The Steel Kiss

Her stay here wouldn’t be long; she was taking Rose to the hospital for her surgery in a few hours.

“Nothing?” Thom asked the detective. “Coffee?”

“Nup.” Looking up, avoiding their eyes.

Hm. Rhyme scanned the man’s face. Something was up.

“That escalator. You oughta leave it, Linc. Good conversation starter.”

And good conversation deflector, Rhyme thought. He was impatient. There was evidence to organize. He was meeting with the prosecutor in the cases against Griffith and Morgan, and Mel Cooper would be arriving soon.

“What’s up, Lon?”

“Okay, gotta tell you.”

Rhyme looked toward him. But Sellitto’s eyes were on Sachs.

She finished assembling the evidence and then peeled off the tight latex gloves. Blew on her fingers. For years Rhyme had not experienced the relief that a small act like that brought, after hours of being gloved, but he remembered the sensation clearly.

“Go ahead, Lon.” Amelia Sachs wanted her news straight and fast—bad news, at least. He reflected that she never seemed to have much use for the good.

“You’ve been suspended.”

“What?”

“The fuck is this about?” Rhyme snapped.

“A problem at One PP.”

Sachs was closing her eyes. “I leaked the story, right? About the smart controllers? And didn’t tell the brass. But I had to, Lon.”

Rhyme said, “This is bullshit. She probably saved lives. Companies shut down their servers and Griffith wasn’t able to hack in.”

Sellitto’s doughy face registered confusion. “What’re you talking about?”

Sachs explained about her clandestine meeting with the reporter, who broke the story that some companies were hesitant, for financial reasons, to go offline to upgrade their cloud servers with the new CIR security updates.

Sellitto gave a sour look. “Whatever. But that ain’t it. Sorry, Amelia. It’s Madino.”

Rhyme recalled. The captain from the 84th Precinct, who’d convened the Shooting Team after Sachs had shot a round into the escalator motor to save Greg Frommer’s life.

“Turns out there were some reporters got on the case.”

“And he told me they went away.”

“Well, they didn’t go very far. It’s a big deal now, police firing weapons.”

“At unarmed kids, yeah,” Rhyme snapped. “Not at industrial machinery.”

Sellitto held up two palms. “Please, Linc. I’m the messenger is all.”

Rhyme recalled his exchange with Sachs a few days ago.

As long as there’re no reporters trying to make their careers with stories on cops shooting guns in malls, I’ll be cool.

I don’t think that’s much of a journalistic subspecialty…

It had seemed funny at the time.

Sachs said, “Go on.”

“The reporters, they kept at him about what happened, who was involved. They threatened to go over his head.”

She smirked. “And he was afraid that’d jeopardize his plush new office in One PP if he didn’t throw me to the wolves.”

“In a nutshell, yep.”

“Bottom line?” she muttered.

“Three months, no pay. Sorry, Amelia. I gotta do the weapon and shield thing. Just like the fucking movies.” He appeared genuinely disgusted by the whole affair.

A sigh, then she handed them over. “I’ll fight it. Talk to the PBA lawyer.”

“You can. Sure.” His tone was like quicksand.

She eyed him closely. “But?”

“My advice. Take the wrist slap and move on. Madino could make it bad for you.”

“I’ll make it bad for him.”

Silence for a moment. Then the reality of NYPD politics—well, every governmental body’s politics—appeared to seep in, and a look of resignation stilled her face.

Sellitto continued, “Everybody’ll forget about it in a few months. You’ll be back on track. You fight, it’ll drag out. Make more press. They do not want that. Could sideline you for a long time. You know how the system works, Amelia.”

Rhyme said contemptuously, “This is bullshit, Lon.”

“I know it, you know it, they know it. The difference is they don’t care.”

She said, “But we’ve got the Griffith/Morgan case to wrap up.”

“Effective immediately.”

She pulled off her lab jacket, swapped it for her sport coat, the dark-gray one, cut to accommodate both her figure and her Glock 17. A tricky job of tailoring, Rhyme had always thought.

Her voice contained a shrug, as she said, “Not the worst timing, I guess. Gives me a chance to take better care of Mom over the next couple of weeks. Maybe it’s a blessing.”

But it wasn’t, of course. And Rhyme could easily see she didn’t feel that way at all. She was facing an empty, and edgy, quarter year and mad as hell about it. He was certain of this because it was how he would have felt under these circumstances. Working is what we’re made for—dogs, horses, humans. Take that away and we’re diminished, sometimes irreversibly.

“I have to get her to the hospital now.” She strode out and left the town house.