The Cold Moon

Sachs was interviewing the suspect at the moment, though he wasn’t being very cooperative.
    Sellitto was sitting next to Mel Cooper, the slightly built, ballroom-dancing forensic technician that Rhyme insisted on using. Cooper suffered for his brilliance as a crime scene lab man; Rhyme called him at all hours to run the technical side of his cases. He’d hesitated a bit when Rhyme called him at the lab in Queens that morning, explaining that he’d planned to take his girlfriend and his mother to Florida for the weekend.
    Rhyme’s response was, “All the more incentive to get here as soon as possible, wouldn’t you say?”
    “I’ll be there in a half hour.” He was now at an examination table in the lab, awaiting the evidence. With a latex-gloved hand, he fed some biscuits to Jackson; the dog was curled up at his feet.
    “If there’s any canine hair contamination,” Rhyme grumbled, “I won’t be happy.”
    “He’s pretty cute,” Cooper said, swapping gloves.
    The criminalist grunted. “Cute” was not a word that figured in the Lincoln Rhyme dictionary.
    Sellitto’s phone rang again and he took the call, then disconnected. “The vic at the pier—Coast Guard and our divers haven’t found any bodies yet. Still checking missing persons reports.”
    Just then Crime Scene arrived and Thom helped an officer cart in the evidence from the scenes Sachs had just run.
    About time . . .
    Baker and Cooper lugged in a heavy, plastic-wrapped metal bar.
    The murder weapon in the alleyway killing.
    The CS officer handed over chain-of-custody cards, which Coopersigned. The man said good-bye but Rhyme didn’t acknowledge him. The criminalist was looking at the evidence. This was the moment that he lived for. After the spinal cord accident, his passion—really an addiction—for the sport of going one-on-one with perps continued undiminished, and the evidence from crimes was the field on which this game was played.
    He felt eager anticipation.
    And guilt too.
    Because he wouldn’t be filled with this exhilaration if not for someone else’s loss: the victim on the pier and Theodore Adams, their families and friends. Oh, he felt sympathy for their sorrow, sure. But he was able to wrap up the sense of tragedy and put it somewhere. Some people called him cold, insensitive, and he supposed he was. But those who excel in a field do so because a number of disparate traits happen to come together within them. And Rhyme’s sharp mind and relentless drive and impatience happened to coincide with the emotional distance that is a necessary attribute of the best criminalists.
    He was squinting, gazing at the boxes, when Ron Pulaski arrived. Rhyme had first met him when the young man had been on the force only a short time. Although that was a year earlier—and Pulaski was a family man with two children—Rhyme couldn’t stop thinking of him as the “rookie.” Some nicknames you just can’t shake.
    Rhyme announced, “I know Amelia has somebody in custody but in case it isn’t the perp, I don’t want to lose time.” He turned to Pulaski. “Give me the lay of the land. First scene, the pier.”
    “All right,” he began uneasily. “The pier is located approximately at Twenty-second Street in the Hudson River. It extends into the river fifty-two feet at a height of eighteen feet above the surface of the water. The murder—”
    “So they’ve recovered the body?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Then you meant apparent murder?”
    “Right. Yessir. The apparent murder occurred at the far end of the pier, that is, the west end, sometime between six last night and six this morning. The dock was closed then.”
    There was very little evidence: just the fingernail, probably a man’s, the blood, which Mel Cooper tested and found to be human and type AB positive, which meant that both A and B antigens—proteins—were present in the victim’s plasma, and neither anti-A nor anti-B antigens were. In additiona separate protein, Rh, was present. The combination of AB antigens and Rh positive made the victim’s the third-rarest blood type, accounting for about 3.5 percent of the population. Further tests confirmed that the victim was a male.
    In addition, they concluded that he was probably older and had coronary problems since he was taking an anticoagulant—a blood thinner. There were no traces of other drugs or indications of infection or disease in the blood.
    There were no fingerprints, trace or footprints at