"Now, check this out, Mum. I've got a show tomorrow. One of Mr.
Balzac's little things. You know."
"I remember."
"But this time it's different. This time he's letting me go on solo. I'm
warm-up and main bill rolled into one."
"Really, honey?"
"True as toast"
Outside the doorway Mr. Geldter shuffled past. "Hello, there."
Kara nodded at him. She recalled that when her mother had first come to Stuyvesant Manor, one of the city's best aging facilities, the woman and the widower had caused quite a stir.
"They think we're shacking up," she'd told her daughter in a whisper. "Are you?" Kara had asked, thinking it was about time her mother struck up a relationship with a man after five years of widowhood. "Of course not!" her mother had hissed, truly angry. "What a thing to suggest." (The incident defined the woman perfectly: a hint of the bawdy
was fine but there was a very clear line--established arbitrarily-past which you would become The Enemy, even if you were her flesh and blood.)
Kara continued, rocking forward excitedly and telling her mother in an animated way about what she planned for tomorrow. As she spoke she studied her mother closely, the skin oddly smooth for a woman in her midseventies and as healthy pink as a crying baby's, hair mostly gray but with plenty of defiant wiry black strands scattered throughout. The staff beautician had done it up in a stylish bun. "Anyway, Mum, some friends'll be there and it'd be great if you could come too."
"I'll try."
Kara, now sitting on the very edge of the armchair, realized suddenly
that her fists were clenched, her body a knot of tension. Her breath was coming in shallow sibilant gasps.
I'll try....
Kara closed her eyes, filling with slivers of tears. Goddamnit!
I'll try....
No, no, no, that's all wrong, she thought angrily. Her mother wouldn't
say, I'll try." That wasn't her sort of dialogue. It might be: "I'll be there, hons. In the first row." Or she'd say frostily, 'Well, I can't tomorrow. You should've let me know earlier."
Whatever else about her mother, there was nothing I'll-try about her.
Balls-out for you, or hell-to-pay against. Except now-when the woman was hardly a human being at all. At most
a child, sleeping with her eyes open. The conversation Kara had just had with the woman had occurred only in the girl's hopeful imagination. Well, Kara's portion had been real. But her mother's, from the Just fine, darling. And haws life treating you? to the glitch of I'll try, had been ginned up by Kara herself.
No, her mother hadn't said a single word today. Or during yesterday's visit. Or the one before. She'd lain beside the ivy window in some kind of waking coma. Some days she was like that. On others, the woman might be fully awake but babbling scary nonsense that only attested to the success of the invisible army moving relentlessly through her brain, torching memory and reason.
But there was a more pernicious part of the tragedy. Once in a rare while, there'd be a fragile moment of clarity, which, brief though it was, perfectly negated her despair. Just when Kara had come to accept the worst that the mother she knew was gone forever-the women would return, just
like in the days before the cerebral hemorrhage. And Kara's defenses vanished, the same way an abused woman forgives her slugging husband at the slightest hint of contrition. At moments like that she'd convince herself that her mother was improving.
The doctors said that there was virtually no hope for this, of course. Still, the doctors hadn't been at her mother's bedside when, several months ago, the woman woke up and turned suddenly to Kara. "Hi there, hons. 1 ate those cookies you brought me yesterday. You put in extra pecans the way 1 like them. And heck with the calories." A girlish smile. "Oh, I'm glad you're here. 1 wanted to tell you what Mrs. Brandon did last night. With the remote control."
Kara had blinked, stunned. Because, damn, she had brought her mother pecan sandies the day before and had stocked them with extra nuts. And, yes, crazy Mrs. Brandon from the fifth floor had copped a remote and bounced the signal off the windows next door into the nursing home's lounge, confounding the residents for a half hour by changing channels and volume like a poltergeist.
There! Who needed better evidence than this that her vibrant mother, her real mother remained within the injured shell of a body and could someday escape.
But the next day Kara had found the woman staring at her daughter suspiciously, asking why she was there and what she wanted. If this was about the electric bill for twenty-two dollars and fifteen cents she'd paid it and had the canceled check for proof. Since the pecan-sandy/remote-control performance there'd been no encores.
Kara now touched her mother's arm, warm, wrinkle-free, baby pink. Sensing what she always did here on her daily visits: the numbing trilogy of wishing that the woman would mercifully die, wishing that she'd come back to her vibrant life-and wishing that Kara herself could escape from the terrible burden of wanting both of those irreconcilable choices.
A glance at her watch. Late for work, as always. Mr. Balzac would not be happy. Saturday was their busiest day. She drained the coffee cup, pitched it out and walked into the hallway.
A large black woman in a white uniform lifted a hand in greeting. "Kara! How long you been here?" A broad smile in a broad face.
"Twenty minutes."
"I would've come by and visited," Jaynene said. "She still awake?" "No. She was out when 1 got here."
"Oh, I'm sony."
'Was she talking before?" Kara asked.
"Yep. Just little things. Couldn't tell if she was with us or not. Seemed like it.... This is some gorgeous day, hm? Sephie and me, we're gonna take her walking in the courtyard later if she's awake. She likes it. She always does better after that."
I've gotta get to work," Kara told the nurse. "Hey, I'm doing a show tomorrow. At the store. Remember where it is?"
"Sure do. What time?"
"Four. Come on by."
'Tm off early tomorrow. I'll be there. We'll drink some more of those peach margaritas after. Like last time."
"That'll work," Kara replied. "Hey, bring Pete."
The woman scowled. "Girl, nothing personal, but th' only way that man'll see you on Sunday is if you're playing the halftime show for the Knicks or the Lakers an' it's on network 1V."
Kara said, "From your mouth to God's ear."
Chapter Five
One hundred years ago a moderately successful financier might've called this place home.
Or the owner of a small haberdashery in the luxurious shopping neighborhood of Fourteenth Street. Or possibly a politician connected with Tammany Hall, savvy in the timeless art of growing rich through public office. The present owner of the Central Park West town house, however, didn't know, or care, about its provenance. Nor would the Victorian furnishings or subdued fin de siecle objets d'art that had once graced these rooms appeal to Lincoln Rhyme at all. He enjoyed what surrounded him now: a disarray of sturdy tables, swivel stools, computers, scientific devices-a density gradient rack, a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, microscopes, plastic boxes in myriad colors, beakers, jars, thermometers, propane tanks, goggles, latched black or gray cases of odd shapes, which suggested they contained esoteric musical instruments.
And wires.
Wires and cables everywhere, covering much of the limited square
footage of the room, some tidily coiled and connecting adjacent pieces of machinery, some disappearing through ragged holes shamefully cut into the hard-earned smoothness of century-old plaster-and-Lath walls.
Lincoln Rhyme himself was largely wireless now. Advances in infrared and radio technology had linked a microphone on his wheelchair--and on
his bed upstairs-to environmental control units and computers. He drove his Storm Arrow with his left ring finger on an MKIV touchpad but all the other commands, from phone calls to email to slapping the image from his compound microscope onto computer monitors, could be accomplished by using his voice.
It could also control his new Harmon Kardon 8000 receiver, which was
currently piping a pleasant jazz solo through the lab. "Control, stereo off," Rhyme reluctantly ordered, hearing the front door
slam. The music went silent, replaced by the erratic beat of footsteps in the front hall and the parlor. One of the visitors was Amelia Sachs, he knew; for a tall woman she had a decidedly light footfall. Then he heard the distinctive clump of Lon Sellitto's big, perpetually out-turned feet.
"Sachs," he muttered as she entered the room, "was it a big scene? Was
it huge?"
"Not so big." She frowned at the question. 'Why?"
His eyes were on the gray milk crates containing evidence she and several other officers carried. "I was just wondering because it seemed to take a long time to search the scene and get back here. It is okay for you to use that Hashing light on your car. That's why they make them, you know. Sirens are allowed too." When Rhyme was bored he grew testy. Boredom was the biggest evil in his life.
Sachs, however, was impervious to his sourness-she seemed in a particularly good mood-and said merely, 'We've got ourselves some mysteries here, Rhyme."
He recalled that Sellitto had used the word "bizarre" about the killing. "Give me the scenario. What happened?"
Sachs offered a likely account of the events, culminating in the perp's escape from the recital hall. "The respondings heard a shot inside the hall then they did a kick-in. Timed it together, went in through the only two doors in the room. He was gone." Sellitto consulted his notes. "The patrol officers put him in his fifties, medium height, medium build, no distinguishings other than a beard, brown hair. There was a janitor who says he didn't see anybody go in or out of the room. But maybe he got witnessitis, you know. The school's gonna call with his name and number. I'll see if I can refresh his memory."
"What about the vic? What was the motive?"
Sachs said, "No sexual assault, no robbery."
Sellitto added, "Just talked to the Twins. She hasn't got any present or recent boyfriends. Nobody in the past that'd be a problem."
"She was a full-time student?" Rhyme asked. "Or did she work?" "Full-time student, yeah. But apparently she did some performing on the side. They're finding out where." Rhyme recruited his aide, Thorn, to act as a scribe, as he often did, jotting down the evidence in his elegant handwriting on one of the large whiteboards in the lab. The aide took the marker and began to write. There was a knock on the door and Thorn disappeared momentarily
from the lab.
"Incoming visitor!" he called from the hallway.
"Visitor?" Rhyme asked, hardly in the mood for company. The aide,
though, was being playful. Into the room walked Mel Cooper, the slim, balding lab technician whom Rhyme, then head of NYPD forensics, had met some years ago on a joint burglary/kidnapping case with an upstate New York police department. Cooper had disputed Rhyme's analysis of a particular type of soil and had been right, it turned out. Impressed, Rhyme had dug into the tech's credentials and found that, like Rhyme, he was an active and highly respected member of the International Association for Identification experts at identifying individuals from friction ridges, DNA, forensic reconstruction and dental remains. With degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry, Cooper was also top-notch at physical evidence analysis.
Rhyme mounted a campaign to get the man to return to the city where he'd been born and he finally agreed. The soft-spoken forensic tech/champion ballroom dancer was based in the NYPD crime lab in Queens but he often worked with Rhyme when the criminalist was consulting on an active case.
Greetings all around and then Cooper shoved his thick, Harry Potterstyle glasses high on his nose and squinted a critical eye at the crates of evidence like a chess player sizing up his opponent. "What do we have here?"
"'Mysteries,'" Rhyme said. "To use our Sachs's assessment. Mysteries." 'Well, let's see if we can't make them a little less mysterious."
Sellitto ran through the scenario of the killing for Cooper as he donned
latex gloves and began looking over the bags and jars. Rhyme wheeled up close to him. "There." He nodded. "What's that?" He was gazing at the green circuit board with a speaker attached.
"The board I found in the recital hall," Sachs said. "No idea what it is. Only that the unsub put it there-I could tell by his footprints."
It looked like it'd come from a computer, which didn't surprise Rhyme; criminals have always been in the forefront of technological development. Bank robbers armed themselves with the famous 1911 Colt.45 semiautomatic pistols within days of their release even though it was illegal for anyone but the military to possess one. Radios, scrambled phones, machine guns, laser sights, GPS, cellular technology, surveillance equipment and computer encryption ended up in the arsenal of criminals often before they were added to law enforcers'.
