More Twisted

Rhyme said. “Let her know we’ve got a scene to run.”
    “Oh, kinda forgot to mention,” Sellitto said as he chewed. “I called her already. She’s probably at the scene by now.”

    Amelia Sachs never got over the somber curtain that surrounded the site of a homicide.
    She believed this was good, though. To feel the sorrow and the outrage at intentional death pushed her to do the job that much better.
    Standing in front of the three-story town house on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the tall, redheaded detective was aware of this pall now, and perhaps felt it a bit more than she normally would have, knowing that Ron Larkin’s death could affect many, many needy people around the world. What would happen to the foundation now that he was gone?
    “Sachs? Where are we?” Rhyme’s impatient voice cut through her headset. She turned the volume down.
    “Just got here,” she replied, worrying her fingernail.She tended to hurt herself in small, compulsive ways—particularly when she was about to search a scene where a tragedy like this had occurred. She felt the pressure of getting it right. To make sure the killer was identified and collared.
    She was in working clothes: not the dark suits she favored as a detective, but the white hooded overalls worn by crime scene searchers, to make certain that they didn’t contaminate the scene with their own hair, sloughed-off epidermal cells and any of the thousands of bits of trace evidence we constantly carry around with us.
    “I don’t see anything, Sachs. What’s the problem?”
    “There. How’s that?” She clicked a switch on her headset.
    “Ah, perfect. Hmm. Did that used to be a geranium?”
    Sachs was looking at a planter containing a shriveled plant beside the front door. “You’re talking to the wrong girl, Rhyme. I buy ’em, I plant ’em, I kill ’em.”
    “I’m told they need water occasionally.”
    Rhyme was in his town house about a mile and a half away, across Central Park, at the moment but was seeing exactly what Sachs saw, thanks to a high-definition video feed, running from a tiny camera mounted on her headset to the CSU’s rapid response vehicle. From there it continued its wireless journey onward, ending up on a flat-screen monitor two feet in front of the criminalist. They’d worked together for years, with Rhyme generally in his lab or bedroom and Sachs working the crime scenes herself, reporting to him via radio. They’d tried video in the past but the resulting image wasn’t clear enough to behelpful; Rhyme had bullied the NYPD into paying some big bucks for an HD system.
    They’d tested it before but this was the first time it would be used on a case.
    Carrying the basic crime scene equipment, Sachs started forward. She glanced down at the doormat, which contained a lightning bolt above the letters LES, for Larkin Energy Services.
    “His logo?”
    “I’d guess,” she replied. “You read the article about him, Rhyme?”
    “Missed it.”
    “He was one of the most popular bosses in the country.”
    Rhyme grunted. “All it takes is one disgruntled employee. I always wondered about that word. Is a happy employee ‘gruntled’? Where’s the scene?”
    She continued into the town house.
    A uniformed officer stood downstairs. He looked up and nodded.
    “Where’s his wife?” Sachs asked. She wanted to get the chronology of events.
    But the woman, the officer explained, was still at the hospital being treated for a wound. She was expected to be released soon. Two detectives from Major Cases were with her.
    “I’ll want to talk to her, Rhyme.”
    “We’ll have Lon get her over here after she’s released. Where’s the bedroom. I can’t see it.” His tone suggested he was struggling not to be impatient.
    Sachs sometimes thought that his gruffness was ameans to shelter himself from the emotional dangers of police work. Sometimes she believed that it was simply his nature to be gruff.
    “Bedroom?”
    “Upstairs, Detective.” The patrolman nodded.
    She went up two flights of steep, narrow steps.
    The site of the murder was a large bedroom decorated in French provincial style. The furniture and art were undoubtedly expensive but Sachs found that there were so many flourishes and scrolls and draped cloth—in gaudy yellows and greens and golds—that the room set her on edge. A designer’s room, not a homeowner’s room.
    Near the far window was the bed, ironically underneath an old painting of shot birds on a