The Cutting Edge (Lincoln Rhyme #14)(86)

“The shit, you’re saying,” Bishop barked.

“Once he was finished he made a call. And the gate—”

“Got it, just say ‘civie.’ Fewer syllables.”

Dobbs seemed pleased to deliver the next bit of information. “The civie, she heard him say, ‘Lincoln, I got everything you wanted. Anything else?’”

Oh. The civie gatekeeper was a she. Harder to roll a female head, though it could be done.

Then he focused.

The assistant continued, “‘Lincoln.’ As in Lincoln Rhyme, I’d think. Rhyme works with NYPD a lot and knows PERT. He helped set it up. The guy wrote the book on forensics and crime scene. He’s in a wheelchair, you know.”

“Wheelchair,” Bishop mused. “What the hell did he want our evidence for? And unauthorized copying?” He tried to figure this out. He couldn’t make any headway. He waved Dobbs into a chair—he’d been hovering—and called a friend, a dep inspector at NYPD, and asked if he knew anything about it. But he learned that, no, the NYPD wasn’t pursuing a case against El Halcón. They thought the Mexican was a turd, who didn’t? But the only deaths he’d caused in New York City were from overdosing on his product; the shootout was outside the city limits.

He hung up, staring out the window. Dark-gray smoke still rose. The fire had been bad.

Mentally he kicked around several theories about Rhyme’s involvement. If, in fact, he had been involved.

“Rhyme’s off the force, right? The wheelchair thing, you mentioned.”

“Oh, yeah, Hank. For years. He consults.” Dobbs was really quite a bundle of eager.

“For NYPD. Us too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Has he ever done any consulting for a defense team?”

“I don’t know. He could. Lot of people do.”

“We’ve got a team on El Halcón’s attorney and the rest of his entourage, right?”

Dobbs said, “To the extent we can, Hank. There’re a lot of them. A dozen came up from Mexico City.”

“Find out if any of ’em ever went to Rhyme’s home or office.”

“Sure.”

“Now.”

“Sure.” The assistant made a phone call, had a conversation and a few moments later disconnected. “Well. Try this on, Hank.”

Oh, please. But he just lifted a querying eyebrow.

More eager than ever now. “Tony Carreras-López, El Halcón’s main lawyer from Mexico—we’re on him twenty-four/seven. He was at Rhyme’s place, Central Park West, today. Before that, just before that, he stopped at a bank. Chase. He was inside for fifteen minutes. Then to Rhyme’s, then back to his hotel.”

“Money? Withdrawal? Wire transfer?”

“Don’t know. No probable cause for a warrant, of course, so we couldn’t get any details.”

Was Carreras-López hiring Rhyme as a consultant for the defense to look for holes in the case?

Our case.

My case.

Bishop paused and closed his eyes momentarily. He couldn’t imagine what holes there might be. Of course, no crime scene officer was perfect, no lab analyst was perfect. And someone like Rhyme could very well find something that might derail the entire investigation.

And help that horrific piece of murdering shit, El Halcón, escape justice.

After a moment or two of thought, Bishop decided he had a way to make sure that wasn’t going to happen.

He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

“Yessir?”

“Come into my office.”

“Right away.”

A moment later a clean-cut, gray-suited man of thirty-five stepped into Bishop’s office. He nodded to Bishop and Dobbs.

“Have a seat.”

The man did and Bishop continued, “I need you to start a criminal investigation. Immediately. Tonight.”

“Yessir, of course,” said FBI Special Agent Eric Fallow, withdrawing a notebook from his pocket and uncapping his pen.





Chapter 43



Daryl Mulbry from Alternative Intelligence Service was calling back.

“Hello. Lincoln, this just keeps getting better and better! First, your unsub—what were you calling him?”

“Unsub Forty-Seven.”

“First, Mr. Forty-Seven is a brilliant diamond thief, then it seems he’s a psychotic serial killer who dubs himself the Promisor, and now we see he’s actually a mercenary hired to do some nasty deeds in Brooklyn. Though still a psycho, by the looks of it. Never a dull moment.”

“Daryl?”

A chuckle. “I know, you want to get down to business. First, here’s what I’ve got about your Russian. Or a Russian. Or some Russian. Probably yours. First, some background. There are known routes that operatives and assets take when they leave certain countries, Russia, for instance, and want to come into the U.S. We call it ‘purging,’ as in they purge their background by flying to three or four different cutout locations. One pattern is pretty common: Moscow to Tbilisi to Dubai to Barcelona to Newark. Four separate tickets, four separate identities. And that’s what we think this Russian did. There was no one individual on all of those flights—the separate tickets, separate names. But we took a peek at flight manifests—shhh, it’ll be our secret—and found there was one constant with all of them.”