Thom offered him food too and Rhyme came close to saying, “Enough, we’re not a soup kitchen”—a clever jab, he thought—but Pulaski declined anyway.
A moment later the low bubble of a powerful car’s exhaust thudded through the closed window. Amelia Sachs had arrived. She gave the engine some gas and it then went silent. She walked inside, hung her bomber jacket on a hook and adjusted the belt around her blue jeans, to slip rearward the plastic Glock holster for comfort. She wore a teal high-necked sweater and beneath that, Rhyme had seen this morning as she’d dressed, a black silk T-shirt. They’d listened to the weather report on the radio—today would be unseasonably cold for mid-March, just like the past week. In Washington, DC, they’d witnessed cherry blossoms dying by the thousands.
Sachs nodded to those assembled. Sellitto waved back and noisily finished his soup.
Now that most of the team was in place, and fed—Rhyme reflected with amused cynicism—Sellitto briefed them.
“’Bout an hour ago. Robbery and multiple murder. Midtown North. Third floor of Five-Eight West Four-Seven. Patel Designs, owned by Jatin Patel, fifty-five. He’s one of the deceased. Diamond cutter and he made and sold jewelry. Was pretty famous, what I hear. I’m not a jewelry kind of guy, so who knows? Major Cases drew it, and they drew me. And I’m drawing you.”
The Major Case Division, overseen by a deputy inspector from the Detective Bureau in One Police Plaza, did not generally run homicides or retail location burglaries.
Lon Sellitto had noted the glance Rhyme and Sachs shared. He now explained why this case was an exception.
“The feeling came down from our friends at City Hall that the last thing we need is a violent robbery in the Diamond District. Especially if he’s got more stores in mind. People’ll stop shopping. Bad for tourism, bad for the economy.”
“The victims probably aren’t too elated either, wouldn’t you say, Lon?”
“I’m telling you what I was told is all, Linc. Okay?”
“Proceed away.”
“Now, one other wrinkle and this we’re keeping a wrap on. The perp tortured Patel. The supervising captain from Midtown North thinks he didn’t want to give up the good stuff—open the safe or whatever. So the killer used a box cutter on him till he talked. It was pretty bad.”
Some other shit too…
Rhyme said, “Okay. Let’s get to work. Sachs, the scene. I’ll get Mel Cooper in. You stay put, Pulaski. Keep you in reserve for the time being.”
Sachs pulled her jacket off the hook, slipped it on, then clipped two spare magazines on her left hip. She headed for the door.
Thom walked into the parlor and smiled at Sachs. “Oh, Amelia. Didn’t see you come in. You hungry?”
“I am. Missed breakfast and lunch.”
“Soup? Perfect for a cold day.”
She gave him a wry smile. Slamming the Torino Cobra, with its 405-horsepower engine and four-speed manual, through Midtown Manhattan made any beverage, let alone hot soup, problematic.
She pulled her keys from her pocket. “Maybe later.”
Chapter 4
The crime scene at Patel Designs on 47th Street presented Amelia Sachs with three questions.
One, since the perp had left hundreds of diamonds behind—just sitting in the open safe—what, in fact, had he stolen? If anything.
Two, why was Patel tortured?
Three, who had placed the anonymous call to report the crime and give a fairly detailed description of the perp? There was a Part B to this question: Was he still alive? When she’d first arrived at the third-floor shop she’d smelled the air and known immediately a weapon had been fired here. She guessed the witness had walked into the robbery, been shot and fled, stopping at the street pay phone from which he’d called 911.
The shop was small and the distance from gun to victim would, at most, have been ten or fifteen feet. Hard to miss with a lethal shot at that range. And there were no stray slugs anywhere in the office or the hallway. The witness had almost certainly been hit.
Sachs, in the crime scene white hooded jumpsuit and booties, stepped around the sizable pool of blood, in the rough shape of Lake Michigan, and laid the numbers for the photographs—the small placards placed where the evidence and significant elements of the crime were located. After shooting the photos, she walked the grid: searching the scene inch by inch. The grid pattern, the only approach she used, as she’d learned from Rhyme, involved walking from one end of the scene to the other, then turning, stepping a foot to the side and returning, the way one mows a lawn. Then you turn perpendicular and search the same scene again, “against the grain,” as Rhyme described it.
She went through the routine now: gathering trace, taking footprints, searching for friction ridge prints and swabbing where the perp might have left DNA. Standing momentarily with hands on hips, she surveyed the floor plan of the shop, which embraced, she estimated, only about nine hundred square feet. She glanced out the front door, held open by a rubber wedge, noting a man in a jumpsuit similar to hers. She said to him, “Computer’s in the office. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”
The ECT—evidence collection technician—had specialized training in security cameras and storage devices. He’d extract what he could from the hard drive in Patel’s office; a single camera was pointed at the front door from behind the counter. It seemed to be working; a tiny red eye glowed teasingly, and a cable ran from the camera to the man’s desktop computer, which sat next to a large printer and, curiously, an ancient fax machine. The camera wasn’t connected to a central station, only the computer.
Regarding the security system, though, Sachs was sure that crossing fingers wouldn’t be enough. This perp did not seem like a man to forget about erasing security videos. As every cop knew, however, erasing digital media was never permanent. Lots of incriminating data could be unearthed—if the data had existed in the first place. A big if.
Sachs now filled out chain-of-custody details on separate cards to be affixed to the evidence itself or the paper or plastic evidence bags it had been stashed in.
Next. The hard part.
She had saved the bodies till the last.
Because, if they didn’t need to be processed first, you just put it off for a little bit longer.
The image that immediately seized her attention when she’d first entered and that touched her still was the fingers of the couple whose throats had been slashed. The hands had been tied behind them and at some point they’d moved close—most likely just before the end—and interlaced their fingers. Though they had thrashed in pain from the knifing, their fingers remained intertwined. In their death throes they had found some small comfort in the grip. Or she hoped they had. Sachs had been a street cop, then a detective working Major Cases, for years. The heart hardened, as it must, in this line of work. But details like these could still summon an urge to cry, even if no tears swelled. For some cops this never happened. She thought she was a better officer for it.
The owner of the store, Jatin Patel, had died from a slashed throat too. One difference, though, was the torture. The medical examiner’s office tour doctor, a slim Asian American woman, had pointed out the slices on his hands, ear and face. Pistol-whipping too. The wounds were all premortem.
Neither Patel nor the couple seemed to have been personally robbed, though Patel had no phone on him or in the shop. At least, the usual take remained: Wallets, purses, jewelry and cash were intact. She photographed the three bodies from all angles, rolled for fibers and other trace and took hair samples for exclusion later. She got fingernail scrapings, though none of the victims had apparently fought the unsub. Alternative light source scans of their skin, near where the lamp cord bound their wrists, revealed no fingerprints. She hadn’t expected any; throughout the scene there were so many cloth glove prints, some in blood, that she knew, almost to a certainty, the unsub wouldn’t have left his own.
“Sorry,” came the voice from the office.