The Steel Kiss

Sachs asked, “You thinking what I am?”

“Yep. Your unsub reads Todd’s blog about the controller, thinks it might be a nifty murder weapon—for whatever reason. Contacts Todd, arranges to meet him here. Learns what he needs to so he can hack into the controller.”

Sachs continued the likely narrative: “Then suggests they go to the club, Forty Degrees North. But before they get there, he pulls Todd into the construction site and beats him to death with his hammer. Makes it look like a robbery. He killed him there, rather than here, to keep the investigation focused away from Williams’s office.”

Whitmore said, “I don’t quite follow this, Mr. Rhyme.”

Rhyme said, “Amelia was after the perp at the mall in Brooklyn. She assumed it was a coincidence that the escalator collapsed while she was there.”

Sachs added, “But it wasn’t. Unsub Forty knew how to hack the controller and opened the door intentionally.”

“To cause a distraction and escape?” Pulaski asked. “When he saw you were after him?”

Rhyme’s face tightened at the young man’s flawed thinking. “How would he know there was a DataWise controller in the escalator?”

Blushing, the young man said, “Sure, sure. Wasn’t thinking. He’d have had it planned out ahead of time. He was at the mall—to kill either somebody at random or Frommer in particular—by popping open the access panel.”

Pulaski’s Motorola crackled. He stepped aside to take the transmission.

Sachs explained to Rhyme and Whitmore, “The unsub was spotted here about twenty minutes ago. We called in backup. That’s why the weapons; we thought you might be him when we heard you on the other side of the building.”

The young officer rejoined them. “One car patrolling the neighborhood, other’s pulling up here. No sign of him yet.”

Rhyme said, “Any chance he’s in the building?”

“Homeless guy said he was standing at that intersection,” Sachs said, nodding. “He probably would have seen him if the unsub’d come this way.”

Whitmore asked, “But I’m curious. Why would he come back here?”

Rhyme said, “He might live nearby.” The area was mostly commercial but there were pockets of tenements and newer—that is, seventy-five- or eighty-year-old—apartments.

“Or he’s worried he didn’t cover his tracks well enough and came back to look for evidence. He saw us and took off.” She looked over the building. “See if it’s been broken into, Ron.”

He circled the structure and returned. “Windows’re intact. But the back door might’ve been jimmied. Scratch marks.”

Rhyme couldn’t feel the thud in his insensate chest but he knew this occurred…  from the rapid pulse in his forehead. “You said to look for evidence, Sachs. He could also—”

“Have come here to destroy it!” She spun toward the building.

It was at just that moment that there came a muffled whump from within the building. Whatever kind of incendiary device Unsub 40 had planted, it must have been quite large. Within seconds, smoke and flames began spiraling out of the ground-floor windows, which had shattered from the heat.

Rhyme caught a mouthful of smoke and ash and, coughing hard, he struggled to maneuver backward in his chair. Evers Whitmore helped him do so, kicking away a trash basket that was blocking the criminalist’s escape. Ron Pulaski called Dispatch to send the FDNY.

And Amelia Sachs ran to the front door of the building, picked up a loose cobblestone and used it to smash through the glass of the door. She turned to Rhyme and shouted, “What floor is the blogger’s office on?”

“Sachs, no!”

“What floor?”

“The top,” he replied, still coughing hard.

She turned and leapt inside, barely avoiding the points of glass that ringed the open doorway like shark’s teeth.

* * *

She’s going in?

Well. Good fortune for me.

My police girl, Red, the thief of White Castle, has no idea that it’s five full gallons of low-octane gas pooling in flame in the basement. An ocean of flame. The building, dry as a California pine, won’t last long.

Will she? Will she last very long?

I was going right back home, to Chelsea, and an Internet café, to send out a few emails. But I decided to stay. I’m looking out a hall window, fifth floor, of an abandoned tenement across the street and a few doors down. Bad for living in, good for spying. I crouch, shrinking, to watch what’s unfolding below me.

Can’t see me here, none of them can.

Pretty sure.

No, no one’s looking up. Police cars are cruising but looking on the streets and sidewalks only. They’re thinking I’ve gone. Because who would wait around?

Well, I would. To see who exactly it is after me. And to see who will crisp to death, or suffocate, thanks to the gift I left. Smoke from the building is thick already. And thickening more. How can Red breathe? How can she see?

Sirens, I can hear them. Fire engine intersection horns, blaring. I love the sound, trumpeting pain and sorrow.