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Medical records …
“Listen, thanks, Lyle.”
“Anytime. I’ve got zero patience for bullshit. Especially when it’s coming from our team.”
He walked the man around the house to his car. He said, “And, you know, anything you want to talk about.”
Spencer nodded, understanding Ron was not speaking of Burdick’s setup. “Same goes for you.”
They shook hands and Spencer got into his unmarked, the Dodge listing to the left under his weight.
Standing on his trim lawn, which he so enjoyed tending, Ron stared down the street, watching the detective’s car disappear.
He was again thinking, Medical reports.
And then thinking one more thing, which he now just couldn’t get out of his mind.
Personal vendetta? Man, that’s low … And a lot of work.
54.
“I COULD SMELL IT, RHYME.”
Amelia Sachs walked into the town house carrying the oddest bit of evidence he’d ever seen: a metal door, sealed in cellophane wrap. Where the hinges had been were nothing but clusters of bullet holes.
The gloves, he noted too, were not standard latex. They were black. Neoprene probably, which told Rhyme precisely what smell she was referring to.
“The construction trailer? After we breached the door, I could smell it. I aborted and backed out. He had a trap—charges on a couple of drums of HF. The place is gone.”
“Injuries?”
“No, the teams’re good.”
She’d explained that Hale had fooled them yet again. The heat signature “proving” that he was inside was only a lantern or heat lamp set at about 98 degrees, placed on a Roomba.
“A what?”
“Vacuum cleaner you can program to move on its own.”
Such a thing existed?
“At least the charges were small. If there had been a half ki of C4, and it blew the canisters,thatwould’ve made things awkward.”
Amelia Sachs tended toward understatement on the topic of risk to her person.
“And that?” he said, pointing at the door she carried.
“I wantedsomething,” she grumbled. “Got my mask on and emptied two mags into the hinges and ripped it off just before I had to dodge the acid.” She added an exasperated, “I’m pretty pissed. I’ll need to do an FDR. They won’t waive it. I checked.”
Any time an officer’s weapon was fired, even accidentally, he or she had to fill out a Firearms Discharge Report. They were lengthy. The city took guns seriously and firing them even more so.
She handed the tech the door. “Mel. Here.”
Cooper stepped from the sterile portion of the parlor, and in his own neoprenes took the thing from her.
Rhyme said, “The knob.”
She was nodding. “I’m betting he didn’t wear gloves all the time, and he was probably pretty sure that if there was a breach, the acid’d not only kill the intruder but would melt the knob into sludge, along with any trace he’d left there.”
