Vimal noticed the family car was gone. His father would be elsewhere. Thank goodness. He had no interest in seeing the man. Now. Or ever.
He walked inside and down to the studio. He noted that the bars had been replaced, which made sense, since this was New York City, and one could never have too much security. But the locks and hasps had been removed from the door, as had the fixture for the iron bar. The food and cartons of beverages were gone.
The studio was no longer Alcatraz.
Vimal walked to the closet and found what he sought, wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper. And returned to the front yard.
He told his mother and brother that he’d be inside in a moment and walked to the passenger side of the detective’s car and sat back in the passenger seat. “I’ve got something for you. And that man you work with, Mr. Rhyme.”
“Vimal. You don’t need to do that.”
“No. I want to. One of my sculptures.”
He unwrapped the object and set it on the dashboard. It was the four-sided pyramid he’d carved last year and been thinking of in the moments before he’d believed he was going to die. The piece was seven inches high and the base seven inches, as well. Sachs leaned forward and looked at it, then stroked the dark-green granite sides. “Smooth.”
“Yes. Smooth. And straight.”
“They are.”
Michelangelo believed you needed to master the basic inanimate shapes before you could render a living form in stone.
Vimal said, “It’s inspired by diamonds. Most diamonds are found in nature as octahedrons. Two pyramids joined at the base.”
She said, “Then they’re cleaved into two pieces for cutting. Usually for round brilliants.”
He laughed. “Ah, you’ve had quite the education about our business.” He too leaned forward and touched it with a finger. “It won first prize at a juried arts competition at Brooklyn last year, first at a competition in Manhattan and second in the New England Sculpting Show.”
Which, he reflected, his father had not allowed him to enter. A friend had entered it for him.
“First prize,” she said, clearly trying to sound impressed—while studying the mundane geometric shape.
Vimal said playfully, “Not bad for a paperweight, hm?”
Looking at him with a wry smile, Sachs said, “There’s more to it, I’ve got a feeling. Do I push a secret button and it opens up?”
“Not quite but you’re close. Look at the underside.”
She lifted the sculpture and turned it over. She gasped. Inside was a carved-out impression of a human heart—not a Hallmark card version but an anatomically correct heart, with exact reproductions of veins and arteries and chambers.
It had taken eighteen months to craft the piece, working with the smallest of tools. It was, you might say, a negative sculpture: the empty space, not the stone, was the organ.
How did I do, Signore Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni?
“It’s called Hidden.
“Vimal, I don’t know what to say. It’s astonishing. Your talent…” She set it back on the dash then leaned forward and hugged him. His face burned with a blush and he awkwardly pressed his palms into her back.
Then he climbed out of the car and walked back to the house, where some, though not all, of his family waited.
Chapter 67
At 9 p.m. Lincoln Rhyme decided: Time for a drink.
With an unsteady but determined hand, he poured several fingers of Glenmorangie scotch, the bourbon cask variety, into a Waterford glass, which contained a few drops of water. This, he believed, opened up the whisky.
The Waterford represented a victory for him. Though he’d never in his life been inclined to luxurious items like this, he’d been determined to graduate from unbreakable plastic tumblers—which he, as a quad, had used for years—to something elegant. Had his grip failed, $137 would have shattered on the floor.
But he’d mastered the vessel. And was convinced, without objective proof, that the whisky tasted better from crystal.
Sachs was upstairs, showering. Thom was in the kitchen, whipping up something for dinner. Rhyme deduced it involved garlic and some licorice-oriented herb or spice. Perhaps fennel. No gourmand, nor even much of a diner, Rhyme nonetheless found it helpful to know foods. A few years ago he’d run up against a hired killer whose hobby was cooking, and ingredients for various dishes provided important clues in his capture. (The killer’s avocation was not only a source of great pleasure for him but also gave him the chance to put his extremely expensive—and sharp—knives to work on the job. Witnesses tended to tell everything he wanted to know in the face of a razor-sharp Japanese filleting knife.)
Heavy glass in one hand, Rhyme used a finger of his other to maneuver to the front of the Unsub 47 evidence charts.
He was certainly grateful that both Rostov and Krueger were out of the picture and that none of the officers running the case had been injured seriously. The mayor had called to express his thanks. Dwyer, the head of the geothermal operation, had too. But the case wasn’t completely over, from his perspective. There were some loose ends. For instance: the disappearance of the Northeast Geo worker who’d helped Krueger plant the C4 charges in the drilling shafts. He was surely dead but Rhyme would devote whatever time and effort were necessary to locating the body, for the sake of his family.
Justice…
The South African Police were apparently more than eager to pursue the employees in Krueger’s “security” company. They rounded up some lower-level administrative people and located Terrance DeVoer and his wife, in Lesotho, the landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. Not a wise choice of escape route for a fugitive, considering he’d be on airline watchlists and, if he wished to drive, he would have to return to the very country that had warrants out for his arrest.
DeVoer would be handed over to the SAP in a day or so.
As to the diamond mines behind the plot, the NYPD foreign liaison division and the FBI, working with State, had contacted them both. Dobprom hadn’t replied and Rhyme had been told not to expect a response. The Guatemalan mine that had hired Krueger, New World Mining, had at least returned phone calls but vehemently denied any involvement in the incident.
This portion—the Russian and Central American legs—of the investigation had stalled.
Rhyme was, however, determined to unstall it.
Another, more pressing, issue was whether there was in fact another device. Just because three kilos of C4 had been delivered didn’t mean there were only three bombs in the Northeast Geo shafts. Maybe Krueger had divided the plastic into four or five lumps and planted other gas line bombs. The police were still canvassing possible targets along the fault line in the vicinity of Northeast Geo, and FDNY was still staged in the area, awaiting another tremor, which would signal possible fires. The Bomb Squad and ESU, working with Northeast Geo, were finally beginning their careful excavation of the shafts.
Loose ends.
Now, as he looked up at the charts, yet one more question arose in his thoughts, and he instructed the phone to make a call.
“Hey, Linc. What’s up?” Lon Sellitto sounded impatient.
“Just some follow-up on the case. When you came to see me the other day about that gas device that didn’t go off, the one in that woman’s basement? Claire Porter?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Had you been to the scene before you came over here? Think carefully. It’s important.”
“What’s to think? The answer is no. I was downtown and somebody called me. I never was at the scene. Why?”
“Loose ends.”
“Whatever. Anything else? We’re watching Walking Dead.”
“What?”
“Night, Linc.”
Other questions floated to the surface.
But then he turned to the entryway to the parlor and the idea of trying to answer them was put on hold momentarily, while he focused on the immediate item on the agenda for this evening.
Dinner with his bride.
Amelia Sachs was walking into the room now. She was wearing a long, green dress, low-cut and sleeveless.