The Steel Kiss

Sachs tumbled inside, falling on the glass-encrusted floor.

No cuts. Well, none serious. She felt a bit of sting in her knee—the joint that had tormented with arthritic pain, until the surgery. Now the ache was back, thanks to the fall. But she rose and tested. The mechanism functioned. She glanced at the smoke rolling inside from under the door. The whole office now felt hot. Could the flames have risen this fast and be roasting the oak under her feet?

She coughed hard. Found an unopened bottle of Deer Park, unscrewed the cap and chugged. Spat again

Scanning fast, Sachs noted three file cabinets, shelves filled with paper in all forms: magazines, newspapers, printouts, pamphlets. All extremely combustible, she noted. Riffling, she saw they were mostly generic articles about the dangers of data mining, government intrusion into privacy, identity theft. She didn’t immediately see anything related to the controllers Rhyme and Whitmore had been talking about or anything else that might have motivated their unsub to murder Williams.

In the corner, flames teased their way out from under a baseboard. And ignited a bookshelf. Across the room, another tongue of fire lapped at a cardboard box and, with no delay at all, set it on fire.

The building groaned again and the door began to sweat varnish.

Gasped at another sound: The window opposite the one she’d climbed through, the front of the building, crashed inward. In a lick of a second her Glock was out, though the draw was mere instinct; she knew the intruder wasn’t a threat but was in fact what she’d counted on for salvation all along. Sachs nodded to the New York City firefighter, perched nonchalantly on a ladder, connected to a truck forty some odd feet below.

The woman guided the top of the ladder to a hover about two feet from the windowsill. She called, “Building’s gonna drop, Detective. You leave now.”

If she’d had an hour she might have parsed the documents and found something relevant that might lead to the unsub’s motive, victims past and victims future, his identity. She did the only thing available, though. Grabbed the laptop computer, ripped out the power cord and with no time to unscrew the wires connecting it to the monitor sliced the unit free with her switchblade.

“Leave that,” the FDNY firefighter said through her mask.

“Can’t,” Sachs said and hurried to the window.

“Need both your hands!” Shouting was required now. The building moaned as its bones snapped.

But Sachs kept her arm around the computer and clambered out onto the ladder, gripping with her right hand only. Her legs scissored around the edge and another rung. Every muscle in her body, it seemed, was cramping. But still she held on.

The operator below maneuvered them away from the building. The office room Sachs had been in just seconds before was suddenly awash with flame.

“Thanks!” Sachs called. The woman was either deaf to her words because of the roar or was pissed that Sachs had ignored her warning. There was no response.

The ladder retracted. They were twenty feet above the ground when it jerked and Sachs finally had to release the computer to keep from plunging to the street.

The laptop spun to the sidewalk and cracked open, raining bits of plastic and keys in a dozen different directions.

* * *

An hour later Lincoln Rhyme and Juliette Archer were at one of the evidence tables. Mel Cooper was nearby. Evers Whitmore stood in the corner, juggling two calls on two mobiles.

They were awaiting the evidence from the burned-out building; the structure was completely gone. It had collapsed into a pile of smoldering stone and melted plastic, glass and metal. Sachs had ordered a backhoe to excavate and Rhyme hoped something of the incendiary device might remain.

As for the computer, Ron Pulaski had taken it downtown to the NYPD Computer Crimes Unit at One PP in hopes that Sachs’s mad vertical dash hadn’t been in vain; Rodney Szarnek would determine if any data on the laptop was salvageable.

The front door now opened and another figure walked into the parlor. Amelia Sachs’s face was smudged, her hair askew, and she wore two bandages, presumably covering cuts from broken glass—it seemed she’d taken out at least three panes in her dramatic break-in of Williams’s office.

Rhyme was actually surprised she wasn’t more badly hurt. He wasn’t happy she’d ignored him and taken the risk. But they’d fallen into an unspoken agreement years ago. She pushed herself and that was just who she was.

When you move they can’t getcha…

An expression of her father’s and it was her motto in life.

Sachs carried a small milk crate, containing evidence from the building—very little, however, as was often the case when a scene is destroyed by flames. His damning clues.

A bout of coughing. Tears ran.