The Steel Kiss

“Stay busy. Keep your mind going.” He tilted his head toward her. “Riddles. Make your life about solving riddles.”

A deep breath and a look of pain, then one of panic crossed her face. “I don’t know if I can handle it, Lincoln. I really don’t.” Her voice caught.

Rhyme wondered if she’d start to cry. She wasn’t the sort for whom tears came easily, he guessed. But he knew too that the condition she was facing pushed you to places you couldn’t imagine. He’d had years to build up a sinewy guard around his heart.

New to the game…

He turned swiveled his chair to face her. “Yes. You. Can. I’d tell you if it wasn’t in your core. You know me by now. I don’t sugarcoat. I don’t lie. You can do it.”

Her eyes closed and she inhaled deeply once. Then she was looking at him again, her remarkable blue eyes driving into his, which were far darker. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“You have to. You’re my intern, remember? Now. Let’s get to work,” he said.

The moment passed and together they began to catalog what Sachs had recovered at Griffith’s apartment: hairs, toothbrush (for the DNA), reams of handwritten notes, books, clothing, printouts on hacking and technical details about breaking into secure networks. Even pictures of fish in an aquarium (Sachs had sifted in the sand at the bottom for buried clues—this was a common hiding place—but found none). Many items were from what turned out to be his profession—making and selling the miniatures: stores of wood and metal, tiny hinges, wheels, paint, varnish, pottery. Many, many tools. Had they been sitting on the shelves of Home Depot or Crafts 4 Everyone, they’d be benign; here the blades and hammers took on a sinister air.

The Steel Kiss…

Since the documentation offered no leads to Griffith’s whereabouts Rhyme and Archer concentrated on the trace evidence from his apartment and the Edwin Boyle crime scene, near the dead man’s printing company, to see if they might find hints as to where he’d been before, which might be the place where he was now.

But after a half hour of “dust work,” as Archer rather charmingly dubbed their efforts, referring to Edmond Locard, she wheeled back from the envelopes and bags and slides. She glanced at Griffith’s notebook, the manifesto. He noted she’d braked to a stop and was staring out the window. Finally she turned back to him. “You know, Lincoln, part of me doesn’t believe it.”

“What’s that?”

“Why he’s doing this. He’s against consumerism. But he’s a consumer too. He had to buy all these tools and the supplies for his work. He buys food. He special-orders his shoes for his big feet. He benefits from shopping. And he makes his living selling things. That’s consumerism.” She turned her chair to face him, her beautiful eyes sparkling. “Let’s try an experiment.”

Rhyme looked at the evidence bags.

“No, I don’t mean a physical experiment. A hypothetical. Let’s say there is no evidence in the case. An exception to Locard’s Principle. Imagine a case where there isn’t a single lick of PE. How’s this? A killing on the moon. We’re on earth and we have no access to the evidence at all. We know the victim was murdered up there. There are suspects. But that’s it, no trace, no physical evidence. Where do we go from there? The only approach is to ask, why did the perp kill the victim?”

He smiled. Her premise was absurd, a waste of time. But perhaps he found her enthusiasm charming. “Go on.”

“If this were an epidemiologic investigation, and you and I were presented with unidentified bacteria killing some people but not others, we’d ask: Why? Is it because they’ve been to some country and contracted it? Is it because there’s something about the victims physically that makes them and not others vulnerable to the disease? Have they engaged in certain behaviors that have exposed them to the bacteria? So let’s look at Vernon’s victims. I’m not buying the theory they were targeted because they were rich consumers, buying expensive stoves or microwaves. What else is common among them? Why he killed them might lead to how he knew them might lead to where he met them…  and to where he’s sitting right now. You with me?”

The criminalist within him was resistant, but Lincoln Rhyme had to admit the logician was intrigued. “Okay. I’ll play along.”

CHAPTER 51

Juliette Archer was saying, “Who were the people that Griffith targeted? Other than Amelia’s mother and the drivers of the cars he took control of—those were to stop us from catching him. The victims. Greg Frommer, Abe Benkoff, Joe Heady. And the potential victim in Scarsdale, the hedge fund manager, William Mayer.”

“Well, what about them?” Rhyme was happy to cooperate but he was compelled to add a spoonful of devil’s advocacy into the stew.