A Textbook Case

her head, looking around for something to stop the bleeding.
    Another keening sound of desperation from the victim’s throat. Her head waved more frantically yet.
    Ah, maybe she was suffocating.
    Sachs carefully eased the duct tape off her mouth and set it aside to be collected later for evidence. The victim sucked in air desperately, starting off a jag of coughing. Finally she managed, “We have to leave! Fire!”
    “It’s okay, the pilot light—”
    “Not that. There!” she pointed.
    The pendulum of Sachs’s gaze swung to the left.
    What was that?
    A flicker of unsteady shadow.
    She dropped to her knees. Behind the washing machine was a Starbucks Frappuccino bottle with a rag stuffed in the neck. It, too, was filled with gasoline and the improvised wick was burning. The gasoline flowing down the wall was just starting to pool around it.
    A Molotov cocktail.
    Oh, hell, the pilot light wasn’t the igniter. This bottle was.
    Sachs grabbed the woman by the shoulders. They rushed the door.
    And then, the explosion.

5
    “Sachs!” Lincoln Rhyme was calling into his headset microphone. He was in his parlor lab, surrounded by the thousands of evidence containers. He hadn’t moved much; it was difficult to maneuver.
    He glanced at Thom, who was also on the phone, trying to reach someone at the command post for an update. Neither Sellitto nor Detective Ron Simpson was answering.
    The report from the scene was that there’d been a huge explosion in the basement of the townhouse that Sachs had been searching. The tenants and their pets had been saved—as had the bulk of the building; the fire was mostly out. But Sachs and the intended victim, both of whom were in the laundry room, where the device was set, were unaccounted for.
    Rhyme was furious with her for not waiting for the Bomb Squad.
    “It’s their fucking job,” he muttered, drawing a quizzical glance from his aide, who would, of course, have no idea whom he was fighting with.
    He made a mobile call. But Lon Sellitto didn’t pick up.
    “Goddamn it!”
    Police and fire reports tumbled their way.
    Oh, Jesus Christ…
    And then, at last, “Rhyme…”
    “Sachs! Where are you? What happened?”
    “Wait one—”
    “I don’t want to wait one anything. What the hell happened?” He nodded at Thom, who hung up his own on-hold call.
    “We’re fine. The vic and I got out the back. We just made it to the corridor before it blew.”
    She went on to describe what he’d rigged.
    “I wanted to collect some of the evidence, Rhyme. Anything. This time there wasn’t any contamination. But I didn’t have the chance.”
    “You’re all right?”
    “Yeah, dizzy from the fumes, smoke.”
    “The vic?”
    “Same, dizzy, she’s on oxygen. She breathed ‘em for longer than I did.”
    “She see anything?”
    Sachs explained that, as in the homicide on Twenty-sixth Street, the perp had hit her from behind and duct-taped her, then rigged the bomb.
    “Same thing, Rhyme. It was slow. Like he wanted her to think about the death she was facing. Lon’s interviewing her.”
    “Come on back here right away, Sachs. We just handed our unsub his first defeat and he’s probably not very happy about it. And that young guy, Marko? Is he there?”
    “He came over from the academy. He and I’re going to walk the grid. Not that there’s much to collect.”
    “Well, tell him he did a competent job,” Rhyme said and disconnected.
    Though it sounded like damning with faint praise, in fact, coming from Lincoln Rhyme, it was a stellar compliment.
    # # #
    At midnight, Sachs, Sellitto and Cooper were in the parlor.
    The opposite of the earlier scene, the site of the attempt on Tenth Street had yielded Evidence Lite; Sachs could carry all of it herself in one milk carton.
    Sellitto had interviewed the victim, Simone Randall, at length. Like Jane Levine at the first crime scene, she had no enemies, certainly none who’d do something like this. She worked as an assistant in the entertainment field. She and her boss had just gotten back from a meeting on the West Coast. Simone had no clue why someone would do this to her and hadn’t seen any threats when she’d arrived. She told Sachs about the other people on the street as she’d gotten out of the taxi: two guys making out and a homeless woman. Patrol officers canvassed but didn’t come up with anybody. He also contacted Simone’s boss, who’d dropped her off in front of her apartment, but he hadn’t seen anything