The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

She clicked a finger against a thumbnail. Twice. Tension rippled through her. "The analyst in Queens didn't tell us the type of wood. We need to find that out."

"I'll request it." Rubbing his forehead with one hand, Pulaski scrolled through more analyses with the other. "Looks like hammers and bombs aren't enough. This guy wants to poison people too? Significant traces of organochlorine and benzoic acid. Toxins. Typical of insecticides but they've been used in homicides. And more chemicals that..." He regarded a database. "... profile as varnish."

"Sawdust and varnish. He's a carpenter, construction worker? Or somebody putting his bombs in wooden boxes or behind paneled walls."

But since there'd been no reports of improvised explosive devices in the area, encased in wood or otherwise, Sachs put this possibility low on the likelihood scale.

"I want the manufacturer," Sachs said. "The varnish. The type of sawdust too."

Pulaski said nothing.

She glanced his way and noted that he was looking at his phone. A text.

"Ron?"

He started and slipped the phone away. He'd been preoccupied lately. She wondered if there was an illness in the family.

"Everything okay?"

"Sure. Fine."

She repeated, "I want the manufacturer."

"Of the... oh, the varnish."

"Of the varnish. And type of wood. And brand of makeup."

"I'll get on it." He sent another request to the crime lab.

They turned to the secondary category of evidence--that which might or might not have come from the unsub. The ECTs had collected the entire contents of the bin where they found the Starbucks trash, on the theory that the rubbish from the coffee chain might not have been the only things the perp discarded. There were thirty or forty items: napkins, newspapers, plastic cups, used Kleenex, a porn magazine probably ditched before hubby returned home to the family. Everything had been photographed and logged, but nothing, the analysts in Queens reported, seemed relevant.

Sachs, however, spent twenty minutes looking at each item, both individual shots of the evidence in the bin and wide-angle images before the contents were collected by the ECTs.

"Check this out," she said. Pulaski walked closer. She was indicating two napkins from a White Castle fast-food restaurant.

"Home of the slider." Pulaski added, "What is that, by the way?"

Sachs shrugged; she knew it was a small hamburger. No idea where the name had come from. One of the earliest fast-food franchises in America, White Castle specialized in burgers and milk shakes.

"Any friction ridges?"

Pulaski read the report. "None."

How hard did they try? she wondered. Recalling that Rhyme's two nemeses were incompetence and laziness, Sachs stared at the napkins. "Odds they came from him?"

Pulaski enlarged the wide-angle shots. The rumpled White Castle napkins were directly beside the Starbucks discards.

"Could be. Our boy likes chain food, we know."

A sigh. "Napkins're one of the best sources for DNA. The analyst could've run them, compared it with Starbucks."

Lazy, incompetent...

Then she relented.

Or was he just overworked? The story of policing.

Sachs called up the images of the opened napkins. Each contained stains.