Jeffery Deaver: The Steel Kiss

No, not a spy.

She continued to gaze into his eyes.

On impulse — exceedingly rare for him — he said, “All right.”

A formal smile. “Thank you. I can start now.”

A pause, “Tomorrow.”

Archer seemed amused and cocked her head playfully. As if she might easily have negotiated and won a change in the sign-on date but didn’t feel like pushing the matter.

“You need the address?” Rhyme asked.

“I have it.”

In lieu of shaking hands they both nodded, sealing the agreement. Archer smiled and then her right index finger moved to the touchpad of her own wheelchair, a silver Storm Arrow, the same model Rhyme had used until a few years ago. “I’ll see you then.” She turned the unit and eased up the aisle and out the doorway.

The detached house was dark-red brick. The color close to that of Patrolman Buddy Everett’s glasses frames, the color of dried blood, viscera. You couldn’t help but think that. Under the circumstances.

Amelia Sachs was lingering, her eyes taking in the warm illumination from inside, which flickered occasionally as the many visitors here floated between lamp and window. The effect could be like a strobe; the house was small and the guests many.

Death brings out even the most tenuous connections.

Lingering.

In her years as a police officer Sachs had delivered news of loss to dozens of family members. She was competent at it, vamping on the lines they were taught by the psychologists at the academy. (“I’m very sorry for your loss.” “Do you have someone you can turn to for support?” With a script like that, you had to improvise.)

But tonight was different. Because Sachs didn’t believe she’d ever been present at the exact moment when a victim’s electrons departed cells, or, if you were of a different ilk, the spirit abandoned the corpus. She’d had her hands on Greg Frommer’s arm at the moment of death. And as much as she did not want to make this trip, the pact had been sealed. She wouldn’t break it.

She slid her holster east of her hip, out of sight. It seemed a decent thing to do, though she had no explanation why. The other concession to this mission was to make a stop at her apartment, also in Brooklyn, not terribly far, to shower and change clothes. It would have taken luminol and an alternative light source wand to find a lick of blood anywhere on her person.

Up the stairs and ringing the bell.

The door was opened by a tall man in a Hawaiian shirt and orange shorts. Fifties or so. Of course, this was not the funeral; that would be later. Tonight the gathering was the quick descent of friends and relatives to support, to bring food, to distract from the grief and to focus it.

“Hi,” he said. His eyes were as red as the lei around the neck of the parrot on his belly. Frommer’s brother? The resemblance was jarring.

“I’m Amelia Sachs. With the NYPD. Is Mrs. Frommer able to speak with me for a moment or two?” She said this kindly, her voice cleansed of officialdom.

“I’m sure. Please come in.”

The house contained little furniture and the pieces were mismatched and threadbare. The few pictures on the walls might have come from Walmart or Target. Frommer, she’d learned, had been a salesclerk at a shoe store in the mall, working for minimum pay. The TV was small and the cable box basic. No video game console, though she saw they had at least one child — a skateboard, battered and wrapped in duct tape, sat against a far corner. Some Japanese manga comics were stacked on the floor beside a scabby end table.

“I’m Greg’s cousin, Bob.”

“I’m so sorry about what happened.” Sometimes you fell into rote.

“We couldn’t believe it. The wife and I live in Schenectady. We got here as fast as we could.” He said again, “We couldn’t believe it. To... well, die in an accident like that.” Despite the tropical costume, Bob grew imposing. “Somebody’s going to pay for this. That never should’ve happened. Somebody’s going to pay.”

A few people of the other visitors nodded at her, eyeing her clothing, picked out carefully. Calf-length skirt in dark green, black jacket and blouse. She was dressed funereally, though not by design. This was Sachs’s typical uniform. Dark offers a more uncooperative target profile than light.

“I’ll get Sandy.”

“Thanks.”

Across the room was a boy of about twelve, flanked by a man and two women in their fifties, Sachs estimated. The boy’s round, freckled face was red from crying and his hair tousled badly. She wondered if he’d been lying in bed, paralyzed at the news of his father’s death, before family arrived.

“Yes, hello?”

Sachs turned. The slim blond woman was very pale of face, a stark and unsettling contrast with the bold red of her lids and the skin around her eyes. Adding to the eeriness were her striking green irises. Her sundress, in dark blue, was wrinkled and though her shoes were close in style they were from different pairs.

“I’m Amelia Sachs, with the police department.”

No shield display. No need.

Sachs asked if they could have a word in private.

Odd how much easier it was to level your Glock at a stoned perp leveling his at you forty paces away, or downshift from fourth to second while turning at fifty, the tachometer redlined, to make sure some son of a bitch didn’t get away.

Steel yourself. You can do this.

Sandy Frommer directed Sachs toward the back of the house and they walked through the living room into a tiny den that, she saw once they entered, was the boy’s room — the superhero posters and comics, the jeans and sweats in piles, the disheveled bed were evidence of that.

Sachs closed the door. Sandy remained standing and regarded the visitor warily.

“I happened to be on the scene when your husband died. I was with him.”

“Oh. My.” Her look of disorientation swelled momentarily. She focused on Sachs again. “A policeman came to the door to tell me. A nice man. He wasn’t at the mall when it happened. Somebody had called him. He was from the local precinct. An Asian man? Officer, I mean.”

Sachs shook her head.

“It was bad, wasn’t it?”

“It was, yes.” She couldn’t deflate what had happened. The story had already made the news. The accounts were sanitized but Sandy would eventually see medical reports and would learn exactly what Greg Frommer went through in his last minutes on earth. “But I just wanted you to know I was with him. I held his hand and he prayed. And he asked me to come see you and tell you he loved you and your son.”

As if suddenly on a vital mission, Sandy walked to her son’s desk, on which sat an old-model desktop computer. Beside it were two cans of soda, one crushed. A bag of chips, flattened. Barbecue. She picked up the cans and set them in the trash. “I was supposed to renew my driver’s license. I only have two days. I didn’t get around to it. I work for a maid service. We’re busy all the time. My license expires in two days.”

So, her birthday soon.

“Is there someone here who could help you get to DMV?”

Sandy found another artifact — an iced tea bottle. It was empty and that too went into the trash. “You didn’t have to come. Some people wouldn’t have.” Every word seemed to hurt her. “Thank you.” The otherworldly eyes turned to Sachs briefly then dropped to the floor. She tossed the sweats into the laundry. She reached into her jean pocket and withdrew a tissue, dabbed her nose. Sachs noted that the jeans were Armani, but were quite faded and worn — and not in the factory-washed way of new garments (Sachs, former fashion model, had little regard for such useless trends). They’d either been bought secondhand or, Sachs’s guess, dated to an earlier, and more comfortable, era in the family’s life.