He recalled the case, easily picturing the face of the man who’d served eight years for a rape he did not commit. The convict’s eyes, fixed on Rhyme’s, had been filled with hope and desperation. The woman technician who’d intentionally written the false report, because she believed him guilty, had not looked up from the floor.
Rhyme said, “I never make a judgment about the moral nature of the defendants in the trials I work. I’m in the midst of a big case at the moment but if you want to come to my town house, we can talk about it.”
“Ah, really, Mr. Rhyme? I am so grateful.”
“I can’t promise anything but I’d like to hear the details.”
They chose a time and Rhyme gave his address. They disconnected.
Rhyme wheeled up to the evidence charts. Cooper was writing up some recent information from the crime lab in Queens: The DNA and fingerprinting from the jacket found in the storm drain had come back negative. So had the hairs and swabs from the Gravesend attack.
Rhyme noted the words on the whiteboard. He tucked them away and then returned to thinking about what the Mexican lawyer had told him. He thought too of Sachs, Sellitto, Cooper and the others, hard at work on the Unsub 47 case and reflected, What would they think if they knew I’m considering signing on with the drug dealer’s team?
There was no good answer to that question and so he ignored it and returned to the evidence.
Chapter 36
The word “bedridden” didn’t really fit for the now. It fit for the then.
The long-time-ago then.
The Jane Austen then. The Brontë Sisters. The novels that Claire Porter used to read and reread—in college and after. Recently, some of them.
Bedridden.
Often, in those books, a character was tucked away under down comforters and thick blankets, with a compress on a feverish forehead, because of some mysterious unnamed disease. Or exhaustion. Exhaustion was a common malady in the then. When reading about life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Porter always wondered what could be so stressful back then that you had to recuperate by staying in bed for weeks at a time. Or taking a cruise (if you were one of the posh people).
Posh. Another good then word.
Nothing posh about my bedridden life, thought the thirty-four-year-old.
Lying on her Sealy Posturepedic in the bedroom of their first-floor apartment in Brooklyn, Porter looked out the window at Cadman Park, monotone and wet and chill today, which fit her mood pretty well.
The slim brunette barista had been sidelined not by exhaustion or a novelist’s anonymous disease but because she’d tripped over a dog. Not even hers, but a fuzzy little thing that’d slipped a lead while she and her husband had been out jogging and darted in front of her. She’d twisted away, instinctively, and heard a pop in her ankle. Down she went.
Hell, a sprain, she’d thought.
Wrong. It was one fucking nightmare of a break.
Two surgeries to start, then a battle with infection, then under the knife again—to place steel pins. Bionic woman, her husband had joked gamely, though he was clearly shaken by her pain—and, understandably, dismayed by his new responsibilities; the couple had an eighteen-month-old daughter. Dad—a graphic designer in Midtown—was now living a double-shift life. And she couldn’t even think about his cheerfully forced nod when the doctor said it was best to avoid “intimate relations” that would put the ankle at risk for at least six months. (Something Victorian about the MO’s phrase too, come to think of it.)
With a crutch, Porter could just about handle the basics: The bathroom. A trip to the mini fridge that Sam had set up in this, the guest, bedroom. She could get a bottle and the solid food to feed Erin, whose small bed was beside hers. That was about the extent of her activity until the wound healed. How she loved to cook, how she loved to run, how she loved the barista job—the banter, the quirky and bizarre people she met.
But it was another month of being bedridden.
Claire Porter resolved to be good and follow orders. Another fall, the doctor warned, could make the injury far worse. Infection, necrosis of the skin. Ick. And though he hadn’t mentioned amputation, Google had. And once seated in her mind, that thought stuck like a leech and wouldn’t let go.
At least she could continue her online studies. Barista now, owner of a small restaurant consulting business in two years. She lifted the Mac onto her tummy, glanced at the crib. Thank you for snoozing, honey doll! Hell, she wanted to kiss the girl’s toffee-blond hair. But that would be a big project.
Bedridden.
She booted up and worked for a few minutes, then, goddamn it. The urge. She needed to use the bathroom.
It was funny how we can anticipate exactly where and how pain will get us. Porter went through the instinctive choreography of shifting one leg, the other, her torso and arms in a complicated pattern to let her sit up without bringing tears to her eyes.
Or puking.
She negotiated the sitting-up with relatively little discomfort. And she managed to snag the crutches pretty well.
Now the standing-up part.
A deep breath, everything coming into alignment. Okay, scoot forward.
Then…okay slow…then up.
Porter, who weighed in at about 110 pounds, felt the force of gravity tugging her down, down, down. The crutches did this, turned her into a load of bricks. But she managed. A few steps. She paused as her vision crinkled a bit. She was light-headed. Lowering her head, breathing deeply, she reminded herself to get up slowly next time. Fainting? She couldn’t even imagine what a fall would do to her fragile bones.
Then her head cleared and she moved toward the hall. She paused to look down at Erin, who slept the sleep of youthful oblivion, with dreams, if at all, simple and kind.
Claire Porter hobbled onward to the bathroom. Sam had modified it—he’d put a shower seat in the tub and replaced the wall-mounted head with a handheld unit. He’d added a high seat on the toilet so she didn’t need to put much weight on her foot.
One good thing about the accident. No fashion choices. It was sweats, sweats, sweats…Just tug the turquoise bottoms down with the panties and sit. Job done.
Getting up was a bit harder but she knew how to manage it.
Anticipation…
Up and pain-free. Damn, my right leg’s going to be solid wood by the time this is over.
As Claire Porter was washing her hands she felt a shudder throughout the apartment. Windows rattled and a glass sitting on the shelf leapt off the edge and died in a dozen shards on the tile floor.
Porter gasped.
My God. What was that? Another one of those earthquakes? She’d followed the news. Something about that drilling—the construction site they said was responsible was a half mile from here. There was a lot of protesting. Environmental folks versus big business. She couldn’t remember exactly.
Wow, a quake in New York! This was something. She’d have to tell her mother about it when they talked next. It had been a fairly minor tremor—no damage to the walls or windows.
But that was a problem.
And a serious one.
Bare feet. Broken glass.
Stupid, she thought. She had slippers (well, slipper; nothing was going on the bad foot) but hadn’t bothered to put it on. And now five feet of obstacle course to get to the hallway.
She looked down. When the glass hit, it hit hard.
Shit. It would be impossible for her to clean up the mess. Bending over was no option. She could use the crutch to push the bigger pieces out of the way but she couldn’t see the smaller ones on the white tile.
Towels. She would cover the floor with bath towels and place her good foot only where there were no lumps. The smaller ones wouldn’t penetrate—she hoped.
She pulled the thickest towels from the racks and strewed them on a path to the door.
One step. Good.
She paused to find a spot for the next one and froze.
What was that? S
he smelled natural gas.
“Jesus, Jesus…”
Porter recalled the terrible news story about what had happened after the first earthquake. The damage from the shaking hadn’t been bad at all. A few broken windows. But some gas lines had broken. The resulting explosions and fires had killed several people: a couple, trapped in their burning house.
Well, she and her daughter weren’t going to be victims.
They were on the first floor. She’d get Erin and clutch her tight and hobble outside, shouting her head off for the other tenants to get out too.
Move, move, move!
Another step.
One more. And then the glass splinter leveraged through the towel like a scorpion’s stinger and pierced her heel.
Porter screamed and fell backward. She released the crutch and got her hand behind her head just in time to keep her skull from cracking on the side of the porcelain bathtub. Pain careened through her body. Her vision crinkled again—from the agony. It then returned, though blurred by more tears.
The smell of gas was stronger here: Her face was beside the access panel to the bathroom pipes, which led down to the basement, where the cracked gas line would be.
Go! Somehow, she had to get to the room and save her baby.
Crawl over the fucking glass if you have to!
An image came to her: The news footage of the buildings burning following the most recent quakes—that horrifying tornado of orange flames and oily black smoke.
Save your daughter.
“Erin!” she cried involuntarily.
The girl must have heard—or perhaps she’d been woken by the foul smell of the gas—and she started screaming.
“No, honey, no! Mommy’s coming!” She struggled to roll onto her belly, so she could start her frantic crawl to her daughter.
But she hadn’t realized that her broken ankle had become wedged beneath the bathroom’s heavy wooden vanity. As she rolled over, she felt, and heard, the gritty snap of the delicate bone work giving way. Breathtaking pain exploded within her entire body.
Screaming in unison with her infant daughter, Claire Porter looked at her foot. The metal rods that the surgeon had implanted just the other day had ripped through the skin and, bloody, were poking out of the top of her foot. She gagged and felt her head thud hard against the tile floor as blackness embraced her like oily smoke.
Chapter 37
Vimal Lahori was back in his beloved bus station, the Port Authority.
Better this time. Less pain. The horror of the killing had diminished. And he had money.
At home last night, before he’d gone down to the studio to “have words” with his father, he’d walked upstairs on the pretext of getting a sweater. He’d done that…but he’d also taken the three thousand dollars—his three thousand—that Nouri had paid him, as well as his wallet. He had lifted another two hundred of his father’s because he was owed that, and much, much more, for the cutting jobs his father had rented him out for. He got his phone too. A razor, toothpaste and brush, the antiseptic Adeela had given him. Some bandages. And of course his Book, his most precious possession.
Vimal had been planning all along to escape last night as soon as his parents were busy with their game or had gone to sleep. He’d agreed to some ambiguous peace treaty with his father, which Vimal hadn’t meant a word of. But then it turned out that his father hadn’t meant a word of it either. He should have guessed that Papa was lying—and going to entrap him in the basement prison; the bottled water stacked up, the food in the fridge, the sleeping bag. Lite fucking beer?
Goddamn it.
He shivered with rage.
Vimal was now walking away from the Greyhound window. The one-way ticket cost him $317.50. The journey from New York to the station at 1716 7th Street, in Los Angeles, would take sixty-five hours.
Thinking about what was coming next, Vimal Lahori was sorrowful, he was terrified.
But these emotions were outweighed by the exhilaration he felt, and he knew he was doing the right thing. He turned his phone on and texted his mother that he loved her. And texted his brother that he loved him too and he’d be in touch from someplace out of town.
He then bought a soda—a large Cherry Coke, a secret delight (his father never let him have any beverage with caffeine because he was, for some reason, convinced it would make his son’s hands shake, resulting in a flawed diamond facet). Vimal bought a slice of pizza too. He stood, eating and sipping, at a dirty high-top table. There were no chairs for customers. To encourage turnover in the “dining room,” he guessed.
He looked into what amounted to his luggage—a canvas bag he’d bought for a dollar at a grocery store. And he took out what gave him as much comfort as the Port Authority itself.
The Book. A holy book in a way. It was something he turned to a lot, something that comforted him, that never failed to astonish.
The Collected Sketches of Michelangelo had been printed years ago, in the early part of the prior century. Vimal considered the master to be the greatest sculptor who’d ever lived and, given his own passion, it was logical that he’d be drawn to the man and his art. The artist was Vimal’s god. Oh, he liked pop music, manga and would have liked binge-worthy TV, had his father allowed him to watch much of it. But he loved Michelangelo and, in those moments when his ancestral country’s religious legacy—reincarnation—seemed plausible to him (this was rare, usually after wine), he fantasized that the ancient sculptor’s soul—part of it, at least—resided within Vimal himself.
Of course, Michelangelo was a prodigy. He was under thirty when he sculpted David and Pietà. Vimal didn’t rise to that level yet, though his own works, crafted in marble and granite and lapis, usually placed first or second in competitions around the New York City area.
But it had occurred to Vimal, with a shock, recently, that there was possibly a subtler, a subconscious, reason for his obsession with the man. Once, flipping through the pages, on break at Mr. Patel’s, he realized that the majority of Michelangelo’s sketches depicted in the volume, while superbly executed, were incomplete.
The man seemed incapable of finishing his drawings.
His 1508 study for Adam was merely a head and chest and floating, detached arms. His sketch for a Risen Christ featured a nearly faceless Jesus.
Incomplete…
Those sketches are just like me, Vimal had concluded, while acknowledging that the “disembodied” theory sounded like bad pop psychology on a bad TV show.
There was another parallel too between the two men. Vimal had shared this with Adeela and she’d given him one of her wry smiles. Meaning, Really? Aren’t you carrying this a bit far?
Well, no, he wasn’t.
The analogy was this: Michelangelo considered himself a sculptor before all else and only reluctantly would take on commissions for paintings. He wasn’t exactly a hack at this, of course, having produced the Sistine Chapel ceiling in merely four years, as well as The Last Judgment and dozens of other masterpieces. But Michelangelo’s passions lay elsewhere, with marble not canvas. And for Vimal, it was marble not jewelry.
Painting and diamond cutting, in their respective cases, simply didn’t ignite that undeniable, searing fire that flares when you’re doing the one thing that God, or the gods, or whatever, put you on earth for.
As he finished the greasy slice and slurped the last of the soda, anger at his father once more swelled. Then he tamped it down and, with a last look at the Poseidon statue, closed the book and replaced it in his bag.
Walking with his head mostly down—he wore a black baseball cap—he left the pizzeria and avoided the clusters of police, making his way to the waiting area. The bus would be leaving soon.
He sat down on a plastic chair, next to a pleasant-looking girl in her late twenties. He noticed from her ticket that, for the first leg of the journey at least, she would be on the same bus that his ticket was for. The address sticker on her guitar case was Springfield, Illinois. She wasn’t very Midwest
in appearance, at least from Vimal’s limited knowledge of the region. Her hair was green and blue and she had three nose studs and a ring in her eyebrow. Vimal supposed that her dreams of stages and cabarets and theater in New York had come to an end. Her stoic face suggested this too. Wistful, as if she’d lost something important and given up looking. Which seemed sadder than sad.
Then Vimal reflected that this might be his imagination and she was going to spend a few days with some former roommates from college, drink plenty of wine from a box, sleep with a local bar boy and have the time of her life.
What was the truth?
The older he got, Vimal Lahori had decided, the less he knew.
A staticky voice—of indeterminate gender—announced that the bus was ready to depart. He leaned down, gathered his bag and rose.
* * *
“Any idea where he’s run off to?”
“None,” Sachs explained to Rhyme, who’d asked about Vimal Lahori, after the young man’s prison break from his own house. Clever, pretending to grind away on sculpture, all the while you’re cutting steel bars.
Sick, of course, that his father had decided to play jailer.
Sachs continued, “He took about three thousand from his father—though his mother tells me that it’s really his. Lahori takes everything the boy makes as a diamond cutter and banks it. He gives the kid an allowance.”
“At his age? Hm.”
The doorbell rang and Thom went to answer it. He returned a few moments later with Edward Ackroyd, dressed in a two-piece suit, pinstripe light gray, perfectly pressed. White shirt and red-and-blue-striped tie. Rhyme pictured him wearing this getup for a meeting at 10 Downing Street.
“Lincoln. Amelia.”
He’d given up, at last, on the “sir” and “ma’am.” Rhyme imagined that Scotland Yard protocols were largely baked in.
The insurance man said hello as well to Cooper.
“Any new leads?” he asked.
Rhyme offered the latest developments.
“Vimal Lahori.” Ackroyd nodded. “A bit more to go on. But locked in his basement?” A brief frown at this news. “And now he’s vanished. Doesn’t he know he’s in danger? Well, pointless question. Of course he does. But why doesn’t he want help?”
The Cutting Edge Page 23