He started forward.
The bodyguards were still looking away.
Opening the attache case, he took out the Rand McNally and the heavy gun. Hiding the weapon inside the colorful map, he strolled casually toward the car. Grady's bodyguards were now standing together on the sidewalk, with their backs to him. One reached down to open the door for the prosecutor.
Twenty feet away...
Reverend Swensen thought to Grady, God have mercy on yourAnd then the angel's millstone landed squarely on his shoulders.
"On the ground, on the ground, now, now now now!"
A half-dozen men and women, a hundred demons, grabbed Reverend Swensen's arms and flung him hard to the sidewalk. "Don't move don't move don't move don't move!"
One grabbed the gun, one snatched away the briefcase, one pressed the reverend's neck down into the sidewalk like the weight of the city's sin. His
face scraped against the concrete and pain shot through his wrists and shoulder sockets as handcuffs were ratcheted on him and his pockets turned inside out.
Crushed to the concrete Reverend Swensen saw Grady's car door open and three policemen leap out, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests. "Stay down, head down down down!"
Jesus our Lord in Heaven....
He watched a man's feet walk closer to him. In contrast to the fierceness
of the other officers this man was quite polite. In a southern-accented voice he said, "Now, sir, we're going to roll you over and then I'm going to read you your rights. And you let me know if you understand' em."
Several cops turned him over and pulled him to his feet. The reverend started in shock.
The man speaking was the one in the dark sportscoat he'd thought was
following him in Washington Square. Next to him was the blond man in glasses who'd apparently taken over the surveillance. The third, the swarthy man who'd asked about the time the concert began, stood nearby.
"Sir, my name's Detective Bell. And I'm going to read those rights now. You ready? Good. Here we go."
Bell looked over the contents of Swensen's attache case.
Extra ammunition for the H K pistol. A yellow pad inscribed with what looked to be a very bad sermon scrawled on it. A guidebook, New York on Fifty Dollars a Day. There was also a beat-up Gideon Bible stamped with the name and address: THE ADELPHI HOTEL, 232 BOWERY, NEW YORK, NEW YORK.
Hmmm, Bell thought wryly, looks like we can add a count of Bible larceny to the charges.
He found nothing, though, that suggested a direct connection between this attempt on Grady's life and Andrew Constable. Discouraged, he handed off the evidence to be logged in and called Rhyme to tell him that the impromptu operation by the Saving Asses team had been successful.
Back at Rhyme's an hour earlier the criminalist had continued to pore over the revised crime scene report while Mel Cooper had researched the fibers the CS team had found in Grady's office. Finally Rhyme had made some troubling deductions. The analysis of the footprints in the office revealed that the intruder had stood for some minutes in one spot-the right
front comer of the secretary's desk. The inventory of the office showed only one item in this portion of the desk: the woman's daily calendar. And the only entry for this weekend was Chrissy Grady's recital at the Neighborhood School.
Which meant that the person who broke in undoubtedly noted this. As for the attacker himself, Rhyme had ventured that he might be disguised as a minister or priest. With the help of an FBI database Cooper managed to trace the black fibers and dye to a cloth manufacturer in Minnesota, which-Cooper and Rhyme learned from its website-specialized in black gabardine for clerical-clothing makers. Rhyme also noted that several of the white fibers CS had found were polyester bonded with starched cotton, which suggested a white lightweight shirt with a stiff clerical collar attached.
The single red satin fiber was the sort that could've come from a ribbon bookmark in an old book, as could the gold leaf. A Bible, for instance. Rhyme had run a case years ago in which a smuggler had hidden drugs in a hollowed-out Bible; that CS search team had found similar trace in the man's office.
Bell had ordered Grady and his family not to attend their daughter's recital. In their place a team of ESU troopers would drive to the school in Grady's city car. Teams stationed themselves north of the school on Fifth Avenue, on cross streets west at Sixth Avenue and east at University Place and south in Washington Square Park.
Sure enough, Bell, who'd taken the park, had spotted a minister walking nervously toward the school. Bell had started to tail him but was spotted so he'd peeled off. Another SWAT officer picked up and tracked him to the school. A third detective from Bell's SWAT group approached and asked about the concert, checking visually for signs of weapons, but not finding any obvious ones-and hence having no probable cause to detain and search him.
But the suspect remained under close surveillance and as soon as he was seen pulling the gun from his attache case and starting for the decoys he was taken down.
Expecting a fake priest, they'd been surprised to find that they'd caught a real one, which the contents of Swensen's wallet confirmed-despite the contrary testimony of the embarrassingly bad sermon. Bell nodded at the H K automatic. "Pretty big gun for a priest," he said.
Im a minister."
"Meant to say." "Ordained."
"Good for you. Now I'm wondering: I read you those rights. You want to waive your right to remain silent? Tell you, sir, you bow up to what you just did and things'll go a lot easier for you. Tell us who wanted you to kill Mr. Grady."
"God."
"Hmm," Bell said. "Okay. How 'bout anybody else?"
"That's all I'm saying to you or to anybody. That's my answer. God." 'Well, all right, let's getcha downtown now and see if He's inclined to throw bail for you."
Chapter Twenty-four
They call that music?
A thud of a drum and then the raw sound of a brass instrument rehearsing short passages penetrated Rhyme's parlor. It was coming from the Cirque Fantastique, across the street in the park. The notes were jarring and the tone gaudy and brash. He tried to ignore it and returned to his phone conversation with Charles Grady, who was thanking him for his efforts in collaring the minister who'd come to town to kill him.
Bell had just interrogated Constable, down at the Detention Center. The prisoner said he knew Swensen but had drummed him out of the Patriot Assembly over a year ago because of an "unhealthy interest" in the daughters of some parishioners. Constable had had nothing to do with the man after that and he'd fallen in with some backwoods militiamen, according to local gossip. The prisoner adamantly denied that he knew anything about the attempted killing.
Still, Grady had arranged to have delivered to Rhyme a box of evidence from the crime scene at the Neighborhood School and one from the Reverend Swensen's hotel room. Rhyme had looked through it quickly but found no obvious connection to Constable. He explained this to Grady and added, 'We need to get it to some forensic people upstate, in-what's the town?"
"Canton Falls."
"They can do some soil or trace comparisons. There might be something
linking Swensen to Constable but I don't have any samples from up there." "Thanks for checking, Lincoln. I'll have somebody get it up there
ASAP."
"If you want me to write an expert's opinion on the results I'd be happy to," the criminalist said then had to repeat the offer; the last half was drowned out by a particularly raucous horn solo.
Hell, yes, I could write better music than that, he thought.
Thorn called time-out and took Rhyme's blood pressure. He found the
results high. "I don't like it," he said. 'Well, for the record, I don't like a lot of things," Rhyme responded petulantly, frustrated with their slow progress with the case: a tech at the FBI lab in D.C. had called and said that it would be morning before they'd have any report on the bits of metal found in the Conjurer's bag. Bedding and Saul had called more than fifty hotels in Manhattan, but had found none that used APC key cards that matched the one found in the Conjurer's running jacket. Sellitto had also called the relief watch outside the Cirque Fantastique-fresh officers had replaced the two who'd been there since that morning-and they'd reported nothing suspicious.
And, most troubling of all, there'd been no luck in finding Larry Burke, the missing patrol officer who'd collared the Conjurer near the crafts fair. Dozens of officers were searching the West Side but had turned up no witnesses or evidence as to where he might be. One encouraging note, though: his body wasn't in the stolen Mazda. The car hadn't yet been raised but a diver who'd braved the currents reported that there were no bodies inside the car itself or the trunk.
'Where's the food?" Sellitto asked, looking out the window. Sachs and Kara had gone up the street to pick up some takeout from a nearby Cuban restaurant (the young illusionist was less excited about dinner than the prospect of her first Cuban coffee, which Thorn described as "one-half espresso, one-half condensed milk, and one-half sugar," the concept of which, despite the impossible proportions, had instantly intrigued her).
The bulky detective turned to Rhyme and Thorn and asked, "You ever
have those Cubano sandwiches? They're the best." But neither the food nor the case meant anything to the aide. "Time
for bed." "It's nine thirty-eight," Rhyme pointed out. "Practically afternoon. So it's
not. Time. For. Bed." He managed to make his singsong voice sound both
juvenile and threatening at the same time. 'We have a fucking killer on the loose who keeps changing his mind about how often he wants to kill people. Every four hours, every two hours." A glance at the clock. "And he might just now be perpetrating his nine thirty-eight killing. I appreciate that you don't like it. But I have work to do."
"No, you don't. If you don't want to call it a night, all right. But we're going upstairs to take care of some things and then you're taking a nap for a couple of hours."
"Ha. You're just hoping I'll fall asleep till morning. Well, I won't. I'll stay
awake all night." The aide rolled his eyes. He announced in a firm voice, "Lincoln'll be
upstairs for a few hours."
"How'd you like to be out of work," Rhyme snapped.
"How'd you like to be in a coma?" Thorn shot back.
"This is fucking crip abuse," he muttered. But he was giving in. He un
derstood the danger. When a quad sits too long in one position or is constricted in the extremities or, as Rhyme loved to put it so indelicately in front of strangers, needs to piss or shit and hasn't for a while-there was a risk of autonomic dysreflexia, a soaring of the blood pressure that could result in a stroke, leading to more paralysis or death. Dysreflexia's rare but it'll send you to the hospital, or a grave, pretty damn fast, and so Rhyme acquiesced to a trip upstairs for the personal business and then a rest. It was moments like this-disruptions of "normal" life-that infuriated him most about his disability. Infuriated and, though he refused to let on, deeply depressed him.
In the bedroom upstairs Thorn took care of the necessary bodily details.
"Okay. Two hours' rest. Get some sleep."
"One hour," Rhyme grumbled.
The aide was going to argue but then he glanced at Rhyme's face and, while he probably saw anger and don't-fuck-with-me eyes, which wouldn't have affected him one bit, he observed too the criminalist's heartfelt concern for the next victims on the Conjurer's list. Thorn conceded, "One hour. If you sleep."
"An hour it is," Rhyme said. Then added wryly, "And I'll have the sweet
est of dreams.... A drink would help, you know." The aide tugged at the subtle purple tie-a gesture of weakening that Rhyme seized on like a shark lapping a molecule of blood. "Just one," the criminalist said.
"All right." He poured a little ancient Macallan into one of Rhyme's
tumblers and arranged the straw next to his mouth. The criminalist sipped long. "Ah, heaven..." Then he glanced at the
empty glass. "Someday I'll teach you how to pour a real drink."
'Tll be back in an hour," Thorn said.
"Command, alarm clock," Rhyme said sternly. On the flat-screen moni
tor a clock face appeared and he orally set the alarm to sound in one hour.
"I would've gotten you up," the aide said.
"Ah, well, just in case you were occupied and somehow forgot," Rhyme
said coyly, "now I'll be sure to be awake, won't I?" The aide left, closing the door behind him, and Rhyme's eyes slipped to the window, where the peregrine falcons perched, lording over the city, their heads turning in that odd way of theirs-both jerky and elegant at the same time. Then one-the female, the better hunter-glanced quickly at him, blinking her narrow slits of eyes, as if she'd just sensed his gaze. A cock of her head. Then she returned to her examination of the hubbub of the circus in Central Park.
