"I have a few, I think."
Mathers was returning. "Coffee?" he called from the hallway.
"No, thanks."
Ashberry turned to the door.
Now!
He started to rise, pulling the gun from the box, keeping it below Geneva's eye level.
Aiming at the doorway, finger around the trigger.
But something was wrong. Mathers wasn't appearing.
It was then that Ashberry felt something metallic touch his ear.
"William Ashberry, you're under arrest. I have a weapon." It was the girl's voice, though a very different sound, an adult voice. "Set that breakdown on the desk. Slow."
Ashberry froze. "But--"
"The shotgun. Set it down." The girl nudged his head with the pistol. "I'm a police officer. And I will use my firearm."
Oh, Lord, no . . . It was all a trap!
"Listen up, now, you do what she's telling you." This was the professor--though, of course, it wasn't Mathers at all. He was a stand-in too, a cop who was pretending to be the professor. He glanced sideways. The man had come back into the office through a side door. From his neck dangled an FBI identification card. He too held a pistol. How the hell had they gotten onto him? Ashberry wondered in disgust.
"An' don' move that muzzle so much's a skinny little millimeter. We all together on that?"
"I'm not going to tell you again," the girl said in a calm voice. "Do it now."
Still he didn't move.
Ashberry thought of his grandfather, the mobster, he thought of the screaming shopkeeper, he thought of his daughter's wedding.
What would Thompson Boyd do?
Play it by the book and give up.
No fucking way. Ashberry dropped into a crouch and spun around, lightning fast, lifting the gun.
Somebody shouted, "Don't!"
The last word he ever heard.
Chapter Forty-One
"Quite a view," Thom said.
Lincoln Rhyme glanced out the window at the Hudson River, the rock cliffs of the Palisades on the opposite shore and the distant hills of New Jersey. Maybe Pennsylvania too. He turned away immediately, the expression on his face explaining that panoramic views, like people's pointing them out, bored him senseless.
They were in the Sanford Foundation office of the late William Ashberry atop the Hiram Sanford Mansion on West Eighty-second Street. Wall Street was still digesting the news of the man's death and his involvement in a series of crimes over the past few days. Not that the financial community had ground to a halt; compared with, say, the betrayals visited on shareholders and employees by executives of Enron and Global Crossing, the death of a crooked executive of a profitable company didn't make compelling news.
Amelia Sachs had already searched the office and removed evidence linking Ashberry to Boyd and taped off certain p
arts of the room. This meeting was in a cleared area, which happened to feature stained-glass windows and rosewood paneling.
Sitting beside Rhyme and Thom were Geneva Settle and attorney Wesley Goades. Rhyme was amused that there'd been a few moments when he'd actually suspected Goades of complicity in the case--owing to his suddenly materializing in Rhyme's apartment, looking for Geneva, and the Fourteenth Amendment aspect of the intrigue; the lawyer would've had a strong motive to make certain that nothing jeopardized an important weapon for civil libertarians. Rhyme had also wondered if the man's loyalty to his former insurance company employers had led him to betray Geneva.