The Deliveryman: A Lincoln Rhyme Short Story

Jeffery Deaver The Deliveryman: A Lincoln Rhyme Short Story

I

Thursday, 8:30 p.m.

What’s the story, Sachs? How was the scene? Complicated? Difficult? Impossible?”

Lincoln Rhyme turned his motorized wheelchair from his computer, where he’d been reading an email, toward the arched doorway of his parlor.

Amelia Sachs was walking into his parlor-cum-laboratory on Central Park West. She deposited on a nearby evidence table the large gray milk crate she was lugging, then pulled off her black 511 tactical jacket. She was clothed in blue jeans and a T-shirt — off-white today — that were typical of what she wore beneath the Tyvek overalls when she walked the grid at a crime scene. Her pretty face, her former fashion model face, eased into a smile. “The scene? Challenging, let’s say. You’re in a good mood.”

“He is. It’s pretty disorienting.” This came from Rhyme’s aide just entering the room behind Sachs. Thom Reston, a slim young man, was impeccably dressed in dark gray Italian slacks and a solid taupe shirt. Rhyme was a quadriplegic — his spine damaged at the C4 level — and largely paralyzed from the neck down. Accordingly, and not surprisingly, he was given to swings of temperament that could be quite dramatic. (Of course, even before the accident that rendered him disabled, as head of the NYPD crime scene operation, he’d been dour to insufferable quite often, he’d been fast to admit.) Thom was in a good position to voice an opinion on the matter; after years of caregiving, he knew his charge’s emotional gravity quite well, the way one half of a long-married couple knows the other’s by instinct.

“My moods are hardly relevant. Why would they be?” His eyes were on the crate — containing evidence from the complicated, difficult and, if not impossible, then challenging homicide scene Sachs had just run in Manhattan.

Sachs seemed amused by the half-hearted denial. She asked, “The Baxter case?”

“If I were in a good mood — though again, irrelevant — that might be a source.”

The Baxter prosecution had been a particularly tough one, unique for Rhyme; he could not recall handling another purely white collar criminal case in his years as an NYPD detective or, more recently, a forensic consultant. Baxter, an Upper Eastsider/Long Islander, had been charged with scamming millions from other Upper Eastsider/Long Islanders (true, the vics came from all over the New York metro area but were all of the same pedigree). Most could probably afford to lose the money but, wherever your socialist or income inequality sympathies lay, one cannot take what belongs to others. The former stockbroker and bond trader devised exceedingly clever financial scams that had hummed away, undetected, for several years. An assistant DA had discovered the schemes, though, and she’d asked Rhyme to assist on the evidentiary side of the case. He’d had to bring all his forensic skills to the game to identify cash trails, drop sites, remote locations from which pay phone and other landline calls were made, meetings in restaurants and bars and state parks, physical presence on private jets, relevant documents and objets d’art purchased with stolen cash.

Rhyme had managed to pull together enough evidence for a conviction on wire fraud and larceny and other financial offenses but, not content with those crimes alone, he kept digging… and found that Baxter was more of a threat than it seemed at first glance. Rhyme had found evidence that he’d participated in at least one shooting and discovered an illegal pistol hidden in a self-storage unit. The detectives and DA couldn’t find any physical victims; it was speculated that he’d simply intimidated some poor mark with a well-placed .45 shot or two. The absence of a bullet-riddled victim, though, was irrelevant; possessing a handgun without proper license was a serious felony. The DA added the charge and, just today, the jury returned a guilty-on-all-counts verdict.

Lincoln Rhyme lived for the — okay—challenge of forensic work and once his contribution to a case was finished, he grew uninterested. Today, however, the ADA had just sent Rhyme an email in which she reported the verdict while adding a footnote: One of the victims scammed by Baxter out of her nest egg had tearfully thanked the prosecutor and “anyone else who helped in the trial.” The guilty verdict meant she would have a much easier path in suing Baxter to recoup some of the stolen funds. She’d be able to send her grandchildren to college, after all.

Rhyme regarded sentiment as perhaps the least useful of emotions, yet he was pleased at his contribution to People v. Baxter. Hence the, yes, good mood.

But Baxter was going into the system, Rhyme’s role was over and so: Time to get back to work. He inquired once more about the homicide scene Sachs had just run in Manhattan.