Dellray, a former undercover agent, was now the foremost runner of informants in the Northeast.
"You want Perone." Nick was nodding.
"Hell-o. That boy's suspendered minder, Seville, has burned him nice and toasty already. But he's jus' a starter, an appetizer, an aperitivo. We'll go onward and upward from there. The world awaits. Now I wanta hear, all I wanta hear, is Yessir, I'm on board. I don't, I'll be squeezing some parts of your life you don't want nail marks in. We all together on that?"
A sigh. A nod.
"Delighted. But..." Dellray said, his dark face furiously screwed up. "Can't hear you and more important, the micro-phones can't hear you. Of which we got more than the sets o' the Bachelor and Survivor combined. So?"
"I'll do it. I agree."
Sachs pulled out her mobile and called another detective, who was parked outside in an unmarked car. "Need transport down to Central Booking." She looked at Nick and read him his rights. "Lawyer?"
"No."
"Good call."
The detective arrived in the doorway, a solid Latina whom Sachs had known for years. Rita Sanchez. The woman nodded to Sachs.
"Rita. Get him downtown. I'll be there soon to handle the paperwork. Call the U.S. attorney too."
The woman stared coolly at Nick. She knew the story of their relationship. "Sure, Amelia. I'll handle it." Her tone was saying: Jesus, I'm sorry, honey.
"Amelia!" Nick was pausing at the door, Sanchez and the uniform slowing. "I'm... I'm sorry."
What's the worst evil?
She looked past him, to the detective, and nodded. Nick was led from the apartment.
"Whatsis?" Fred Dellray asked, nodding at the gym bag Nick had with him.
Sachs unzipped it and extracted a painting. Well. Took a deep breath. The canvas was similar to one that she'd admired years ago. One she'd wanted so very badly but hadn't been able to afford. Remembered the freezing cold Sunday they'd seen it in the SoHo gallery, after brunch on Broome and West Broadway. Remembered the night, back in their apartment, snow tapping on the window, the radiator clicking, lying beside Nick, thinking about the painting. Sorry she couldn't buy it but much, much happier she was a cop than someone with a more lucrative job who could've plunked down the Visa and bought the canvas on the spot.
"I don't know," she said, replacing the painting in the bag. "No idea."
And, turning away, she wiped one small tear from the corner of her right eye and sat down to write up the rest of the report.
CHAPTER 57
Ah, Amelia," Thom said as she walked into the parlor. "Wine?"
"Gotta work."
"You sure?"
"Yes." She noted that both Rhyme and Archer had whiskies in their cup holders. "I mean, no. I mean, yes, I'll take one."
The aide returned a moment later. He glanced at the bottle of scotch nearby. "Wait."
"Wait," Rhyme said, attempting to preempt. "What does that mean? I hate it when people say that. 'Wait.' Wait what? Stop moving? Stop breathing? Stop their mental processes?"
"Okay, what 'wait' means is that somebody has done something unacceptable, something of which I am only now aware and about which I am lodging a protest. You raided the booze."
Archer laughed. "He commanded me to stand up, walk over there and pour some. No, Lincoln, I'm not taking the fall for you. I'm just a lowly intern, remember?"
Rhyme grumbled, "If you'd given me a decent amount to begin with, there would've been no issue."
Thom snagged the bottle and left the parlor.
"Wait!" Rhyme called. "And that's the proper use of the word."
Sachs gave a smile at the exchange and returned to the evidence, pacing as she looked over the packets and regarded the charts. She did this often, the pacing, to bleed off energy. When he was capable of it, Lincoln Rhyme used to do exactly the same when considering an intractable problem with a case.
The doorbell sounded and Rhyme heard Thom's footsteps zip to the door. The nearly subaudible greeting of the visitor explained to Rhyme who had come a-calling.
"Time to get to work," Rhyme said.
Sachs nodded to Mel Cooper, who walked into the parlor shucking his jacket. He'd heard about Alicia Morgan, and Rhyme now explained about her contamination of the evidence. The tech shrugged. "We've been up against worse." He looked over the evidence from Griffith's and Morgan's apartments. "Yes, yes. We'll find some answers in here."
Rhyme was pleased to see Cooper's eyes shine with the intensity of a prospector spotting a thumb-sized nugget.
Sachs was digging latex gloves from her pocket when her phone dinged. An incoming text.
She read the message. She sent back another text and then walked to the computer. A moment later she opened an email. Rhyme saw the official heading. It was an evidence file from NYPD Crime Scene headquarters.
"They found what I was trying to remember--from that earlier case." She held up the caisson that Vernon Griffith had made. The wheels were identical to those depicted in the picture she'd just received from CSU.
She said, "Alicia said she'd met Vernon when he killed somebody who bullied him."
"Right."
"I think the vic was Echi Rinaldo, the drug dealer and transport man--the homicide I haven't made any progress on."
Archer said, "Yes, the wheels match, toy wheels."
"That's right. Also, Rinaldo was slashed to death with what might've been one of those."
She nodded at the razor saws and knives they'd recovered from Griffith's apartment.
"All right, good," Rhyme said. "Another scene involving Griffith. Anything about that case that might give us an idea where he's hiding?" He and Sachs had worked the case together briefly but then Rhyme had retired before they had progressed very far.
She ran through what she knew, concluding: "Just that he jumped into a gypsy cab and headed to somewhere in the Village. Nothing more specific than that."
"Ah," Rhyme said softly, gazing up at the board. "That puts us in a slightly different position."
"But the Village," Archer said, "is huge. If there's no way to narrow it down..."
"Always question your assumptions."
Sachs: "Happy to. Which one?"
"That Vernon was referring to Greenwich Village."
"What other village is there?"
"Middle Village." He glanced at Archer. "A neighborhood in Queens."
She nodded. "The one you called--because of the humus and the other trace. And I was skeptical of."
"Correct."
"I guess we didn't need two question marks after all."
Sachs was looking over an online map of Middle Village. It wasn't a small area. "Got any idea where exactly he might be?"
"I do," Rhyme said, looking over the map himself, hearing Juliette Archer's words.
The answers to riddles are always simple...
"I can narrow it down."
"By how much?" Cooper asked.
"To about six feet."
St. John Cemetery in Queens is the permanent resting site of a number of notables.
Among them: Mario Cuomo, Geraldine Ferraro, Robert Mapplethorpe and, no less, Charles Atlas. But Amelia Sachs knew it mostly through a quasi-professional connection, you might say. The Catholic cemetery held the bodies of dozens of the most famous gangsters in history. Joe Colombo, Carmine Galante, Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese, John Gotti, and the quintessential Godfather, Lucky Luciano.
Sachs now parked her Torino at the entrance on Metropolitan Avenue, in Middle Village, pastoral by New York City standards. The main building was a structure that both Bavarians and Elizabethan country folk would have found familiar. Steepled, turreted, with leaded windows and brick walls framed by white trim.
She climbed out and, from habit, unbuttoned her jacket then touched her Glock grip with open palm to orient position. If you'd asked her a moment later if she'd done this, she couldn't have told you.
There were two unmarked cars parked nearby, from the local precinct. They were
, she was pleased to note, highly unmarked. No buggy whip antennas or computers occupying the interstitial portion of the front seat. Real license plates, not government or permanents.
A young patrol officer, name of Keller on the breastplate, nodded to her from his vantage point near the entrance.
"Can we walk?" she asked.
"Yes, and it's better."
She understood he'd be referring to the fact that any car would arouse attention in the largely open cemetery.
"We should move fast, though. It'll be dark soon. We've got the entrances covered, but..."
They started off, silently, through the entrance and then along the asphalt drive. The spring evening was mild as a greeting card and a number of people were here, leaving flowers. Some were alone, widows and widowers probably. Mostly elderly. There were couples too, flowering their parents' graves or perhaps their children's.
In five minutes they came to a deserted section of the cemetery. Two ESU officers, compact crew-cut men in tactical gear, looked up. They were taking cover behind a mausoleum.
She nodded. One of the tac cops said, "He got here a half hour ago and he hasn't budged. We had an undercover move people away. Told them there's going to be a state funeral later and we wanted to keep the area clear for security."
Sachs looked past them to a grave about fifty feet away, at the back of a man sitting on a bench near a tombstone.
"If he rabbits," she asked, "other teams?"
"Oh, we're covered. There, there and there," Keller said, pointing. "He's not going anywhere."
"No car?"
"No vehicle, Detective."
"Weapons?"
"Didn't present." This from one of the tac officers. His partner shook his head. Added, "But there's a backpack beside the bench. In reach."
"He took something out of it. Set it on the tombstone, there, see it? I looked with the binoculars. Seems like it's a toy. A ship or something. A boat."
"It's a miniature," Sachs said without looking closely. "Not really a toy. Back me up. I'm going to take him."
Vernon Griffith did not resist.
He would have been a formidable opponent; he was truly skinny but she could see muscles under the close-fitting shirt and he was tall, with a very long reach. And the backpack probably contained another deadly ball-peen or maybe a blade or saw like the ones she'd found in Chelsea.
The Steel Kiss...
He'd been clearly surprised at the officers' sudden presence and, after half rising, dropped down on the bench once more, holding his strikingly long hands up, straight in the air. Keller directed him onto his knees and then the ground, where he was cuffed and frisked. And the backpack searched. No guns, no hammers, nothing that might be used as a weapon.
Sachs guessed that he'd been lost in a meditation about his brother, Peter, whose grave he was sitting in front of. Or, if he believed in that sort of thing, maybe Griffith actually thought they were engaging in a conversation.
On the other hand he might simply have been thinking of practical matters. What was to come next? After the events of the past few days he'd have some thinking to do.
Then, helped to his feet and flanked by the ESU officers, he and Sachs walked to the front of the cemetery office. Griffith was deposited on another bench, this one featuring a verdigris dove. They were waiting for a prisoner transport van; Griffith would have been very cramped in the back of one of the unmarkeds. Besides, he had hurt people in such clever and unpleasant ways that you wouldn't want him behind you in a squad car, much less a Ford Torino, even cuffed.
Sachs sat next to him. She took out her tape recorder, clicked it on, then recited his Miranda rights. Asked if he understood them.
"I do. Sure."
Griffith had long fingers, to match the feet, whose size they knew, of course. His face was lengthy too but the pale, beardless visage was nondescript. His eyes were hazel.
She continued, "We know that Alicia Morgan had you kill certain individuals connected with the U.S. Auto vehicle that was defective and killed her husband. But we'd like to know more. Will you talk to us?"
He nodded.
"Could you state yes, please?"
"Oh, sorry. Yes."
"Tell me in your words what happened. She's told my partner some things but not everything. I'd like to hear it from you."
He nodded and without hesitation explained how Alicia had approached him, after seeing him kill someone on the street. "Someone who was attacking me," he added emphatically.
She recalled that Rhyme had told her Griffith had goaded Rinaldo to attack. But she nodded encouragingly.
"You said she had me kill the Shoppers who'd made and sold the car that killed her husband."
Shoppers? she wondered.
"But I did it because I wanted to help her. She was burned and cut and, you know, changed forever by what happened. I agreed."
"She wanted the people she felt were to blame to be killed by a product?"
"Things, yes. Because that's what killed her husband and injured her."
"Tell me about Todd Williams."
He confirmed what they'd guessed. That Williams, a digital activist, was a genius of a hacker and had taught Griffith how to crack the DataWise5000s. And, pretending he worked for an ad agency, he bought the databases of the products containing the controllers and of people or companies who had purchased the specific items.
Griffith added that he and Alicia had searched the list for anyone employed by U.S. Auto, the fuel injector company, the agency creating their ads or the lawyers defending them. "Greg Frommer, Benkoff, Joe Heady. The woman insurance attorney in Westchester."
"Afterward, where were you and Alicia supposed to be going?"
"Don't know. Upstate maybe. Canada'd be better. This all happened so fast. Didn't plan anything out. How'd you get here?" he asked. "I never told Alicia about my brother."
Sachs explained, "A case from a while ago. The victim you killed named Echi Rinaldo."
"The Shopper."
Again, that word.
"He was a drug dealer," Sachs said.
"I know. I read the story after. But still. How?"
"That case was on my docket. One of the pieces of evidence from the scene where you killed him was a wheel from a toy. You had a caisson in your apartment in Chelsea. It had the same wheel."
Griffith nodded. "I'd made one for Peter, a caisson." Nodding back toward his brother's grave. "I had it with me that night at dinner. I left the restaurant and was coming here to put it on his grave." He shivered with disgust or anger. "He broke it."
"Rinaldo?"
A nod. "He was walking back to his truck and wasn't looking where he was going. Knocked into me and it got crushed, the caisson. I insulted him and he came after me. I killed him." Griffith shook his head. "But here, how'd you figure here?"
Sachs explained that after they'd connected Vernon and Rinaldo, with Rhyme making the Middle Village leap, it hadn't taken much to speculate that the evidence from the various scenes--the humus, the large quantities of fertilizer and pesticides or herbicides, along with the phenol, an ingredient in embalming fluid--might mean he'd visited the famed cemetery here.
To about six feet...
A call revealed that Peter Griffith, Vernon's brother, was interred here. Sachs had called the director and asked if they had records of Vernon visiting the grave. He said he didn't know about visits, but there had been some odd occurrences around the Griffith plot: Someone would leave miniature furniture or toys at the grave site. The director told her the pieces were extremely well made. The man supposed some visitors took them. The ones that were turned in he kept in the office, waiting for someone to claim them. The combination had all the makings of an urban legend: miniatures and a cemetery.
"When he was alive Peter always liked what I made for him. The boy things, of course. Medieval weapons, tables and thrones for castles. Catapults and war towers. Cannon and caissons. He would have liked that boat, the Warren skiff. On his tombstone.
Where is it?"
"In an evidence bag." She felt compelled to add, "It will be well taken care of."
"You police, you were watching the grave?"
"That's right."
Sachs had noted that his brother was only twenty when he passed. She commented on this. Then asked, "What happened to him?"
"Shoppers."
"You've said that. What does that mean?"
Griffith looked at his backpack. "There's a diary in there? My brother's diary. He dictated it to an MP3 player. I've been transcribing it, thinking I was going to publish it someday. There's some remarkable things Peter's said. About life, about relationships, about people."
Sachs found the leather book. It contained easily five hundred pages.
Griffith continued, "In high school, Manhasset, some of the cool kids made friends with him. He thought they really meant it. But, uh-uh, they just were using him to get even with a girl who wouldn't have sex with them. They drugged her, convinced Peter it was somebody else, and they got pictures of him with her in bed. You know, you can imagine."
"They posted them online?"
"No, this was before phone cameras. They took Polaroids and passed them around school." He nodded toward the battered leather-bound volume. "The last page. The last entry."
Sachs found it.
Some things don't really go away. Never ever. I thought it would. Really believed it would. Tell myself I don't need friends like Sam and Frank. They're slugs, they're useless. They're garbage. As bad as Dano or Butler. Worse really 'cause they say one thing and do something else. Tell yourself they're not worth thinking about. But it doesn't work.
And nobody believed me that I didn't know it was Cindy. Everybody in school, the police, everybody, thought I planned it.
No charges, but didn't matter. Reinforced I was a freak.
Vern went crazy, wanted to kill them. My brother always had that temper, always wanted to get even with anybody who crossed him or me. Mom and Dad always had to keep an eye on him. His Shoppers, wanted to kill the Shoppers.
What happened with Frank and Sam and Cindy and everything--I'm not mad, like Vern. I'm just tired. So tired of the looks, so tired of the notes in my locker. Cindy's friends spit on me. She's gone. She and her family moved.
So tired.
I need to sleep. That's what I need, to sleep.