The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

She read the message. She sent back another text and then walked to the computer. A moment later she opened an email. Rhyme saw the official heading. It was an evidence file from NYPD Crime Scene headquarters.

"They found what I was trying to remember--from that earlier case." She held up the caisson that Vernon Griffith had made. The wheels were identical to those depicted in the picture she'd just received from CSU.

She said, "Alicia said she'd met Vernon when he killed somebody who bullied him."

"Right."

"I think the vic was Echi Rinaldo, the drug dealer and transport man--the homicide I haven't made any progress on."

Archer said, "Yes, the wheels match, toy wheels."

"That's right. Also, Rinaldo was slashed to death with what might've been one of those."

She nodded at the razor saws and knives they'd recovered from Griffith's apartment.

"All right, good," Rhyme said. "Another scene involving Griffith. Anything about that case that might give us an idea where he's hiding?" He and Sachs had worked the case together briefly but then Rhyme had retired before they had progressed very far.

She ran through what she knew, concluding: "Just that he jumped into a gypsy cab and headed to somewhere in the Village. Nothing more specific than that."

"Ah," Rhyme said softly, gazing up at the board. "That puts us in a slightly different position."

"But the Village," Archer said, "is huge. If there's no way to narrow it down..."

"Always question your assumptions."

Sachs: "Happy to. Which one?"

"That Vernon was referring to Greenwich Village."

"What other village is there?"

"Middle Village." He glanced at Archer. "A neighborhood in Queens."

She nodded. "The one you called--because of the humus and the other trace. And I was skeptical of."

"Correct."

"I guess we didn't need two question marks after all."

Sachs was looking over an online map of Middle Village. It wasn't a small area. "Got any idea where exactly he might be?"

"I do," Rhyme said, looking over the map himself, hearing Juliette Archer's words.

The answers to riddles are always simple...

"I can narrow it down."

"By how much?" Cooper asked.

"To about six feet."

St. John Cemetery in Queens is the permanent resting site of a number of notables.

Among them: Mario Cuomo, Geraldine Ferraro, Robert Mapplethorpe and, no less, Charles Atlas. But Amelia Sachs knew it mostly through a quasi-professional connection, you might say. The Catholic cemetery held the bodies of dozens of the most famous gangsters in history. Joe Colombo, Carmine Galante, Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese, John Gotti, and the quintessential Godfather, Lucky Luciano.

Sachs now parked her Torino at the entrance on Metropolitan Avenue, in Middle Village, pastoral by New York City standards. The main building was a structure that both Bavarians and Elizabethan country folk would have found familiar. Steepled, turreted, with leaded windows and brick walls framed by white trim.

She climbed out and, from habit, unbuttoned her jacket then touched her Glock grip with open palm to orient position. If you'd asked her a moment later if she'd done this, she couldn't have told you.