” From a young man in the back of the classroom, which contained about thirty people, ranging from early twenties to forties, skewed toward the younger. Despite the stylish, spiky hipster hair, the man had police in him. While the college catalog bio — not to mention the tens of thousands of Google references — offered up Rhyme’s official rank at the time he’d left the force on disability some years ago, it was unlikely that anyone unconnected to the NYPD would use it.