Page 67 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

Mel Cooper was analyzing what Sachs had found on her second visit to the place, where she had happened to meet the Whittaker Media security chief, Lyle Spencer.

“What do we have, Mel?”

“Wrapper from a Jolly Rancher piece of candy.”

“Why do we think it’s his?”

“Bit of dish detergent on it, same profile as earlier. And some graphite—the grade that locksmiths use.”

“Prints, DNA?”

“None.”

“So he carefully unwrapped the candy before popping it into his mouth. Couldn’t he tear it open with his teeth, and be helpful? So this delicacy? Is it rare? Limited sources? Will it lead us someplace?”

Cooper bent over the computer and typed. “The number-one hard candy in America. One million two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of revenue every year.”

Rhyme sighed.

“Halloween? A million pounds’re sold.”

“Thank you, Mel,” Rhyme said acerbically. “I could have deduced the wrapper’s uselessness evidentially from the revenue stat, without the weight information.”

Cooper, unfazed, continued, “Around it, on the floor, Amelia found traces of boron, copper and iron. It was probably his since the control samples from the building don’t show any of these.”

“Put them on the board,” Rhyme called to Thom, their current scribe, and up went the notes.

The significance?

That he couldn’t say. Not yet. These were among the most common materials in the manufacturing industry.

So little evidence …

Rhyme couldn’t sweep from his mind Sachs’s earlier speculations.

The paper’s a red herring. Nothing to do with what he’s really up to. He’s an illusionist and’s got something else entirely going on.

He tried to put himself into the mind of the man who was the Locksmith’s doppelganger—the Watchmaker.

How do the cogs fit together?

Newspapers, knives, tricky locks, lingerie, two innocent, unrelated victims (and possibly more), days-old human blood …

What are you trying to construct?

But he had no answers. Rhyme’s eyes went to the photo of the splashy newspaper page and his mind to a place where it had gone, reluctantly, earlier: the question of what was motivating the Locksmith to commit these complex and risky crimes against the paper—and, ultimately, against the Whittakers?

“What’s the story behind the family?” Rhyme asked.

Cooper said he didn’t know much. He was not a consumer ofWhittaker Media Group products. He read theTimesand theWall Street Journal, and he and his girlfriend watched little TV news; mostly they listened to NPR and podcasts.

That was basically Thom’s journalistic diet too, the aide reported.

“You want me to look into them?”

“No. I’ll do it.” Rhyme went online and engaged in some high-school-level research. In a half hour he had a rough picture of the Whittakers and their empire.

Averell and Lawrence had inherited a modest chain of newspapers in the New York suburbs from their father, a few radio stations too. The operation was only marginally profitable. The brothers, Ivy League grads (both academically and athletically distinguished) were ambitious. They’d never wanted anything to do with the mundane and profit-neutral chain and pursued careers other than journalism. Averell in manufacturing, Lawrence in investing.

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