The Kill Room

fronted he was a cop, flashing a fake badge, saying he worked with Sachs; he’d know her name by now.
    That conversation between Sachs and Sellitto was Lydia Foster’s own personal Special Task Order.
    She felt a burst of breathtaking anger toward the killer. What he’d done to Lydia—the pain he’d inflicted—had been unnecessary. To get information from a civilian you needed only to threaten. Physical torture was always pointless.
    Unless you enjoyed it.
    Unless you got pleasure in wielding a knife, slicing precisely, skillfully.
    “Why’d you get the call?” she asked.
    “Fucker cut her so much, she bled through the ceiling. Neighbors downstairs saw blood on the wall. Called nine one one.” The detective continued, “The place was ransacked. I don’t know what he was looking for but he went through everything she had. There wasn’t a single drawer untouched. No computer or cell phone either. He took it all.”
    The files on the Moreno interpreting assignment, probably already shredded or burned.
    “CS on the way?”
    “I called a team from Queens. They’ll be here any minute.”
    Sachs had a set of basic crime scene gear in the trunk of the Torino. She returned to the vehicle and began to pull on the powder-blue overalls and booties and shower cap. She’d get started now. Every minute that passed degraded evidence.
    And every minute that passed let the monster who’d done this get farther and farther away.
    * * *
    WALKING THE GRID.
    Garbed like a surgeon, Amelia Sachs was moving through Lydia Foster’s apartment in the classic crime scene search pattern, the grid: one pace at a time from wall to wall, turn, step aside slightly and return. And when that was done you covered the same ground in the same way, only perpendicular to your earlier search.
    This was the most time-consuming method of searching a scene but also the most thorough. This was how Rhyme had searched his scenes and it was the way he insisted those working for him did too.
    The search is perhaps the most important part of a crime scene investigation. Photos and videos and sketches are important. Entrance and exit routes, locations of shell casings, fingerprints, smears of semen, blood spatter. But finding crucial trace is what crime scene work is all about. Merci, M. Locard. When you walk the grid you need to open up your whole body to the place, smelling, listening, touching and, of course, looking. Scanning relentlessly.
    This is what Amelia Sachs now did.
    She didn’t think she was a natural at forensic analysis. She was no scientist. Her mind didn’t make those breathtaking deductions that came so quickly to Rhyme. But one thing that did work to her advantage was her empathy.
    When they’d first started working together, Rhyme had apparently spotted within her a skill he himself did not have: the ability to get into the mind of the perpetrator. When she walked the grid she found she was actually able to mentally become the killer or rapist or kidnapper or thief. This could be a harrowing, exhausting endeavor. But when it worked, the process meant she would think of places in the scene to examine that a typical searcher might not, hiding places, improbable entrance and escape routes, vantage points.
    It was there that she would discover evidence that would otherwise have remained hidden forever.
    The techs from Crime Scene in Queens arrived. But, as before, she was handling the preliminary work alone. You’d think more people made for a better search but that was true only in an expansive area like those involving mass shootings. In a typical scene a single searcher is less distracted—and is also aware that there’s no one else to catch what he misses, so he concentrates that much harder.
    And one truth about crime scene work: You’ve only got one chance to find the critical clue; you can’t go back and try again.
    As she walked through the apartment where Lydia Foster’s corpse sat, head back and bloody, tied to a chair, Sachs felt an urge to speak to Rhyme to tell him what she was seeing and smelling and thinking. And once again, as when walking the grid at Java Hut, the emptiness at being unable to hear his voice chilled her heart. Rhyme was only a thousand miles away but she felt as if he’d ceased to exist.
    Involuntarily she thought again of the surgery scheduled for later in the month. Didn’t want to consider it, but couldn’t help herself.
    What if he didn’t survive?
    Both Sachs and Rhyme lived on the