Of course, it was possible he’d died of the wounds from the rock fragments. They hadn’t seemed serious but Rhyme had known victims of bad gunshot wounds to walk and act normally for hours before keeling over and dying.
Possible too that the unsub had found him, like he had Weintraub, killed him and disposed of the body. But in either of those cases he would have expected a missing-persons report. And Cooper’s survey of the precincts—admittedly quick—had found none.
The tech was peering into a microscope. “Trace on the jacket: More kimberlite. And some plant material. Two types. One is from leaves and grass similar to the control samples Amelia took from around the storm drain. What you’d expect. But there’s some flecks that’re unique.”
“And they’re what?”
“Hold on.” He was flipping through cellular-level images in the horticultural database that Rhyme had created at the NYPD years ago and that he still helped maintain. He loved plants as forensic markers.
“Something called…Yes, I’m pretty sure it’s something called Coleonema pulchellum. Aka confetti bush. Not indigenous to the area—it comes from Africa—but common here as a deodorizer and in potpourri.”
The perp had been to a gift shop lately, possibly. Or did he live in an apartment where pungent smells were a problem?
“The brass,” Rhyme called.
Cooper, who was certified by the AFTE, the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners, turned to the two spent 9mm shells that Sachs had collected. The slugs themselves, all of which had lodged in Weintraub’s body, would be sent from the Medical Examiner’s Office, after the autopsy. Given the urgency of the case, the doctor performing the postmortem had photographed one slug and sent the image to Cooper. The preliminary analysis was that it had been fired from the same weapon that was used at the shooting at Patel’s. No surprise since the gunshot residue was almost identical; the powder in all the rounds would have come from the manufacturer’s same lot.
“Prints on the brass?” Rhyme asked.
Cooper shook his head.
No surprise here either.
Cooper then ran through the list of trace and minute substances that Sachs had collected.
“Sawdust, diesel fuel, metals consistent with welding. Heating oil, air-conditioner coolant. Then trichlorobenzene. I don’t know what that is.”
“Used as a pesticide, I think. Or used to be. Nasty stuff. Look it up.”
Cooper read from a government environmental alert: “‘Trichlorobenzene has several uses. It is an intermediate—a building block—to make herbicides, substances that destroy or prevent the growth of weeds. It is also used as a solvent to dissolve waxes, grease, rubber and certain plastics and a dielectric fluid (a liquid that conducts little or no electricity).’ And, yeah, you’re right, used to be used for termite control.”
This trace suggested that their unsub had been in or near a factory, old buildings, a basement, a service station or a construction site. Something to note but there was nothing particularly helpful in these finds to aid them in locating him.
Cooper got a call and had a brief conversation, then walked to the computer just as the screen switched to email. He said, into his phone, “Got it.” He disconnected.
“What’s that?”
“Amelia had an EC team prowl around the storm drain where she found the jacket. They hit gold.”
“And that would be?”
“A MetroCard.”
“Well. But is it his?”
“I’d say yes. It wasn’t there very long,” Cooper said. “Wet but not too wet. Like the jacket.”
In 2003 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s MetroCard had replaced the token for payment in city buses and subways. Rhyme loved them because each one had a unique identifier, so the point of departure of every subway rider could be established. Couple that with the MTA’s extensive CCTV and facial recognition algorithms and you could occasionally come up with a reasonable estimation of where and when that rider disembarked.
“They’re scanning the data and sending it separately.”
Unsub 47 would not, of course, have used his own credit card for the purchase but—if he’d used the fare card for travel—they might get some good facial images of him swiping it at a station.
Rhyme asked, “Prints, DNA on the card?”
“Negative. Evidence of cloth glove impressions.”
A sigh. “Anything else in the storm drain?”
“Nope.”
Rhyme gazed at the evidence chart. The facts written upon it—and facts that were absent—proved what Rhyme already knew: Unsub 47 was uncommonly clever, never leaving prints, disabling video cameras, ditching his jacket after being spotted, wearing a ski mask or looking away from security cameras, making determined efforts to eliminate witnesses and tidy up after the theft.
But Lincoln Rhyme was used to being challenged by smart perps. He thought about the most brilliant one he’d been up against: Charles Vespasian Hale, known by the nickname “the Watchmaker.” The name came from both his obsession with timepieces and the fact that his crimes were planned with the precision of a clock’s mechanism. The man was a superstore of criminal services, available to anyone who could pay his substantial fee—from terrorist attacks to murder to kidnapping to mundane larceny, and everything in between. (Including jailbreaks, Rhyme reflected, with the pique he always felt when he thought of Hale; the man was still on the lam, having escaped from the prison Rhyme had put him in.)
Rhyme now heard Thom let someone into the town house, and Lon Sellitto ambled into the parlor, shedding his jacket.
“Too effing cold out there. Ridiculous. March. You ever see a March like this?”
Rhyme usually ignored conversations regarding climate. He did this now and briefed the detective on their incremental progress.
Sellitto grimaced. “City Hall won’t be happy. We’ve gotta move faster.”
“Tell Forty-Seven to be more cooperative.”
“Linc. We held off telling that Brit about S and VL. And one of ’em’s dead. Let’s get him canvassing for the protégé. Whatta you think?”
Rhyme shrugged. This was one of the few gestures his body was capable of. “At this point, sure.”
Sellitto called the number on Ackroyd’s card and asked him if he could come in. The detective disconnected. “Be here soon.”
Cooper’s computer sang with the sound of incoming email.
“Transit. The CCTV.”
Rhyme explained to Sellitto about the MetroCard.
“Damn. That’s good.”
The New York City transit system is overseen by two separate police forces. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police takes care of law enforcement for much of the surface transportation in the region, including some outlying counties. The NYPD’s Transit Bureau guards the subways.
The message, from an officer at Transit’s Brooklyn headquarters on Schermerhorn Street, reported that it was a one-ride card, bought with cash. He’d used it two days ago. “He got on the train in Brooklyn, the stop near Cadman Plaza. They don’t know if or where he transferred or got off, but he started out heading toward Manhattan. And those trains would get him to Forty-Second Street pretty fast.”
Sellitto muttered, “Walking distance to Patel’s.”
The day before the killing. Maybe casing it, checking out security.
Cooper read some more. “The RTCC folks say there’s something odd we should look at.”
The NYPD was part of the Domain Awareness System, a surveillance system that included a network of close to seven thousand CCTV cameras throughout the city, about two-thirds of them owned by private companies and individuals, who had given the police access. Scores of detectives staffed camera monitors at the Real Time Crime Center, located at One Police Plaza. The software was so sophisticated that it could automatically flag a “suspicious package” or identify and track potential suspects with as little input as “six-foot, medium build, light-blue jacket.”
The RTCC had pulled the video from the subway station when and before the fare card was swiped.
“Odd?” Rhyme murmured.
Cooper typed and a video appeared on the screen, in color and of pretty good resolution. Medium definition.