“That’d be great.”
“We’ll suit you up. Reggie?” he called to a worker just passing nearby. “Hard hat and vest for the lady.” He paused. “For the detective. Ain’t the best fashion choice, the vest, but rules is rules.”
She pulled on the orange garment and donned the hat—after banding her hair up in a ponytail. Thought about taking a selfie to send to Rhyme and her mother.
Then decided: Naw.
“How could he’ve gotten past the guard without a pass or credentials?”
Schoal shrugged. “Not that hard. Somebody in a vest and hat, they walk in with a bunch of guys, security wouldn’t notice. That’s not a risk we worry about: It’s the trucks that show up off hours to drive away with your ’dozer or ten thousand bucks’ worth of copper pipe. Sorry I said ‘lady.’”
“I’ve been called worse.” She dug into the evidence bag and handed him a picture from the MTA security camera, which, of course, didn’t show much at all. The dark coat, the dark slacks, dark stocking cap. The text described a white male, average build and about six feet.
“Detective, what’d this guy do exactly?”
Sometimes you were tight-lipped, sometimes you sensed an ally. “He killed a jewelry store owner and two people—a couple—in Midtown yesterday.”
“Fuck me. The Promisor. God. That was terrible. Those kids. Going to get married…and he killed ’em.”
“That’s him.”
“And you think he bought his gun from one of my guys?”
“That’s what we want to find out.”
They began circulating, talking to the workers who’d drawn Sunday duty. The men—and a few women—were more than willing to talk and no one evaded eye contact, any more than normal, or otherwise suggested that he or she was the person Unsub 47 had met with.
After a half hour of no luck they’d been through nearly all the workers on duty and Sachs was thinking she—or Ron Pulaski—would have to return and canvas the rest tomorrow. She didn’t like that they’d have to wait. She was sure that Forty-Seven was still on the trail of VL and continuing his hunt for those who’d committed the terrible sin of adorning their fingers with diamond rings.
But a moment later, a break. A tall African American worker listened to her words and then began nodding almost immediately.
“You know, I did see somebody here about when you were saying, Friday. I thought he was corporate. He wasn’t in a Carhartt or anything, just a black jacket, with hat and vest.”
The worker’s name was Antoine Gibbs.
Schoal said, “The execs from the head office, they come to the site, they don’t wear suits a lot of times.”
Gibbs said, “So this guy, he was talking to somebody else. I guess one of ours—he did have on boots and was wearing Carhartt. They talked, and looked around, and then they walked away, toward Seven. It was kind of odd, suspicious, I guess, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.”
“Seven?” Sachs asked.
Gibbs indicated one of the drilling pens surrounded by the six-foot-high green fence. This one did not have a derrick rising from it. Beside a gate was a sign.
Area 7
Drilling: 3/8–3/10
HDPE: 4/3
Grouting: 4/4
As they walked to the site Sachs asked the tall worker, “Did you see his face?”
“Not clear, no. Sorry. Pretty much the build of the guy was in that picture you showed me. But no face.”
Her eyes were on the battered fence.
“Could they get inside? Maybe they wanted to conduct some business out of sight.”
Gibbs told her, “If he had a key. A lot of guys do.”
“What’s in there?” Nodding at the fence.
Schoal answered. “Shafts and a mud pit.” He could see she didn’t understand and added, “See, geothermal works by pumping fluid from the surface down hundreds, or thousands, of feet, and back up again.”
“I read your billboard.”
“PR guy wrote it but it gives you an okay idea. The first step is we drill shafts—in this case about five to six hundred feet—into bedrock. Then we feed pipe into it. That loop I mentioned, basically two thick hoses joined at the end—called HDPE, high-density polyethylene—so the fluid can circulate. Since geothermal only works when the piping’s in contact with the ground we pour conductive grout down the shaft after the piping’s in place. This one, Area Seven, there’re twenty shafts. We’ve drilled them all but they’re not scheduled for the piping to go in for a couple of weeks—April third. It’s shut down till then.”
She said to the supervisor, “So there’d be nobody working and they could talk in private. Can you open it up for me?”
Schoal asked Gibbs, “Mud pit?”
“Haven’t dredged it out yet.”
He said to Sachs, “Just watch your step. The way drilling works is we pump water down with the drill face, and mud and rock’re pumped back up into what we call a mud pit. Eventually it’s emptied out and the sludge and stone’re taken to dump sites but the one in Seven hasn’t been emptied yet. Nasty stuff.”
Schoal fished a key from his belt and opened the gate. Sachs walked inside, adding, “Can you wait out here?”
He nodded, though he didn’t get why, his expression said.
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.”
His brows, set high in his well-worn face, knitted close. He brushed at his thinning, curly hair, walked to the front door and looked outside. He called back to her, “No trucks, no accidents.” He added that a few people were outside of their houses, looking around.
Maybe, Ruth thought, there had been a crash and a collision had ruptured a propane truck. But wait, propane didn’t smell like natural gas. Ruth knew this because barbecuing was one of their most enjoyable pastimes in the summer.
She walked to the cellar door and opened it. She was hit with the same stink but ten times stronger. “Honey! Come here!”
Arnie appeared in an instant. He noticed the open door. Sniffed. “My God.”
He peered downstairs and started to reach for the light, then stopped, as she was about to say, No! Arnie glanced at the fire extinguisher sitting next to the stove. It was seven years old.
She said, “We should get out. We should get out now.”
“I’ll call. We have to call. Isn’t there a special number you call for gas leaks? How do we find it?” He reached for the wall phone.
“Gas company?” she asked, incredulous. “Forget it, hon! We’ll call nine one one from outside.” She stepped toward her purse. “Come on! We have to get out.”
“I’ll just—”
From the basement door a tide of flame and smoke exploded outward, enveloping Arnie. As he flung his arms up and covered his face, he was blown against the far wall and landed on the floor, crying out in pain.
No, no, no! Ruth ducked beneath the raging tornado of fire that swirled from the doorway, screaming her husband’s name. She crouched and started toward him.
Suddenly a jolt sent her to her knees and the half of the kitchen floor where she was standing dropped three or four feet—the explosion had taken out the joists. As the smoke and flames and dust swirled about them, she could see Arnie—lying on his side, swiping frantically at his burning clothing. He was above her, on the part of the floor that hadn’t dropped. From the gap between the sections of flooring flowed dense black smoke, tongues of flame and red sparks like stinging bees.
Ruth struggled to her feet on the slanting floor, looking around frantically. They couldn’t use the back door now to escape—with the sunken floor, the exit was too high to reach, and was bathed in flames spiraling up from the basement.
The front. They had to get out the front. But first, Ruth needed to climb up to the level that Arnie lay on.
“Honey, honey!” she called. “The front! Get out the front!” But the words vanished in the roar. She hadn’t known that fire could be so loud.
Dodging the whips of flame, she started to climb up to Arnie, who was choking and writhing in pain. At least, she saw, he’d managed to strip off the burning clothing.
; She put her hands on the end of the floorboards at his level and started to boost herself up. “The front door. Let’s—”
But at that moment the portion of the floor she was standing on dropped away completely and Ruth plunged into the basement, landing in a ragdoll pile on the concrete, pelted on head, arms and shoulders by boards, the kitchen table, cookbooks and cans of beans.
Fire was all around her now: storage boxes, Arnie’s magazines, Christmas decorations, the girls’ old clothing, furniture. And flames licked the cans and jars of flammables on Arnie’s workbench—cleaners, paint thinner, turpentine, alcohol. They could be exploding any moment.
Ruth Phillips understood she was about to die.
Thinking of Claire and Sammi. The grandchildren, too. Arnie, of course. The love of her life. Then, now, forever.
She ducked as another joist collapsed and slammed to the floor. It narrowly missed her head.
Choking on the smoke, twisting away from the needle-sharp embers and the fists of heat.
But then, Ruth thought: No.
She wasn’t going to die this way. In pain. Not by fire.
She looked around, as best she could through the fog of boiling smoke. The stairs were gone but in the corner, right under the ledge of the floor that remained, where Arnie lay, was her mother’s old dresser. She crawled to it and climbed on the top. She wasn’t strong enough to do a pull-up and roll onto the floor above her. But she kicked off the slippers, for better grip, stretched her leg high and planted a foot on the mirror on top of the dresser, feeling a thigh muscle drawn to the snapping point.
She ignored the pain.
Flames swelled. A can of turpentine exploded and a swirl of pine-scented fire and smoke ballooned beside her. Ruth turned away, felt the sting of fire on her ankles and arms. But her clothing didn’t ignite.
The fire, she saw, was licking a gallon can of paint thinner.
Now. This is it. Last chance.
Gripping the broken hardwood planks above her, she kicked hard and, in clumsy desperation, clawed her way up, rolling onto the kitchen floor beside Arnie.
“Ruth!” Arnie crawled to her. He was down to his boxer shorts. Half his hair was gone, eyebrows too. And there were burns on his face, neck, chest and right arm but they hadn’t incapacitated him.
The Cutting Edge Page 15