Page 107 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

“No, he’s at work, but I’ll call him. I’ll do it now.” There was a pause as she made another call on a different phone and broke the news to Kemp. A moment of silence. “I know, I know … but they’re sure. They found evidence and … you know how he’s been …” Hervoice faded as if she didn’t want to be too hard on her cousin in front of his father. She asked about a workshop or someplace else he might be staying. Another pause. “Did he say where? Anything more? … All right, honey. I’ll see you later.” She came back on the line with Sachs and Rhyme. “Martin works in real estate. Late last year Kitt asked him about subletting an artist’s loft or workshop. What neighborhoods would be the most out of the way? He said he didn’t want distractions.”

“Why did he want it?” Rhyme whispered, and Sachs repeated the question.

A moment later, Joanna said, “Kitt didn’t say.”

“What did Martin tell him?” Sachs asked.

“He recommended Long Island City, Spanish Harlem, the South Bronx. But he never heard back from Kitt about what he decided on.”

Sachs said, “Please keep this to yourself for the time being. We don’t want to tip our hand. We want to find him and bring him into custody safely.”

“Thank you for that,” Joanna said.

“Ah, Kitt,” Whittaker whispered. They ended the call.

“So,” Rhyme said, offering an exasperated sigh, “our perp, he’s hiding out somewhere in an area that’s about sixty square miles. What could the problem possibly be?”

The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer is a remarkable merger of two devices essential to forensic scientists.

Lincoln Rhyme had always insisted on having one in the lab, though the units are quite pricey. They’re used to find out what an unknown sample of evidence might be. Chromatography, which was invented in Russia in the early 1900s, has been described as a horse race. An unknown sample is vaporized into a gas, which then beginsa journey through a column filled with a liquid or a gel. Different substances within the sample move at different speeds through the column. The result is a graph of the materials. Each one is then analyzed in the companion device, the mass spectrometer, which identifies them.

In the sterile portion of the lab Mel Cooper and Amelia Sachs were using the GC/MS to unlock the secrets of the evidence she’d collected from Kitt Whittaker’s apartment and the site of the Sandleman Building fire that had nearly been Ron Pulaski’s funeral pyre.

As they waited for the results, Cooper confirmed that the running shoe in Kitt’s closet was the one he’d worn in the first two apartment invasions and the Bechtel Building, replaced now by smooth-soled shoes, which held less trace—as Rhyme had speculated he’d done.

Outside, Lyle Spencer and Rhyme watched. The criminalist hoped some unique geographic trace would adhere to something Sachs had bagged and tagged and this would lead them to the man’s workshop. Even if they could narrow down only a five- or six-block area, the canvassers, armed with pictures of Kitt Whittaker, could then go to work.

Spencer had pulled a shoulder muscle in the climb—that remarkable ascent—and had stripped to a T-shirt as he applied an ice pack Thom had fixed up for him. He was perhaps the most muscular man Rhyme had ever seen. On one biceps was a tattoo of an anchor; on the other were the initialsT.S. in Old English type.

Spencer coughed yet again. The smoke was still embedded in his lungs.

“FromThe Towering Inferno,” Cooper called.

Another popular cultural reference, Rhyme deduced. He wasreferring to the evidence that Spencer had lifted from the floor, just before his descent to the ground.

“We’ve got ammonia, urea nitrogen, phosphate, soluble potash.”

“Ah,” Rhyme said, “fertilizer. I didn’t know what to make of the boron, copper and iron from the Bechtel Building. Now, combined with these, it’s fertilizer.” He asked Spencer, “Your arm okay to write the notations on the board?”

“Sure.” He did so, then stepped back and reviewed the entries. “Bricks in a wall.”

Rhyme’s very expression. It meant small bits of evidentiary discoveries, while not dispositive in themselves, could be combined into a formidable case for the prosecution. The more bricks the better, even if one duplicated another. Redundancy was good. Rhyme knew all too well that defense attorneys always managed to cast doubts on some of the evidence.

What you describe is possible.

No further questions …

Rhyme said, “Any hits on the accelerant he used?”

Cooper ran some of the ash Sachs had collected near the point of ignition. Shortly the results were displayed on one of the high-def monitors.

Rhyme studied the results. “Hell. I know the brand. He could’ve bought it from any one of a hundred stations in the city. Useless.”

There was nothing else from theInfernobuilding. Cooper and Sachs were now looking at trace she had found in Kitt’s apartment.

Reading from the computer analyzer, Cooper said, “Have water. In addition to H2O, there’s sodium, chloride, magnesium, sulfate and calcium.”

Sachs took the sample and peered at it through the other staple of any forensic lab: the compound microscope. Compared to thechromatograph, this instrument was simplicity itself. you looked through lenses and something small became big.