The young officer laughed. "I had a hunch you needed to buy some time."
"That's exactly right. I liked the embassy part, by the way."
"Improvising. So what do we do next?"
"We let the bread bake," Rhyme said cryptically. "And see if we can't rustle up some of this Bahamian rum I've been hearing about."
CHAPTER 44
INTO THE PARLOR OF THE TOWN HOUSE, the laboratory, Amelia Sachs carted a milk crate containing the evidence from the Lydia Foster crime scene.
"Did Lincoln call?" she asked Mel Cooper, who eyed the crate with interest.
"Nope, not a word."
Cooper, the expert lab man, was now officially on board, thanks to a call by Lon Sellitto and Captain Myers, to arrange for his reassignment to the Rhyme Precinct. Cooper, an NYPD detective, was balding and diminutive and wore thick Harry Potter glasses that never seemed to remain exactly perched where they should be. You would think his off-hours life
would be filled with math puzzles and Scientific American but his leisure time was largely taken with ballroom dancing competitions, with his stunningly gorgeous Scandinavian girlfriend, a mathematics professor at Columbia University.
Nance Laurel was at her desk. The woman glanced blankly at the physical evidence, then back to the policewoman, and Sachs didn't know if this was a greeting or a symptom of one of the pauses before she spoke.
Sachs offered grimly, "I got it wrong. There're two perps." She explained about her erroneous assumption. "I was following the sniper. The man who killed Lydia Foster's somebody else."
"Who do you think?" Cooper asked.
"Bruns's backup."
"Or a specialist hired by Metzger to clean up," Laurel said. It seemed to Sachs that her voice brightened at this. Good news for the case, good news for the jury--that their primary suspect would order one of his officers to do something so heartless. Not a word of sympathy for the victim, not a frown of concern.
Sachs truly hated the woman at this moment.
She continued, pointedly speaking only to Mel Cooper, "Lon's agreed to keep it a motive-unknown case for the time being--like the IED at the Java Hut's still officially a gas main explosion. I thought it was better not to let Metzger know how the investigation's going."
Laurel was nodding. "Good."
Sachs stared at the whiteboards then began to revise them in light of what they'd learned. "Let's give Lydia Foster's killer the title Unsub Five Sixteen. After today's date."
Laurel asked, "Anything more about the ID of the shooter, the man you followed to NIOS?"
"No. Lon's got a surveillance team on him. They'll call as soon as they make an ID."
Another pause. Laurel said, "I'm just curious: Did you think about getting his fingerprints?"
"His--"
"When you were following the sniper downtown? The reason I'm asking is I was working a case once and an undercover detective dropped a glossy magazine. The subject picked it up for her. We got his prints."
"Well," Sachs said evenly, "I didn't."
Because if I had done that we'd have his fucking ID by now. Which we don't.
An impenetrably cryptic nod from Laurel.
Just curious...
That was as irritating as "if you don't mind."
Sachs turned away from her, wincing slightly, and handed off the evidence from the Lydia Foster crime scene to Mel Cooper, who regarded the slim pickings with the same dismay that Sachs felt.