More Twisted

neck but he wasn’t taking chances. His gun was aimed directly toward the agent.
    “Lower the weapon and identify yourself!”
    “I’m State Department. Security.”
    “Lower the weapon and show me.”
    “Jesus Christ,” Kitty snapped. “She’s guarding me. There’s a man after us.”
    Norma pointed her gun toward the ground and withher other hand held out her ID. He read it and nodded. “You should’ve called it in.”
    “It just happened. Look, over there. Your two o’clock. White male, big guy. Drove us off the street. Probably armed.”
    “What’s he after?”
    “She’s a homicide witness.”
    Then the officer frowned. “Is that him?” He was gazing at Norma’s car. Kitty saw a man crouching behind it.
    “Yeah,” Norma said. Then to Kitty, “Get down!” And shoved her onto the asphalt walkway they were crouching on. Kitty was furious. She should’ve insisted they stay at the town house.
    “You, wait!” the officer called, starting forward. “Police. Don’t move!”
    But by then the attacker had realized that he was outnumbered. He raced back to his Jeep. He backed the vehicle over the curb and sped up Madison, leaving a trail of blue smoke in his wake.

    Via the high-def video system, Lincoln Rhyme, in his lab, was watching Kitty Larkin talk to Sellitto and Sachs inside the black Town Car. The widow was giving them an account of the incident in a shaky voice.
    Rhyme was thinking: This system is quite an invention. It was as if the people were right there in front of him.
    “I couldn’t really say what happened,” Kitty said. “It was all so fast. I didn’t even see him clearly.”
    Norma Sedgwick gave a similar account of the incident. They differed in the color of the Jeep’s shade of green,in the height of the assailant, in the color of his shirt.
    Witnesses . . . Rhyme didn’t have much faith in them. Even honest ones get confused. They miss things. They misinterpret what they do see.
    He was impatient. “Sachs?”
    He saw the screen jump a little as she heard his voice.
    “Excuse me,” she said to Kitty and Sellitto. The scene swiveled as she climbed out of the car and walked away.
    “What, Rhyme?”
    “We don’t need to worry about what they saw or didn’t see. I want the scene searched. Every inch.”
    “Okay, Rhyme. I’ll get to work.”
    Sachs walked the grid—Rhyme’s term for the most comprehensive, some would say compulsive, way of searching a crime scene—with her usual diligence. A lab tech from Queens processed the evidence in the back of the Crime Scene’s rapid response vehicle. But the only things relating to the Larkin killing were two more of the coir fibers like the one on the balcony. One of the fibers was pressed into a small black fleck, which might’ve come from an old leather-bound book; Rhyme remembered similar evidence from a case some years ago.
    “Nothing else?” he asked, irritated.
    “Nope.”
    Rhyme sighed.
    There is a well-known rule in forensics called Locard’s Principle. The Frenchman Edmond Locard, one of the fathers of forensic science, came up with a rule that posited an inevitable exchange of trace evidence (he spoke of “dust”) between the perpetrator and either the crime scene or the victim.
    Rhyme believed in Locard’s Principle; in fact, it was the underlying force that drove him to relentlessly push those who worked for him—and to push himself too. If that connection, however fragile, can be established, then the perp might be found, crimes solved and future tragedies prevented.
    But making that link assumes the investigator can locate, identify and grasp the implications of that trace evidence. In the case of the Larkin homicide Rhyme wasn’t sure that he could. Circumstance might play a role in this—the environment, third parties, fate. Then too the killer might simply be too smart and diligent. Too pro -fessional, as Fred Dellray had observed.
    Sachs took every defeat personally. “Sorry, Rhyme. I know it’s important.”
    He said something dismissive. Not to worry, we’ll keep looking over things in the lab here, maybe the autopsy will reveal something helpful . . . .
    But he supposed his reassurance rang false to her.
    It certainly did to him.

    “Are you all right?” Norma asked.
    “Knees hurt. When I went down on the ground.”
    “Sorry about that,” the agent said, looking over Kitty from the rearview mirror. Norma had high cheekbones and exotic Egyptian eyes.
    “Don’t be silly.