The Skin Collector

CHAPTER 75

The stocky, balding man, in a short gray overcoat, strolled along the wide sidewalk with feet pointed outward. He carried a battered briefcase. Few people on the street noted his physique or gait. He was as nondescript as could be. Businessman, accountant, ad agency executive. He was a Muggle. He was a Prufrock.

He liked this place. Greenwich Village was less chic than, say, SoHo or TriBeCa but more of a neighborhood; Little Italy had come and gone but the Village remained a bastion for old-school Manhattanites, the quirky ones, the artistic, the descendants of European immigrants. The ’hood was populated by the families of, yes, stocky, balding husbands and stolid wives, ambitious yet modest sons, clever daughters. He blended here.

Which was good. Considering his mission.

The sun was down and the temperature low but at least the sky was clear and the sleet of the past few days had ended.

He walked to the window of the Café Artisan and perused the stained menu. It was a real coffeehouse. Italian. This place had been steaming milk before Starbucks was even a gleam in the eye of whatever Seattlian, not Sicilian, had created the franchise.

He gazed through the early deployment of Christmas decorations in the fudgy window and studied the scene at a table against the far wall: A redheaded woman in a burgundy sweater and tight black jeans sat across from a man in a suit. He was lean and looked like a lawyer on the verge of retirement. The woman was asking the man questions and jotting responses in a small notebook. The table, he noted, rocked a bit; the wedge under the north-by-northeast leg was not performing.

He studied the man and the woman carefully. Had he been interested in sex, which he was not, the woman would certainly have appealed.

Amelia Sachs, the woman he’d come here to kill, was quite beautiful.

Since the weather was cold, it wasn’t conspicuous for this man to be wearing gloves, which was fortunate. The ones covering his hands were black wool, since leather gives a print nearly as distinctive as one’s own friction ridges. Traceable, in other words. But cloth? No.

He was now noting where Amelia’s purse sat — on the back of her chair. How trusting were people here. Had this been São Paulo or Mexico City, the purse would have been fixed to the back of her chair with a nylon tie, like the sort used to bind garbage bags and prisoners’ wrists.

The purse was latched but this didn’t trouble him. Several days ago he’d bought a bag just like hers and practiced, practiced, practiced slipping something inside silently (he’d studied sleight of hand for years). Finally he’d honed the technique sufficiently so that it took all of three seconds to open the bag, slip a small object inside and refix the clasp. He’d done this a hundred times.

He now reached into his pocket and palmed a bottle of an over-the-counter painkiller. It was identical in brand to those that Amelia Sachs preferred. (He’d learned this from her medicine cabinet.) She’d had osteoarthritis problems in the past and though she didn’t seem to be too troubled recently, he’d observed, she still popped the pills from time to time.

Ah, the trials our bodies put us through.

The capsules in this bottle looked identical to the ones she bought. There was one difference, however: Each of his pills consisted of compressed antimony.

Like arsenic, antimony is a basic element, a metalloid. The name is from the Greek for ‘banishing solitude’. Antimony had been used in the past to darken the eyebrows and lids of promiscuous women, including Jezebel in the Bible.

It’s a ubiquitous and useful element, employed frequently even today in industry. But antimony, Sb, atomic number 51, has also been the cause of thousands of excruciatingly painful deaths throughout history. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was perhaps the most famous victim. (The question remains: intentional or not? We’d have to ask Antonio Salieri.)

At a jab of pain from her reconstructed knee, which she’d feel sooner or later, Sachs would pop two pills.

And instead of relief she’d be hit with a fierce headache, vomiting, diarrhea, numb extremities.

She’d be dead in a few days — according to the media, yet another victim of Billy Haven, who’d managed to slip the tainted drugs into her purse before he and his terrorist relatives were stopped.

Although in truth the Stantons had nothing to do with this impending murder.

The man outside the Café Artisan, preparing to kill Sachs, was Charles Vespasian Hale, his birth name, though he was known by many others too. Richard Logan was one. And most recently: David Weller, the indignant attorney who’d contacted the New York Bureau of Investigation about the upstart young officer Ron Pulaski.

The only name that he truly liked, however, was the one that described him best: the Watchmaker — echoing both his skill in crafting intricate criminal plots and his passion for clocks and watches.

He now regarded one of these, a Ventura SPARC Sigma MGS, a digital wristwatch that cost five thousand dollars. Hale owned 117 watches and clocks, the majority of which were analog, even if powered by electronics and batteries. He had Baume & Merciers, Rolexes and TAGs. He’d had a chance to steal a six-million-dollar Patek Philippe Calibre 89, the famed commemorative pocket watch created to honor the company’s 150th anniversary. It had more complications — those windows and dials giving information in addition to the present time — than any other watch ever created. The eighteen-karat masterpiece offered such data as the phase of the moon, power reserve, month, temperature, date of Easter, constellations, sunset and split second.

And yet Hale had chosen not to steal the masterpiece.

Why? Because the Patek was a relic. It was a new era now. The way of analog was gone. It had taken Hale some time to accept this but his arrest by Lincoln Rhyme some years ago had shown him that the world had changed.

And Hale had risen to greet the dawn.

The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face — so to speak — of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.

And counted down.

Four …

Three …

Two …

One …

A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the café.

Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee shop.

He was unseen by everybody — including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee — as they stared toward the kitchen, where he’d left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone smoke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn’t) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.

Amelia looked around — as did everyone — for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.

A new record: two seconds.

Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.

No. He’d go someplace else. The man rose and headed out into the chill.

The sound stopped — battery-plucking time. A glance back. Sachs returned to her coffee, to her notes. Oblivious to her impending death.

The Watchmaker turned toward the subway entrance at West Fourth Street. As he walked along the sidewalk in the brisk air an interesting thought occurred to him. Arsenic and antimony were metalloids — substances that shared qualities of both metals and non-metals — but were rigid enough to be crafted into enduring objects.

Would it be possible, he wondered, to make a timepiece out of these poisons?

What a fascinating thought!

And one that, he knew, would occupy his fertile mind for weeks and months to come.

CHAPTER 76

‘Go with it,’ Lincoln Rhyme said. The criminalist was alone in his parlor, talking through the speakerphone as he gazed absently at a website featuring some rather classy antiques and fine arts.

‘Well,’ said the voice, belonging to a captain at the NYPD, presently in police headquarters. The Big Building.

‘Well, what?’ Rhyme snapped. He’d been a captain too; anyway, he never took rank very seriously. Competence and intelligence counted first.

‘It’s a little unorthodox.’

The fuck does that mean? Rhyme thought. On the other hand, he himself had also been a civil servant in a civil-servant world and he knew that it was sometimes necessary to play a game or two. He appreciated the man’s reluctance.

But he couldn’t condone it.

‘I’m aware of that, Captain. But we need to run with the story. There are lives at risk.’

The captain’s first name was unusual. Dagfield.

Who would name somebody that?

‘Well,’ Dag said defensively. ‘It has to be edited and vetted—’

‘I wrote it. It doesn’t need to be edited. And you can vet. Vet it now. We don’t have much time.’

‘You’re not asking me to vet. You’re asking me to run what you’ve sent me, Lincoln.’

‘You’ve looked it over, you’ve read it. That’s vetting. We need to go with it, Dag. Time’s critical. Very critical.’

A sigh. ‘I’ll have to talk to somebody first.’

Rhyme considered tactical options. There weren’t many.

‘Here’s the situation, Dag. I can’t be fired. I’m an independent consultant that defense attorneys around the country want to hire as much as the NYPD does. Probably more and they pay better. If you don’t run that press release exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I sent it to you, I’ll hang out my shingle for the defense and stop working for the NYPD altogether. And when the commissioner hears that I’ll be working against the department, your job’ll be in the private sector and I mean fast food.’

Not really satisfied with that line. Could have been better. But there it was.

‘You’re threatening me?’

Which hardly required a response.

Ten seconds later: ‘Fuck.’

The slamming phone made a simple, sweet click in Rhyme’s ear.

He eased his wheelchair to the window, to look out over Central Park. He liked the view more in the winter than the summer. Some might have thought this was because people were enjoying summer sports in the fine months, running, tossing Frisbees, pitching softballs — activities forever denied Rhyme. But the reality was that he just liked the view.

Even before the accident Rhyme had never enjoyed that kind of pointless frolic. He thought back to the case involving the Bone Collector, years ago. Then, just after his accident, he’d given up on life, believing he’d never exist in a normal world again. But that case had taught him a truth that had endured: He didn’t want that normal life. Never had, disabled or not. His world was the world of deduction, of logic, of mental riposte and parry, of combat with thought — not with guns or karate blows.

And so looking out at the stark, leaf-stripped vista of Central Park, he felt wholly at home, comforted by the lesson that the Bone Collector had taught him so many years ago.

Rhyme turned back to the computer screen and waded once more into the world of fine arts.

He checked the news and discovered that, yes, Dag had come through. The unvetted, unedited, unchallenged press release had been picked up everywhere.

Rhyme glanced at the clock face on his computer and returned to browsing.

A half hour later his phone rang and he noted the caller ID report: Unknown.

Two rings. Three. He tapped the answer button with his right index finger.

He said, ‘Hello there.’

‘Lincoln,’ said the man he knew as Richard Logan, the Watchmaker. ‘Do you have a moment to talk?’

‘For you, always.’

CHAPTER 77

‘I’ve seen the news,’ the Watchmaker said to Rhyme. ‘You released my picture. Or the artist’s renderings of me as Dave Weller. Not a bad job. An Identi-Kit, I assume. Both fat and slim, hair, no hair, mustache, clean-shaven. Aren’t you so impressed with the confluence of art and computer science, Lincoln?’

The reference to the press release Rhyme had pressured the NYPD brass into going with. ‘It was accurate then?’ the criminalist asked. ‘My officer wasn’t sure when he worked with the artist if he had the cheek structure right.’

‘That young man. Pulaski.’ The Watchmaker seemed amused. ‘He observes two-dimensionally and draws conclusions from the preliminary. You and I both know the risks of that. He’s a better forensic cop than undercover, I’d imagine. Less improvisation in crime scene work. I deduce a brain injury?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

The Watchmaker continued, ‘He’s lucky that when I set him up, it was with the Bureau of Investigation, not some of my real associates. He’d be dead otherwise.’

‘Possibly,’ Rhyme said slowly. ‘His instincts are good. And he’s quite the shot apparently. Anyway, he’s all I could spare under the circumstances. I was busy trying to stop a psychotic tattoo artist.’

Now that he knew the Watchmaker had escaped from prison and was alive, Rhyme thought back to the man’s appearance from several years ago, when he’d last seen him face-to-face. Yes, there were similarities, he now reflected, between the lawyer Pulaski had described to the Identi-Kit operator and the Watchmaker from several years ago — attributes that Rhyme could now recall, though some key factors were different. He now said, ‘You had non-surgical work done. Like packing silicone or cotton into your cheeks. And the hair — thinning shears and a razor — a good job duplicating male-pattern baldness. Makeup too. Most movie studios get it wrong. The weight — your size — that was a body suit, right? Nobody could gain fifty pounds in four days. The tan would be from a bottle.’

‘That’s right.’ A chuckle. ‘Maybe. Or a tanning salon. There are about four hundred in the metropolitan area. You might want to start canvassing. If you’re lucky, by Christmas you could find the one I went to.’

Rhyme said, ‘But you’ve changed — modded, if you will — again, right? Since we’ve run the picture.’

‘Of course. Now, Lincoln, I’m curious why you released my information to the media. You ran the risk that I’d go to ground. Which I have.’

‘The chance that somebody might’ve spotted you. They’d call it in. We were ready to move fast.’

‘All-points bulletin.’

The press announcement Rhyme had just coerced the brass into releasing reported that a man known as Richard Logan, aka the Watchmaker, aka Dave Weller, had escaped several days ago from federal prison in Westchester. The Identi-Kit pictures were given, along with the hint that he might be feigning a Southern accent.

‘But no takers,’ the Watchmaker pointed out. ‘No one dimed me out. Since I’m still … wherever I am.’

‘Oh, and by the way, I’m not bothering to trace this call. You’re using cutouts and forward proxies.’

This wasn’t a question.

‘And we’ve raided Weller’s law firm.’

A chuckle. ‘The answering service, post office box and website?’

‘Clever,’ Rhyme said. ‘The wrongful death specialty seemed a bit cruel.’

‘Pure coincidence. First thing I thought of.’

Rhyme asked, ‘Oh, a point of curiosity? You’re not really Richard Logan, are you? That’s one of your pseudonyms.’

‘Yes.’

The man didn’t offer his real name and Rhyme didn’t bother to push.

‘So how did you figure out that I’d escaped?’

‘Like so much about what I do — what we both do — there was a postulate.’

‘A hunch,’ the Watchmaker said.

Rhyme thought of Sachs, who often chided his derision of the word, and he smiled. ‘If you will.’

‘Which you then verified empirically. And what gave rise to that postulate?’

‘In Billy Haven’s backpack we found a notebook, The Modification, a how-to guide for getting botulinum toxin into the New York City water supply. Elegant in the extreme. It was like an engineering schematic, every step outlined, timed down to the minute. I doubted the Stantons and Billy would’ve been able to come up with something that elaborate: a serial killer to misdirect from a plot to target the water supply with bombs, which was in turn meant to cover up the real plot to poison the water. And you learned how to weaponize the toxin. Resistant to chlorine. Quite a coup, that was.’

‘You found the notebook?’ The man sounded displeased. ‘I told Billy to transcribe it into an encrypted digital file on a computer with no Internet access. Then destroy the original.’ A pause. ‘But I’m not surprised. That whole gang from Southern Illinois seemed rather analog. And, yes, not particularly brilliant. Like the toxins Billy decided to use? I recommended commercial chemicals but Billy had this affection for plants. He spent a lot of time by himself in the woods, I gathered, sketching them when he was young. Tough childhood when your parents are killed by the federal government and your moral compass is a neo-Nazi militia.’

‘The Modification? You coined the word?’

‘That was mine, yes. Though I was inspired by Billy’s avocation. Body modifying. It suited their apocalyptic views. I was embarrassed actually. Too on the nose. But they liked the sound.

‘You dictated it to Billy, the whole plan?’

‘That’s right. And his aunt. But Billy wrote it down. They came to visit me in prison. The cover was that Billy was writing a book about my life.’ He paused. ‘There’s a story I’ve been dying to tell but haven’t found the appropriate listener. I think you’ll appreciate it, Lincoln. When I was finished giving him the plan and he’d written it all down, I said, “It’s all yours, Moses. Go forth.” Billy and Harriet didn’t get it. I know you’re familiar with the theological concept of God as a watchmaker.’

When contemplating the origin of the universe, Isaac Newton, René Descartes and others of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries argued that design requires a designer. If something as complex as a watch could not exist without a watchmaker, by analogy human life in the universe — far more complicated than a timepiece — surely could not exist without a God.

‘I had to explain that, given my nickname, dictating The Modification was as if I were God, handing down the Ten Commandments to Moses. I meant it as a joke. But they took it seriously. They started to refer to the plan as the Modification Commandments.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘I feel sorry for those who don’t appreciate irony. But to get back to the issue: how you found out about me … If you’re willing to share.’

‘Of course.’

‘You had the notebook. But it wasn’t in my handwriting; that was Billy’s. No fingerprints or DNA. I never touched it. And, yes, there were a lot of references to critical timing — when to administer the poison and where, the diversionary attacks, when to have Joshua, Billy’s cousin, get the batteries and lights in the underground passages where the crimes occurred, how many minutes after someone had called nine one one could the police be counted on to arrive. It’s all in the timing, of course. But leaping from that to my escape from prison?’

Rhyme wondered where the man was standing, what his posture was. Was he outside, cold? Or outside, hot, in balmy weather? ‘Nemesis’ was an imprecise term, not to mention melodramatic. But Rhyme allowed himself to think of the Watchmaker this way. He said, ‘Evidence.’

‘That doesn’t surprise me, Lincoln. But what?’

‘The tetrodotoxin. We found traces.’ The super poison from the fugu fish.

‘Oh, my …’ A sigh from the other end of the line. ‘I told Billy to destroy any residue.’

‘I’m sure he tried. There was just a minuscule amount of trace at one of the scenes.’ Rhyme, of all people, knew how difficult it was to banish all whispers of a substance. ‘We didn’t find any in his safe house, so where had it come from? I checked VICAP and nobody had used it in any crimes that had been reported in the last few years. So what could Billy have been doing with tetrodotoxin? Then it occurred to me: A clue was its nickname, the zombie drug. To induce the appearance of cardiac arrest and death.’

‘That’s right,’ the Watchmaker admitted. ‘Billy delivered some, smuggled in the pages of a book. In prison they check for shivs and heroin, not milligrams of fish ovary. I used it to fake the heart attack and get transferred to the hospital in White Plains.’

Was that a seagull cawing in the background? And then, a ship’s horn? No, a foghorn. Interesting. They were little used in this day of radar and GPS. Rhyme took note. A flare on his computer screen. It was a message from Rodney Szarnek, the computer crimes expert. It reported that the analysis of the Watchmaker’s call to Rhyme had been unsuccessful; it had skidded to a stop at an anonymous proxy switch in Kazakhstan.

Rhyme had lied about the phone trace.

He gave a mental shrug — nothing ventured, nothing gained — and returned to the conversation. ‘What finally convinced me, though, was a mistake you made.’

‘Really?’

‘When you were on the street with Ron Pulaski, you referred to the attempted hit in Mexico on the federal police official. The project you’d put together a few years ago.’

‘Right. I wanted to mention something specific. For credibility.’

‘Ah, but that case was sealed. If you were a legitimate lawyer who’d never met Richard Logan, like you claimed, you’d have had no idea about the Mexico City job.’

A pause. Then: ‘Sealed?’

‘Apparently the State Department and the Mexican Gabinete Legal were not happy that you — an American — had come minutes away from killing a high-ranking Mexican law enforcer. They preferred to act as if the incident had never happened. There was no press about it.’

‘Oh.’ He sounded bitter.

Rhyme said, ‘Now answer me a question.’

‘All right.’

‘How did you get the gig? For the Stantons and their AFFC?’

‘It was time to get out of prison. I got in touch with the people who’d been involved in the domestic terror incident a few years ago when you and I went head-to-head. Remember?’

‘Of course.’

‘They set me up with the AFFC — another white supremacist militia. I told them I could put them on the map. Harriet and Billy came to visit me in prison and I laid out a plan. By the way, did you ever see them together, those two, aunt and nephew? Uneasy dynamic there. Gives a whole new meaning to the name American Families First.’

Rhyme demurred. The observation, true or not, didn’t interest him.

The Watchmaker continued, ‘They wanted to make a name for themselves. So we brainstormed. I came up with the idea of botulism in the drinking water. I learned that Billy was a tattoo artist. We’d tattoo victims with an Old Testament message. Apocalypse, I was saying. They just love that kind of rhetoric. Striking a blow for their idiotic values. They loved it too when I suggested they use poisons as the murder weapons. Justice for the minority and socialist values that were poisoning society, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, they just lapped that up. Well, Matthew did. Billy and Harriet seemed a bit more tempered. You know, Lincoln, the small-minded are the most dangerous.’

Not necessarily, the criminalist reflected, considering the man he was conversing with at the moment.

CHAPTER 78

‘So,’ Rhyme continued, ‘in exchange for your plan they slipped you some of the tetrodotoxin. And arranged to bribe medical personnel and prison guards, so you’d be declared dead and smuggled out of the lockup. And found some homeless corpse to be shipped to the funeral home for cremation.’

‘More or less.’

‘Must have been pricey.’

‘Twenty million cash total.’

‘And the funeral home charade? With you as Weller. Why that?’

‘I knew you’d send somebody to see who was collecting the ashes. I had to make you believe in your heart that the Watchmaker was dead. The best way to do that was to have the family’s indignant lawyer come to town to collect his ashes … and report your undercover officer to the authorities. That was a wonderful turn. Didn’t anticipate that.’

Rhyme then said, ‘But one thing I don’t understand: Lon Sellitto. You poisoned him, of course. You borrowed a fireman’s outfit at the site of the Belvedere Apartment attack and gave him the laced coffee.’

‘You figured that out too?’

‘Arsenic is metalloid poison. Billy used only plant-based toxins.’

‘Hm. Missed that. Mea culpa. Tell me, Lincoln, were you one of those boys who read children’s puzzle books and could always spot what was wrong with this picture?’

Yes, he had been, and, yes, he could.

Rhyme added, ‘And you slipped the doctored painkillers into Amelia Sachs’s purse.’

A dense pause. ‘You found those?’

The minute Rhyme had deduced the Watchmaker was still alive and was probably behind Lon’s attack, he’d told Sachs, Pulaski and Cooper to be on the lookout for any attacks. She’d recalled that someone had sat near her in a coffeehouse where she’d been meeting with a witness in the Metropolitan Museum case. She’d found a second bottle of painkillers in the bag.

Rhyme asked, ‘Arsenic as well? The results aren’t back yet.’

‘I’ll tell you, since you’ve figured it out. Antimony.’

Lincoln Rhyme said, ‘See, that’s what I don’t follow: trying to kill Lon and Amelia and blame the deaths on the Stantons? It was you dressed up like Billy Haven at the scenes? Looking at her through the manhole cover on Elizabeth Street? Outside the restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen? In the building near the Belvedere?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So why …?’ His voice faded. The thoughts were coming fast, exploding like firecrackers. ‘Unless …’

‘Catching on, are you, Lincoln?’

‘Twenty million dollars,’ he whispered. ‘To buy your freedom. There is no way the Stantons and the AFFC could have gotten you that much money to bribe the guards and medics. No, no — they’re a shoestring operation at best. Someone else financed your escape. Yes! Somebody who needed you for another job. You used the AFFC as a cover for something else.’

‘Ah, that’s my Lincoln,’ said the Watchmaker.

The voice was condescending and a moment’s anger burst. But then the thought landed and he laughed out loud. ‘Lon. Lon Sellitto! He was the whole point of this. You needed him killed or out of commission, and you used the AFFC as a scapegoat.’

‘Exactly,’ the man whispered. And the tone of his voice taunted: Keep going.

‘The case he’d been working on. Of course. The break-in at the Metropolitan museum. He was getting close to finding out what it was all about and your employer needed to stop him.’ He considered other facts. ‘And Amelia too. Because she’d taken over the Met case … But you’re admitting it all now,’ Rhyme said slowly, troubled. ‘Why?’

‘I think I’ll let it go at that, Lincoln. Probably not good to say much more. But I will tell you that nobody is at risk anymore. Amelia’s safe. The only reason to poison her or Ron or your brilliant nerdy assistant, Mel Cooper, would be to shift the blame to the AFFC. And obviously that’s pointless now. Besides, I’ve changed tack.’

Rhyme pictured the man shrugging.

‘You’re safe too, of course. You always have been.’

Always have been?

Rhyme gave a laugh. ‘The anonymous phone call about somebody’s breaking into my town house through the back door. When Billy snuck in to poison my whisky. That was you.’

‘I was keeping tabs on him. The night he went to your town house, I was following. He wasn’t supposed to kill you, hurt you in any way. When he changed into a workman’s uniform and got a needle ready, I knew what he was up to.’

This made no sense at all.

Until a moment later another deduction. Rhyme whispered, ‘You need me for something. You need me alive. Why? To investigate a crime, of course. Yes, yes. But which one? One committed recently?’ What open major cases were there? Rhyme wondered. Then realized. ‘Or one that’s going to happen? Next week?’

‘Or next month or next year,’ the Watchmaker offered, sounding amused.

‘The Metropolitan museum break-in? Or something else?’

No word.

‘Why me?’

A pause. ‘I’ll just say that the plan I’ve put together needs you.’

‘And it needs me to be aware of it,’ Rhyme shot back. ‘So my knowing is a gear or a spring or a flywheel in your timepiece.’

A laugh. ‘How well put. It’s so refreshing to talk to somebody who gets it … But now I should be going, Lincoln.’

‘One last question?’

‘Of course. Answering may be a different matter.’

‘You told Billy to find that book, Serial Cities.’

‘That’s right. I needed to make sure he and the Stantons appreciated how good you were — and how much you and Amelia had learned about the militias and their tactics.’

Rhyme said ruefully, ‘You had no particular interest in the Bone Collector? I got that wrong.’

‘I guess you did.’

A laugh and Rhyme said, ‘So the connection I found between the Bone Collector and you wasn’t there at all?’

A pause.

‘You found a connection between us?’ The Watchmaker sounded curious.

‘There’s a famous watch on display here in Manhattan. It’s made entirely out of bone. Some Russian, I think. I wondered if stealing that was on your agenda.’

‘There’s a Mikhail Semyonovitch Bronnikov in town?’

‘I think that was it. And you didn’t know?’

The Watchmaker said, ‘I’ve been rather … preoccupied lately. But I’m familiar with the piece. It’s quite astonishing. Mid-1860s. And you’re right: made entirely of bone, one hundred percent.’

‘I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for you to risk getting caught — and waste the time, so to speak — trying to break into a Manhattan antiques store to steal a watch.’

‘No, but it was creative thinking, Lincoln. Just what I’d expect of you.’ Another pause. Rhyme imagined that he was checking his own timepiece. ‘Now I think it’s best to say goodbye, Lincoln. I’ve been on the line a little too long. Sometimes those proxies and phone switches can be traced, you know. Not that you’d ever try.’ A chuckle. ‘Till we meet again …’

Next week, next month, next year.

The line went dead.