The Broken Window (2 page)

The subject of Richard Logan’s “well-funded plot which originated at high levels”—Rhyme could only smile when he read the polished Interpol description—was a Protestant minister from Africa, who’d run a refugee camp and stumbled on a massive scam in which AIDS drugs were stolen and sold and the money used to purchase arms. The minister was relocated by security forces to London, having survived three attempts on his life in Nigeria and Liberia and even one in a transit lounge at Malpensa airport in Milan, where the Polizia di Stato, armed with stubby machine guns, scrutinize much and miss very little.

The Reverend Samuel G. Goodlight (a better name for a man of the cloth Rhyme couldn’t imagine) was now in a safe house in London, under the watchful eye of officers from Scotland Yard, the home of the Metropolitan Police Service, and was presently helping British and foreign intelligence connect the dots of the drugs-for-arms plan.

Via encrypted satellite calls and e-mails flying around several continents, Rhyme and an Inspector Longhurst of the Metropolitan Police had set up a trap to catch the perp. Worthy of the precise plots that Logan himself crafted, the plan involved look-alikes and the vital assistance of a larger-than-life former arms broker from South Africa who came with a network of curried informants. Danny Krueger had made hundreds of thousands selling weapons as efficiently and dispassionately as other businessmen sell air conditioners and cough syrup. But a trip to Darfur last year had shaken him badly, seeing the carnage his toys caused. He’d given up the arms trade cold and had resettled in England. Others on the task force included officers from MI5, as well as personnel from the London office of the FBI and an agent from France’s version of the CIA: La Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.

They hadn’t known even the region of Britain in which Logan was in hiding, planning his hit, but the boisterous Danny Krueger had heard that the killer would be making his move in the next few days. The South African still had many contacts in the international underground and had put out hints about a

“secret” location where the meetings between Goodlight and the authorities would take place. The building had an exposed courtyard that was a perfect shooting zone for the killer to assassinate the minister.

It was also an ideal place to spot and take down Logan. Surveillance was in place and armed police, MI5 and FBI agents were on twenty-four-hour alert.

Rhyme was now sitting in his red battery-powered wheelchair on the first floor of his Central Park West town house—no longer the quaint Victorian parlor it had once been, but a well-equipped forensic laboratory, larger than many labs in medium-size towns. He found himself doing what he’d done frequently over the past several days: staring at the phone, whose number-two speed-dial button would call a line in England.

“The phone’s working, right?” Rhyme asked.

“Is there any reason for it not to be?” Thom, his caregiver, asked this in a measured tone, which Rhyme heard as a belabored sigh.

“I don’t know. Circuits overload. Phone lines get hit by lightning. All kinds of things can go wrong.”

“Then maybe you should try it. Just to make sure.”

“Command,” Rhyme said, getting the attention of the voice-recognition system hooked to his ECU—the
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computerized environmental control unit that substituted in many ways for his physical functioning. Lincoln Rhyme was a quadriplegic; he had only limited movement below the place where his neck was broken in a crime-scene accident years before—the fourth cervical vertebra, near the base of the skull. He now ordered, “Dial directory assistance.”

The dial tone filled the speakers, followed by
beep beep beep
. This irritated Rhyme more than a nonperforming phone would have. Why hadn’t Inspector Longhurst called? “Command,” he snapped.

“Disconnect.”

“Seems to be fine.” Thom placed a coffee mug in the cup holder of Rhyme’s wheelchair and the criminalist sipped the strong brew through a straw. He looked at a bottle of Glenmorangie eighteen-year-old single-malt whisky on a shelf—it was nearby but, of course, always just out of Rhyme’s reach.

“It’s morning,” Thom said.

“Obviously it’s morning. I can
see
it’s morning. I don’t want any… It’s just…” He’d been waiting for a reason to ride the young man on the issue. “I seem to recall being cut off rather early last night. Two tumblers. Virtually nothing.”

“It was three.”

“If you were to add up the contents, the cubic centimeters, I’m speaking of, it was the same as two small ones.” Pettiness, like liquor, could be intoxicating in its own right.

“Well, no scotch in the morning.”

“It helps me think more clearly.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“It does. And more creatively.”

“Doesn’t do that either.”

Thom was wearing a perfectly ironed shirt, tie and slacks. His clothes were less wrinkled than they used to be. Much of the job of a quadriplegic’s caregiver is physical. But Rhyme’s new chair, an Invacare TDX, for “total driving experience,” could fold out into a virtual bed, and had made Thom’s job much easier. The chair could even climb low stairs and speed along as fast as a middle-aged jogger.

“I’m saying I want some scotch. There. I’ve articulated my desire. How’s that?”

“No.”

Rhyme scoffed and stared at the phone again. “If he gets away…” His voice faded. “Well, aren’t you going to do what everybody does?”

“What do you mean, Lincoln?” The slim young man had been working with Rhyme for years. He’d been fired on occasion and had quit too. But here he still was. A testament to the perseverance, or perverseness, of both principals.

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“I say, ‘If he gets away,’ and you say, ‘Oh, but he won’t. Don’t worry.’ And I’m supposed to be reassured. People do that, you know: They give reassurance when they have no idea what they’re talking about.”

“But I didn’t say that. Are we having an argument about something I didn’t say but could have? Isn’t that like a wife being mad at her husband because she saw a pretty woman on the street and thought he
would
have stared at her if he’d been there?”

“I don’t know what it’s like,” Rhyme said absently, his mind mostly on the plan in Britain to capture Logan. Were there holes in it? How was security? Could he trust the informants not to leak information the killer might pick up on?

The phone rang and a caller-ID box opened on the flat-screen monitor near Rhyme. He was disappointed to see the number wasn’t a London exchange but closer to home—in the Big Building, cop-speak for One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan.

“Command, answer phone.”
Click.
Then: “What?”

From five miles away a voice muttered, “Bad mood?”

“No word from England yet.”

“What’re you, on call or something?” Detective Lon Sellitto asked.

“Logan’s disappeared. He could make a move at any time.”

“Like having a baby,” Sellitto said.

“If you say so. What do you need? I don’t want to keep the line tied up.”

“All that fancy equipment and you don’t have call waiting?”

“Lon.”

“Okay. Something you oughta know about. There was a burglary-murder a week ago Thursday. Vic was a woman lived in the Village. Alice Sanderson. Perp stabbed her to death and stole some painting.

We got the doer.”

Why was he calling about this? A mundane crime and the perp in custody. “Evidence problem?”

“Nope.”

“So I’d be interested
why
?”

“The supervising detective just got a call a half hour ago?”

“The chase, Lon. The chase.” Rhyme was staring at the whiteboard that detailed the plan to catch the killer in England. The scheme was elaborate.

And fragile.

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Sellitto brought him out of his reflection. “Look, I’m sorry, Linc, but I gotta tell you, the perp’s your cousin, Arthur Rhyme. It’s murder one. He’s looking at twenty-five years, and the D.A. says it’s an airtight case.”

It’s been quite a while.”

Judy Rhyme sat in the lab. Hands together, face ashen, she fiercely avoided looking at anything except the criminalist’s eyes.

Two responses to his physical condition infuriated Rhyme: when visitors struggled agonizingly to pretend his disability didn’t exist, and when they considered it a reason to be his best friend, joking and slinging around tough talk as if they’d been through the war together. Judy fell into the first category, measuring her words carefully before she set them delicately in front of Rhyme. Still, she was family, of sorts, and he remained patient as he tried to keep from glancing at the telephone.

“A long time,” the criminalist agreed.

Thom was picking up the social details to which Rhyme was forever oblivious. He’d offered Judy coffee, which now sat untouched, a prop, on the table in front of her. Rhyme had glanced at the whisky once more, a longing peek that Thom had no trouble ignoring.

The attractive, dark-haired woman seemed in better shape, solid and more athletic, than the last time he’d seen her—about two years before his accident. Judy risked a look at the criminalist’s face. “I’m sorry we never got here. Really. I wanted to.”

Meaning not a social visit before he was injured but a sympathy call after. Survivors of catastrophes can read what is unsaid in conversations as clearly as the words themselves.

“You got the flowers?”

Back then, after the accident, Rhyme had been dazed—medication, physical trauma, and the psychological wrestling match with the inconceivable: the fact that he would never walk again. He didn’t remember any flowers from them but he was sure the family had sent them. A lot of people had. Flowers are easy, visits are hard. “Yes. Thanks.”

Silence. An involuntary, lightning-fast glance at his legs. People think if you can’t walk there’s something wrong with your legs. No, they’re fine. The problem was telling them what to do.

“You’re looking good,” she said.

Rhyme didn’t know whether he did or not. Never really considered it.

“And you’re divorced, I heard.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry.”

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Why? he wondered. But that was a cynical thought and he gave a nod, acknowledging her sympathy.

“What’s Blaine up to?”

“She’s out on Long Island. Remarried. We don’t stay in touch much. Without kids, that usually happens.”

“I enjoyed that time in Boston, when you two came up for the long weekend.” A smile that wasn’t really a smile. Painted on, a mask.

“It was nice, yes.”

A weekend in New England. Shopping, a drive south to Cape Cod, a picnic by the water. Rhyme remembered thinking how lovely the place was. Seeing the green rocks by the shore, he’d had a brainstorm and decided to start a collection of algae from around the New York City area for the NYPD

crime lab database. He’d spent a week driving around the metro area, taking samples.

And, on the trip to see Arthur and Judy, he and Blaine hadn’t fought once. Even the drive home, with a stop at a Connecticut inn, was nice. He remembered making love on the back deck of their room, the smell of honeysuckle overwhelming.

That visit was the last contact with his cousin in person. They’d had one other brief conversation but only via the phone. Then came the accident, and silence.

“Arthur kind of fell off the face of the earth.” She laughed, an embarrassed sound. “You know we moved to New Jersey?”

“Really?”

“He was teaching at Princeton. But he got laid off.”

“What happened?”

“He was an assistant and a research fellow. They decided not to offer him a full professor’s contract. Art says politics was behind it. You know how that is in colleges.”

Henry Rhyme, Art’s father, was a renowned professor of physics at the University of Chicago; academia was an esteemed pursuit in that branch of the Rhyme family. In high school Arthur and Lincoln would debate the virtues of university research and teaching versus a private-sector job. “In academia, you can make a serious contribution to society,” Art had said as the boys shared two somewhat illegal beers, and managed to keep a straight face when Lincoln supplied the requisite follow-up line: “That, and the teaching assistants can be pretty hot.”

Rhyme wasn’t surprised that Art had gone for a university job.

“He could’ve continued to be an assistant but he quit. He was pretty angry. Assumed he’d get another job right away, but that didn’t happen. He was out of work for a while. Ended up at a private company.

A medical-equipment manufacturer.” Another automatic glance—this time at the elaborate wheelchair.

She blushed as if she’d committed a Don Imus. “It wasn’t his dream job and he hasn’t been real happy.

I’m sure he wanted to come see you. But probably he was ashamed he hadn’t done so well. I mean, with
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you being a celebrity and all.”

Finally, a sip of coffee. “You both had so much in common. You two were like brothers. I remember Boston, all the stories you told. We were up half the night, laughing. Things I never knew about him. And my father-in-law, Henry—when he was alive he’d talk about you all the time.”

“Did he? We wrote quite a bit. In fact, I had a letter from him a few days before he died.”

Rhyme had dozens of indelible memories of his uncle, but one particular image stood out. The tall, balding, ruddy-faced man is rearing back, braying a laugh, embarrassing every one of the dozen or so family members at the Christmas Eve dinner table—embarrassing all, that is, except Henry Rhyme himself, his patient wife and young Lincoln, who is laughing right along. Rhyme liked his uncle very much and would often go to visit Art and the family, who lived about thirty miles away, on the shores of Lake Michigan in Evanston, Illinois.

Now, though, Rhyme was in no mood for nostalgia and was relieved when he heard the door open and the sound of seven firm footsteps, from threshold to carpet, the stride telling Rhyme who it was. A moment later a tall, slim redhead wearing jeans and a black T-shirt under a burgundy blouse entered the lab. The shirt was loose and the stern angle of a black Glock pistol was visible high on her hip.