"We know," the man continued, "that he hid the delivery without any problem."
"You think this man, this killer, followed him and tortured him to find out where it was?"
"Unlikely. From what I've heard it was a street fight. He died in a few minutes. And more or less in public. You want me to find who did it and--"
"I'm not interested, at this point," Morales said calmly, "in that. Finding the delivery: That's our only mission."
A pause on the other end of the line. "The seller has the money."
"That's not an issue either." The seller would not take Morales's money and steal back the delivery. Morales knew the man's operation well. That double-dipping would serve little purpose. Besides, the relationship between them was a partnership, and it was far too early in the game for one partner to screw the other. "What else do you know?"
"We're monitoring scanners. Nobody has much info. Wasn't a hijacking and there were no contracts out on anybody fitting his description."
"Use who you need to--but only our men, or people deep in our pocket--and find out what you can, retrace Rinaldo's steps, get surveillance in place on anyone who knows anything. Police too if you need to."
"Yessir. Oh, one more thing."
"Yes?"
"Rinaldo wasn't alone when it happened. He had his son with him."
Ah, yes. That's right. Morales recalled this. It was decided that he'd take the boy with him on his rounds yesterday to give an air of innocence if he were stopped for a traffic violation. He'd never met the boy but believed him to be about eight or nine.
"What did he see?"
"Nothing, from what we're picking up on the chatter. But who knows?"
"I'll keep that in mind. Now, get started."
"Yessir."
He disconnected and, his jaw tight, looked over the soccer players. They should be in school. Where were their parents?
He reflected on his lieutenant's call and decided this was not the time to save fifty-nine dollars. He slipped the battery out of his phone--these he kept--and broke the unit in half, then dropped the carcass into a bag for disposal. From a drawer he withdrew another phone and, with a sharp, bone-handled knife, his father's, he began to slice through the encasing plastic carefully, one centimeter at a time.
After disconnecting the call, the stocky man put his Samsung into the pocket of his olive drab combat jacket and, sipping excellent diner coffee, wondered where the name Echi came from.
Wasn't that some kind of foreign word? No. Ecco. Was that it? From an old language? Like Greek or Roman? Ecco, therefore I am. In his job Stan Coelho didn't have much connection with old-time writing or foreign languages, other than Spanish. And occasionally Russian, if he had to go up against the Brighton Beach crew in Brooklyn.
He should read more. He should learn more.
Another bite of sloppy eggs.
So, Ecco Rinaldo was dead and a very important delivery had gone missing.
Well, this was a mess.
Perched on a creaky stool, he was finishing breakfast at a diner on the Upper East Side, eggs over easy, toast to mop, and turkey sausage, which because it was turkey was supposed to have less calories and fat than the other kind, the real kind. Probably didn't, though. Turkey fat, pig fat, both pretty much the same.
He felt his girth press against his belt, as if the meal was already expanding his forty-four-inch waist. It wasn't, Coelho was sure, but the imagined bloating felt real. He'd get the weight under control soon.
"Hey, honey, refill." He tapped the coffee cup. "And that Danish. The cheese one. And the bill."
"Sure thing."
He reached for his wallet but he reached carefully. He was carrying a Glock inside that taut waistband, pretty concealed but not absolutely concealed, and the diner was crowded. Not the place for somebody to scream, "That asshole's got a gun!"
Reflecting on the phone call a moment ago: his mission was to find the delivery, maybe find who did Rinaldo, but at this point doing that was optional. The delivery was all that mattered.
He left a bit of sausage, in caloric compensation, and chewed down half the Danish, which tasted mostly of sugar. Not that that was a negative. He poured back two slugs of coffee and ate the rest of the pastry. He wiped his mouth and his impressive moustache, as salt-and-pepper as his thick hair. Digging for bills, he left a ten and five under the plate, a generous tip. Then replaced the wallet--replacing carefully--and left the diner, walking out onto Third Avenue, congested with people headed to work, mostly going south, to Midtown. He lived in Queens, where the commute was different, mostly you took buses or walked to the subway or elevateds. It was still crowded, but not like this.
Manhattan.
Good diners here. Not much of anything else for him.
Coelho stood close to the diner and lit a cigarette. A woman passing by, dragging her overbundled kid to an overpriced school, glared at him. His return glare said, Fuck you, it's still America. He wanted to exhale smoke her way but she was gone fast, plodding along in her massive and ugly boots.
Smoking, thinking about where the delivery might be. The huge number of people streaming past seemed to flaunt the hopelessness of the mission.
At last, his phone hummed and he looked at caller ID.
"Yo."
"Still no word who bodied Rinaldo."
"Don't care about that," Coelho said. "Gimme something about the delivery. S'all we care about at this point."
The caller was some punk who ran numbers and did drop-offs and pickups for the crews. Similar to the dead Rinaldo's job. Coelho had never met him, but he was vouched for. He had an accent that seemed to be a mix of three different languages.
"The delivery arrived in town at eleven in the a.m. yesterday. Off a train from Chicago."
"I know all this. Keep going."
"Some driver picked it up in Jersey, the depot at Newark. Took it to some location in Midtown. Met Rinaldo for the transfer. Then...nobody knows what happened."
"'Some location' is not particularly fucking helpful."
"I'm working on that, man. It was the West Side, near the water, someplace they wouldn't be seen."
Wouldn't be seen? Midtown west wasn't Midtown central but it was still one of the busiest places on the face of the earth. Hell, the traffic to and from the highway running along the Hudson alone meant ten thousand witnesses an hour.
But, he reflected, Rinaldo may have been stupid enough to get himself killed but he wasn't stupid when it came to his job, especially a task entrusted to him by the infamous Miguel Angel.
"K," Coelho told his contact. "I'll head over there now. But stay on top of it. I need an address. There'll be something in it for you. Promise."
"Thanks."
They disconnected.
Zipping his jacket up, not so much for the cold, which it really wasn't, but just so his concealed gun stayed concealed, Coelho started the walk to Midtown, calculating how many calories the hike would burn.
A fair amount, he reflected happily and bought a hotdog and a Coke to tide him over on the journey.
"There's more here than it seemed last night," said Mel Cooper dubiously, nodding at the mass of evidence from the Echi Rinaldo crime scene, laid out on the evidence tables in Rhyme's town house.
"Is there really?" Rhyme glanced over at the slightly built, bespectacled man. The response had been ironic. The meaning: What's the point of stating the obvious? Beneath was the subtextual message: If there's so much perhaps we should be analyzing and not discussing.
Cooper was the preeminent forensic lab technician in the NYPD's crime scene operation, headquartered in Queens. He frequently worked with Rhyme and Sachs, manning the equipment here. He'd arrived last night, worked until 4 a.m., headed home to his mother's house for a bit of sleep and was now back, robed and masked like a surgeon.
"We're not making any progress."
"Now, that is a valid observation."
The analyses of the effluvia from the streets of Midtown was
yielding no leads, and so Rhyme considered next steps. He said to Cooper, "Rinaldo's burner phone's still with Szarnek down at computer crimes. It had some kind of wipe feature, but they're trying to restore the data." Rhyme wheeled to a table, on which a Post-it note had been pasted. It read: Found within six feet of victim. It was a mountain and included two dozen different shoe print and fifty different fingerprint samples. Three used condoms. Rhyme grimaced, not at the distasteful aspect of these particular items but because while the odds were minimal that the killer took time before or after the slaughter to have protected sex, he might actually have done so.
And, though Rhyme despised cliches, the adage about no stone being left unturned was the bylaw for crime scene work.
There were also piles of trash--literally--from the route where the blood trail began to the place near the middle of the alley where Rinaldo had died.
Rhyme made a decision. "Let's focus on where he'd been earlier and who he'd been in contact with. He was a deliveryman...if we can pin him to locations where he made his deliveries, we might find somebody he hooked up with."
"And who had a motive to kill him."
"Maybe. That'll be for Amelia to find out. Our job is just to find the where and the who."
As he surveyed the evidence that might be helpful in their new task, Cooper asked, "Any chance Lon'll be up for working the case? I was talking to him last week. He seemed a bit better."
Rhyme shook his head. Lon Sellitto, his former partner and the Major Cases detective who officially ran the investigations Rhyme assisted on as a consultant, was still ill, laid low by a poison attack in a recent case. "I asked, and he's still out of commission."
Cooper sighed. "Even after all these months?"
He'd nearly died. It was a medical miracle that he'd been saved.
Rhyme dismissed the subject with: "Let's get to it. Anything on the body or on the bed of the truck or tire treads that'll give us a history of where he was earlier in the day?"
It was clear there'd been a struggle and Rinaldo had fought his assailant. Locard's Principle, named for the French criminalist Edmond Locard, holds that there is always a transfer of evidence between perp and crime scene or perp and victim. This is especially true in the case of physical struggle. Ideally, Rinaldo would have dug some telltale DNA from his killer's skin with his fingernail as he fought the man. Now, reading the ME's and Sachs's reports, they learned that Rinaldo had worn gloves. Trace from the gloves and his coat, run through the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, revealed no chemicals that might lead them to a particular location or suggest a profession that the killer might have had or hairs or other DNA-rich evidence.
Rhyme sighed. "Tires and Rinaldo's shoes. Let's see what they collected."
Fortunately the truck had fairly new tires--and the victim had worn treaded running shoes--so there was a fair amount of soil trace in both.
Cooper prepared a sample for the GC/MS. As he did so, Rhyme squinted and turned away from the machine. He'd heard the faint sound of a key in the front door (after the accident rendered him disabled, he was convinced that his surviving senses grew more acute). Thom was in the kitchen, so this would be Sachs, who'd left earlier to pick up Rinaldo's son at a Child and Family Services facility and take him to an emergency foster care family. He was glad she'd returned; he wanted her insights into the case.
But then he heard something in addition to her footfalls, something that troubled him.
Another set of steps, softer.
He sighed.
"What's wrong?" Mel Cooper asked, noting the expression.
He didn't answer.
Sachs turned the corner with a companion. The boy, strapping and dark-skinned, with crewcut black hair, stopped in the parlor doorway, eyes wide as he gazed at the equipment.
Sachs gave a faint smile at, Rhyme supposed, what would be his look of dismay. She said, "This is Javier."
"Hi," Mel Cooper said.
Rhyme nodded, forcing a smile onto his face.
The boy nodded cautiously then turned back to the machinery.
Sachs paused only a moment and, knowing what Rhyme would be thinking, said, "Javier's not staying here. The foster family's not far away, on the West Side. I told him I'd stop here and he could meet the people who are going to catch the man who killed his father."
The boy fiddled with what looked like a pencil box. It had a picture of some boxy cartoon characters and the word "Minecraft" on it. He also held a tablet of drawing paper and Rhyme could see some sketches of similar characters. They were pretty good for a child of his age.
"Well, yes." Rhyme nodded at him. What was the boy's name again? He'd forgotten already. "We're doing--"
"You in one of those chairs. Damn. Wheels. And a motor. I've seen them. Why?"
"I can't walk."
He blinked. "You can't walk? How d'you play soccer?"
"I can't."
"Shit."
Rhyme now smiled genuinely. "Yeah. Shit."
Sachs said, "Javier? These men're going to use all this equipment, like you see on TV. They're going to find that man."
"Yeah." The boy's eyes had grown cloudy again. He wasn't going to cry, Rhyme assessed, and he wasn't going to give in to a temper tantrum. But he seemed to be shrinking, withdrawing.
"I'll be back in a half hour, Rhyme," Sachs said.
She turned. Javier, however, remained where he was, staring at Rhyme's chair. He pointed to a screen--the one attached to the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. He said, "There's this game. FIFA. A video game. You know FIFA?"
He had no idea. He said, "Sure."
"This game, you can play soccer. Any team you want. Chelsea. Liverpool. Galaxy. It's cool. You can play it in your chair. You don't have to run around. You can play it sitting there."
"Thanks, Javier."
"Yeah. It's a good game."
Then he turned and together he and Sachs walked out the door.
"Seems like a good kid," Cooper said. "Too bad what happened."
"The trace, Mel," Rhyme reminded. "The trace." And nodded emphatically at the GC/MS.
The foster family, living in a small townhouse on the Upper West Side, seemed perfect for their task. Unflappable, calm, casual. Just the sort to take the edge off children wrested from traumatic home lives.
Sally Abbott was a pretty brunette--in her thirties, Amelia Sachs estimated. She was in jeans and a burgundy sweater. Her husband, a few years older, short but athletic, wore an affable smile and shook Sachs's hand vigorously, then turned his attention to Javier. He engaged the boy immediately in conversation--all of it about the boy himself, what he liked to do and eat and, of course, what teams he liked. They appeared easygoing but the Child and Family Services caseworker had assured Sachs that some of their past placements had been kids from similar backgrounds as Javier--even tougher ones. However the boy reacted to them, the couple would be prepared to deal.
The attention and good cheer behind these first few minutes seemed natural but Sachs also guessed this was standard procedure for the foster process. There would be times in the future for serious talk, tears at night, angry outbursts at fate or at spilled soda or at nothing at all, but people like this generous couple knew their job. Now was simply the time for welcome and reassurance.
Peter Abbott took the boy to show him to his room. Javier wheeled the suitcase himself--he wouldn't let the man take it.
Sachs was glad for the moment alone with Mrs. Abbott. She said in a low voice, "There's no reason to be concerned, but I'm having an officer stay outside in an unmarked car. You'll see it, an SUV." She explained that they were still investigating his father's killing. Her belief was that it was probably a random murder. The incident did not appear to be an organized crime hit; the circumstances suggested a chance mugging gone bad or a personal fight. "Still, until we know more, we just want to be safe."
The foster mother said she understood and that this had happened before, usually in the context of protecting children fro
m natural parents who were unstable and under restraining orders. But she asked, "Can we go to the park, to games?"
"Oh, sure. Officer Lamont'll just hang out with you. He'll be in plain clothes. Javier met him. They get along well. They're Mets fans."
She smiled. "So'm I. Peter roots for the Cubs...I know, I know. But I love him anyway."
Sachs too offered a grin.
She and Mrs. Abbott then walked to the boy's bedroom, on the second floor, and Sachs was impressed. It was clean and cozy, filled with gender-neutral toys and decorations. A desktop computer with a sign: Call Mom Sally or Dad Peter before you go online.
She approved of that.
Sachs didn't know the protocol about physical contact but when she said goodbye to the boy, he threw his arms around her. "You come see me, Miss Amelia?"
"Sure will!" Sachs hugged back firmly. She handed both him and Mrs. Abbott business cards. "Anything, anytime, you need me, please, give me a call."
She watched Javier drop down on the bed, unzip his Minecraft box and take from it some colored pencils. He began to draw.
Outside, Sachs had taken no more than two steps toward her Ford Torino when her phone hummed. It was Rhyme.
"Hi, I just dropped him off. He seems pretty--"
His voice cut her off. "We've got a lead. You know the old armory on West Fifty?"
"Sure." It was a decrepit abandoned facility dating from early in the last century. The place was, she'd read, scheduled for demolition...though it seemed that articles about that fate had been popping up in the papers for decades.
"How'd you nail it?"
"Rinaldo's shoes and his truck's tread marks. Mel and I found trace from horse shit and recycled oil. The front of the armory's on Five-one and Eleven but--Mel checked--there's a back entrance at Fifty and Ten, near a stable where they house Central Park horses. And next to that is a recycled oil warehouse."
"I'm on my way."
Stan Coelho was smoking, leaning against an office building wall, on the far West Side of Manhattan, admiring the Intrepid aircraft carrier. Big effing ship. He'd never been in an armed service, but if he had been, he'd want to be a sailor on a boat like that.
Well, now that he studied it, a new carrier. This one looked like the accommodations wouldn't be exactly four star.