The Steel Kiss

She glanced away from him and stepped to the recesses of the parlor to take a call. Her back was to the room. He wondered if it was her mother. Her shoulders were slumped. Was all okay? He knew the troubled history of mother and daughter but also knew that it had improved with the years. Rose had mellowed. Sachs had too, with regard to her mother. Years go by, edges dull. Entropy. And now, of course, the woman’s illness. Someone’s physical condition, as he well knew, can change all.

He couldn’t hear or deduce much. Finally: “restaurant” and “worked out” and “congratulations.” She sounded enthusiastic. Then, after she’d listened for a time: “I have faith in you.”

Not Rose. Then who?

He turned back to the evidence charts, wheeled closer. His meditation was interrupted by Lon Sellitto. “Anything close in NCIC?”

“No,” Rhyme said. The fourteen people files and the seven property files in the National Crime database were geared toward individuals with outstanding warrants or who were otherwise suspects and toward stolen property; it was possible to run a profile of a crime or pattern of crimes and shoot out a few names but that wasn’t what the FBI’s system was designed for.

Juliette Archer said, “In the media and academic sites I found plenty of stories or reports of instances of hacking smart systems. Mostly for the sake of hacking. Nature of the hobby, my son tells me. The challenge. Nobody’s intentionally weaponized an appliance, though some hackers’ve taken control of cars and stoplights.”

“Stoplights. That’s a scary thought.” From Sellitto.

She continued, “It’s cheaper to use wireless controls in them—public works doesn’t have to dig and lay cables.”

Sellitto said, “Solid backgrounding. You’d make a good cop.”

“Passing the physical’d be a problem.”

Sellitto muttered, “Linc sits on his ass all day long. You can consult. Give him some competition. Keep him sharp.” The rumpled detective was once more scanning the charts. “The hell’s his profile? Maybe explosives but we ain’t had any bangs lately. Toxins but nobody’s been poisoned. He’s a fine woodworker. What’s he build, do you think? Cabinets or bookshelves? With the glass, maybe that’s it.”

“No,” Rhyme said, “the glass fragments were old. And Amelia found glazing compound. I don’t think furniture glass is mounted with glazing. That’s for residences. Besides, see the rubber? It was found with the ammonia. That told me he replaced a broken window and cleaned the new one with a squeegee and paper towel.” His voice faded as he looked at the chart. “Window.”

Pulaski said, “Even psycho killers need to do home repairs. Probably it’s not related to the case.”

Rhyme mused, “But he’d just recently repaired it. The trace was fresh and found with other evidence from the scene. Just speculating here but if you were going to break into somebody’s house or an office—”

“You could front you were a repairman,” Sellitto said.

Sachs “Put on coveralls. Carry a new piece of glass with you. Break in, get what you need inside, then replace the glass, clean it and leave. Anybody looking would think you were the super or’d been hired to do repairs.”

Archer added, “And he pretended to be a workman once before—in the Theater District.”

Sellitto said, “Maybe he broke in somewhere to find out if there was some device that had one of those controllers in it. That DataWise thing.”

“He doesn’t need to,” Archer pointed out. “His first vic, Todd Williams, downloaded the list of products with controllers and the people or companies who bought them.”

Did she actually say “vic”? Rhyme was amused.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sellitto said. “That’s right.”

Rhyme said, “I could see it if the shards of glass we found were frosted—he’d replaced the glass with clear so he could see his kill zone. But the broken pane was clear. Old or cheap but clear. I want to work with this. Assuming our window repairman scenario is valid and—let’s be bold here—he’s planning another attack, then it’s because there’s no embedded product at the target location.”

Sachs quickly said, “And that’s because he’s going after somebody who’s not on the list. A specific person, rather than a random consumer.”

“Good,” Rhyme said. “Let’s work with that.”

“But why?” From Archer.

Rhyme’s eyes closed momentarily. Then opened fast. “Somebody who’s a threat. What Lon was just suggesting. It’s his second mission. To stop those who’re after him or a threat to him. Us. Maybe a witness, somebody who knows him and might be growing suspicious. Anything on the charts that might suggest a victim unrelated to the products, nothing to do with his manifesto against consumers?”

He scanned the charts. Although the source for some items had not been isolated (Queens??), everything had been identified—except one thing.

“Damn it, Mel. What the hell is the plant? We asked the Horticultural Society ages ago.”

“It was yesterday.”

“Ages, like I said,” Rhyme snapped. “Call. Find out.”