The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

Silence for a moment then footsteps from inside.

"Who is it?" came the gruff voice.

"Name is Ron. I was a friend of Baxter's. Charles Baxter."

Ron could see shadows moving under the door. Was O'Denne pulling a gun from his pocket and debating just shooting the visitor through the door? It didn't seem smart to do that in your residence. But Ron realized O'Denne might not be particularly stable and might therefore be unconcerned about wasting an intruder close to home. And as for anyone else nearby, he guessed gunshots were more or less common here and therefore largely ignored.

"What do you want?"

"You know Charles's dead."

"What do you want?"

"He told me about you. I want to pick up with you where he left off."

A click from the other side of the door.

A gun cocking? Or de-cocking?

But the sound turned out to be one of several locks snapping open.

Ron tensed, his hand slipping toward his pistol. Tony raised his Glock.

The door opened and Ron looked inside, scanning the man who stood before him, backlit in light from a cheap lamp with a torn shade.

Ron's shoulders slumped. All he could think: Oh, man... What do I do now?

CHAPTER 59

Lincoln Rhyme heard the front door of his town house open and close. Footsteps approached.

"It's Amelia," Juliette Archer said. They were in the parlor.

"You can tell from the sound. Good. Yes, your hearing, vision, smell will improve. Some doctors dispute it but I've run experiments and I'm convinced it's true. Taste too, if you don't kill off your sapictive cells with excessive whisky."

"The what? Sapictive?"

"Taste receptor cells."

"Oh. Well, life's a balance, isn't it?"

Amelia Sachs walked inside, nodding greetings.

"A confession from Griffith?" he asked.

"More or less." She sat down and told him a story of two brothers bullied--the younger one to death--and his sibling's growing instability and desire for revenge. Griffith's account aligned perfectly with what Alicia Morgan had told them.

"'Shoppers,'" Archer mused after hearing the story. "Well, didn't see that one coming."

While the mental makeup of a perp was largely irrelevant to Rhyme, he now had to admit to himself that Vernon Griffith was one of the more complex suspects he'd ever been up against.

"Not unsympathetic," Sachs offered.

Stealing the very words Rhyme had been about to offer.

She explained that there would probably be a plea deal. "He admitted we got him dead to rights. He doesn't want to fight it." A smile. "He asked if I thought they'd let him make furniture in prison."

Rhyme wondered if that was a possibility. It seemed that felons incarcerated for murder might not be allowed access to saws and ball-peen hammers. The man might have to settle for making license plates.