The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(17)
Sachs believed that the caller was the employee or associate of Patel’s who’d walked into the crime and been shot, VL. A canvass of the Port Authority, where he’d made the most recent phone call, had revealed no sightings of anyone injured. Rhyme had wanted someone to remove the coins from the pay phones from which the man had made the call and fingerprint them.
“You don’t need a quarter to call nine one one,” Sellitto had said, amused. “The city got that worked out in the budget.” Hospitals had been alerted to report anyone injured by what would be rock splinters but the odds that the roughly one thousand emergency room doctors in the New York area would learn of this request and follow through, if they did, were pretty damn slim.
Sachs had called the company that owned the diamonds, Grace-Cabot in Cape Town, South Africa. It was hours later there, early morning, and she’d left a message. There was, after all, a possibility that the stones had been shipped back or were elsewhere, perhaps contracted out to other diamond cutters who worked with Patel.
If that was true the case would become even more confounding, and it would be up to the high-value evidence technicians to run an inventory and learn if anything was in fact missing.
As for physical evidence, there’d been hundreds of friction ridge images—fingerprints—discovered: the shop, the elevator, the handles of the doors to the street, the doors to the stairwell, the railings in the stairwells. But none were in the IAFIS database. He hadn’t expected any hits; the number of cloth glove prints suggested Unsub 47 never took them off.
Don’t make it easy for us, do they? A rhetorical query that Rhyme didn’t bother to express aloud.
Some crimes—sexual in nature and physical fights, for instance—are usually DNA-rich exchanges, and the deoxyribonucleic acid database—CODIS, in America—might reveal an identity in such instances. But a crime like this, by a gloved killer, wearing a long-sleeve outer garment and slacks—as well as the ski mask—would offer little chance for him to leave behind DNA.
Some cloth fibers had been found, none of which matched the clothing worn by the victims. Some were black cotton, most likely from gloves—since they were found on doorknobs and drawers. Also, Sachs had discovered black polyester fibers, which were probably from the ski mask.
No empty cartridge shells from the gunshot; he’d taken the brass with him.
“What do we have there?” Rhyme asked his lab man impatiently. His eyes on the electrostatic footprints from Jatin Patel’s shop, now scanned and slapped onto a high-def screen.
Mel Cooper was wearing a white lab coat, cap and gloves, as well as a face mask. And his ever-present Harry Potter glasses. “Hard to say for certain but our boy’s between a ten and an eleven and a half.” Since shoe toes curl upward and heel size varies, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain an exact size. “And some distinctive wear marks but there’s no tread.”
“So businessman footwear.”
“Right.” Much better if the perps wear running shoes. The distinctive tread marks will usually give you brand and model number, and sometimes even color can be ascertained from the model.
“Any small lines in the blood, next to the shoe prints?” Rhyme was looking at an image shot by Sachs on her Sony digital camera.
“Lines?” Cooper asked.
“Wormy lines, squiggly lines,” Rhyme muttered. “I can’t tell.” When he noted that both Sellitto and Cooper were glancing his way, perplexed, he started to speak but Sachs, hunched over an examination table, said, “From dangling shoelaces. They might not show up in the electrostatics but they would in the blood.”
Rhyme smiled. He loved her.
“Ah.” Cooper examined the footprint photos. Sellitto looked once, then checked texts.
“Ah, bored, are we, Lon? Many a case’s been closed because of something as trivial as finding out if the perp wears shoes with laces or not.”
“Hey, Linc, you’re the squiggly line/bloody shoe-print guru. Not me.” He took another phone call and stepped away.
No squiggles, it turned out. Probably slip-ons.
The witness had reported only one perp present, and footprints confirmed the killer was by himself.
His weapon was most likely a 9mm Glock, like Sachs’s, to judge from the polygonal rifling of the slug. Gun barrels for the past 150 years have contained interior indentations to spin the bullet as it leaves the weapon, making it more accurate. Most have lands and grooves—troughs. Glocks, however, have wavy indentations, not sharp edges, which give the bullet more speed and power. They aren’t the only guns with this feature—others are Heckler & Koch, Kahr Arms, Magnum Research, Tanfoglio, and CZ—but Glocks are by far the most common to feature polygonal rifling.
Sellitto disconnected his phone. “That was a couple gold shields. Went to Patel’s sister’s house, delivered the news. His wife had passed away a few years ago and the sister’s the only family he’s got in the area. They said it was pretty tough for her. She nearly collapsed. They waited till her husband got home to ask her questions. She said she didn’t know much about the business. That was a ‘man thing,’ she said.
“Patel’d never told her or her husband that he was concerned about security or that anybody’d been casing the shop. But he was really famous as a cutter—here and internationally too. Word could’ve gotten around that he had some nice shit for somebody to steal. My word, not hers.”