Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories - 3

by Jeffery Deaver

  After his accident at the subway crime scene, he converted a parlor in his Central Park West townhouse into a forensic lab, one that was as well equipped as that in many small cities.

  Det. Melvin Cooper, an NYPD Crime Scene officer who often worked with Capt. Rhyme and did much of his laboratory work for him, recalled one of the first cases run out of his townhouse. "It was a big homicide, and we had a bunch of evidence. We cranked up the gas chromatograph, the scanning electron microscope and the mass spectrometer. Some other instruments, too. Then I turned on a table lamp and that was the last straw. It blew out the electricity. I don't mean just his townhouse. I mean the entire block and a lot of Central Park, too. Took us nearly an hour to get back on line."

  Despite his injury, Capt. Rhyme was not active in disability rights organizations. He once told a reporter, "How would you describe me? Six feet, white, one hundred eighty pounds, black hair, disabled. Those are all conditions that have, to a greater or lesser degree, affected my career as a criminalist. But I don't focus on any of them. My purpose in life is to find the truth behind crimes. Everything else is secondary. In other words, I'm a criminalist who, by the way, happens to be disabled."

  Ironically, largely because of this attitude, Capt. Rhyme has been held out by many advocates as an example of the new disabled movement, in which individuals are given neither to self-pity nor to exploiting or obsessing over their condition.

  "Lincoln Rhyme stood for the proposition that the disabled are human beings first with the same talents and passions--and shortcomings--as everyone else," said Sonja Wente, director of the Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Center. "He avoided both the pedestal and the soapbox."

  Capt. Rhyme himself observed in a recent interview, "The line between the disabled and the nondisabled is shrinking. Computers, video cameras, high-definition monitors, biometric devices and voice recognition software have moved my life closer to that of somebody who's fully able bodied, while the same technology is creating a more sedentary, housebound life for those who have no disability whatsoever. From what I've read, I lead a more active life than a lot of people nowadays."

  Nonetheless, Capt. Rhyme did not simply accept his disability but fought hard to maintain his ability to live as normal a life as he could and, in fact, to improve his condition.

  "Lincoln engaged in a daily regimen of exercises on various machinery, including a stationary bike and a treadmill," said Thom Reston, his personal aide and caregiver for a number of years. "I was always saying slow down, take it easy, watch your blood pressure." The aide added, laughing, "He ignored me."

  In fact in recent years, Reston said, the exercise paid off, and Capt. Rhyme was able to regain some use of his extremities and some sensation, a feat that spinal cord doctors described as a rare achievement.

  Capt. Rhyme was not only a practicing criminalist; throughout his tenure at the NYPD, he was in demand as a teacher and lecturer. After his accident, when traveling became more difficult, he continued to lecture on occasion at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Fordham University in New York City. He wrote about forensic issues and his articles have appeared in, among others, Forensic Science Review, The New Scotland Yard Forensic Investigation Annual, American College of Forensic Examiners Journal, Report of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors and The Journal of the International Institute of Forensic Science.

  He authored two books: a text on forensic science, still in use by thousands of police departments and law enforcement agencies around the world, and a popular nonfiction book, The Scenes of the Crime, about sites in New York City where unsolved murders occurred. The book is still in print.

  Capt. Rhyme was himself the subject of a series of best-selling popular novels, which recounted some of his better-known cases, including The Bone Collector, about a serial kidnapper; The Stone Monkey, recounting the hunt for a Chinese "snakehead," or human smuggler; and The Twelfth Card, in which he and Det. Amelia Sachs, who worked with him often, had to investigate a crime that occurred just after the Civil War. Recently, The Burning Wire detailed his efforts to stop a killer who was using the New York City power grid as a murder weapon.

  Publicly dismissive of the novels, he stated in interviews that he thought the books merely trivial "entertainments," good for reading on airplanes or at the beach, but little else.

  Privately, though, he was delighted to be the subject of the series, keeping an autographed set on his shelves. Visitors reported that he would often make them sit silent and listen to passages on CD he particularly liked.

  "Lincoln and his ego were never far apart," joked Mr. Reston.

  Capt. Rhyme was divorced from his wife, Blaine Chapman Rhyme, twelve years ago. They had no children. He is survived by his partner, Det. Sachs; his aunt Jeanette Hanson; and four cousins, Arthur Rhyme, Marie Rhyme-Sloane, Richard Hanson and Margaret Hanson.

  A memorial service for Capt. Rhyme will be held at 7 p.m., Monday, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, at Central Park West, New York, NY. Det. Sachs has asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to a charitable organization of their preference for the benefit of children with spinal cord injuries or disease.

  *

  THE FIRST FLOOR of the townhouse on Central Park West was quiet, dark. The lights were off and little of the dusk light from outside penetrated the curtains in the east-facing room.

  What had once been a quaint Victorian parlor was now filled with laboratory equipment, shelves, cabinets, office chairs, electronic devices. On examining tables were plastic and paper bags, tubes and boxes containing evidence. They were in no particular order.

  The atmosphere here was of a workplace whose otherwise busy pulse had been stopped cold.

  Tall, red-haired Amelia Sachs stood in the corner, beside frumpy Lon Sellitto. They both wore black suits.

  Her eyes, gazing down at Lincoln Rhyme's obituary.

  Sellitto glanced down at it. "Weird, hm?"

  She gave a faint unhappy laugh, then shook her head.

  "Felt exactly the same way. Hard enough to think about the idea, you know, without seeing it in black and white."

  "Yeah, I guess that's it."

  Sellitto looked at his watch. "Well, it's about time."

  The hour was close to 7 p.m., Monday, when the obit announced the memorial service was about to start.

  "Ready?"

  "As I'll ever be."

  The two people shared a glance, left the townhouse. Sachs locked the door. She glanced up at Lincoln Rhyme's darkened bedroom, outside of which the falcons nested on the ledge. She and Sellitto started down the street toward the Society for Ethical Culture, which was just a short walk away.

  *

  AMELIA SACHS RETURNED to the townhouse, accompanied by a group of other officers.

  Casual observers might have thought that the cops were returning from the memorial service for a reception in the house of the deceased.

  But they'd be wrong. The hour was merely seven twenty, which wouldn't have allowed nearly enough time for a proper service, even for someone as unspiritual as Lincoln Rhyme. And a closer look at the officers might reveal that they had their weapons drawn and were whispering into microphones held in hands or protruding from headsets.

  The dozen officers split into two groups, and on word from Lon Sellitto at a nearby command post, one sped through the front door, another jogged around back.

  Amelia Sachs, not surprisingly, was the first one through the front door.

  The lights flashed on and she crouched in the doorway, ignoring the painful griping of arthritic joints, as she trained her Glock on an astonished man in a suit and dark blue shirt, bending over an evidence table. He was surprised in the act of picking up a plastic bag in his latex-gloved fingers.

  "Freeze," Sachs barked and he did, noting undoubtedly the steadiness of her hand holding the pistol and the look in her eye that explained that she was more than prepared to fire it.

  "I--"

  "H
ands on your head."

  The solidly built middle-aged man sighed in disgust, dropped the bag and complied. "Look, I can explain."

  Sachs wondered how often she'd heard that in her years as a cop, at moments just like this.

  "Cuff him, search him," she barked to young, spiky-haired Ron Pulaski and the other officers on the takedown team. "He's a cop. Remember he might have two weapons."

  They relieved the man of his service Glock and, yep, a backup in an ankle holster, then cuffed him.

  "You don't understand."

  Sachs had heard that quite a bit, too.

  "Detective Peter Antonini, you're under arrest for murder." She offered up the mantra of the Miranda warning then asked, "Do you wish to waive your right to remain silent?"

  "No, I sure as hell don't."

  "There's not much he needs to say anyway," said a new voice in the room. Lincoln Rhyme wheeled his Merits Vision Select wheelchair, gray with red fenders, out of the small elevator that connected the lab with the upstairs bedroom. He nodded at the examination table. "Looks like the evidence tells it all."

  *

  "YOU?" ANTONINI GASPED. "You're...you were dead."

  "I thought you wanted to remain silent," Rhyme reminded him, enjoying the look of absolute astonishment on the guilty man's face.

  The criminalist wheeled to the evidence table and looked over what the officers had pulled from Antonini's pocket--Baggies of hair and dirt and other trace, which he intended to substitute for the evidence that had been sitting on the table, evidence the officer believed would convict him of murder.

  "You son of a bitch."

  "He keeps talking," Rhyme said, amused. "What's the point of Miranda?"

  At which point Detective second-class Peter Antonini, attached to Major Cases, did indeed fall silent as Sachs called Sellitto in the command van and told him about the successful takedown. He would in turn relay the news to the brass at One Police Plaza.

  You were dead...

  Rhyme's phony death and the obituary had been a last-ditch effort to solve a series of crimes that cut to the heart of the NYPD, though crimes that might have gone unnoticed if not for an offhand observation made by Ron Pulaski a week before.

  The young officer was in the lab helping Sellitto and Rhyme on a murder investigation in Lower Manhattan when a supervisor called with the news that the suspect had shot himself. Rhyme found the death troubling; he wanted closure in his cases, sure, but resolution by suicide was inelegant. It didn't allow for complete explanations, and Lincoln Rhyme detested unanswered questions.

  It was just then that Pulaski had frowned and said, "Another one?"

  "Whatta you mean?" Sellitto had barked.

  "One of our suspects dying before he gets collared. That's happened before. Those two others, remember, sir?"

  "No, I don't."

  "Tell us, Pulaski," Rhyme had encouraged him.

  "About two months ago, that Hidalgo woman, she was killed in a mugging."

  Rhyme remembered. A woman being investigated for attempted murder--beating her young child nearly to death--was found dead, killed during an apparent robbery. The evidence initially suggested Maria Hidalgo was guilty of beating the child, but after her death it was found that she was innocent. Her ex-husband had had some kind of psychotic break and attacked the child. Sadly she'd died before she could be vindicated.

  The other case, Pulaski had reminded him, involved an Arab-American who'd gotten into a fight with some non-Muslim men and killed one of them. Rhyme and Sellitto were looking into the politically charged case when the suspect fell in his bathtub and drowned. Rhyme later determined that a Muslim had killed the victim, but under circumstances that suggested manslaughter or even negligent homicide, not murder.

  He, too, died before the facts came out.

  "Kinda strange," Sellitto had said, then nodded at Pulaski. "Good thinking, kid."

  Rhyme had said, "Yeah, too strange. Pulaski, do me a favor and check out if there're any other cases like those--where suspects under investigation got offed or committed suicide."

  A few days later Pulaski came back with the results: There were seven cases in which suspects died while out on bail or before they'd been officially arrested. The means of death were suicide, accident and random muggings.

  Sellitto and Rhyme wondered if maybe a rogue cop was taking justice into his own hands--getting details on the progress of cases, deciding the suspects were guilty and executing them himself, avoiding the risk that the suspects might have gotten off at trial.

  The detective and Rhyme understood the terrible damage this could cause the department if true--a murderer in their midst using NYPD resources to facilitate his crimes. They talked to Chief of Department McNulty and were given carte blanche to get to the truth.

  Amelia Sachs, Pulaski and Sellitto interviewed friends and family of the suspects and witnesses nearby at the time they died. From these accounts it appeared that a middle-aged white man had been seen with many of the suspects just before their deaths. Several witnesses thought the man had displayed a gold shield; he was therefore a detective. The killer clearly knew Rhyme, since three of the victims were apparently murdered while the criminalist was running their cases. He and Sachs came up with a list of white detectives, aged thirty-five to fifty-five, he'd worked with over the past six months.

  They surreptitiously checked the detectives' whereabouts at the times of the killings, eventually clearing all but twelve.

  Rhyme opened an official investigation into the most recent case--the fake suicide that Pulaski had commented on. The scene was pretty cold and hadn't been well preserved--being only a suicide--but Amelia Sachs came up with a few clues that gave some hope of finding the killer. A few clothing fibers that didn't match anything in the victim's apartment, tool marks that might have come from jimmying a window and traces of unusual cooking oil. Those weren't helpful in finding the killer's identity, but a few things suggested where he might live: traces of loam-rich soil that turned out to be unique to the banks of the Hudson River, some of which contained "white gas," kerosene used in boats.

  So it was possible that the rogue cop lived near the river in Manhattan, the Bronx, Westchester or New Jersey.

  This narrowed the list to four detectives: from the Bronx, Diego Sanchez; from New Jersey, Carl Sibiewski; from Westchester, Peter Antonini and Eddie Yu.

  But there the case stalled. The evidence wasn't strong enough to get a warrant to search their houses for the clothing fibers, tools, cooking oil and guns.

  They needed to flush him. And Rhyme had an idea how.

  The killer would know that Rhyme was investigating the suicide--it was an official case--and would know that the criminalist probably had some evidence. They decided to give him the perfect opportunity to steal it or replace it with something implicating someone else.

  So Rhyme arranged his own death and had the chief send out the memo about it to a number of officers, including the four suspects (the others were told of the ploy and they agreed to play along). The memo would mention the memorial service, implying that at that time the lab would be unoccupied.

  Sellitto set up a search and surveillance team outside the townhouse and, while Rhyme remained in his bedroom, Sachs and Sellitto played the good mourners and left, giving the perp a chance to break in and show himself.

  Which he, oh so courteously, had done, using a screwdriver that appeared to be the same one that had left the marks on windows of prior victims' residences.

  Rhyme now ordered, "Get a warrant. I want all the clothes in his house, cooking oils and soil samples, other tools, too. And any guns. Send 'em to ballistics."

  As he was now led to the door, Peter Antonini pulled away roughly from one officer holding him and spun to face Rhyme and Sachs. "You think the system works. You think justice is served." His eyes were mad. "But it doesn't. I've been a cop long enough to know how screwed up it all is. You know how many guilty people get off every day? Murderers, child abusers,
wife beaters...I'm sick of it!"

  Amelia Sachs responded, "And what about those innocent ones you killed? Our system would have worked for them. Yours didn't."

  "Acceptable losses," he said coolly. "Sacrifices have to be made."

  Rhyme sighed. He found rants tedious. "It's time you left, Detective Antonini. Get him downtown."

  The escorts led him off out the door.

  "Thom, if you don't mind, it's cocktail hour. Well past it, in fact."

  A few moments later, as the aide was fastening a cup of single-malt scotch to Rhyme's chair, Lon Sellitto walked into the room. He squinted and gazed at Rhyme. "You don't even look sick. Let alone dead."

  "Funny. Have a drink."

  The chunky detective pursed his lips then said, "You know how many calories're in whiskey?"

  "Less than a donut, I'll bet."

  Sellitto cocked his head, meaning good point, and took the glass Thom offered. Sachs declined, as did Pulaski.

  The rumpled detective sipped scotch. "Chief of Department's on his way. Wants to thank you. Press officer, too."

  "Oh, great," Rhyme muttered. "Just what I need. A bunch of sappy-eyed grateful visitors. Hell. I liked being dead better."

  "Linc, got a question. Why'd you pick the Watchmaker to do the deed?"

  "Because he's the only credible perp I could think of." Rhyme had recently foiled an elaborate murder plot by the professional killer, who'd threatened Rhyme's life before disappearing. "Everybody on the force knows he wants to kill me." The criminalist took a long sip of the smoky liquor. "And he's probably one of the few men in the world who could."

  An uneasy silence followed that sobering comment and Pulaski apparently felt the need to fill it. "Hey, Detective Rhyme, is this all accurate?" A nod at the memo that contained his obituary.

  "Of course it is," Rhyme said as if the comment was absurd. "It had to be--in case the killer knew something about me. Otherwise he might guess something was up."

  "Oh, sure. I guess."

  "And by the way, do you always get your superior officers' attention with 'hey'?"