The Steel Kiss

They turned to the secondary category of evidence—that which might or might not have come from the unsub. The ECTs had collected the entire contents of the bin where they found the Starbucks trash, on the theory that the rubbish from the coffee chain might not have been the only things the perp discarded. There were thirty or forty items: napkins, newspapers, plastic cups, used Kleenex, a porn magazine probably ditched before hubby returned home to the family. Everything had been photographed and logged, but nothing, the analysts in Queens reported, seemed relevant.

Sachs, however, spent twenty minutes looking at each item, both individual shots of the evidence in the bin and wide-angle images before the bin’s contents were collected by the ECTs.

“Check this out,” she said. Pulaski walked closer. She was indicating two napkins from a White Castle fast-food restaurant.

“Home of the slider.” Pulaski added, “What is that, by the way?”

Sachs knew it was a small hamburger. No idea where the name had come from. One of the earliest fast-food franchises in America, White Castle specialized in burgers and milk shakes.

“Any friction ridges?”

Pulaski read the report. “None.”

How hard did they try? she wondered. Recalling that Rhyme’s two nemeses were incompetence and laziness, Sachs stared at the napkins. “Odds they came from him?”

Pulaski enlarged the wide-angle shots. The rumpled White Castle napkins were directly beside the Starbucks discards.

“Could be. Our boy likes chain food, we know.”

A sigh. “Napkins’re one of the best sources for DNA. The analyst could’ve run them, compared it with Starbucks.”

Lazy, incompetent…

Then she relented.

Or he was just overworked? The story of policing.

Sachs called up the images of the opened napkins. Each contained stains.

“What do you think?” Sachs asked. “One’s brown, the other reddish?”

“Can’t tell. If we had our hands on them ourselves, we could do a color temperature to be sure. At Lincoln’s, I mean.”

Tell me about it.

Sachs said, “I’m thinking, on one napkin, chocolate and strawberry milk shakes. Reasonable deduction. And the other? That stain is definitely chocolate. Another stain too, less viscous, like a soft drink. From two different visits. One, he has two shakes. The other, a shake and a soda.”

“Skinny guy but he can sure pack the calories away.”

“But more important, he likes White Castle. A repeat customer.”

“If we’re lucky, he lives nearby. But which one?” Pulaski was online, checking out the restaurant chain in the area. There were several.

A click in her thoughts: the motor oil.

“Maybe the oil’s a bomb or maybe he goes to the White Castle in Queens,” she said. “It’s on Astoria Boulevard, Automotive Row. My dad and I used to buy auto parts there Saturday morning, then go back home and play amateur mechanics. Maybe he picked up the oil trace getting lunch. Long shot, but I’m going to go talk to the manager there. You call the lab in Queens and have somebody go over those napkins again. Fine-tooth cliché. Friction ridges. DNA too. Maybe he ate with a friend and the buddy’s DNA is in CODIS. And stay on the sawdust, I want the type of wood. And keep after them for the manufacturer of the varnish. And I don’t want the analysts who did this report. Call Mel.”

Quiet, self-effacing Detective Mel Cooper was the best forensic lab man in the city, perhaps in all of the Northeast. He was also an expert at human identification—friction ridge prints, DNA and forensic reconstruction. He had degrees in math, physics and organic chemistry and was a member of the prestigious International Association for Identification and the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts. Rhyme had hired him away from a small-town police department to work the NYPD Crime Scene Unit. Cooper was always a part of the Rhyme team…  when they were working criminal cases.

As Sachs pulled on her jacket and checked her weapon, Pulaski made a call to the CSU to request Cooper’s assistance.

She was at the door when he disconnected and said, “Sorry, Amelia. Have to be somebody else.”

“What?”

“Mel’s on vacation. All week.”

She exhaled a fast laugh. In all the years they’d worked together she’d never known the tech to take more than a day off.

“Find somebody good then,” she said, walking briskly into the hallway and thinking: Rhyme retires and everything goes to hell.

CHAPTER 8

Is that…  That’s an escalator. Yes, it is. Well, a portion of one. The top part. Sitting in your hallway. But I guess you know that.”

“Mel. Come on in. We’ve got work to do.”

Cooper, diminutive, slim and with a perpetual faint smile on his face, walked into the parlor of Rhyme’s town house, shoving his dark-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. He moved silently; he wore his standard footgear, Hush Puppies. The men were alone; Whitmore had returned to his Midtown law firm.