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They moved to the center section of the mobile construction headquarters and sat at the table. “Coffee?” Hale asked.
“No, I’m good.”
“It went all right?”
The detective clicked his tongue. “Perfect. None of them suspect anything. Now, here’s this,” Gilligan said, as if about to deliver a Christmas present to a buddy. He withdrew several sheets from his inside jacket pocket. It was quite the nice garment. Thedetective, Hale had learned, had several sources of income—all of it tax free—beyond what the NYPD paid him. Hale himself had put $100K into an offshore account for Gilligan this year alone.
“What is it?”
“Lifted it from a file at Rhyme’s. It’ll be helpful.”
Hale opened the sheets and scanned the list of eighteen names. Most of them were crossed out.
“You’ll want to talk to the others, the one’s I haven’t checked off,” Gilligan said. “Might be a witness.”
“What’s the climate like there, in Rhyme’s?”
“The crane thing’s got them occupied. Totally. My case is on the back burner.”
He was referring to the Department of Structures and Engineering theft. The possessive pronoun “my” was true in two senses: it was Gilligan’s case because he was lead detective on it—but also because he was the thief, the man who’d broken into the building and stolen the documents and drives.
Hewas the man Rhyme and Amelia Sachs had nicknamed Unsub 212.
The stolen DSE materials were what now covered the table in front of the men.
“Anything new I should know about Rhyme’s security?”
“No. Still just the parcel X-ray machine. The biotox frame. The detectors for bombs and radiation.”
When the detective had first reported to Hale that there was a uranium detector, Gilligan had laughed. “Rhyme thinks somebody’s going to nuke him?”
Hale had not bothered to explain that dirty devices—which spread radioactive material—are a far more realistic danger than a nuclear reaction.
“And still no metal detectors?”
“No.”
“The video you took? The card?”
Gilligan seemed hesitant as he handed Hale an SD card. “I didn’t get much. I didn’t want to, you know, be too obvious, taping.”
The detective had worn a body cam with a button lens on the occasions he’d been to Rhyme’s. Some of this was to allow Hale to see exactly what the defenses were like in the town house.
Hale also wanted to see the criminalist himself. Like a herpetologist needs to observe his favorite species of snake in its own environment.
He called up a movie-viewing program on his laptop, loaded the card and scrubbed through what Gilligan had recorded.
The quality was good for the most part. The detective had stood still and panned slowly. He did, however, cover the lens with his sleeve frequently—out of fear of being detected, probably.
Hale now froze a frame, leaning toward the screen.
He was looking at a particularly clear, well-lit capture.
And studied the image intensely.
Lincoln Rhyme is a handsome man, with a prominent nose and thick, trimmed dark hair. Those confined to wheelchairs sometimes gain weight or grow gaunt. Rhyme has done neither. He exercises, it’s clear.
His dark eyes are keen, and a comma of hair falls over his right forehead. His brows are furrowed as he looks toward the portion of his parlor sealed off by a glass wall. It is the sterile side of the room, the laboratory. This hermetical sealing is similar to the finest watchmaking facilities, which are kept breathlessly clean, out of fear that dust—or far worse, a bit of sand or grit—might make its way into the works and render the timepiece useless.
