Page 130 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

Well, they had the name of one such person who’d seen the victim that day. His son. They’d had dinner at about six—at which time father had reported to son about the encounter with the homeless man.

Or, more accurately, the son hadtoldthe police that’s what his father had said.

What if the man’s son, whose first name was Yannis, had been lying, setting up the homeless man?

Had the son returned later, met his father in the garden and stabbed him? Then taken his wallet and dabbed his slacks with Miracle Sav medicine, a unique and therefore damning bit of evidence? And then planted the evidence in the homeless shelter, turning Michael Xavier into a fall guy for the killing?

Rhyme thought for a moment. “Mel?”

The detective glanced his way from the sterile portion of the lab.

“I need you to do something. It’s a little … odd.”

“Odder than conducting a postmortem on a fly?”

“Only a bit.”

“Detective Tye Kelly?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, this’s Detective Mel Cooper. I’m out of the Queens lab.”

“Okay.”

“I worked with Lincoln Rhyme.”

“What’s the story about that, somebody at OnePP sidelining him? That sucks.”

“Sure does. He did some work on the Gregarios case, right?”

“Yeah, he helped us close it.”

“About that. I was looking over the file, just happened to see it, and I was having some doubts.”

Kelly chuckled. “You’re not sure about something Lincoln Rhyme concluded about a case? You really want to go there?”

They were on speaker and Cooper and Rhyme shared a glance. Cooper, it seemed, was struggling to keep a straight face.

“Hear me out.” He recited what Rhyme had told him about the lack of defensive wounds and the theory that the son had set up the homeless man.

“But we checked out Yannis—that’s the Greek version of John, by the way. I never knew that. Got him on security video nearby, getting out of his car around five thirty, walking toward his father’s house, then walking back around seven and leaving.”

Rhyme was thinking. He scrawled a note and pushed it in front of Cooper, who read and nodded.

“Detective,” he said, “where did he park?”

A pause. Computer keys typed. “It was the Arbor Vale Convenience Mall, about a block away from his dad’s house.”

“His father had a driveway, didn’t he?” Cooper was catching on. Rhyme hadn’t needed to prompt.

“Yeah, he did, but the son said he wanted to stop into a grocery store and pick up something for dinner.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah.”

Rhyme wrote and Cooper delivered the lines.