Page 149 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

80

Alonzo Rodriguez slicked out his handlebar mustache, using the pocket mirror he carried for that purpose.

Fifty-two and somber and a cop blue to his heart, he had collared a respectable number of criminals in his days on the street. His arrest record was good and his arrest-to-conviction record exemplary. All of the perps he collared were guilty but many of them evoked some sympathy within Rodriguez. They were family men and women, they had fallen on hard times, they had children to support and the fact was the majority of them were in the slammer for non-violent drug offenses.

But the one thing that he couldn’t stand and had no patience for was a law enforcer who’d broken the rules.

That offense should bring down the wrath of God.

His phone hummed. “Yes?”

His assistant said in her pleasant alto voice, “Lincoln Rhyme is here, sir. He’s coming up with his aide.”

“Yeah, okay.” Rodriguez supposed he sounded gruff. No, heknewhe sounded gruff. But try though he might, he could never deliver a single syllable that didn’t have rough edges, like a piece of chipped shale.

He opened a bottom desk drawer and took from it a compact Glock 26. As a commander he hadn’t carried a weapon on the job in several years. He kept it loaded, though not chambered. Glocks have light pulls. Now, he racked a round. Careful to keep his finger away from the trigger, he slipped the weapon into the holster, which he clipped to his belt.

Rodriguez rose and walked into the ante office. His assistant, a middle-aged woman with frothy brunette hair sprayed firmly into place, nodded. Her face was troubled. She wouldn’t know what exactly was going on—her boss with aweapon?—but she would sense that the outcome wasn’t going to be good.

In this, she was correct.

Down the hall, then into the elevator for a descent of several floors. He walked into Robbery. He approached a couple of detectives he knew. They were large men, one Anglo, one Black. They exchanged greetings.

“Need to borrow you guys for about fifteen. You free?”

With glances of curiosity toward each other, they said they were. One of them then noted the gun, and his expression made clear he had perhaps never seen a commander with a weapon affixed to his belt. “What’s up, Al?”

“Gotta collar somebody. I just want backup.”

“Well, sure. But only fifteen minutes? Where we going?”

“Not far.”

81

Ihad an office here,” Lincoln Rhyme was telling Thom. “Back in the day.”

They were on the twelfth floor of OnePP, in the hallway beside the elevators, one of which they’d just exited.

The NYPD, like many big governmental organizations, was forever renaming its offspring. Now the Crime Scene Unit was part of the Detective Bureau’s Forensic Investigation Division. When Rhyme, a captain, ran the CSU, it was part of Investigation Resources.

He continued, “I didn’t spend much time here. I was usually in the field or the lab.”

Other differences between then and now: OnePP had been “the Big Building.” The uniforms had been redesigned, and there were more women, more people of color. He inhaled. Ah, but the cleanser was the same. At least that was his olfactory recollection, though he allowed that it could easily be imagination.

He said to Thom, “Brutalist.”

“What?” The aide was frowning.

“The style of the building. Architectural style.”

“That’s not real.”

“No, it is. Concrete, angular, colorless. Ugly. Popular in the sixties and seventies.”

“If I was the architect behind the movement,” Thom said, “I’d hire a PR firm to come up with a better name.”

The style was vastly different from the old headquarters at 240 Centre Street, which had housed the NYPD from 1909 to 1973. A more beautiful building was not to be found in Lower Manhattan. Victorian and rococo, sweeping archways and domes and spires. There was much marble and brass and beveled glass.