|
She had barked a quiet laugh. She happened to own a case of that very wine (well, part of a case now). It was made by a little-known vineyard. Perhaps not the best Rioja ever produced but the wine offered
another bouquet: that of fond memory. She and a French lover had consumed plenty of it during a week in Spain—a perfect liaison, just the thing for a woman in her late twenties who'd recently broken up with her boyfriend. The
vacation fling was passionate, intense and, of course, doomed, which made it all the better.
Alice had leaned forward to see who'd mentioned the wine: a nondescript man in a business suit. After a few
glasses of the featured selections she'd grown braver and, juggling a plate of finger food, had made her way across the room and asked him about his interest in the wine.
He'd explained about a trip he'd
taken to Spain a few years ago with an ex-girlfriend. How he'd come to enjoy the wine. They'd sat at a table and talked for some time. Arthur, it seemed, liked the same food she did, the same sports. They both jogged and spent
an hour each morning in overpriced health clubs. "But," he said, "I wear the cheapest JC Penney shorts and T-shirts I can find. No designer garbage for me. . . ." Then he'd blushed, realizing he'd possibly
insulted her.
But she'd laughed. She took the same approach to workout clothes (in her case, bought at Target when visiting her family in Jersey). She'd quashed the urge to tell him, though, worried about
coming on too strong. They'd played that popular urban dating game: what we have in common. They'd rated restaurants, compared Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes and complained about their shrinks.
A
date ensued, then another. Art was funny and courteous. A little stiff, shy at times, reclusive, which she put down to what he described as the breakup from hell—a long-term girlfriend in the fashion business. And his grueling
work schedule—he was a Manhattan businessman. He had little free time.
Would anything come of it?
He wasn't a boyfriend yet. But there were far worse people to spend time with. And
when they'd kissed on their most recent date, she'd felt the low ping that meant, oh, yeah: chemistry. Tonight might or might not reveal exactly how much. She'd noticed that Arthur had furtively—he thought—been checking out the tight pink little number she'd bought at Bergdorf's especially for their date. And Alice had made some preparations in the bedroom in case kissing turned into something else.
Then the faint uneasiness, the concern about the spider, returned.
What was bothering her?
Alice supposed it was nothing more than a residue of
unpleasantness she'd experienced when a delivery man had dropped off a package earlier. Shaved head and bushy eyebrows, smelling of cigarette smoke and speaking in a thick Eastern European accent. As she'd signed the papers,
he'd looked her over—clearly flirting—and then asked for a glass of water. She brought it to him reluctantly and found him in the middle of her living room, staring at her sound system.
She'd told him
she was expecting company and he'd left, frowning, as if angry over a snub. Alice had watched out the window and noted that nearly ten minutes had passed before he got into the double-parked van and left.
What had he been doing in the apartment building all that time? Checking out—
"Hey, Earth to Alice . . . "
"Sorry." She laughed, continued to the couch,
then sat next to Arthur, their knees brushing. Thoughts of the delivery man vanished. They touched glasses, these two people who were compatible in all-important areas—politics (they contributed virtually the same amount to the
Dems and gave money during NPR pledge drives), movies, food, traveling. They were both lapsed Protestants.
When their knees touched again, his rubbed seductively. Then Arthur smiled and asked, "Oh,
that painting you bought, the Prescott? Did you get it?"
Her eyes shone as she nodded. "Yep. I own a Harvey Prescott."
Alice Sanderson was not a wealthy woman by
Manhattan standards but she'd invested well and indulged her true passion. She'd followed the career of Prescott, a painter from Oregon who specialized in photorealistic works of families—not existing people but ones he himself
made up. Some traditional, some not so—single parent, mixed race or gay. It was next to impossible finding any of
his paintings on the market in her price range but she was on the mailing lists of the galleries that occasionally sold his work. Last month she'd learned from one out west that a small early canvas might be coming available for $150,000. Sure enough, the owner decided to sell and she'd dipped into her investment account to come up with the cash.
She glanced at her walls and told him she wasn't sure where to hang the painting in her small apartment. A brief fantasy played out: Arthur's staying over one Saturday night and on Sunday, after brunch,
helping her find the perfect place for the canvas.
Her voice was filled with pleasure and pride as she said, "You want to see it?"
"You bet."
They rose and she walked toward the bedroom, Arthur behind her.
They got to the bedroom door.
Which was when the black-widow struck.
With a jolt Alice now understood what had been bothering her, and it had nothing to do with the rude delivery man. No, it was Arthur. When they'd spoken yesterday he'd asked when the Prescott would be arriving.
She'd told him she was getting a painting but had never mentioned the artist's name. Slowing now, at the bedroom door. Her hands were sweating. If he'd learned of the painting without her telling him, then maybe he'd found other facts about her life. What if all of the many things they had in common were lies? What if he'd known about her love of the Spanish wine ahead of time? What if he'd been at the tasting just to get close to her? All the restaurants they knew, the travel, the TV shows. . . .
My God, here she was leading a man she'd known for only a few weeks into her bedroom. All her defenses down . . .
Breathing hard now. . . . Shivering.
"Oh, the painting," he whispered, looking past her. "It's beautiful."
And, hearing his calm, pleasant voice, Alice laughed to herself. Are you crazy? She must have mentioned Prescott's name to Arthur. She tucked the uneasiness away. Calm down. You've been living alone too long. Remember his smiles, his joking. He thinks the way you think.
Relax.
A faint laugh. Alice stared at the two-by-two-foot canvas, the muted colors, a half-dozen people at a dinner table looking out, some amused, some pensive, some troubled.
"Incredible," he said.
"The composition is wonderful but it's their expressions that he captures so perfectly. Don't you think?" Alice turned to him.
Her smile vanished. "What's that, Arthur? What are you doing?" He'd put on beige cloth gloves and was reaching into his pocket. And then she looked into his eyes, which had hardened into dark
pinpricks beneath furrowed brows, in a face she hardly recognized at all.
2
The trail had led from Scottsdale to San Antonio to a rest area in Delaware off Interstate 95, filled with truckers and restless families, then finally to the improbable destination of London.
And the
prey who'd taken this route? A professional killer Lincoln Rhyme had been pursuing for some time, a man he'd been able to stop from committing a terrible crime, but who'd managed to escape from the police with only minutes to
spare, "waltzing," as Rhyme had put it bitterly, "out of the city like a goddamn tourist who had to be back at work Monday morning."
The trail had dried up like dust and the police and
FBI could learn nothing about where he was hiding or what he might be planning next. But a few weeks earlier Rhyme had heard from contacts in Arizona that this very man was the likely suspect in the murder of a U.S. Army
soldier in Scottsdale. Leads suggested he'd headed east—to Texas, then Delaware.
The name of the perp, which might have been real or a cover, was Richard Logan. It was likely that he came from the
western portion of the United States or Canada. Intense searches turned up a number of Richard Logans, but none fit the profile of the killer.
Then in a burst of happenstance (Lincoln Rhyme would never
use the word "luck"), he'd learned from Interpol, the European criminal-information clearinghouse, that a professional killer from America had been hired for a job in England. He'd killed someone in Arizona to gain
access to some military identification and information, met with associates in Texas and been given a down payment on his fee at some truck stop on the East Coast. He had flown to Heathrow and was now somewhere in the U.K., the
exact location unknown.
The subject of Richard Logan's "well-funded plot which originated at high levels"—Rhyme could only smile when he read the polished Interpol description—was a Protestant
minister from Africa, who'd run a refugee camp and stumbled on a massive scam in which AIDS drugs were stolen and sold and the money used to purchase arms. The minister was relocated by security forces to London, having
survived three attempts on his life in Nigeria and Liberia and even one in a transit lounge at Malpensa airport in Milan, where the Polizia di Stato, armed with stubby machine guns, scrutinize much and miss very little.
The Reverend Samuel G. Goodlight (a better name for a man of the cloth Rhyme couldn't imagine) was now in a safehouse in London, under the watchful eye of officers from Scotland Yard, the home of the
Metropolitan Police Service, and was presently helping British and foreign intelligence connect the dots of the drugs-for-arms plan.
Via encrypted satellite calls and emails flying around several
continents, Rhyme and an Inspector Longhurst of the Metropolitan Police had set up a trap to catch the perp. Worthy of the precise plots that Logan himself crafted, the plan involved look-alikes and the vital assistance of a
larger-than-life former arms broker from South Africa who came with a network of curried informants. Others on the task force included officers from MI5, as well as personnel from the London office of the FBI and an agent from
France's version of the CIA: La Direction Générale de la Sécurité
Extérieure.
They didn't yet know even the region of Britain in which Logan was in hiding, planning his hit, but the boisterous South
African had heard that the killer would be making his move in the next few days. He still had many contacts in the international underground and had put out hints about a "secret" location where the meetings between
Goodlight and the authorities would take place. The building had an exposed courtyard, surrounded by two tall industrial buildings. It was a perfect shooting zone for the killer.
It was also an ideal
place to spot and take down Logan. Surveillance was in place and armed police, MI5 and FBI agents were on twenty-four-hour alert.
But Logan had disappeared and there'd been no sign of him recently.
Rhyme was now sitting in his red battery-powered wheelchair in the first floor of his Central Park West town house—no longer the quaint Victorian parlor it had once been, but a well-equipped forensic
laboratory, larger than many labs in medium-size towns. He found himself doing what he'd done frequently over the past several days: staring at the phone, whose number-two speed-dial button would call a line in England ending
in 1212. Traditionally most branches of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard had those as their final digits, echoes of the Yard's first telephone number: Whitehall 1212.
"The phone's working, right?" Rhyme asked.
"Is there any reason for it not to be?" Thom, his caregiver, asked this in a measured tone, which Rhyme took as
tantamount to a belabored sigh.
"I don't know. Circuits overload. Phone lines get hit by lightning. All kinds of things can go wrong."
"Then maybe you should try it. Just to make sure."
"Command," Rhyme said, getting the attention of the voice-recognition system hooked to his ECU—the computerized
environmental control unit that substituted in many ways for his physical functioning. Lincoln Rhyme was a quadriplegic; he had only limited movement below the place where his neck was broken in a crime-scene accident years
before—the fourth cervical vertebra, near the base of the skull. He now ordered, "Dial directory assistance."
The dial tone filled the speakers, followed by beep beep beep. This
irritated Rhyme more than a nonperforming phone would have. Why hadn't Inspector Longhurst called? "Command," he snapped. "Disconnect."
"Seems to be fine." Thom placed a
coffee mug in the cup holder of Rhyme's wheelchair and the criminalist sipped the strong brew through a straw. The aide was wearing a perfectly ironed shirt, tie and slacks.
Rhyme stared at the phone
again. "If he gets away . . . " His voice faded. "Well, aren't you going to do what everybody does?"
"What do you mean, Lincoln?" The slim young man had been working with
Rhyme for years. He'd been fired on occasion and had quit too. But here he still was. A testament to the perseverance, or perverseness, of both principals.
"I say, 'If he gets away,' and you say,
'Oh, but he won't. Don't worry.' And I'm supposed to be reassured. People do that, you know: They give reassurance when they have no idea what they're talking about."
"But I didn't say that. Are
we having an argument about something I didn't say but could have? Isn't that like a wife being mad at her husband because she saw a pretty woman on the street and thought he would have stared at her if he'd been there?"
"I don't know what it's like," Rhyme said absently, his mind on the plan in Britain to capture Logan. Were there holes in it? How was security? Could he trust the informants not to leak
information the killer might pick up on?
The phone rang and a caller-ID box opened on the flat-screen monitor near Rhyme. He was disappointed to see that the number wasn't from London but closer to
home—in the Big Building, cop-speak for One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan.
"Command, answer phone." Click. Then: "What?"
From five miles away a voice muttered, "Bad mood?"
"No word from England yet."
"What're you, on call or something?"
"Logan's disappeared. He could make a move at any time."
"Like having a baby," Sellitto said.
"If you say so. What do you need? I don't want to keep the line tied up."
"All that fancy equipment and you don't have call waiting?"
"Lon."
"Okay. Something you oughta know about. There was a burglary-murder a week ago Thursday. Vic was a woman lived in the Village. Alice Sanderson. Perp stabbed her
to death and stole some painting. We got the doer."
Why was he calling about this? A mundane crime and the perp in custody. "Evidence problem?"
"Nope."
"So I'd be interested why?"
"The supervising detective just got a call a half-hour ago?"
"The chase, Lon. The chase." Rhyme
was staring at the whiteboard that detailed the plan to catch the killer in England. The scheme was elaborate.
And fragile.
Sellitto brought him out of his reflection. "Look,
I'm sorry, Linc, but I gotta tell you, The perp's your cousin, Arthur Rhyme. It's murder one. He's looking at twenty-five years, and the D.A. says it's an airtight case."
© 2007 Jeffery W. Deaver
|
|
