And Sam is taking pictures of me and Cindy with a Polaroid. Getting it all--her drugged sleepy face and my string-bean body and my you know. Other people too are there. Laughing and laughing.
I'm grabbing clothes and putting them back on and crying. "What are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing?"
Frank and Sam are looking over the pictures and laughing ever harder and one of them says, Hey, you're a natural born pornstar, String Bean!
Frank still laughing hard lifts up Cindy's head by her hair, "You like it after all, bitch?"
I got it then. Remembering them coming out of Cindy's house a month ago, seeing them on my secret route home, talking to them for the first time. Cindy had told them no. No fucking, no blow job, get out of my house. Or something.
And that's when they'd th
ought of it. Seeing me. How to get even with Cindy Hanson.
The "Epic" was a lie. The Alien Quest was a lie. Music at the party was a lie.
All of it, a lie.
CHAPTER 46
Amelia Sachs entered the parlor, set down the evidence cartons gathered at her mother's town house, and walked straight up to Juliette Archer. Threw her arms around the surprised woman, nearly dislodging the wrist strapped to the Storm Arrow's armrest.
"I--" the woman began.
"Thank you. You saved my mother's life."
"We all did," Archer said.
"But," Rhyme said, "she's the one who came up with the blackout strategy."
"I don't know how to thank you."
A shrug, similar to the ones Rhyme was capable of.
Sachs looked from the intern to Rhyme. "You two make a good team."
Rhyme, with typically little patience for the sentimental, or the irrelevant, asked Mel Cooper, "What's the latest?" The tech was just hanging up the phone from a conversation with someone in the Traffic Division.
He explained that there had been no fatalities. The closest brush with death had been a doctor whose sedan crashed into the rear end of a Toyota and ruptured the gas tank. He and the other driver were inundated with fuel but pulled out by a passersby before the two cars vanished in flames. (To be doubly safe the doctor had stripped naked in the middle of the street, flinging his drenched clothing away.) A half-dozen people, however, had been badly injured.
Rhyme now called Rodney Szarnek to ask about the incident. "Any way to trace the signal?"
The computer cop went into a long explanation about cell towers, public Wi-Fi and VPNs.
"Rodney."
"Sorry. The answer's no."
He disconnected. "One hell of a weapon," Sachs said to Rhyme and Archer.
Sellitto, downtown, called and reported that everyone on the team--and their family members--was now under protective detail. "It's UAC-prioritized," he muttered.
Rhyme had given up trying to stay on top of New York City Police Department shorthand. "Which is?"
"It'll be in place Until the Asshole is Caught," Sellitto said.
Archer laughed.
Sachs and Cooper were unpacking evidence she'd collected from her mother's house--the garden, the house itself and the steps across the street, where witnesses had seen a skinny worker taking a break, reading the paper, sipping coffee.