Page 61 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

“Okay, I meant to say, I’m going to ask youtwofavors. One is what you just said. The other is not mentioning to anybody that the evidence I just collected ended up here.”

“Which is where?” He was looking at Rhyme’s stately town house.

“My husband and I live here,” she said. “Lincoln Rhyme. He’s a criminalist. Former NYPD.”

“Wait. Lincoln Rhyme’s yourhusband?”

She nodded.

“Damn.” He appeared both impressed and mystified. Then he gave a smile. “What evidence? I don’t know anything about any evidence.” He shrugged and she wondered if the massive shoulders had ever torn a garment seam with a gesture like that. “I tend to get amnesia. I was going to see a doctor for it but I kept forgetting to make the appointment.” Delivered deadpan.

She dug black nitrile gloves from her pocket and pulled them on. “Aren’t you curious why I asked?”

“You’re running a renegade operation you don’t want the brass to know about. Maybe you’re worried about corruption, maybe politics, maybe you shook a stick at the wrong person. Been there, done that.” Lyle Spencer—the man who, she’d calculated, had had four hours’ sleep last night—yawned and, to the extent he could, stretched back, crossed his arms across that massive chest and closed his eyes.

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Here are the tax consequences,” said the man who looked like he would know everything there was to know about tax consequences.

He had the pale complexion of somebody who spent his days in offices in front of computers and calculators. Gray suit, white shirt, trim hair. In his forties. His glasses, Averell Whittaker decided, should not be called glasses at all but spectacles.

The two men were in Whittaker’s home office, high atop the tower that bore his family name. The structure was on opulent Park Avenue.

The accountant had his hand on the thick document as if it were a bomb with a spring trigger and were he to let go the results would be disastrous.

Which they would be indeed.

Whittaker said, “Thank you, John. I’ll review it.”

This he wouldn’t do. He knew exactly what was going to happen, and he knew exactly what the consequences, tax and otherwise, would be. It was John’s job—along with his team of a dozen otherpeople—to look out for Whittaker and his companies. And to stop him from doing something stupid.

But stupid in one man’s eye is noble in another’s.

Whittaker said, “Langston, Holmes says the papers’ll be ready next week.”

A pause. “All right.”

The two words were spoken as if Whittaker had just told him he was about to rappel down a thousand-foot cliff.

At night, in a rainstorm.

After the accountant was gone, Whittaker picked up his cane, which was ebony and topped with a brass sculpture of a woman’s head. He’d selected this one, rather than the lighter and rubber-tipped version recommended by the doctor, because the woman bore a passing resemblance to Mary.

He rose and limped his way to the window. He caught a glimpse of himself in the antique mirror decorating one wall. His face was gray, the unhealthy visage mocked by the perfect, thick, white hair, the imperial nose, the wizard brows and, beneath them, piercing black stones of eyes.

Then he stared out the window at a vista that included perhaps three hundred thousand people.

And where are you?

He returned to his computer and, not sitting, logged in to his email.

His heart sank yet again. Not that he truly expected a reply.

But he’d hoped. Oh, had he hoped.

Where? …

Kitt:

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