A Textbook Case

usually he was the epitome of detached calm.
    “They found another exit route.” The big detective handed off the box to Marko. “But this should be the end of it.” Then he frowned as he looked around at the hundreds of collection and sample bags lining the walls throughout the first floor of the townhouse. “I don’t have any idea what the fuck’s going on here.”
    But Lincoln Rhyme did.
    “Oh, what’s going on, Lon, is our unsub’s smart. He’s
brilliant
.” Rhyme looked around. “I say ‘he,’ but remember, we keep open minds. It could be a she, too. Never make assumptions.”
    “He, she or it,” Sellitto muttered. “I still don’t get it.”
    The criminalist continued, “You know Locard’s Principle?”
    “Sorta.”
    “How about you, Marko?”
    The young officer blinked and answered, as if reciting. A hundred years ago, he said, the famed French criminalist Edmond Locard developed a theory: In every crime there is an exchange of evidence between the perpetrator and the victim or the scene. The trace elements swapped may be extremely minuscule but they always exist and in most cases can lead to the perp if the investigator has the intelligence and resources to discover them.
    “Close enough. Well, at the scene—” Rhyme’s hand rose unsteadily and he pointed at the pictures Sachs had shot of the victim’s body and that Cooper had printed out “—we know the unsub left something of himself. He
had
to. Locard’s Principle is never wrong. But, you see, he
knew
he’d leave something.”
    Sachs said, “And rather than trying to clean up all traces of himself afterward, he did the opposite. He covered up many clues as to who he is, why he’s doing this, what he has planned next.”
    Brilliant…
    Too much evidence instead of too little.
    Rhyme had to admit he felt a grudging admiration for the unsub. Last year, he had appeared in a documentary on the A&E network, about a woman’s conviction for homicide in Florida. She had been sentenced to life on the basis of evidence that turned out to have been tainted—the crime scene officer had first searched the site of the homicide and then the suspect’s house, accidentally depositing a tiny paint chip from the murder site on the woman’s clothes as he gathered them in her house. This chip placed her at the scene and the jury convicted. A review of forensic evidence collection procedures revealed that officer had been told to use the same gloves in searching both scenes, as a money-saving measure. In a second trial, the woman was found not guilty.
    Rhyme had been on the show to discuss the benefits and the risks of evidence in investigations. He’d commented that all it took was one or two minuscule bits of trace or foreign objects to throw a case off entirely.
    In
this
situation, Unsub 26 had managed to taint the scene with thousands of smokescreens.
    Rhyme glanced at Cooper. “How long before we can get started?”
    “Still be an hour or two just to categorize everything.”
    “Ah.” He wasn’t pleased.
    Sachs asked Sellitto, “What’d you and the canvassing teams find out about the vic?”
    “Okay,” the detective said, pulling out his notebook, “her name was Jane Levine, thirty-one. Assistant marketing manager for a brokerage firm downtown. No criminal history. She’d been going out with her boyfriend for seven, eight months. He was the guy who reported her missing then found the body. I talked to him for a while but then he lost it. I mean, totally.”
    Rhyme noticed Sachs’s abundant lips tighten at this news and he guessed her reaction was how not only the loss but witnessing the horror would affect the man for the rest of his life: that last searing image of his lover dying under such unthinkable circumstances. Rhyme knew that Sachs struggled with the human side of crime—not, as one would think, pushing it away. Rather, she embraced the horror and wanted to keep it raw. She believed it made her a more empathetic and therefore, a better cop.
    Though he took the opposite approach—remaining aloof—this was one of the things he loved her for.
    He turned his attention back to Sellitto, who was continuing his discussion. “Now, I checked. He’s alibi’d out, the boyfriend.” Family and acquaintances are the number-one suspects—and the number-one guilty perps—in homicides. Sellitto continued, “He was in Connecticut with his parents last night. He got back in the city about eight this morning and went to her