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Authors: Jeffery Deaver
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From somewhere deep inside the pipe came another clink of metal on metal, workers hammering, tightening old joints.
As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.
FIVE
H ere’s the situation,” Lincoln Rhyme announced. “We’ve got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline.”
“No ransom demands”—Sellitto supplemented Rhyme’s synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. “Jerry,” Rhyme said to Banks, “brief them about the scene this morning.”
There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme’s dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme’d be home of course) but he’d discouraged that. And he’d stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He’d spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he’d given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.
Solitude.
It was all he craved, and oh how he missed it now.
Pacing, looking tense, was compact Jim Polling. Lon Sellitto was the case officer but an incident like this needed a captain on board and Polling had volunteered for the job. The case was a time bomb and could nuke careers in a heartbeat so the chief and the dep coms were happy to have him intercept the flak. They’d be practicing the fine art of distancing and when the Betacams rolled their press conferences would be peppered with words like delegated and assigned and taking the advice of and they’d be fast to glance at Polling when it came time to field the hardball questions. Rhyme couldn’t imagine why any cop in the world would volunteer to head up a case like this one.
Polling was an odd one. The little man had pummeled his way through Midtown North Precinct as one of the city’s most successful, and notorious, homicide detectives. Known for his bad temper, he’d gotten into serious trouble when he’d killed an unarmed suspect. But he’d managed, amazingly, to pull his career together by getting a conviction in the Shepherd case—the cop-serial-killer case, the one in which Rhyme’d been injured. Promoted to captain after that very public collar, Polling went through one of those embarrassing midlife changes—giving up blue jeans and Sears suits for Brooks Brothers (today he wore navy-blue Calvin Klein casual)—and began his dogged climb toward a plush corner office high in One Police Plaza.
Another officer leaned against a nearby table. Crew-cut, rangy Bo Haumann was a captain and head of the Emergency Services Unit. NYPD’s SWAT team.
Banks finished his synopsis just as Sellitto pushed disconnect and folded his phone. “The Hardy Boys.”
“Anything more on the cab?” Polling asked.
“Nothing. They’re still beating bushes.”
“Any sign she was fucking somebody she shouldn’t’ve been?” Polling asked. “Maybe a psycho boyfriend?”
“Naw, no boyfriends. Just dated a few guys casually. No stalkers, it looks like.”
“And still no ransom calls?” Rhyme asked.
“No.”
The doorbell rang. Thom went to answer it.
Rhyme looked toward the approaching voices.
A moment later the aide escorted a uniformed police officer up the stairs. She appeared very young from a distance but as she drew closer he could see she was probably thirty or so. She was tall and had that sullen, equine beauty of women gazing out from the pages of fashion magazines.
We see others as we see ourselves and since the accident Lincoln Rhyme rarely thought of people in termsof their bodies. He observed her height, trim hips, fiery red hair. Somebody else’d weigh
As Tammie Jean Colfax cried and cried she heard another clink. Then a distant groan, very faint. And it seemed to her, through her tears, that the black eye finally winked.
FIVE
H ere’s the situation,” Lincoln Rhyme announced. “We’ve got a kidnap victim and a three p.m. deadline.”
“No ransom demands”—Sellitto supplemented Rhyme’s synopsis, then turned aside to answer his chirping phone. “Jerry,” Rhyme said to Banks, “brief them about the scene this morning.”
There were more people hovering in Lincoln Rhyme’s dark room than in recent memory. Oh, after the accident friends had sometimes stopped by unannounced (the odds were pretty good that Rhyme’d be home of course) but he’d discouraged that. And he’d stopped returning phone calls too, growing more and more reclusive, drifting into solitude. He’d spend his hours writing his book and, when he was uninspired to write another one, reading. And when that grew tedious there were rental movies and pay-per-view and music. And then he’d given up TV and the stereo and spent hours staring at the art prints the aide had dutifully taped up on the wall opposite the bed. Finally they too had come down.
Solitude.
It was all he craved, and oh how he missed it now.
Pacing, looking tense, was compact Jim Polling. Lon Sellitto was the case officer but an incident like this needed a captain on board and Polling had volunteered for the job. The case was a time bomb and could nuke careers in a heartbeat so the chief and the dep coms were happy to have him intercept the flak. They’d be practicing the fine art of distancing and when the Betacams rolled their press conferences would be peppered with words like delegated and assigned and taking the advice of and they’d be fast to glance at Polling when it came time to field the hardball questions. Rhyme couldn’t imagine why any cop in the world would volunteer to head up a case like this one.
Polling was an odd one. The little man had pummeled his way through Midtown North Precinct as one of the city’s most successful, and notorious, homicide detectives. Known for his bad temper, he’d gotten into serious trouble when he’d killed an unarmed suspect. But he’d managed, amazingly, to pull his career together by getting a conviction in the Shepherd case—the cop-serial-killer case, the one in which Rhyme’d been injured. Promoted to captain after that very public collar, Polling went through one of those embarrassing midlife changes—giving up blue jeans and Sears suits for Brooks Brothers (today he wore navy-blue Calvin Klein casual)—and began his dogged climb toward a plush corner office high in One Police Plaza.
Another officer leaned against a nearby table. Crew-cut, rangy Bo Haumann was a captain and head of the Emergency Services Unit. NYPD’s SWAT team.
Banks finished his synopsis just as Sellitto pushed disconnect and folded his phone. “The Hardy Boys.”
“Anything more on the cab?” Polling asked.
“Nothing. They’re still beating bushes.”
“Any sign she was fucking somebody she shouldn’t’ve been?” Polling asked. “Maybe a psycho boyfriend?”
“Naw, no boyfriends. Just dated a few guys casually. No stalkers, it looks like.”
“And still no ransom calls?” Rhyme asked.
“No.”
The doorbell rang. Thom went to answer it.
Rhyme looked toward the approaching voices.
A moment later the aide escorted a uniformed police officer up the stairs. She appeared very young from a distance but as she drew closer he could see she was probably thirty or so. She was tall and had that sullen, equine beauty of women gazing out from the pages of fashion magazines.
We see others as we see ourselves and since the accident Lincoln Rhyme rarely thought of people in termsof their bodies. He observed her height, trim hips, fiery red hair. Somebody else’d weigh
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