The Broken Window (Lincoln Rhyme 8)

Still talking on her phone, Pam moved toward the computer but she was looking at the keyboard, not the screen.

Look up! Rhyme urged silently.

Please! Read the goddamn message!

But like all kids today, Pam didn't need to look at the screen to make sure she'd typed correctly. With her cell held tight between cheek and shoulder, she glanced fast at the keyboard as she stabbed the letters with quick strokes.

"gotta go. bye mr Rhyme. C U :-)"

The screen went black.

*

Amelia Sachs was uncomfortable in the crime-scene Tyvek jumpsuit, with surgeon's hat and booties. Claustrophobic, nauseous from inhaling the bitter scent of damp paper and blood and sweat in the warehouse.

She hadn't known Captain Joseph Malloy well. But he was, as Lon Sellitto had announced, "one of ours." And she was appalled at what 522 had done to him, to extract the information he wanted. She was nearly finished running the scene and carried the evidence-collection bags outside, infinitely grateful for the air here, even though it reeked of diesel fumes.

She kept hearing the voice of her father. As a young girl she'd glanced into her parents' bedroom and found him in his dress patrolman's uniform, wiping tears. This had shaken her; she'd never seen him cry. He'd gestured her inside. Hermann Sachs always played straight with his daughter and he'd sat her down on a bedside chair and explained that a friend of his, a fellow officer, had been shot and killed while stopping a robbery.

"Amie, in this business, everybody's family. You probably spend more time with the guys you work with than you do with your own wife and kids. Every time somebody in blue dies, you die a little bit too. Doesn't matter, patrol or brass, they're all family and it's the same pain when you lose somebody."

And she now felt the pain he'd been speaking of. Felt it very deeply.

"I'm finished," she said to the crime-scene crew, who were standing beside their rapid response van. She'd searched the scene alone but the officers from Queens had videotaped and photographed it and walked the grid at the secondary scenes--the likely entrance and exit routes.

Nodding to the tour doctor and her associates from the M.E.'s office, Sachs said, "Okay, you can get him to the morgue."

The men, in their thick green gloves and jumpsuits, walked inside. Assembling the evidence in the milk crates for transport to Rhyme's lab, Sachs paused.

Someone was watching her.

She'd heard a tink of metal on metal or concrete or glass from up a deserted alleyway. A fast look, and she believed she saw a figure hiding near a deserted factory's loading dock, which had collapsed years ago.

Search carefully, but watch your back. . . .

She remembered the scene at the cemetery, the killer, wearing the swiped police hat, watching her. Felt the same uneasiness she had there. She left the evidence bags and walked down the alley, hand on her pistol. She saw no one.

Paranoia.

"Detective?" one of the techs called.

She kept going. Was there a face behind that filthy window?

"Detective," he persisted.

"I'll be right there." A little irritation in her voice.

The crime-scene tech said, "Sorry, it's a call. From Detective Rhyme."

She always shut her phone off when she got to a scene to avoid distractions.

"Tell him I'll call him right back."

"Detective, he says it's about somebody named Pam. There's been an incident at your town house. You're needed right away."

Chapter Thirty-nine

Amelia Sachs ran inside fast, oblivious to the pain in her knees.