They'd tested it before but this was the first time it would be used on a case.
Carrying the basic crime scene equipment, Sachs started forward. She glanced down at the doormat, which contained a lightning bolt above the letters LES, for Larkin Energy Services.
"His logo?"
"I'd guess," she replied. "You read the article about him, Rhyme?"
"Missed it."
"He was one of the most popular bosses in the country."
Rhyme grunted. "All it takes is one disgruntled employee. I always wondered about that word. Is a happy employee 'gruntled'? Where's the scene?"
She continued into the town house.
A uniformed officer stood downstairs. He looked up and nodded.
"Where's his wife?" Sachs asked. She wanted to get the chronology of events.
But the woman, the officer explained, was still at the hospital being treated for a wound. She was expected to be released soon. Two detectives from Major Cases were with her.
"I'll want to talk to her, Rhyme."
"We'll have Lon get her over here after she's released. Where's the bedroom. I can't see it." His tone suggested he was struggling not to be impatient.
Sachs sometimes thought that his gruffness was a means to shelter himself from the emotional dangers of police work. Sometimes she believed that it was simply his nature to be gruff.
"Bedroom?"
"Upstairs, Detective." The patrolman nodded.
She went up two flights of steep, narrow steps.
The site of the murder was a large bedroom decorated in French provincial style. The furniture and art were undoubtedly expensive but Sachs found that there were so many flourishes and scrolls and draped cloth--in gaudy yellows and greens and golds--that the room set her on edge. A designer's room, not a homeowner's room.
Near the far window was the bed, ironically underneath an old painting of shot birds on a kitchen table. The bedclothes were on the floor, flung there by the medical crews attending to Ronald Larkin, she supposed. The sheet and pillows revealed a large brown bloodstain.
Sachs stepped closer and wondered if there'd been--
"Any slug penetration?" Rhyme asked.
She smiled. Those words were going to be the next in her thoughts. She'd forgotten he was seeing exactly what she was.
"Doesn't seem to be." She could find no bullet holes on Larkin's side of the bed. "We'll have to check with the medical examiner."
"Tells me he might've used fragmenting bullets."
Professional killers sometimes bought or made rounds that broke apart when they hit flesh--to cause more damage and be more likely to inflict fatal wounds. Fired from this close--about six feet away--you would have expected a normal slug to continue through the skull and exit.
"What's that?" Rhyme asked. "To your left."
"There we go." She was looking at a bullet hole in the side of a gilded bedside table, bits of fiber protruded. Sachs picked up the pillow. The slugs had pierced it and continued on. She found another hole in the wall. And on the floor a smaller bloodstain, from the wife's wound, she supposed. There were bits of dull lead on the floor. "Yep. Frags."
She shook her head.
"What're you doing, Sachs? You're making me dizzy."
"Oh. Forgot we're attached, Rhyme. I was just thinking about the slugs. The pain."
Fragmenting bullets tend to be less numbing than regular rounds and cause more agony as the pieces fan out in the body.
"Yes, well." Rhyme added nothing more.
Sachs would take samples and photos later. Now she wanted to get a sense of how the crime had occurred. She stepped outside onto the small balcony--the home of three more drought-stricken plants. It was clear where the killer had stood, aiming through the window. He might've intended to break in and shoot from closer but had been deterred by the locked windows and French door. Rather than waking his victims by trying to jimmy the lock he'd smashed the glass and fired through the hole.
"How'd he get there? From the roof?" Rhyme asked. "Ah, no, I see. What the hell's on the hook?"
Sachs was wondering the same. She was gazing at a grappling hook, from which a rope dangled into the backyard garden below. She examined the hook.
"Cloth, Rhyme. Flannel. Looks like he cut a shirt up."
"So nobody'd hear it make contact when he threw it. Clever boy. I assume it's a knotted rope?"
"Yeah, how'd you know?" She looked over the balcony at the thirty-foot black rope. The cord had knots tied in it about every two feet.
"Even the best athletes can't climb a rope thinner than about an inch. You can climb down one but not up. Gravity--one of the four universal forces in physics, by the way. It's the weakest one, but it still works pretty damn well. Hard to beat it. Okay, Sachs, walk the grid and collect the collectibles. Then come on home."
"Been having a dis-cussion with one of my buddies. Here we are, all cozy in BK. Hey, hey, smile when I'm talking 'bout you."
Fred Dellray was on the other end of the phone, in Brooklyn apparently. Rhyme could picture him with one of his CIs. The tall, lanky FBI agent, with piercing eyes as dark as his skin, ran a network of confidential informants--the chic term for snitches. Much of Dellray's work nowadays was counterterrorism and he'd developed a number of international connections.
One of whom was apparently discussing rumors with Dellray about the Ronald Larkin killing. (Though CIs never really discussed anything with the agent. Either they told him what he wanted to know or they didn't, and in the case of the latter, good luck.) "Word is goin' 'round, Lincoln, that this shooter is a serious pro-fessional, know what I mean? Just in case you couldn'ta figured that one out on your own. I mean, money, money, money. No dollar a-mount but think way outside the Wal-Mart price tag for a kill."
"Any details on the shooter? Description?"
"Only deets are: U.S. citizen but may have other passports. Spent a lot of time overseas, trained in Europe, word is. Africa, and Middle East connections lately. But then all the bad boys do."
"Mercenary?"
"Most likely."
Rhyme had assisted in several cases involving mercenary soldiers, one not too long ago, in fact, an arms importing scheme in Brooklyn. Rhyme had dealt with many types of criminals in his career but he'd found the mercenaries to be, on the whole, far more dangerous than your average street thug, even those in the mob. They often felt a moral justification in killing, were extremely smart and often had a worldwide network of contacts. Unlike a punk in Tony Soprano's crew, they knew how to slip across borders and disappear into jurisdictions where you'd never find them.
"Any thoughts on who hired him?"
"Nup, not a skinny li'l fact on that one."
"Working with backup?"
"Dunno. But lots of 'em do."
"Why was Larkin hit?" Rhyme asked into the speakerphone.
"Ah, that'd be the other un-known . . . ." He apparently turned aside to say something to his snitch, who replied in a fast, eager-to-please voice, though Rhyme couldn't make out his words. Dellray came back on. "Sorry, Lincoln. No reasons my good friend here heard about. And I know he'd share with me. 'Cause that's the kinda friend he aspires to be. Wish I had more for you, Lincoln. I'll keep lookin'."
"Appreciate it, Fred." They hung up.
He turned to the man sitting on a stool next to him and nodded a greeting.
Mel Cooper had arrived when Rhyme was on the phone with Dellray. He was a slightly built, balding man somewhere in his thirties, precise of movement (he was a champion ballroom dancer). Cooper was a forensic lab technician, based in the Crime Scene headquarters in Queens. Rhyme, who'd hired the tech at the NYPD years ago, occasionally still shanghaied him to work on cases here in the town house. He now shoved his thick glasses up on his nose. They discussed the mercenary angle, though Rhyme could see that the news didn't mean much to him. Cooper preferred dealing with the information provided by microscopes, density gradient units and computers to that offered by human beings.
r /> A prejudice that Rhyme largely shared.
A few minutes later the criminalist heard the front door open and Amelia Sachs's confident stride on the marble. Then silence as she hit the carpet and finally a different sound on the wood floor.
She stepped inside, bearing two cartons of evidence.
A smiling greeting to Mel Cooper, then she kissed Rhyme and set the cartons down on an examining table.
Cooper and Sachs both pulled on powder-free latex gloves.
And they got to work.
"Weapon first," Rhyme said.
They pieced together the bullets and learned that they were .32 caliber, probably fired from an automatic--Sachs found bits of fireproof fiber that would have come from a sound suppressor, and silencers are not effective with revolvers, only auto-loaders or single-shot weapons. Rhyme noted again the killer's professional quality that Dellray had alluded to, since he'd taken the time to pick up the spent shell casings from the balcony; automatics eject the used brass.
Unfortunately the bullets were too shattered to reveal anything about the lands and grooves--the rifling in the barrel--which could in turn help identify the type of pistol the killer had used. The medical examiner might find some intact slugs during the autopsy, but Rhyme doubted it; bone will easily shatter fragile bullets like these.
"Friction ridges?" The technical term for fingerprints.
"Zip. Some latex glove marks on the window. Looks like he wiped some dirt away to get a better shot."
Rhyme grunted in frustration. "Shoe tread marks?"
"None on the balcony. And in the garden at the foot of the rope? He obliterated his prints before he left."
The grappling hook was a CMI brand with epoxy-coated tines. They'd been wrapped in strips of gray and blue flannel, cut, as Sachs speculated, from an old shirt--no identifying label, of course.
Pro-fessional . . .
The knotted rope was Mil-Spec 550 chute cord, black, with a nylon braided shroud over seven inner lines.
Cooper, who'd gone online to get a profile of the rope, looked up from the computer and reported, "Sold all over the country. And it's cheap. He'd've paid cash for it."
It was far better to have expensive evidence, bought with traceable credit cards.
Sachs handed a small plastic envelope to Mel Cooper. "I found this near the grappling hook."
"What is it?" he asked, looking at the small fleck inside.
"Lint, I think. Might be from his pockets. I figured he pulled out his weapon as soon as he climbed over the railing."
"I'll burn a sample," Cooper said and turned to a large machine sitting in the corner of the lab, switching it on.
"How about trace?" Rhyme asked.
"Nothing in the garden or the wall he scaled to get into the backyard. On the balcony, we've got a few things. Dirt from the garden. Then sand and some other dirt that doesn't match what's in the garden or the planters. A bit of rubber--maybe from the sole of a boot or shoe. Two hairs--black and curly. No bulb attached."
This meant that there could be no DNA analysis; you need the root of the hair for that. Still, the strands had most likely come from the killer. Ron Larkin had pure gray hair and his wife was a redhead.
Mel Cooper looked up from the computer screen of the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which had run an analysis of the lint. "He's a bodybuilder, I'd guess. Dianabol. Steroid used by athletes."
"What kind of sports?" Rhyme asked.
"You're asking the wrong person, Lincoln. I don't do a performance-enhanced foxtrot or waltz. But if he's got traces in his pocket lint I think it's safe to say he's serious about it."
"And then this . . ." Sachs held up another plastic bag. At first glance, it appeared empty. But with his magnifying glasses on, Cooper found and extracted a small brown fiber. He held it up for Rhyme to see.
"Good catch, Sachs," Rhyme said, straining his head closer. "Nothing gets by you. What is it?"
Cooper put the fiber under an optical stereo microscope and bent over the twin eyepieces. He then turned to a computer and typed with lightning-fast fingers. "I think . . ." He looked back to the microscope. "It's coir fiber."
"Which is?"
"I'm finding out." Cooper read for a moment then reported: "Used for ropes mostly. Also rugs, runners, coasters, decorative nicknacks."
"But not the rope he rode in on?" Rhyme asked.
"No. That's pure nylon. This is something else. Coir comes from coconut. The biggest producers are in Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa."
"Doesn't exactly point directly to his front door now, does it? What else do we have?"
"That's it."
"Check the sand and dirt. GC 'em."
A gas chromatograph test revealed that the trace contained significant levels of diesel fuel and saltwater.
"But a special kind of fuel," he said, reading the screen of the nearby computer. "It's got microbiocides in it. With the saltwater that means its probably marine fuel. Diesel fuel in ships often gets contaminated with microorganisms. The manufacturers put in an additive to prevent that."
Sachs said, "So, he's got a boat. Or lives near a dock."
"Or came ashore by boat," Rhyme said. Vessels were still the most untraceable way to get into the country on the Eastern Seaboard--and also one of the best ways to avoid roadblocks and surveillance if you wanted to travel around the New York area.
"Let's add it all to a chart. Thom! If you'd be . . . Thom?"
"Yes?" The aide walked into the parlor. Like Sachs and Cooper he was wearing gloves but his were yellow and had the name Playtex on them.
"Could you jot down our findings to date?" Rhyme nodded toward the whiteboard and Thom stripped off the gloves and wrote what his boss dictated.
RONALD LARKIN HOMICIDE
* * *
* Coir fiber.
* Dirt from garden below the balcony.
* Dark hairs, curly. No bulb attached.
* Bit of rubber, black, possibly from sole of shoe.
* Dirt and sand with traces of marine diesel fuel, saltwater.
* No friction ridges, tread marks, tool marks.
* Lint containing traces of Dianabol steroid. Athlete?
* .32 caliber automatic, sound suppressor, fragmentation bullets.
* CMI grappling hook, wrapped in strips of old flannel shirt.
* Mil-Spec 550 rope, knotted. Black.
Suspect:
* U.S. citizen, other passports?
* trained in Europe.
* mercenary with African, Middle East connections.
* no motive.
* high fee.
* employer unknown.
Rhyme scanned the list. His eyes fixed on one item.
"The rope," Rhyme said.
"Well . . . " Sachs looked at Cooper. "I thought--"
"I know it's nylon. And it's untraceable. But what about it's so interesting?"
Sachs shook her head. "I give."
"The knots. They've been compressed ever since he tied them."
Cooper said, "Still don't get it, Lincoln."
He smiled. "Look at them like little surprise packages of evidence. I wonder what's inside, don't you? Let's open them up."
"You mean me, right?" Cooper said.
"I'd love to help, Mel. But . . ." Rhyme gave a smile.
The tech picked up the rope in his gloved hands. He started to untie a knot. "Like iron."
"So much the better for us. Whatever's inside has been trapped nice and tight since he tied them."
"If there's anything there at all," Cooper said. "This could be a total waste of time."
"I like that, Mel. It sums up the whole business of crime scene work, wouldn't you say?"
When Rhyme had lived alone, the front parlor of his town house--across the hall from the lab--had been used as a storeroom. But now that Sachs was living here part of the time she and Thom had redecorated, turned it into a comfortable living room.
There were contemporary Asian paintings and silk s
creens, from NoHo and East Village galleries, a large portrait of Houdini (a present from a woman they'd worked with on a case some years ago), a Blue Dog print, two large flower arrangements and comfortable furniture imported all the way from New Jersey.
On the mantel rested pictures of Sachs's father and mother and of her as a teenage girl, peeking out from under the hood of a '68 Dodge Charger she and her father worked on for months before finally admitting to themselves that the patient was terminal.
And her history wasn't the only one represented in the parlor.
She'd sent Thom on a mission into the basement of the town house where he'd rummaged through boxes and returned with framed decorations and citations from Rhyme's days with the NYPD. Personal photographs, as well. Several of them showed Rhyme during his Illinois childhood, with his parents and other relatives. One was of the boy and his folks in front of their house, beside a large blue sedan. The parents smiled at the camera. Lincoln was smiling as well, but his was a different expression--one of curiosity--and the eyes were looking to the side at something off camera.
One snapshot depicted a slim, intense, teenage Lincoln. He was wearing a school track uniform.
Thom now opened the front door and ushered three people into the room: Lon Sellitto, as well as a portly sixtyish man in a gray suit and minister's collar and, gripping his arm, a woman with pale skin and eyes as red as her hair. She had no reaction to the wheelchair.
"Mrs. Larkin," the criminalist said. "I'm Lincoln Rhyme. This is Amelia Sachs."
"Call me Kitty, please." She nodded a greeting.
"John Markel," the reverend said and shook Sachs's hand, gave a sallow smile to Rhyme.
He explained that his diocese, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, operated several charities in the Sudan and Liberia and ran a school in the Congo. "Ron and I have worked together for years. We were going to have lunch today, about our work over there." He sighed and shook his head. "Then I heard the news."
He'd hurried to the hospital to be with Kitty and then said he'd accompany her here.