Page 17 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. It was she who said, “‘Probably’?”

“Here’s part of the ‘odd.’” Sellitto took a long drink of coffee, which apparently authorized him to chew down another cookie. “Might have touched her, but she couldn’t tell. Basically what he does is he moves things around in her apartment. Personal things, clothes, hygiene stuff, sits beside the bed and eats one of these.” He pointed at the pastry.

“Jesus,” Thom said.

“I’ll say. Kid was petrified. Thought he might still be in the apartment after she woke up.”

“Why?”

“That’s the other part of ‘odd.’ The door was locked, both the knob and two deadbolts, so she figured he had to be there. Only he wasn’t.”

“So,” Sachs said. “He had a key.”

“No, he didn’t. She’s sure of that. He picked the locks to get in. And used his tools to lock up after he left. What kind of burglar does that?”

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Sachs asked, “And she’s positive there’s no spare key?”

“She was going to give a set to her mother but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. A responding said she admitted she’d been drinking the night before. But nothing more than on a typical gals’ night out. Can I say ‘gal’?”

“Lon,” Rhyme said impatiently.

“Anyway, her word, not mine. Then they wondered if she’d moved things herself—you know, staging it to blame an ex or the landlord. But she didn’t point any fingers, so that theory’s shot. And anyway, they said she was really freaked. Genuinely. She thought it might be a ghost but decided that, quote, ‘wasn’t real likely.’”

Sachs sat down in front of a computer and went online. After she did some keyboarding, a video began to play. It depicted an attractive woman, blond, in a low-cut sweater, sitting at her kitchen table in a bright and neatly ordered dwelling—it smacked of your average New York City apartment. She was smiling broadly at the camera. She was holding up some makeup accessory with affection.

Influencing, apparently.

Sachs froze the image and studied the woman closely. “Annabelle,” she whispered.

This was her way, Rhyme understood. Sachs wanted to know the victims in the cases she was running, wanted to know their histories, their loves, their fears, as many details of their lives as she could absorb—and wanted to know too, in the case of murder, what the last few minutes of those lives had entailed. This bonding with the victim, she believed, made her a better investigator, and the process started with knowing the name.

Though Rhyme was no less sympathetic to the victims’ fates than Sachs, such details did not interest, much less motivate, him.

There were people cops and there were science cops, and the two of them were respective examples of each. This created occasional tension. But, on the whole, it could be argued that this very contrast was what made them click so well.

“So, breaking and entering,” Rhyme said, eyes off the computer and on the ceiling. “Moving things around. A chance for prints, DNA, footprints. Anything else?”

“Well, stole a knife and a pair of panties.”

“Hm.” The suggestion of sex and violence was always troubling, even if he had not, at this point, acted on it.

“But the strangest part was he left a message. It was on a torn-out newspaper page. Left it in her underwear drawer. He used her lipstick to write on it. ‘Reckoning,’ and it was signed ‘the Locksmith.’”

“What was the newspaper?” Sachs asked.

“Daily Herald,” Sellitto said. “From February of this year.”

Rhyme didn’t know it. He paid scant attention to news unless a story shed light on a case he was investigating or contained information that might be useful in the future. He had little patience for most media.

The lieutenant continued, “A rag. Tabloid scandal sheet. The company that publishes it owns a TV station—same thing—and some shock-jock radio shows.”

“Shock jock.” Rhyme had not heard the term but when he realized “disc jockey,” he got it.

He said thoughtfully, “Okay, Lon. She’s upset. Who wouldn’t be? She caught a stalker, maybe. Or it was random. But there was no assault.”

Assault is awareness of physical contact of any kind. She was asleep.