The Steel Kiss

Good point. Alphonse Gravita—aka Alpho, but more popularly Alpo, woof woof—was a shining piece of non-work. The germ of a dealer had been lucky enough to miss getting busted but he had his eye on moving up, expanding his street business from the mini mart he hung out in in Ocean Hill to Bed-Stuy and Brownsville.

“Hold on.” Reilly sat up straighter.

“The DR guy there?”

“Negative. But Alpo and his buddy…  wait, something’s happening.”

“What?” The chewing had stopped.

“Looks like a transaction…  Pull out.” The latter spoken to the perfumed cop sitting beside him.

Bad choice of words, he decided. Or good. But she missed the innuendo.

The officer zoomed out to get a broader shot, to catch everything that Alpo and the blond man were doing. Alpo was looking around and fishing in his pocket. The blond kid was too. Then palm met palm.

“Okay, got an exchange.”

“What was it?”

“Shit. Fair number of bills. But couldn’t see the product. Could you see?”

“No, sir,” the surveillance woman answered. Gardenia came to mind, the perfume, though Reilly had no clue what gardenias smelled—or looked—like.

The tactical cop radioed, “Your call, Sarge.”

Reilly debated. They’d just seen an illegal drug transaction. They could come home with two heads. But it might make sense to collar White Boy alone, outside, and keep Alpo in play. They’d have at least one collar to their credit if they couldn’t go back to the 73 with the DR scumbag in metal. The kid might also have intel about the Dominican. They could squeeze the nervous little punk until he gave up plenty.

Or just let this one pass—obviously the deal wasn’t that big. The blond kid could walk away and they’d hope Big Boy showed up.

Tactical: “They’re still there, just sitting there?”

“Right.”

“We move in?”

“No, don’t want to lose the Alpo connection to our DR friends. Maybe take the other guy if he leaves. Until then wait.”

“The DR guy’s fifty minutes late.”

Reilly made a decision.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do. But answer the question: You order me that calzone?”

* * *

Lincoln Rhyme was saying, “We know he’s going to hit somebody again. I want a memo out to every precinct and FDNY station. Any accident involving a product, seeming accident, I want to hear about it. Stat. Immediately. ASAP. Whatever cliché you want to use.”

Mel Cooper said he’d take care of that and drew his phone the way he would the small revolver he wore almost quaintly on his hip.

Sachs received a text and glanced at her phone. “The smart controller company. They want to talk.”

“Or,” Archer said, “tell us in person how uncooperative they intend to be.”

When it came to investigative work, she was quite the fast learner, Rhyme reflected and called for Thom to set up a Skype call.

Soon the distinctive heartbeat of the app’s ringtone pulsed through the room and a moment later the screen came to life.

It wasn’t much of a wagon circling. Only two people from CIR Micro were on the screen and one of them, he easily deduced, was Vinay Parth Chaudhary himself, looking both South Asian and authoritarian. He wore a collarless shirt and stylish metal-framed glasses.

The other was a sallow-faced, solid man in his fifties. The lawyer, presumably. He was in a suit, no tie.

They sat in an antiseptic office: a bare table, on which were two monitors, bookending the pair. On the wall behind them was a slash of maroon and blue paint. Rhyme at first thought it was a painting but saw that, no, it was directly on the wall. Maybe a stylized rendering of the company’s logo.

“I’m Amelia Sachs, detective with the NYPD. We spoke earlier. This is Lincoln Rhyme, a forensic consultant who’s assisting on our case.” It was just the two of them. As earlier, Rhyme had decided that the company might be less cooperative with more people present, even if the outfit wasn’t any longer a target of litigation.

“I’m Vinay Chaudhary, president and CEO. This is Stanley Frost, our chief general counsel.” His voice was pleasant, calm. Hardly any inflection. He didn’t appear threatened. But Rhyme supposed that men who are worth forty billion dollars rarely are.

“This is about a crime involving our products?” Frost asked.

“That’s right. Your DataWise Five Thousand smart controller. An individual here in New York City intentionally sent a signal to one of those devices that was installed in a Midwest Conveyance escalator. It activated the access panel at the top of an up escalator. It opened. A man fell in and was killed.”

Chaudhary: “I heard about the accident, of course. But I didn’t know it was intentional. How terrible. I do have to say, we told Midwest to use the DataWise solely for uploading diagnostic and maintenance data and for emergency shutoff. Not to allow access.”

“We have correspondence to show that,” Frost the lawyer said.