She told him, “Don’t want to disturb any evidence from where they might’ve been standing.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. Crime scene stuff. We see all those shows, the wife and me. I love ’em. You guys can catch a butterfly that was at the murder scene and there’ll be an image of the killer in the damn thing’s wings. That’s just amazing. You ever do that?”
“Never have.” Sachs reminded herself to share that one with Rhyme.
She donned gloves and put rubber bands on her shoes—to differentiate her footprints from the unsub’s—leaving it to the supervisor to draw his own conclusions about that high-tech forensic tool.
Butterfly wings…
But once inside she noted that this site was useless—more than useless, then smiled at the grammatical contradiction that Rhyme would have loved. Like “extremely unique.”
Or would it be less than useless?
The problem, forensically, was that the ground inside was gravel and rock, which wouldn’t reveal any footprints, so she had no idea where the unsub and the worker might’ve stood—if they’d been here at all.
Still, with gloved hands she scooped up about a half pound of stones from the place where they logically might have been—near the gate—and placed them in a plastic evidence bag.
The center of Area 7 was the mud pit: a trough, running lengthwise from one end of the fence to the other. It was about fifteen feet wide, surrounded by the narrow rocky walkway. It was filled with what Schoal had described: a mucky pool, deep brown and gray, its surface iridescent with oil or other chemicals. A yellow measuring stick, rising from the middle, showed the pit was just over six feet deep. The smell was a powerful mix of damp earth and diesel fuel.
Nasty stuff.
A dozen of the geothermal shafts, twelve inches in diameter, rose from the pool too. They were covered with plastic bags. To one side was a machine that looked like a small, stationary cement mixer, presumably for pouring the grout into the shafts once the piping was fed down them.
The only way to get across the pit was to walk on planks laid over it, between the shafts…and to walk very carefully. They were only about ten inches wide and, because they were eighteen feet long or so, appeared quite springy.
Sachs was wondering if the unsub would have walked over one of them to get to the other side. There was a window cut into the far fence, about head height. It would make sense for the unsub to have walked to it and looked out to see if it was safe to exit. It wouldn’t hurt to get a few samples from the ground beneath the window.
She eyed the precarious wooden plank.
Shaking her head. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it isn’t.
Then smiling to herself and thinking: And when, exactly, has it been easy?
She began across the plank, walking carefully, one foot after the other, as the narrow bridge bounded up and down. On the other side she scooped up stones and dirt from beneath the window and started back.
She was halfway back when the world changed.
The ground around her shook fiercely and she heard a deep rumbling. What the hell was going on? A derrick had fallen, one of the buildings under construction collapsed, a plane had crashed nearby.
A voice from behind her, Schoal’s, in a much higher register than earlier, called out, “Christ Almighty.”
As car alarms began bleating and people screamed, Sachs struggled to stay upright. The plank was bouncing hard and, desperate to keep from falling, she dropped fast and hard on one knee, her bad—well, her worse—one. Fiery pain rose from the limb to her jaw. The plank dipped under her weight, but then rebounded and pitched her off like a swimming pool diving board. Arms flailing, Amelia Sachs fell toward the mud. In the second before she hit she tried frantically to twist upright, to keep her face to the sky so she could breathe after she landed.
But the maneuver didn’t work and she dropped face-first into the brown-and-gray glue, which slowly began to suck her beneath the surface.
Chapter 23
You feel that? That shudder?” Ruth Phillips, putting away groceries in the cupboard, shouted to her husband.
He didn’t answer.
This happened a lot. Not that he was hard of hearing. It was more of an architectural issue.
They were in their bungalow in Brooklyn, on the edge of the Heights. The home was a railroad-style structure, which, she’d learned when they moved in decades ago, you saw much more in the South. Railroad, it was called, because there was a long hallway running from the front door past the living room, the three bedrooms and the dining room to the kitchen, in the back. Like the trains you saw from the old-time movies, with a corridor beside the passenger compartments. Ruth didn’t think any trains still had this feature but there might have been some somewhere. Her only experience with that mode of transport was the LIRR, which they took out to Oyster Bay to see daughter number one.
Arnie was in the living room, which faced the small street, sixty feet away from her.
The far end of the train.
She set the Green Giant canned beans down and repeated the question. Louder.
“What?” he called.
And once more: “You feel that? That shudder or something?”
“Supper? Yeah, what’s for supper?”
She pulled her yellow sweater tighter about her stocky form and stepped outside, onto the back porch. Car accident? Plane crash? She and Arnie had been on the promenade on September 11 and had seen the second plane hit.
She returned to the house and walked halfway up the hall and noted her husband, still parked in front of the TV.
They were both in their early sixties, just edging close to the time when they could start compiling dreams for retirement. Arnie was inclined to a motor home and Ruth wanted a place by a lake, preferably in Wisconsin, to be near daughter number two and her husband. This set of youngsters was the sort who smiled, with cheerful groans, whenever Arnie made a cheese joke. Which was a lot. The shudder a moment ago had brought back the idea of terrorism and Ruth thought once more: Time to start making firm plans for that move.
“Not ‘supper.’ ‘Shudder,’ I said. Like something was shaking. Was there an accident? Didn’t you feel it?”
“Yeah, I did, something. Construction maybe.”
“Sunday?”
Glasses had shivered, windows rattled. She’d felt the rumbling in her feet; she’d pulled on her slippers as soon as they got back from the grocery store and finished carting the bags inside.
“Dunno.” He had the game on. He loved his games.
Arnie said, “So anyway. What is for supper. Since the subject’s come up.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Oh. Thought you were cooking.”
“Already? No.”
She returned to the kitchen. Ruth’s procedure for stowage was logical. First, freezer items went to roost. Then perishables that could germify—Arnie’s wonderful word—like meat, fish and milk. Then fresh fruits and veggies. Then boxes and finally the long-term stuff. The cheerful Green Giants, in cans, would be the last to get tucked away.
“Then you’re baking?” Arnie was in the corridor now. He’d come her way so they could speak in normal voices. “One of those pies? I was dreamin’ about rhubarb.”
“I’m not baking either.”
“Hm.” Arnie now stepped into the dining room, adjacent to the kitchen. His eyes were not on his bride of forty-three years but on the stove. She noted his expression of curiosity and she frowned. “What is it, hon?”
“The oven’s not on?”
She waved to it. Meaning no.
“I could smell gas. I thought you’d turned it on. And it took a minute for the burner to catch.”
“No, but…” Her voice faded. Ruth too could smell that rotten egg scent.
“Maybe the city’s doing some work and they hit a gas main. That was the shudder. You know, it’s stronger now.”
“Yeah. It is.”