The Deliveryman: A Lincoln Rhyme Short Story

She responded, “Victim was thirty-eight-year-old Eduardo ‘Echi’ Rinaldo, worked as a deliveryman. Had his own company, legit. But he also did a little street dealing — grass and coke mostly — and transported whatever the crews needed moved, which was a little less than legit: stolen merch, drugs, even undocumenteds.”

“Bodies?”

“That’s right. Well, live ones.” She shrugged. “He was freelance, worked for anybody who paid, but mostly the Latino crews. GT had next to nothing on him.”

The Organized Crime Division’s Gang Taskforce, operating out of NYPD headquarters at One Police Plaza, was unequaled in tracking crews in the metro area. If GT didn’t have info on the late Echi he was insignificant indeed.

“So gangs’ve taken to outsourcing,” he mused.

“Why pay benefits and retirement plans, you can avoid it?” She smiled and continued, “He was slashed to death in an alley and I mean slashed. Don’t have the weapon but I’d say serrated blade. Jugular, wrists. He tried to crawl to the street but didn’t get very far. Bled out, ME says, in two, three minutes.”

The perp must’ve known what he was doing. The vast majority of stab wounds are superficial, and quick death from a sharpened edge requires attention to important veins and arteries.

Rhyme’s eyes had turned to the milk crate she’d brought in. “That’s all you collected?”

The doorbell sounded and Thom went to answer it. Rhyme noticed Sachs give a faint — and, it seemed to him, wry — laugh.

He saw why a moment later. Two ECTs walked into the lab wheeling hand trucks on which were bungeed a dozen milk crates similar to the one Sachs had just carried in by herself. Each crate was filled to overflowing.

“Ask and ye shall receive,” Sachs said.

“That’s from one scene?” Rhyme asked.

“You wanted impossible.”

“Not that impossible.”

She’d collected, by his count, perhaps five hundred items of evidence from the Rinaldo killing. As every criminalist knew, too much evidence was as troublesome as not enough.

She said, “We’ve got cigarette butts, roach clips, food wrappers, coffee cups, a kid’s toy, beer cans, broken bottles, condoms, scraps of paper, receipts. It was one messy alley.”

“Jesus.”

Sachs greeted the evidence collection techs — both women, Latina and Anglo — and directed them to place what they’d brought on examination tables. The darker-skinned woman cast a worshipful gaze toward Rhyme. Not many evidence collection techs — entry level at CSU — got a glimpse of the legendary criminalist.

Rhyme gave a neutral tip of the head; he had as little need for reverence as he did for sentiment, probably less.

Sachs, however, thanked them and referred to some social get-together with one or both or someone else that was in the works and they left.

Her phone hummed and she took a call, stepped aside to speak for a moment. Her face was grim. Rhyme deduced, though he wasn’t certain, that the call was personal. Her mother had been having serious health issues lately — cardiac surgery loomed — and Sachs, both his professional and romantic partner, had been preoccupied with the woman’s condition lately.

She disconnected. He glanced at her and received a noncommittal shake of the head in response. Meaning: Later. Now, the case. Let’s move on.

He said to her, “Rinaldo? The details?”

“He was driving a panel truck, a sixteen footer. Six p.m. he parked outside a bodega on West Three-one, for cigarettes. When he came out there was some altercation. Not sure what, exactly. Argument. Shouting. The witness couldn’t hear the words.”

“Witness.” This didn’t encourage Rhyme much. He believed in the cold science of evidence and deeply distrusted accounts of those present at a crime, whether participants or observers.

“His son. Eight years old. He was in the truck, waiting.”

“So he saw it happen.” Rhyme could reluctantly accept that an eyewitness to the actual incident might make some contributions to investigators — if they remained suitably skeptical.

But Sachs said, “No. The killing happened in the back of an alley beside the store. The boy never got out of the cab of the truck. He says he saw a form — a man, he thinks, in a hat, but no other ID — run from the alley into the street, behind the truck. He flagged a cab. The boy said it was a regular car that pulled over. So, a gypsy.”

“Any leads?”

“Not so far. Some detectives’re canvassing but I don’t hope for much more.”

Gypsy, or unlicensed, taxi companies kept few records and the owners and drivers were reluctant to assist the police, since they operated just below the surface of the law. “But the boy — his name is Javier — thinks he heard the perp tell the driver ‘the Village.’ He didn’t hear anything else. Then the car took off.”

Greenwich Village embraced many blocks and hundreds of acres. Without more to narrow down his destination, the killer might have said “Connecticut.” Or “New England.”

“Funny, though,” Sachs said, “with Rinaldo’s job — deliveryman for the crews? What was the perp’s connection with the Village?”