The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

"You must have loved your brother a lot."

"I kept my old phone with his voice mail messages on it. I listen to them all the time. It's some comfort." He turned to her. "Any comfort in this life is good, don't you think?"

Sachs believed she knew the answer to her next question. "Those boys who took pictures of your brother and that girl. What happened to them?"

"Oh, that's why I moved into the apartment in Chelsea. Easier for me to do what I'd decided to--find them and kill them; they worked in the city. One I slashed to death. Sam. The other, Frank? Beat him to death. The bodies're in a pond near Newark. I can tell you more about those, if you want. She was going to kill me, wasn't she? Alicia."

Sachs hesitated.

The story would come out, sooner or later. "Yes, Vernon. I'm sorry."

Resignation on his face. "I knew. I mean, deep down, I knew she was using me. Anybody who wants you to kill people, just comes out and asks you, after you've slept together." A shrug. "What did I expect? But sometimes you let yourself be used because... well, just because. You're lonely or whatever. We all pay for love one way or another." Another searching gaze of her face. "You're nice to me. Even after I tried to kill your mother. I don't think you're a Shopper after all. I thought you were. But you're not." After a moment he continued, "Can I give you something?"

"What?"

"In the backpack. There's another book."

She looked inside. Found a slim volume. "This?"

"That's right."

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.

She flipped through it, examining the pictures of crime scene miniatures. Sachs had never seen anything like it. Frances Glessner Lee was the creator of the dioramas. Sachs gave a soft laugh, looking at the tiny doll, a corpse, lying in a kitchen.

"You can have it. I'd like you to."

"We're not allowed. You understand."

"Oh. Why not?"

She smiled. "I don't know. A police rule. But we're not."

"Sure. Maybe you could buy one, now that you know about it."

"I'll do that, Vernon."

Two uniformed officers approached. "Detective."

"Tom," she responded to the taller of the two.

"Bus's here."

She said to Griffith, "We'll take you to booking. You're not going to be a problem, are you?"

"No."

Sachs believed him.

CHAPTER 58

He in there."

Ron Pulaski looked from the boy, no more than fifteen, to the building the kid was pointing at. The place was bad, worse than most in East New York. Ron and his children had seen The Hobbit not long ago and at one point the dwarves and Bilbo were heading for a cave. That's what this place reminded him of. One of those old stone structures, dried-blood brown, and with windows black and sunken as corpse eye sockets. Some broken. Some dotted with bullet holes.

Seemed appropriate, this dim, forbidding place, for Oden to be dealing from. Or where he fabricated his infamous Catch. The drug of drugs.

Or maybe he did that elsewhere and it was here that he tortured rivals and suspected informants.