The Cutting Edge

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Out! We have to get out! The front!”

  Keeping low, for what little air remained in the house, they started down the hall but got only halfway to the front door. Because of the smoke they hadn’t been able to see that the living room and front alcove were a mass of flame too. The bedroom windows weren’t an option either. Those rooms were burning as well.

  “Garage,” she cried. It was their last hope.

  Gripping each other hard, they pushed forward. Just before the heat and flames drove them back—to a claustrophobic, searing death in the narrow corridor—they reached the garage door. Ruth touched the metal knob and let go immediately.

  “It’s hot,” she said.

  A pause. They both laughed, a bit hysterical. Because of course it was hot. Everything in the damn house was hot.

  She gripped the knob again, twisted it and shoved open the door. They crouched. But there were no flames here, just smoke and fumes roiling into the garage from the vents and up from under the baseboards. They plunged inside. It was hard to see through the eye-stinging clouds but the garage was small and—since it was used for storage only, not parking—they could follow the path to the front between rows of boxes and kitchen appliances and sports equipment from days long ago.

  Choking and wiping their streaming eyes, they moved steadily to the front of the structure. She felt light-headed and fell once. Ruth then got a breath of better air, low to the floor, then another and, with Arnie’s help, she rose again.

  Arms around each other, husband and wife finally made it to the front of the garage. With another laugh, this one of pure relief, Ruth pressed the button of the door opener.

  Chapter 24

  Just breathe, Detective.”

  She nodded to the city medical tech. And tried to follow his orders. Slowly. Okay…Inhale, exhale. The coughing began in earnest once more.

  Not okay.

  Hacking, spitting.

  Try again. Control it…Concentrating on her lungs, the muscles in her chest. Yes, she controlled it. Breathe in, out. Slowly.

  Okay. Controlling it.

  No more coughing. Good.

  “Sounding great, Detective,” the tech said. He was a cheerful man with curly black hair and skin a mocha shade.

  “All good,” she rasped.

  Then she puked.

  Again, again, again.

  Sitting on the back lip of the ambulance, she bent double at the waist and evacuated a mass of the filthy mud soup.

  Most had gone into her gut, not her lungs, apparently.

  After a moment or two of retching, the feeling subsided.

  She took the bottle of water that the EMT offered. Rinsed her mouth and poured it over her face. She couldn’t imagine what she looked like from the neck up. She’d shed her clothes and dressed in a set of Tyvek overalls—she kept a carton in the trunk of her car. It felt like her hair weighed thirty pounds. Her fingernails, always short, ended in goth black crescents.

  Beside her sat her Glock, which, before she did anything else, she’d cleaned in a mini field strip, including running a patch soaked with Hoppe’s solvent through the barrel. It had been dangerously clogged.

  “What was that shit?” she asked. “That I swallowed?”

  She posed this question to Arthur Schoal, the Northeast Geo supervisor, who was beside the ambulance. He was still looking mortified at what had befallen her.

  “The mud? Just water, soil, clay, maybe a bit of diesel fuel from the drills. Nothing more toxic than that.”

  Yeah, she tasted petroleum. And she thought back to her younger bad-girl days: when you needed gas for your Camaro and you had no money but you did have a length of siphoning hose and the inside knowledge of where some local numbers runner or Mafioso wannabe parked his Caddie.

  Another bout of coughing, another slug of water. The regurgitation—one of her absolute least favorite activities—seemed at bay.

  The important thing, she told herself, was that her knee was fine, after the slam onto the wobbly plank. She was still mobile and free—largely free—from the arthritic pain that had dogged her for so many years.

  She squinted away tears from the puking, and noticed ribbons of mud on Schoal’s clothes.

  “You pulled me out?”

  “Me and Gibbs. The guy we were talking to.”

  “He here?”

  “No, he went to call his wife. See if she was okay.”

  Okay? she wondered.

  “I’ll have to pay you,” she said to Schoal.

  The man blinked and nodded, though he’d had no idea what she was talking about.

  “For the mud treatment. In a spa they can cost a hundred bucks.”

  He laughed.

  Sachs did too. And summoned up every ounce of willpower to keep from sobbing.

  She’d told the joke not for him but to shove aside the utter horror of being held immobile in the muck, unable to breathe.

  It had affected her. Badly. Being held helpless, being sucked down, down, down. She’d almost been buried alive—wet earth or dry, that made no difference. Confinement was her personal hell.

  She shivered once more. Recalling a banished memory from years ago. As a girl she’d read a book that she believed was called Stranger than Fiction, about real-life occurrences that were, well, strange. One was about exhuming a coffin, for some reason, only to find fingernail scratches on the inside of the lid. She hadn’t slept for two days after that and when she did she refused to cover up with sheets or blankets.

  “Hey, Detective. You okay?”

  She controlled the creeping panic attack, like she’d controlled the coughing. But just.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Deep breaths, she told herself.

  Okay, okay.

  She wanted to call Rhyme. No, she didn’t want to. She wanted to drive two hundred miles an hour even if it meant burning out the Torino’s engine. No, she wanted to go home and curl up in bed.

  Frozen—hands, feet, arms, belly and neck, all held motionless in the wet, slimy grave.

  She shivered. Put. It. Away.

  The medical technician said, “Detective, your heart rate…”

  Her finger was clipped to one of the heavy-duty machines the EMTs came armed with.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe…

  “Better.”

  “Thanks.” She pulled the clip off, handed it to the tech. “I’m good now.”

  He was examining her carefully. And he nodded.

  It was then that she noticed that the Northeast Geo workers were talking among themselves, standing in clusters. Their expressions were troubled. And it wasn’t Sachs’s near-death experience that took their attention.

  She recalled wondering about the supervisor’s comment that Gibbs, the worker she’d been speaking to, had called his wife to see if she was all right.

  Something was going on.

  She realized too that there were a dozen sirens in the distance. Ambulance sirens and police sirens.

  She remembered the shaking of the ground. And she thought immediately of a terrorist attack. The Twin Towers once again.

  “What happened?” Sachs whispered, the tame volume partly from concern, partly because her vocal cords weren’t up to a louder task.

  A male voice, not Schoal’s or the EMT’s, said, “Believe it or not: earthquake.”

  A slim man approached, pale, about forty. He was in gray slacks and white shirt and blue windbreaker, beneath the requisite orange vest. His paisley tie disappeared against his chest between the second and third buttons from the top of his shirt, probably so it didn’t get caught in machinery gears. His glasses were round.

  He looked, Sachs thought, sciencey.

  Which made sense because, as it turned out, he was a scientist.

  Schoal introduced her to Don McEllis, an inspector with the New York State Division of Mineral Resources within the Department of Environmental Conservation. He was an engineer and a geologist and it was his job, he explained, to supervise the
drilling that his organization had approved. Since the Northeast geothermal project dug shafts that were five hundred feet or deeper, the DMR regulated the work; above that depth the Division of Water oversaw the construction.

  “Earthquake?”

  “Yep.”

  Sachs recalled some TV show, or maybe an article, about quakes in the New York area. There’d been several.

  “Did it cause any damage?”

  McEllis said, “At least one fire. That’s the main danger with earthquakes in first-world nations. Even if a building isn’t designed to be earthquake-proof, most of ’em’ll remain standing. But gas lines can shear. So, fires. San Francisco, nineteen oh six, the city burned, it didn’t collapse.”

  “I’m standing up,” she said to the med tech.

  He looked at her quizzically. “Okay.”

  She’d expected him to say no.

  “I am.”

  “You can stand up.”

  She stood. She was a little woozy but managed to rise without difficulty, though she swayed a bit—mostly from the weight of the mud embedded in her hair.

  “How powerful was it?”

  “Minor. Three point nine—that’s the Richter scale.” With a scientist’s combination of knowledge and naïveté, he methodically explained that the famous scale everyone knew about was in fact outmoded for measuring most earthquakes; it was used nowadays only for classifying minor tremors. “Anything larger than five is rated according to the MM, or moment magnitude, scale.”

  She didn’t want to ask for more information because she knew he would oblige.

  But continue he did anyway. “This magnitude is typical of what we see in the Northeast. The faults in the New York area aren’t as active or as well defined as in California, say. Or Mexico or Italy or Afghanistan. That’s the good news: Quakes are very infrequent. But the bad news is the nature of the geology here is that if there were to be a bad earthquake the damage would be much more serious and would travel much farther. Also, our buildings aren’t made to withstand it. San Francisco’s pretty earthquake-proof nowadays. But here? A quake that registered six on the MM scale in New York City—which isn’t all that powerful—could leave ten thousand people dead, twice that buried in the rubble. Whole neighborhoods would have to be shut down because the buildings would be too unstable.”

  Buried in the rubble…

  Sachs again forced away the arms of panic. Barely.

  “Where was the epicenter?” she asked.

  “Nearby,” McEllis said. “Very nearby.”

  Schoal was staring over Area 7, whose gate was still open. They could see the plastic-bag-covered shafts. The supervisor was somber. Sachs recalled that the protesters were complaining about fracking. Maybe Schoal was thinking, despite his comments earlier, that possibly their drilling had caused the quake.

  Or maybe it was just that he’d be concerned the tremor would give the protesters ammunition in attacking the project.

  Sachs took another bottle of water from the medic and, with a smile of thanks, tilted her head back so she was staring at the sky. She emptied the bottle into her hair. He fed her four more and by the last one, it felt that most of the mud was gone.

  Better. Mud-wise and panic-wise.

  She was ready. She called Lincoln Rhyme.

  “You hear?”

  “About what?”

  “The earthquake.”

  “What earthquake?”

  That answered the question.

  “Shook up the city, half hour ago.”

  “Really? Hm.” His tone said his mind was elsewhere. “You find anything at the jobsite?”

  “I think so. I’ll be back soon. Going to stop by my place.”

  “Why?”

  “Want to clean up first.”

  “Don’t bother with that. Who cares? Just come on in.”

  She said nothing for a moment. He must have wondered about the pause. “I won’t be long.”

  Sachs disconnected before he could protest further.

  Chapter 25

  Vimal’s childhood bedroom—also his present bedroom—was small, on the second floor of the modest home in this modest Queens neighborhood, Jackson Heights. This particular area was a largely Indian community.

  It was a two-story, single-family brick structure, with small front and backyards, neither of which was any good for football, except to practice footwork.

  He’d lived here, within these four very claustrophobic walls, for all of his life. At least he had it to himself now. He’d had to share the space with his brother for a few years until Dada, his grandfather, passed, and Sunny moved into the old man’s room.

  Upon returning home from Dev Nouri’s, Vimal had taken a spot bath—washcloths only—not wanting to disturb the wound that Adeela had so carefully dressed. An examination of his torso revealed that she’d done a good job. There was no more bleeding and still no infection. Now, back in his bedroom, he toweled his legs and chest with one hand and, with the other, manned the remote. He was searching the news on the Samsung.

  The murder was a prominent story but it was not the lead; that would be the earthquake that had shaken up Brooklyn and much of the rest of the city.

  When the anchor got to the deaths of Mr. Patel and the engaged couple, he said there were some new details about the “daring” robbery, though Vimal wasn’t sure how much balls it took to walk into a largely deserted office building, kill three unarmed individuals and run out.

  He wrapped the towel around his thin waist and watched the screen. The next bit of news stunned him.

  Saul Weintraub, the assayer and evaluator Mr. Patel used from time to time, had been killed, as well. The police believed there was some connection between the four murders.

  Vimal closed his eyes briefly in dismay and sat, heavily, on the edge of his bed.

  So the killer—the Promisor—believed Mr. Weintraub had seen something Saturday morning, that he was a witness. Vimal recalled that Mr. Patel said he was meeting with the man sometime that weekend.

  How had the killer found where Mr. Weintraub lived?

  Vimal recalled the newscast of the press conference on Saturday afternoon, the police spokesman’s urging anyone with knowledge of the killing to come forward immediately.

  And Vimal’s reading between the lines.

  For their own safety…

  How safe was he?

  Vimal felt pretty secure, thinking again of his minimal connection with Mr. Patel: being paid in cash and keeping nothing personal in the shop to identify him. And trying to track Vimal down by scouring the Diamond District wouldn’t be very productive. Unlike in years past, there were few diamond merchants left in the old, musty office building at 58 West 47th. Only one or two cutters, two jewelry stores. And Vimal was sure that no one in the building or on the street would know who he was. He kept to himself, preferring to get home to his studio at the end of the day. And most of the diamantaires and others in the business who might know him were here in Jackson Heights, miles—and a river—away from the Manhattan Diamond District. Vimal had acquaintances who worked in the galleries of SoHo or NoHo, or were studying art where he so wanted to be: Parsons, or Pratt in Brooklyn. But he wasn’t close to any of them.

  His closest friend in the diamond world was another cutter, about his age: Kirtan Boshi—they’d have lunch or drinks together frequently, sometimes double-dating, with Adeela and Kirtan’s girlfriend, an aspiring model. Kirtan worked for a diamantaire but some distance from 47th Street, in a building in the Fashion District; the shop had a name that gave no clue as to the Indian ethnicity of the owner—or that it was a jewelry store.

  No, it seemed very unlikely that a killer, however determined, could find him.

  Vimal tossed aside the towel, pulled on underwear, blue jeans, T-shirt and sweatshirt, his Nikes.

  On TV: back to the earthquake. He couldn’t hear what the commentators were talking about. Two men seemed to be arguing. A crawl said that an environmental group thought that d
rilling work deep beneath the city might be to blame.

  He shut the set off. Vimal Lahori had his own problems.

  Filled with resignation, he trooped downstairs. In the living room, Sunny—younger, though taller, than Vimal—looked up from the TV screen and paused the video game. “Yo. Dude.”

  The eighteen-year-old’s eyes revealed his concern, even if his low-key greeting and the deflecting grin hadn’t. Sunny was a freshman at Hunter, destined, the boy hoped, for medical school. Vimal believed he would—and should—end up in tech, an opinion he kept to himself.

  “You, like, cool?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  Awkwardly, the younger brother stood, as if debating whether he should embrace Vimal, who decided the question himself and dropped into the couch before the uneasy moment arrived. Vimal snatched up the controller and resumed the game his brother had been playing.

  “Screw you,” Sunny said, laughing hard—too hard.

  “You’re only at level seven?”

  “I’ve been playing for ten minutes is all. You couldn’t get to seven in a day.”

  “I got to eight on Thursday. Four hours.”

  “Gimme.”

  Vimal held the controller away as his brother grabbed for it. After some tame horse wrestling he handed the device over. Vimal took a second controller and they played jointly. A few more aliens died, another spaceship blew up. Vimal found Sunny looking him over closely.

  “What, man? It’s freaking me out.”

  “What?”

  “That eyeball shit. Stop it.”

  Sunny’s character on the screen got vaporized. Not seeming to notice, he asked, “What was it like?”

  “Like?”

  “Getting shot at?”

  Vimal corrected, “It wasn’t getting shot at. It was getting shot.”

  “No shit!”

  “Yeah. I walked in. There he was. Bang. Loud, like totally loud. Not like on TV. I mean, loud.”

  An abrupt voice from behind them. “You’re hurt?” His father had been standing in the hallway, it seemed. He walked into the living room.