"Twenty-five minutes to high tide," Banks called.
Maybe Dellray's team could get the exact location out of him. They could drag Mr. 823 into an alley somewhere with a bag of apples. Nick had told her that was the way they talked perps into "cooperating." Whack 'em in the gut with a bag of fruit. Really painful. No marks. When she was growing up she wouldn't have thought cops did that. Now she knew different.
Banks tapped her shoulder. "There. A bunch of old piers."
Rotten wood, filthy. Spooky places.
They skidded to a stop and climbed out, running toward the water.
"You there, Rhyme?"
"Talk to me, Sachs. Where are you?"
"A pier just north of Battery Park City."
"I just heard from Lon, on the East Side. He hasn't found anything."
"It's hopeless," she said. "There're a dozen piers. Then the whole promenade . . . And the fireboat house and ferry docks and the pier at Battery Park . . . We need ESU."
"We don't have ESU, Sachs. They're not on our side anymore."
Twenty minutes to high tide.
Her eyes darted along the waterfront. Her shoulders sagged with helplessness. Hand on her weapon, she sprinted to the river, Jerry Banks not far behind.
"Get me something on that leaf, Mel. A guess, anything. Wing it."
Fidgeting, Cooper looked from the microscope to the computer screen.
Eight thousand varieties of leafy plants in Manhattan.
"It doesn't fit the cell structure of anything."
"It's old," Rhyme said. "How old?"
Cooper looked at the leaf again. "Mummified. I'd put it at a hundred years, little less maybe."
"What's gone extinct in the last hundred years?"
"Plants don't go extinct in an ecosystem like Manhattan. They always show up again."
A ping in Rhyme's mind. He was close to remembering something. He both loved and hated this feeling. He might grab the thought like a slow pop-up fly. Or it might vanish completely, leaving him with only the sting of lost inspiration.
Sixteen minutes to high tide.
What was the thought? He grappled with it, closed his eyes . . .
Pier, he was thinking. The vic's under a pier.
What about it? Think!
Pier . . . ships . . . unloading . . . cargo.
Unloading cargo!
His eyes snapped open. "Mel, is it a crop?"
"Oh, hell. I've been looking at general-horticulture pages, not cultivated crops." He typed for what seemed like hours.