The Steel Kiss (Lincoln Rhyme 12)

Alicia opened her bag, pulled on blue latex gloves and stepped forward fast, ripping the controller from Rhyme's chair. She walked to the pocket doors to the parlor and closed and locked them.

Rummaging through her bag, she extracted a razor knife--which would, of course, be Vernon's. It was in a plastic tube and she popped the plastic top off and shook out the tool. Alicia turned the blade Rhyme's way and stepped closer to the wheelchair.

CHAPTER 53

I know about you, Alicia. We made the connection between Griffith's victims and the U.S. Auto case. I saw your picture in one of the stories."

This gave her pause. She stopped and cocked her head, clearly considering these implications.

He continued, "I figured right away that you and Griffith faked the assault in your apartment. You made sure the super could hear your fight and come and supposedly rescue you. The minute I saw you outside I hit a special phone code. A speed dial for emergencies."

Alicia looked past Rhyme to the computer. She typed until she found the call log. No outgoings in the past ten minutes and the most recent callee had not been 911 or NYPD Dispatch but Whitmore's law firm. She redialed it and they heard through the speaker the matter-of-fact receptionist say, "Law office." Alicia hung up.

Her face relaxed, as she would be concluding that Rhyme had just now made the connection and that no one else knew the truth. She looked around the room. Rhyme noted she wore her age well. Pale eyes, freckles. Few wrinkles. Her hair, blond with gray streaks, was voluminous and rich. The scars were prominent but did not diminish her attractiveness. Vernon would be putty in her hands.

"Where's the evidence you collected at Vernon's apartment?"

She'd be afraid he'd collected some articles about the U.S. Auto case or that he had some other evidence of what the real motive was, which could ultimately lead to her.

"I tell you, you'll kill us."

A wrinkle of brow. "Of course. But I give you my word I'll leave everyone else alive. Your friend Amelia--Vernon was pretty obsessed with her. I was almost jealous. She'll be fine, Amelia. And her mother. And the others on your team. But you're dead. Obviously. Both of you."

"What you're asking isn't that easy. Some of the evidence's in processing in Qu

eens, the main Crime Scene Unit. And--"

"My other option is to burn this place down. But that'll attract a lot of attention and I might miss some things. Just tell me."

Rhyme was silent.

Alicia looked around the parlor: at the file cabinets, boxes of paper and plastic bags, shelves, instruments. She walked to a cabinet, opened it and peered in. Closed the drawer. Tried another. Then she perused the broad, white examination tables, and flipped through the boxes that contained plastic and paper bags of the evidence. She unfurled a garbage bag, the deep green of a body bag from the coroner, and tossed some notebooks and clippings inside.

She continued collecting evidence that seemed likely to have references to her and the litigation and then extracted a paper bag from her purse and began depositing the contents carefully, just as he'd thought: hairs, Griffith's, of course. A scrap of paper; it undoubtedly held his friction ridge prints. And then--well, she'd certainly thought this out carefully--one of Vernon's shoes. She didn't leave it; she left several impressions on the floor near Rhyme's chair.

Rhyme said, "It's terrible what happened to you and your husband. But none of this will fix that."

She snapped, "The cost-benefit analysis. I think of it as the who's-it-cheaper-to-screw analysis." When she bent forward at one point to press the shoe to the floor, her blouse fell away and he could see clearly the leathery and discolored scar on her chest.

"You won your case, the article said."

Rhyme noted, in a detached state, that several of the evidence bags had come open when she'd tossed them into the garbage bag. Even facing death, Lincoln Rhyme was riled by the contamination.

"I didn't win. I settled. And I settled before the memo came to light. Michael, my husband, had been drinking before the accident happened. That had nothing to do with the fuel injector hose splitting. But the alcohol would've worked against us at trial. And there was evidence that he made my injuries worse--he broke my arm pulling me from the burning car before he died. And my lawyer said they'd spin that... and the drinking. The jury might give us nothing. So I took a settlement.

"But it's never been about money. It was about two companies who murdered my husband and scarred me forever and never came to justice. Nobody was ever indicted. The company paid out a lot of money to plaintiffs but the executives went home to see their families that night. My husband didn't. Other husbands and wives and children didn't either."

"Greg Frommer quit the company and went on to do volunteer work," Rhyme said. "He felt guilty about what happened with the fuel injectors."

The sentence tripped leadenly off his tongue and deserved the Oh-please look that Alicia gave him.

"The People's Guardian. That was all nonsense, right?"

Alicia nodded. "Vernon isn't the most attractive man in the world. It wasn't hard to get him to do what I wanted. I needed people responsible for Michael's death to die the way he and the others had. Because of products. Because of greed. Vernon was happy to go along and we decided to turn it into a political issue as a cover. To keep people from thinking about U.S. Auto and maybe making a connection to me."

"Why The Steel Kiss, the name for his manifesto?"

"He came up with that. Thinking of his tools, saws and knives and chisels, I think."