The Steel Kiss

After a moment she said, “Intuition. How you hate that word, I know. But that’s what it was. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Something was off about him. It was Mom who brought it into focus. Nick said he took the fall for his brother. But she said that if he’d really cared for me, he never would’ve done that. Nick was a decorated cop; he had cred all over downtown. His brother gets busted, he could’ve worked with the DA on sentencing, helped Donnie get into a program in prison. Organized an operation to nail Delgado—that was all a lie, by the way, but I didn’t know it at first. But he wouldn’t have taken the fall.” She smiled, her full lips, free of color, forming a mild crescent. “Didn’t have a splinter of evidence, just a gut feel.”

“No,” Rhyme said. “Not gut. Heart. Sometimes that’s better than evidence.”

She blinked.

“But you didn’t hear me say that, Sachs. You never heard me say that.”

“I better get to Mom.” She kissed his mouth hard. “That woman’s got to get well fast. I miss sleeping here.”

“I miss that too, Sachs. I really do.”

CHAPTER 60

Rhyme looked up from his monitor, on which he was engaged in a chess match against a smart, but largely unimaginative computer program.

He said to the visitor dawdling in the parlor doorway, “Come on in.” And to the microprocessor: “White queen to e-seven. Check.”

Rhyme let the software cogitate on that move and wheeled away from the work station, facing Ron Pulaski. “Where’ve you been, Rookie? You missed the climax, the crescendo, the denouement of the Griffith case. Here you are, arriving for the coda. How dull.”

“Well, that other case. I was multitasking.”

“Do you know how much I detest that word, Pulaski? Using ‘task’ as a verb is as mortifying as using ‘ask’ as a noun. Unacceptable. And tacking on the prefix ‘multi’ is unnecessary. ‘Tasking,’ if you’re going to accept it as a predicate, includes a single endeavor or a dozen.”

“Lincoln, we live in the era of the—”

“If you say ‘sound bite,’ I will not be happy.”

“—the, uhm, era of the frequent use of a contracted phrase or single word to convey a complex concept. That’s what I was going to say.”

A stifled laugh and he reminded himself not to sell the kid short. Rhyme needed someone to ground him.

But through the repartee Rhyme could see he had something important on his mind. “You heard from Amelia? About Griffith?” Rhyme asked.

A nod. Ron sat in the rattan chair. “Sad character. Sad story.”

“Was, yes. But in the eyes of the law, revenge is no more acceptable as a motive than sexual lust or terrorism. Now I’m tired of being pretentious. Since the case is over, there’s no reason for you to be here. So. What’s up?”

The young officer’s eyes remained on a miniature dresser of Griffith’s. Then he looked at a kitchen table. He studied this until, apparently, it was time to talk.

“The other case.”

“Gutiérrez.”

Pulaski looked at him. “The way you said that, Lincoln. You know it wasn’t Gutiérrez.”

“I made the supposition. Wasn’t hard.”

“Jenny calls me transparent.”

“A bit of that in you, Rookie, yes. Not that it’s bad.”

Pulaski didn’t seem to care if it was good or bad. “The other case?”

“Go on.”

“It was the Baxter case.” Accompanied by an unnecessary glance at the whiteboard in the corner, whose back was turned to them. Like an angry spouse.

This revelation Rhyme had not guessed. Ideas formed, but it was his colleague, not Rhyme, who had center stage.

“I went through the case files. I know it was closed but I went through them anyway. And I found some loose ends.”

Rhyme recalled Archer’s questioning observations: Why the outside storage space that Baxter had neglected to tell investigators about. But again Pulaski was the player at bat. Rhyme asked, “Which were?”

“Well, one was pretty interesting. I looked over the detectives’ notes and got the names of everybody Baxter met with over the past year or so. One in particular seemed interesting. Someone named Oden.”

“Never heard of him.”

“The name was in a transcription of a witness’s statement so they wrote O-D-E-N. Turns out the name was actually O apostrophe D-E-N-N-E.”

“Irish not a misspelled Norse deity,” Rhyme observed.

“I asked around, checked more notes. There wasn’t much. But I did find this O’Denne had some connection to the drug world in Brooklyn. He was behind some kind of new drug people were talking about it on the streets. Synthetic. Seemed like the name was Catch. But detectives on the case never pursued the lead. I guessed it was because Baxter… ”

“You can say it, Rookie. Died.”

“That’s right. But I did. I followed up.”

“Unofficially?”

“Sort of.”

“She’s sort of pregnant.”

“Finally got an ID. O’Denne was in East New York. Why would Baxter—a financial bigwig—have anything to do with this gangbanger in East New York? I went to talk to O’Denne and find out—”

“—if Baxter was more than just a scam artist.”