Джеффри Дивер - The Midnight Lock

Rhyme put his digital signature on the report and sent it to Lon Sellitto, Amelia Sachs, the head of the NYPD’s Organized Crime squad and prosecutor John Sellars, as well as the district attorney in Garner County.

On the TV high on the wall in the nonsterile section of the parlor, Rhyme noted the words:

You saw this frequently, but these words were in bright red, all caps.

The typography suggested it was not hype, but a significant event.

The chyron scrolled:

Riots and arson in three cities... one dead, dozens injured. Followers of Verum take to the streets.

He shut the TV off, hearing the bubbling of Sachs’s Ford approaching. He’d have to tell her about these odd developments.

Glancing out the window, he saw the car skid to a stop — it seemed to be the only way she was capable of bringing vehicles to rest — directly in front of the building.

She shut the engine off but didn’t climb out. She would be texting or reading a message. Maybe the report on the Buryak murder investigation he’d just sent.

It was then that he looked past her, across Central Park West, and noticed a man who seemed to be watching Sachs from behind a food truck selling Jamaican fare. He was eating a sandwich, wrapped in paper and foil.

He tossed out what remained of his sandwich and after wiping his mouth and fingers with a napkin pulled on sunglasses and a black beret.

No!

It was Aaron Douglass, Buryak’s hit man.

Rhyme’s temple was pulsing with blood from his accelerating heart and he struggled to remain calm as he ordered, “Call Sachs.”

The phone’s electronic voice replied, “Calling Sachs.”

No ring; it went right to voice mail.

Christ!

Through the window, Rhyme saw that Douglass drew a gun from his belt and started across the street.

“Thom! Call nine one one. Gunman outside the town house!”

The aide appeared, phone in hand, not asking questions, dialing.

Rhyme called, “He’s going for Amelia.”

Thom started for the front door.

“Stop! You’ll get shot too!”

The aide paused, talking to Dispatch, as Rhyme accelerated fast and slapped the automatic door opener. But before he could call out to her, Douglass stepped to the front of the car and fired a half-dozen rounds, point blank, through the windshield. The bullets easily penetrated the glass.

“No!” Rhyme cried.

Douglass turned and, as Rhyme reversed backward quickly, fired several shots his way. They were wide and hit the brownstone, digging out bits of shrapnel. One stung his cheek.

The gunman started toward Rhyme but then sirens were audible. He hesitated and sprinted south, out of sight.

A moment later Rhyme heard more shots. The police weren’t that close yet. It couldn’t be them. Douglass would be firing into the air to stop a vehicle and carjack it. Or perhaps simply to shoot a driver in cold blood, dump the body and steal the car.

His eyes turned back to the Torino.

Rhyme believed he could see an arm extended — perhaps beckoning for help or struggling to open the door or rising into the air as a last living gesture.

The limb remained extended for a moment and then dropped out of sight.

Wearing Tyvek overalls, the medical examiner was trudging forward slowly. He was not a young man, like most of the tour docs were.

If you wanted to rise to the top, the line ME work was seen generally as a stepping-stone to better medical careers — like assistant prosecutors aiming for Wall Street law firms. Rhyme knew Dr. Jonny Christen well. They’d worked together when Rhyme was a Crime Scene man and then head of the Crime Scene Unit. He and Christen would often arrive at a scene together — even when Rhyme was brass and had no reason to walk the grid, other than he loved to do so.

Christen was a legend in the ME’s office. He’d officiated at the deaths of hundreds of celebrities, politicians and sports figures.

The deaths of cops too.

Which is what he was doing now.

He always seemed more respectful when examining the body of a fallen police officer than the others.

The rotund man with a white mustache now glanced down at the body that lay faceup on the sidewalk, the chest and face covered with a sheet. A shaft of sun happened to hit the gold shield on the belt and reflected outward, a sparkling starburst.

Rhyme nodded. He was looking at the bloodstained sheet. It was one that Amelia Sachs had picked out, dark gray, a color that pleased him, though you could make the argument that it wasn’t a color at all, of course, but a blend of black and white. To be precise.

There was an argument to be made — Lincoln Rhyme knew this better than anybody — that the sheet might contaminate the crime scene. That was true in theory, but here, on this busy urban thoroughfare, there had been plenty of eyewitnesses and so forensics, while necessary, would be — in a very non-Rhyme linguistic construction — less necessary than under other circumstances.

Christen pulled up the sheet. “Three to the chest, one to the neck.”

Footsteps behind him.

It was Ron Pulaski. “Lincoln, you okay?”

“Obviously I’m okay, Rookie. Don’t contaminate the scene any more than it is.”

Crime Scene evidence collection techs were already walking the grid.

The young officer stared at the body.

He was looking down when he heard the woman’s voice. “How bad will it be?”

Rhyme turned to see Amelia Sachs walking up beside him. He answered her question with the phrase he’d just thought: “Pretty bad.”

Aaron Douglass might have helped them put together hours of incriminating evidence against Viktor Buryak.

But Aaron Douglass was no more.

“No choice,” she said, clearly troubled that Douglass had given her no option other than to kill him.

Returning on foot northbound on the sidewalk, Sachs had been carrying two bags of deli food. She’d witnessed Douglass fire the rounds into the Torino and at Rhyme, then run south, to where his car was parked. She’d dumped the groceries, drawn down and demanded that he drop his weapon.

He had chosen to engage — unwisely, given her handgun skills (second place isn’t a blue ribbon, true, but it still means you put the slugs where they’re supposed to be ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time). Apparently his muzzle hadn’t moved more than thirty degrees in her direction, before he received a tight group of rounds.

Rhyme wondered if he’d died curious about whom exactly he’d shot in the driver’s seat of the Torino.

The answer to that question was: Lyle Spencer, the security chief of Whittaker Media Group.

It seemed that Spencer had quite the affection for sports cars, and Sachs had handed over the keys to him, saying, “There’s a blue flasher in the glove compartment. Probably best to keep it under a hundred.” She had then headed off on foot to the deli.

The lending of the car and the pedestrian grocery shopping mission were facts she had not shared with Rhyme until now — which explained his earlier panic.

Lyle Spencer, Rhyme was reflecting: the man who climbed a hundred-foot rope as if it were nothing to save Ron Pulaski’s life.

The man who’d considered a swan dive from a broken window in the Sandleman Building.

The man who had been one hell of a cop but who risked it all, and lost, to try to save his daughter.

The man who now joined Rhyme and Sachs, hobbling slowly and wincing with each step.

“How are you?” Sachs asked him.

“Two ribs cracked and bruises that’re the shape — and the color — of eggplants. Same size too. All right. Maybe I’m exaggerating.”

It seemed that while Spencer’s criminal past prohibited him from carrying weapons, he was never without PPE, personal protective equipment, when he was in the field. In this case a CoolMAX Level 3A vest.