The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(32)

It was then that Mikey, braced on the floor, kicked the man with both feet, as hard as he could, using every ounce of energy in his strong legs. The man tumbled off the ottoman and into a bookcase. He hit his head and lay stunned, squinting in pain.

Emma, with her hands in front of her, easily rose to her feet.

“Run! Now, go!” And Mikey struggled to stand.

He meant her alone. His improvised plan was to pile onto the madman and use his teeth to rip flesh or break fingers. He’d die but at least his love would escape.

Emma didn’t hesitate. But she didn’t make for the door. She grabbed Mikey by the shoulder and yanked her fiancé to his feet.

“No!”

“Yes!” she shouted.

Mikey noted that the assailant was wiping tears of pain from his eyes and gripping his battered head. They’d have only a few seconds to escape before the man could focus. Together they sprinted toward the door, Emma in the lead, and she pulled it open fast. Then they pushed into the hall, just as the stunningly loud gunshot sounded behind them and a bullet, missing Mikey’s head by less than a foot, cracked into the wall across the hall.

They fled toward the stairs at the end of the hallway, which would lead them straight down to the entryway and the street.

Of course, if the man followed them into the hall, he’d have a perfect shot into their backs as they descended the stairs. But there was nothing else to do. At least here, at this moment, Mikey thought hysterically, they were less dead than in their apartment.

He positioned himself directly behind Emma as they took the steps two at a time downward to the lobby.

She got to the ground first and leapt to the front door, pulling it open.

Which was when he fell.

On the third step from the bottom, he lost his balance and, not having use of his hands, he went down hard, first on his side, then onto his belly, the wood taking skin from throbbing cheek and chin.

Emma cried, “No, honey!”

“Keep going!” he called.

But once again she ignored him. She stepped forward and crouched to help Mikey up.

Above them, a door slammed and the floor creaked—he knew the exact spot, just outside their apartment, where the loose board made that noise. The sound meant the killer would be approaching the top of the stairs now.

He’d be aiming.

With a fierce lunge, Mikey rose to his full height. He stepped behind her and shouted, “Run!”

He prayed that his body would shield the bullets, stopping them, and give his love—his beautiful girl—a chance to make it, unhurt, into the street.





Chapter 15



The murder of Saul Weintraub had taken place within a four-by-four-foot square of the entrance alcove in his house.

Unsub 47 had come in through an unlocked basement window, walked straight up the stairs, shot Weintraub three times, once to the face and a double-tap to the chest, and then fled through the front door. She knew it had happened this way since the killer had left moist footprints—from the drizzle outside—in a direct path from entry to exit.

Although Weintraub hadn’t been tortured with the knife, he had been beaten—pistol-whipped, it seemed, since there were no blunt objects in his house that might have caused the wounds; nothing Sachs found held blood or tissue. She guessed the blows were to force him to reveal what Weintraub had told the police or who VL was. There was another possibility, too: that the killer had demanded something. Weintraub’s coat lay beside him and one of the pockets was turned out, as if the killer had asked that he produce something.

Or was it simply because Weintraub, in anticipation of walking out to the police car, had pulled his gloves from the pocket? They lay nearby too.

Dressed in her white overalls, booties, hood and cornflower-blue gloves, she walked the grid in the house while two crime scene evidence techs, whom she knew from the main headquarters, ran the secondary scenes—the backyard and alley and the sidewalk on which he’d, possibly, entered and later fled. Sachs was optimistic about finding evidence in the back—near the window where he’d entered—but the odds were slim that she would find any relevant clues on the sidewalk in front of the house; heavy foot traffic would have deposited thousands of bits of trace, dirt, mud, trash, animal crap, pee.

She sent several of the uniforms whom Ben Kohl had assigned to her to canvass for wits and search for evidence for three or four blocks in the direction the unsub had fled. She knew the escape route since a woman, a dog walker, had seen him jogging from Weintraub’s house, just after the shots. He’d pulled off a cap or mask and the woman had seen that he was white with short light-colored hair.

Sachs assembled what she’d found. No single bit of evidence seemed particularly helpful. The shoe prints seemed the same, the fibers too—from the gloves and the ski mask.

Three spent brass shells. Fiocchi 9mm—probably what had been fired in Midtown at the witness, though there he’d collected the spent round. The fact he’d left them here meant he was in a hurry, probably because of the noise of the shots. The brass also had been ejected some distance, the ones she found, under furniture.

A Motorola radio crackled from the belt of an officer nearby. She couldn’t hear the transmission but he sent a reply from his shoulder mike and walked up to Sachs. “Detective? One of the uniforms canvassing? Found something in a storm drain. Two blocks that way.” He pointed in the direction that the perp had fled. “She didn’t want to touch it. Clothing or something.”