Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
– LOUIS-HECTOR BERLIOZ
Alone now, Rhyme and Sachs looked over the tables containing the evidence that had been collected in both the St. James corruption scandal and the Watchmaker case.
Sachs was concentrating hard, but Rhyme knew she was distracted. They'd stayed up late and talked about what had happened. The corruption was bad enough but that officers themselves had actually tried to kill other cops shook her even more.
Sachs claimed she was still undecided about quitting the force but one look at her face told Rhyme that she was going to leave. He also knew she'd had a couple of phone calls with Argyle Security.
There was no doubt.
Rhyme now glanced at the small rectangle of white paper sitting in her briefcase open in his lab: the envelope containing Sachs's letter of resignation. Like the glaring light of the full moon in a dark sky, the whiteness of the letter was blinding. It was hard to see it clearly, it was hard to see anything else.
He forced himself not to think about it and looked back at the evidence.
Gerald Duncan-dubbed "Perp Lite" by witty Thom-was awaiting arraignment on the infractions he had committed, all minor ones (the DNA analysis revealed that the blood on the box cutter, on the jacket fished out of the harbor and pooled on the pier was Duncan's own, and the fingernail crescent was a perfect match).
The 118th Precinct corruption case was moving slowly.
There was sufficient evidence to indict Baker and Wallace, as well as Toby Henson. Soil at the Sarkowski crime scene and the samples Sachs had collected at Creeley's Westchester house matched trace found in Baker's and Henson's homes. Of course, they had a rope fiber implicating Baker in Creeley's death, but similar fibers were found on Wallace's boat. Henson owned leather gloves whose texture patterns matched those found in Westchester.
But this trio wasn't cooperating. They were rejecting any plea bargains, and no evidence implicated anyone else, including the two officers who'd been outside the East Village social club, who claimed they were innocent. Rhyme had tried to unleash Kathryn Dance on them but they were refusing to say anything.
Eventually, Rhyme was confident, he could find all the perps from the 118th and build cases against them. But he didn't want eventually; he wanted now. As Sachs had pointed out, the other cops from the St. James might be planning to kill more witnesses-maybe even make another attempt on her or Pulaski. It was also possible that one or more of them were forcing Baker, Henson and Wallace to remain silent by threatening their families.
Besides, Rhyme was needed on other cases. Earlier he'd gotten a call about another incident-FBI Agent Fred Dellray (temporarily sprung from financial crimes hell) explained that there'd been a break-in and arson at the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology operation in Brooklyn. The damage was minor but the perp had breached a very sophisticated security system and, with terrorism on everyone's mind, any burglary of a government facility got attention; the Feds wanted Rhyme to assist in the forensic side of the investigation. He wanted to help but he needed to get the Baker-Wallace extortion case wrapped up first.
A messenger arrived with the file on the murder of Duncan's businessman friend, engineered by Baker when the man refused to be extorted. The case was still open-there's no statute of limitations on murder-but there'd been no entries for a year. Rhyme was hoping to find some leads in the older case that might help them identify perps from the 118th Precinct.
Rhyme first went into the New York Timesarchive and read the short account of the death of the victim, Andrew Culbert. It reported nothing other than that he was a businessman from Duluth and had been killed during an apparent mugging in Midtown. No suspects were found. There was no follow-up to the story.
Rhyme had Thom mount the investigation report on his page-turning frame and the criminalist read through the sheets. As often, in a cold case, the notes were in several different handwritings, since the investigation had been passed on-with progressively less energy-as time passed. According to the crime scene report, there'd been little trace, no fingerprints or footprints, no shell casings (death was from two shots to the forehead, the slugs ubiquitous.38 Specials; a test of the weapons they'd collected from Baker and the other cops at the 118th revealed no ballistics matches).
"You have the crime scene inventory?" he asked Sachs.
"Let's see. Right here," she said, lifting the sheet. "I'll read it."
He closed his eyes so he'd have a better image of the items.
"Wallet," Sachs read, "one hotel room key to the St. Regis, one minibar key, one Cross pen, one PDA, one packet of gum, a small pad of paper with the words 'Men's room' on the top. The second sheet said 'Chardonnay.' That's it. The lead detective from Homicide was John Repetti."
Rhyme was looking off, his mind stuck on something. He looked at her. "What?"
"I was saying, Repetti, he ran the case out of Midtown North. You want me to call him?"
After a moment Lincoln Rhyme replied, "No, I need you to do something else."
It's possessed.
Listening to the scratchy recording of the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson singing "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" through her iPod, Kathryn Dance stared at her suitcase, bulging open, refusing to close.
All I bought was two pairs of shoes, a few Christmas presents…okay, threepairs of shoes, but one was pumps. They don't count. Oh, but then the sweater. The sweater was the problem.
She pulled it out. And tried again. The clasps got to within a few inches of each other and stopped.
Possessed…
I'll go for the elegant look. She found the plastic valet laundry bag and offloaded jeans, a suit, hair curlers, stockings and the offending, and bulky, sweater. She tried the suitcase again.
Click.
No exorcist was necessary.
Her hotel room phone rang and the front desk announced she had a visitor.
Right on time.
"Send 'em up," Dance said and five minutes later Lucy Richter was sitting on the small couch in Dance's room.
"You want something to drink?"
"No, thanks. I can't stay long."
Dance nodded at a small fridge. "Whoever thought up minibars is evil. Candy bars and chips. My downfall. Well, everything's pretty much my downfall. And to add insult to injury the salsa costs ten dollars."
Lucy, who looked like she'd never had to count a calorie or gram of fat in her life, laughed. Then she said, "I heard they caught him. The officer guarding my house told me. But he didn't have any details."
The agent explained about Gerald Duncan, how he was innocent all along, and about the corruption scandal at an NYPD precinct.
Lucy shook her head at the news. Then she was looking around the small room. She made some pointless comments about framed prints and the view out the window. Soot, snow and an air shaft were the essential elements of the landscape. "I just came by to say thanks."
No, you didn't, thought Dance. But she said, "You don't need to thank me. It's our job."
She observed that Lucy's arms were uncrossed and the woman was sitting comfortably now, slightly back, shoulders relaxed, but not slumped. A confession, of some sort, was coming.
Dance let the silence unravel. Lucy said, "Are you a counselor?"
"No. Just a cop."
During her interviews, though, it wasn't unusual for suspects to keep right on going after the confession, sharing stories of other moral lapses, hated parents, jealousy of siblings, cheating wives and husbands, anger, joy, hopes. Confiding, seeking advice. No, she wasn't a counselor. But she was a cop and a mother and a kinesics expert, and all three of those roles required her to be an expert at the largely forgotten art of listening.
"Well, you're real easy to talk to. I thought maybe I could ask your opinion about something."
"Go on," Dance encouraged.
The soldier said, "I don't know what to do. I'm getting this commendation today, the one I was telling you about. But there's a problem." She explained more about her job overseas, running fuel and supply trucks.
Dance opened the minibar, extracted two $6 bottles of Perrier. Lifted an eyebrow.
The soldier hesitated. "Oh, sure."
She opened them and handed one to Lucy. Keeping hands busy frees up the mind to think and the voice to speak.
"Okay, this corporal was on my team, Pete. A reservist from South Dakota. Funny guy. Very funny. Coached soccer back home, worked in construction. He was a big help when I first got there. One day, about a month ago, he and I had to do an inventory of damaged vehicles. Some of them get shipped back to Fort Hood for repairs, some we can fix ourselves, some just are scrapped.
"I was in the office and he'd gone to the mess hall. I was going to pick him up at thirteen hundred hours and we were going to drive to the bone lot. I went to get him in a Humvee. I saw Petey there, waiting for me. Just then an IED went off. That's a bomb."
Dance knew this, of course.
"I was about thirty, forty feet away when it blew. Petey was waving and then there was this flash and the whole scene changed. It was like you blinked and the square became a different place." She looked out the window. "The front of the mess hall was gone, palm trees-they just vanished. Some soldiers and a couple of civilians who'd been standing there…One instant there, then they were gone."
Her voice was eerily calm. Dance recognized the tone; she heard it often in witnesses who'd lost loved ones in crimes. (The hardest interviews to do, worse than sitting across from the most amoral killer.)
"Petey's body was shattered. That's the only way to describe it." Her voice caught. "He was all red and black, broken… I've seen a lot over there. But this was so terrible." She sipped the water and then clutched the bottle like a child with a doll.
Dance offered no words of sympathy-they'd be useless. She nodded for the woman to continue. A deep breath. Lucy's fingers intertwined tightly. In her work, Dance characterized this gesture-a common one-of trying to strangle the unbearable tension arising from guilt or pain or shame.
"The thing is…I was late. I was in the office. I looked up at the clock. It was about twelve fifty-five but I had a half cup of soda left. I thought about throwing it out and leaving-it'd take five minutes to get to the mess hall-but I wanted to finish the soda. I just wanted to sit and finish it. I was late getting to the mess hall. If I'd been on time he wouldn't've died. I would've picked him up and we'd have been a half mile away when the IED blew."
"Were you injured?"
"A little." She pulled up her sleeve and displayed a large leathery scar on her forearm. "Nothing serious." She stared at the scar and then drank more water. Her eyes were hollow. "Even if I'd been just oneminute late at least he'd've been in the vehicle. He probably would have survived. Sixty seconds…That would've made the difference between him living and dying. And all because of a soda. All I wanted was to finish my goddamn soda." A sad laugh escaped her dry lips. "And then who shows up and tries to kill me? Somebody calling himself the Watchmaker, leaving a big-ass clock in my bathroom. For weeks all I can think about is how a single minute, one way or the other, makes the difference between life and death. And here's this freak throwing it in my face."
Dance asked, "What else? There's something more, isn't there?"
A faint laugh. "Yep, here's the problem. See, my tour was scheduled to be up next month. But I felt so guilty about Pete that I told my CO I'd reenlist."
Dance was nodding.
"That's what this ceremony's about. It's not about getting wounded. We're wounded every day. It's about reenlisting. The army's having a tough time getting new recruits. They're going to use the reenlisters as poster children for the new army. We like it so much we want to go back. That sort of thing."
"And you're having second thoughts?"
She nodded. "It's driving me crazy. I can't sleep. I can't make love to my husband. I can't do anything… I'm lonely, I'm afraid. I miss my family. But I also know we're doing something important over there, something good for a lot of people. I can't decide. I simply can't decide."
"What would happen if you told them you changed your mind?"
"I don't know. They'd be pissed probably. But we're not talking court-martial. It's more myproblem. I'd be disappointing people. I'd be backing down from something. Which I've never done in my life. I'd be breaking a promise."
Dance thought for a moment, sipping the water. "I can't tell you what to do. But I will say one thing: My job is finding the truth. Most everybody I deal with are perps-criminals. They know the truth and they're lying to save their butts. But there're also a lot of people I come across who lie to themselves. And usually they don't even know it.
"But whether you're deceptive to the cops or your mother or husband or friends or yourself, the symptoms're always the same. You're stressed, angry, depressed. Lies turn people ugly. The truth does the opposite… Of course, sometimes it seems like the truth is the last thing we want. But I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a suspect to confess and he gives me this look, it's like pure relief in his face. The weirdest thing: Sometimes they even say thanks."
"You're saying Iknow the truth?"
"Oh, yeah. You do. It's there. Covered up real good. And you might not like it when you find it. But it's there."
"How do I find it? Interrogate myself?"
"You know, that's a great way to put it. Sure, what you do is look for the same things I look for: anger, depression, denial, excuses, rationalization. When do you feel that way and why? What's behind this feeling or that one? And don't let yourself get away with anything. Keep at it. You'll find out what you really want."
Lucy Richter leaned forward and hugged Dance-something very few subjects ever did.
The soldier smiled. "Hey, got an idea. Let's write a self-help book. The Girl's Guide to Self-Interrogation.It'll be a best seller."
"In all our free time." Dance laughed.
They tapped the water bottles together with a ring.
Fifteen minutes later they were halfway through the blueberry muffins and coffee that they'd ordered from room service when the agent's mobile phone chirped. She looked at the number on caller ID. Kathryn Dance shook her head and gave a laugh.
The doorbell of Rhyme's town house rang. Thom arrived in the lab a moment later, accompanying Kathryn Dance. Her hair was loose, not in the taut braid of earlier, and the iPod headsets dangled around her neck. She took off a thin overcoat and greeted Sachs and Mel Cooper, who'd just arrived.
Dance bent down and petted Jackson, the dog.
Thom said, "Hmm, how'd you like a going-away present?" Nodding at the Havanese.
She laughed. "He's adorable but I'm about at my livestock limit at home-both the two- and four-legged variety."
It had been Rhyme on the phone, asking her, please, could she help them out once more?
"I promise it's the last time," he now said as she sat beside him.
She asked, "So what's up?"
"There's a glitch in the case. And I need your help."
"What can I do?"
"I remember you told me about the Hanson case in California-looking over the transcript of his statement gave you some insights into what he was up to."
She nodded.
"I'd like you to do the same thing for us."
Rhyme now explained to her about the murder of Gerald Duncan's friend, Andrew Culbert, which set Duncan on the path of bringing down Baker and Wallace.
"But we found some curious things in the file. Culbert had a PDA but no cell phone. That was odd. Everybody in business nowadays has a cell phone. And he had a pad of paper with two notes on it. One was 'Chardonnay.' Which might mean that he'd written it to remind himself to buy some wine. But the other was 'Men's room.' Why would somebody write that? I thought about it for a bit and it occurred to me that it was the sort of thing that somebody'd write if they had a speech or hearing problem. Ordering wine in a restaurant, then asking where the rest rooms were. And no cell phone, either. I wondered if maybe he was deaf."
"So," Dance said, "Duncan's friend was killed because the mugger lost his temper when the victim couldn't understand him or didn't hand over the wallet fast enough. He thoughtthat Baker killed his friend but it was just a coincidence."
Sachs said, "It gets trickier."
Rhyme said, "I tracked down Culbert's widow in Duluth. She told me he'd been deaf and mute since birth."
Sachs added, "But Duncan said that Culbert had saved his life in the army. If he was deaf he wouldn't've been in the service."
Rhyme said, "I think Duncan just read about a mugging victim and claimed he was his friend-to give some credibility to his plan to implicate Baker." The criminalist shrugged. "It might not be a problem. After all, we collared a corrupt cop. But it leaves a few questions. Can you look at Duncan's interview tape and tell us what you think?"
"Of course."
Cooper typed on his keyboard.
A moment later a wide-angle video of Gerald Duncan came on the monitor. He was sitting comfortably in an interview room downtown as Lon Sellitto's voice was giving the details: who he was, the date and the case. Then the statement proper began. Duncan recited essentially the same facts that he'd told Rhyme while sitting on the curb outside the last "serial killer" scene.
Dance watched, nodding slowly as she listened to the details of his plan.
When it was finished Cooper hit PAUSE, freeze-framing Duncan's face.
Dance turned to Rhyme. "That's all of it?"
"Yes." He noticed her face had gone still. The criminalist asked, "What do you think?"
She hesitated and then said, "I have to say…My feeling is that it's not just the story about his friend getting killed that's a problem. I think virtually everything he's telling you on that tape is a complete lie."
Silence in Rhyme's town house.
Total silence.
Finally Rhyme looked up from the image of Gerald Duncan, motionless on the screen, and said, "Go on."
"I got his baseline when he was mentioning the details of his plan to get Baker arrested. We know certain aspects of that are true. So when the stress levels change I assume he's being deceptive. I saw major deviations when he's talking about the supposed friend. And I don't think his name's Duncan. Or he lives in the Midwest. Oh, and he couldn't care less about Dennis Baker. He has no emotional interest in the man's arrest. And there's something else."
She glanced at the screen. "Can you cue to the middle? There's a place where he touches his cheek."
Cooper ran the video in reverse.
"There. Play that."
"I'd never hurt anybody. I couldn't do that. I might bend the law a bit… "
Dance shook her head, frowning.
"What?" Sachs asked.
"His eyes…" Dance whispered. "Oh, this's a problem."
"Why?"
"I'm thinking he's dangerous, very dangerous. I spent months studying the interview tapes of Ted Bundy, the serial killer. He was a pure sociopath, meaning he could deceive with virtually no outward signs whatsoever. But the one thing I could detect in Bundy was a faint reaction in his eyes when he claimed he'd never killed anyone. The reaction wasn't a typical deception response; it revealed disappointment and betrayal. He was denying something central to his being." She nodded to the screen. "Exactly what Duncan just did."
"Are you sure?" Sachs asked.
"Not positive, no. But I think we've got to ask him some more questions."
"Whatever he's up to, we better have him moved to level-three detention until we can figure it out."
Since he'd been arrested for only minor, nonviolent crimes Gerald Duncan would be in a low-security holding tank down on Centre Street. Escape from there was unlikely but not impossible. Rhyme ordered his phone to call the supervisor of Detention in downtown Manhattan.
He identified himself and gave instructions to move Duncan to a more secure cell.
The jailer said nothing. Rhyme assumed this was because he didn't want to take orders from a civilian.
The tedium of politics…
He grimaced then glanced at Sachs, meaning that she should authorize the transfer. It was then that the real reason for the supervisor's silence became clear. "Well, Detective Rhyme," the man said uneasily, "he was only here for a few minutes. We never even booked him."
"What?"
"The prosecutor, he cut some deal or another, and released Duncan last night. I thought you knew."
Lon Sellitto was back in Rhyme's lab, pacing angrily.
Duncan's lawyer, it seemed, had met with the assistant district attorney and in exchange for an affidavit admitting guilt, the payment of $100,000 for misuse of police and fire resources, and a written guarantee to testify against Baker, all the criminal charges were dropped, subject to being reinstated if he reneged on the appearance in court as a witness against Baker. He'd never even been printed or booked.
The big, rumpled detective stared at the speakerphone, glowering, hands on his hips, as if the unit itself were the incompetent fool who'd released a potential killer.
The defensiveness in the prosecutor's voice was clear. "It was the only way he'd cooperate," the man said. "He was represented by a lawyer from Reed, Prince. He surrendered his passport. It was all legit. He's agreed not to leave the jurisdiction until Baker's trial. I've got him in a hotel in the city, with an officer guarding him. He's not going anywhere. What's the big deal? I've done this a hundred times."
"What about Westchester?" Rhyme called into the speakerphone. "The stolen corpse?"
"They agreed not to prosecute. I said we'd help them out on a few other cases they needed our cooperation for."
The prosecutor would see this as a gold ring in his career; bringing down a gang of corrupt cops would catapult him to stardom.
Rhyme shook his head, livid. Incompetence and selfish ambition infuriated him. It's hard enough to do this job without interference from politicians. Why the hell hadn't anybody called him first, before releasing Duncan? Even before Kathryn Dance's opinion about the interview tape, there were too many unanswered questions to release the man.
Sellitto barked, "Where is he?"
"Anyway, what proof-?"
"Where the fuck is he?" Sellitto raged.
The prosecutor hesitated and gave them the name of a hotel in Midtown and the mobile number of the officer guarding him.
"I'm on it." Cooper dialed the number.
Sellitto continued. "And who was his lawyer?"
The assistant district attorney gave them this name too. The nervous voice said, "I really don't see what all the fuss-"
Sellitto hung up. He looked at Dance. "I'm about to push some serious buttons. You know what I'm saying?"
She nodded. "We've got fan-hitting shit out in California too. But I'm comfortable with my opinion. Do whatever you can to find him. I mean, everything. I'll give that same opinion to whoever you want me to. Chief of department, mayor, governor."
Rhyme said to Sachs, "See what the lawyer knows about him." She took the name, flipped open her phone. Rhyme knew of Reed, Prince, of course. It was a large, respected firm on lower Broadway. The attorneys there were known for handling high-profile, white-collar criminal defense.
In a grim voice Cooper said, "We've got a problem. That was the officer at the hotel suite, guarding Duncan. He just checked his room. He's gone, Lincoln."
"What?"
"The officer said he went to bed early last night, saying he wasn't feeling well and he wanted to sleep in today. Looks like he picked the lock to the adjacent room. The officer has no idea when it happened. Could've been last night."
Sachs pinched her phone closed. "Reed, Prince doesn't have a lawyer on staff with the name he gave the prosecutor. And Duncan isn't a client."
"Oh, goddamn," Rhyme snapped.
"All right," Sellitto said, "time for the cavalry." He called Bo Haumann at ESU and told them they needed to arrest their suspect yet again. "Only we aren't exactly sure where he is."
He gave the tactical officer the few details they had. Haumann's reaction, which Rhyme didn't hear, could nonetheless be inferred from Sellitto's expression. "You don't need to tell me,Bo."
Sellitto left a message with the district attorney himself and then called the Big Building to inform the brass about the problem.
"I want more on him," Rhyme said to Cooper. "We were too fucking complacent. We didn't ask enough questions." He glanced at Dance. "Kathryn, I really hate to ask this… "
She was putting away her cell phone. "I've already canceled my flight."
"I'm sorry. It's not really your case."
"It's been my case since I interviewed Cobb on Tuesday," Dance said, her green eyes cold, her lips drawn.
Cooper was scrolling through the information they'd learned about Gerald Duncan. He made a list of phone numbers and started calling. After several conversations he said, "Listen to this. He's not Duncan. The Missouri State Police sent a car out to the address on the license. It's owned by a Gerald Duncan, yeah, but not our Gerald Duncan. The guy who lived there was transferred to Anchorage for his job for six months. The house's empty and up for rent. Here's his picture."
The image was a driver's license shot of a man very different from the one they'd arrested yesterday.
Rhyme nodded. "Brilliant. He checked the paper for rental listings, found one that'd been on the market for a while and figured it wasn't going to rent for the next few weeks because of Christmas. Same as the church. And he forged the driver's license we saw. Passport too. We've been underestimating this guy from the beginning."
Cooper, staring at his computer, called out, "The owner-the real Duncan-had some credit card problems. Identity theft."
Lincoln Rhyme felt a chill in the center of his being, a place where in theory he could feel nothing. He had a sense that an unseen disaster was unfolding quickly.
Dance was staring at the still image of Duncan's face as intently as Rhyme stared at his evidence charts. She mused, "What's he really up to?"
A question they couldn't begin to answer.
Riding the subway, Charles Vespasian Hale, the man who'd been masquerading as Gerald Duncan, the Watchmaker, checked his wristwatch (his Breguet pocket watch, which he'd grown fond of, wouldn't fit the role he was about to assume).
Everything was right on schedule. He was taking the train from the Brooklyn neighborhood where he had his primary safe house, feeling anticipation and an edginess too, but nonetheless he was as close to harmony as he'd ever been in his life.
Very little of what he'd told Vincent Reynolds about his personal past had been true, of course. It couldn't be. He planned a long career at his profession and he knew that the mealy rapist would spill everything to the cops at the first threat.
Born in Chicago, Hale was the son of a high school Latin teacher (hence the middle name, after a noble Roman emperor) and a woman who was the manager of the petites department at a suburban Sears store. The couple never talked much, didn't do much. Every night after a quiet supper his father would gravitate to his books, his mother to her sewing machine. For familial activity they might settle in two separate chairs in front of the small television set and watch bad sitcoms and predictable cop dramas, which allowed them a unique medium of communication-by commenting on the shows, they expressed to each other the desires and resentments that they'd never have the courage to say directly.
Quiet…
The boy had been a loner for much of his life. He was a surprise child and his parents treated him with formal manners and apathy and a quizzical air, as if he were a species of plant whose watering and fertilizing schedule they were unsure of. The hours of boredom and solitude grew to be an open sore, and Charles felt a desperation to occupy his time, for fear the excruciating stillness in the household would strangle him.
He spent hours and hours outside-hiking and climbing trees. For some reason it was better to be alone when you were outside. There was always something to distract you, something you might find over the next hill, on the next branch up in the maple tree. He was in the field biology club at school. He went on Outward Bound expeditions and was always the first to cross the rope bridge, dive off the cliff, rappel down a mountainside.
If he was condemned to be inside, Charles developed a habit of filling his time by putting things in order. Arranging office supplies and books and toys could endlessly fill the painful hours. He wasn't lonely when he did that, he didn't ache with boredom, he wasn't afraid of the silence.
Did you know, Vincent, that the word "meticulous" comes from the Latinmeticulosus, meaning fearful?
When things weren't precise and ordered, he'd grow frantic, even when the glitch was something as silly as a misaligned train track or a bent bicycle spoke. Anything not running smoothly would set him on edge the way a fingernail screech on a blackboard caused other people to cringe.
Like his parents' marriage, for instance. After the divorce, he never spoke to either of them again. Life should be tidy and perfect. When it wasn't, you should be free to eliminate the disorderly elements altogether. He didn't pray (no empirical evidence that you could put your life in order or achieve your goals via divine communication) but if he had, Charles would have prayed for them to die.
Hale went into the army for two years, where he flourished in the atmosphere of order. He went to Officer Candidate School and caught the attention of his professors, who, after he was commissioned, tapped him to teach military history and tactical and strategic planning, at which he excelled.
After he was discharged he spent a year hiking and mountain climbing in Europe then he returned to America and went into business as an investment banker and venture capitalist, studying law at night.
He worked as an attorney for a time and was brilliant at structuring business deals. He made very good money but there was an underlying loneliness about his life. He shunned relationships because they required improvisation and were full of illogical behavior. More and more his passion for planning and order took on the role of lover. And like anyone who substitutes an obsession for a real relationship, Hale found himself looking for more intense ways to satisfy himself.
He found a perfect solution six years ago. He killed his first man.
Living in San Diego, Hale learned that a business associate had been badly injured. Some drunk driver had plowed into the man's car. The accident shattered the businessman's hip and snapped both legs-one of which had to be amputated. The driver expressed no remorse whatsoever and continued to deny he'd done anything wrong, even blaming the accident on the victim himself. The punk was convicted but, a first-time offender, he got off with a light sentence. Then he began harassing Hale's associate for money.
Hale decided that enough was enough. He came up with an elaborate plan to terrify the kid into stopping. But as he looked over the scheme he realized it made him feel uncomfortable, edgy. There was something clumsy about it. The plan wasn't as precisely ordered as he wanted. Finally he realized what the trouble was. His scheme left the victim scared but alive. If the kid died, then it would work perfectly and there'd be nothing to trace back to Hale or his injured associate.
But could he actually kill a human being? The idea sounded preposterous.
Yes or no?
On a rainy October night he made his decision.
The murder went perfectly and the police never suspected the man's death was anything but an unfortunate home electrocution accident.
Hale was prepared to feel remorse. But there was none. Instead he was ecstatic. The plan had been so perfectly executed, the fact that he'd killed someone was irrelevant.
The addict wanted more of his drug.
A short time later Hale was involved in a joint venture in Mexico City-building a development of upscale haciendas. But a corrupt politician managed to throw up enough stumbling blocks so the deal was going to collapse. Hale's Mexican counterpart explained that the petty politician had done this a number of times.
"It's a shame he can't be removed," Hale had said coyly.
"Oh, he can never be removed," the Mexican said. "He is, you would say, invulnerable."
This caught Hale's attention. "Why?"
The crooked Distrito Federal commissioner, the Mexican explained, was obsessed with security. He drove in a huge armored SUV, a Cadillac custom-made for him, and was always with armed guards. His security company constantly planned different routes for him to get to and from his homes and offices and meetings. He moved his family from house to house randomly and often didn't even stay in houses that he owned, but in friends' or rentals. And he often traveled with his young son-the rumors were that he kept the boy near as a shield. The commissioner also had the protection of a senior federal interior minister.
"So, you could say he's invulnerable," the Mexican explained, pouring two glasses of very expensive Patrón tequila.
"Invulnerable," mused Charles Hale in a whisper. He nodded.
Not long after this meeting, five apparently unrelated articles appeared in the October 23 edition of El Heraldo de México.
A fire in the office of Mexicana Seguridad Privado, a security services company, resulted in the evacuation of all employees. No injuries were reported and the damage was minor.
A hacker shut down the main computer of a mobile phone provider, resulting in a disruption of service in a portion of Mexico City and its southern suburbs for about two hours.
A truck caught fire in the middle of Highway 160, south of Mexico City, near Chalco, completely blocking northbound traffic.
Henri Porfirio, the head of the Distrito Federal commercial real estate licensing commission, died when his SUV crashed through a one-lane bridge and plunged forty feet, struck a propane truck parked there and exploded. The incident occurred when drivers were following directions from a flagman to pull off the highway and take a side road to avoid a major traffic jam. Other vehicles had made it successfully over the bridge earlier but the commissioner's vehicle, being armor plated, was too heavy for the old structure, despite a sign that stated it could support the SUV's weight. Porfirio's security chief knew about the traffic jam and had been trying to contact him about a safer route but was unable to because the commissioner's mobile phone was not working. His was the only vehicle that fell.
Porfirio's son was not in the SUV, which he otherwise would have been, because the child came down with a minor case of food poisoning the day before and remained at home with his mother.
Erasmo Saleno, a senior interior official in the Mexican federal government, was arrested after a tip led police to his summer home, where they found a stash of weapons and cocaine (curiously reporters had been alerted too, including a photographer connected with the Los Angeles Times).
All in a day's news.
A month later Hale's real estate project broke ground and he received from his fellow investors in Mexico a bonus of $500,000 U.S. in cash.
He was pleased with the money. He was more pleased, though, with the connections he'd made through the Mexican businessman. It wasn't long before the man put him in touch with someone in America who needed similar services.
Now, several times a year, between his business projects, he would take on an assignment like this. Usually it was murder, though he'd also engaged in financial scams, insurance fraud and elaborate thefts. Hale would work for anyone, whatever the motive, which was irrelevant to him. He had no interest in why somebody wanted a crime committed. Twice he'd murdered abusive husbands. He killed a child molester one week before he'd murdered a businesswoman who was a major contributor to the United Way.
Good and bad were words whose definitions were different for Charles Vespasian Hale. Good was mental stimulation. Bad was boredom. Good was an elegant plan well executed. Bad was either a sloppy plan or one carelessly carried out.
But his current plot-certainly his most elaborate and far-reaching-was humming along perfectly.
God created the complex mechanism of the universe, then wound it up and started it running…
Hale got off the subway and climbed to the street, his nose stinging from the cold, his eyes watering, and started along the sidewalk. He was about to push the button that would set the hands of his real chronograph in motion.
Lon Sellitto's phone rang and he took the call. Frowning, he had a brief conversation. "I'll look into it."
Rhyme glanced up expectantly.
"That was Haumann. He just got a call from the manager of a delivery service on the same floor as the company that the Watchmaker broke into in Midtown. He said a customer just called. A package they were supposed to deliver yesterday never showed up. Looks like somebody broke in and stole it around the time that we were sweeping the offices looking for the perp. The manager asked if we knew anything about it."
Rhyme's eyes slipped to the photographs that Sachs had taken of the hallway. Bless her, she'd taken pictures of the entire floor. Below the name of the delivery service were the words High Security-Valuable Deliveries Guaranteed. Licensed and Bonded.
Rhyme heard the white noise of people talking around him. But he didn't hear the words themselves. He stared at the photograph and then at the other evidence.
"Access," he whispered.
"What?" Sellitto asked, frowning.
"We were so focused on the Watchmaker and the fake killings-and then on his scheme to flush out Baker-we never looked at what else was going on."
"Which was?" Sachs asked.
"Breaking and entering. The crime he actuallycommitted was trespass. All of the offices on that floor were unguarded for a time. When they evacuated the building, they left the doors unlocked?"
"Well, yeah, I suppose," the big detective said.
Sachs said, "So while we were focused on the flooring company the Watchmaker might've put on a uniform or just hung a badge over his neck then strolled right inside the delivery service and helped himself to that package."
Access…
"Call the service. Find out what was in the package, who sent it and where it was going. Now."
A taxicab pulled up in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Fifth Avenue. The huge building was decorated for Christmas, dolled up in the tasteful Victorian regalia that you'd expect on the Upper East Side. Subdued festive.
Out of this cab climbed Charles Vespasian Hale, who looked around carefully on the remote chance that the police were following him. It would have been exceedingly unlikely that he'd be under surveillance. Still, Hale took his time, looked everywhere for anyone showing him the least attention. He saw nothing troubling.
He leaned down to the open taxi window and paid the driver-tendering the cash in gloved hands-and, hooking a black canvas bag over his shoulder, he climbed the stairs into the large cathedral-like lobby, which echoed with the sound of voices, most of them young; the place was lousy with kids freed from school. Evergreens and gold and ornaments and tulle were everywhere. Bach two-part inventions plucked away cheerily on a recorded harpsichord, echoing in the cavernous entryway.
'Tis the season…
Hale left the black bag at the coat check, though he kept his coat and hat. The clerk looked inside the bag, noted the four art books, then zipped it back up and told Hale to have a nice day. He took the claim check and paid admission. He nodded a smile at the guards at the entrance and walked past them into the museum itself.
"The Delphic Mechanism?" Rhyme was talking to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art via speakerphone. "It's still on display there?"
"Yes, Detective," the man replied uncertainly. "We've had it here for two weeks. It's part of a multicity tour-"
"Fine, fine, fine. Is it guarded?"
"Yes, of course. I-"
"There's a possibility that a thief's trying to steal it."
"Steal it? Are you sure? It's a one-of-a-kind objet.Whoever took possession could never show it in public."
"He doesn't intend to sell it," Rhyme said. "I think he wants it for himself."
The criminalist explained: The package stolen from the delivery service in the building on Thirty-second Street was from a wealthy patron of the arts and was destined for the Metropolitan Museum. It contained a large portfolio of some antiques being offered to the museum's furniture collection.
The Metropolitan Museum? Rhyme had wondered. He'd then recalled the museum programs found in the church. He'd asked Vincent Reynolds and the clock dealer, Victor Hallerstein, if Duncan had mentioned anything about the Met. He had, apparently-spending considerable time there-and he'd expressed particular interest in the Delphic Mechanism.
Rhyme now told the director, "We think he may have stolen the package to smuggle something into the museum. Maybe tools, maybe software to disable alarms. We don't know. I can't figure it out at this point. But I think we have to be cautious."
"My God…All right. What do we do?"
Rhyme looked up at Cooper, who typed on his keyboard and gave a thumbs-up. Into the microphone the criminalist said, "We've just emailed you his picture. Could you print it out and get a copy to all the employees, the security surveillance room and the coat check? See if they recognize him."
"I'll do it right now. Can you hold for a few minutes?"
"Sure."
Soon the director came on the line. "Detective Rhyme?" His voice was breathless. "He's here! He checked a bag about ten minutes ago. The clerk recognized the picture."
"The bag's still there?"
"Yes. He hasn't left."
Rhyme nodded at Sellitto, who picked up the phone and called Bo Haumann at ESU, whose teams were on their way to the museum, and told him this latest news.
"The guard at the Mechanism," Rhyme asked, "is he armed?"
"No. Do you think the thief is? We don't have metal detectors at the entrance. He could've brought a gun in."
"It's possible." Rhyme looked at Sellitto with a lifted eyebrow.
The detective asked, "Move a team in slow? Undercover?"
"He checked a bag…and he knows clocks." He asked the museum director, "Did anybody look in the bag?"
"I'll check. Hold on." A moment later he came back. "Books. He has art books inside. But the coat-check clerk didn't examine them."
"Bomb for diversion?" Sellitto asked.
"Could be. Maybe it's only smoke but even then people'll panic. Could be fatalities either way."
Haumann called in on his radio. His crackling voice: "Okay, we've got teams approaching all the entrances, public and service."
Rhyme asked Dance, "You're convinced he's willing to take lives."
"Yes."
He was considering the man's astonishing plot-making skills. Was there some other deadly plan he'd put into play if he realized he was about to be arrested at the museum? Rhyme made a decision. "Evacuate."
Sellitto asked, "The entire museum?"
"I think we have to. First priority-save lives. Clear the coatroom and front lobby and then move everybody else out. Have Haumann's men check out everybody who leaves. Make sure the teams have his picture."
The museum director had heard. "You think that's necessary?"
"Yes. Do it now."
"Okay, but I just don't see how anyone could steal it," the director said. "The Mechanism's behind inch-thick bullet-proof glass. And the case can't be opened until the day the exhibit closes, next Tuesday."
"What do you mean?" Rhyme asked.
"It's in one of our special display cases."
"But why won't it open until Tuesday?"
"Because the case has a computerized time lock, with a satellite link to some government clock. They tell me nobody can break into it. We put the most valuable exhibits in there."
The man continued speaking but Rhyme looked away. Something was nagging him. Then he recalled, "That arson earlier, the one that Fred Dellray wanted us to help out on. Where was it again?"
Sachs frowned. "A government office. The Institute of Standards and Technology or something like that. Why?"
"Look it up, Mel."
The tech went online. Reading from the website, he said, "NIST is the new name for the National Bureau of Standards and-"
"Bureau of Standards?" Rhyme interrupted. "They maintain the country's atomic clock… Is thatwhat he's up to? The time lock at the Met has an uplink to the NIST. Somehow he's going to change the time, convince the lock that it's next Tuesday. The vault'll open automatically."
"Can he do that?" Dance asked.
"I don't know. But if it's possible, he'll find a way. The fire at NIST was to cover up the break-in, I'll bet… " Then Rhyme stopped talking, as the full implications of the Watchmaker's plan became clear. "Oh, no…"
"What?"
Rhyme was thinking about Kathryn Dance's observation: That to the Watchmaker, human life was negligible. He said, "Time everywhere in the country is governed by the U.S. atomic clock. Airlines, trains, national defense, power grids, computers…everything. Do you have any idea what's going to happen if he resets it?"
In a cheap Midtown hotel, a middle-aged man and woman sat on a small couch that smelled of mildew and old food. They were staring at a television set.
Charlotte Allerton was the stocky woman who'd pretended to be the sister of Theodore Adams, the first "victim" in the alley on Tuesday. The man beside her, Bud Allerton, her husband, was the man masquerading as the lawyer who'd secured Gerald Duncan's release from jail by promising that his client would be a spectacular witness in the crooked cop scandal.
Bud really was a lawyer, though he hadn't practiced for some years. He'd resurrected some of his old skills for the sake of Duncan's plan, which called for Bud's pretending to be a criminal attorney from the big, prestigious law firm of Reed, Prince. The assistant district attorney had bought the entire charade, not even bothering to call the firm to check up on the man. Gerald Duncan had believed, correctly, that the prosecutor would be so eager to make a name for himself on a police corruption case that he'd believe what he wanted to. Besides, who ever asks for a lawyer's ID?
The Allertons' attention was almost exclusively on the TV screen, showing local news. A program about Christmas tree safety. Yadda, yadda, yadda…For a moment Charlotte's gaze slipped to the master bedroom in the suite, where her pretty, thin daughter sat reading a book. The girl looked through the doorway at her mother and stepfather with the same dark, sullen eyes that had typified her expression in recent months.
That girl…
Frowning, Charlotte looked back to the TV screen. "Isn't it taking too long?"
Bud said nothing. His thick fingers were intertwined and he sat forward, hunched, elbows on knees. She wondered if he was praying.
A moment later the reporter whose mission was to save families from the scourge of burning Christmas trees disappeared and on the screen came the words Special News Bulletin.
In doing his research into watchmaking, so that he could be a credible revenge killer, Charles Hale had learned of the concept of "complications."
A complication is a function in a watch or clock other than telling the time of day. For instance, those small dials that dot the front of expensive timepieces, giving information like day of the week and date and time in different locations, and repeater functions (chimes sounding at certain intervals). Watchmakers have always enjoyed the challenge of getting as many complications into their watches as possible. A typical one is the Patek Philippe Star Calibre 2000, a watch featuring more than one thousand parts. Its complications offer the owner such information as the times of sunrise and sunset, a perpetual calendar, the day, date and month, the season, moon phases, lunar orbit and power reserve indicators for both the watch's movement and the several chimes inside.
The trouble with complications, though, is that they're just that. They tend to distract from the ultimate purpose of a watch: telling time. Breitling makes superb timepieces but some of the Professional and Navitimer models have so many dials, hands and side functions, like chronographs (the technical term for stopwatches) and logarithmic slide rules, that it's easy to miss the big hand and the little hand.
But complications were exactly what Charles Hale needed for his plan here in New York City, distractions to lead the police away from what he was really about. Because there was a good chance that Lincoln Rhyme and his team would find out that he was no longer in custody and that he wasn't really Gerald Duncan, they'd realize he had something else in mind other than getting even with a crooked cop.
So he needed yet another complication to keep the police focused elsewhere.
Hale's cell phone vibrated. He glanced at the text message, which was from Charlotte Allerton. Special Report on TV: Museum closed. Police searching for you there.
He put the phone back in his pocket.
And enjoyed a moment of keen, almost sexual, satisfaction.
The message told him that while Rhyme hadtipped to the fact that he wasn't who he seemed to be, the police were still missing the time of day and focusing on the complication of the Metropolitan Museum. He was pointing the police toward what appeared to be a plan to steal the famous Delphic Mechanism. At the church he'd planted brochures on the horologic exhibits in Boston and Tampa. He'd rhapsodized on the device to Vincent Reynolds. He'd hinted to the antiques dealer about his obsession with old timepieces, mentioning the Mechanism specifically, and that he was aware of the exhibit at the Met. The small fire he'd set at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Brooklyn would make them think he was going to somehow reset the country's cesium clock, disabling the Met's time-security system, and steal the Mechanism.
A plot to steal the device seemed to be just the clever, subtle deduction for the cops to seize as Hale's real motive. Officers would spend hours scouring the museum and nearby Central Park looking for him and examining the canvas bag he'd left. It contained four hollowed-out books, inside of which were two bags of baking soda, a small scanner and, of course, a clock-a cheap digital alarm. None of them meant anything but each was sure to keep the police busy for hours.
The complications in his plan were as elegant, if not as numerous, as those in what was reportedly the world's most elaborate wristwatch, one made by Gerald Genta.
But at the moment Hale was nowhere near the museum, which he'd left a half hour ago. Not long after he'd entered and checked the bag, he'd walked into a restroom stall, then taken off his coat, revealing an army uniform, rank of major. He'd donned glasses and a military-style hat-hidden in a false pocket in his coat-and had left the museum quickly. He was presently in downtown Manhattan, slowly making his way through the security line leading into the New York office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In a short time a number of soldiers and their families would attend a ceremony in their honor, hosted by the city and the U.S. Departments of Defense and State, in the HUD building. Officials would be greeting soldiers recently returned from foreign conflicts and their families, giving them letters of commendation for their service in recent world conflicts and thanking them for reenlisting. Following the ceremonies, and the requisite photo ops and trite statements to the press, the guests would leave and the generals and other government officials would reconvene to discuss future efforts to spread democracy to other places in the world.
These government officials, as well as the soldiers, their families and any members of the press who happened to be present, were the real point of Charles Hale's mission in New York.
He had been hired for the simple purpose of killing as many of them as he could.
With husky, ever-smiling Bob driving, Lucy Richter sat in the car as they made their way past the reviewing stand outside the Housing and Urban Development building, where the parade was just winding down.
Her hand on her husband's muscular thigh, Lucy was silent.
The Honda nosed through the heavy traffic, Bob making casual conversation, talking about the party tonight. Lucy responded halfheartedly. She'd grown troubled once again about the Big Conflict-what she'd confessed to Kathryn Dance. Should she go through with the reenlistment or not?
Self-interrogation…
When she'd agreed a month earlier; was she being honest or being deceptive with herself?
Looking for the things Agent Dance told her: anger, depression…Am I lying?
She tried to put the debate out of her head.
They were close to the HUD building now and across the street she saw protesters. They were against the various foreign conflicts America was involved in. Her friends and fellow soldiers overseas were pissed off at anybody who protested but, curiously, Lucy didn't see it that way. She believed the very fact that these people were free to demonstrate and were not in jail validated what she was doing.
The couple drew closer to the checkpoint at the intersection near the HUD building. Two soldiers stepped forward to check their IDs and to look in the trunk.
Lucy stiffened.
"What?" her husband asked.
"Look," she said.
He glanced down. Her right hand was on her hip, where she wore her sidearm when on duty.
"Going for the fast draw?" Bob joked.
"Instinct. At checkpoints." She laughed. But it was a humorless sound.
Bitter fog…
Bob nodded at the soldiers and smiled to his wife. "I think we're pretty safe. Not like we're in Baghdad or Kabul."
Lucy squeezed his hand and they proceeded to the parking lot reserved for the honorees.
Charles Hale was not completely apolitical. He had some general opinions about democracy versus theocracy versus communism versus fascism. But he knew his views amounted to the same pedestrian positions offered by listeners calling in to Rush Limbaugh or NPR radio, nothing particularly radical or articulate. So last October when Charlotte and Bud Allerton hired him for the job of "sending a message" about big government and wrong-minded American intervention in "heathen" foreign nations, Hale had yawned mentally.
But he was intrigued by the challenge.
"We've talked to six people and nobody'll take the job," Bud Allerton told him. "It's next to impossible."
Charles Vespasian Hale liked that word. One wasn't bored when taking on the impossible. It was like "invulnerable."
Charlotte and Bud-her second husband-were part of a right-wing militia fringe group that had been attacking federal government employees and buildings and UN facilities for years. They'd gone underground a while ago but recently, enraged at the government's meddling forays into world affairs, she and the others in her nameless organization decided it was time to go after something big.
This attack would not only send their precious message but would cause some real harm to the enemy: killing generals and government officials who'd betrayed principles America was founded on and sent our boys and-God help us-girls to die on foreign soil for the benefit of people who were backward and cruel and non-Christian.
Hale had managed to extract himself from his rhetoric-addicted clients and got to work. On Halloween he'd come to New York, moved into the safe house in Brooklyn, and spent the next month and a half engrossed in the construction of his timepiece-acquiring supplies, finding unwitting associates to help him (Dennis Baker and Vincent Reynolds), learning everything he could about the Watchmaker's supposed victims and surveilling the HUD building.
Which he was now approaching through the bitterly cold morning air.
This building had been chosen for the ceremonies and meetings not because of the department's mission, which had nothing to do with the military, of course, but because it offered the best security of any federal building in lower Manhattan. The walls were thick limestone; if a terrorist were somehow to negotiate the barricades surrounding the place and detonate a car bomb, the resulting explosion would cause less damage than it would to a modern, glass-facaded structure. HUD was also lower than most offices downtown, which made it a difficult target for missiles or suicide airplanes. It had a limited number of entrances and exits, thus making access control easier, and the room where the awards ceremony and later the strategic meetings would take place faced the windowless wall of the building across the alleyway so no sniper could shoot into the room.
With another two dozen soldiers and police armed with automatic weapons on the surrounding streets and tops of buildings, HUD was virtually impregnable.
From the exterior, that is.
But no one realized that the threat wouldn't be coming from outside.
Charles Hale displayed his three military-issue IDs, two of them unique to this event and delivered to attendees just two days ago. He was nodded through the metal detector, then physically patted down.
A final guard, a corporal, checked his IDs a second time then saluted him. Hale returned the gesture and stepped inside.
The HUD building was labyrinthine but Hale now made his way quickly to the basement. He knew the layout of the place perfectly because the fifth supposed victim of the psycho Watchmaker, Sarah Stanton, was the estimator of the flooring company that had supplied carpeting and linoleum tile to the building, a fact he'd learned from public filings regarding government contractors. In Sarah's file cabinets he found precise drawings of every room and hallway in HUD. (The company was also across the hall from a delivery service-which he'd called earlier to complain about a package to the Metropolitan Museum that had never been delivered, lending credence to the apparent plot to steal the Delphic Mechanism.)
In fact, all of the Watchmaker's "assaults" this week, with the exception of the attention-getting blood bath at the pier, were vital steps in his mission today: the flooring company, Lucy Richter's apartment, the Cedar Street alleyway and the florist shop.
He'd broken into Lucy's to photograph, and later forge, the special all-access passes that were required for soldiers attending the awards ceremony (he'd learned her name from a newspaper story about the event). He'd also copied and later memorized a classified Defense Department memo she'd been given about the event and security procedures that would be in effect at HUD today.
The apparent murder of the fictional Teddy Adams had served a purpose, as well. It was in the alley behind this very building that Hale had placed the body of the Westchester car wreck victim. When Charlotte Allerton-playing the man's distraught sister-had arrived, the guards had let the hysterical woman through the back door of HUD and allowed her to use the restroom downstairs without searching her. Once inside, she'd planted what Hale was now retrieving from the bottom of the in-wall trash bin: a silenced.22-caliber pistol and two metal disks. There'd been no other way to get these items into a building protected by a series of metal detectors and pat-downs. He now hid these in his pockets and headed to the sixth-floor conference room.
Once there, Hale spotted what he thought of as the mainspring of his plan: the two large flower arrangements that Joanne Harper had created for the ceremony, one in the front of the room and one in the back. Hale had learned from the Government Service Administration vendor liaison office that she had the contract to supply flower arrangements and plants to the HUD facility. He'd broken into her Spring Street workshop to hide something in the vases, which would pass through security with, he hoped, only a brief look, since Joanne had been a trusted vendor for several years. When Hale had broken into her workshop he'd taken with him, in his shoulder bag, something in addition to the moon-faced clock and his tools: two jars of an explosive known as Astrolite. More powerful than TNT or nitroglycerin, Astrolite was a clear liquid that remained explosive even when absorbed into another substance. Hale found which arrangements were going to HUD and poured the Astrolite into the bottoms of the vases.
Hale, of course, might have simply broken into the four locations without the fiction of the Watchmaker, but if anyone had seen a burglar or noticed anything missing or out of order, the question would have arisen: What was he really up to? So he'd created layers of motives for the break-ins. His original plan was simply to pretend to be a serial killer to get access to the four locations he needed to, sacrificing his unfortunate assistant, Vincent Reynolds, in order to convince the police that the Watchmaker was just who he seemed to be. But then in mid November, an organized crime contact in the area called and told him that an NYPD cop named Dennis Baker was looking for a hit man to kill an NYPD detective. The mob wouldn't touch killing a cop, but was Hale interested? He wasn't but he immediately realized that he could use Baker as a second complication to the plan: a citizen getting revenge against a crooked cop. Finally, he added the wonderful flourish of the Delphic Mechanism theft.
Motive is the one sure way to get yourself caught. Eliminate the motive, you eliminate suspicion…
Hale now stepped to the front flower arrangement in the conference room and adjusted it the way any diligent soldier would do-a soldier proud to be part of this important occasion. When no one was looking he pushed one of the metal disks he'd just retrieved from downstairs-computerized detonators-into the explosive, pushed the button to arm it and fluffed up the moss, obscuring the device. He did the same to the arrangement in the back, which would detonate via a radio signal from the first detonator.
These two lovely arrangements were now lethal bombs, containing enough explosive to obliterate the entire room.
The tone in Rhyme's lab was electric.
Everyone, except Pulaski, on a mission at Rhyme's request, was staring at the criminalist, who was in turn gazing at the evidence charts that surrounded him like battalions of soldiers awaiting his orders.
"There're still too many questions," Sellitto said. "You know what's going to happen if we push thatbutton."
Rhyme glanced at Amelia Sachs. "What do you think?" he asked.
Her ample lips tightened. "I don't think we have any choice. I say yes."
"Oh, man," Sellitto said.
Rhyme said to the rumpled lieutenant, "Make the call."
Lon Sellitto dialed a little-known number that connected him immediately to the scrambled phone sitting on the desk of the mayor of New York City.
Standing in the conference room in HUD, which was filling up with soldiers and their guests, Charles Hale felt his phone vibrate. He pulled it from his pocket and glanced down at the text message, another one from Charlotte Allerton. FAA grounding all flights. Trains stopped. Special team at NIST office checking U.S. clock. It's a go. God bless.
Perfect, Charles thought. The police believed the complication about the Delphic Mechanism and his apparent plan to hack into the computer controlling the nation's cesium clock.
Hale stepped back, looked over the room and plastered a satisfied look on his face. He left and took the elevator down to the main lobby. He walked outside, where limos were arriving, under heavy security. He eased into the crowd that was gathered on the other side of the concrete barriers, some waving flags, some applauding.
He noted the protesters too, scruffy young people, aging hippies and activist professors and their spouses, he assessed. They carried placards and were chanting things that Hale couldn't hear. The gist, though, was displeasure at U.S. foreign policy.
Hang around, he told them silently.
Sometimes you get what you ask for.
Entering the sixth-floor conference room with seventeen other soldiers from all branches of the armed services, United States Army Sergeant Lucy Richter gave a brief smile to her husband. A wink too to her family-her parents and her aunt-who were sitting across the room.
The acknowledgment was perhaps a little abrupt, a little distant. But she was not here as Bob's wife or as a daughter or niece. She was here as a decorated soldier, in the company of her superior officers and her fellow men and women at arms.
The soldiers had assembled downstairs in the building, while their families and friends had come to the conference room. Waiting for their grand entrance, Lucy had chatted with a young man, an air force corps-man from Texas who'd come back to the States for medical treatment (one of those fucking rocket-propelled grenades had ricocheted off his chest pack before exploding several yards away). He was eager to get back home, he'd said.
"Home?" she'd asked. "I thought we were reenlisting."
He'd blinked. "I am. I mean my unit. That ishome."
Standing uneasily in front of her chair, she glanced at the reporters. The way they looked around them, searching hungrily for story opportunities like snipers seeking targets, made her nervous. Then she put them out of her mind and gazed at the pictures that had been mounted for the ceremony. Patriotic images. She was moved by the sight of the American flag, the photo of the Trade Center towers, the military banners and emblems, the officers with their decorations and rows of breast bars, revealing how long and where they'd served.
And all the while the debate raged. Thinking back to what Kathryn Dance had said, she asked herself: And what's the truth for me?
Go back to the land of bitter fog?
Or stay here?
Yes, no?
The side doors opened and in walked two quick-eyed men-Secret Service-followed by a half dozen men and women in suits or uniforms with senior staff insignias and ribbons and medals covering their chests. Lucy recognized a few of the bigwigs from Washington and New York City, though she was more stirred by the presence of the brass from the Pentagon, since they'd come up through the world that she'd made a part of her life.
The wearisome debate continued within her.
Yes, no…
The truth…What's the truth?
When the officials were seated, a general from New Jersey made a few comments and introduced a poised, handsome man in a dark blue uniform. General Roger Poulin, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rose and walked to the microphone.
Poulin nodded to his presenter and then to those in the room. In a deep voice he said, "Generals, distinguished officials from the Departments of Defense and State and the City of New York, fellow servicemen and -women and guests…I'm delighted to welcome you here today to this celebration honoring eighteen brave individuals, people who have risked their lives and displayed their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the freedom of our country and carry the cause of democracy throughout the globe."
Applause erupted and the guests rose to their feet.
The noise died down and General Poulin began his speech. Lucy Richter listened at first but her attention soon faded. She was looking at the civilians in the room-the family members and guests of the soldiers. People like her father and mother and husband and aunt, the spouses, the children, the parents and grandparents, the friends.
These people would leave after the ceremony, go to their jobs or their homes. They'd get back to the simple business of making their way in the world one day, one hour, one minute at a time.
Her military demeanor would not, of course, let her smile but Lucy Richter could feel her face relaxing and the tension in her shoulders vanish like the bitter fog carried away on a hot wind. The anger, the depression, the denial-everything that Kathryn Dance had told her to look for-suddenly were gone.
She closed her eyes momentarily and then turned her attention back to the man who was, after the president of the United States, her senior commander, understanding clearly now that, whatever else happened in her life, her decision had been made and she was content.
Charles Hale was in the men's room of a small coffee shop not far from the HUD building. In a filthy stall he extracted a trash bag from beneath his undershirt. He stripped off the military uniform and put on jeans, sweats, gloves and a jacket, which he'd just bought. He stuffed the uniform, coat and hat inside, keeping the gun. He took the battery and chip out of his phone and added them to the bag. Then, waiting until the restroom was empty, he stuffed it into the trash, left the coffee shop and walked outside.
On the street again, he bought a prepaid mobile phone with cash and wandered along the shadowy sidewalk until he was three blocks from HUD. From this vantage point he had a narrow view of the back of the building and the alley where the first "victim" of the Watchmaker had been found. He could just make out a sliver of the sixth-floor window of the conference room where the ceremonies were going on.
The jacket was thin and he supposed he should be cold, but in the excitement of the moment he felt no discomfort. He looked at his digital wristwatch, which was synchronized to the timers in the bomb detonators.
The time was 12:14:19. The ceremony had been under way since noon. With bombs, he'd learned in his exhaustive research, you always gave people the chance to settle in, for stragglers to arrive, for guards to grow lax.
12:14:29.
One nice aspect of these particular bombs, he reflected, something fortuitous, was that Joanne the florist had filled the vases with hundreds of tiny glass marbles. Anybody not killed or badly injured by the explosives themselves would be riddled with these pellets of glass.
12:14:44.
Hale found himself leaning forward, his weight on the balls of his feet. There was always the possibility that something would go wrong-that security would make a last-minute sweep for explosives or that somebody had seen him on the video camera entering the building then leaving suspiciously after a short period of time.
12:14:52.
Still, the risk of failure made the victory against boredom that much sweeter. His eyes were riveted on the alleyway behind the HUD building.
12:14:55.
12:14:56.
12:14:57.
12:14:58.
12:14:59.
12:15:00
Silently a huge fist of flame and debris shot out of the conference room window. A half second later came the stunning sound of the explosion itself.
Voices around him. "Oh, my God. What-?"
Screams.
"Look, there! What's that?"
"God, no!"
"Call nine-one-one! Somebody…"
Pedestrians were clustering on the sidewalk, staring.
"A bomb? An airplane?"
Concern on his face, Hale shook his head, lingering for a moment to savor the success. The explosion seemed bigger than he'd anticipated; the fatalities would be greater than Charlotte and Bud had hoped. It was hard to see how anybody could have survived.
He turned slowly and continued up the street, where he descended once more into the subway station and took the next train uptown. He emerged at the station and headed toward the Allertons' hotel, where he'd pick up the rest of his payment.
Charles Hale was satisfied. He'd staved off boredom and had earned some good money.
Most important, though, was the breathtaking elegance of what he'd done. He'd created a plan that had worked perfectly-like clockwork, he thought, enjoying the self-conscious simile.
"Oh, thank you," Charlotte whispered, speaking both to Jesus and to the man who'd made their mission a success.
She was sitting forward, staring at the TV. The special news report about the evacuation of the Metropolitan Museum and the halting of public transportation in the area had been replaced by a different story-the bombing at the HUD building. Charlotte squeezed her husband's hand. Bud leaned over and kissed her. He smiled like a young boy.
The news anchorwoman was grim-despite her restrained pleasure at being on duty when such a big story broke-as she gave what details there were: A bomb had gone off within the Housing and Urban Development building in lower Manhattan, where a number of senior government and military officials had been attending a ceremony. An undersecretary of state and the head of the Joint Chiefs were present. The cameras showed smoke pouring from the windows of a conference room. The important detail-the casualty count-had not come in yet, though at least fifty people were in the room where the bomb detonated.
A talking head popped up on the screen; his complete lack of knowledge of the event didn't stop him from drawing the conclusion that this was the job of fundamentalist Islamic terrorists.
They'd soon know differently.
"Look, honey, we did it!" Charlotte called to her daughter, who had remained in the bedroom, lost in a book. (That satanic Harry Potter. Charlotte had thrown out two of them. Where on earth had the girl gotten another copy?)
The girl gave an exasperated sigh and returned to the book.
Charlotte was momentarily furious. She wanted to storm into the bedroom and slap the girl's face as hard as she could. They'd just won a spectacular victory and the girl was showing nothing but disrespect. Bud had asked several times if he could take a hickory stick to the girl's bare butt. Charlotte had demurred but she was now wondering if maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.
Still, her anger faded when she thought of their victory today. She stood up. "We better leave." She shut the TV off and continued packing a suitcase. Bud walked into the bedroom to do the same. They were going to drive to Philadelphia, where they'd get a plane back to St. Louis-Duncan had told them to avoid the New York airports afterward. They'd then return to the backwoods of Missouri and go underground again-waiting for the next opportunity to further their cause.
Gerald Duncan would be here soon. He'd collect the rest of his money and leave town too. She wondered if she could convert him to their cause. She'd spoken to him about the idea but he wasn't interested, though he said he'd be more than happy to help them out again if they had any particularly difficult targets and if the money was right.
A knock on the door.
Duncan was right on time.
Laughing, Charlotte strode to the door and flung it open. "You did it! I-"
But her words stopped short, the smile vanished. The policeman, in black helmet and combat outfit, pushed inside. With him was Amelia Sachs, a large black pistol in her hand, her face furious, eyes squinting as she scanned the room.
A half dozen other cops streamed in behind them. "Police! Freeze, freeze!"
"No!" Charlotte wailed. She twisted away but got only one step before they tackled her hard.
In the bedroom, Bud Allerton gasped in shock as he heard his wife scream, the harsh voices and the stomping of feet. He slammed the door shut and pulled an automatic pistol from his suitcase, worked the slide to put a round in the chamber.
"No!" his stepdaughter cried, dropping her book and scrabbling for the door.
"Quiet," he whispered viciously. He grabbed her by the arm. She screamed as he flung her onto the bed. Her head hit the wall and she lay stunned. Bud had never liked the girl, didn't like her attitude, didn't like her sarcasm and her rebelliousness. Children were put on earth to obey-girls especially-or suffer the consequences if they didn't.
He listened at the door. It sounded like a dozen officers were in the living room of the suite. Bud didn't have much time for a prayer but those through whom God speaks can be moved to communicate with Him as circumstances allow.
My dear Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, thank you for the glory you've bestowed upon us, the true believers. Please give me the strength to end my life and hasten my journey to you. And let me send to hell as many of those as I can who have come here to transgress against you.
There were fifteen bullets in the clip of his pistol. He could take plenty of the police with him, if he remained steady and if God gave him the strength to ignore the wounds he'd receive. But still they'd have a lot of firepower. He needed some advantage.
Bud turned toward his sobbing stepdaughter, who was clutching her bleeding head. He added a coda to the prayer, with a kindness that he thought was particularly generous under the circumstances.
And when you receive this child into heaven, please forgive her her sins against you. She knew not what she did.
He rose, walked over to his stepdaughter and grabbed her by the hair.
"Is Allerton in there?" Amelia Sachs shouted to Charlotte, nodding at the closed bedroom door.
She said nothing.
"The girl?"
Downstairs, the desk manager explained what suite Charlotte and Bud Allerton, along with their daughter, were staying in and the layout of the place. He was pretty sure they were upstairs now. The clerk recognized the picture of the Watchmaker and said that the man had been here several times but hadn't been back today, as far as he knew.
"Where's Allerton?" Sachs now snapped. She wanted to grab the woman and shake her.
Charlotte remained silent, glaring up at the detective.
"Bathroom clear," one ESU officer called.
"Second bedroom clear."
"Closet clear," called Ron Pulaski, the slim officer looking nearly comical in the bulky flak jacket and helmet.
Only the bedroom with the closed door remained. Sachs approached it, stood to the side and motioned the other officers out of the line of fire. "You, inside the bedroom, listen! I'm a police officer. Open the door!"
No response.
Sachs tested the knob. The door was unlocked. A deep breath, gun up.
She opened the door fast and dropped into a combat shooting position. Sachs saw the girl-the same one who'd been in Charlotte's car at the Watchmaker's first crime scene. The girl's hands were tied together and adhesive tape was over her mouth and nose. Her skin was blue and she thrashed on the bed, desperate for oxygen. It was a matter of seconds until she suffocated.
Ron Pulaski shouted, "Look, the window's open." Nodding toward the bedroom window. "Guy's getting away."
He started forward.
Sachs grabbed him by the flak jacket.
"What?" he asked.
"It's not secure yet," she snapped. She nodded to the living room. "Check the fire escape from there. See if he's outside. And be careful. He might be targeting the window."
The rookie ran to the front of the room and looked out fast. He called, "Nope. Might've gotten away." He radioed ESU outside to check the alley behind the hotel.
Sachs debated. But she couldn't wait any longer. She had to save the girl. She started forward.
But then stopped fast. Despite the horrifying suffocation, Charlotte's daughter was sending her a message. She was shaking her head no, which Sachs took to mean that this was an ambush. The daughter looked to her right, indicating where Allerton, or somebody, was hiding, probably waiting to shoot.
Sachs dropped into a crouch. "Whoever's in the bedroom, drop your weapon! Lie down, face forward in the middle of the room! Now."
Silence.
The poor girl thrashed, eyes bulging.
"Drop the weapon now!"
Nothing.
Several ESU officers had come up. One hefted a flashbang grenade, designed to disorient attackers. But people can still shoot if they're deafened and blinded. Sachs was worried that he'd hit the girl if he started pumping bullets indiscriminately. She shook her head to the ESU officer and aimed into the bedroom through the door. She had to get him and now; the child had no time left.
But the girl was shaking her head again. She struggled to control the convulsions and looked to Sachs's right, then down.
Even though she was dying, she was directing Sachs's fire.
Sachs adjusted her aim-it was much farther to the right than she would have guessed. If she'd fired at the place she'd been inclined to, a shooter would've known her position and possibly hit her with return fire.
The girl nodded.
Still, Sachs hesitated. Was the girl really sending her this message? The child was revealing discipline that few adults could muster, and Sachs didn't dare misinterpret it; the risk of hurting an innocent was too great.
But then she recalled the look in the girl's eyes the first time she'd seen her, in the car near the alley by Cedar Street. There, she'd seen hope. Here, she saw courage.
Sachs gripped her pistol firmly and fired six rounds in a circular pattern where the girl was indicating. Without waiting to see what she'd hit she leapt into the room, ESU officers behind her.
"Get the girl!" she shouted, sweeping the area to her right-the bathroom and closet-with her Glock. One ESU trooper covered the room with his MP-5 machine gun as the other officers pulled the girl to safety on the floor and ripped the tape off her face. Sachs heard the rasp of her desperate inhalation, then sobbing.
Sachs flung open the closet door and stepped aside as the man's corpse-hit four times-tumbled out. She kicked aside his weapon and cleared the closet and the bathroom, then-not taking any chances-the shower stall, the space under the bed and the fire escape too.
A minute later the entire suite was clear. Charlotte, red-faced with fury and sobbing, was sitting handcuffed on the couch and the girl was in the hallway being given oxygen by medics; she'd suffered no serious injuries, they reported.
Charlotte would say nothing about the Watchmaker, and a preliminary search of the rooms gave no indication where he might be. Sachs found an envelope containing $250,000 cash, which suggested that he'd be coming here to collect a fee. She radioed Sellitto downstairs and had him clear the street of all emergency vehicles and set up hidden takedown teams.
Rhyme was on his way in his van and Sachs called to tell him to take the back entrance. She then went into the hallway to check on the girl.
"How you doing?"
"Okay, I guess. My face hurts."
"They took the tape off pretty fast, I'll bet."
"Yeah, kinda."
"Thanks for what you did. You saved lives. You saved mylife." The girl gazed at Sachs with a curious look then glanced down. The detective handed her the Harry Potter book she'd found in the bedroom and Sachs asked if the girl knew anything about the man calling himself Gerald Duncan.
"He was creepy. Like, way weird. He'd just look at you like you were a rock or a car or a table. Not a person."
"You have any idea where he is?"
She shook her head. "All I know is I heard Mom say he was renting a place in Brooklyn somewhere. I don't know where. He wouldn't say. But he's coming by later to pick up some money."
Sachs pulled Pulaski aside and asked him to check all the calls to and from Charlotte's and Bud's mobile phones, as well as the calls from the hotel room phone.
"How 'bout the lobby phone too? The pay phone, I mean. And the ones on the street nearby."
She lifted an eyebrow. "Good idea."
The rookie headed off on his mission. Sachs got a soda and gave it to the girl. She opened the can and drank down half of it fast. She was looking at Sachs in a strange way. Then she gave a laugh.
Sachs asked, "What?"
"You really don't remember me, do you? I met you before."
"Near the alley on Tuesday. Sure."
"No, no. Like, a long time before that."
Sachs squinted. She recalled that she hadfelt some sense of familiarity when she'd seen the girl in the car at the first crime scene in the alley. And she felt it even more strongly now. But she couldn't place where she might've seen the girl prior to Tuesday. "I'm afraid I don't remember."
"You saved my life. I was a little girl."
"A long time…" Then Amelia Sachs squinted, turned toward the mother and studied Charlotte more closely. "Oh, my God," she gasped.
Inside the shabby hotel room, Lincoln Rhyme shook his head in disbelief as Sachs told him what she'd just learned: that they had known Charlotte some years ago when she'd come to New York using the pseudonym Carol Ganz. She and her daughter, whose name was Pammy, had been victims in the first case Sachs and Rhyme had worked together-the very one he'd been thinking of earlier, the kidnapper obsessed with human bones, a perp as clever and ruthless as the Watchmaker.
To pursue him, Rhyme had recruited Sachs to be his eyes and ears and legs at the crime scenes and together they'd managed to rescue both the woman and her daughter-only to learn that Carol was really Charlotte Willoughby. She was part of a right-wing militia movement, which abhorred the federal government and its involvement in world affairs. After their rescue and reunion, the woman managed to slip a bomb into the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. The explosion killed six people.
Rhyme and Sachs had taken up the case but Charlotte and the girl disappeared into the movement's underground, probably in the Midwest or West, and eventually the trail went cold.
From time to time they would check out FBI, VICAP and local police reports with a militia or right-wing political angle but no leads to Charlotte or Pammy panned out. Sachs's concern for the little girl never diminished, though, and sometimes, lying in bed with Rhyme at night, she'd wonder out loud how the girl was doing, if it was too late to save her. Sachs, who'd always wanted children, was horrified at the kind of life her mother was presumably forcing the girl to live-hiding out, having few friends her age, never going to a regular school-all in the name of some hateful cause.
And now Charlotte-with her new husband, Bud Allerton-had returned to the city on yet another mission of terrorism, and Rhyme and Sachs had become entwined in their lives once again.
Charlotte now glared at Rhyme, her eyes filled with both tears and hatred. "You murdered Bud! You goddamn fascists! You killed him." The prisoner then gave a cold laugh. "But we won! How many did we kill tonight? Fifty people. Seventy-five? And how many senior people in the Pentagon?"
Sachs leaned close to her face. "Did you know there'd be children in that conference room? Husbands and wives of the soldiers? Their parents? Grandparents? Did you knowthat?"
"Of course we knew it," Charlotte said.
"They were just sacrifices too, is that right?"
"For the greater good," Charlotte replied.
Which was maybe a slogan she and her group recited at the beginning of their rallies, or whatever meetings they had.
Rhyme caught Sachs's eye. He said, "Maybe we should show her the carnage."
Sachs nodded and clicked on the TV.
An anchorwoman was on the screen. "…one minor injury. A bomb squad officer who was driving a remote-control robot in an attempt to defuse the bombs was wounded slightly by shrapnel. He's been treated and released. Property damage was estimated at five hundred thousand dollars. Despite initial reports, neither al-Qaeda nor any other Islamic terrorist group has been implicated in the bombing. According to a New York Police Department spokeswoman, a domestic terrorist organization was responsible. Again, if you're just joining us, two bombs exploded around noon today in the office of Housing and Urban Development in lower Manhattan but there were no fatalities and only one minor injury. An undersecretary of state and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were among the intended victims… "
Sachs muted the volume and turned a smug gaze toward Charlotte.
"No," the woman gasped. "Oh, no…What-?"
Rhyme said, "Obviously-we figured it out beforethe bomb went off and evacuated the room."
Charlotte was appalled. "But…impossible. No…The airports were shut down, the trains-"
"Oh, that," Rhyme said dismissively. "We just needed to buy some time. At first, sure, I thought he was stealing the Delphic Mechanism but then I decided it was just a feint. But that didn't mean he hadn'tdone something to the NIST clock. So while we were figuring out what he was really up to, we called the mayor and had him order flights and public transportation in the area suspended."
You know what's going to happen if we pushthat button…
She glanced into the bedroom where her husband had died such a pointless death. Then the ideologue within her kicked in and she said in a flat voice, "You'll never beat us. You may win a battle or two. But we'll take our country back. We'll-"
"Yo, hold that rhetoric, wouldja?" The speaker was a tall, lanky black man, stepping into the room. This was FBI Special Agent Fred Dellray. When he'd heard about the domestic terrorist angle he'd handed off the accounting fraud case that he'd been assisting on ("Was a yawner anyway") and announced that that he was going to be the federal liaison on the HUD bombing.
Dellray was wearing a powder blue suit and a shocking green shirt underneath a brown herringbone overcoat, circa 1975; the agent's taste in couture was as brash as his manner. He looked Charlotte over. "Well, well, well, lookit what we caught ou'selves." The woman gazed back defiantly. He laughed. "A shame you're going to jail for…well, forever,and you didn't even do whatcha'll had your heart set on. How's it feel t'be swimmin' laps in the loser pool?"
Dellray's approach to interviewing suspects was a lot different from Kathryn Dance's; Rhyme suspected she wouldn't approve.
Charlotte had been arrested by Sachs on state charges and it was now Dellray's turn to arrest her for the federal crimes-both for this incident and for the UN bombing years ago, her involvement in a federal courthouse shooting in San Francisco and some miscellaneous charges.
Charlotte said she understood her rights and then started another lecture.
Dellray wagged a finger at her. "Gimme a minute, sweetheart." The lean man turned to Rhyme. "So how'd you figure this one out, Lincoln? We heard X,we heard Y,all 'bout some boys in blue taking money they shouldn'ta been doin' and then some bizarre fella leavin' clocks as callin' cards-then next thing we know the airports're closed and there's a priority-one security alert at HUD innerupting my nap."
Rhyme detailed the frantic process of kinesic and forensic work that led them to figure out the Watchmaker's real plan. Kathryn Dance had suggested that he was lying about his mission in New York. So they'd looked into the evidence again. Some of it pointed to the possible theft of a rare artifact in the Metropolitan Museum.
But the more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Rhyme figured Duncan had made up the story about the undelivered package to the Met just to get them focused on the museum. Somebody as careful as the Watchmaker wouldn't leave the trail he did. He turned in Vincent, knowing the rapist would give up the church, where he'd left other museum brochures referring to the Mechanism. He mentioned it to Hallerstein and to Vincent as well. No, he was up to something else. But what? Kathryn Dance reviewed the interview tape again, several times, and decided that he might have been lying when he said he picked the supposed victims simply because their locations meant easy getaways.
"Which meant," Rhyme told Dellray, "that he picked them for some other purpose. So, did they have anything in common?"
Rhyme had remembered something Dance learned about the first crime scene. Ari Cobb had said that the SUV was originally parked in the back of the alley but then the Watchmaker returned to the front to leave the body. "Why? One reason was that he needed to put the victim in a particular place. What was it near? The back door to the Housing and Urban Development building."
Rhyme had then gotten the client list from the flooring company where he'd planted the fake fire extinguisher bomb and learned that they'd provided carpeting and tile for the HUD offices.
"I sent our rookie downtown to look around. He found a building across Cedar Street that was being renovated. The crews had tarred the roof a week ago, just before the cold spell. Flakes of tar matched those found on our perp's shoes. The roof was a perfect place to check out HUD."
This also explained why he'd poured sand on the ground at the crime scene and swept it up-to make absolutely certain they didn't find trace that'd help anyone identify him later when he came back to assemble and arm the bombs.
Rhyme also found that the other victims had a connection to the building. Lucy Richter was being recognized there today, and she'd had the specially issued passes and IDs to get into all parts of the building. She also had a classified memo on security and evacuation procedures.
As for Joanne Harper, it turned out that she'd done the flower arrangements for the ceremony-a good way to smuggle something into the building.
"A bomb, I guessed. We got the mayor involved and he called the press, had them hold off on the story that we were evacuating HUD so the perps wouldn't rabbit. But the device blew before the bomb squad could disarm it." Rhyme shook his head. "Just hateit when good evidence blows up. You know how hard it is to lift prints off pieces of metal that've been flying through the air at thirty thousand feet a second?"
"How'dja get Miss Congeniality here?" Dellray asked, nodding at Charlotte.
Rhyme said dismissively, "That was easy. She was careless. If Duncan was fake, then the woman helping him at the first scene in the alley had to be fake too. Our rookie got all the tag numbers of cars in the vicinity of the alley off Cedar. The car the supposed sister was driving was an Avis, rented to Charlotte Allerton. We checked all the hotels in the city until we found her."
Dellray shook his head. "An' what about yo' perp? Mr. Clockmaker?"
"It's 'Watchmaker,'" the criminalist grumbled. "And that's a different story." He explained that Charlotte's daughter, Pam, had heard that he had a place in Brooklyn but she didn't know where it was. "No other leads."
Dellray bent down. "Where in Brooklyn? Need to know. And now."
Charlotte replied defiantly, "You're pathetic! All of you! You're just lackeys for the bureaucracy in Washington. You're selling out the heart of our country and-"
Dellray leaned forward, right into her face. He clicked his tongue. "Uhuh. No politics, no phi losophy…All we want're answers to the questions. We all together on that?"
"Fuck you" was Charlotte's response.
Dellray blew air through his cheeks like a trumpet player. He moaned, "I am nomatch for this intellect."
Rhyme wished Kathryn Dance was here to interrogate the woman, though he guessed it would take a long time to pry information from her. He eased forward in the wheelchair and said in a whisper, so Pam couldn't hear, "If you help us out I can make sure you see your daughter from time to time when you're in prison. If you don't cooperate, I will guarantee that you never see her again as long as you live."
Charlotte glanced into the hallway, where Pam sat on a chair, defiantly clutching her Harry Potter. The dark-haired girl was pretty, with fragile features, but very slim. She wore faded jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt. The skin around her eyes was dark. She clicked her fingernails together compulsively. The girl seemed needy in a hundred different ways.
Charlotte turned back to Rhyme. "Then I'll never see her again," she said calmly.
Dellray blinked at this, his usually unrevealing face tightening in revulsion.
Rhyme himself could think of nothing more to say to the woman.
It was then that Ron Pulaski came running into the room. He paused to catch his breath.
"What?" Rhyme asked.
It took a moment for him to be able to answer. Finally, he said, "The phones…The Watchmaker…"
"Out with it, Ron."
"Sorry…" A deep breath. "We couldn't trace his mobile but a hotel clerk saw her, Charlotte, making calls around midnight every night over the past four or five days. I called the phone company. I got the number she called. They traced it. It's to a pay phone in Brooklyn. At this intersection." He handed the slip of paper to Sellitto, who relayed it to Bo Haumann and ESU.
"Good job," Sellitto said to Pulaski. He called the deputy inspector of the precinct where the phone was located. Officers would start a canvass of the neighborhood as soon as Mel Cooper emailed pictures of the composite to the DI.
Rhyme supposed that the Watchmaker might not live near the phone-it wouldn't have surprised the criminalist-but a mere thirty minutes later they had a positive identification from a patrol officer, who found several neighbors who recognized the man.
Sellitto took the number and alerted Bo Haumann.
Sachs announced, "I'll call in from the scene."
"Hold on," Rhyme said, glancing at her. "Why don't you sit this one out. Let Bo handle it."
"What?"
"They'll have a full tactical force."
Rhyme was thinking of the superstition that cops on short time were more likely to get killed or injured than others. Rhyme didn't believe in superstitions. That didn't matter. He didn't want her to go.
Amelia Sachs would be thinking the same thing, perhaps; she was debating, it seemed. Then he saw her looking into the hallway at Pam Willoughby. She turned back to the criminalist. Their eyes met. He gave a faint smile and nodded.
She grabbed her leather jacket and headed for the door.
In a quiet neighborhood in Brooklyn a dozen tactical officers moved slowly along the sidewalk, another six creeping through an alley behind a shabby detached house.
This was a neighborhood of modest houses in small yards, presently filled with Christmas decorations. The minuscule size of the lots had no effect on the owners' ability to populate the land with as many Santas, reindeer and elves as possible.
Sachs was walking down the sidewalk slowly at the head of the takedown team. She was on the radio with Rhyme. "We're here," she said softly.
"What's the story?"
"We've cleared the houses on either side and behind. There's nobody opposite." A community vegetable garden was across the street. A ragged scarecrow sat in the middle of the tiny lot. Across his chest was a swirl of graffiti.
"Pretty good site for a takedown. We're-hold on, Rhyme." A light had gone on in one of the front rooms. The cops around her stopped and crouched. She whispered, "He's still here… I'm signing off."
"Go get him, Sachs." She heard an unusual determination in his voice. She knew he was upset that the man had escaped. Saving the people at the HUD building and capturing Charlotte were fine. But Rhyme wasn't happy unless all the perps ended up in cuffs.
But he wasn't as determined as Amelia Sachs. She wanted to give Rhyme the Watchmaker-as a present to mark their last case together.
She changed radio frequencies and said into her stalk mike, "Detective Five Eight Eight Five to ESU One."
Bo Haumann, at a staging area a block away, came on the radio. "Go ahead, K."
"He's here. Just saw a light go on in the front room."
"Roger, B Team, you copy?"
These were the officers behind the bungalow. "B Team leader to ESU One. Roger that. We're-hold on. Okay, he's upstairs now. Just saw the light go on up there. Looks like the back bedroom."
"Don't assume he's alone," Sachs said. "There could be somebody else from Charlotte's outfit with him. Or he might've picked up another partner."
"Roger that, Detective," Haumann said in his gravelly voice. "S and S, what can you tell us?"
The Search and Surveillance teams were just getting into position on the roof of the apartment building behind and in the garden across the street from the Watchmaker's safe house, on which they were training their instruments.
"S and S One to ESU One. All the shades're drawn. Can't get a look at all. We've got heat in the back of the house. But he's not walking around. There's a light on in the attic but we can't see in-no windows, just louvers, K."
"Same here-S and S Two. No visual. Heat upstairs, nothing on the ground floor. Heard a click or two a second ago, K."
"Weapon?"
"Could be. Or maybe just appliances or the furnace, K."
The ESU officer next to Sachs deployed his officers with hand signals. He, Sachs and two others clustered at the front door, another team of four right behind them. One held the battering ram. The other three covered the windows on the ground and the second floors.
"B Team to One. We're in position. Got a ladder next to the lit room in the back, K."
"A Team, in position," another ESU officer radioed in a whisper.
"We're no-knock," Haumann told the teams. "On my count of three, flashbangs into the rooms that have the lights on. Throw 'em hard to get through the shades. On one, simultaneous dynamic entry front and back. B Team, split up, cover the ground floor and basement. A Team, go straight upstairs. Remember, this guy knows how to make IEDs. Look for devices."
"B Team, copy."
"A, copy."
Despite the freezing air Sachs's palms were sweating inside the tight Nomex gloves. She pulled the right one away and blew into it. Did the same with the left. Then she cinched up the body armor and unsnapped the cover of her spare ammo clip carrier. The other officers had machine guns but Sachs never went for that. She preferred the elegance of a single well-placed round to a spray of lead.
Sachs and the three officers on the primary entry team nodded at one another.
Haumann's raspy voice began the count. "Six…five…four…three…"
The sound of breaking glass filled the crisp air as officers flung the grenades through the windows.
Haumann, continuing calmly: "Two…one."
The sharp crack of the flashbangs shook the windows and bursts of white light filled the house momentarily. The burly officer with the battering ram slammed it into the front door. It crashed open without resistance and in a few seconds the officers were spreading out in the sparsely furnished house.
Flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, Sachs stayed with her team as they worked their way up the stairs.
She began hearing the voices of the other officers calling in as they cleared the basement and the rooms on the ground floor.
One upstairs bedroom was empty, the second, as well.
Then all the rooms were declared clear.
"Where the hell is he?" Sachs muttered.
"Always an adventure, huh?" somebody asked.
"Invisible fucking perp," came another voice.
Then in her earpiece she heard: "S and S One. Light in the attic just went out. He's up there."
In the small bedroom toward the back they found a trapdoor in the ceiling, a thick string hanging from it. A pull-down stair. An officer shut out the light in this room so it would be harder to target them. They stood back and pointed their guns at the door as Sachs gripped the string and pulled hard. It creaked downward, revealing a folding ladder.
The team leader shouted, "You, in the attic. Come down now… Do you hear me? This is your last chance."
Nothing.
He said, "Flashbang."
An officer pulled one off his belt and nodded.
The team leader put his hand on the ladder but Sachs shook her head. "I'll take him."
"Are you sure you want to?"
Sachs nodded. "Only, let me borrow a helmet."
She took one and strapped it on.
"We're set, Detective."
"Let's do it." Sachs climbed up near the top-then took the flashbang. She pulled the pin and closed her eyes so the flash from the grenade wouldn't blind her and also to acclimate her eyes to the darkness of the attic.
Okay, here we go.
She pitched the grenade into the attic and lowered her head.
Three seconds later it detonated and Sachs, opening her eyes, charged the rest of the way up the ladder into the small area, filled with a haze of smoke and the smell of explosive residue from the flashbang. She rolled away from the opening, clicking on her flashlight and sweeping it in a circle as she moved to a post, the only cover she could find.
Nothing to the right, nothing center, nothing-
It was then that she fell off the face of the earth.
The floor wasn't wood at all, like it seemed, but cardboard over insulating crud. Her right leg crashed through the Sheetrock of the bedroom ceiling, gripping her, immobile. She cried out in pain.
"Detective!" somebody called.
Sachs lifted the light and the gun in the only direction she could see-straight in front of her. The killer wasn't there.
Which meant he was behind her.
It was at that moment that the overhead light clicked on, almost directly above her, making her a perfect target.
She struggled to turn around, awaiting the sharp crack of a gun, the numb slam of the bullet into her head or neck or back.
Sachs thought of her father.
She thought of Lincoln Rhyme.
You and me, Sachs…
Then she decided no way was she going out without getting a piece of him. She took the pistol in her teeth and used both hands to wrench herself around and find a target.
She heard boots on the ladder as an ESU officer charged up to help her. Of course, that'swhat the Watchmaker was waiting for-a chance to kill more of the officers. He was using her as bait to draw other cops to their deaths and hoped to escape in the chaos.
"Look out!" she called, gripping her pistol in her hand. "He's-"
"Where is he?" the A Team leader asked. The man was crouching at the top of the stairs. He hadn't heard her-or hadn't listened-and had sped up the ladder, followed by two other officers. They were scanning the room-including the area behind Sachs.
Her heart pounding furiously, she struggled to look over her shoulder. She asked, "You don't see him? He's gotta be there."
"Zip."
He and another officer bent down, gripped her body armor and pulled her out of the Sheetrock. Crouching, she spun around.
The room was empty.
"How'd he get out?" the ESU officer muttered. "No doors or windows."
Sachs noticed something across the room. She gave a sour laugh. "He was never here at all. Not up here, not downstairs. He probably took off hours ago."
"But the lights. Somebodywas turning them on and off."
"Nope. Take a look." She pointed to a small beige box connected to the fusebox. "He wanted to make us think he was still here. Give him a better chance to get away."
"What is it?"
"What else? It's a timer."
Sachs finished searching the scene at the house in Brooklyn and sent what little evidence she could find to Rhyme's.
She stripped off her Tyvek outfit and pulled her jacket on, then hurried through the cutting chill to Sellitto's car. In the back sat Pam Willoughby, clutching her Harry Potter book and sipping hot chocolate, which the big detective had scrounged for her. He was still in the perp's safe house, finishing up the paperwork. Sachs climbed in, sat beside her. At Kathryn Dance's suggestion, they'd brought the girl here to examine the place and the Watchmaker's possessions in hopes that something might trigger a memory. But the man hadn't left much behind and in any event nothing Pammy saw gave her any more insights about him.
Smiling, Sachs looked the girl over, remembering that strange expression of hope when she'd seen her in the rental car at the first scene. The policewoman said, "I've thought about you a lot over the years."
"Me too," the girl said, looking down into her cup.
"Where did you go after New York?"
"We went back to Missouri and hid out in the woods. Mom left me with other people a lot. Mostly I just stayed by myself and read. I didn't get along very good with anybody. They were crappy to me. If you didn't think the way they did-which was pretty messed up-they totally dissed you.
"A lot of them were home-schooling people. But I really wanted to go to public school and I made a big deal out of it. Bud didn't want me to but Mom finally agreed. But she said if I told anybody about her, what she'd done, I'd go to jail too as an assistant…no, an accomplice. And men would do stuff to me there. You know what I'm talking about."
"Oh, honey." Sachs squeezed her hand. Amelia Sachs wanted children badly and knew that, one way or another, they were in her future. She was appalled that a mother had put her child through this.
"And sometimes, when it got real bad, I'd think about you and pretend you were my mother. I didn't know your name. Maybe I heard it back then but I couldn't remember. So I gave you another one: Artemis. From this book I read about mythology. She was the goddess of the hunt. Because you killed that mad dog-the one that was attacking me." She looked down. "It's a stupid name."
"No, no, it's a wonderful name. I love it… You recognized me in the alleyway Tuesday, didn't you? When you were in the car?"
"Yeah. I think you were meant to be there-to save me again. Don't you think things like that happen?"
No, Sachs didn't. But she said, "Life works in funny ways sometimes."
A city car pulled up and a social worker Sachs knew climbed out and joined them.
"Whoa." The woman, a pretty African-American, rubbed her hands together in front of the heater vent. "It's not even winter yet officially. This isn't fair." She'd been making arrangements for the girl and she now explained, "We've found a couple real nice foster families. There's one in Riverdale I've known for years. You'll stay there for the next few days while we see if we can track down some of your relatives."
Pammy was frowning. "Can I get a new name?"
"A new-?"
"I don't want to be me anymore. And I don't want my mother to talk to me again. And I don't want any of those people she's with to find me."
Sachs preempted whatever the social worker was going to say. "We'll make sure nothing happens to you. That's a promise."
Pammy hugged her.
"So I can see you again?" Sachs asked.
Trying to contain her excitement at this, the girl said, "I guess. If you want."
"How 'bout shopping tomorrow?"
"Okay. Sure."
"Good. It's a date." Sachs had an idea. "Hey, you like dogs?"
"Yeah, some folks I stayed with in Missouri had one. I liked him better than the people."
She called Thom at Rhyme's town house. "Got a question."
"Go ahead."
"Any takers on Jackson yet?"
"Nope. He's still up for adoption."
"Take him off the market," Sachs said. She hung up and looked at Pam. "I've got an early Christmas present for you."
Sometimes even the best-designed watches simply don't work.
The devices really are quite fragile, when you think about it. Five hundred, a thousand minuscule moving parts, nearly microscopic screws and springs and jewels, all precisely assembled, dozens of separate movements working in unison… A hundred things can go wrong. Sometimes the watchmaker miscalculates, sometimes a tiny piece of metal is defective, sometimes the owner winds the mechanism too tight. Sometimes he drops it. Moisture gets under the crystal.
Then again the watch might work perfectly in one environment but not in another. Even the famed Rolex Oyster Perpetual, revolutionary for being the first luxury divers' watch, can't withstand unlimited pressure underwater.
Now, near Central Park, Charles Vespasian Hale sat in his own car, which he'd driven here from San Diego-no trail at all, if you pay cash for gas and avoid toll roads-and wondered what had gone wrong with his plan.
He supposed the answer was the police, specifically Lincoln Rhyme. Hale had done everything he could think of to anticipate his moves. But the former cop managed to end up just a bit ahead of him. Rhyme had done exactly what Hale had been worried about-he'd looked at a few gears and levers and extrapolated from them how Hale's entire timepiece had been constructed.
He'd have plenty of time to consider what went wrong and to try to avoid the same problems in the future. He'd be driving back to California, leaving immediately. He glanced at his face in the rearview mirror. He'd dyed his hair back to its natural color and the pale blue contact lenses were gone, but the collagen, which gave him the thick nose and puffy cheeks and double chin, hadn't bled from his skin yet. And it would takes months before he regained the forty pounds he'd lost for the job and became himself again. He felt pasty and sluggish after all this time in the city and needed to get back to his wilderness and mountains once again.
Yes, he'd failed. But, as he told Vincent Reynolds, that wasn't significant in the great scheme of things. He wasn't concerned about the arrest of Charlotte Allerton. They knew nothing of his real identity (they'd believed all along his real name was Duncan) and their initial contacts had been through extremely discreet individuals.
Moreover, there was actually a positive side to the failure here-Hale had learned something that had changed his life. He'd created the persona of the Watchmaker simply because the character seemed spooky and would snag the attention of a populace and police turned on by made-for-TV criminals.
But as he got into the role, Hale found to his surprise that this character was the embodiment of his true personality. Playing the part was like coming home. He had indeed grown fascinated with watches and clocks and time. (He'd also developed an abiding interest in the Delphic Mechanism; stealing it at some point in the future was a distinct possibility.)
The Watchmaker…
Charles Hale was himself simply a timepiece. You could use a watch for something joyous like checking contractions for the birth of a baby. Or heinous: coordinating the time of a raid to slaughter women and children.
Time transcends morality.
He now looked down at what sat on the seat next to him, the gold Breguet pocket watch. In his gloved hands, he picked it up, wound it slowly-always better to underwind than over--and carefully slipped it between the sheets of bubble wrap in a large white envelope.
Hale sealed the self-adhesive flap and started the car.
There were no clear leads.
Rhyme, Sellitto, Cooper and Pulaski were sitting in the lab on Central Park West, going over the few things found in the perp's Brooklyn safe house.
Amelia Sachs was not present at the moment. She hadn't announced where she was going. But she didn't need to. She'd mentioned to Thom that she'd be nearby, if they needed her-at a meeting on Fifty-seventh and Sixth. Rhyme had checked the phone directory. That was the location of the Argyle Security headquarters.
Rhyme simply couldn't think about that, and he was concentrating on how to continue the search for the Watchmaker, whoever he might be.
Working backward, Rhyme constructed a rough scenario of the events. The ceremony had been announced on October 15, so Carol and Bud had contacted the Watchmaker sometime around then. He'd come to New York around November 1, the date of the lease on the Brooklyn safe house. A few weeks later, Amelia Sachs had taken over the Creeley case and soon after, Baker and Wallace decided to have her killed.
"Then they hooked up with the Watchmaker. What'd he tell us, when we thought he was Duncan? About their meeting?"
Sellitto said, "Just that somebody at the club put them together-the club where Baker put the touch on his friend."
"But he was lying. There was no club… " Rhyme shook his head. "Somebody put them together, somebody who knows the Watchmaker-probably somebody in the area. If we can find them, there could be some solid leads. Is Baker talking?"
"Nope, not a word. Nobody is."
The rookie was shaking his head. "That's going to be a tough one. I mean, how many OC crews are there in the metro area? Take forever to track down the right one. Not like they're going to be volunteering to help us out."
The criminalist frowned. "What're you talking about? What's an organized crime posse got to do with anything?"
"Well, I just assumed somebody with an OC connection was the one who'd put them together."
"Why?"
"Baker wants to have a cop killed, right? But he can't do it in a way that'll make him look suspicious so he has to hire somebody. He goes to some mob connection he has. The mob's not going to clip a cop so he puts Baker in touch with somebody who might: the Watchmaker."
When nobody said anything, Pulaski blushed and looked down. "I don't know. Just a thought."
"And a fucking good one, kid," Sellitto said.
"Really?"
Rhyme nodded. "Not bad…Let's call the OC task force downtown and see if their snitches can tell us anything. Call Dellray too…Now, let's get back to the evidence."
They'd located some friction ridges in the safe house in Brooklyn but none of the fingerprints came back positive from the Bureau's IAFIS system and none matched prints from prior scenes. The lease for the house had been executed under yet another fake name and the man had given a phony prior address. It had been a cash transaction. An exhaustive search of Internet activity in the neighborhood revealed that the man had apparently logged on occasionally through several nearby wireless networks. There were no records of emails, only Web browsing. The site he'd visited most often was a bookstore that sold continuing-education course texts for certain medical specialties.
Sellitto said, "Shit, maybe somebody else's hired him."
You bet, Rhyme thought, nodding. "He'll be targeting another victim-or victims. Probably coming up with his plan right now. Think of the damage he could do pretending to be a doctor."
And I let him get away.
An examination of the trace evidence Sachs had collected revealed little more than shearling fibers and a few bits of a green vegetative material containing evaporated seawater-which didn't, it turned out, match the seaweed and ocean water found around Robert Wallace's boat on Long Island.
The deputy inspector at the Brooklyn precinct called to report that further canvassing of the neighborhood had been useless. A half dozen people remembered seeing the Watchmaker but nobody knew anything about him.
As for Charlotte and her late husband, Bud Allerton, the investigative efforts were much more successful. The couple had not been nearly as careful as the Watchmaker. Sachs had found a great deal of evidence about the underground militia groups they'd been harbored by, including a large one in Missouri and the infamous Patriot Assembly in upstate New York, which Rhyme and Sachs had tangled with in the past. Phone calls, fingerprints and emails would give the FBI and local police plenty of leads to pursue.
The doorbell rang and Thom left the room to answer it. A moment later he returned with a woman in a military uniform. This would be Lucy Richter, the Watchmaker's fourth "victim." Rhyme noted that she was more surprised at the forensic lab in his town house than his disability. Then it occurred to him that this was a woman involved in a type of combat where bombs were the weapon of choice; she'd undoubtedly seen missing limbs and para- and quadriplegia of all sorts. Rhyme's condition didn't faze her.
She explained that she'd called Kathryn Dance not long ago to say she wanted to speak to the investigators; the California detective had suggested she call or stop by Rhyme's.
Thom zipped in and offered her coffee or tea. Normally piqued about visitors and reluctant to give anyone an incentive to linger, Rhyme now, to the contrary, glared at the aide. "She might be hungry, Thom. Or might want something more substantial. Scotch, for instance."
"There's just no figuring you out," Thom said. "Didn't know there was an armed forces hospitality rule in the Lincoln Rhyme edition of Emily Post."
"Thanks, but nothing for me," Lucy said. "I can't stay long. First, I want to thank you. For saving my life-twice."
"Actually," Sellitto pointed out, "you weren't in any danger the first time. He was never going to hurt you-or any of the victims. The second time? Well, okay, accepted-since he wanted to blow the conference room to smithereens."
"My family was there too," she said. "I can't thank you enough."
Rhyme was, as always, uneasy with the gratitude, though he nodded with what he thought was an appropriate acknowledgment.
"The other reason is that I found out something that might be helpful. I've been talking to my neighbors about when he broke in. One man, he lives three buildings down the street, told me something. He said that yesterday he was getting a delivery at the back of the building and he found a rope dangling into the alley from the roof. You can get there from my roof pretty easily. I was thinking that maybe that was how he escaped."
"Interesting," Rhyme said.
"But there's something else. My husband took a look. Bob was a Navy SEAL for two years-"
"Navy? And you're army?" Pulaski asked, laughing.
She smiled. "We have some…interesting discussions from time to time. Especially during football season. Anyway, he looked at the rope and said whoever tied it knew what he was doing. It was a rare knot used in abseiling-you know, rappelling. It's called a dead man's knot. You don't see it much in this country, mostly in Europe. He must've had some experience rock climbing or mountaineering overseas."
"Ah, some hard information." Rhyme glanced darkly at Pulaski. "A shame the victimhad to find the evidence, don't you think? That really is in ourjob description." He turned toward Lucy. "The rope's still there?"
"Yes."
"Good…You in town for a while?" Rhyme asked. "If we catch him, we might need you to testify at his trial."
"I'm going back overseas soon. But I'm sure I can come back for a trial. I could get a special leave for that."
"How long will you be there?"
"I reenlisted for two years."
"You did?" Sellitto asked.
"I wasn't going to. It's tough over there. But I decided to go back."
"Because of the bomb at the ceremony?"
"No, it was just before that. I was looking at the families and the other soldiers there and thinking it's funny how life puts you in places you never thought you'd be. But there you are and you're doing something good and important and, basically, it just feels right. So." She pulled on her jacket. "If you need me, I'll get a leave home."
They said good-bye and Thom saw her out the door.
When he returned Rhyme told the aide, "Add that to the profile. A rock climber or mountaineer, possibly European trained." To Pulaski, Rhyme said, "And have somebody from the CS Unit go collect the rope that you missed in the first place-"
"Actually, I wasn't really the one who searched-"
"-and then find a climbing expert. I want to know where he might've trained. And run the rope too. Where'd he buy it and when?"
"Yessir."
Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang again and Thom returned with Kathryn Dance. The white iPod earbuds dangling over her shoulders, she greeted everyone. She was holding a white, eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelope.
"Hi," said Pulaski.
Rhyme lifted an eyebrow in greeting.
"I'm on my way to the airport," Dance explained. "Just wanted to say good-bye. Oh, this was on the doorstep."
She handed the envelope to Thom.
The aide glanced at it. "No return address." Frowning.
"Let's be safe," Rhyme said. "The basket."
Sellitto took the envelope and walked to a large bin that was made out of woven steel strips-like a wicker laundry hamper. He set the envelope inside and clamped the lid shut. As a matter of course, any unidentified packages went into the bomb basket, which was designed to diffuse the force of a small-to-medium-sized improvised explosive device. It contained sensors that would pick up any trace of nitrates and other common explosives.
The computer sniffed the vapors emanating from the envelope and reported that it wasn't a bomb.
Wearing latex gloves, Cooper retrieved and examined it. The envelope bore a computer-generated label, reading only, Lincoln Rhyme.
"Self-sticking," the tech added with a resigned grimace. Criminalists preferred old-style envelopes that perps had to lick; the adhesive was a good source of DNA. Cooper added that he was familiar with the brand of envelope; it was sold in stores all over the country and virtually untraceable.
Rhyme wheeled closer and, with Dance beside him, watched the tech extract a pocket watch and a note, also the product of a computer printer. "It's from him," Cooper announced.
The envelope had been there for no more than a quarter of an hour-the time between Lucy Richter's departure and Dance's arrival. Sellitto called Central to have some cars from the nearby Twentieth Precinct sweep the neighborhood. Cooper emailed the Watchmaker's composite to the house.
The timepiece was ticking and showed the accurate time. It was gold and there were several small dials set in the face.
"Heavy," Cooper said. He pulled on magnifying goggles and examined it closely. "Looks old, signs of wear…no personalized engravings." He took a camel hair brush and dusted the watch over a piece of newsprint. The envelope too. No trace was dislodged.
"Here's the note, Lincoln." He mounted it on an overhead projector.
Dear Mr. Rhyme:
I will be gone by the time you receive this. I have by now, of course, learned that none of the attendees at the conference was injured. I concluded you had anticipated my plans. I then anticipated yours and delayed my trip to Charlotte's hotel, which gave me the chance to spot your officers. I assume you saved her daughter. I am pleased about that. She deserves better than that pair.
So congratulations. I thought the plan was perfect. But I was apparently wrong.
The pocket watch is a Breguet. It is the favorite of the many timepieces I have come across. It was made in the early 1800s and features a ruby cylinder escapement, perpetual calendar and parachute antishock device. I hope you appreciate the phases-of-the-moon window, in light of our recent adventures. There are few specimens like this watch in the world. I give it to you as a present, out of respect. No one has ever stopped me from finishing a job; you're as good as they get.
(I would say you're as good as I, but that is not quite true. You did not, after all, catch me.) Keep the Breguet wound (but gently); it will be counting the time until we meet again.
Some advice: If I were you, I would make every one of those seconds count.
– The Watchmaker
Sellitto grimaced.
"What?" Rhyme asked.
"You get classier threats than me, Linc. Usually my perps just say, 'I'm gonna kill you.' And what the hell is that?" He pointed to the note. "A semicolon? He's threatening you and he's using semicolons. That's fucked up."
Rhyme didn't laugh. He was still furious about the man's escape-and furious too that he apparently had no desire to retire. "When you get tired of making bad jokes, Lon, you might want to notice that his grammar and syntax are perfect. That tells us something else about him. Good education. Private school? Classically trained? Scholarships? Valedictorian? Put those on the chart, Thom."
Sellitto was unfazed. "Fucking semicolons."
"Got something here," Cooper said, looking up from the computer. "The green material from his place in Brooklyn? I'm pretty sure it's Caulerpa taxifolia. A noxious weed."
"A what?"
"It's a seaweed that spreads uncontrollably. Causes all kinds of problems. It's been banned in the U.S."
"And presumably, if it spreads, you can find it everywhere," Rhyme said sourly. "Useless as evidence."
"Actually, no," Cooper explained. "So far, it's been found only on the Pacific Coast of North America."
"Mexico to Canada?"
"Pretty much."
Rhyme added sarcastically, "That's virtually a street address. Call out the SWAT team."
It was then that Kathryn Dance frowned. "The West Coast?" She considered something for a moment. Then she asked, "Where's the interview with him?"
Mel Cooper found the file. He hit PLAYand for the dozenth time they watched the killer look into the camera and lie to them all. Dance leaned forward intently. She reminded Rhyme of himself gazing at evidence.
He'd been through the interview so often he was numb to the words; it provided nothing helpful now that he could tell. But Dance gave a sudden laugh. "Got a thought."
"What?"
"Well, I can't give you an address but I can give you a state. My guess is that he comes from California. Or lived there for some time."
"Why do you think that?"
She backed up with the rewind command. Then played part of the interview again, the portion where he talked about driving to Long Island to take delivery of the confiscated SUV.
Dance stopped the tape and said, "I've studied regional expressions. People in California usually refer to their interstate highways with the article 'the.' Thefour-oh-five in L.A., for instance. In the interview he referred to 'the four ninety-five' here in New York. And did you hear him say freeway? That's common in California too, more so than expresswayor interstate.Which is what you hear on the East Coast."
Possibly helpful, Rhyme thought. Another brick in the wall of evidence. "On the chart," he said.
"When I get back I'll open a formal investigation in my office," she said. "I'll put out everything we've got statewide. We'll see what happens. Okay, I better be going… Oh, I'll be expecting you both out in California sometime soon."
The aide glanced at Rhyme. "He needs to travel more. He pretends he doesn't like to but the fact is, once he gets someplace he enjoys it. As long as there's scotch and some good crime to keep him interested."
"It's Northern California," Dance said. "Wine country, mostly, but not to worry, we have plenty of crime."
"We'll see," Rhyme said noncommittally. Then he added, "But one thing-do me a favor?"
"Sure.
"Shut your cell phone off. I'll probably be tempted to call you again on the way to the airport if something else comes up."
"If I didn't have the children to get back to I might just pick up."
Sellitto thanked her again and Thom saw her out the door.
Rhyme said, "Ron, make yourself useful."
The rookie looked at the evidence tables. "I already called about the rope, if that's what you mean."
"No, that's notwhat I mean," Rhyme muttered. "I said useful." He nodded at the bottle of scotch sitting on a shelf across the room.
"Oh, sure."
"Make it two," Sellitto grumbled. "And don't be stingy."
Pulaski poured the whiskey and handed out two glasses-Cooper declined. Rhyme said to the rookie, "Don't neglect yourself."
"Oh, I'm in uniform."
Sellitto choked a laugh.
"Okay. Maybe just a little." He poured and then sipped the potent-and extremely expensive-liquor. "I like it," he said, though his eyes were telling a different story. "Say, you ever mix in a little ginger ale or Sprite?"
Before and After.
People move on.
For one reason or another, they move on, and Before becomes After.
Lincoln Rhyme heard these words floating through his head, over and over. Broken record. People move on.
He'd actually used the phrase himself-when he'd told his wife he wanted a divorce, not long after his accident. Their relationship had been rocky for some time and he had decided that whether or not he survived the broken neck, he was going to go forward on his own and not tie her down to the difficult life of a gimp's wife.
But back then "moving on" meant something very different from what Rhyme was facing now. The life he'd constructed over the past few years, a precarious life, was about to change in a big way. The problem, of course, was that by going to Argyle Security, Sachs wasn't really moving on. She was moving back.
Sellitto and Cooper were gone and Rhyme and Pulaski were alone in the downstairs lab, parked in front of an examination table, organizing evidence in the 118th Precinct scandal cases. Finally confronted with the evidence-and the fact they'd unwittingly hired a domestic terrorist-Baker, Wallace and Henson copped pleas and were diming out everybody involved at the 118th. (Though nobody would say a word about who'd hooked the Watchmaker up with Baker. Understandable. You simply don't give up the name of a senior member of an OC crew when you're headed off to the same prison he might end up in, thanks to your testimony.)
Preparing himself for Sachs's departure, Rhyme had concluded that Ron Pulaski would eventually be a fine crime scene cop. He had ingenuity and intelligence and was as dogged as Lon Sellitto. Rhyme could wear the rough edges off him in eight months or a year. Together, he and the rookie would run scenes, analyze evidence and find perps, who'd go to jail or die trying not to. The system would keep going. The process of policing was bigger than just one man or woman; it had to be.
Yes, the system would keep going… But it was impossibly hard toimagine that system without Amelia Sachs.
Well, fuck the goddamn sentiment, Rhyme said to himself, and get back to work. He glanced at the evidence board. The Watchmaker's out there somewhere; I'm going to find him. He is…not…getting…away.
"What?" Pulaski asked.
"I didn't say anything," Rhyme snapped.
"Yeah, you did. I just…"He fell silent under Rhyme's withering glare.
Returning to his tasks, Pulaski asked, "The notes I found in Baker's office? They're on cheap paper. Should I use ninhydrin to raise the latents?"
Rhyme started to respond.
A woman's voice said, "No. First you try iodine fuming. Thenninhydrin, thensilver nitrate. You have to do it in that order."
Rhyme looked up to see Sachs in the doorway. He slapped a benign look on his face. Putting on a good front, he praised himself. Being generous.Being mature.
She continued, "If not, the chemicals can react and you can ruin the prints."
Well, thisis awkward, the criminalist thought angrily. He stared at the evidence boards as the silence between them roared like the December wind outside.
She said, "I'm sorry."
Unusual to hear those words from her; the woman apologized about as often as Lincoln Rhyme did. Which was close to never.
Rhyme didn't respond. He kept his eyes on the charts.
"Really, I'm sorry."
Irritated at the greeting card sentiment, he glanced sideways, frowning, barely able to control his anger.
But he saw that she wasn't speaking to him.
Her eyes were fixed on Pulaski. "I'll make it up to you somehow. You can run the next scene. I'll be copilot. Or the next couple of scenes."
"How's that?" the rookie asked.
"I know you heard I was leaving."
He nodded.
"But I've changed my mind."
"You're not quitting?" Pulaski asked.
"No."
"Hey, not a problem," Pulaski said. "Wouldn't mind sharing the job for a little while more, you know." His relief at not being the only ant under Lincoln Rhyme's magnifying glass clearly outweighed any disappointment at getting busted back down to assistant.
Sachs tugged a chair around to face Rhyme.
He said, "I thought you were at Argyle."
"I was. To turn them down."
"Can I ask why?"
"I got a call. From Suzanne Creeley. Ben Creeley's wife. She thanked me for believing her, for finding out who'd really killed her husband. She was crying. She told me that she just couldn't bear the thought that her husband had killed himself. Murder was terrible but a suicide-that would've undermined everything they'd had together over the years."
Sachs shook her head. "A knot in a rope and a broken thumb…I realized that that's what this job is all about, Rhyme. Not the crap I got caught up in, the politics, my father, Baker and Wallace…You can't make it too complicated. Being a cop is about finding the truth behind a knot and a broken thumb. Nothing more than that."
You and me, Sachs…
"So," she asked, matter-of-fact, as she nodded toward the boards, "our bad boy-anything new on him?"
Rhyme told her about his present, the Breguet, then summarized: "A rock or mountain climber, possibly trained in Europe. He's spent time in California, near the shore. And he's been there recently. May live there now. Good education. Uses proper grammar, syntax and punctuation. And I want to go over every gear in the watch again. He's a watch maker,right? That means he's probably taken the back off to poke around inside. If there's a molecule of trace, I want it." Rhyme nodded at the man's note and added, "He admits he was watching Charlotte's hotel around the time we collared her. I want every vantage point where he might've been standing searched. You're recruited for that one, Ron."
"Got it."
"And don't forget what we know about him. Maybe he's gone and maybe he isn't. Make sure your weapon's in reach. Outsidethe Tyvek. Remember-"
"Search well but watch my back?" Pulaski asked.
"An Afor retention," the criminalist said. "Now get to work."