“Tie? And you didn’t complain?”
True, Rhyme had little patience for what he considered affectation. But this occasion was different. For all her edge and edginess and her need of speed and blunt firearms, her passion for tactical solutions, Sachs had a splinter of teen girl within her and she was enjoying the game of wedding planning. This included shopping for a whatever-the-hell-it-was trousseau and a romantic honeymoon, and if that pleased her, by God, Rhyme was more than happy to accommodate.
Though he really hoped he could convince her about Greenland.
“Well, tell her to shop later. I need her to run a scene. We’ve got a situation.”
A ping resounded within Rhyme the way a submarine’s sonar detects something unexpected off the port bow.
He texted Sachs and received no response. “Maybe on the stand, testifying. Tell me more.”
Thom appeared in the doorway—Rhyme hadn’t realized he’d left. The aide said, “Lon, coffee? Cookies? I’ve been baking. I’ve got a couple of different kinds. One is—”
“Yes, yes, yes.” It was Rhyme answering. “Bring him something. Make a decision yourself. I want to hear his story.”
Situation…
“Proceed,” he told Sellitto.
“Anything chocolate,” Sellitto called to Thom’s back.
“Easily arranged.”
“Kidnapping, Linc. Upper East Side. Apparently one adult male snatched another.”
“Apparently? What requires interpretation?”
“The only wit was nine years old.”
“Ah.”
“Perp grabs vic, tosses him into a car trunk. Takes off.”
“The girl is sure about this? Not a figment of her overactive little imagination, stoked by watching too much television, ruining her thumbs on video games, reading too many Hello Pony stories?”
“Hello Kitty. Ponies are a different book.”
“Did Mommy or Daddy confirm?”
“Morgynn, the girl, was the only one who saw. But I think it’s legit. She found a calling card he’d left behind.” Sellitto held up his phone and displayed a photo.
At first Rhyme couldn’t make out the image. It was a picture of a dark shape, thin, lying on a sidewalk.
“It’s a—”
Rhyme interrupted. “Noose.”
“Yep.”
“Made out of?”
“Not sure. Girl said he set it on the spot where he got the vic. She picked it up but the responding set it back in the same place he’d left it, more or less.”
“Great. I’ve never worked a scene contaminated by a nine-year-old.”
“Relax, Linc. All she did was pick it up. And the responding wore gloves. Scene’s secure, waiting for somebody to run it. Somebody, as in Amelia.”
The noose was made out of dark material, which was stiff, since segments were not flush with the pavement, as would be the case with more limp fibers. From the size of the poured-concrete sidewalk panel, the noose was about twelve to fourteen inches long in total, the neck hoop about a third of that.
“The wit’s still on scene. With Mommy. Who isn’t very happy.”
Neither was Rhyme. All they had to go on was a nine-year-old schoolgirl with the observational skills and perception of a…well, nine-year-old schoolgirl.
“The vic? Rich, politically active, connected with OC, record?”
Sellitto said, “No ID yet. Nobody reported missing. A few minutes after the snatch somebody saw a phone fly outta a car—dark sedan, nothing more. Third Avenue. Dellray’s boys’re running it. We find out who, we find out why. Business deal gone bad, vic has information somebody wants, or the old standby. For-profit ransom.”
“Or it’s a psycho. There was the noose, after all.”
“Yeah,” Sellitto said, “and the vic just happened to be WTWP.”
“What?”
“Wrong time, wrong place.”
Rhyme scowled once more. “Lon?”
“It’s going around the department.”
“Flu viruses—not viri, by the way—go around the department. Idiotic expressions do not. Or should not, at least.”
Sellitto used the cane to rise to his feet and aimed his bulky form toward the tray of cookies that Thom was setting down, like a Realtor seducing prospective buyers at a condominium open house. The detective ate one, then two, then another, nodded approval. He poured himself a cup of coffee from a silver pitcher and spilled in artificial sweetener, his concession to the battle against calories being to sacrifice refined sugar for pastry.
“Good,” he announced through a mouthful of cookie. “You want one? Some coffee?”
The criminalist’s eyes swiveled instinctively toward the Glenmorangie, sitting golden and alluring on the high shelf.
But Lincoln Rhyme decided: No. He wanted his faculties about him. He had a feeling that the girl’s observations were all too accurate, that the kidnapping had occurred just as she had described it and that the macabre calling card was a taunting message of a death soon to be.
And perhaps more after that.
He texted Amelia Sachs once again.
Chapter 3
A plop, as water fell from ceiling to floor.
Ten feet.
Every four seconds.
Plop, plop, plop.
The resulting sound wasn’t a splash. The floor of this old, old factory, now abandoned, was scarred from the passage of metal and wooden objects, and the water didn’t accumulate in pools but eased away in crevices and cuts, as patterned as an old man’s face.
Plop, plop.
Moans, too, as the chill autumn breeze slipped over the mouths of ducts, pipes and vents, the way you’d blow across a bottle neck to make a hooing sound. Didn’t see that much anymore, no, you didn’t. Because kids used to do it mostly with soda bottles, which were now plastic, not glass. Plastic didn’t work very well. Beer bottles you could use but adults didn’t get any pleasure out of the hooo-hoooing sounds.
Stefan had once written a piece of music to be played on Mountain Dew bottles, each filled with a different amount of water to produce a chromatic scale of twelve notes. He had been six years old.
The tones the factory now made were a C sharp, an F, a G. There was no rhythm, as the wind was irregular. Also:
Distant traffic, a constant.
More-distant exhalations of jet airplanes.