Page 135 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

He turned, his face wary, as if expecting to see the blade again.

“Have you been tailing Joanna and Martin Kemp?”

“That’s right. Checking out their haunts, stores they go to, banks, lawyers, friends.”

“In the past week, did either of them go to what looked like a warehouse or storeroom or workshop?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“Where?”

“Lower East Side. One of the old tenement neighborhoods.”

There wasn’t much left of the ramshackle Manhattan. Hell’s Kitchen in West Midtown was gone. Harlem was redeveloped. The railyards were now all underground, the surrounding residential and industrial clutter bulldozed away and the ’hoods turned into glitz. But there were still pockets of tattered buildings—one and two stories—south and east, where immigrants had settled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Interesting, she reflected, this was one neighborhood that Kemp hadnotmentioned when asked about places Kitt was thinking of for a workshop.

“Who was there?”

“I didn’t see. Joanna picked up a bag and dropped something off. I just saw the hand and then the door closed.”

If it was the Locksmith’s workshop, Joanna was probably picking up Annabelle’s or Carrie’s underwear and the knives to implicate Kitt.

“You have an address?”

Now he was coy. It was a what-can-you-do-for-melook. “If I had an exclusive or access to records, something …”

“Okay, I’ve got a good story for you, Gibbons.”

“Yeah?” His eyes were eager.

“I’ll even give you the headline: ‘Reporter Does the Right Thing.’”

“In this business, you always have to give it a try.” He shrugged. “Argyle Street, Lower East Side. I don’t know the number but the building had a name. Something about baking supplies.”

Well, that didn’t end well.

I’m in my workshop in the Sebastiano building, I’ve called up a TV station on my computer. It’s one of the traditional stations, not WMG, Whittaker’s outlet. I suspect I wouldn’t get an accurate account of the arrest of Joanna and her fiancé for attempting to murder her family members onthatchannel.

I’m packing up, suitcases, boxes. I won’t be able to stay here much longer. Joanna will eventually sell me out in exchange for a reduced sentence. But I have a little time; she’ll be a hard negotiator.

Glancing occasionally at the computer, I note that some of the unanswered questions that arose in apartment 2019 are now being explained: Joanna had planned the murders to gain control of the Whittaker Media empire. And the man she was setting up to be the Locksmith was none other than her own cousin, Kitteridge Whittaker, a handsome young man, with the face of a crusading politician.

Since he isn’t in fact the perpetrator, that means, the anchor-woman says in anchor-speak, that the real Locksmith is still at large.

Which hardly needs to be said, but then I don’t know the average IQ of the audience.

Yet the Shakespearean soap opera of the Whittaker family is of less interest to the viewing audience than the fact that Joanna is Verum.

This is taking the bulk of airtime.

There have already been incidents. Her supporters aren’t happy she’s been arrested. Arson, broken windows, graffiti.

I see a sign:Free Verum now!

One talking head speculates that she wanted control of her uncle’s company because she hoped to use Whittaker’s media outlets as a bullhorn in spreading her messages.

Another one offers that she grew disgusted by her capitalist upbringing and, like a true revolutionary, wanted to undermine the System,“with a capital ‘S.’”

I actually laugh out loud. They have no idea that she whipped up Verum simply for the ego and the money.

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