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Clumsy, but he rather liked it.
In 212’s case, though, no one involved in the investigation, nor anyone in city government, could figure out why the perp had committed the crime. Yes, he got plenty of details on infrastructure, tunnels, bridges, underground passages—of which there were enough beneath the five boroughs to form an entire shadow city. But how did that help the bad guys plan an attack? Even the dullest terrorists could find suitable targets in this target-rich city without having to resort to maps of tunnels or engineering diagrams.
The materials would also show which passages ran beneath banks or jewelry stores or fur warehouses. But digging upward into a vault for a heist is purely the stuff of 1970s TV movies, Amelia Sachs had pointed out. And stealing cash was pointless. The serial numbers of every twenty-, fifty- and hundred-dollar bill in circulation would fit on a single fifty-gigabyte thumb drive, and scanners to spot purloined bills were in use everywhere.
Gone were the good old days.
“Hm,” Rhyme offered. It was a variation of a grunt. When he spoke, it was, more or less, to himself. “No obvious reason for the heist. And yet the datawerestolen. And it was risky.” He wheeled close to the board. “For. A. Purpose. And what might that be?”
Frustration sent his eyes to the bottle of Glenmorangie scotch sitting on a high shelf nearby. Rhyme’s right arm and hand werelargely functional, yes, and could easily grip a bottle, and open and pour it.
He could not, however, stand and snag it from the perch where his mother hen had set it. Coincidentally, that very individual—his caregiver, Thom Reston—happened to enter the parlor just then and notice Rhyme’s gaze. He said, “It’s morning.”
“Aware of the time, thank you.”
When Rhyme didn’t look away from the colorful label, Thom said, “No.”
The man was dressed impeccably, as always, today in tan slacks, a baby-blue shirt and a floral tie. He was slim yet strong, his muscles largely developed not from hunks of iron or machines but from moving Rhyme himself. It was Thom who got the man into and out of the chair and bed and bath.
Another grunt and dark glance toward the liquor.
Itwasearly, no disputing, but the concept of “cocktail hour” had always been a moving target for Lincoln Rhyme.
He looked back at the whiteboard devoted to the DSE theft, but his going-nowhere meditation on the theft was interrupted by the hum of the door buzzer.
Rhyme looked up. It was Lon Sellitto, his former partner from the days before the accident. He was senior in Major Cases, Amelia Sachs’s assignment, and was the detective who most often liaised with Rhyme when he was used by the NYPD as a consultant.
He looks energized,” Rhyme said, ordering the latch to open.
Inside, the big man, balding in an unenthusiastic way, sloughed off his brown raincoat and hung it. Not that Rhyme cared, but Sellitto seemed to buy the ugliest garments on the rack. And onecouldfind colors that were not muddy-camel-brown, could one not? Sellitto’s clothes were often wrinkled too, as today, a function of the man’s round physique, Rhyme guessed. Most manufacturers presumably created garments out of textiles whose waiting state was smooth.
Then again, what did Rhyme know? Thom and Sachs bought his outfits—like today’s taupe slacks, black polo shirt and forest-green cardigan. Someone once commented that what he was wearing looked comfortable. Thom had cut him a glance and Rhyme’s planned response—“Wouldn’t exactly know, now, would I?”—was replaced with an insincere smile.
Sellitto offered a brief nod to all in the room. Then a frown crossed his face as his eyes shot to an overlarge Sony TV screen mounted in the corner. “Why isn’t the news on?”
“Lon.”
“Is this the remote? No. Where’s the remote?”
Thom picked it up from a shelf and powered the unit up.
Rhyme said, “Why don’t you just tell us, instead of waiting for the anchor-bot?”
“A situation,” Sellitto said, but didn’t elaborate. He took the remote and clicked to one of the national stations. Depicted were aBreaking Newsbulletin, a crawl at the bottom that Rhyme was too far away to read, and video of damage at a construction site. Another message popped up. It reportedE. 89th Street, New York City.This was replaced by:One dead, six injured in crane collapse.
Sellitto looked from Sachs to Rhyme. “It wasn’t an accident. Somebody did it on purpose. They’ve sent the city a list of demands. And if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to do it again in twenty-four hours.”
3.
THE MAYOR HADreceived an email with a URL that took him to a private chat room on the anonymous message board 13Chan.
Rhyme read the words that Sellitto called up on the computer monitor in the center of the parlor.
Nearly 50 million Americans live in housing they can’t afford. 600,000 have no homesat all, and one third of those are families with children. Yet New York continues to encourage developers’ building luxury high-rises, which it has done since the early twentieth century.
The city is the largest landowner in the area. It holds 370 million square feet of property and its obsene how little of that is devouted to affordable housing. There are huge amounts of space in the city that are unusedand not being planned for development, which we know because we have examined real estate records.
Our demand is this: The city will create a nonprofit corporation; to this corporation, the city will transfer the properties that are on the list below and convert them to affordable housing.
