Page 125 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

They paused and listened at the door. She nodded to an S&Sofficer, Search and Surveillance. The man tried to find a gap between the door and the threshold, but there wasn’t enough space through which to fish a fiber optic camera stalk. He shook his head.

Nodding, Sachs stepped close and examined the door. She thought of the subtle touch of the Locksmith. The fine tools, the delicate manipulation of the intricate mechanism inside. Sachs put an electronic stethoscope against the door and listened.

Good enough for her.

She stepped back and whispered, “Breaching team. Ready?”

You never shoot the lock out of a door, as actors do on TV and in the movies.

Amelia Sachs knew that doing so was useless at best, disastrous at worst, given that bullets ricochet or fragment on deadbolts and lock surfaces, which are, after all, made to withstand the impact of blows, including gunshots. That shrapnel will put your eye clean out.

But hinges … that’s another matter. When taking out a door, a breaching team will use special rounds, usually fired from a twelve-gauge shotgun. The slugs are made from sintered material—metal powder suspended in wax. This will blow the hinges out, tout de suite. No one has a better sense of humor than cops and within the New York City Emergency Service Unit, they were known as “Avon’s Calling” rounds, a reference to a door-to-door makeup sales business that Sachs had heard about from her mother.

She whispered to the lead breacher, “Go.”

He placed the muzzle against the bottom hinge and pulled the trigger. Sachs had turned away but felt the muzzle blast on the parts of her back that were above and below the bulletproof plate she wore. The sound was astonishingly loud in the closed area of the hallway. A second shot on the top hinge and then the coup de grace was the battering ram in the middle. The door collapsed inward andlanded with what was probably a loud crash—who could tell after the stunning report of the scattergun?

Sachs, in the lead, and the other ESU officers streamed inside, dispersing to avoid the bottleneck of the door, known as the “death funnel.” They cried, “Police on a warrant! Police! Show yourself!”

There was no one in the massive open living area of Averell Whittaker’s lofty apartment, other than the body of the security guard, Alicia Roberts, whose death was not unanticipated, since she hadn’t picked up the calls from her boss, Lyle Spencer, to warn her that she might be in danger.

One ESU officer went to the body. “She’s gone.”

Sachs then noted a parlor door kicked open. She and two other officers approached.

“Police! Show yourselves! Come out, hands above your head.”

A voice behind her. “Security guard’s weapon is missing.”

Sachs called, “I want that gun on the floor now. Throw it so I can see it.”

“I’ll kill Averell!” It was Joanna’s voice. “Let us go.”

Sachs said to the S&S officer beside her, “Video in.”

He unhitched the small camera once more and turned it on, then extended the flexible lens cable. He and Sachs approached the doorway, she covering him. He fed the lens in and, on the screen, Sachs saw Joanna Whittaker, her face stained with blood, standing behind her uncle, holding a pistol toward the door. Her fiancé, Martin Kemp, gripped a knife uncertainly as he stood over a young man—Kitt Whittaker, she recognized—who was strapped in a wheelchair.

“Drop the weapon!”

“Back off! You arrest me and there’ll be trouble! You’ll regret it!”

What on earth did that mean?

Sachs turned to the woman ESU officer who’d checked on thebody of the security guard. “Flash-bang. I want this over with. We’re not negotiating.”

“Okay, Detective.” She drew from her belt a stun grenade, which looked very much like a canister of pepper spray. The body of the device was cardboard and contained a powerful explosive charge. To use one, you held down the lever on the side—the “spoon”—and pulled the pin. Then you tossed it into the desired location. In three and a half seconds it exploded, with a huge flash and a report that was around 140 decibels. Being next to one when it detonated was an extremely unpleasant experience.

Joanna said, “I’m not kidding. I have friends you don’t know about. Back out now!”

Sachs nodded to another officer. “You too. Flash-bang.”

The man hesitated. “A space like that, you’ll only need one.”

Joanna was ranting, “It’ll be the biggest mistake of your life.”

Sachs smiled. “Let’s go with two. Pull the pins.”

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