A Textbook Case Read Online Free PDF

we’ll expand it.”
    “Sachs!” Rhyme’s voice burst through her headset. No video camera—just a standard-issue Motorola with an earpiece and stalk mike. It was voice activated. Sachs needed both hands free to drive; she’d hit close to eighty on the way down here from Rhyme’s townhouse. The Torino boasted 405 bhp and with an impressive 447 foot pounds of torque. And Amelia Sachs made use of every bit of those specs.
    “I’m here, Rhyme. With Ron Simpson from the Sixth.” She relayed the information the man had given her.
    “Forty-eight? Hell.”
    They’d hoped the two-block area would include a lot fewer apartment buildings to search than that.
    But at least it was something. And it could be a lot worse. In looking for a way to narrow down the hunt for Unsub 26 or his next victim, Rhyme had come up with an interesting strategy.
    Theorizing that the soil/vegetation and cleaning materials evidence held valuable leads, the question became how to analyze them quickly, given the sheer number of samples?
    Hence, the call to Marko.
    Who had connections in the forensic science department at the police academy. Rhyme had asked the young man to get his professors’ okay to enlist the rookies to help, with Marko supervising. Although there were hundreds of samples, because so many students were helping, each one had no more than five or ten. They were to look for the smallest samples, on the assumption that the largest quantities were materials that the unsub had intentionally flooded the scene with.
    For hours there’d been no discoveries. But an hour ago Marko had called the townhouse.
    “Detective Rhyme, sir?”
    Rhyme didn’t bother to correct him on the appellation. “Go on.”
    “We might’ve found something. We did what you said and prioritized everything according to quantity, then concentrated on the smallest trace. The least common was some vegetation that contained traces of urushiol.”
    “The toxin in poison ivy or sumac,” Rhyme had blurted.
    Sachs had wondered, as she often did, How does he
know
that?
    “Yessir. And it’s in poison oak, too.”
    “No, forget that. You don’t see it much in Manhattan. We’ll stick with ivy and sumac.”
    Marko had added that that vegetation was attached to bits of flower petals. They’d absorbed small amounts of glyphosate—”
    “An herbicide used to
kill
poison ivy and sumac.”
    “Yessir,” Marko said again. “So the perp might’ve spent time in a flower garden that was recently treated for the toxic plants.”
    He added another discovery: “They also found trace fragments of bovine bone dust in the soil attached to the vegetation.”
    “West Village,” Rhyme had pronounced. “Runoff, rains, rats… they carry all sorts of goodies from the meat-packing district, including beef bone dust.”
    He’d had Sellitto start a hunt in city parks in the western part of Greenwich Village, any that had flower gardens. “But only the ones that’d been recently treated for poisonous plants.”
    And the results of that search led here, to where Sachs was now standing, on West Tenth Street. The small park, about three blocks from the meat-packing district, was surrounded by three-, four- and five-story townhouses and brownstones, nearly all of them apartments.
    Rhyme had explained their find to Sellitto, who’d ordered the sweep in the area, telling the patrol officers to pay attention to laundry rooms, kitchens and storerooms, since the other category of evidence in play was domestic cleaning supplies.
    “Long shot,” the detective had muttered.
    “It’s the only shot we’ve got.”
    It was now 10:30 p.m. and the officers had been canvassing for half an hour.
    Many citizens were reluctant to open their doors, even for police, or someone
claiming
to be police. Language was always a barrier and, even once they were admitted, the officers often had to try to survey individual units, since some buildings did not have communal laundry rooms.
    Sachs watched a