The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(11)
Stepping out of character, Sachs lowered her head and slumped against the wall, breathing hard and wiping sweat from her eyes and temples. When she’d recovered from the dark channeling, she returned to the hallway and browsed through the evidence. She located Patel’s calendar and looked through it. The entries indicated that “S” would be here at 11 a.m., “W and A”—William and Anna, the murdered couple—at 11:45. “VL” was written in the margin on Saturday, not next to any particular time. VL was likely the answer to Question Number Three—who had called 911. A partial answer only, though, as initials were not an identification.
She speculated: The unsub could have been in or near the building when S arrived or left, and he could have been worried that S had seen his face. He needed Patel to tell him S’s name to find and eliminate him. The same with VL.
She thumbed through other pages of the day planner. Along with notations of hundreds of meetings and apparent assignments over the past month, there were two references to appointments with S in the past ten days. VL appeared regularly, three or four times a week. So VL was possibly an employee or associate; this meant he would know the door code and so might walk into the robbery in progress, surprising the robber, who shot him.
Who are you, both? S? And VL?
And where are you?
Then a thought occurred.
If he was the one who’d walked in on the robbery, gotten shot and fled…how had he escaped?
The unsub had shot him. But then he would have chased after the man immediately. Given five or six seconds to step around the bodies and avoid slipping in the blood, the killer still would have had a good chance at catching up with the fleeing witness.
Sachs studied the hall once more. She’d assumed the killer had entered via the elevator, particularly because he’d spray-painted the camera just outside it. Or perhaps he’d taken the stairs, next to the elevator.
But there was another door on this floor, next to Patel’s office, a fire exit. Sachs had noticed it but had noted too the sign that warned: Fire Exit. Alarm Will Sound When Opened.
Since no one in the building had reported an alarm and the door was closed, she assumed the perp hadn’t used it. And he wouldn’t have thought that VL had escaped that way.
The actual site of the murder, or robbery, is the primary crime scene but there are others, of course. The perp has to get there and then get away and each of the secondary scenes can be a source of delightfully incriminating evidence. In fact, those scenes often yield more helpful clues than the primary scene since the perps might be more cavalier on the way to a job and more careless fleeing afterward.
She walked to the door. Pulling her weapon, Sachs pushed it open. No alarm.
Entering the dim, musty stairwell, Sachs played her flashlight beam upward and then down to the landing below. She paused and listened. There were creaks and grinds, and the wind, this cold ugly March wind, moaned through ancient seams in the building. But she heard no sound of footsteps. Of weapons chambering rounds.
The evidence had not given any indication that the perp had remained behind but there was no evidence suggesting he hadn’t.
Crouching, she swept her Maglite beam once more into the darkness.
She continued slowly down the stairs and there, on the landing between the second and third floors, she found a small scattering of objects.
It was similar to what she’d found inside the doorway of Patel’s office, chips and grains and dust of dark gray stone. She’d thought it might be gravel tracked in by someone, though none of the victims’ shoes revealed similar traces. But apparently not. In addition were shreds of brown paper—the shade of a grocery or lunch bag. And, explaining a lot, there was a bullet. It was deformed and flattened, and on the mushroomed nose were bits of the same gray rock. Several of the shards of stone were bloody, though the slug was not.
A logical scenario presented itself. The unsub breaks in, steals the Grace-Cabot stones, kills the engaged couple, then tortures Patel to get S’s name, thinking he might be a witness. He kills Patel. He’s about to leave when VL enters the office, using the door code. The killer’s surprised and shoots at him. The vic is carrying a bag containing stones to be carved and polished into jewelry. The bullet hits the stone and he’s wounded by some shards. He flees through the fire door, which the killer ignores, thinking he can’t have gone that way because of the alarm bar.
So there are two witnesses whom the perp is presumably aware of: S, whose name and address Patel might have given up under torture. And VL, who might have seen only the ski mask but may know something else the unsub does not want to come to light.
Whoever VL is, he’d be at risk too, of course. One concern might be that a stone splinter had lodged in or near a vital organ. He might be bleeding severely.
That risk might or might not be the case.
The other, though, was certain. Sachs assumed that the unsub had looked at Patel’s diary and knew that not only S but VL was a potential threat.
Of course, the unsub might flee the area with his spectacular diamond windfall.
But Sachs’s few moments of channeling him earlier suggested otherwise. She believed, she knew that he was staying put for the time being; a man who would so casually orchestrate a bloody crime scene like this was absolutely not the sort to leave witnesses alive.
Chapter 6
The Port Authority, of all things, brought him comfort.