The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(62)

The tech took the bags and got to work examining what had been uncovered.

Rhyme noticed that her eyes remained distant, her posture tense. She tugged at her hair, then dug the index finger of her right hand into the thumb of that hand once more. An old habit. She tried to control the self-harm. Sometimes she didn’t care. Amelia Sachs lived on the edge, in many senses.

He noticed her hand drop to her knee. She winced.

“Sachs?” Rhyme asked.

“I fell. That’s all. Nothing.”

No, it wasn’t nothing. Whatever had happened had shaken her. And now she had a brief coughing fit. Cleared her throat. He felt an urge to ask if she was okay but she didn’t like that question any more than he did.

Rhyme said, “Any indication Forty-Seven was picking up that new weapon of his?”

“No, but I didn’t get very far. We’ll have to keep canvassing.” She turned to Cooper. “Speaking of the weapon: Ballistics?”

He explained that the gun used at Gravesend was a .38 special. Probably the Smittie 36 or the Colt Detective. Both, classic snub-nose. Five rounds. Not very accurate and punishing on the shooting hand. But at close range as wicked as any other firearm.

Cooper added, “And I heard from the evidence collection techs out of Queens. No sign of the Glock—or anything else—in the storm drains or Dumpsters near Saul Weintraub’s.”

Sachs shrugged. “I was going back to the construction site tomorrow to keep up the canvassing but there’s a problem. I met a state inspector down there. Works for the Division of Mineral Resources. He said the city’s shutting down construction at the geothermal site until they can see if the drilling’s caused the quake.”

Ackroyd said, “Oh, it’s a geothermal plant they’re building?”

“Right.”

“How deep?”

“I think five, six hundred feet.”

“Yes, I’d guess that could do it. My company used to insure against damage from fracking and high-pressure water mining. Those’ve definitely caused earthquakes and undermined buildings and homes. But we gave up issuing policies. It was costing us too much. And I have heard of geothermal drilling leading to earthquakes too. In one case a school was destroyed in a fire from a broken gas line. Another one, two workers were buried alive.”

Sachs once more dug an index nail into the thumb cuticle. Deep. The flesh went pink. Rhyme believed he now understood what had happened at the geothermal site.

She continued, “Northeast is appealing the shutdown but until that’s resolved, there won’t be any workers on-site. We’ll have to interview them at home.”

“How many?”

“About ninety. I told Lon. He’ll recruit uniforms. Pain in the ass. But there’s no other way.”

Cooper looked up from a computer monitor. “Got the results from the construction site, Amelia. Same mineral trace as at Patel’s and Weintraub’s, so he was definitely there. But nothing new, other than diesel fuel. And mud. Was there a lot of mud down there?”

A pause. “Some. Yeah.”

“Nothing else.”

The door buzzer sounded and Thom let Ron Pulaski into the parlor.

The young officer nodded to those present and introduced himself to Edward Ackroyd; the two had never met. The young officer then handed off to Mel Cooper the evidence bags he’d collected on the Judith Morgan assault on the Upper East Side. The tech got to work, as Pulaski explained to the others what had happened in the latest Promisor assault. Morgan, twenty-six, had been in a bridal boutique, getting some final adjustments to her wedding dress. A man who’d been outside the shop followed her to her apartment and forced her into an alcove on the ground floor.

“He was rambling on and on about how she’d ruined a beautiful diamond by cutting it into a ring. He was going to kill her, she thought. Or cut her ring finger off. But then he changed his mind. He told her that since she’d treated the ring like shit, that’s where it was going to end up.”

Sachs asked, “Did he say anything that’d give us a clue where he lives? Works?”

“No. But said she could smell aftershave, alcohol, cigarette smoke residue, very foul. And onions. He has blue eyes.”

Sachs said, “Same as earlier.”

“And that he was foreign but she couldn’t tell his accent.”

Rhyme told Pulaski they were pretty sure he was Russian and new to the city.

“She thinks the gun was a revolver—I showed her pictures. And the utility knife was gray metal. That’s about it.”

Sachs wrote these finds up on the chart.

Cooper returned to give them the results of the Judith Morgan crime scene search. “Not much. Too many footprints to find anything more about his shoes. Some black cotton fibers—ski mask, I’d guess. General trace but all typical of that neighborhood. No kimberlite this time.”

Sachs sat down in a wicker chair. She tapped her knee with an index finger, as if she were testing a melon. She was staring at the TV screen. The news was on. Though the set was muted, the closed captioning was telling the story in its own form of clumsy English.

That story was about the earthquake.

Sachs was frowning, Rhyme noted, and she whispered, “Oh, no.”

He turned his full attention to the story. The anchor was announcing that one of the two fires believed to have started when the tremor snapped gas lines, had taken two lives.