They knew a few things from the anonymous call (assuming it was accurate): The perp was probably white, male, his face obscured by a black cloth ski mask. He wore gloves and was armed. Average height. Another call had been made to 911, reporting that the killer had carried a black briefcase. It hadn’t been found at the scene, so he would have it with him possibly, unless he’d ditched it.
Sachs believed that the caller was the employee or associate of Patel’s who’d walked into the crime and been shot, VL. A canvass of the Port Authority, where he’d made the most recent phone call, had revealed no sightings of anyone injured. Rhyme had wanted someone to remove the coins from the pay phones from which the man had made the call and fingerprint them.
“You don’t need a quarter to call nine one one,” Sellitto had said, amused. “The city got that worked out in the budget.” Hospitals had been alerted to report anyone injured by what would be rock splinters but the odds that the roughly one thousand emergency room doctors in the New York area would learn of this request and follow through, if they did, were pretty damn slim.
Sachs had called the company that owned the diamonds, Grace-Cabot in Cape Town, South Africa. It was hours later there, early morning, and she’d left a message. There was, after all, a possibility that the stones had been shipped back or were elsewhere, perhaps contracted out to other diamond cutters who worked with Patel.
If that was true the case would become even more confounding, and it would be up to the high-value evidence technicians to run an inventory and learn if anything was in fact missing.
As for physical evidence, there’d been hundreds of friction ridge images—fingerprints—discovered: the shop, the elevator, the handles of the doors to the street, the doors to the stairwell, the railings in the stairwells. But none were in the IAFIS database. He hadn’t expected any hits; the number of cloth glove prints suggested Unsub 47 never took them off.
Don’t make it easy for us, do they? A rhetorical query that Rhyme didn’t bother to express aloud.
Some crimes—sexual in nature and physical fights, for instance—are usually DNA-rich exchanges, and the deoxyribonucleic acid database—CODIS, in America—might reveal an identity in such instances. But a crime like this, by a gloved killer, wearing a long-sleeve outer garment and slacks—as well as the ski mask—would offer little chance for him to leave behind DNA.
Some cloth fibers had been found, none of which matched the clothing worn by the victims. Some were black cotton, most likely from gloves—since they were found on doorknobs and drawers. Also, Sachs had discovered black polyester fibers, which were probably from the ski mask.
No empty cartridge shells from the gunshot; he’d taken the brass with him.
“What do we have there?” Rhyme asked his lab man impatiently. His eyes on the electrostatic footprints from Jatin Patel’s shop, now scanned and slapped onto a high-def screen.
Mel Cooper was wearing a white lab coat, cap and gloves, as well as a face mask. And his ever-present Harry Potter glasses. “Hard to say for certain but our boy’s between a ten and an eleven and a half.” Since shoe toes curl upward and heel size varies, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain an exact size. “And some distinctive wear marks but there’s no tread.”
“So businessman footwear.”
“Right.” Much better if the perps wear running shoes. The distinctive tread marks will usually give you brand and model number, and sometimes even color can be ascertained from the model.
“Any small lines in the blood, next to the shoe prints?” Rhyme was looking at an image shot by Sachs on her Sony digital camera.
“Lines?” Cooper asked.
“Wormy lines, squiggly lines,” Rhyme muttered. “I can’t tell.” When he noted that both Sellitto and Cooper were glancing his way, perplexed, he started to speak but Sachs, hunched over an examination table, said, “From dangling shoelaces. They might not show up in the electrostatics but they would in the blood.”
Rhyme smiled. He loved her.
“Ah.” Cooper examined the footprint photos. Sellitto looked once, then checked texts.
“Ah, bored, are we, Lon? Many a case’s been closed because of something as trivial as finding out if the perp wears shoes with laces or not.”
“Hey, Linc, you’re the squiggly line/bloody shoe-print guru. Not me.” He took another phone call and stepped away.
No squiggles, it turned out. Probably slip-ons.
The witness had reported only one perp present, and footprints confirmed the killer was by himself.
His weapon was most likely a 9mm Glock, like Sachs’s, to judge from the polygonal rifling of the slug. Gun barrels for the past 150 years have contained interior indentations to spin the bullet as it leaves the weapon, making it more accurate. Most have lands and grooves—troughs. Glocks, however, have wavy indentations, not sharp edges, which give the bullet more speed and power. They aren’t the only guns with this feature—others are Heckler & Koch, Kahr Arms, Magnum Research, Tanfoglio, and CZ—but Glocks are by far the most common to feature polygonal rifling.
Sellitto disconnected his phone. “That was a couple gold shields. Went to Patel’s sister’s house, delivered the news. His wife had passed away a few years ago and the sister’s the only family he’s got in the area. They said it was pretty tough for her. She nearly collapsed. They waited till her husband got home to ask her questions. She said she didn’t know much about the business. That was a ‘man thing,’ she said.
“Patel’d never told her or her husband that he was concerned about security or that anybody’d been casing the shop. But he was really famous as a cutter—here and internationally too. Word could’ve gotten around that he had some nice shit for somebody to steal. My word, not hers.”
Sachs asked, “Partners? Employees? She have any idea who that witness was?”
“She didn’t really know. He owned the place himself. No full-time employees—he was too cheap and didn’t trust anybody else to work on the stones. Except, his sister thought, some young man worked there occasionally, apprenticing to be a diamond cutter. They asked about S and VL. But zip.”
Sachs said, “Probably paid in cash, off the books, to save money; no payroll information to help us track him down.”
A team from Crime Scene in Queens had searched Patel’s modest apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he’d lived alone since his wife passed away of cancer some years ago. There was no evidence of a break-in, and—as Rhyme had wondered—the Grace-Cabot diamonds were not there.
Neither was Patel’s phone, so their contact at the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit was presently getting a list of numbers, incoming and outgoing, from the provider. They hoped one of these would prove to be a call to or from S or VL.
Sachs stepped away to take a call and, nodding absently as she had a conversation, jotted a few notes. Then gave the caller her email address.
A moment later a computer sounded with an incoming message and she disconnected and called it up.
“Movie time,” she said. “Security company for the building. This’s the security video of the floor this morning.” She downloaded it and began playing the grainy black-and-white footage.
Rhyme wheeled closer. Patel had arrived for work at about eight thirty this morning. Nothing happened until a few minutes before eleven. A man appeared, bearded and in a black overcoat and a short-brimmed hat, possibly with short dark hair. He pushed a button on the intercom of Patel’s shop, was admitted and stayed about twenty minutes.
“Probably S—Patel’s eleven o’clock.”
Five minutes later he left, according to the time stamp, some black speckles began to appear in the image and for a fraction of a second you could see a gloved hand and a shape of a head in the ski mask as the unsub sprayed black paint at the lens, while staying largely out of sight. The fuzzy images—literally thirteen frames—revealed nothing.
Rhyme looked to Cooper, who anticipated his question. “I ran the paint. It’s generic. No source.”