Jeffery Deaver

The Collateral Heart Excerpt

Chapter 1

Wouldn’t you know it? The risk that finally caught up with him wasn’t the one he was expecting.

Oh, he knew his life was constantly in danger.

Daily.

Hourly.

Billy Welsh could be moving from car to car during a red light in the middle of Broadway, armed with his squeegee, enduring the wrath of drivers while he hoped for the one, just one, who might nod thanks for the spotless windshield and hand over a single or, man, five dollars . . . when, wham, a texting driver would take him out. Driving at thirty or forty could be plenty lethal.

He could be drawing very bad chalk pictures of cats and superheroes on the sidewalk (that usually got him coins). And some psycho dude would gut him because God had declared Billy was a “Satan-izer.” A term a man had actually used during such an encounter on Fifty-seventh Street.

He could get cut or earn a beatdown simply for selling stuff. The Senegalese bosses could snap because Billy’s selling pencils and kitchenware and shoelaces somehow competed with knockoff Kate Spade purses and fake Tommy Bahama shirts. Billy was skinny and had a tricky heart, which could probably be beaten to silence by a few firm blows.

All risks.

And there were others too.

But, stretching, waking up in this deserted building in Spanish Harlem—east—Billy had to take the chance.

Rent didn’t pay for itself.

A funny expression he used a lot. Funny, since he was homeless.

On this day, already proving hot, he needed money and not for rent.

Something real.

Something important.

Something for which the risk was worth it.

And that meant leaving the security of his home.

The Abernathy and Ca Building.

The old manufacturing place, where the last letters of the second owner’s name, or whatever it might be, had worn away.

Campbell. Canton. California. Carter . . . Cadaver . . . Ha.

Billy liked it here. The crews didn’t come around much, at least not to the second floor, up the narrow stairway. The crazies either.

He could stay in bed, unimpeded, and dwell on his finances and his brief marriage that had been doomed to end from the moment it had begun. But also happier memories like his childhood cat, a TV show where he was almost an extra, and his two Employee of the Month stars.

Gretta, of course, his ex, showed up in the second category sometimes.

Will always did.

And he wondered yet again how his mind had kind of deflated.

The wiring, some doctor had called it. The diagnosis seemed . . . What was the word? Flipper. Flipping. Flippant. That was it. The city hospital ER medico had sent him to Psych, whispering to the nurse, “He’ll be okay, just some fucked-up wiring.”

He decided to risk the Senegalese today and infringe on their territory and stake out his claim as  the Walmart of 125th Street.

Risk . . .

He peed in his bucket. Washed his hands and brushed his teeth with park water from a bottle. Real toothpaste. Then began gathering the merchandise. Statues, a food scale, a set of baby utensils in the shape of SpongeBob (only the unopened ones sold), books, shoe polish, dishes with cartoon characters, dishes with rainbows, dishes with unicorns . . . About twenty-five pounds of merch.

Into the shopping bag they went. Including the gray blanket he had owned for twenty-two years, which he would spread out as his showroom floor.

How much could he make?

His goal was twenty-nine dollars.

Which is what the present cost. The present for his son, whose sixth birthday was on Saturday.

Will lived with his mother. A woman who had not lost her job. And had not gone bankrupt by taking out payday loans. Who had not been evicted in some funky legal maneuver because somebody wanted a five-million-story high-rise on the site of his basement studio.

A pretty woman Gretta was, and one now married to a man with fully functioning  wiring.

Ah, his life would change.

Things would change.

He knew it.

He’d fought his way up before and he would do so again.

But first, priorities: a Disney toy purchased from the real Disney Store in Times Square, not dusty and smeared and bought from a guy like himself, off a two-decade-old, gray blanket spread on the sidewalk. A new toy in a new box.

Billy Welsh, who had been valedictorian in a Midwest middle school, where class ranking didn’t count, and in the bottom third in high school, where it did, picked up the shopping bag and started toward the stairs.

When the unexpected risk caught up to him.

Not crazies, not crews, not bosses—I got Bahama, I got Dolce, I got Spade. . . .

But smoke.

Billy lived up here, higher in the building  because it was safer.

But that also meant it would take a few minutes longer to escape.

If there were, for instance, a fire.

He felt heat and saw sparks in the stairwell nearest him.

No!

He grabbed the bag with his money. He grabbed his drawing chalk and his squeegee but left the sales inventory shopping bag and hurried to the stairwell.

Smoke was everywhere now.

Out, get out.

Coughing.

Sparks and heat, rising fast.

Fire in his beloved Abernathy and Ca home was not supposed to be a risk.

This was not the way he would die. . . .

A cut throat, yeah, or a pounded heart, or the wiring just giving out because it was too much work for his poor, badly wired brain.

But not fire.

Where were the exits?

Only the back door, the one chained but with a gap big enough for an emaciated frame like his to fit through. The front was nailed shut, like the fire exits. One never needed to worry about escaping from a building that no one was supposed to be in, in the first place.

Weird. The smoke didn’t move; it was simply just there, filling the hallway and growing thicker and thicker.

Choking hard.

He glanced out a window. Ground floor ones were boarded over. But here, the second floor? It would mean a thirty-foot jump onto rubble from which rebar rods poked high into the air.

Skewers.

No, he had to get out another way.

Coughing and spitting smoke crud from his mouth. There were flecks of something suspended in the dark cloud. Bits of rubber or plastic. That would be what was burning, he guessed. Some crap on the floor that Mr. Abernathy and Mr. Ca illegally—by today’s standards—had constructed their otherwise fine factory with.

He startled as something hit his foot.

Glancing down. A huge rat was fleeing too.

Think, he told himself.

Which was so hard.

Add facing burning to death to that, his brain began to spin wildly. It wanted to shut down.

Control it!

For a moment, at least he did.

Sirens. So people were on their way.

But they wouldn’t know anyone was here. Maybe, since it was abandoned they would just let it burn. Let the flames do the work that was going to get done anyway—the A and C building wouldn’t last forever. Time to move on.

Get to the roof!

Yes, fire travels upward, but at least there, there would be some fresh air to gulp. They’d see him. And while he’d be fifty feet in the air, those fire people had hooks and ladders or cranes. And they would lift him and his chalk and present-money and squeegee to safety.

Into the stairwell, coughing, choking, spitting . . .

The smoke was not as thick here and he could see above him the door.

Roof Access

Billy staggered up. And gripped the knob. He pulled.

It was locked. He tugged hard. Didn’t budge. He tried again and his sweating hand slipped off the knob. He stumbled and his chalk fell. His bag of money too, mostly coins. They danced and spun down the stairs. . . .

No!

His money . . . Will’s Disney money . . .

Billy Welsh gripped the only tool he had—the squeegee—and brought it down on the knob.

Nothing happened.

Risk . . .

He began pounding once more.

Chapter 2

“How’d it go? I let myself in.”

“I assumed,” Lincoln Rhyme said to Lon Sellitto. “Since voilà. Here you are. How did it go? It went.”

Amelia Sachs, ever less abrupt than her husband, offered, “Went well, Lon. Very well. She’s one of the top neuro specialists in the world.” The tall, lean redhead tugged off her jacket and hung it on a hook. The Glock snapped from the Blackhawk OWB, outside-the-waistband, holster and went onto a shelf. People, she had told Rhyme, just didn’t appreciate how uncomfortable it was to tote around a six-gun. Or, in this case, a seventeen-gun. Rhyme took her word for it, not having carried a weapon on belt or under arm in decades.

Rhyme wheeled his elaborate chair farther into the parlor in the front of his Central Park West town house, a structure dating to Victorian times, a convenient reference point though the queen had little if anything to do with boisterous New York City back in the day.

While Sachs was in work clothes—black slacks and a white blouse, accessorized by the now-empty holster, Rhyme was in what he usually wore. Sweatpants and a pullover black sweater. It had a high collar and his aide, Thom Reston, knowledgeable about fashion as with so many other things, had said he resembled a beatnik.

A frown in response. “A what?”

“Beatnik. A cool guy from the fifties? Poetry, pot, protest. The beat movement? Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg?”

“Ah,” Rhyme said, overly unenthusiastic. “A cultural reference. Therefore why would I know or care?” His philosophy working as a criminalist or, well, his philosophy about everything, was that if a fact did not relate to an immediate problem he was solving, it was as pointless as a spring breeze. The example he cited: he had once deduced that a drummer for a quasi-popular rock group had lied about his whereabouts when his girlfriend had vanished because Rhyme had found that the man’s snare drum’s tension rods had not been tightened, though he claimed he’d been home practicing; one does not play a drum at any time, concert, rehearsal or practice, without tightening the rods.

This was an acceptable application of culture.

Thom had accompanied Rhyme and Sachs, married some years now, to the doctor’s appointment at the superb Langone medical center in Midtown Manhattan. He remained unresponsive to the inquiry by Sellitto, who was presently helping himself to what Rhyme guessed was his second, or third, cup of coffee from the carafe Thom had left out. A cookie too. Rhyme heard the aide’s pastries were superb. He enjoyed the man’s cooking but with no sweet tooth he couldn’t comment on the dolce.

“Lincoln’s a good candidate for procedures. They ran a Britannica’s worth of tests.”

Rhyme grumbled, “It was exhausting.”

His resting state always bordered on curmudgeonly, but he was in fact pleased, if not elated, at what had transpired during the appointment. Handsome by many accounts with a full head of dark hair and prominent nose, Rhyme was a quadriplegic, injured at a crime scene some years ago. Though the injury was classified as “incomplete,” he was still largely paralyzed from the neck down. Twenty-first-century America saw spinal cord injuries galore from military service, automobiles and bicycles and construction work and rock climbing and skateboards and dozens of other sources. Nearly twenty thousand occurred each year. Presently a quarter million people had serious SCIs. The medical community was forever working hard to improve their patients’ condition. While there was no fix yet to allow those with serious conditions like Rhyme’s to walk, advancements were constantly being announced: efforts to rewire nerves and incorporate prosthetics that could be controlled by the patients themselves—either through movement of muscles connected to surviving nerves or, astonishingly, through “thinking” the limbs and appendages into moving, just like those without a disability. Rhyme had regained use of his right arm and hand (joining his left ring finger, which, for some reason, had retained mobility from the beginning).

It was even possible to do what had long been considered way out of reach: restore sensation to parts of the body. Ninety percent of Lincoln Rhyme had been numb since the accident. The advantage was the absence of pain, of course, but anyone craving the pleasure and comfort and contentment of touch will tell you that this was no advantage at all.

Sachs continued, explaining to Sellitto that Dr. Yang used brain–­computer interfacing, spinal cord stimulation and the complex process of what she wryly dubbed “nerve stealing,” actually rerouting nerves to make the nonfunctioning portions of the body work. “She’ll go through the results and let us know.”

Sellitto was nodding. “That’s good, Linc. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

The detective was a large man, forever battling his weight. Rhyme wasn’t sure why he bothered unless it was a health issue. Then, there was the issue of garments. It seemed he bought clothing that was resistant to an iron’s touch—he was constantly disheveled.

The two men used to be partners, in the days before Rhyme ascended to run the NYPD’s crime scene operation and he sometimes wondered if Sellitto’s look was intentional, calculated to put suspects at ease, give them a sense of confidence and superiority—lowering their defenses, so that he could lunge like a fencer, destroy their phony stories and skewer them into confessing.

Today the rumpled attire was gray—a slightly too large suit, maybe indicia of him dropping a few pounds. The shade was light. Wouldn’t darker be aesthetically safer with wrinkles? A white shirt. He wore a tie too and Rhyme knew it would be a clip-on. His street-fighting days were largely over, but he still followed the practice of some gold shields who wore fake ties so a perp couldn’t grab attached neckwear in a fight.

Thom, slim and dressed in opposition to Sellitto, was in a perfectly pressed pair of Italian slacks and powder-blue dress shirt, smooth as Sheetrock—and a real tie. He poured coffee for the couple. Rhyme could manage holding a mug, but drinking was easier with a straw and tumbler in the cupholder, and he was tired from the battery of tests. He thanked the aide and then turned back to his former partner.

“To what do I owe, et cetera, et cetera,” Rhyme began, in fact quite pleased to see the man. Sellitto was not known for social calls (unpleasant creatures, in Rhyme’s thinking), so the detective’s presence meant a case was in the offing.

A case in turn meant challenges to meet, questions to be answered and, accordingly, boredom to be pinned dead to an examination board like a moth.

And, of course, it meant the noble act of taking a criminal off the street. That too.

Sellitto looked to Sachs and Rhyme. “You ever heard of McGuire OLS?”

Rhyme shook his head. Sachs said, “I haven’t either. And I’m not feeling witty enough to make any cute plays on acronyms.”

Rhyme thought of a couple. He kept quiet.

The detective began, “It’s a New York–based company. In the news a lot recently. You’ve never heard of this, Linc. The letters stand for open language search. There’s this thing called large language models. I can—”

In a slightly louder voice than he’d been using, Rhyme recited, “LLM. What is McGuire OLS?”

Suddenly, bringing blink of surprise to Sellitto’s face and a smile to Sachs’s, a disembodied, male voice from the heavens began to speak: “That’s an excellent question and one I can definitely help you with. McGuire OLS, incorporated as McGuire Open Language Search, Inc., is a large language model service company. It was founded a year ago by Edward McGuire as a spin-off from McGuire Computer Services, of which he is CEO. Their product is OLS, trademarked, a search engine. Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence that have been trained to understand and generate human language or visuals in response to text or other input, through the process of inference. Millions or billions of parameters that make up the models are what lead to the ‘large’ designation.

“Often large language models don’t perform internet searches on their own—but they can help or enhance searches in several ways when interfacing with tools or systems that do have internet access integrated. OLS is considered unique in that its algorithms feature proprietary search refinement criteria. Would you like me to explain further and give examples?”

“No,” Rhyme told it.

“Holy shit,” Sellitto muttered, glancing skyward, where the speakers nestled.

Rhyme had to chuckle. “And the irony is it’s a large language model that’s telling us about another large language model. I wonder if it’s jealous.”

“You actually use that thing?”

“You think, Lon, because I act like Sherlock Holmes, I’m forever trapped in the nineteenth century?”

“Yeah, I kinda do.”

“The only problem is the first damn sentence. Like it’s trying to be my new best friend. Somebody at tech is working on it.”

Rhyme and Sachs had always believed in using the most cutting-edge tools available to forensic scientists and artificial intelligence and large language models were simply examples of these, like electron microscopes and DNA analyzers. The pair didn’t hesitate to use them, though always with a degree of skepticism. Like Wikipedia or a preliminary crime scene report or canvass result, you had to treat them as merely starting points.

Sachs said, “Lon, it’s the NYPD’s LLM system. It’s experimental. But you should try it. I’ll send the link.”

“So, it’ll tell me if it was Petey Soames or Leon Brown who emptied his Glock at OG Van Ness on Fourteenth Street at ten p.m. on Saturday?”

Rhyme considered. “If the input’s right, yes. Data’s everything, Lon.”

A skeptical smile. Then, eyes on the speaker, Sellitto asked, “You call it LLM. No name.”

“It’s a computer, Lon, not a fuzzy dog. So, now we’re all experts at McGuire and his company. Let’s move on. You’re here why?”

“Well, this morning, somebody tried to assassinate McGuire.”

“Where?” Sachs asked.

“Manhattan. Near a customer’s office. Perp followed him. Had been for some days.”

Rhyme: “Method? A firearm?”

A nod. “Handgun. Five rounds, old wheel gun. One bum primer, four misses. From twenty feet. Amateur. Shooter didn’t know what he was doing.”

Rhyme had never been a gun person. He carried a sidearm when he was with the department and he had access to one now, but found guns would get in the way in searching scenes. He knew, though, that revolvers were notoriously inaccurate when you just tugged the trigger repeatedly—double action, as opposed to cocking the hammer back first—single action shooting, as it was known. That undoubtedly was how the assassin, probably in a panicked frenzy, would have fired.

“You said he’d been stalking McGuire. And ‘assassinate.’ So I assume it was something ideological, not road rage or a romantic triangle.”

“Right, the perp was a crank. Thomas Elron Olsen. Thirty-one. He sent dozens of emails a day to the company and McGuire personally and published manifestos.” The detective looked at his phone. “Here’s part of one: ‘You’re destroying the environment with your data farms upstate! And in South America, Central America, Africa and India you rape the land for materials for your chips. Every day the world dies a little more, thanks to you. Your day is coming.’ ”

Rhyme said, “Let me see the post.”

Sellitto displayed the screen.

“Good grammar, punctuation. No fan of the Oxford comma.”

“Professional student. And graduate assistant at Columbia and NYU.”

“And what’s the thing about data farms?” Sachs asked.

Sellitto told Rhyme something he had not known. “There’s a movement that thinks artificial intelligence servers—where they crunch the data—are bad. They use massive amounts of energy—so much so that they contribute to greenhouse gases. They also need huge supplies of water and screw up local communities and wildlife preserves. It’s not proven, but when has that ever stopped anybody? People try to move away from the farms, but nobody’ll buy their houses. And then the equipment gets outdated pretty damn fast. That means the old servers are just e-waste. They have to be dumped but they’re full of heavy metal and toxins and that ruin the land.”

Rhyme cut a glance to Sachs, who lifted an eyebrow. Maybe they’d have to look into their own LLM’s environmental responsibility. He wondered whether the thing would be honest if they posed the question if it was a danger to the environment.

Sellitto continued, “And the second part of Olsen’s rant? The chips? A lot of the raw materials for AI computer chips come from exploited Third World countries. I don’t really know about that either, but whatever, he was upset enough about it to point a .38 Special at somebody and pull the trigger. So.” He dug into another cookie. When the chewing was done: “Why I’m here. You free now to lend a hand?”

He was and said so.

Sellitto sent and received some texts and then gave Sachs information. She sat down at one of the computers where they stood, at sat: in the non-sterile side of the parlor—the lab was on the other, separated by Plexiglas.

After a few minutes, a Zoom call was underway.

“Mr. McGuire,” Sellitto said, speaking to the man filling the high-def monitor on the wall near the trio. He was, literally, larger than life. “This is Captain Rhyme and Detective Sachs.”

Younger than Rhyme would have thought, though he guessed all Silicon Valley–ish people were around the CEO’s age—mid-thirties. A head of tousled dark red hair. He was wearing a T-shirt with the name and faded art of some rock group on it. His background was a tall bookshelf packed with titles that Rhyme could not make out.

“Hello, Detective. Captain Rhyme. I mean, I’ve heard of you, of course.”

He and Sachs nodded in greeting. And Rhyme had the definite impression that the computer man wasn’t pleased to be in the meeting. “I’ve gotta say, like I was telling Detective Sellitto, I really don’t think we need to make that big a deal of it all. I’d like to put it behind me. I’ve got so much work to do.” He did, in fact, seem truly harried: tired, red eyed, wrinkled shirt and a desk piled high with file folders.

Sellitto said, “Still a crime, Mr. McGuire, and we need to follow up.”

“I understand,” he said sourly. “But …”

A man is nearly killed and he doesn’t want an aggressive investigation?

Ah, then Rhyme wondered if there was a logic to his attitude. Maybe the last thing he wanted was to draw the public’s attention to the environmental issues surrounding data farming—which they might not otherwise know about.

An aide walked into the scene—a businessman in the traditional sense, Wall Street, with dark suit and white shirt and tie, trim hair—and whispered something. McGuire nodded. The man vanished. The CEO looked back to the camera.

Sachs asked, “Could you give us the details, please.”

“All right. I was going to a meeting with one of our suppliers, a software security company. It’s in downtown Manhattan, not far from City Hall. I got out of the limo and was about ten feet from the door when this man runs up and fires a pistol at me. Just bang bang bang. A revolver. An old one, I think. Like that guy had in Pulp Fiction.”

He exhaled and his face looked hollow. “Life flashing before your eyes. That kind of thing. I just froze. And it was so friggin’ loud. I mean, I felt that punch in my chest and jaw. That’s why I thought I’d been shot. It was just the muzzle blast or whatever you call it.

“Then it was over. Seconds. His eyes were so . . . He was so angry and it just wasn’t fair. I mean, our data farms are smaller than Anthropic and OpenAI. And we meet all the zoning and environmental regs.”

“What about the mining, the Third World countries?”

“Oh, you saw his email about the chips?” he scoffed. “We source most of it from U.S. mines and if we buy anything from overseas, it’s all open-market negotiations. We pay a shitload of money. There’s no exploitation. I think he’s gone down rabbit holes on the internet. Once a nut gets a bee in their bonnet somebody’s the villain, you can’t stop them.”

It was then that Rhyme’s phone, sitting on the work platform of his chair, hummed. A screen popped up. It was a text from Ron Pulaski, a patrol officer who frequently worked with them. He was a good cop in all aspects of the job, but he truly shone as  a crime scene officer. Rhyme had basically designated him to be his successor.

The message read:

Arson in Spanish Harlem. Thought you’d be interested: perp sent a message, I think. And looks like he might have more fires in mind.

This intrigued Rhyme.

He texted back.

Picture of “message”?

Rhyme looked back at the screen. McGuire was reiterating that he really wanted to treat  the whole thing as a fluke, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. “I understand you’ve got official stuff you need to do, but it’s a really busy time for us right now.”

Rhyme’s attention wavered once more when he received another photo, sent by Pulaski from the scene in Spanish Harlem. It was of a box, a fireproof one like the kind people store important documents in. It looked relatively new and painted on the top, in the color of dried blood, brown red, or maybe in blood itself, Rhyme reflected, was the numeral 1.

He turned the phone toward Sachs, who frowned as she read the missive. Then glanced at Rhyme before returning to the video call.

And looks like he might have more fires in mind. . . .

Rhyme said, “So you’ve got a BOLO out on Olsen. Any sightings?”

A “be on the lookout” alert was like the old-time all-points bulletin. Rhyme was never sure why the change. He then noted that McGuire was frowning.

So was Lon Sellitto. As if he’d just remembered something, the detective muttered, “Oh, I didn’t say? Olsen’s dead.”

McGuire was saying, “My security man got him. Three shots in the head.”

Rhyme gave an exaggerated frown, directing it toward Sellitto. “Dead. Clearly deceased.”

“Doornail,” Sellitto said.

“Then what exactly would you like me for, if you have the perp discovered, arrested, convicted and executed—all in the space of, what was it, Lon, three minutes?”

McGuire gave an I-told-you-so shrug.

Sellitto muttered defensively to Rhyme and Sachs, “We’re thinking maybe he’s part of a movement. A conspiracy. It oughta be uncovered.”

“But online, right?”

“Mostly, I guess, yeah.”

“And we’re supposed to do what, Lon? Sit here and read emails? There’s no crime scene to search, no PE to analyze—I’m really not at my best without trace, fibers, dirt and fingerprints, now, am I?”

“Well . . .” Sellitto was looking down at his phone.

Rhyme’s mobile hummed with another text. A frown.

It was from the detective, three feet away.

What was this?

He read:

City Hall wants to keep people like McGuire happy—make sure companies headquartered in NYC stay here.

Jesus Christ . . .

Rhyme looked at the Zoom screen. “Mr. McGuire, I think we’re in agreement here, pretty much case closed. If you hear anything from Olsen’s associates or get any other clues about this conspiracy, more threats, give us a call. But we just got an emergency notification for another case. That needs looking into.”

“Absolutely, Captain Rhyme, Detective Sachs. Good luck. And if you ever need any AI work, we’re the best in the business.”

They disconnected.

“Look, Linc, I just do what I’m told.”

“I only have one thing to say, Lon.” He nodded to his phone where the text he’d just received sat. “‘Headquartered’ is not a verb.” He tilted his head toward the phone and said firmly, “Call Ron Pulaski.”

–

Read more of The Collateral Heart when it is released in November.