AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Something was wrong.
He hit the door lock button on his keypad and the woman entered. No longer in Tyvek, Montez wore a bright green blouse and black leather skirt, and her heels clattered on the ancient oak floors. At her throat was a locket that contained pictures of her two young children, he knew; she’d showed them off proudly the first time she’d been here with a trove of evidence for him to analyze.
“Captain Rhyme. What’s all this?” She stood at the X-ray machine and explosives and radiation detectors, and a small biotoxin chamber, in the front hallway.
“Just being careful.”
A nod. “Can’t have too much careful in this day and age,” she said earnestly.
When Rhyme had learned a few months ago that an assassin was targeting him, he’d asked one of his most brilliant criminalist students to get into the attacker’s mind and come up with the most logical way to kill Rhyme. The young man had decided the perp would exploit a weakness, something Rhyme loved and couldn’t resist: evidence. He would plant a bomb or toxin in something from a crime scene.
So, until the assassin was identified and the threat eliminated, everything that came into the house from unknown origins was scanned.
Cooper and Montez greeted each other, and the lab man and Thom began feeding the envelopes and containers through the security machines.
Rhyme finally had to ask, “Sonja. I’ve called Amelia. She hasn’t—”
The woman interrupted, frowning. “You mean you don’t know?” She walked farther into the parlor until she was next to him.
Rhyme’s heart began to pump furiously; given that he was insensate from the neck down, he knew this solely because of the throbbing in his temple.
“What?”
“She collapsed at the scene … She was in the basement of the jobsite, got exposed to something. Chemicals. The same stuff that killed a second worker.”
“And is she—?”
“I’m fine,” came a raspy voice from the doorway.
Amelia Sachs walked inside.
Rhyme frowned. She was carting an eighteen-inch green oxygen tank, to which was attached a clear tube, ending in a mask.
She clapped it onto her face, inhaled deeply and then noddedto a large glass jar in one of the evidence cartons. Inside was a small opaque plastic container. “That’s it. In there. Be really careful. It’s what he used to drop the counterweights. Killed one of the workers. Knocked me out. Medics got me …”
Her voice faded and he wondered if she were going to say “just in time.” But that was a phrase too dramatic for Amelia Sachs. And her pause was simply so she could take in more oxygen.
Yet her initial pronouncement was not exactly accurate. She was not fine. “Fragile” was not a word that existed in her universe, but whatever had happened had—he sought a word—diminishedher.
Inhaling more of the oxygen, she began to walk to the sterile portion of the lab, where she often stood to help Cooper navigate the evidence she’d collected. But now she diverted to one of the noisy—and unsightly—wicker chairs that had come with the town house and had yet to be discarded. She sat heavily and caught her breath.
“Sachs,” Rhyme began.
She lifted an eyebrow briefly but remained silent.
Yet another way in which they were alike: minimizing physical maladies. Rhyme, for instance, as a quadriplegic, had blood pressure concerns—autonomic dysreflexia—that needed attention. The remedy was simple—nitroglycerine two percent paste, or some other drugs—but he tended to slough off symptoms and stay focused on the job. She suffered from arthritis and simply ignored the pain and popped pills—over-the-counter ones only—and continued on with the investigation.
The faint motion of her head told him she was doing this now, refusing to acknowledge her present condition. Her eyes told a different story.
She inhaled yet again and turned to Sellitto. In a low voice: “I had to send in a bomb squad robot to collect the sample. And whatever that crap is, it melted the tires and dissolved the cameralens. They’re going to send Major Cases a bill. Just to warn you. It won’t be cheap.”
•••
As she uploaded the crime scene photos she’d taken, Sachs explained about the second death, the worker who’d gone down to where the counterweights had fallen, in the first basement. He’d apparently been overcome and stumbled into the substance, which began eating away his skin. He crawled about thirty feet before he died.
“Those were the fumes that got me.”
After a soft coughing fit, she added that when she hadn’t responded to Sonja Montez’s radio call, a med tech had hurried to the scene and found her at the foot of a ladder that led to the basement. A team got her out and on oxygen right away. They wanted her to go to the ER, but she declined.
