The Watchmaker’s Hand

1

His gaze over the majestic panorama of Manhattan, 218 feet below, was interrupted by the alarm.

He had never before heard the urgent electronic pulsing on the job.

He was familiar with the sound from training, while getting his Fall Protection Certificate, but never on shift. His level of skill and the sophistication of the million-dollar contraption beneath him were such that there had never been a reason for the high-pitched sound to fill the cab in which he sat.

Scanning the ten-by-eight-inch monitors in front of him... yes, a red light was now flashing.

But at the same time, apart from the urgency of the electronics, Garry Helprin knew that this was a mistake. A sensor problem.

And, yes, seconds later the light went away. The sound went away.

He nudged the control to raise the eighteen-ton load aloft, and his thoughts returned to where they had been just a moment ago.

The baby’s name. While his father hoped for William, and his wife’s mother for Natalia, neither of those was going to happen. Perfectly fine names. But not for Peggy and him, not for their son or daughter. He’d suggested they have some fun with their parents. What they’d decided at last: Kierkegaard if a boy. Bashilda if a girl.

When she first told him these, Garry had said, “Bathsheba, you mean. From the Bible.”

“No. Bashilda. My imaginary pony when I was ten.”

Kierkegaard and Bashilda, they would tell the parents, and then move on to another topic — quickly. What a reaction they’d—

The alarm began to blare again, the light to flash. They were joined by another excited box on the monitor: the load moment indicator. The needle was tilting to the left above the words: Moment Imbalance.

Impossible.

The computer had calculated the weight of the jib in front of him — extending the length of a Boeing 777 — and the weight on the jib behind. It then factored into the balance game the weight of the load in front and the weight of the concrete counterweights behind. Finally, it measured their distance from the center, where he sat in the cab of the crane.

“Come on, Big Blue. Really?”

Garry tended to talk to the machines he was operating. Some seemed to respond. This particular Baylor HT-4200 was the most talkative of them all.

Today, though, she was silent, other than the warning sound.

If the alarm was blaring for him, it was blaring in the supervisor’s trailer too.

The radio clattered, and he heard in his headset: “Garry, what?”

He replied into the stalk mike, “Gotta be an LMI sensor problem. If there was moment five minutes ago, there’s moment now. Nothing’s changed.”

“Wind?”

“None. Sensor, I’m...” He fell silent.

Feeling the tilt.

“Hell,” he said quickly. “It is a moment fault. Forward jib is point three nine degrees down. Wait, now point four.”

Was the load creeping toward the end of the blue latticed jib on its own? Had the trolley become detached from the drive cables?

Garry had never heard of that happening.

He looked forward. Saw nothing irregular.

Now: —.5

Nothing is more regulated and inspected on a construction site than the stability of a tower crane, especially one that soars this high into the sky and has within its perimeter a half-dozen structures — and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human souls. Meticulous calculations are made of the load — in this case, 36,000 pounds of six-by-four-inch flange beams — and the counterweights, the rectangular blocks of cement, to make sure this particular crane can lift and swing the payload. Once that’s signed off on, the info goes into the computer and the magic balance is maintained — moving the counterweights behind him back and forth ever so slightly to keep the needle at zero.

Moment...

— 51

He looked back at the counterweights. This was instinctive; he didn’t know what he might see.

Nothing was visible.

— 52

The blaring continued.

— 54

He shut the alarm switch off. The accompanying indicator flashed Warning and the Moment Imbalance messages continued.

— 55

The super said, “We’ve hit diagnostics and don’t see a sensor issue.”

“Forget sensors,” Garry said. “We’re tilting.”

— 58

“I’m going to manual.” He shut off the controller. He’d been riding tower cranes for the past fifteen years, since he signed up with Moynahan Construction, after his stint as an engineer in the army. Digital controls made the job easier and safer, but he’d cut his teeth operating towers by hand, using charts and graphs and a pad attached to his thigh for calculations — and, of course, a needle balance indicator to get the moment just right. He now tugged on the joystick to draw the load trolley closer to center.

Then, switching to the counterweight control, he moved those away from the tower.

His eyes were fixed on the LMI, which still indicated moment imbalance forward.

He moved the weights, totaling a hundred tons, farther back.

This had to achieve moment.

It was impossible for it not to.

But it did not.

Back to the front jib.

He cranked the trolley closer to him. The flanges swung. He’d moved more quickly than he’d meant to.

He was looking at his coffee cup.

The chair — padded, comfortable — did not come factory-equipped with a cup holder. But Garry, an afficionado of any and all brews, had mounted one on the wall — far away from the electronics, of course.

The brown liquid was level; the cup was not.

Another glance at the LMI indicator.

A full –2 percent down in the front.

He worked the trolley control and brought the load of flanges closer yet.

Ah, yes, that did it.

The alarm light went out as the balance indicator now moved slowly back to —.5 and then 0, then 1, and kept rising. This was because the counterweights were so far back. Garry now reeled them in until they were as far forward as they could go.

It brought the LMI needle to 1.2.

This was normal. Cranes are made to lean backward slightly when there is no weight of a load on the front jib, which should, at rest, be about one degree. The main stability comes from the massive concrete base — that’s what holds it upright when there’s no balancing act going on.

“Got it, Danny,” he radioed. “Stable. But I’ll need maintenance. Got to be some counterweight issue.”

“K. I think Will’s off break.”

Garry sat back and sipped his coffee, replaced the cup, listened to the wind. It would be some minutes before the mechanic arrived. To get to the cab from the ground, there was one way and one way only.

You climbed the mast.

But the cab was twenty-two stories above the ground. Which meant at least one, maybe two five-minute rest stops on the way up.

Guys on the site sometimes thought if you were a crane operator you were in lousy shape, sitting on your ass all day long. They forgot about the climb.

With no load to deliver, no hook block to steer carefully to the ground, he could sit back and enjoy the indescribable view. If Garry wanted, he could put a name to what he was looking at: the five boroughs of the city, a huge parcel of New Jersey, a thin band of Westchester, one of Long Island too.

But he wasn’t interested in GPS information.

He was thrilled by the browns and grays and greens and white clouds and the endless blue — every shade far richer and bolder than when viewed by landlocked pedestrians below.

From a young age, Garry had known he wanted to build skyscrapers. That’s what he had made with his Legos. That’s what he had begged his parents to take him to visit, even when his mother and father blanched at the idea of standing on observation decks. He only liked the open ones. “You know,” his father had said, “sometimes people go crazy and throw themselves off the edge of high places. The fear takes them.”

Naw, probably not. There was nothing to fear from heights. The higher he got, the calmer he became. Whether it was rock climbing, mountaineering, or building skyscrapers, heights comforted him.

He was, he told Peggy, “in heaven” when he was far, far aboveground.

Back to baby names.

Kierkegaard, Bashilda...

What would they really pick? Neither wanted a Junior. And they didn’t want any names currently in vogue, which you could find easily in the tiny booklets on the Gristedes checkout lane.

He reached for his coffee cup.

No!

The level had changed again. The front jib was dipping once more.

— 4

A moment later, the duo of warning signs burst on again, and the alarm, which had defaulted back on, blared.

The balance indicator jumped to –1.2.

He hit Transmit. “Dan. She’s moving again. Big-time.”

“Shit. What’s going on?”

“Can’t reel the load any farther. I’m dropping it. Clear the zone. Tell me when.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He couldn’t hear the command from here, but he had a view through the Plexiglas straight down between his legs and saw the workers scatter quickly as the ground foreman told them to get out of the way.

Of course, “dropping” the load didn’t mean that literally — yanking the release and letting the seventeen tons of steel free-fall to the ground. He eased the down lever and the bundle dropped fast. He could see, on his indicators and visually through the Plexiglas, exactly where it was on descent. At about thirty feet above the ground, he braked, and the bundle settled onto the concrete. Maybe some damage.

Too bad.

He adjusted the counterweights, hit the hook release and detached the load.

But this had no effect.

The word “impossible” came to his mind yet again.

He cranked the counterweights backward once more.

This had to arrest the forward tilt.

No load and the counterweights were at the far end of the back jib.

And still...

“Dan,” he radioed, “we’re five degrees down, forward jib. Counterweights’re back.”

— 6.1

A crane is not meant to lean more than five degrees. Beyond that, the complicated skeletons of steel tubes and rods and plates begin to buckle and bend. The slewing plate — the huge turntable that swung the jib horizontally — was groaning.

He heard a distant but loud crack. Then another.

— 7

Into the radio: “I’m losing it, Dan. Hit the siren.”

Just moments later came the piercing emergency cry. This was not associated with a crane disaster specifically. It just meant some bad shit was going to happen. Instructions would be coming from the loudspeaker and on the radio.

“Garry, get out. Down the mast.”

“In a minute...”

If Big Blue was going down, he was going to make sure she landed with as few injuries to those on the ground as possible.

He scanned the surroundings. There were buildings almost everywhere.

But fifty feet to the right of the jib was a gap between the office building in front of him and an apartment complex. Through the gap, he could see a street and a park. On this temperate day, there would be people outside, but they had most likely heard the siren and would be looking toward the akilter crane.

Cars and trucks, with windows rolled up?

“I’m aiming away from the buildings. Have somebody clear that park on Eighty-Ninth. And get a flagman into the street, stop traffic.”

“Garry, get outta there while you can!”

“The park! Clear it!”

Creaking, groaning, the wind...

Another explosive snap.

He operated the swivel control and the slewing plate cried from binding against the bearings. The electric motor was laboring. Then, slowly, the jib responded.

“Come on, come on...”

Thirty feet from the gap.

Any minute now. He could feel it. Any minute she was going to drop.

Cars continued to stream past.

His decision was logical, but nonetheless stabbed his heart.

People were about to die because of him. Maybe fewer than if he didn’t move the jib, but still...

The numbers rolled through his frantic mind.

Distance to the gap: twenty feet.

LMI: –8.2

“Come on,” he whispered.

“Garry...”

“Clear the goddamn park! The street!” He tore the headset off as if the distraction of transmissions was gumming the mechanism further.

Twelve feet from the gap, nine degrees down.

The joystick was all the way to the right and the jib should have been swinging madly. But the binding metal of the slewing plate had slowed it to a crawl.

Slowed, but not stopped.

A sudden squeal. Nails on a chalkboard...

He jammed his teeth together at the sound.

Ten feet, ten degrees down.

Eight feet from the gap.

Please... A little farther...

Close. But if Big Blue failed now, the jib would slice through four or five floors of offices, all open design, hundreds of workers at desks and in cubicles, at coffee stations, in conference rooms. He could see them. A few were on their feet, staring at the tilting mast. No one was running. They were taking videos. Jesus...

Seven feet.

The motion stalled momentarily, then resumed, with the squeal and grinding even louder.

He nudged the stick to the left and it responded, swinging back a foot or two, then he shoved it to the right. The plate resumed its rotation in that direction, past the sticking point.

Six feet from the gap, down twelve degrees...

Crack...

The loud sound from behind made him jump.

What was it?

Ah, of course.

The exit door in the floor that led down to the mast, to the ladder, to safety, had buckled. He climbed from his seat briefly and tugged. Useless.

There was only one other exit — above him. But that gave no access to the mast.

Forget it now. Just get another five feet and she’ll be clear.

The jib was still tilting down, but the LMI indicator had stopped at –13. The engineers, of course, had known that there was no point in going farther. A jib would never tilt that far forward.

Six feet away from the lifesaving gap, the mast suddenly pitched forward a few feet. Garry slipped from the seat and fell. He landed face-first on the bulb of the window. From here, he found himself looking straight downward, twenty-two stories, to the jobsite. He inhaled and exhaled deeply, leaving a design of condensation on the glass in front of him. It was, curiously, almost in the shape of a heart.

He thought of his wife.

And of their child, soon to be born.

Kierkegaard or Bashilda...

2

At some point, an open investigation slips over an unseen border and becomes a cold case.

Who knows what the time frame is? Some cops might say a year, some might say a decade.

Lincoln Rhyme didn’t like the phrase. It suggested that the offense had been seized on by podcasters and documentary TV show producers to sell the ever-popular tale of an evildoer escaping justice.

The unsolved cases that drew the most attention were murders, of course. The spouse that went missing, the mafioso snitch, the abusive father who has “no idea” where his young son wandered off to. No one paid much attention to unsolved larcenies — other than the spectacular: the diamond heist, the armored truck stickup, the parachuting from a Boeing 727 with $200K in ransom (and where are you, D. B. Cooper?).

To Rhyme, an unsolved case was merely an unsolved case, whether twenty-four hours or one hundred years old, and it absolutely needed to be closed, larcenies included. Which was what was presently occupying much of his time.

This one was a few months old and the inability to solve it was giving Rhyme — and the NYPD and Homeland Security — more than a little concern.

A person they’d designated “Unknown Subject” — Unsub 212 — had on February 12 (hence, the moniker) broken into the NYC Department of Structures and Engineering and downloaded a trove of infrastructure documents: blueprints, engineering diagrams, underground maps, plats, permit requests — all the bits and bytes of material involved in the gargantuan process of helping the organism of New York City grow and morph. To be safe, maybe, the unsub had also copped hundreds of hard copies of the same and other documents, maybe in case some of the digital files were encrypted.

At the time of the theft, everyone thought: Terrorism. Always a good default motive for a crime of this sort. Bombs would be planted, subways hijacked, buildings targeted with missiles or airplanes.

Rhyme and his wife and professional forensic partner, Amelia Sachs, had been brought in to try to identify the unsub via forensics. Despite the man’s accidentally setting off an alarm and fleeing, leaving his burglar tools behind, they could come up with no leads. The city remained on high alert for a while, but no terrorist attacks ensued.

And so, Unsub 212’s theft remained an active case, and his nickname was atop the evidence whiteboard in the corner of the parlor of Rhyme’s nineteenth-century town house, the war room for the cases he and Sachs ran — she, as an NYPD detective, and he, a consulting forensic scientist. The boards were known throughout law enforcement as “murder boards,” though this one offered details of a theft instead; there’d been no loss of life or injury in the incident. Rhyme and Sachs had turned their attention away from the case temporarily — to a couple of urgent organized crime prosecutions, but those were now finished. There was nothing more to do than wait to testify at trial as an expert witness — either at one or the other, of course, never together; defense lawyers would have a field day inquiring about the relationship status of the two. There was not, legally, any reason they could not testify jointly, but criminal trials are about four things: optics, optics, optics... and then the law.

So now it was back to the open — not “cold” — Unsub 212 case.

Rhyme aimed his motorized wheelchair toward the board. Injured on a crime scene years ago, rendered a quadriplegic, the former head of NYPD forensics was always searching out any medical treatments that might improve his condition. While there was no way, yet, to restore sensation below his neck, complicated procedures involving surgery and prosthetics had restored most movement to his right arm, which he exercised regularly. The chair, quite the “miracle of mobility,” the literature declared, could also be deftly operated by his left ring finger, the one appendage that had escaped the consequences of the catastrophic accident.

The human body is nothing if not an assembly of marvels and flukes.

Sachs was reading out loud a report from the Major Cases detective in charge of the 212 case. “No persons of interest on the city payroll,” she announced. She went on to explain that the officer had been interviewing employees of the DSE, thinking that it might be an inside job, as intangible property thefts often were when hackers were not involved. There was a video of the thief physically breaking into the server room, where he downloaded the files on a hard drive. It was clever: these days everyone protected against those sharp and bored Eastern European and Chinese hackers, but physically guarding data on-site lagged.

There was a video too of the unsub leaving the building. It came to Rhyme and the investigators via the city’s Domain Awareness System.

Aka, according to some civil libertarians, Big Brother.

The New York Police Department’s DAS was a network of twenty thousand CCTV video cameras around the city. The system collected and stored video and data from a wealth of information: license plate readings, summonses, recordings of 911 calls, complaints, officers’ reports, warrants and arrest notices. The entries numbered in the billions.

One of the DAS cameras had caught Unsub 212 walking out of the Engineering building, then disappearing around the corner. The alarm would be blaring, but he maintained a normal pace so as not to draw attention to himself.

How helpful was the vid? That was another matter. It recorded dark clothing, a hat. Head down, of course.

Rhyme’s assessment: useless, other than offering the man’s body build. Medium. A fact that was, he reflected, more or less useless too.

He glanced into the western portion of the parlor, where the lab was located behind a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass, sealed against contamination. Past the instruments and workstations — the envy of small- or even some medium-sized police labs — were brown shelves holding cataloged evidence. His eyes were on the small red plastic tool kit 212 had left behind when, after he’d gotten what he wanted, he’d had to flee.

They’d examined the box when the lead detective first brought it in and had done a thorough job. But, to Rhyme’s irritation, it had yielded no fingerprints, DNA or other trace. This was also a surprise. Evidence that’s abandoned quickly tends to be the most helpful — not, for instance, wiped clean of prints.

Sachs’s hands went to her trim hips, in black jeans, and, head tilted, her long dark red hair fell straight down, plumb. “What was he after?”

The key question, of course.

Motive is irrelevant in a trial and Rhyme didn’t particularly care for the topic during the investigation either, preferring evidence as the arrow that might point to the perp. Yet, ever skeptical Rhyme had to admit that, absent solid forensics, discovering a motive might lead you to a helpful location or even perps themselves. His metaphor in class: motive might give you the neighborhood, and forensic analysis was the door-knocking that might get you the bloody knife or recently fired, if not smoking, gun.

Clumsy, but he rather liked it.

In 212’s case, though, no one involved in the investigation, nor anyone in city government, could figure out why the perp had committed the crime. Yes, he got plenty of details on infrastructure, tunnels, bridges, underground passages — of which there were enough beneath the five boroughs to form an entire shadow city. But how did that help the bad guys plan an attack? Even the dullest terrorists could find suitable targets in this target-rich city without having to resort to maps of tunnels or engineering diagrams.

The materials would also show which passages ran beneath banks or jewelry stores or fur warehouses. But digging upward into a vault for a heist is purely the stuff of 1970s TV movies, Amelia Sachs had pointed out. And stealing cash was pointless. The serial numbers of every twenty-, fifty- and hundred-dollar bill in circulation would fit on a single fifty-gigabyte thumb drive, and scanners to spot purloined bills were in use everywhere.

Gone were the good old days.

“Hm,” Rhyme offered. It was a variation of a grunt. When he spoke, it was, more or less, to himself. “No obvious reason for the heist. And yet the data were stolen. And it was risky.” He wheeled close to the board. “For. A. Purpose. And what might that be?”

Frustration sent his eyes to the bottle of Glenmorangie scotch sitting on a high shelf nearby. Rhyme’s right arm and hand were largely functional, yes, and could easily grip a bottle, and open and pour it.

He could not, however, stand and snag it from the perch where his mother hen had set it. Coincidentally, that very individual — his caregiver, Thom Reston — happened to enter the parlor just then and notice Rhyme’s gaze. He said, “It’s morning.”

“Aware of the time, thank you.”

When Rhyme didn’t look away from the colorful label, Thom said, “No.”

The man was dressed impeccably, as always, today in tan slacks, a baby-blue shirt and a floral tie. He was slim yet strong, his muscles largely developed not from hunks of iron or machines but from moving Rhyme himself. It was Thom who got the man into and out of the chair and bed and bath.

Another grunt and dark glance toward the liquor.

It was early, no disputing, but the concept of “cocktail hour” had always been a moving target for Lincoln Rhyme.

He looked back at the whiteboard devoted to the DSE theft, but his going-nowhere meditation on the theft was interrupted by the hum of the door buzzer.

Rhyme looked up. It was Lon Sellitto, his former partner from the days before the accident. He was senior in Major Cases, Amelia Sachs’s assignment, and was the detective who most often liaised with Rhyme when he was used by the NYPD as a consultant.

“He looks energized,” Rhyme said, ordering the latch to open.

Inside, the big man, balding in an unenthusiastic way, sloughed off his brown raincoat and hung it. Not that Rhyme cared, but Sellitto seemed to buy the ugliest garments on the rack. And one could find colors that were not muddy-camel-brown, could one not? Sellitto’s clothes were often wrinkled too, as today, a function of the man’s round physique, Rhyme guessed. Most manufacturers presumably created garments out of textiles whose waiting state was smooth.

Then again, what did Rhyme know? Thom and Sachs bought his outfits — like today’s taupe slacks, black polo shirt and forest-green cardigan. Someone once commented that what he was wearing looked comfortable. Thom had cut him a glance and Rhyme’s planned response — “Wouldn’t exactly know, now, would I?” — was replaced with an insincere smile.

Sellitto offered a brief nod to all in the room. Then a frown crossed his face as his eyes shot to an overlarge Sony TV screen mounted in the corner. “Why isn’t the news on?”

“Lon.”

“Is this the remote? No. Where’s the remote?”

Thom picked it up from a shelf and powered the unit up.

Rhyme said, “Why don’t you just tell us, instead of waiting for the anchor-bot?”

“A situation,” Sellitto said, but didn’t elaborate. He took the remote and clicked to one of the national stations. Depicted were a Breaking News bulletin, a crawl at the bottom that Rhyme was too far away to read, and video of damage at a construction site. Another message popped up. It reported E. 89th Street, New York City. This was replaced by: One dead, six injured in crane collapse.

Sellitto looked from Sachs to Rhyme. “It wasn’t an accident. Somebody did it on purpose. They’ve sent the city a list of demands. And if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to do it again in twenty-four hours.”

3

The mayor had received an email with a URL that took him to a private chat room on the anonymous message board 13Chan.

Rhyme read the words that Sellitto called up on the computer monitor in the center of the parlor.

The next page featured a list of properties throughout the five boroughs. Some seemed to be vacant land, but most were built-out structures, presumably abandoned: schools, a public housing tower, a former dock and helipad in Brooklyn that had been bought from the Defense Department, a research lab that had been owned by the National Institutes of Health and transferred to the City University of New York, warehouses that had been under lease to the state for storing census records, a former National Guard armory.

“The group’s name?” Sachs asked.

No deep digging was necessary.

A brief search revealed that the word “Kommunalka” referred to a program used once upon a time in the Soviet Union — a frenzied building of communal apartments after World War II to address a housing shortage.

Sachs skimmed the articles. “Wonder if the perps did their homework. Most of the Soviet buildings’ve been torn down and replaced by — you guessed it — expensive bourgeois apartments.”

Rhyme was intrigued. Forensically, sabotage was no more interesting than his current stolen engineering document case. The deadline, however, and the risk of more death, now moved Unsub 212 to a lower priority.

Rhyme asked, “How did he do it? IED?”

Sellitto answered, “No explosives that anybody heard. Somehow, he got to the counterweights, tinkered with them. The foreman doesn’t know. It changed the balance and the thing went down. Oh, you’re going to be getting a—”

Rhyme’s mobile whirred and he commanded, “Answer phone.”

He then said into the unit, “Yes?”

A woman’s harried voice. “Captain Rhyme?”

“That’s right.”

“Please hold for Mayor Harrison.”

A moment later the man’s smooth voice came through the speaker. “Captain Rhyme.”

“Mayor.”

Knowing Rhyme wouldn’t bother with such protocols, Sachs said, “You’re on speaker with Detectives Sachs and Sellitto.”

“Lon. You’re there.”

“Just briefing Lincoln and Amelia now.”

“I wanted to let you know that we’re not agreeing. You know our policy.”

The city didn’t pay ransom and it didn’t give in to extortion demands.

The man continued, “We couldn’t do what they’re asking anyway. Whoever’s behind this has no idea of what’s involved. There’re a hundred documents we’d have to put together. A nonprofit needs a three-person board, president, VP, secretary, treasurer, registered agent, and, Christ, a million approvals: the state revenue, IRS, EPA. Hell, a budget. Needs to be funded. We can’t deed anything over until all that’s done, which would take weeks or months...”

“Can you buy time?” Sachs asked.

“They set up that chat room on 13Chan. It’s closed to the public, but we can post. I wrote that we need more time.”

“They responded?”

“Two words. ‘See above.’ I’ll show you.” He recited a complicated URL and Sachs typed it into a nearby computer. A header for the site popped up, and in a private messaging window appeared a line drawing:

The mayor said, “No other response.”

Sachs asked, “This the first time there’s been affordable housing extortion in the city?”

“Protests, peaceful shit. Chaining themselves to jobsites, throwing eggs. Never violence.”

Rhyme’s eyes were on the wreckage. From a distance, the machines looked fragile. But the close-up images in the videos showed sturdy steel rods and support brackets.

Then again, had the Kommunalka Project actually been behind it?

“Timing?” he asked.

A pause. “How’s that, Captain?”

“Did the demand come in before the crane fell or after?”

“Oh, you’re thinking it was an accident and this group jumped on the bandwagon. It was ten minutes before the collapse.”

Answering that question.

Sachs asked, “We’re looking at the news. Nothing about the demand.”

“No. We’re not announcing. That’ll mean panic. I’ve ordered all high-rise construction suspended for the time being and we’re getting officers to every site where there’s a tower crane.”

“That’s going to raise questions,” Sachs pointed out.

In an off-hand tone, Harrison said, “Ah, I’ll blame the feds or something. Hold on.”

Voices, urgent, sounded in the background of the mayor’s call.

“I have to go, Captain, Detectives. Please, do whatever you can. The city’s resources? They’re at your disposal. Liaise with the Bureau and DHS.”

The call was disconnected.

Staring at the wreckage again. The blue of the tower was brilliant. Was it painted that way for safety? Or to advertise? Or simply cosmetics?

Sellitto poured some coffee from the carafe that had materialized. He walked to the computer monitor on the wall and squinted as he read the terrorists’ note.

“So, they’re not the brightest bulbs,” he said. “Maybe we can use that.”

“How’s that?” Rhyme queried.

“Misspellings — ‘obsene.’ And ‘its’ without an apostrophe.”

Rhyme clicked his tongue. “Those were intentional, to make us think they’re stupid. They’re not.”

“Yeah?”

“Other rules of grammar and punctuation’re right. They use ‘that’ and ‘which’ correctly. ‘That’ restricts the meaning of the preceding word: ‘the properties that are on the list below.’ ‘Which’ is nonrestrictive — providing optional information. For instance: where they happened to have learned about the city’s lack of redevelopment plans.”

“Linc—”

“And they use ‘since’ correctly too, meaning ‘from a point in time.’ It can be used to mean ‘because,’ but that’s not preferred. And see, they use ‘because’ in the proper sense a few sentences later. And the apostrophe before the gerund. ‘Developers’ building...’ That’s correct.”

“Gerund?”

Rhyme: “It’s a verb used as a noun. ‘Running is good for you.’ Or so I’m told. A gerund takes the possessive. Is no one else aware of these rules? Astonishing.”

“Jesus, Linc, when your students make a little screwup on their papers, you give them shit like this?”

He frowned. “An F. Of course.” A nod toward the post on the screen. “The chat room’s anonymous. But the original email. Who sent it and how?”

Lon said, “Public IP address. A coffee shop in Brooklyn with no security camera. The Computer Crimes people think the perp wasn’t even in the place. He must’ve been outside and hijacked their router.”

“Well, one fact to note: they know computers. Or’re working with someone who does.” He added, “I think the mayor should announce. He’ll have to before tomorrow morning. Give people a chance to stay clear of jobsites.”

Sellitto repeated, “Harrison’s right — there’d be panic. And he’s gotta be worried about copycatting. Is that a goddamn gerund?”

“It would be if ‘copycat’ were a verb. Which I consider nonstandard. Even if some people don’t.”

Rhyme continued to study the footage of the twisted tower and the wreckage of everything in its path. It had fallen forward, not to its side, and the long tower and arm atop it extended from the concrete base in the middle of the jobsite between two tall buildings, which it had narrowly missed, to a park across the uptown-downtown avenue. Had it veered just a dozen feet right or left, it would have collided with glass high-rises. The death toll would have been far higher.

“How many cranes are there in the city?”

Sachs pulled out her phone and asked the question. She squinted as she read. “New York, all boroughs, twenty-six. We’re low on the list. Toronto has over a hundred. L.A. about fifty.”

That was all? Twenty-six? Rhyme thought there would be more. He didn’t get outside much, of course, but when he did, it seemed the soaring towers were everywhere, the crossbeams balancing precariously atop the stalks.

Rhyme said, “I’ll call Mel and get him up here. What’s Pulaski doing?”

Sachs said, “Homicide’s been using him. He’s running a scene in Midtown.”

Rhyme said, “When he’s done, I want him here.”

“I’ll call,” Sellitto said.

“And let’s get a chart going.”

Sachs moved aside the Unsub 212 board, but kept it near the front. They were expecting an update from the lead detective, who was on his way here presently.

In the cleared space, she tugged an easel and blank pad forward and started a new board. “How about naming the guy after the street. Unsub 89?”

“A perfect christening,” Rhyme said.

She wrote this at the top of the chart in her fine handwriting.

Sellitto said, “Think it’s a Russian thing? A cell. Given the name. Kommunwhatever?”

Rhyme shook his head. He was thinking back to a history course he’d tolerated years ago. He recalled that left-leaning movements in mid-twentieth-century America enjoyed co-opting Soviet terms: agitprop, kompromat, intelligentsia.

“Doubt it. The Russians may have a perennial interest in destabilizing democracy, but I doubt the Motherland’d pressure the city to find housing for the proletariat. That’s a Roman word, by the way. Marx stole it.

“But I agree with the mayor. We’ve got to coordinate with the feds. Maybe have Lyle handle that.”

A recent addition to the ranks of NYPD detectives, Lyle Spencer was a former head of corporate security for a media empire. He was quiet, but interviewees tended to cooperate when he asked them questions. The man was massive, a bodybuilder, and his eyes were fierce. Rhyme believed he had seen Spencer smile once, but he wasn’t sure.

Sachs left a message for the detective, detailing the situation and what they needed him to do.

Sellitto opened his briefcase and extracted a thick wad of documents. “This’s from the foreman at the jobsite on Eighty-Ninth: blueprints, maps, SD cards from some security cams, a few other things he thought might be helpful.”

Sachs tugged a worktable into the center of the non-sterile portion of the parlor, and Sellitto spread out the materials. From this sea of paper, she selected a diagram of the site and taped it to a whiteboard. The overhead view depicted the crane and the building whose construction it was part of. Surrounding structures were depicted in rudimentary sketches.

She looked at the TV screen, then drew an arrow on the board. “That’s the way it fell. Between these buildings... All right, I’ll get on the grid. Who knows, maybe we’ll find a receipt from that Chinese restaurant in Queens where the wannabe Russian revolutionaries meet every Wednesday.”

Sellitto gave a sardonic yeah-right laugh.

“Ah, it does happen.” Rhyme was frowning as he looked at Sachs. “What was his name again? That serial killer. Staten Island. Dudley...?”

“Smits. Dudley Smits.” To Sellitto, she said, “He dropped a woman’s business card when he was leaving a murder scene. Had his prints on it. We moved into her apartment and just hung out. Ten hours later he showed up with a knife and a roll of duct tape. The look on his face, priceless. Worth the wait.”

4

In New York, no wilderness attracts birdwatchers like Central Park. Bigger forest preserves exist in the region, but the glowing green rectangle in Manhattan is home to the most fowl per square acre.

Wielding a pair of Nikon binoculars, the man remained motionless, gazing at a black-capped chickadee. He’d been to Central Park several times and knew the sizable inventory that birdwatchers could draw upon to fill out their collection lists.

He was dressed in casual, late-spring trousers (black) and a windbreaker (navy blue). Trim and athletic, thinning hair halfway to gray, but trimmed and combed carefully into place.

After a moment, the bird flicked away, and he recorded some observations in a small notebook. He continued to scan, slowly, south to north.

“Having much luck?”

The voice, a woman’s, was directed at him. He turned. Pear-shaped and binoculared, she was glancing at the notebook in the man’s hand. Her outfit was red and yellow, as if to make the point that camouflage was not a necessary component when birdwatching.

He said, “Saw an ovenbird.”

“No!”

“I did.”

“Did you put it on eBird?”

An online service that included rare sighting alerts.

“Not yet. You?”

She shrugged. “Not much. Just got here. I hear there’s a mute swan. I’ll check the ponds and reservoir later. Where was the ovenbird?”

“Near the museum.”

She turned toward the Metropolitan, across the park, as if the two-tone warbler might be winging its way from there to here at this very moment. Then she turned back and regarded him glancingly. He was hardly handsome, he knew. And his appearance put him around fifty. But he was of fit build and had one special attribute that often appealed: a naked ring finger.

She said, “I saw an American widgeon near the boathouse.”

“Did you?”

Silence fell between them. Then, suddenly, she blurted, “If I were a bird, that’s what I’d be.” She corrected. “Well, a water bird of some kind. Duck, swan, goose. It seems more peaceful. Not a pelican, though. They’re kind of shits. I’m Carol.”

“David.” Holding the notebook in one hand and the Nikon in the other prevented a handshake. Nods sufficed.

A pause. She said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”

Birdwatchers were a close-knit crew. Especially in Manhattan.

“Just transferred here.” The man looked at his phone for the time.

“From where?”

“San Diego.”

“Oh, love it. It’s beautiful there.”

He knew she’d never been.

Another pause. He said, “I better be going. Have a meeting.”

“Nice talking to you. I’m going to go look for that ovenbird. Maybe I’ll see you here again.”

“I hope so,” he said with a smile and turned west, following the sidewalk to another stand of the bushes that were ubiquitous in this part of the park. He gazed past the greenery, without the binoculars, and examined a building across the street, a brownstone — also common here.

He noted, on the sidewalk in front of it, a slim and balding man wearing a loose-fitting dark suit. On his belt was a gold NYPD detective badge. Climbing the stairs, he pressed a bell and looked up at the security camera. A moment later, the door opened.

Ah, there he is...

Beyond the officer, the man in the park could see into the dim hallway. And he now made a sighting far more exciting than any bird — which he had zero interest in anyway, other than as an excuse to be in the park with binoculars.

The person he could see, before the door closed, was of particular — you might say obsessive — interest to him. His name was Lincoln Rhyme, and it was he whom the faux birdwatcher, Charles Vespasian Hale, also known as the Watchmaker, had come to New York to kill.

5

Move. Fast.

It’s not too late, but it soon will be.

NYPD patrolman Ron Pulaski was thinking that there’s that phrase you hear sometimes, about “the first forty-eight.” Meaning that if you didn’t get a solid lead within the first two days of a homicide, the case grew progressively more difficult to solve. That was crazy, as every cop knew, nothing more than a catchphrase from TV. It was the first forty-eight minutes that counted. After that, evidence and witness’s memories started to vanish.

This death was well past that time — in fact, it was about two days old, smack on the line of the true-crime cliché.

Which is why he was moving fast.

Trim and blond and carefully clean-shaven, features hidden by the CSU Tyvek suit and mask, Pulaski was now gazing over the scene: a concrete floor, stained and pitted and cracked from ancient industrial machinery, long gone, whose design and function couldn’t be deduced from the nature of the wear beneath his feet. Water in shallow pools coated with a skim of deep blue and red oil. Concrete-block walls from which rods and pipes protruded. Rusty banks of shelves, empty, their paint largely gone. Mold was a chief design element.

Narrow windows were horizontal slats at the tops of the walls, typical of cellars like this one. Spattered and greasy, they nonetheless let in some light.

A defunct hot-air furnace of galvanized steel dominated one end of the space.

But was that one magic thing that would lead to the killer still here? Or had it evaporated or been digested by rats or dissolved into a billion molecules of obscuring matter?

There had once been that bit of vital evidence. At the time of the murder. It had absolutely been present.

According to a Frenchman who died in 1966.

Edmond Locard had been a forensic investigator — a criminalist — in Lyon, where he established the first forensic science laboratory in the world. His most famous precept was simple and has remained true to this day: it is impossible for a criminal to act without leaving traces of his presence either on the victim or within the scene.

Ron Pulaski had heard those words a hundred times — from his mentor, Lincoln Rhyme. He’d come to believe them.

And he knew that here, somewhere, had been the clues to find the person who had murdered the man who lay at Pulaski’s feet in this dank cellar of a warehouse on the East Side of Manhattan. It possibly still was.

But that adverb was important.

Possibly...

Because after all this time — that infamous forty-eight hours — it might have vanished or morphed into something unrecognizable.

He knew the vital clue was nothing as tangible as friction-ridge prints or drops of the killer’s own blood or a helpful shell casing. Those obvious clues were absent.

So it came down to “dust,” Locard’s charming word for trace evidence.

Pulaski glanced again at the victim. Fletcher Dalton.

In a gray suit, white shirt and dark tie, he was on his back, dead eyes on the black ceiling. The thirty-two-year-old was a broker at a trading house on Wall Street and lived by himself at 845 East 58th Street. He had not shown up for work yesterday and hadn’t been found at home. His name and picture were put out on the wire. Two hours ago, an officer from Patrol happened to notice the door ajar in the deserted warehouse, which was scheduled for demo. He inhaled just one breath before he knew, and he called Homicide.

While Pulaski typically worked with Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, his crime scene reports and testimony at trial as a forensic expert had been noticed, and he’d recently been recruited to run scenes on his own.

Pulaski was pleased for the chance. He’d been Rhyme’s and Sachs’s assistant for some years, and both of them thought he should branch out. Forensic work proved to be far more engaging than street crime — the province of his official assignment, the Patrol Division. Another advantage: it made Jenny happier. The odds of her becoming a widow were considerably smaller when her husband’s job involved picking up hairs with tweezers rather than confronting meth-addled gangbangers.

Another thing: he was good at crime scene work.

And the icing on the cake? He liked it.

How rare was it for what you love and what you excel at to come together?

Rhyme had told him that some people are born to crime scene work, while others simply do a job.

Inspired versus functional.

Artist versus mechanic.

The criminalist didn’t exactly say aloud which camp Pulaski fell into, but he really didn’t need to; with Lincoln Rhyme, you had to infer much, and the younger officer knew how to read him.

Another scan of the forty-by-fifty room. The nature of the killing seemed clear. Dalton was shot outside on the sidewalk and dragged into the basement — after the killer kicked the door open. Only one perp was present here; the dust on the floor told that story.

It was clear that the shooter had dragged the body from the door, straight to where he’d dumped it, with no detours — but of course Pulaski searched the entire space.

He used a pattern of his own: a spiral, starting at the center of the crime and walking in ever-expanding circles. He then turned and did the same in reverse, moving in shrinking loops. Lincoln advocated the grid pattern; with it, you search the scene back and forth, as if mowing a lawn. Then you turn perpendicular and search the same way, overlapping the same ground again.

Pulaski respected the grid, but he liked his own method better; the idea had come when his wife asked him to serve a spiral-cut ham at Thanksgiving.

He squinted against the glare from the half-dozen powerful halogen lights sitting on tripods strategically placed in the room.

It’s here somewhere...

It has to be, right, Mr. Locard?

But where?

Find it, he told himself firmly now.

The clock is ticking...

His spiral-ham search completed, he concentrated on the most important parts of the scene: the path from the door to the body and the body itself.

And there, on Dalton’s lapel, he found it.

The thing that fell into the vital category of evidence at a scene: different from everything else.

It was a dark blue fiber. A synthetic polymer. Because of that composition and its length, it had come from either a scarf or a stocking cap, which the officer knew because he had spent long hours studying scarves and stocking caps (and most other fabrics, for that matter), so that if he happened upon a sample at a crime scene he would have a good chance of identifying it in the field, rather than back in the lab, where the same results would have been attained, but after considerably more time.

Move. Fast.

Outside, Pulaski quickly stripped off the Tyvek, told the collection techs to get the evidence to the lab in Queens, and released the body to the Medical Examiner’s tour doctor.

He then walked from the site of the murder to the subway station that Dalton — who had a MetroCard in his pocket — most likely would have exited from on his way home the night he died, three and a half blocks away (one did not bus one’s way from Wall Street to the Upper East Side).

And here, along a stretch of warehouses and commercial buildings, he found what he was hoping for.

A Domain Awareness System camera mounted on a lamppost.

He placed a call to Central and was patched through to one of the DAS operators — dozens of them sat before banks upon banks of video screens, as they and their algorithmic partners scanned for bad guys and bad deeds.

Pulaski identified himself and gave the location of the camera, and the date and time Dalton would likely have passed by here.

“Okay,” the man said. “You want it now?”

“Yeah, this number.”

They disconnected. Soon his phone hummed and he called up the clip. Stepping out of the sun to see the screen better, he watched the video.

Ah, there.

A slim man, white, with a fastidious mustache appeared. He wore black slacks and jacket and his head was covered with a dark blue stocking cap, of exactly the same shade as the fiber Pulaski had just found.

As he walked east, his eyes were across the street, perhaps on Dalton; that side was not visible to the camera.

The man’s hand was at his side — and once, he tapped his pocket. This he might have done for any number of reasons, but one would have been to make sure his gun was there, safely tucked away.

He was then out of sight. Fifteen minutes later he returned, quickly, and Pulaski formulated a theory of what had happened: somewhere along this street Dalton had witnessed something. It could not have been a recognizable crime; had it been, the trader would have called 911. Pulaski had checked: the only calls from this neighborhood that day had been reports of two heart attacks and a bad fall.

Whatever the crime was, Blue Hat could not afford to let Dalton live.

Pulaski called the DAS people back and asked if there were other cameras in the vicinity.

No, none.

Then he had an idea. He’d try something that he was sure would not work.

But he did it anyway.

He gave the DAS officer the time stamp of the tape where one could see Blue Hat’s face the most clearly, and told him to take a screen capture and send it to another alphabet operation of the NYPD.

The department’s FIS — Facial Identification Section — is not nearly the invasive operation that people believe it is. Its mission is to match pictures of possible suspects taken from security cameras in the field — or occasional bad-idea selfies — with mug shots or wanted-poster pictures in order to establish identities.

Pulaski had submitted about sixty images over his career, and no matches had been returned.

This one was different.

The officer he was on the line with said, “Well, guess what, Ron. That picture? FIS returned a ninety-two percent likely match.”

“Is that good?”

“Ninety-two’s pretty much gold.” He laughed. “And I’ll give you gold for another reason too. You’re not going to believe who your suspect is. You sitting down?”

“Good morning, this is up-to-the-minute business news with WKDP. Investors came down with a bad case of the jitters following the collapse this morning of a crane at a construction site on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. One worker was killed and a half-dozen injured. Evans Development and Moynahan Construction are the companies involved in building the luxury seventy-eight-story high-rise, where units will start at five million dollars. City officials report that the inspection certificates of all the tower cranes operating in New York are current, but federal regulators have urged that construction at those jobsites be suspended pending an investigation by the Department of Buildings and the federal National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST has investigated the World Trade Center collapses and Pentagon attack on 9/11, and the Champlain Towers South building collapse in Miami. Stock in Evans Development, a publicly traded company, fell to an all-time low.”

6

The lights left little doubt as to where the incident had happened.

Hundreds of them, white, blue, red.

Sachs piloted her ancient Ford Torino, painted an urgent crimson, fast along the cross street toward the macabre spectacle, whipping through and around traffic. She nearly resorted to the sidewalk when several trucks refused to part and let her pass. At Third Avenue, the impatient honking resulted in a man’s raised middle finger, which was instantly joined by its three companions and thumb to offer friendly greeting — the sort you’d give to a baby — when he saw the portable blue flasher unit and the NYPD placard on the dash.

Finally, a vehicular break, thanks to uniforms diverting cars and trucks elsewhere. She gunned the engine and made the finish line, skidding to a stop at the edge of the massive construction site on East 89th Street.

The vids on the news hadn’t come close to depicting the carnage. The crane — made of blue pipes, much thicker than they appeared from a distance — lay between the two buildings it had narrowly missed, a tornado track of debris and damage extending from the base — a slab of concrete — to the park, where the tip of the boom had dug itself deep into the earth. Everything beneath it was flattened. The strip of disaster was a clutter of piping, metal parts, papers, slabs of cement, machinery, girders, concrete dust, bits of plastic, wire and cables, bent ladders and twisted stairs and landings. Apparently you didn’t climb straight up to the top of a crane but ascended a ladder twenty feet or so, then turned and climbed once more, the rungs staggered so a slip-and-fall would be injurious but not fatal.

She looked at the cab, metal crushed and glass shattered. The damage was extensive. The operator would have died instantly — impact must have been at a hundred miles an hour — but what a terrible last few seconds he must have had, thinking of his fate as he saw the ground race toward him through the large windows.

Smoke rose, though there did not seem to have been a fire.

Like all New Yorkers, Sachs had seen hundreds of cranes in her years in the city, but had paid little attention to them. She’d heard of some accidents, but they were rare. To her, the machinery signaled another problem: they were flags of construction sites, which meant street lanes would be closed, further slowing the city’s already decelerated traffic.

Another fact she knew about cranes from her job: they were referred to by organized crime triggermen and bosses as “headstones,” because they rose over construction sites, which were popular places to dump hit victims when concrete was being poured.

She retrieved her crime scene gear from the trunk and started into the site, passing onlookers and a homeless man in a filthy brown three-quarter-length overcoat. On his head was perched a fuzzy hat, dark brown and orange, in the shape of those worn by Taliban warlords. Oblivious to the loss of life, he was nosing along the yellow tape, pointing his blue-and-white coffee cup toward the growing crowd and begging for change. But only half-heartedly. He spent more time looking over the debris. A scavenger, probably happy to pocket the dead operator’s wallet or cash that had fallen from his pocket. Pathetic.

He glanced her way briefly, noting the badge and her cold glare, and moved on.

Sachs ducked under the tape and oriented herself, finding the base of the crane. Before she started toward it, a large woman in a yellow vest that read Safety Supervisor approached and handed her a white hard hat. She shook her head, thinking that the hat would, even if in a small way, contaminate the scene. “I don’t—”

“Required.” The woman steamed away to deliver another hat to someone who might be an executive or a government inspector. They were armed with a clipboard and briefcase.

Sachs asked a uniform, awkwardly trying to adjust a too-large hard hat, “Where’s the IC?”

The uniform pointed to another officer, middle-aged, also in a hat, his yellow. She walked up to the incident commander.

“Captain.”

“You’re Sachs. Detective out of Major Cases, right? You work with Lincoln Rhyme.”

A nod.

“These’re weird.” He tapped the plastic on his skull.

“Any more news on the injured?”

“Nothing new. One fatality, five in the hospital. Two critical. Oh, and one heart attack. He’ll live.”

Her phone purred with a text.

Lon Sellitto had written:

Well, so much for blaming the feds for the shutdown.

Of course, panic would happen sooner or later anyway, so it was just as well word went out. The news might prompt witnesses to come forward.

Her eyes were on the tangled metal and mounds of debris. The tower of the crane was about fifteen feet square, with the bottom segment set in that concrete slab. All four feet were still mounted there; the tower had bent or snapped about thirty feet up.

She said to the IC, “Lon said he sabotaged the counterweights.” A glance at the huge concrete slabs, lying sideways like discarded children’s building blocks. “Have any idea how?” She scanned the trolley mechanism they were attached to. “No sign of IED residue.”

“First thing I thought of, but I couldn’t find any either. And nobody heard a bang. Waiting to talk to the foreman. He’s been, you know, on the phone with the families. And corporate.”

“Where is he?”

He nodded to a heavyset man of about fifty, in light blue slacks and blue shirt, whose pocket bristled with pens. His yellow hard hat was tilted forward at a jaunty angle and was covered with stickers from equipment manufacturers and unions.

She sympathized with him having to make the difficult calls to the family members, but she needed to start on the scene.

She approached. “Sorry, sir. I need to talk to you. Now, please.” She held up her ID. He looked at her weapon first, then the fine print.

“I’ll call you back.” He disconnected and turned his red eyes toward her. From the smoke? From crying? Probably both.

“You know this was intentional.”

S. Nowak — the name stitched on his blue shirt — was taut with anger, his teeth locked firmly together as he stared at the disaster. He nodded. “That officer over there told me, yeah. I can’t believe somebody’d do something like this.”

“Did you or anybody on your crews see anyone who might’ve been involved?”

He shook his head. “I’ve asked everybody. Nobody saw a thing.”

She continued, “The detective you talked to earlier, Detective Sellitto?”

“Yeah, big guy. Brown suit.”

“That’s him. He said they sabotaged the counterweights. It threw the balance off.”

“That’s right.”

“You have any idea how they did it?”

A shake of his head. “Somehow unhooked a couple of them. None of us can figure out how. They’re made to stay on their tracks whatever happens. Impossible to fall. Except... I guess not.” His eyes were staring at the slabs. “You know physics?”

“If it applies to car engines, yeah. Other than that...” A shrug.

“So you’re aware of torque.”

“Sure. Force that turns the drive shaft.”

“And moment?”

“Moment?” she asked. “Like in time?”

“No. It’s when there’s force but no movement. Cranes stay upright because of moment. There’s downward force on the front jib — the boom that carries the load. The counterweights in the back have to equal the force in front. That’s moment — like balance. Maintaining moment is what operators — well, and the computers they use — do.” He repeated almost reverently, “Balance. There’s a trolley in the front that holds the hook for the load, and a trolley in the back with the weights. We’re constantly moving the weights back and forth to counterbalance the load.

“Moment is so important that nobody ever screws up. It’s like how pilots just don’t forget to lower the landing gear. So that’s what they attacked. Without the counterweights, there was no way the jib wasn’t going down.” He wiped his eyes. “What is this I heard? Some bullshit about fair housing or something? Jesus Christ.”

“Affordable housing.”

“Hell of a way to pitch your cause.”

“Could he have hacked into that computer?”

“Naw. You can’t hack it. The system’s not online. And that wasn’t the problem,” he said angrily. “They just disconnected the counterweights.” His jaw tightened again as his eyes locked on to a cluster of rebar — the steel rods that reinforce concrete. These, a dozen of them, extended upward about six feet from the concrete slab they were anchored in. There was no mistaking the dried blood and tissue on them and the stains on the concrete.

Jesus...

Nowak was breathing deeply, fast, nearly hyperventilating. “He fell.” A whisper. “All the way, headfirst. Hit the rebar. His body just... quivered. It wouldn’t stop. He was stuck there, upside down. It took three firemen to get him free. Jesus. Three of them... I’ll see that forever...”

So that was how the operator died. Not in the cab. He’d gotten out before it fell and tried to climb down.

Impaled...

“How could the suspect get up there?”

He checked back tears. “Climb, like everybody else. But nobody saw him, or them. We’ve got security during the day. A guard at night, but he’d be at the entrance. He didn’t see anything. I asked him. As for the back, anybody could get over the walls if they wanted to.” He nodded to the eight-foot-high wooden panels with holes cut in some of them for the curious to watch the building go up. “As for the tower, he’d have a hell of a climb, but my boys do it every day.”

“You gave Detective Sellitto some SD cards of security footage. Did you find any others?”

“No.”

“Could it’ve been an inside job?”

“What? You mean one of my people?” He simmered at the suggestion.

She didn’t respond. It was a question that needed to be asked.

And she saw in his eyes the dawning understanding that the idea was reasonable and that he was considering it. Yet his reply was the very thing that Sachs was thinking: “Not impossible, I guess. But think about it. Somebody in this terror outfit joins a union, gets his card, works a site for weeks just to do something like this? And I heard they’ve threatened to do it again. So, what? They have inside people on other jobsites in town?” His voice faded and he took in the brown-stained rods again. Sachs couldn’t help herself; she had to look too.

It took three firemen to get him free...

Then it was time for her to get to work. She had enough background of the scene. She began thinking forensically. Glancing around at the workers huddled together near the entrance, waiting for word if they could return to work or go home. The unsub would have worn what they wore so he could blend in: hard hat, work boots and gloves. Therefore, no latent prints and whatever boot prints he left would be mixed with hundreds of others.

As for facial recognition, the hard hats, dust masks and bandannas made that impossible — even if they lifted a clean capture from a video. And she noticed another problem with FR.

“A lot of sunglasses.”

“You do beam work facing east in the morning and west in the afternoon, you need to see where exactly you’re putting your boots when you’re a hundred feet in the air.”

Sachs looked at the counterweights.

“Where’re the ones that fell first?”

They’d be the ones that the terrorists had sabotaged.

He pointed to a ragged hole in the wooden floor. “Temporary cover over the first basement. Went through it like butter.”

Sachs walked to the hole and looked down. “Anybody down there?” She saw what might have been a flashlight beam.

“I sent somebody to see if anybody was hurt. I didn’t hear, so I guess not.”

So there’d be some contamination of the few things they knew for certain the suspect had touched — the cement blocks and the mechanism affixing them to the crane. But that was crime scene work — aiding casualties had to take priority over evidence.

“Hey, Nowak!”

They both looked toward the site’s entrance. Two middle-aged women, crying, were standing beside another worker, the man who’d called.

“Family. I gotta talk to ’em.”

He walked off slowly and Sachs joined the team from Crime Scene, a trio, standing behind the bus, gearing up. They were evidence collection technicians, civilian employees of the NYPD. The city had been using ECTs more and more in recent years. So much crime, so much to analyze, it didn’t make logistical sense to tie up uniforms or gold shields with the grunt work that most crime scenes involved. Their training was arduous and they worked hard, many ECTs hoping they could join the department as officers.

After briefing them, she herself suited up in white Tyvek.

The hard hat was a contaminant, and it didn’t fit under the hood of the jumpsuit. She set it aside — though not without the thought that Lincoln Rhyme’s disabled condition resulted from him getting hit in the neck by a falling wooden beam at a construction site. Outside the suit, she strapped on a utility belt, which held a holster, and she snapped her Glock into the gray plastic. This too was a source of potential contamination, but one that was worth dealing with. Perps returned to the scene of the crime more frequently than one might expect. You constantly balanced crime scene integrity with survival.

After telling herself for the tenth time to stop looking at the bloody rebar, she tugged on gloves, picked up her personal collection kit, the one from her trunk, and walked to an opening that led to the first basement. A ladder was used to access the level and she climbed down it.

On that floor, she looked around the large empty space, dimly lit by ambient light from holes in the ceiling. She turned toward where the weights had fallen and her shoulders slumped. To get to them, she had to climb through a dark, narrow tunnel about twenty or thirty feet long, four feet high and three feet wide.

Of course, she thought wryly.

Amelia Sachs’s greatest fear was enclosed spaces.

Well, get on with it. The scene’s not going to search itself, and the Kommunalka Project is probably picking which crane’ll be the next to come down.

Her throat suddenly burned and she coughed. The scents were what you’d expect: damp concrete, sawdust, motor oil and diesel exhaust. But there was something else: some kind of chemical. Astringent. Strong. When the counterweights landed, they must have crushed a drum of cleaning fluid. She pulled on a second mask, which helped.

Sachs stepped into the tunnel, walking awkwardly in a taut crouch.

One yard, two...

Give me a high-speed pursuit any day, she thought, the tachometer kissing red.

Give me a firefight with a tweaker in East New York, muzzle to muzzle.

Anything but this.

Three yards...

Well, damn it, the slower you go, the longer you’re in here.

Finally she was out, and in a normal-sized corridor. At the end of this passage, she could see the weights, illuminated by light filtering through the hole they’d created. Dust floated around them.

Here, the chemical scent and the irritation, stinging both her throat and her eyes, were worse. Much worse.

Get to the weights. There was a chance that the unsub had left a dot of DNA or a fingerprint when he’d sabotaged the mechanism.

As good as a business card.

Dudley Smits...

She took one step forward and nearly tripped.

Shining her light downward, Amelia Sachs, the woman who rarely gasped, gasped now.

A worker — maybe the one the foreman had sent down here to check for casualties — lay on his stomach. A flashlight lay nearby; it was this beam of light she’d seen.

The man’s eyes were open but unblinking, and it was clear he was dead.

And yet, wait. It seemed his hands were moving. She aimed the beam of her own flashlight at one of them.

And now another raspy intake of breath.

His skin was bubbling and dissolving. The appendage was settling as it liquified.

And the part of his face that rested on the concrete floor was doing the same. From chin to cheek, the flesh was being eaten away and bloody bone and flaps of muscle and ridges of gum were becoming exposed.

Sachs was coughing harder now.

She took a deep breath to clear her lungs...

Mistake.

Bad mistake.

It simply drew in more of the irritant, stabbing her mouth and nose and chest, and she began coughing in earnest.

The searing pain of fire. She had to escape. Fast.

Dropping her gear, Sachs turned and stumbled back into the tunnel. Now the dreaded passageway was her lifeline.

Lurching forward toward the ladder, she tried to push the Transmit button of her Motorola.

She missed.

Her vision was crackling, black on the periphery.

She staggered toward the ladder. The cough had grown into choking.

She took one step forward and, losing yet more of her sphere of sight, realized she was going down.

When she landed, she had a thought: That’s weird. How can I smack the concrete so hard and not feel a—

7

“Detective.” Ron Pulaski was speaking into his phone. On the other end of the line was Lon Sellitto, who was — in the ever-changing structure of the NYPD — Pulaski’s sorta-kinda boss.

But job hierarchy didn’t matter at the moment. Pulaski had called Sellitto because Sellitto was senior and respected, and because the news Pulaski was about to share could not be ignored or lost in a report. Sellitto would make sure it was not.

“Pulaski,” Sellitto said without waiting to hear what the patrolman’s agenda was. “I left a message. Lincoln’s going to need you on the crane case.”

“Okay. But you gotta hear this. A scene I just ran?”

“Yeah, Homicide? East Side?”

Pulaski was outside the warehouse where Fletcher Dalton had died. The tape was still up. The emergency vehicles were gone.

“I have a probable ID. It’s Eddie Tarr.”

“Wait, you mean—?”

“The bomb maker. Yeah.”

“Man. Wasn’t he on the West Coast? That report on the wire, the government building in Anaheim or someplace? Blew the shit out of it.”

Pulaski said, “He’s here now. Well, he’s ninety-two percent here.” He explained about the percentage likelihood of facial recognition. “But I’m thinking of it as one hundred.”

“So the vic, the stock trader — this Dalton — was just a wrong-time/wrong-place guy.”

“Looks like it. Saw something he shouldn’t. Payment transfer, I’m guessing.”

“Just the facial ID? That’s all you got? Nothing else?”

“A maybe else.”

“What?” Sellitto grumbled.

Pulaski reminded himself not to be cute with a veteran like the detective. “There wasn’t any more DAS coverage in the area. But I found a security cam in a clothing boutique.” The patrolman had thought it was a nice place. Normally, he’d have bought Jenny something in it — but not when the time was speeding past, the forty-eight-minute mark left far behind.

“I think Tarr got into a dark red sedan that maybe had Jersey plates.”

“Tarr... I’m just looking him up on NCIC. Jesus. He sells his bombs all over the world. Doesn’t matter what your politics are. You pay him enough he’ll make you an IED, no questions asked. He doesn’t plant them. He just makes them. The Palestinians’ve bought them to blow up Israelis, and vice versa. So, sedan you were saying? Maybe Jersey?”

“I rolled trace from where the tires were. Maybe that’ll give me a lead.”

“Wasn’t it two days ago?”

“Like Lincoln says, ‘The unlikely is better than nothing.’ ”

Sellitto muttered, “I think he said it better than that.”

“He probably did.”

Sellitto said, “I’m going to tell Dellray at the Bureau, and I know a guy at ATF. They’ll want to jump on any leads to Tarr. Says here there’re rewards on his head, half million.”

“I’m going to follow up.”

“The crane, though, Pulaski.”

“I will. But I want this guy.”

“He’s terrorist enabled. And interstate. And international. That makes it fed all the way.”

Pulaski said evenly, “No, not all the way. He killed a vic here. It’s a homicide. And it’s my case.”

A pause. “Fair enough. Listen, something else. I need to talk to you. Won’t take long. Maybe lunch today at Maggie’s?”

“I can do a half hour. That’s it, though.”

“Good. Make it one o’clock?”

“Sure.” Pulaski was staring absently at the door that Tarr — if Tarr was the killer — had kicked open after shooting Dalton in the back of the head.

“Oh, hold on, Pulaski... Got a notice coming through. About your Tarr case.”

His heart thudded.

The detective continued, “Yeah, here it is. You want to write this down.”

“I’m ready.”

“They got a shitload of red cars in Jersey.”

Pulaski started to say, “Very funny,” but Sellitto’d already hung up.

8

Among the places that Charles Hale had stayed were the Plaza Athénée in Paris, the Marquis Reforma in Mexico City, the Connaught in London, the weird but luxurious boat hotel in Singapore.

He’d chosen them, though, not for their ultra-posh décor and disciplined service, but because they were strategically important for his jobs: murdering a Saudi prince, discrediting a casino owner, stealing a valise containing something valuable enough for him to be paid one million dollars to pilfer... and assignments in the same vein.

Hale parked his SUV on a quiet street in Greenwich Village, walked a half block and turned into a dusty cul-de-sac. Here was his temporary New York City residence. It lacked the panache of any of those elegant, excessive places, but was perfect for his mission here.

It was a WillScot construction trailer squatting at the end of Hamilton Court, not far from the Hudson River. This was a spacious model, 480 square feet. A large central area and two smaller offices on either side, one of which was his bedroom. A bathroom — working, if small. Plenty of tables and shelves. It had been broken into months ago and some half-hearted graffiti decorated the walls, but otherwise there’d been no vandalism. Now, with the lights on much of the time, and security cameras aimed around the perimeter, anyone taking the trouble to slip down the cul-de-sac and peek would believe it occupied and depart, looking elsewhere for larceny or walls to spray-paint into bold art.

Hamilton Court was lined by partially demolished buildings or those scheduled to come down. New condos were planned, but construction was on hiatus for at least three months, according to court filings.

And Hale needed the place for only a day or two longer.

As he walked to the trailer, he stayed on the cobblestoned street itself; the sidewalks had been broken up with jackhammers, but the shattered concrete had not been removed. The paths looked like miniature rivers filled with jagged beige icebergs.

At the trailer, he opened the door’s two electronic deadbolts and an unpickable chain key lock. He stepped inside and disarmed the security system. He doffed his jacket and put away the birdwatching gear.

The interior was sparse. Hale considered most decorations to be distractions and wastes of time. This prejudice did not apply to timepieces, of course, of which there were a half dozen: clocks and a reproduction of a clepsydra — the predecessor to the hourglass. But these weren’t really adornments; they were associates. Friends. He had not brought them with him; the travel accommodations wouldn’t have allowed for that. He kept them in a storage space downtown, but now he’d cleaned that out. He would not need it after this job.

Several of these timepieces he had constructed himself. His nickname, the Watchmaker, was not purely figurative.

Built-in fiberboard tables and metal shelves held paperwork, electronic and mechanical tools, instruments, several computers, a router, a coffeemaker, food and drinks. It was all arranged in perfect rows, as if Hale had used a ruler to place the objects. Any misalignment set him on edge.

The workings of a watch are order personified.

As is time itself.

No deviation is acceptable.

Two chairs sat in the center area. He’d also bought a TV, a terrestrial model with antenna, so he didn’t need to subscribe to a cable service. While he had not seen an entertainment show for six years and three months, he needed the unit to collect news about any investigations against him. At the CIA and other spy outfits, the vast majority of the intel they gathered came not from disguised operatives or clever hacking, but from the media. Hale harvested information in the same way. The police, afraid of being seen as less than candid in the public’s eye, always spilled too much.

On the shelves were a few books. Most were relevant to his projects here in the city, and several were devoted to Lincoln Rhyme. Some dealt with the topic of horology, the study of timepieces, but few about the physics of time. Despite Hale’s obsession with the topic, lofty theory didn’t interest him — the space-time continuum, black holes, wormholes, Stephen Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture...

All of that was best described in TV’s Doctor Who: “People assume that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.”

Hale caught a glimpse of himself in a wall mirror and the image gave him a jolt, even all these months after the surgery. Unlike every other cosmetic surgical patient on earth, Hale had paid, and paid a great deal, to turn his original self — handsome by most standards — into an older man, with a bunched-up and baggy face. This was necessary because his prior appearance was known (he’d even had a mug shot taken — thank you so much, Lincoln Rhyme), and anyone suspecting that he would go for plastic surgery would assume he would remove years, not add them. He’d given himself a balding pate too, which came from meticulous, painful plucking, not telltale shaving.

He made himself a cup of strong coffee. As he took the first sip, he received a text alert, accompanied by a flashing red background on the screen.

His security app — sensors at the chained-off opening of the cul-de-sac — had picked up a presence.

The slim figure was walking toward the trailer, keeping to the shadows on the east side of Hamilton, looking about cautiously. His hand was at his side, but it was easy to see that he was holding a gun. That metal did not reflect sunlight — it was flat black — but the gold NYPD detective badge on his belt certainly did.

Hale walked to the door and from a compartment hidden behind a framed certificate of inspection removed a similar gun — a Glock, though his was mounted with a silencer.

Just as the cop arrived at the door, Hale opened it and, glancing across the site to make sure he hadn’t been followed, ushered in Andy Gilligan. This was the man Hale — as birdwatcher — had seen an hour before, walking through Lincoln Rhyme’s front door.

The detective was well connected in the NYPD and smart and gutsy — and without his assistance, murdering the criminalist would be infinitely more difficult.

9

Rhyme had called her twice, but Amelia Sachs hadn’t answered.

Probably because she was concentrating on walking the grid at the crane collapse site.

Like Rhyme, Amelia became so focused on searching for relevant evidence that the external world vanished. It was one aspect of their lives that had drawn them together.

Still, he thought, she should have checked in by now.

The door buzzer sounded. Rhyme looked at the monitor, hit Enter and NYPD detective Mel Cooper walked into the parlor.

Trimly built, with a perpetual half smile on his face and the habit of pushing his thick black-framed glasses higher on his nose every few minutes, Cooper was the best forensic lab man in the city. Years ago, Rhyme had used all his negotiating skills (and budgetary cudgels) to steal him away from the small-town police department where he ran a crime scene lab. Cooper took seamlessly to urban forensics, though he occasionally expressed regret at not working crimes like the famous one in his hometown, involving a taxidermied fox, a sugar-maple log and a homemade rocket — a case he’d never gotten around to explaining to an intrigued Lincoln Rhyme.

Cooper had two passions: science and ballroom dancing, at which he and his mesmerizing Scandinavian girlfriend excelled.

He greeted Rhyme and Sellitto, who nodded distractedly, as he was on the phone.

After hanging his jacket, the tech took the Lipton tea Thom had brewed just for him (he liked to say he had simple tastes), then began to robe up. He looked around the parlor, frowning.

“I know. There’s no evidence.” Rhyme scowled. Then: “Have you heard from Amelia? She was on grid at the crane site and should’ve called in by now.”

Cooper lifted a dismissing hand at the curious question; there’d be no reason for him to have heard from her.

“Is that anything?” He was now nodding at the documents that the foreman had provided: maps of the site, diagrams of the crane.

“Just backgrounder,” Sellitto said after hanging up.

And Rhyme said staunchly, “Of. Zero. Evidentiary. Value.”

Cooper looked over the chart on which Sachs had drawn the wreckage path. “Terrible. How tall was it?”

Sellitto said, “It’s a self-erecting model...”

“A what?” Cooper asked, lifting a wry eyebrow.

The detective scoffed. “It’s just what they call it. The tower expands by adding other segments. This one was at the maximum height they can go. About two hundred twenty feet.”

And where the hell are you, Sachs? Rhyme looked to his phone once more, then grew angry with himself for the juvenile move.

Without evidence to analyze, there was nothing to do at the moment but a task he truly hated: scrubbing the security videos taken at the site.

He had a brief desire to fling the computer across the room.

Which he very likely might have done if he’d been able to. Lord knew he’d had enough temper tantrums when he was running CSU. Woe to anyone — brass included — who contaminated a scene or was too lazy to search or investigate as completely as they should.

More scrubbing.

Not a single goddamn frame of the person who’d climbed the tower to loosen or cut free the counterweights.

Nothing, nothing.

No-effing-thing.

“What was that?” Sellitto asked.

Rhyme, unaware that he’d spoken aloud, shook his head.

The doorbell rang and Rhyme looked at the video monitor. It was Sonja Montez, a talented evidence collection technician. He knew her diligence and savvy; she “got” crime scenes, understood them. She spoke to them and they spoke back. This might have been, she admitted candidly, because she knew the streets, having run with a girl gang in high school, though whatever they’d gotten up to, Montez had a clean record.

In her arms were two plastic bins like those that milk cartons are kept in. She’d hit the buzzer with her elbow.

Why had she brought the evidence from the scene and not Sachs?

Something was wrong.

He hit the door lock button on his keypad and the woman entered. No longer in Tyvek, Montez wore a bright green blouse and black leather skirt, and her heels clattered on the ancient oak floors. At her throat was a locket that contained pictures of her two young children, he knew; she’d showed them off proudly the first time she’d been here with a trove of evidence for him to analyze.

“Captain Rhyme. What’s all this?” She stood at the X-ray machine and explosives and radiation detectors, and a small biotoxin chamber, in the front hallway.

“Just being careful.”

A nod. “Can’t have too much careful in this day and age,” she said earnestly.

When Rhyme had learned a few months ago that an assassin was targeting him, he’d asked one of his most brilliant criminalist students to get into the attacker’s mind and come up with the most logical way to kill Rhyme. The young man had decided the perp would exploit a weakness, something Rhyme loved and couldn’t resist: evidence. He would plant a bomb or toxin in something from a crime scene.

So, until the assassin was identified and the threat eliminated, everything that came into the house from unknown origins was scanned.

Cooper and Montez greeted each other, and the lab man and Thom began feeding the envelopes and containers through the security machines.

Rhyme finally had to ask, “Sonja. I’ve called Amelia. She hasn’t—”

The woman interrupted, frowning. “You mean you don’t know?” She walked farther into the parlor until she was next to him.

Rhyme’s heart began to pump furiously; given that he was insensate from the neck down, he knew this solely because of the throbbing in his temple.

“What?”

“She collapsed at the scene... She was in the basement of the jobsite, got exposed to something. Chemicals. The same stuff that killed a second worker.”

“And is she—?”

“I’m fine,” came a raspy voice from the doorway.

Amelia Sachs walked inside.

Rhyme frowned. She was carting an eighteen-inch green oxygen tank, to which was attached a clear tube, ending in a mask.

She clapped it onto her face, inhaled deeply and then nodded to a large glass jar in one of the evidence cartons. Inside was a small opaque plastic container. “That’s it. In there. Be really careful. It’s what he used to drop the counterweights. Killed one of the workers. Knocked me out. Medics got me...”

Her voice faded and he wondered if she were going to say “just in time.” But that was a phrase too dramatic for Amelia Sachs. And her pause was simply so she could take in more oxygen.

Yet her initial pronouncement was not exactly accurate. She was not fine. “Fragile” was not a word that existed in her universe, but whatever had happened had — he sought a word — diminished her.

Inhaling more of the oxygen, she began to walk to the sterile portion of the lab, where she often stood to help Cooper navigate the evidence she’d collected. But now she diverted to one of the noisy — and unsightly — wicker chairs that had come with the town house and had yet to be discarded. She sat heavily and caught her breath.

“Sachs,” Rhyme began.

She lifted an eyebrow briefly but remained silent.

Yet another way in which they were alike: minimizing physical maladies. Rhyme, for instance, as a quadriplegic, had blood pressure concerns — autonomic dysreflexia — that needed attention. The remedy was simple — nitroglycerine two percent paste, or some other drugs — but he tended to slough off symptoms and stay focused on the job. She suffered from arthritis and simply ignored the pain and popped pills — over-the-counter ones only — and continued on with the investigation.

The faint motion of her head told him she was doing this now, refusing to acknowledge her present condition. Her eyes told a different story.

She inhaled yet again and turned to Sellitto. In a low voice: “I had to send in a bomb squad robot to collect the sample. And whatever that crap is, it melted the tires and dissolved the camera lens. They’re going to send Major Cases a bill. Just to warn you. It won’t be cheap.”

As she uploaded the crime scene photos she’d taken, Sachs explained about the second death, the worker who’d gone down to where the counterweights had fallen, in the first basement. He’d apparently been overcome and stumbled into the substance, which began eating away his skin. He crawled about thirty feet before he died.

“Those were the fumes that got me.”

After a soft coughing fit, she added that when she hadn’t responded to Sonja Montez’s radio call, a med tech had hurried to the scene and found her at the foot of a ladder that led to the basement. A team got her out and on oxygen right away. They wanted her to go to the ER, but she declined.

Montez was needed at another scene. Sachs thanked her. The women embraced, and with farewell nods to the others, the ECT left the town house.

Sachs seemed to have had enough of sitting. She rose, wrapped the tube around the oxygen tank and was going to set it aside. But with some irritation she hesitated, unraveled the tube and took more breaths through the mask.

“Jesus, Amelia,” Sellitto said, “lie down for a bit.”

“Later,” she said absently.

And again ignored Rhyme’s look of concern.

She turned to Mel Cooper, who had taken the collected samples and was setting them out on a workspace in the sterile portion of the lab.

“That jar.” She nodded toward it again. “The fire marshal said to use neoprene gloves, an apron and a respirator.”

Rhyme noticed her hollow eyes staring at the photos on the large monitor above the evidence boards: images of the victim in the basement, the melting skin, the bubbling of tissue and blood.

Then she turned away and back with them, in the lab. Fully back.

Cooper found the appropriate PPE and donned it over his lab jacket and slacks.

Another brief bout of shallow coughing from Sachs, a wince at the pain, then: “There just wasn’t much to collect, Rhyme. Sonja found boot prints at the base of the tower, where the ladder started. It was the only way up. But they matched the operator’s. I had the morgue send a picture. Our unsub must’ve worn booties at the crane and then pulled them off when he walked back into the site so his boots’d look like everyone else’s.

“How he did it was he got a device on the counterweights trolley rail. Can’t really tell what it was. The stuff dissolved it almost completely.”

She explained that the substance, whatever it was, had begun to dissolve the concrete of the weights itself. “Made them lighter and the crane began to tip forward. The operator did what he could, but finally two of the weights dropped free, and that was it.” Her voice sounded husky and tired, and she paused for more oxygen. She coughed hard several times and wiped her mouth with a tissue, then glanced unobtrusively at it. Rhyme could see no blood, but his view was masked; he wondered if she could.

She repeated what she’d told him earlier — about all the workers in gloves and boots. Dressing like them, the unsub might as well have been invisible.

Murder in a construction site...

“The precinct’s got a dozen uniforms out canvassing stores and offices nearby. See if anybody got a look of someone carting a box into the site.”

Rhyme grimaced. Videos and witnesses, yet only enough evidence to fit into — not even fill — two small milk crates.

Ridiculous.

Sellitto looked toward Cooper, who was running samples through his equipment. “You found out what that shit is yet, Mel?”

Eyes on the crime scene images, Rhyme gave a brief laugh of surprise. “Well, we know what it is. The only question is can we find out where the unsub got it.”

“You know just by looking at the pictures?” Sellitto asked.

“Of course. That, and Amelia’s symptoms.”

“And?”

“Take radioactive toxins and botulinum out of the equation, and it’s the most dangerous substance on earth.”

10

“Hey,” said Andy Gilligan in greeting.

Charles Hale nodded and through the curtain in the door window scanned Hamilton Court once more.

The cop snapped, “I looked. Nobody was following. I know what I’m doing. Not my first circus.”

Wasn’t the expression “rodeo”?

Hale closed and locked the door, then put the gun back into the compartment, feeling no urge to explain his caution or to comment on the fact that Gilligan himself had been clutching a firearm as he approached the trailer.

They moved to the center section of the mobile construction headquarters and sat at the table. “Coffee?” Hale asked.

“No, I’m good.”

“It went all right?”

The detective clicked his tongue. “Perfect. None of them suspect anything. Now, here’s this,” Gilligan said, as if about to deliver a Christmas present to a buddy. He withdrew several sheets from his inside jacket pocket. It was quite the nice garment. The detective, Hale had learned, had several sources of income — all of it tax free — beyond what the NYPD paid him. Hale himself had put $100K into an offshore account for Gilligan this year alone.

“What is it?”

“Lifted it from a file at Rhyme’s. It’ll be helpful.”

Hale opened the sheets and scanned the list of eighteen names. Most of them were crossed out.

“You’ll want to talk to the others, the one’s I haven’t checked off,” Gilligan said. “Might be a witness.”

“What’s the climate like there, in Rhyme’s?”

“The crane thing’s got them occupied. Totally. My case is on the back burner.”

He was referring to the Department of Structures and Engineering theft. The possessive pronoun “my” was true in two senses: it was Gilligan’s case because he was lead detective on it — but also because he was the thief, the man who’d broken into the building and stolen the documents and drives.

He was the man Rhyme and Amelia Sachs had nicknamed Unsub 212.

The stolen DSE materials were what now covered the table in front of the men.

“Anything new I should know about Rhyme’s security?”

“No. Still just the parcel X-ray machine. The biotox frame. The detectors for bombs and radiation.”

When the detective had first reported to Hale that there was a uranium detector, Gilligan had laughed. “Rhyme thinks somebody’s going to nuke him?”

Hale had not bothered to explain that dirty devices — which spread radioactive material — are a far more realistic danger than a nuclear reaction.

“And still no metal detectors?”

“No.”

“The video you took? The card?”

Gilligan seemed hesitant as he handed Hale an SD card. “I didn’t get much. I didn’t want to, you know, be too obvious, taping.”

The detective had worn a body cam with a button lens on the occasions he’d been to Rhyme’s. Some of this was to allow Hale to see exactly what the defenses were like in the town house.

Hale also wanted to see the criminalist himself. Like a herpetologist needs to observe his favorite species of snake in its own environment.

He called up a movie-viewing program on his laptop, loaded the card and scrubbed through what Gilligan had recorded.

The quality was good for the most part. The detective had stood still and panned slowly. He did, however, cover the lens with his sleeve frequently — out of fear of being detected, probably.

Hale now froze a frame, leaning toward the screen.

He was looking at a particularly clear, well-lit capture.

And studied the image intensely.

Lincoln Rhyme is a handsome man, with a prominent nose and thick, trimmed dark hair. Those confined to wheelchairs sometimes gain weight or grow gaunt. Rhyme has done neither. He exercises, it’s clear.

His dark eyes are keen, and a comma of hair falls over his right forehead. His brows are furrowed as he looks toward the portion of his parlor sealed off by a glass wall. It is the sterile side of the room, the laboratory. This hermetical sealing is similar to the finest watchmaking facilities, which are kept breathlessly clean, out of fear that dust — or far worse, a bit of sand or grit — might make its way into the works and render the timepiece useless.

Interrupting Hale’s reverie, Gilligan now said, “You want, I can still try for the mike.” A brief pause. “I’d have to charge you more because of the risk, of course.”

They had debated sneaking a transmitter into the room. Without a metal detector at the door, it would be easy to smuggle in a bug. But Rhyme or someone else would probably sweep the place — especially now that he knew he was the target of a killer.

“No.”

Hale pushed the Play triangle once again.

Now Gilligan has turned from Rhyme and is walking along the row of bookshelves. The camera pans across the titles. Some are books on the law and police procedure, but more are titles devoted to the sciences, notably chemistry, physics, geology and other environmental subjects. One is The Analysis and Classification of Mud on the Eastern Seaboard.

The camera pans back. After mundane footage, the video goes black.

Hale wished Gilligan had gotten a scan of the evidence boards, but he was apparently too nervous to do so.

As Hale sat back, reflecting on what he’d just seen, sipping coffee, Gilligan was looking at the timepieces.

The clepsydra, in particular, grabbed his attention. The instrument was about eighteen inches high. The frame was of ebony and the top and bottom disks featured brass buttons depicting the signs of the zodiac.

“You make that?” Gilligan asked.

“The clepsydra? No. I found it at an antiques store and liked the lines.”

Gilligan asked, “Clep... what?”

“Clepsydra. Predecessor of the hourglass. Same principal, measuring the passage of time, but with dripping water. They predate the sand models by two thousand years. There were problems with them — they couldn’t be used on ships because of the rocking. Condensation was an issue too. Hourglasses like those” — he pointed to two on a shelf nearby — “came about around eight hundred ad. They were inventions of the church, for timing mass and services.”

“It doesn’t look like sand.” Gilligan was squinting.

“No, most of them didn’t use sand. Pulverized marble or burnt eggshell were more accurate. This one? It’s tin oxide. Hourglasses gave us the term ‘knots,’ for speed.”

“Yeah?” Gilligan asked. “I’ve got a boat. Nice one.”

Which I might have bought him, thought Hale.

“Sailors tied knots into a rope and then fixed it to a log. They threw the rope overboard and used an hourglass to see how many knots flipped through their fingers for a given period of time.”

“Cool. I’ll tell my boating buddies.”

Hale finished his coffee, washed the cup and dried his hands. “You spare fifteen minutes now? I have an idea — it’ll be good for both of us — and I want your thoughts.”

Gilligan looked at his digital watch. Cheap. No judgment from Hale. A watch like this might drift.5 seconds a day; a million-dollar mechanical model typically loses twice that. “Sure, I guess.”

Hale once again checked the monitors. Clear. He slung his backpack over his shoulder and the two men stepped outside. Hale set the locks and they continued down the dusty cobblestones.

“Graveyard,” Gilligan muttered.

“What?”

The detective waved his arm, indicating the dilapidated buildings lining the cul-de-sac. “They look like big tombstones.”

They walked around the chain barrier and onto the quiet street, so typical of this part of Greenwich Village.

“Better if we take one car. Yours?”

Gilligan said, “I’ve got to be at One PP in a half hour.”

“I have a meeting too, uptown. I’ll take the train.”

They climbed into the sweet-smelling Lexus, which was spotless. The mileage would be low. Maybe Hale had bought him this, rather than the boat. Maybe a portion of each.

As Gilligan started the engine, Hale asked, “The GPS is disconnected, right?”

“Yeah. I made sure.”

“Head south. Then east. We’re going to Webber and Blenheim.”

After twenty minutes of negotiating the narrow downtown streets, which grew increasingly deserted, they arrived at the intersection. A vacant lot took up half the block. Mostly dirt, some clumps of grass. A dead tree. Trash. In a few places, the sunken brownstone remains of tenements, typical of nineteenth-century Lower East Side.

“What’s here?”

“Part of my plans for Rhyme.”

The detective pulled the sleek car to the curb — carefully; he’d be afraid of scratching the wheels. “He really is an arrogant son of a bitch, you know.”

“No doubt about that.”

They climbed from the car and walked to the six-foot-high chain-link fence around the lot. The gate had been stretched open, so it was easy to slip through.

Hale pointed to a row of abandoned tenements on the other side of the lot.

Gilligan said, “I was thinking about Rhyme.”

“Yes?”

“My brother and me, we hunt. Have all our lives. We’re fucking good shots. Rhyme gets out of the town house some.”

Hale was thinking: Rhyme goes to the Manhattan School of Criminal Justice for the courses he teaches. Tuesday and Thursday and every other weekend. The school was two thousand, three hundred feet from the town house. Usually, his aide drove him in the disabled-accessible van, but on nice days he sometimes motored his way to and from class.

“I could get up on one of those buildings. Two shots. That’d be it. A third for his aide, so he doesn’t try any lifesaving shit. I’d only charge an extra fifty K. What do you think?”

Hale was silent. Then: “No, I think we’ll stick to what I’ve planned.”

Gilligan laughed. “We negotiating? Okay, thirty K.”

“The plan.”

“Like building a watch,” Gilligan said. “You don’t change the design halfway through.”

“Just like that.”

Hale had slowed and Gilligan walked ahead a few paces. When he turned back, he found that he was looking at Hale’s hand, which held a silenced weapon pointed his way.

His eyes revealed shock.

Disbelief too, as if having seen Hale put his Glock back into the compartment beside the trailer door, it was impossible to fathom the concept that someone could actually own two pistols.

11

Lon Sellitto: “So what is it, kryptonite?”

A pop culture reference, Rhyme guessed. Maybe some weapon used by a villain in a movie.

“An inorganic acid. Hydrofluoric. HF’s the chemical symbol. Technically it’s classified as a weak acid.”

Sachs scoffed and Sellitto grumbled, “Weak? Tell him that.” Nodding toward the pictures of the dead construction worker.

“That only means it partially dissociates in water. It’s an ion issue. It can be as corrosive as any other acid. But with HF, corrosion isn’t the real problem. It’s the combination of the elements that makes it so deadly. It’s a one-two punch. The H — hydrogen — burns through the top layer of skin so fast you hardly feel it... Though you definitely do an hour or two later. Then, once it’s in your body, the F — fluoride — attacks internal cells. The result is liquefaction necrosis. And the name of that condition pretty much says it all. Poisoning occurs by contact or inhalation. Breathe it and it’ll burn all the way through your lungs. Dyspnea, cyanosis, pulmonary edema.”

This description coincided with Sachs hitting the oxygen once more.

“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “Does it take much?”

“No, a few drops’ll kill you. There’s no antidote. And you can’t wash it off. All you can do is try to treat the symptoms. Massive pain and infection.” He called to Cooper, “Anything else in addition to the acid in the sample?”

“Fragments and sludge of industrial concrete, sand, steel, a little iron, all in states suggesting they were dissolved by the acid.”

“What’s the concentration?” Rhyme asked.

“Thirty-two percent.”

“That’s a mistake. Run it again or recalibrate the equipment.”

“Done all of the above. Thirty-two percent.”

The highest concentration that Rhyme had ever heard of was twenty, and that was just for shipment and storage — in very specialized containers. The product was then greatly diluted for sale to end users. On the market, it was, at the most, two to four percent. A concentration that Sachs had collected at the scene would quickly eat through anything but the very few materials impervious to it, and gas released when it was exposed to air could kill within minutes.

She had been very fortunate to have missed any more exposure in the tunnel beneath the jobsite.

He glanced her way. She was only half listening. She was inhaling more oxygen and staring at some pictures of upturned rebar rods. They were rusty, but two were darker. Dried blood.

The operator must have landed on these when he fell from the sky.

Rhyme nodded at another one of her pictures on the monitor, depicting the counterweight trolley. The acid delivery device was a smoking discolored blob.

“Damn it. He got it up there somehow. The top of the crane. We’ll have to work on that. Once it was in place, how was it activated?”

“The detonator,” Cooper said, holding up another clear plastic container. Inside was what appeared to be a small board of solid-state electronics, also deformed and charred by the acid. He was speaking with the respirator on, through the attached mike.

“Small charge, probably just pulled open a half-dozen big-caliber rounds for the gunpowder.”

“Antenna?”

“Hard to say.”

Rhyme grumbled, “Of course it’s hard to say. It’s melted into oblivion. But if you had to guess.”

“Not remote. Timed.”

As Rhyme had figured. “Is it off the shelf?”

“No. Homemade.”

So, impossible to trace.

“How much acid?”

Cooper shrugged. “At this concentration, two liters. Maybe three.”

Sachs coughed, a snapping, painful sound. She discreetly lifted a tissue to her mouth once more. A fast glance. With yet another bout of irritation, she stuffed the wad away in her jeans pocket. A hit of oxygen, then she said, “He knew what he was doing. He’d have to calculate how much weight he’d need to remove from the counterweights to make the crane unstable. There’s this thing the foreman was telling me about. Moment. It’s—”

Rhyme said, “Moment equals force times distance. Expressed in units of newton-meters.”

Sellitto was nodding. “So he’s got a degree in engineering. Put that on the chart.”

“No,” Rhyme said dryly. “Put down that he stayed awake in high school science class. Everybody knows that formula.”

Lon Sellitto rolled his eyes. “No, not everybody... But there is one thing we do know.”

Rhyme and Sachs looked toward the detective.

“He’s in good shape. Climbing that.”

“No elevator?”

“No,” Sachs said. “Ladders.” She walked to the diagram the foreman had provided to Sellitto — a side view of the crane before it fell — and tapped various places as she spoke. “Up here, he got into the slewing room, where the turntable is. Then up another ladder to go out onto the top, then down another ladder to the jib on the back.”

Rhyme could see a flat walkway that ran to the rear. It ended at a three-foot-high barrier, on the other side of which was the counterweight trolley. Up to that point were handrails and cables so workers could hook on as fall protection. But beyond that he’d have to tightrope walk — or crawl — along a narrow track two hundred feet in the air to get to the counterweights.

He really would have wanted this crane to come down, going to that risk and effort.

Rhyme repeated his earlier comment. “We need to source the acid.”

Sachs said, “I’ll get some people at the lab in Queens on it.”

“Tell them to look for suppliers who sell thirty-two percent or higher concentrations. You can dilute it, but you can’t make it more concentrated, not without a lot of time and effort.”

She placed the call, and after some deep inhalations, began a conversation with an officer on the other end of the line. Mel Cooper continued to examine the evidence that Sachs and the technicians had collected. Cooper called out the results, which were discouraging. The soil samples from the routes the unsub probably took to get to the crane tower base all matched the dirt throughout the jobsite. What they wanted was soil that didn’t match, which meant it might, possibly, have been left by the unsub and, if unique and traceable, could lead to his house or hideout.

After Sachs disconnected her call, she asked, “The videos you’ve been going through? Anything?”

Rhyme scoffed. “Nothing. The damn cameras all point down, ground level.”

The security system was meant to capture thieves, not acrobats sabotaging equipment in the sky above the jobsite.

He glanced at a digital wall clock. Twenty-two hours till the next crane came down.

On one of the murder boards was a map of New York — all five boroughs. The city’s construction permits department had provided a list of all the tower cranes presently in use. Thom had helped out by marking them with red X’s.

Which of these would be next?

Sellitto received a text. He looked at the screen. “Crap. It’s the mayor. He wants an update.”

“You’ve been here the whole time, Lon. We’ve learned that the unsub uses acid whose source we have no clue about yet, that he didn’t leave any discernable body or other trace at the scene. We’re in the dark completely about race, age and build — other than that he’s got strong legs and a good sense of balance.”

“Then I’ll tell the mayor that. They just need a bone.” He read another missive and said, “Hoped that announcing it was intentional might bring out some witnesses. But nobody’s come forward.”

Not a surprise.

“And where’s Ron?” Rhyme asked, his voice edgy. “We need him here. Isn’t he done with the homicide scene yet? How long could it take?”

Though even as he asked the question he was aware of what he told his students. “You search until there’s nothing left to search for. One hour, ten, seventy-two.”

“Turns out there’s a little more to it. The kid’s got a big win. He may’ve linked it to Eddie Tarr.”

Well, this was interesting. The Dublin-born former industrial engineer who put his considerable skills to work making clever devices that destroyed the structures that equally clever men and women designed and built. Wanted in dozens of jurisdictions, the careful and reclusive Tarr reportedly lived off the grid somewhere in the Northwest. Was he here for a job or to collect in-person payment?

“He’ll be here, but I know he wants to run down a lead or two on Tarr.”

Rhyme and Sachs shared a look. He could see that she too was happy for their protégé. With this, the brass would be taking notice of him.

Rhyme’s phone hummed. It was Lyle Spencer, who’d been following up with the feds on the housing terrorists and the demands they’d made.

“Lyle.”

“Lincoln. I have something on the crane case. I can’t find anything about the Kommunalka Project. Not through NCIS, Homeland, the Bureau. I even checked with the CIA and NSA about traffic including the name. Zip. Even at their Russia desk.

“But there’s software now, websites, where professors can check to see if students have plagiarized papers or had an AI system, like ChatGPT, write the stuff for them. I plugged their letter to the mayor into the web, and some language from a few years ago got returned. The Kommunalkas lifted it verbatim from blog posts by somebody advocating for affordable housing. And this guy was arrested for political protests and vandalism.”

Good thinking on Spencer’s part. Now the equally important question: “Any chance we can find him?”

“Oh, a pretty good one.” Spencer sounded amused. “It’s Stephen Cody.”

“No shit,” Sellitto muttered.

“And that would be?” Rhyme asked impatiently.

A pause, probably suggesting a measure of disbelief. “The U.S. representative.”

Like sports, politics was irrelevant to Rhyme, unless the subject came up in an investigation, and it rarely did. “Never heard of him.”

“Really? He represents your district, Lincoln. In fact, his office is right around the corner from you.”

“I’m Amber Andrews with the midday business report. The stock market continued its slide into negative territory after terrorists claimed credit for the collapse of a construction crane on New York’s Upper East Side, resulting in two deaths and a half-dozen injuries. The real estate market as well is predicted to slump, with commercial and residential developers closing down jobsites, since more attacks are threatened. The group, the Kommunalka Project, is demanding the city create more affordable housing and approve fewer permits for luxury high-rises, like the one sabotaged today on Eighty-Ninth Street. The police and federal authorities are investigating. Residents are being asked to avoid any construction sites with cranes.”

12

He was backstage.

All two hundred and forty pounds of him.

Standing with arms crossed over his massive chest, he kept returning to the question: Was the man he was looking at a killer?

Lyle Spencer was listening, somewhat, to the words from the stage. The debate was within his range of vision, forty feet away, but he was experiencing the event on a monitor. You could see the expressions better this way. Lyle Spencer liked expressions, he liked angles of heads, enfolded or dangling arms, hands making fists, hands splayed. As for legs, he liked legs still and legs tapping.

He really liked tapping legs.

In this instance, the kinesic analysis — body language — was tricky. The truth, he suspected, was in camo, as the debate was between two politicians.

Spencer leaned toward the monitor. A man was debating a woman, who was giving her closing argument. Spencer paid no attention to her. He continued to study her opponent, who was on the right of the stage to the audience. Tall, with a build like the former football player that he was (Spencer had done his homework — always). He wore dark slacks and a blue business shirt with sleeves rolled up. No tie. Thick black hair, tousled intentionally, Spencer was sure. He seemed good at cultivating a Look.

Ah, looking earnest and thoughtful.

But was he a killer?

Unlikely, but hardly impossible. When Spencer was upstate, he’d collared murderous grandmothers and kindergarten teachers and a particularly bad minister. They were pictures of innocence. You never really knew until you started digging. And began checking out evasive eyes and, yes, tapping legs.

The site of this verbal fencing match was an august performing arts center on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Onstage were the candidates for U.S. representative for a district that embraced parts of Manhattan and the Bronx: the incumbent, Stephen Cody — the man Lincoln Rhyme had never heard of — and the challenger, a Manhattan businesswoman in her fifties, Marie Whitman Leppert.

Cody jotted a note.

Killer? Not a killer?

Well...

That minister had tortured his victims, killed them and then went upstairs to write sermons that were both poetic and inspirational. Love thy neighbor was a theme. They were quite good.

Applause signaled the end of the opponent’s concluding remarks. Spencer knew little about the woman.

The moderator, a white-haired, red-frocked woman from public broadcasting, said, “Last word to you, Representative Cody. You have one minute.”

“Thank you, Margaret. And thanks to everyone at the Ninety-Second Street Y for hosting this event.” He paused. Dramatic. “Now, this afternoon was supposed to be a debate. That, to me, means give-and-take and addressing one participant’s position with an opposing one. But all I heard was attack, attack, attack. My opponent was quick to point out what she claimed were problems with my proposals. But did she address the dangers and injustices that those proposals are meant to cure? No.”

He turned to the other podium. Close-up, his eyes were fervent. “You attacked my climate change plans but didn’t offer any alternatives — even though, like I proved, according to the experts, half of New York City will be underwater by the end of the century. You—”

The opponent apparently couldn’t restrain herself. “The way you’d pay for it is pure fantasy and—”

“Ms. Leppert. This is Representative Cody’s final statement.”

“You were happy to tear down my proposal for creating a path to citizenship, but said nothing about how you would help the millions of hardworking individuals who came to this country — like your and my ancestors did — to escape oppression and find opportunity for their families. You questioned my plan for free or subsidized tuition for community or four-year college if the students agree to work programs after graduation that benefit society. You said nothing about addressing the obscene wealth disparity like I did, with my three-point tax plan—”

“Which robs the middle class.”

“Please, Ms. Leppert.”

“My opponent talks about her law-and-order record, spending years as a federal prosecutor in Texas jailing cartel members. And I give her credit for that. God bless her for her service. But that job did not prepare her one bit for the problems we face here: throwing first-time offenders for minor drug misdemeanors in prison—”

“Time, Representative Cody.”

“—effectively ruining their lives. Now, on—”

“Representative?”

“On my website, you’ll be able to see in clear, specific detail what my proposals are, which I’ve only been able to sketch out in broad brushes this afternoon. They’ll help everyone — bus drivers and deli counter-people and nurses and businessmen and — women. And if you honor me with reelection, I pledge that I will tirelessly fight to make each and every one of those proposals a reality. Thank you.”

Applause — somewhat louder than for the opponent, though Spencer wasn’t sure. He suspected that most of the audience members were by now thinking of where to go afterward for tea or alcohol.

The debaters shook the moderator’s hand. Leppert walked backstage first, passing by Spencer with no reaction to his presence, and began speaking with a young female assistant, who gushed about her performance in a sycophantic way that Spencer deduced irritated the candidate. Probably soon to be replaced.

After a brief conversation with the moderator, Cody entered the dim, matte-black space behind the stage. He was about as tall as Spencer, well over six feet, but weighed forty or so pounds less. Now that the two politicos were freed of the constraints of behaving in front of an audience, would fur fly in a big way?

But no.

“Got me good there,” Leppert said with a cheerful frown. “Didn’t have my Post Toasties in order on HB three seventeen.”

“Eh. If you had, I’d’ve gone down in flames. Took a chance. How’s Emily?”

“Healed nicely. Thanks.” Leppert grimaced. “Out for the season, though.”

“That’ll hurt more than the wild pitch.”

“Already filling up her schedule with other stuff — which means my schedule. As chauffeur.” Leppert declined the makeup wipe from the intense assistant; a glance in the mirror apparently told her that she’d keep the paint job the pros had done. She picked up a Coach backpack, removed a diamond necklace and ring, and placed them around her neck and on her finger. She had ditched the posh accessories for the debate, and kept fixed the collar button on her blouse, which she now undid.

She had a Look too.

The conversation rolled into the absent pleasantries of a chance cocktail party encounter.

The businesswoman offered a breezy “See you at the breakfast Tuesday.”

“Stab me with a stick,” Cody muttered as she vanished out the door.

Then he turned to Spencer. Cody did snag a makeup wipe and went to work. “Wasn’t sure who you were here to see. I guess I win. Who’re you with?”

A flash of Spencer’s badge.

The representative rolled down his sleeves, pulled on a jacket. He nodded after Leppert. “Did you hear her say ‘Thank you’ at the end?”

“I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I wasn’t either. I don’t think she did, but I did. In public speaking, you’re not supposed to thank your audience. You’re doing the audience a favor by appearing. They should thank you. I keep forgetting.” He grimaced. “I get riled up.”

“You both thanked the moderator.”

“You have to thank the moderator. Even the bad ones.”

“A close race?”

“I’m way ahead in the polls, but it ain’t over till, et cetera. Marie’s got some momentum. Devoted following. She’s not rags to riches. More JCPenney to riches and she earned it herself, and she really did put cartel punks away. All right. What can I do for you, Detective?” From a case, he removed eyeglasses with bright red frames, replacing the black, apparently believing the midday audience would prefer a more studious and less stylish candidate.

“You study public speaking?”

“Not study. Debate club. Moot court.”

“How many of these do you do a year?”

“Maybe a dozen.”

“You know the crane incident?”

“Of course. Terrible. My colleague was on the scene. His district. They’re saying it’s intentional. Sabotage.”

“That’s right.”

“Domestic terrorism?”

Spencer nodded.

Cody said, “Right wing? Neo-Nazis? Racists? Plenty of those around, but people forget that the left have been pretty fast doing the bad stuff too. A horse-drawn cart blew up in front of J.P. Morgan in 1920, killing thirty-eight. Anarchists were suspected.”

“This is about affordable housing.”

Cody received a text, read, sent a brief reply. He looked up. “Housing.”

Spencer continued, “That’s one of your issues. I saw it on your website.”

“A serious problem, housing. Who are these people?”

“They’re calling themselves the Kommunalka Project, after a public housing plan in Soviet Russia.”

“Never heard of them.”

Spencer watched eyes, hands, legs. The trick in kinesic analysis is to get a baseline — how one behaves when telling known truths — compared to behavior when asked investigative questions. Hence, Spencer asking him about his history of debating — to which he knew the answers. Now he was looking for deviation.

“Either they’re new or they’re deep underground. We can’t find them. And they’re only communicating via the dark web.”

“What was their point with the crane?”

“Extortion. They’re demanding the city turn a couple dozen old buildings into housing units.”

“And if not? More cranes?”

“That’s right.”

“Sick.” Then he was nodding. “All right. Detective, let’s get to it. That’s why you’re here. I have a history of housing activism. And an arrest record, as you probably know. But that wasn’t for housing. It was environmental.”

“You vandalized a planning and zoning board office and a corporation accused of polluting an upstate river. You chained yourself to the gate of an oil depot construction job in Brooklyn.”

“Didn’t have to search very far for that. It’s on my website. And there’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents a criminal from holding office.” A chuckle. “Some would say it’s a prerequisite. You think I’m involved in this. Though I can’t help but notice you still have your handcuffs tucked away.”

“I read transcripts of your last three speeches. You don’t mention affordable housing once.”

“Like I’m trying to distance myself from the Kommunalka-ists.”

“That’s the impression.” He added, “In their note, making the demand for the housing, they used a quotation from you.”

“Ah. That’s it.”

“ ‘The city is the largest landowner in the area. It holds three hundred and seventy million square feet of property and its obsene how little of that is devouted to affordable housing.’ ”

“ ‘Devouted’? Didn’t read my statement that carefully, I guess.”

“And they misspelled ‘it’s’ and ‘obscene.’ ”

Cody asked, “How’d you find it?”

“A cheating website.”

He frowned. “Ashley Madison? That dating thing for married men?”

Spencer had to laugh. “Cheating on term papers. A professor uploads a student’s work and the software looks for previous published writing to see if he stole any of it. Or if a chatbot wrote it.”

Cody nodded. “I used ChatGPT to write a speech for me. It wasn’t bad.”

A large, somber man wearing a black suit stepped into the area. “Sir. The Alliance?”

“I’ll be right down.” The makeup was nearly gone. Cody examined his face, wet a paper towel and finished the job. “Detective, have to ask: Using one’s own public quotation in an extortion note? Doesn’t that seem pretty stupid?”

Spencer shrugged. “Are you in touch with affordable housing activists? From your website’s position paper, I’d think you have to be.”

“You want me to ask about this group?”

“Would you?”

“I will.”

Spencer handed him a card. The politician pocketed it.

Cody said, “When did you get here today?”

“Twenty-five minutes ago. Thirty.”

“So you missed my pledge to introduce federal legislation that would guarantee affordable housing to families making fifty thousand a year or less.”

Oh.

“I’m not avoiding the issue, Detective. I guess what I’d say is: so many problems, so little time.”

13

“Watch that phalanx.”

Ron Pulaski waited, tilting his head slightly.

Lon Sellitto explained by pointing. A flock or a gaggle — or, apparently, a phalanx — of pigeons was headed their way fast. A naïve — some would say idiotic — tourist was tossing seed on the ground nearby.

They were in the square outside of One PP, where they’d met, and were on their way to Maggie’s, a New York diner in the old-school mold. A feeding trough for cops.

“What is a phalanx, exactly?” the younger officer asked as the two continued along the sidewalk.

“Greek for ‘shitload.’ ”

“If I’m ever on Jeopardy! that might help.”

“Rachel and me? We play trivia. We compete. A bar. You?”

“No.”

Sellitto pushed the door open. “Keeps your mind active. Until you have a beer. Then it deactivates.”

They got a booth and Sellitto pulled off his wrinkled brown raincoat, revealing a wrinkled brown suit.

Pulaski couldn’t help but think of the fine suit — pressed flat as a tabletop — that stock trader Fletcher Dalton had died in.

And where the hell was the green-eyed, red-headed bomb maker who had ended his life?

A shitload of red cars in Jersey...

The beige-uniformed waitress approached.

“Lon, Ron. It’s the younger — on and the older — on. See, I said older. Not old, Lon.”

“You’re a dear, Tally.”

Forever armed with a coffeepot, she poured two mugs without their asking. If you didn’t drink coffee, you didn’t come to Maggie’s.

“Anything else?”

Muffin for older — on. Younger picked a grilled cheese sandwich.

“So, you do trivia. What does phalanx really mean?”

“No clue. So.” Sellitto lifted a palm. “Good job with the lead to Tarr. They’re over the moon about it, the task force. Which, by the way, is something else I don’t get. Over the moon, I mean.”

A massive corn muffin arrived. Pulaski recalled Sellitto had said that corn muffins weren’t as bad for you because they didn’t have the sugar that blueberry had. And corn was nutritious. Pulaski didn’t know enough to dispute or agree. And why do so anyway? Everybody loved corn muffins.

The sandwich landed too. A lot of cheese. Pulaski took a bite.

Sellitto asked, “How’d you do it? With Tarr? I never heard.”

Pulaski explained about the blue fiber and the DAS footage.

“Damn.” Sellitto laughed out loud.

The younger officer frowned. “I keep checking the intel sheet for IED chatter or jobs in New York. Threat assessment’s the same as it’s been all month.”

“You’re on intel? You got clearance?”

“Yeah.”

“When?” Sellitto was impressed.

“I don’t know,” Pulaski replied after another bite of the imposing sandwich. “Six, eight months ago. Was a hassle. Man, they look into everything. Talk to your friends, family. Polygraph. Thought they were going to ask me if I was a Yankees fan. And the truth’d come out. I’d be busted.”

The detective laughed.

Odd, Pulaski was thinking: It seemed Sellitto’d been paying close attention to him. Really close. Studying him, sort of. This wasn’t uncomfortable, but was on the line.

The younger officer continued, “I checked some folks who might be Tarr’s potential customers. There’s that militia outfit. Those assholes from Westchester? They don’t like the governor. So maybe they hired him.”

Sellitto was now concentrating. “I don’t know about that one. How can they afford Tarr? I hear he’s expensive as hell.”

“Right, makes me think it’s not them. They’re strip mall, and Tarr is galleria.” A shrug. “There’s talk of a turf war, M-42s against that Jamaican crew, in Spanish Harlem.”

“Naw, they shoot, they don’t blow up.”

Pulaski considered this. “I guess so. I talked to ATF and they’re looking into chatter. Might be hard to find anything, though. At his level, you know. He’s careful.”

With all the data snooping nowadays, the smart bad guys were increasingly using handwritten notes and in-person meetings to communicate and pay for services. That philosophy extended bin Laden’s life for over a decade. And wire transfers, crypto and even cash were out — too traceable. Diamonds and gold were becoming the preferred form of wages.

“So,” Pulaski said, “I’ll hit all the trace I found where that red car was. And canvass the scene again.”

Back to the sandwich. The thing about grilled cheese is that the fourth bite isn’t as much fun as the first, and it goes downhill from there. Too much of the same.

More coffee arrived. It really was the best in the city.

Sellitto sipped. “Ow. Hot, careful.”

Somber now, the detective asked, “Ron, any chance Tarr or somebody could place you on the scene? Well, either of them — the basement scene, or the street where you tipped to the red car?”

“Maybe. But the hit was two days ago. Why would Tarr come back today?”

Of course, if Tarr was keeping tabs on the warehouse, it wouldn’t be impossible to find the lead officer on the case.

“Well, keep looking over your shoulder. Now,” he said, moving on, “the crane thing. Linc and Amelia want you on it.”

“I’ll juggle. I’ll get up there right after this.”

And that word, “this,” was intentional, because it signified that Pulaski knew the lunch was about something other than lunch and he was impatient to hear what.

The detective got it and pushed the corpse of the muffin away, a surprising gesture; food — especially pastries — were meant to be finished in Lon Sellitto’s world. His eyes were suddenly evasive.

“Okay. Here’s the thing... You know, things happen sometimes.”

Pulaski nodded, not so much in agreement with the detective’s pretty much meaningless comment, but solely to encourage the man to get to the point.

“Nothing really lasts forever.” This pronouncement was equally solemn.

And ambiguous.

What was this about? Pulaski was suddenly alarmed. Sellitto wasn’t getting divorced, because he and Rachel weren’t married. They could be breaking up, but the detective and he weren’t so close they’d talk about it.

Anything else he might be talking about? Retiring? Couldn’t imagine that. Sellitto as a security guard? Fishing? Playing bocce? Ha!

“You know we got the biggest crime scene operation in the country, after the Bureau?”

“Sure.”

“Only, we got something that makes it special. It’s Lincoln that sets us apart. And I don’t just mean he’s sharp. Naw, it’s that he’s independent. No politics, no squabbling, no game playing. He runs a case, gets the evidence, presents the evidence, and not a single goddamn other thing matters.”

Pulaski felt his heart beating faster than it had a moment ago.

Nothing really lasts forever...

“We gotta keep that... What would you call it? That model, you know? Keep it intact.”

“Detective?”

Yes, there was bomb maker Tarr to catch and there was a crane killer to stop. But mostly Pulaski needed the man to spit out what he was afraid was coming next.

Maybe the man detected the concern in his eyes. “This isn’t about anything more than a question. There’s nothing I know, okay? But... If anything was to happen to Lincoln, could you take over?”

“What do you know?”

“Nothing. I mean it. All, what do you say, hypothetical.”

“He’s not sick?”

“Naw, what I said — nothing I’ve heard. It’s just we want to know we can maintain what he’s got going. This’s been talked about upstairs. We’ve looked at your record, your reports, your wins.”

A pause. “I had that... thing. A few years ago.”

“We know about it.”

He said nothing more about the subject.

Which Ron Pulaski thought about at least once a day.

Then Sellitto was on to pitching his case again.

“You think like Lincoln, you act like him.” A faint laugh. “And you’re not a prick.”

Which might have been comparing him to some individuals in the NYPD — but definitely was comparing him to Lincoln Rhyme, who, occasionally, was.

Pulaski: “Lincoln’s a civilian. I don’t want to quit.”

“Naw, you’ll be blue. Payroll, benees, everything. It’s just you’ll have, what’s the word? Autonomy. Completely independent. Like him. You keep your rank.” He scowled. “And can get your gold. If you ever schedule the damn test.”

“Been meaning to.” He had always wanted to be a detective, but studying for the test took time he rarely had.

“You’ll keep your years in, everything.”

Tally swooped in with the coffee. Sellitto shook his head. Pulaski did as well. And like a skipping stone, she was on to other patrons.

After a moment, Sellitto said, “You thinking this is going on behind his back, Linc’s? No. It was him brought it up.”

“He did?” Almost a whisper. “What about Amelia?”

A pause. “Her too. We all talked about it.”

“Why wouldn’t she take over?”

“Not her thing. She walks the grid great; you know that. You’d want her with you in a firefight or a high-speed chase. We want a thinking cop. Subway stations and blue fibers and DAS and red sedans. All right, I said my piece.” He frowned. “Is it p-i-e-c-e or p-e-a-c-e?”

“No clue.”

“Do you care?”

Pulaski shrugged. “Not unless some terrorist wrote it in a manifesto and it’ll help nail his ass.”

Sellitto gave a big smile, as rare for him as leaving a half-eaten muffin.

He waved for the check and he paid.

The men stepped outside and Pulaski looked up. No birds in phalanxes or other formations. Just a few solitary pigeons and a lone gull.

After a moment, Pulaski turned. “Don’t like to think about anything happening to Lincoln, Lieutenant. But if it does, or he retires, or whatever, yeah, I’m in.”

Then something happened that had not occurred in all the years the men had known each other. Sellitto stuck out his paw of a hand and gripped Pulaski’s, and they shook firmly.

“Why don’t we make it ‘Lon’ at this point.”

14

The thing soared above her and she thought: Reminds me of something. What?

From years ago. When I was a kid.

At a fast glance, the crane resembled a creature from one of those Transformers movies. But it wasn’t that. She wasn’t much of a moviegoer. Something else.

A huge American flag was attached to the crosspiece, two hundred feet up, and it flapped madly, snapping and fluttering.

She frowned. Was the whole boom thing swinging back and forth?

Yes.

Interesting.

Like a weather vane, it rotated slowly so that the massive crosspiece faced into today’s steady breeze. This happened automatically, it seemed. The mechanism apparently loose. No one was in the cab. In fact, no one was in the jobsite, other than a few men at the entrance. Guards. The mayor had ordered all construction sites shut down until the terrorists were captured.

Could it be this one is targeted next? Simone wondered, recalling the deadline was ten tomorrow morning.

Looking up once more.

And what did it remind her of?

She was close, but the memory remained elusive.

She turned her attention back to what she’d just unloaded from the rental van. A half-dozen open-top boxes containing packets and canisters and jars and other smaller appliances. Sealed cartons. A heavy box, on whose side were the words: “KitchenAid Bread Maker Deluxe.” These sat on the sidewalk beside the van.

This was a familiar sight. She came to the city infrequently, but one observation she’d made was the many moving boxes stationed in front of apartments and town houses throughout the city, waiting for Allied Van Lines, for Mayflower, for brothers-in-law, for sorority sisters to assist in a relocation.

Some people would be moving up. Others, hard with luck, down. Some out of the five boroughs altogether. New York City can gut you, she supposed.

Simone lugged the hand truck from the back. It dropped to the concrete with a clang. She shoved the lip of the cart under the big appliance and strapped it to the back with a canvas tie-down. She began rolling it toward Number 744. This unit was identical to the other structures on this largely deserted avenue on the far West Side. A former industrial block, it was now filled with empty lofts, raw space. Seven Forty-Four was 2,200 square feet of beautiful, ancient oak floors, a working toilet and sink, an overhead bank of lights and zero else.

“Hey, neighbor.”

She turned to find herself looking at a man in his late twenties walking slowly down the stairs of the structure next door to hers.

He was handsome, with sculpted features, thick hair rising confidently skyward, a popular look. Jeans and a T that said something, but had been through the wash a dozen too many times for legibility.

“Hi.” A smile. One of her more entrancing features, she’d been told. She looked past him to his apartment. “The broker told me none of the other places on the street were rented yet.”

“Well, here I am. Your lucky day.” Not quite a flirt. He was being cute. His voice suggested he’d been raised in New England.

He flexed and unflexed his right hand. He seemed born to team sports. “Moving day. Cool.”

“Just a few things I had at my old place. Uptown. The big push is next weekend.”

He subtly examined the blond hair, twined into a perfect braid, the lengthy fingers (bearing no jewelry), the trim figure — though with hips a touch more ample than she, on a bad day, would have liked. He would get nowhere in a scan of any other part of the physique, as she sensed he was inclined to do; she was covered from waist to neck with an excessively large, deep blue Royals sweatshirt. He settled for her heart-shaped face. One of Simone’s avocations was poetry, writing as well as reading, and there was certainly an element about her that suggested a demure Elizabethan literata from England’s Lake District. Mary Shelley, Annabella Byron... She nurtured the look.

Even in the sweats she was a shining lamp for men like this one, particularly those a bit younger than her. And he hovered close, right on the edge of that invisible but well-defined comfort perimeter that surrounds us.

He looked up at the building she was parked in front of. “Yours raw too?”

“Empty as a...” A laugh. The poet within her failed at simile.

“As Shea Stadium in October.”

Sports, right. That’s what she got for wearing a team sweatshirt.

He became the enthusiastic tour guide. “Up the street, the corner, there’s Chinese. It’s okay. Nothing to write home about. Next to it there’s a deli, Mideastern. And two Indian places.”

Her eyes revealed interest. “I love Indian. I dated somebody from New Delhi. That man could cook.”

Orientation had been established, pleasing him no end. As did the fact that the boyfriend was affixed to a past-tense verb.

“How ’bout a gym?” she asked.

“You totally work out,” he said. An excuse to scan her, top to toe. “Yeah, not bad... Health club, I mean.”

She gave no response to the unwieldy flirt, and he continued, “When’re you going to start the buildout?”

“Getting estimates. You?”

“Three, four weeks. Lemme help.”

“You don’t have to. Seriously.”

He assumed a grave look. “I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.”

“What’re you, a lawyer?”

“Broker.”

She frowned. “Do they do much insisting?”

“What we do for a living. You can’t say no to a broker.”

“Just be careful, please.”

He took over on the handcart and rolled it, step by step, up the stairs — yes, carefully. Simone carried boxes up behind him. At the top, she unlocked the door and swung it open. She followed him inside.

“So you bake?” A nod at the big box.

“Hobby.”

“An attractive neighbor who bakes. Jackpot!” He looked around, taking in the scabby walls, the soot-covered ceilings, a rusty metal pillar. “You got some work ahead of you.” Pointing to a patch of green on the floor. “Watch the mold.”

“I have somebody coming. First call I made.”

“I can picture it now. You totally have to put your bed there.” He pointed to a corner.

“That could work.”

Did he give her a slightly coy smile?

She locked up and they returned to the van.

“You heard about those attacks?” he asked, looking up at the crane.

And what did it remind her of?

“Yeah. Scary. Terrorists or something?”

“Assholes.”

She frowned. “If it was going to fall, would it come this way?”

He studied it. “I don’t think so. But, you know, the next attack’s supposed to be tomorrow morning.”

“I heard. Ten o’clock.”

“They might have some other shit planned too.” As he gazed upward, he was doing some fast calculations. “You want, just going to throw this out. You want, maybe we could maybe get out of town for the day. I’ve got a BMW. M8. Ragtop. It’s sweet.” His eyes glowed.

She smiled at the nice try. “Rain check?”

“Deal.”

Simone said, “Beer?”

He blinked.

“Sure.”

She supposed he was thinking bar, but she walked to the back of the van and climbed in. He followed into the dim space. They were both ducking. A cooler was behind the driver’s seat, bungee-corded down. She dug through it and handed him one.

“Woman after my own heart.”

They twisted the tops off and they drank.

He downed half of his right away, which was good. It took only seconds for the drugs to hit him. He dropped the bottle to the bed of the truck, convulsed for a few minutes and then lay still. Pulling on latex gloves she slipped his bottle into a trash bag and mopped up the laced beer with paper towels. This went inside too, along with her open but still full bottle.

Simone never drank on a job.

She climbed out. Before drugging him, she’d scanned to make sure no one was present. That was still true.

Ah. She gave a fast smile.

She had her answer.

A praying mantis.

That’s what the crane reminded her of. One summer, she’d discovered a creature on a railing of her family’s back porch. It was largely motionless, but swayed ever so slightly when ants wandered past filled with their driven but unknowable ant purpose.

She then closed the door of the van and walked to the driver’s side, climbed in. A look at her watch. She had a flirtatious neighbor to dispose of, and a vehicle to burn down to the rims. She’d have to leave now to get to the meeting on time.

15

Explosives, gasoline, poisons, and gunpowder are like fingerprints. Unique. Each sample discovered at a crime scene has characteristics that can lead directly back to a place of manufacture or sale, wholesale if not retail. And at that location, you might just find a portal to your unsub...

A passage from a chapter in Rhyme’s book on forensic analysis in which he discussed tracing substances by studying chemical composition. He went on to give an example. Gasoline.

It is around five percent alkanes; three percent alkenes; twenty-five percent isoalkanes; four percent cycloalkenes; twenty to fifty percent total aromatics. Then there are the additives: blending agents — anti-knock substances, antioxidants, metal deactivators, lead scavengers, upper-cylinder lubricants, detergents and dyes — there are literally a thousand different substances in any particular brand of gasoline.

Unique...

Not so with the substance that Unsub 89 was using to bring down the city’s cranes.

Hydrofluoric acid contains hydrogen and fluoride. And, when diluted, water. No garnish.

If there was anything that might guide their search for a source, it was the concentration.

Yet even that qualifier was not paying off.

The canvassers in Queens, along with Cooper and Sachs, had found eighteen companies in the tri-state area that sold the chemical in the rich concentration of the substance their unsub had used.

She cleared her throat yet again, glanced toward the oxygen, but decided against it. Rhyme was keeping an eye on her. HF exposure through the lungs, as he’d told those in the parlor not long ago, acts more immediately than through the skin. But that’s not to say that there wasn’t a residue of the acid slowly working its way through the small tubes of bronchi and the even tinier bronchioles.

“Sachs? Did they X-ray?”

“No.”

Of course they wouldn’t, not in the field... But that wasn’t really the meaning of his question. He was asking her if it wouldn’t be better to go into the ER and get one done in radiology.

She turned her attention back to the phone.

“Found two more suppliers,” Cooper called from the other side of the glass partition. He recited the names and addresses, and Sachs recorded them elegantly on the murder board.

Nineteen, twenty...

Wonderful, thought Rhyme, in his most sardonic mode.

And then too, he reflected, even if they found the supplier, the perp would’ve taken precautions to hide his identity, paying cash.

Soon the tally hit thirty-seven and finally stalled.

Rhyme said, “Didn’t know it was that common.”

In the sterile portion of the parlor, Cooper, reading from one of the most reliable sources in law enforcement — Google — said, “It’s one of the fastest-growing industrial products on the market.” He went on to explain that the demand for HF acid rose about ten percent a year and would soon top a billion dollars in revenue. “It’s used for more things than you’d think. Etching, cleaning, refining gas, making Teflon and fluoxetine — Prozac. You ever get depressed, Lincoln?”

“No time.”

“To get depressed?”

“No time for your trade association’s up-with-HF spiel.”

So it was as impossible to isolate a source of the acid as it was to source an unregistered Smith & Wesson on the street.

He scanned the chart. Albert Industrial Products to Zeigler Chemicals...

Hell.

Rhyme took a call from Lyle Spencer.

“Lincoln.”

“What did you find out about the politician that I should know everything about but do not?”

The man gave a brief laugh. “I’m convinced Representative Cody didn’t have anything to do with it. The Kommunalka Project just dug up a statement from a paper he wrote years ago. His body language? It told me that the attack was a surprise to him.”

Unlike witnesses’ observations and psychological profiling, kinesic analysis done by an expert was more or less reliable, Rhyme felt. A colleague in California, Kathryn Dance, working for the CBI, had proven to him on several occasions that techniques were reliable in painting interrogees credible or not.

So, the congressman was off the persons-of-interest list.

Spencer continued, “He said he’s never heard of any violent side to the affordable housing movement. But he knows activists. He’s going to contact them.”

“All right,” Rhyme muttered. Another dead end. Or at least a badly wounded one.

After they disconnected, Sachs wrote the detective’s conclusions on the whiteboard, then took a call. “Detective Sachs... That’s right...”

Rhyme’s eyes strayed out the window. From this narrow view alone, he could see three cranes lording over the East Side, all motionless. The stillness was eerie.

Sachs tucked her phone away and, after a blast of oxygen, said, “Downtown. Maybe a witness from the jobsite. I’m going to talk to him.” After another blast of oxygen, she pulled on her black leather jacket and walked into the front hall. A pause. She returned and, without a word to or glance at anyone else, grabbed the tank and hurried outside. A moment later, Rhyme heard her car’s throaty engine fire up. The gruff sound reminded him of her voice, with the acid exposure.

The sound had just disappeared when Rhyme’s phone sounded. It was Sellitto.

“Lon.”

“Gotta tell you, Linc. Just heard.”

“Another one? A crane?”

The deadline in the demand was tomorrow, but extortionists and kidnappers are known to improvise.

“No. It’s Andy Gilligan. He’s dead. Shot.”

Rhyme and Mel Cooper shared a glance.

“Details?”

“Could be a pro job. Double tap, chest, then face. Vacant lot, Lower East Side.”

“What was he doing there?”

“No idea. Supervisor doesn’t know either. No wits and the respondings said his wallet, cash and car keys — to a new Lexus — were on him. The car was there too.”

“And his caseload?”

“Some minor OC stuff. A jacking or two. Some missing shipping containers. Then what we’re working together: Structures and Engineering.”

“Where’s Pulaski?”

“He’s on his way to you right now.”

“Text me the address of the Gilligan scene. Pulaski too.”

“You got it. Oh, and Linc. I talked with Ron about what you and me were saying? He’s okay with it.”

“Good to know.”

The men disconnected and Rhyme ordered his phone to call Pulaski.

One ring later: “Lincoln. I’m on my way—”

“There’s a scene I need you to run. Lon’s texting you the address.”

“The crane case?”

“No. It’s Andy Gilligan. Looks like a professional tap.”

The officer was silent. “Kind of a coincidence...”

“What is?”

“The DSE theft — documents about the city’s infrastructure. Maybe Unsub 89’s the shooter. He wanted the files for the crane attacks. Gilligan got a lead and Eighty-Nine tipped to him, took him out. What do you think?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Run the scene.”

“Call in with what you find.”

16

“Move along there.”

An easy job.

Guard duty, basically, but even easier.

Guarding something nobody would want.

Dennis Chung, a twenty-eight-year-old patrol officer out of a neighboring precinct house, had been one of the uniforms picked to keep an eye on the wreckage at the jobsite on 89th Street.

In regulation blues and a wool jacket, the slim, fit officer was standing near the police-line tape at the north side of the site. The crane had fallen in this direction and taken out all the fencing, two bulldozers, two flatbeds and a shitload of supply pallets. Plaster and concrete dust were everywhere.

Chung’s job was easy, yes, but he still had to be on top of his game. The nobody-would-want part referred to the fact that all the valuable supplies that thieves might walk off with had been secured on the other side of the site, near the main entrance. If you were inclined to perp a sheet of plasterboard or two, you could find some here, but why risk getting collared for what you could get at Home Depot for twenty bucks?

“Move along, please.”

The real risk was one that wouldn’t have existed twenty years ago: selfies.

And apparently — he wasn’t into social media — it was popular to get them at the sites of disasters. And the closer to the wreckage you got, the better. Nobody cared about the police tape. The Do Not Cross words in stark black type apparently translated to “Come on in and take all the pix you want.”

So, he wasn’t stopping thievery; he was saving people’s hides. Most of the acid that had been used in the attack was neutralized — the FDNY had sprayed gallons of some crap on the counterweights and the rear boom of the crane. But there were unstable piles of wreckage and rubble and beams and other spilled chemicals that would guarantee a trip to the emergency room.

And yet here people were taking selfies...

Which raised something Chung had come to worry about in recent years. All the damn pictures people took.

So far, he guessed, he’d been in two or three hundred while on duty. Some people asked him to be in their pix. He declined, of course, but he often ended up in the background inadvertently. The patrolman did a lot of work for the Street Crime Unit, which took on some of the tougher crews in the city. Not all of them were morons, and he guessed they were plenty familiar with computers. Maybe they would scan people’s Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and run pictures of cops in those background shots through facial recognition programs to get their names and addresses.

Maybe far-fetched.

But with all the technology nowadays... nothing seemed impossible.

“Hey, move along.”

The two kids were leaning over the tape to get some shots of the rebar rods that the worker had landed on in his fall from the top of the crane. Two hundred feet in the air. The teens looked privileged. Westchester, maybe? Or Connecticut? And Chung hoped they might start to lecture him on the First Amendment.

At which point he would detain them for trespass.

But, too bad, they simply tucked their phones away and left.

Another scan of the grounds.

A text from his wife about her parents coming for dinner. He was to get dessert after his watch. That was fine too.

He put the phone away.

Which is when he saw motion within the yellow tape. Well within. Not far from the base of the shattered crane, which rose straight up for about thirty feet before it bent and cracked from the fall.

Chung squinted.

Yes, there was somebody moving from south to north — from the direction of the main entrance toward where workers were cutting apart the fallen crane with torches and diamond-edged power saws.

Well, damn.

It was somebody he’d seen before.

A homeless man. He’d walked right past Chung a half hour ago.

He wore a gamy hat like that of a French revolutionary or an Afghan warrior. It was brown and orange, striped. His other garments were a torn and dirty brown overcoat that looked way too warm even on a day like this. Baggy and stained pants. Mismatched shoes. His face was smudged and under his nails were black crescents, particularly troubling to Chung, who had a thing for clean hands.

How had he gotten inside?

Probably just ambled into the site, by virtue of the fact that he was invisible.

All homeless people are.

And Chung thought this fellow was particularly sad. Mid-fifties, wan skin beneath the smudges. Sick, maybe. Likely no family, or a family he was estranged from.

Still, he was trespassing. Chung wouldn’t have thought of citing him, much less bringing him in. But he needed to get the guy out of the site before he got himself killed. The holes in the building floor that the counterweights had crashed through were merely marked with orange caution tape. There was no fence around them — which Chung would have done. One wrong step there, and it’d be a thirty-foot drop to concrete.

And there was rebar down there too.

“Hey, you!”

The man was fifty or sixty feet away, and with the sound of the electric saws grinding their way through steel, the officer guessed his voice didn’t make it to the fellow’s ears.

Chung thought: Oh, hell. He ducked under the tape and, after wagging a finger at a couple of tourists perilously close to an unstable piece of the mast, he started through the wreckage toward where the homeless guy was plodding along.

He called again, and this time his shout came during a pause in the screeching cry of the saws.

The man looked his way and froze.

Chung waved toward the street, but the man just stood there, staring blankly. Drunk, maybe.

When the man stayed put, Chung started for him. He had to duck under some of the fallen crane structures. They seemed sturdy, but each one weighed tons. An unlikely collapse could squash you just as dead as a probable one.

Because the officer had needed to duck, he momentarily lost sight of the homeless man. When he emerged and rose, he scanned in the direction he’d last seen him.

Nothing.

No, wait. There he was. He hadn’t exited, but was in a portion of the site where the operator’s cab had come crashing to the ground.

Goddamn it.

If I break a leg, you’re going to detention, asshole...

The man glanced back at him and now made his way north once more.

Then Chung noticed something else about him. When he’d seen him earlier, he was holding one of those blue-and-white deli coffee cups, begging for money. He still held this in his left hand, but in his right was something shiny, metallic. That’s what he was doing here — not taking an odd shortcut, but scavenging the grounds for items of value. Had he found something that had belonged to the dead operator? Chung could add larceny to the trespass count.

Scavenging from a disaster site. Didn’t get lower than that.

The homeless man now saw Chung coming his way, and he moved more quickly, surprisingly fast. In a few minutes he was climbing through a gap in the shattered fence.

Chung continued after him, but he slowed, minding the booby traps of the wreckage, and when he finally emerged from the site, the man was not to be seen.

One thing remained: the blue cup. He must have dropped it climbing through the fencing.

Had this been a real crime, Chung would, of course, have collected the cup in gloved fingers to preserve it until Crime Scene arrived.

But, while he was pissed at the guy, there was no way he was going to start a case.

He snagged the cup, and after taking the change — he’d give it to a Ronald McDonald House, or some other charity — he tossed it into the back of a garbage truck filling with debris.

Wondering: What had the guy found that was so valuable he didn’t care about what was in the cup?

Chung headed quickly back to his original station, where a group of teen girls had breached the yellow tape. The quartet was well within the site, doing — for God’s sake — a coordinated dance for TikTok, or whatever, in front of a cell phone they’d propped up on what must have been a convenient photo tripod: a porta-potty crushed into a small cube by the weight of the huge mast.

17

Ron Pulaski pulled up to the assembly of emergency vehicles, lights flashing — white and blue and red.

Blue, like patrol uniforms.

Red, like blood.

White, like a corpse.

He told himself to can the soft thinking. He climbed out, hitched up his gun and looked around the site where Andy Gilligan had been murdered.

A dozen vehicles, two dozen emergency workers.

All right, Mr. Locard, what do you have in store for us here?

Orienting himself, he happened to gaze up the street, blocked off by a squad car. On the other side of it, pausing in the middle of the north-south avenue, was a sedan. The windows of the dark-red vehicle were tinted and Pulaski couldn’t see the driver clearly. It might have been merely pausing, like many others, to check out the excitement.

Then again, the minute he squinted, focusing on it, the driver sped away.

Watch yourself...

He proceeded past the CS bus, calling, “A minute” to the pair of evidence collection techs from Queens Crime Scene.

On the street, near the yellow tape, was the gold shield Lon Sellitto had put on the case. He was directing two uniforms to storefronts nearby, for the canvass. Pulaski’d never worked with Al Sanchez, but he knew of him. Out of One PP, the stocky man, with thick, wavy hair, was senior in Homicide. Sellitto had picked a senior investigator, Pulaski supposed, rather than a gold out of the local house, because of the victim — NYPD detective.

Joining him, Pulaski identified himself.

Sanchez said, “Yeah, Lon said you’d be running the scene. You work with that Lincoln Rhyme.”

“I do.”

“I gotta meet him some day. Okay. Let me show you what we got.” They walked under the yellow tape and ducked through a chain-link gate. Soon they were at the body. Sanchez clicked his tongue. “Pro. Three rounds. Double chest, one face.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why he was down here. Don’t even know what he was working on.”

“Some minor OC stuff. Mostly the DSE case.”

“What’s DSE?”

“Department of Structures and Engineering. Perp stole charts, diagrams, maps, construction permit requests, inspection schedules. Stuff like that.”

“Why?” He looked as perplexed as anyone would be at a theft that didn’t involve money, diamonds, trade secrets or the like.

“No idea.”

“You have an unsub?”

“Not yet. But...”

Meaning that Gilligan’s death might get them closer to one.

Sanchez scoffed. “You steal a bunch of paperwork, then triple tap the gold shield who drew the case? That’s a septic system of bad.”

Pulaski looked around. “Funny place for a hit. Not the street. And how’d the shooter get to him?”

Rhyme had taught him that there is no single crime scene.

The body — if we’re talking homicide — is the hub of the wheel. The unsub had to get there and then he had to leave. Those spokes’re as important as where the deed was done.

The body was in almost the direct center of a bulldozer-cleared field, beside a pit that would have been the basement of an old tenement, of which there were plenty in this neighborhood. Pulaski had checked on the property and there were no plans to do anything with it. No permit requests — not since 1978. And the developer never finished the paperwork.

The perp could have come at him from the gate, a half-dozen buildings across the field, a pathway that led to the next east-west street a block away. It was barred with chain-link, but at six feet high that fence would stop only the most out-of-shape killers.

“That’s his car?”

A white Lexus sat at the curb.

“Yeah.”

“ME?”

“Released him. You’re good.”

“Canvassing?”

“Got a half dozen on it.”

“Reports of shots?”

“No.”

Not unusual. Only a fraction of those within hearing distance actually called a report in. Why volunteer to report a person who was, obviously, armed with a deadly weapon?

“Nothing from ShotSpotter either.”

This, however, was odd. The gunshot detection system the NYPD used could triangulate on the sound of a gunshot, give the approximate location and tell if the shooter was in motion — sometimes even determine which direction he was headed in. The system was active in Manhattan, though it didn’t cover all neighborhoods with equal accuracy.

Pulaski reminded himself: Move. Fast.

He walked to the ECTs, a young pair, two men, with the short hair favored by techs of the male variety, in the belief there was less of a chance of shedding one of their own strands at a scene.

The latter seemed pleased to be working a case with Pulaski. His eyes radiated — what was it? Admiration?

Probably. And the source was because he worked with Lincoln Rhyme.

Here he was on their case, Lincoln’s protégé.

And successor?

Pulaski’s gut did a flip with this thought.

He put the subject aside and nodded his acknowledgment. “Let’s move.”

“Yessir.”

“I’m going to run the car and the corpse. You two take that path to the fence — and comb the fence real good. And then those two buildings there. Ground floors have views of the site.” They would have been perfect spots from which to stalk Gilligan.

Doing whatever it was he was doing.

The two donned their space suits and set to work, while Pulaski too garbed up. He had just started toward the corpse when Sanchez called, “Uh-oh.”

The detective nodded toward a shiny black sedan that had just parked nearby, the occupant of the backseat now climbing out. He was in his late fifties, in a nice-fitting charcoal suit. Silver-haired. A long, stern face. He looked over the crime scene and then scanned the press — a half-dozen reporters and camerapeople behind yet another line, some distance from the scene.

Sanchez said, “Everett Burdick. Dep inspector, One PP. You know him?”

“No.”

“We call him Anchor Amber.”

Pulaski chuckled. Cops’ irreverence was legendary. Amber Andrews was a popular newscaster for the local affiliate of a national network. Her broadcasts were always far more about her than the story. Ah, so Burdick was an airtime hound — the sort who ran unnecessary press conferences displaying stacks of cash and packages of drugs seized in raids.

Sanchez added, “Ego and talent, you know. They’re not — what do they say? — mutually exclusive. He’s not a bad cop. Was good on the street, and he’s good at One PP. He just has to let everybody know it.”

Burdick strode up to Sanchez, ignoring Pulaski.

Fine with him. He had work to do. He slipped through the gate and began vacuuming up trace on the way to the corpse and then started on the body, collecting from the victim’s clothing, scraping fingernails, taking a hair sample, looking for the slugs, which turned out to be still within the body. The autopsy doc would remove them and have them sent to ballistics in Queens. Aside from the huge Desert Eagle.50, or the tiny.17 HMR, it’s hard to tell the caliber of the slug from the wound. Most guns are in the 9mm, 380 or .38 range — all basically the same. And these rounds appeared around that size, but there are thousands of weapons with that caliber, so it was pointless to speculate what the make and model might be.

The absence of exit wounds was intriguing. The accuracy meant the shooter was not far away when he pulled the trigger. Normally at that range, the bullets would likely have penetrated the chest cavity, if not the skull, and exited. That this didn’t happen meant he’d possibly used a silencer, which dramatically reduces not only the sound but the velocity of the shot. This theory was born out too by the absence of 911 calls reporting gunshots or of ShotSpotter alerts. Despite what you see in the movies, silencers aren’t that common. Muggers and your average thieves rarely have access. Organized crime and professional triggermen, yes.

So, as Sanchez had speculated: the shooter was likely a pro.

No spent shells. The gun might have been a revolver, which would leave none — and despite the gap between chamber and barrel, it was somewhat quieted by a silencer. A semiauto, conversely, would have ejected brass. Then again, pros always took the empty shells with them. He found, however, where the brass would likely have ended up — to the right of where the shooter stood — and six to eight feet away he took samples of the dirt from where the flying shells would have landed.

Gilligan’s own weapon, a common Glock 17, was on his hip. No extra mag on the opposite side of his body, which told Pulaski that he didn’t do much fieldwork. You never ventured out of the office without at least one extra magazine.

Pulaski then began on the spiral ham. His comprehensive search.

There were a half-dozen footprints, but much of the site was hard-packed clay and gravel and grass, none of which yielded any impressions.

He dropped off what he’d collected at the bus and proceeded to the Lexus.

And what will you have for Mr. Locard and me?

The interior contained the typical: an empty coffee cup, two water bottles, DMV and insurance documents. The vehicle was only a month old. There was paperwork in the door and center console. Car stuff mostly. No more toll receipts nowadays. That information, often helpful, was available with a warrant only, from the bridge, tunnel, and toll road authorities.

He found several restaurant receipts, some recent, though none from this morning.

He lifted soil samples from the carpet, passenger seat and backseats, latents from the wheel, touchpad screen, other controls and surfaces, and door handles, both sides.

In the trunk was a laptop. He bagged this too.

Finally, a search of the seats. Under them, of course, but also in them: a place that no evidence-collecting book — even Lincoln Rhyme’s — suggested searching. But Pulaski patted down the supple leather, as if frisking a suspicious-looking gangbanger for drugs or weapons.

And here he found it, behind a slit cut into the side of the driver’s-side backseat.

Something that put Andy Gilligan’s murder in a whole new light.

18

A lot of people had second phones — the providers courteously offered great deals to suck you in — but Gilligan’s was a burner.

You could tell because it was a brand name, but an older model — three years out-of-date, yet in good shape, no scuffs or chips. Pay-as-you-go companies bought up inventories of older phones like this, selling them to a diverse crowd: those with limited means, teenagers learning how to budget and... to murderers and drug dealers.

As he placed it in the evidence bag, Pulaski was reflecting that a cop could certainly have a burner for legitimate reasons. So he could talk to CIs or suspects and not give away his personal number. Maybe Gilligan did some undercover work.

But why hide it so carefully?

If he was worried about it being stolen, there was the trunk or the glove compartment.

So Pulaski seized on the idea that Gilligan was involved in something illegal and the phone was one he used to communicate with a partner, Mr. X.

Think, he told himself.

Had he come here to meet that person, who had ambushed him?

Pulaski looked at it logically. Gilligan had died facing the shooter. If it was a stranger coming at him in a random attack, the detective would at least have reached for his own gun. But, based on his posture in death, that hadn’t happened.

So then, assume they were partners and met here for some reason. Think! Speculate!

Bold...

He walked to the street and examined the asphalt in front of and behind the Lexus. No recent tire prints. Maybe Mr. X had parked some distance away.

He walked to Sanchez. “I think they knew each other. Gilligan and the shooter.”

“Really?”

“Think so. I need to know where the perp parked. Not near the Lexus, but let’s check along here. Could you clear the street?”

“Sure. I’ll back everybody out.” Sanchez called to the officers on-site and gave the order.

One young woman officer said to Pulaski, “Sir, you want me to ribbon the whole place?”

Sir? They were the same age.

“Yeah, thanks.”

With a flip of her blond ponytail she turned, fetched a roll of yellow tape and started to work.

The two evidence collection techs returned to the gate.

“Find anything?” Pulaski asked.

They replied that they had not.

Which supported his theory that the men were together and had entered the site from this side of the lot.

Maybe it was a hit, pure and simple. Neither Gilligan nor the shooter had any business here, other than the second one’s murdering the detective.

He walked to the CS bus and snagged new evidence bags.

He was about to start his search for recent tire treads, when Sanchez approached. His face was not happy. “He’s not going to do it.”

“Who’s not going to do what?”

“Burdick. He said there’s no need to expand the scene. That that’s what Crime Scene people do when they don’t know what to look for.”

Pulaski frowned. “What does that even mean?”

“I’m just telling you.”

He glanced toward the deputy inspector and, behind him, the reporters.

Phalanx...

The blond officer, holding the yellow roll, looked toward Pulaski uncertainly. The DI had apparently told her too to stand down.

Pulaski approached. He took the roll from her. “I’ve got this.”

“Sorry...”

“No, it’s good.”

He turned toward Burdick and said, “I’m going to have to ask everyone to move back to the intersection. I’m sealing the street.”

And, armed with the tape, he waited for them to migrate.

A few reporters did, but paused when Burdick said, in a voice louder than necessary, “Officer. Like I just explained. Not necessary.” And looked at him with a pinched face that was the gaze of somebody smart talking to somebody less smart. He said, “It’s unprofessional. Might as well tape off the whole neighborhood.”

And for the millionth time, Pulaski had that brief flash: I’m screwing up. I’m doing something wrong.

I had that thing that happened...

Then he kicked the thought aside.

“Based on the evidence I’ve found, I need it sealed.”

“What evidence?”

Pulaski wasn’t going to respond. “The entire block.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Pulaski supposed that whatever nonsense the man was spouting about the size of the declared scene had nothing to do with the size of the declared scene. This was about Deputy Inspector Burdick appearing in charge.

Amber Andrews...

He might just as easily have said, “I want to shrink the perimeter by six inches.” Or something equally nonsensical.

Pulaski said, “Can I talk to you in private, sir?”

The answer apparently was no.

Burdick stood his ground and spoke more loudly yet for the reporters happily witnessing the intramural squabbling. “Look. I’ve been an investigator longer than you’ve been on the force. You don’t need to expand it.” He looked around and pointed across the street to an abandoned tenement, which he seemed to have picked at random. “And you need to search that building. It’s critical. I know it. Instinct, I can tell.”

A structure that had been boarded up for months if not years and in front of which was a dusty sidewalk and entryway that showed no evidence of foot traffic in recent days.

Pulaski lowered his voice. “Are you sure you don’t want to take this private? Just step over to the van.”

Burdick’s icy voice: “You’re Patrol, right?”

“Correct.”

“You’re not in uniform.”

“I’m temporarily assigned to Crime Scene.”

“Name?”

“Pulaski, Ron.”

“Well, Pulaski, Ron. I’m a deputy inspector. You don’t take me out behind the woodshed. I take you.”

“Seniority isn’t the issue. I need the street cleared. There could be evidence that everybody’s walking over right now.”

“You do not need the street cleared. You need to search that building.”

He happened to be pointing to the structure next door to the building he had previously indicated. He’d mixed them up.

Pulaski said firmly, “This’s my crime scene. I control it. I need you to move forty feet in that direction.”

The look of astonishment was remarkable.

In a finger-snap, it turned to rage. And then a snide smile appeared. “Thin ice, Patrolman.”

He’d embarrassed the dep inspector in front of the press.

A cardinal sin.

Pulaski whispered in response, “We had the chance to keep this between us. Now I’m going to ask you once more to move back. And if you don’t, I’m detaining you for obstruction of justice. And I’ll use restraints if I have to.”

Burdick called, “Detective Sanchez! Detective Sanchez!”

The man ambled up. “Sir?”

“I’m suspending this officer effective immediately. You’ll keep the scene secure until another CSU officer arrives.”

Sanchez glanced from Burdick to Pulaski and back again. “It’s his scene, Deputy Inspector. He makes the calls.”

“But not if he’s being incompetent. And insubordinate. I’m relieving him of command.”

Pulaski frowned. There was no procedure for this that he’d heard of. Sanchez’s face revealed that the idea was alien to him as well.

“Can’t do it, sir. You know he’s working for Lincoln Rhyme.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not impressed.”

Keeping his insincerely smiling face as calm as possible — the cameras were clicking — he waited for Sanchez to move or at least for Pulaski to back down.

Like Sachs had taught him, Pulaski wore his service belt outside the Tyvek so his weapon would be easily accessible.

The handcuffs too, which he now reached for.

“You can’t be serious,” the man blustered.

The standoff lasted only a few seconds. Then Burdick gave a faint nod. He said in a louder voice: “Oh, you’re saying there might be an active shooter nearby?”

Burdick turned to the press. “This officer has informed me that we’ve just learned a shooter might be nearby. It would be safer if we moved to the end of the block. You should’ve mentioned that sooner, Officer.”

Pulaski summoned up a my-bad frown. “Sorry, sir. My mistake.”

The DI gestured the reporters back — as if he were saving their lives — and Pulaski quickly ran the tape around the light poles at the far end, and those across the street. He handed off the roll to one of the officers to finish the job at the other end of the block.

Pulaski stepped onto the curb and walked along the entire length of the street, head down, searching for the recent tire tracks — the shooter’s — which he knew were here.

Except there weren’t any.

Oops. Got that one wrong.

But the conclusion was even better than finding the shooter’s tire treads. It meant the killer and his victim drove here together.

Pulaski confirmed this by taking electrostatic impressions from the street beneath the driver’s side and the passenger’s side of the Lexus. The first matched Gilligan’s. The second matched the shooter’s.

He returned to the CS van and looked over the vacant lot. The number cards, yellow with black type on them, placed where every bit of evidence had been found.

He realized he was stalling.

It had occurred to him some moments ago what he had to do.

And he was dreading it.

Was there an alternative?

No, not given his rule on the first forty-eight minutes.

He needed to push the case forward immediately and there was only one way he could make that happen.

He walked to a cluster of uniforms nearby. “Anybody help me? Need some gum.”

One patrolman nodded. “Juicy Fruit.”

“Great.” It was in fact his favorite. He took the stick and began to chew. Then he turned to the blond officer, who had started to string the tape. He nodded to her purse. “I hope you don’t think this’s an insult. But I’ve got to ask you a question.”

19

Lincoln Rhyme was looking into the sterile portion of the parlor, at the cartons Ron Pulaski had just brought in from the Gilligan scene.

Mel Cooper was taking the samples, logging them and starting analysis.

“You scored a burner phone,” Rhyme noted, looking at the evidence bag in Pulaski’s hand.

Lon Sellitto grumbled, “So? It’ll be locked. They’re always locked.”

“This one’s not,” Pulaski said.

“Yeah? Careless of him.”

“It was locked. I unlocked it.”

“How?”

A tightening of his lips. “Wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world. I washed the blood and brains off Gilligan’s forehead, stuffed some chewing gum in the bullet hole and knocked a few pieces of bone back into place. Then I borrowed some makeup from one of the uniforms. Was afraid I’d insulted her, you know, like she’s a woman, of course she’d have makeup. But she was cool with it.”

Rhyme barked an uncharacteristic laugh. “You tricked the facial rec lock.”

Sellitto glanced toward Rhyme. “The chewing gum — makeup trick. Put that in the next edition of your book, Linc.”

The young officer continued, “Once I was in, I shut off the password security.”

“Always thinking, Pulaski. Always thinking. Well, let’s see what’s on it.” Rhyme called, “Thom? Thom!”

The aide walked into the room. “Yes?”

“Glove up and play cop. Give me everything that’s on that phone. Call logs, voice mails, texts. Let’s hope we can see emails without a password.”

“Me?”

“Amelia’s on a lead.”

“Hm. Do I get a raise?”

“No, you get not fired.”

“I’ll organize a strike later.” He pulled on latex gloves and took the evidence bag containing the phone.

“And don’t forget...”

“Chain of custody,” he called as he disappeared into the dining room to begin excavation.

Pulaski gave the men his theory that Gilligan and the shooter knew each other.

“Gilligan? Corrupt?” Rhyme, not pleased, looked around the parlor. “If so, not a great idea, us inviting him in.”

Sellitto said, “But remember, Linc. We didn’t. He came to us.”

Even more troubling... He wanted to be here. Why?

Cooper continued itemizing what Pulaski had found: A laptop. Trace from Gilligan’s shoes, from the corpse and around it, from the logical path the victim and the shooter had walked, from the street beneath the doors, from the Lexus. Fingernail scrapings too and several items from the car.

“Slugs?”

Pulaski said, “Still in him. I think the shooter had a suppressor.”

“Video?” Rhyme was looking at the SD card Pulaski was feeding into a computer.

“Found a receipt for a diner Gilligan ate at yesterday. I stopped by on the way here. They copied their security cam footage for me around the time he was there. Great baklava, by the way.” He called up a player program, loaded the security footage and began scrubbing.

While he searched, Rhyme said, “Mel, the trace. And, Lon, can you do the honors?” A nod at the whiteboard.

“Yeah, with my handwriting? Sister Mary Elizabeth didn’t give me rave reviews in grade school.” But he took the marker and smoothed the top sheet on the easel with his hand, like Picasso ready to draw.

Cooper began calling out the conclusions reached by that workhorse of all crime labs: the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer, which isolates and identifies unknown substances.

The bulk of what Pulaski had collected near the body and in the field were sand and loam soil. This matched the control samples, which meant that they were of no probative value.

But then he discovered trace that did not match. It had come from a source other than the field where Gilligan died.

Mel Cooper reported: “Silica, alumina and magnesia, iron, potassium, sodium, and calcium. Alkaline earth. Decaying organic material. Hydrous aluminum phyllosilicates.”

“Really? Interesting.”

Sellitto’s eyes made a wide and sarcastic circuit of the ceiling. Rhyme ignored it.

He asked, “Where was it collected?”

“On the victim’s shoes and footprints where he and the shooter walked. Most abundant under the passenger’s and driver’s doors, and the car’s front seat carpet, both sides.”

“Ah, excellent! They picked it up before they got in the car. But where? That’s what we want to know. The shooter’s hideout? Maybe the house of some OC head? I want to know more. Mel, ’scope a sample. Optical.”

Another basic tool in crime labs, a compound microscope — so named because it had multiple lenses — was nothing fancy. Its job was simple: to make little things look bigger.

A moment later, images of particles appeared on one of the monitors near Rhyme, mirroring what Cooper was looking at through the eyepiece of the Mitutoyo microscope, a precision instrument that came in at $10K.

“Put a scale up,” Rhyme instructed.

A grid appeared. The smaller particles, tan in color, were about .002mm or smaller.

He said, “All right. With particles that small, and those ingredients? It’s clay.”

One of the six basic categories of earth soils, along with shale, loam, silt, peat and chalk.

Cooper continued, “Ground calcium, consistent with shellfish shells, very old.”

“Clay and shells?” Sellitto mused. “Narrows it to near a shoreline, right? Why the sour face, Linc?”

“Because, yes, you’re right. Shoreline. And New York City has more than five hundred miles of it. More than Boston, Miami, L.A. and San Francisco combined. What else? I want something unique.”

Cooper went on, “Charcoal. Decaying bits of wood coated with varnish, fibers from deteriorating leather and wool. Copper, iron. Then isoamyl alcohol, n-propyl alcohol, epicatechin and vanillin. Everything’s old, very old.”

Rhyme regarded the results as Sellitto wrote in his C— handwriting. “The last? Some kind of liquor. Antique. Hm. All right. Now, that trace came from a different location. Where...?” He drew the word out. “Pulaski, did you—?”

“No GPS in Gilligan’s car. Disabled. Was that what you were going to ask?”

“It was. His other phone? His main one?”

“Wasn’t there. Assume the shooter took it.”

After writing this down, Sellitto offered, “Man is getting guiltier by the minute.”

Pulaski got a text. He read it, and his face tightened with minor disgust.

Sellitto lifted an inquiring eyebrow.

“I had to shepherd a dep inspector out of the way.”

“So? It’s your scene.”

“Yeah, well, I kind of threatened him with obstruction. In front of the press. Nearly cuffed and detained him.”

Rhyme’s reaction was amusement and a bit of pride. He’d done the same thing on several occasions and actually put an NYPD captain in the back of a blue-and-white for an hour.

“Who?” Sellitto asked.

“Burdick.”

Sellitto said, “Oh him. Yeah, well, he’s got an excuse.”

Pulaski was frowning. “What’s that?”

“He’s a dick.”

Cooper called, “I’ve got the shoes. Both’re size eleven. Smooth soles. No manufacturer’s ID.”

Naturally, one of the most common. And shoe size has only a tangential correlation to height or build. “Wear patterns?” he called. Heels or tips worn down in certain ways can reveal professions.

“Gilligan’s’re worn more than the shooter’s, but neither of them tell us anything.”

Cooper, bent over the microscope again, called, “More trace from the mystery location. Fibers that have the cellular structure of horsehair. Like the rest of it, old.”

“The computer?” Rhyme asked. “It’s Gilligan’s for sure?”

Pulaski told him, “Yep. His name and number are on a label on the back. If found, please call et cetera. His prints too. Only his. And it’s his personal one, not PD issue.”

“How do you know?”

Pulaski said, “It’s a Core i7. With an Nvidia graphics card. Too expensive to be PD issue.”

“It’s got to have something we can use. Please tell me it’s not locked.”

A few keystrokes. “Nope. Password.”

Pulaski said, “And it doesn’t have a fingerprint key to unlock it.” Print readers on electronics don’t optically read the ridges, furrows and whorls. They sense conductance — electric charges — in the ridges. Conductance quickly decreases after death, though. The computer would remain locked for the time being.

“I’ve got him on the deli video,” Pulaski called.

Rhyme was looking at a fish-eye high-definition scene of the interior of a diner. He couldn’t help but be impressed. The kid — no, the young man — had gone the extra step to drive to the restaurant and get a copy of the recording. What was significant about this was that he was mixing crime scene work with field investigation. That was unusual — and, some would say, against protocol. Usually a forensic officer handed off findings to a detective, who would then follow up. This two-step process often resulted in delays. Pulaski wasn’t having any of that. He wanted crime scene leads followed up on immediately. And that meant doing it himself. He’d told Rhyme once about this theory he had — the forty-eight-minute rule in closing cases. The criminalist couldn’t disagree.

In the video they watched Andy Gilligan as he entered; the lighting was good. He was led to a table off to the side, where he sat with his back to the camera. He ordered a meal, a cup of coffee. He ate and drank quickly and made no calls and sent or received no texts.

“That’s odd,” Pulaski offered. “Nobody by themselves in a restaurant doesn’t hit the electronics. He’s just staring out the window.”

“Because he feels like a shit for what he did.” Rhyme added, “Or thinking of ways to spend whatever the shooter paid him.”

Then he fell silent and squinted. “There’s something...”

“What’s that, Linc?”

“I want to see it again. From the minute he enters. Regular speed.”

Pulaski manipulated the controls. “You have something?”

The answer was: not exactly. But the images had triggered a vague association.

A memory.

Was it the restaurant?

No, he’d never seen it before.

The view outside?

No, just any city street.

Maybe it was something about Gilligan himself...

After all, the man had spent some hours here in the parlor on the DSE break-in case. He’d been here just this morning.

But, no, it was in a context different from the crime scene work they’d done together in the town house.

Clothing?

No...

A mannerism?

Then: “Yes!”

All three men in the lab looked his way.

What was familiar was the man’s stride.

And Lincoln Rhyme knew where he’d seen it before.

“Mel! I want the security cam of the DSE break-in. Put it on the second monitor.”

Rhyme motored closer to that screen. Come on, he thought impatiently. Come on.

“I’m getting it.”

Apparently, he’d spoken out loud.

Soon, a security video was playing, a case number and date appeared, glowing yellow, on a black screen. The scene came to life and they were looking at what a subtitle explained was the west hallway, first floor, of the Department of Structures and Engineering building. Unsub 212 was walking away from the camera toward the exit, the stolen file folders tucked under his right arm.

“Look at Gilligan’s walk at the diner. Look at the thief’s walk at DSE.”

Sellitto was whispering, “The fuck? They’re the same.”

Many law enforcement agencies were using gait-profiling software to identify perps and witnesses. It wasn’t yet admissible at trial in most states, but comparing how a known individual walked with an unknown individual in security videos like this could help investigators tentatively ID the perp. Rhyme didn’t have a program for this in the lab, but he hardly needed one. The two men were clearly the same.

“And his ear,” Pulaski said.

Ah, yes. In both videos he lifted his left hand and compulsively tugged the lobe, a nervous habit.

There was no doubt. Andy Gilligan was Unsub 212.

Sellitto said, “The hell is this about? The detective running the DSE theft case is also the goddamn perp? Somebody explain that to me.”

At that moment, Mel Cooper’s voice came through the speaker clearly. Normally placid, he sounded energized. “Well, we have something here. Where the shooter’s shell casings landed in the field and he picked them up? Guess what I found in the trace?”

“Mel!” Rhyme exhaled noisily. He wasn’t in the mood for dramatic setups.

Unfazed, the tech turned to them with a smile. “Hydrofluoric acid.”

“Jesus,” Sellitto muttered. “So, the shooter’s been to the crane collapse — or he’s Unsub Eighty-Nine himself.”

Rhyme said, “Too much of a coincidence for him to happen to have been at the scene for no reason. No, he’s the mechanic, either with the Kommunalka Project or hired by them. And he needed an inside man in the city government. He pays Gilligan to get him a list of the properties they want turned into affordable housing. That’s where the list came from. And he wanted charts and maps of building sites in the city so he can figure out which cranes are the best to sabotage.”

Sellitto helped himself to a cookie from a tray that Rhyme had not noticed earlier. Thom, a talented baker, was forever leaving out treats that visitors enjoyed but that his boss had little interest in.

Eyes back on the board, Rhyme whispered, “And the mystery man, the mechanic... Who the hell are you?”

The answer to that very question came just a moment later.

Thom Reston stepped into the parlor. “There isn’t much on Gilligan’s phone. No data, no downloads. Just records of calls. Some local — probably to other burners — but there were some to and from a number in England. I checked the exchange. It’s in Manchester. If that means anything.”

Rhyme was silent for a moment, letting the shock settle.

He said, “It means everything. Unsub Eighty-Nine, the crane man? It’s the Watchmaker.”

20

As he waited for the couple who were soon to die, Charles Vespasian Hale wondered if they had children.

He didn’t want the children, if any, to die — and didn’t want them not to die. They were irrelevant. All that mattered was the husband die because of what he’d seen, and that his wife die because he might have told her what he’d seen.

If that meant the kids grew up as orphans, so be it.

Unless they were accompanying their parents now and entered the house with them.

In which case, they wouldn’t grow up at all.

Hale eased back into the foliage of the small park across the street from their modest bungalow in Queens.

The house was owned by a worker at the jobsite where the crane had fallen. His name had been on the list that Gilligan had stolen from Rhyme’s apartment that morning. Hale had called the workers Gilligan had not gotten to, and only this man turned out to be a witness, having seen something “odd” at the site. An SUV parked where it shouldn’t have been.

It happened to be the vehicle Hale had driven there, to sabotage the crane.

Well, he’d ditched the Chevy already, but what was troubling was that the man had seen the contents of the SUV.

And so, the man had to die.

Hale hadn’t known that Moynahan Construction workers had a special lot. He’d parked on the street and left a hard hat on the dash. This is what caught the worker’s attention.

And signed his death warrant.

Hale had hurried to the man’s house here and, finding no one home, slipped inside and left the present for them.

Hale now remained behind the brush and weeds and waited.

Beside the park was a lawyer’s office. The attorney might or might not have been talented in court, but he or she was definitely a skilled linguist. A sign in the window reported that Spanish, Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Chinese were spoken. Hale had heard that soon the country would be minority white. He occasionally received calls from potential clients wishing to hire him to assassinate someone because they were of one of the “lesser races.”

Yes, that term had actually been used.

He always declined such offers, because, yes, he found such jobs distasteful, but also because those who held such views were invariably stupid — and that quality, in any criminal venture, was an undeniable liability.

Now a car slowed and pulled into the driveway. The couple got out. No children. That answered that question. Though, wait... The woman was roundly pregnant. So a partial yes.

His targets seemed to be an average couple. Average build, average hair, average gait. They walked quaintly arm in arm. No... That wasn’t accurate. He was gripping her arm for support. He was likely one of the half dozen injured when the crane collapsed. There’d been only two deaths, which was a disappointment. Not that he was sadistic by nature — hardly (sadism was inefficient); no, Hale simply wanted the attacks to splash. He needed the city to focus.

The two — in their late twenties, he guessed — walked through a white picket gate and past the — yes — average lawn and garden that dominated their front yard.

The man, athletic and solid like most construction workers, paused and gazed down at a bush with yellow petals. Hale knew some flora, but only those important in his work. Those that were poisonous or irritants or narcotic.

Then they continued to the front door, painted a bold red. After unlocking the latch, the man gestured gallantly for her to enter.

She did; he followed, limping, and swung the door shut for what would be the last time in their lives.

Assured that they were in the kill zone, Hale started up the street to his new SUV — a different color and make from the first. This was a black Pathfinder. As he walked, he placed a phone call from his burner. Inside the couple’s house, the receiving cell phone circuit silently took the call and began a countdown that would, after giving Hale twenty minutes to be nowhere near, set off a small packet of explosives. The charge would be so light that they would hear only a faint crack.

That the sound was gentle, however, did not mean that the consequences would also be. The explosion would shatter a container of hydrofluoric acid.

The liquid form is one of the most deadly surface toxins on earth, but anhydrous HF gas is worse. The resulting fumes — materializing spontaneously when the liquid met air at room temperature — would spread fast from the source and would flow through the entire house in less than a minute, as Hale had turned the HVAC fan up to high when he’d rigged the device.

And the deaths? Unpleasant, yes. HF on the skin was, ironically, not especially painful at first. Gas wafting into lungs and eyes and mouth and nose, though, caused instant unimaginable agony. But it wouldn’t last long, not with the quantity he’d filled the device with.

Now the threat posed by the inquisitive SUV voyeur had been eliminated. It was time to return to what was next on his agenda.

It was, indisputably, the most important aspect of his mission.

And the one about which he was the most curious.

21

“Don’t think I’ve seen you looking quite so surprised, Linc.”

Which was a mild way of putting it.

“I’ve been expecting Hale,” Rhyme said slowly. And he reminded them of a communique that he’d not long ago received via a rather circuitous route. The British Government Communications Headquarters — an innocuous name for one of the most effective snooping agencies in the world — had been listening in on terrorist traffic and coincidentally heard that anonymous actors, one of whom was in Manchester, England, were plotting Rhyme’s death. They’d gotten word to the FBI, which in turn alerted the criminalist.

Manchester was Hale’s temporary base of operation.

“He was going to get here sooner or later — killing me is not the kind of job he’d contract out. But how the hell is he involved with the cranes?”

“Well, I guess the Kommunalka Project hired him, didn’t they?” Sellitto asked.

Rhyme’s eyes went from the evidence boards to the windows. “Maybe. But his being here, it opens up a lot more possibilities. It might explain why nobody’s heard of our resident communists. Thinking about it, a radical underground group, affording Hale’s fees? Not impossible, especially if the Kommunalka’s a front for a bigger operation, but not necessarily likely. Maybe he’s up to something else entirely.

“And good job, Pulaski. Without the facial reconstruction trick, we never would have known.”

But the young officer seemed not to hear the compliment. He was staring at the board. “You know what it means, right? Gilligan’s death? Hale’s going to move on you soon.”

“True. Gilligan was here to check out my security. If Hale killed him, he’s learned what he needs. He’ll act before I change anything.”

Sellitto was shaking his head. “So, Andy Gilligan was bought. That’s tough. But not completely a surprise. You know he’s got a brother?”

Rhyme said, “I didn’t.”

“Yeah. Mick Gilligan’s connected. A crew in Brooklyn. We knew it, of course. And they saw each other some. Andy was up front about it. He told his commander. All he said was he wouldn’t be involved in any operation against Mick. The brass let it slide.” A scowl. “Andy was a damn good cop. He closed cases... But now? We’ve got to go back and check out every one he ran. Look over the recovered drug and cash inventories. See if anything got skimmed.”

Rhyme was thinking of the phone calls to and from England. He called to Thom, “When was the last one?”

The aide looked over the sheet he’d logged the calls on. “Three days ago.”

“That’s when he left the UK and came here. But how’d he get into the country? Man’s on a dozen watch lists.” Rhyme told his computer, “Send Zoom invite. Fred Dellray. Schedule a meeting now.”

The computer did as told and a few moments later the FBI agent was on the screen.

“Lincoln, Lon, and there’s young Pulaski dwelling in the corners.” Dellray was in his office in the federal building in downtown Manhattan. It was a perfunctory place with government-tan paint on the walls, a bookcase behind him filled with carefully ordered volumes. A desktop computer.

Another phone rang and he held up a bony finger, dark as the brown leather of his desk chair. He took the call and muted Zoom.

Though Dellray had advanced degrees, there were no certificates or diplomas on the walls. The only decoration was a poster of a disheveled man in a toga, beneath which were the words:

Beneath it sat a copy of Title 18 of the U.S. Code. The federal criminal statutes. Post-it notes protruded. They were pink, blue and yellow.

Dellray was wearing a very un-FBI suit in powder blue, along with the equally nonconforming yellow shirt and pink tie. He could get away with offending J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost because he was the best runner of undercover agents and CIs in the Bureau — and he got out into the field himself from time to time to play the role of an obscenely rich warlord or arms dealer or the corrupt government official with a gambling problem eager to take a bribe from a contractor.

He disconnected the call and returned to Zoom. “So. Anything interesting on the crane situation? I’ll tell you, all I have to do is peek outside my window and there’s one there, looming. All our counterterror people decided to decamp to the other side of the building in case it does a Humpty Dumpty. It’s. A. Distraction. What do you need?”

“Any unauthorized entries into the U.S. three days ago, or so, of a male, white, forties. Originating in the UK, but he might’ve transited anywhere in the world. And I’ve sent a picture. Mug shot.”

“I’ll do some rings here, Lincoln. I’ll get back. Who’s this arch vill-i-an?”

Rhyme had tried to categorize Dellray’s syntax, grammar and patois. It was not possible.

“The Watchmaker.”

A silence descended. A rarity with Dellray. “Well...”

“Yes, Fred. I know what he’s here for.”

“Keep this line open. I’m headin’ west, where my fearless colleagues’re hiding out from falling cranes. Be right back.”

The lanky man vanished.

22

Abby was watering the gardenias, in a hanging basket on the porch, when she heard the noise.

What was that?

A pop.

It was coming from the neighbor’s house.

The forty-four-year-old mother of three and part-time librarian looked across the narrow strips of side yards to the bungalow that was almost identical to the one she and her husband owned — identical to many of them, actually, in this part of Queens. Only, the next-door couple had gone with red trim, not yellow.

Abby decided she liked red better, but would never go to the expense of painting something that didn’t need to be painted. How stupid was that? Besides, that’d look like she did it because the neighbors had and even though that was true, she didn’t want anybody to think it was true.

Pop.

Her eyes on the bungalow, wondering about the sound. She was thinking what a time they’ve been through, the folks who lived there. The poor husband, the construction worker who’d nearly died in that terrible crane incident that morning.

Abby’s hubby, Tim, was a mechanic at Harbey’s Automotive — yes, not Harvey’s — and had never been in any danger even during the fire.

And the pregnant wife? Going to drop at any minute.

What a time...

One pour for you, she thought to the largest of the hanging plants — secretly her favorite.

One pour for you.

Good drinks, everybody.

Abby loved her plants. She talked to them and believed they did better because of the conversation.

She looked at their house once more.

Wait, what was that?

She was alarmed. Smoke? Was there a fire?

Grabbing her phone, she started to dial 911. Then she paused. No. She realized she was looking at the bathroom. It was steam. A few wisps slid from the partially open window and vanished quickly. And there was no smoke anywhere else.

That’s all it was. Steam.

She herself just loved hot baths.

Abby walked into the kitchen and filled her watering can once again. She walked through the house, careful not to spill on the carpet, and out the door to the front porch, where four more plants waited.

“One pour for you,” she said. And turning to the others, she whispered, “Just be patient. It’s almost your turn.”

As they waited for the lanky FBI agent to return, Rhyme noted some other aspects of Dellray’s office: photos of his wife and three children. So the couple had had another youngster... Then again, maybe he’d had three the last time the subject of his family came up.

The criminalist was perpetually short on knowledge of his colleagues’ personal lives.

Sellitto began to ask something. But Rhyme held up a finger as he stared forward — not at the evidence whiteboard, but out the window. Branches and leaves and clouds, and some striking blue sky beyond.

Dellray returned. He dropped into his chair. “Gotcha one for the ages, Lincoln. Didn’t come across my desk ’cause I’m spending my precious hours and brain cells putting some racist skinheads away. Now, this is most interesting. Three days ago, incident at JFK. No collateral intel, no chatter, no hot box alerts. Not. A. One. We all together on that?”

“I will be when you tell me what you found out.”

A chuckle. “Triple Seven on an international flight. Parks at the gate, everybody hightails it off the big steel bird, passengers, flight crew. Now, this is where it gets good.

“Next flight, few hours later, the first officer does a walk-around. What they have to do. Checks out the plane, kicks the tires, makes sure the wings’re bolted on. And she looks into the nosewheel well. And guess what that woman finds? You can’t, so I’ll tell ya. An oxygen tank, big enough for an eight-hour supply, a mask, and a thermal sleeping bag heated with a twelve-volt battery.”

At thirty-five thousand feet, temperatures can reach –70 Fahrenheit, though you won’t feel unpleasant for very long. Hypoxia — lack of oxygen — will kill you before cruising altitude.

One for the ages...

“Departed where? Manchester?”

“Yes indeed.”

Sellitto muttered, “The Watchmaker, just the sort of grand entrance he’d go for.”

“Evidence?” Rhyme asked.

“PERT bundled it up and took it down to Quantico.”

The Bureau’s Physical Evidence Response Team was good. And the lab in Quantico was perhaps the best in the world.

“Can they pull a print now? I... We have to know for sure.”

“Name’s Hale, right?”

“Charles Vespasian Hale.”

“Hold on.”

A green and yellow flash as he disappeared.

Rhyme’s eyes slipped out the window once again.

A crane stabbed the sky...

In his mind, the pieces were lining up.

But he needed the critical confirmation from Dellray.

Who was back, two minutes later.

“It’s your boy, Lincoln. Nothing big in the surprise department — Hale was smart enough to wear cloth gloves in the plane, but must’ve figured that’d be suspicious inside the terminal. They lifted a print on the door handle for the baggage crew. So the Watchmaker is the crane man.”

“Looks that way. Let Homeland Security know. He’s on their list too.”

They disconnected.

The Watchmaker. The man whose plots Rhyme had foiled several times in the United States and Mexico. The man Rhyme had actually arrested and incarcerated, though he’d managed to escape from a prison that was very difficult to escape from.

The man who was, to use the overly romantic and inartful term, Rhyme reflected, his nemesis.

Now it was Sellitto who was peering out the window. “He’s here. But where?”

Rhyme reflected for a moment. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about, and I have an idea.”

23

It was a twenty mph zone.

Amelia Sachs was doing sixty, and irritated that she had to slow for intersections.

She had dash flashers on the grille, but no siren. She’d have to look into that.

Hell. Speed bump. Down to forty.

Thud, bang.

Ouch...

Then faster.

Sachs was piloting her Torino, engine raging, down a trim residential street in Queens, a block of small, detached single-families. Red brick, beige stone, a few framed, painted in subdued colors. Not unlike the Brooklyn neighborhood she’d grown up in.

One reason for the speed: an earlier delay. A coughing fit had forced her to pull over, lower her head and breathe the sweet oxygen through the mask until the spasms ended. She actually pulled into the parking lot in front of a hospital’s emergency room.

Debating.

But then she’d controlled it and continued on to meet with the witness.

A brief coughing fit now, filling her with anger at the man who would use this shit as a weapon.

Anger at her own lungs for not resisting better.

Forget it.

Drive.

Once through an intersection, her right foot dropped hard and the car jerked ahead, speeding faster yet.

She was hands-free on her cell phone. Com had arranged a patch from the police radio frequency. The line was open to responding officers answering to the address in Queens, where the witness lived.

“Detective Five Eight Eight Five, come in. K.”

“Go ahead.”

“We’re on-site. Looks like a fire.”

“Negative. It’s acid fumes. Keep back. One whiff’ll kill you. I’ve called FD. They’re bringing the hazmat team.”

“Roger, Detective. It’s all over the place now, the smoke or fumes or whatever.”

“Just keep it secure. And stay back. I’d tell you to look for the perp, but we don’t have ID. He could be around there, waiting to see what happens.”

She coughed once again and glanced at the oxygen tank on the passenger’s seat.

No.

No time to stop.

“You all right, Detective?” the officer asked over the line.

“Fine.”

“What’s this all about?”

“Homeowner was a wit in the crane collapse this morning. Unsub got his address. Planted an IED — the acid, not explosives. I mean it, don’t get close.”

“Roger that.”

A skidding turn.

“I’ll be there in fifteen,” she said and disconnected.

Then she turned her head slightly and said to the passengers in the backseat, “How you doing there?”

The woman, sitting directly behind her, said, “I think I’m going to be sick. I’m sorry.”

“We’re almost there.”

“Okay.”

“And you, sir?”

“I’m fine. I like your car.”

In the rearview mirror, Sachs could see the couple. She looked peaked. He was gazing over the interior of the Ford as if he were a prospective buyer.

The man was the workman — the witness — the unsub had just tried to kill.

The call Sachs had received in the town house had come from him. He identified himself as one of the workmen at the site that morning. She decided to interview him herself and drove to Queens.

She had been nearly to the house when she’d placed a call.

“Hello?” It was the voice of the witness she was on her way to meet.

She identified herself. “I just want to make sure you’re home. I’m almost there.”

There’d been a pause. “Well, didn’t he call you?” the worker asked.

“Who?”

“The other detective. He called me after you did. I assumed he’d tell you I gave him a statement, you know. There’s no need for you to come.”

Jesus... Sachs felt the jolt in her belly. Ignoring a sharp urge to cough, she had slammed the accelerator down. “Get out of your house. Now.”

Of course: the call had been from the unsub or an associate — somehow, they’d gotten the worker’s name and number and learning that he’d seen something, the man had to die. She knew the cast investigating the crane attack, and nobody would have called a witness without coordinating with Sachs.

“What do you—?”

She had said, “It wasn’t a cop. It’s the killer. You’re in danger. He knows you’re a witness. Get out now!”

“Oh, Lord.”

“I’m almost there. Go out your back door, walk through the yard of the house behind you to Twenty-Fourth. I’ll meet you there.”

How would he come at them? she’d wondered. No idea, so she called in both ESU — NYPD’s SWAT team — and reported an IED to Central and Bomb Squad.

She had then just arrived at the address and, scanning for any hostiles, skidded around the corner onto 24th. There they had clambered into the backseat — to the extent that an extremely pregnant woman could clamber — and Sachs spun tires, released ghosts of blue smoke.

Now she was en route to the local precinct, where she’d leave them in protective custody and then she herself would race back to the bungalow to walk the grid there.

And confront the fumes again; she’d been right about the MO; Unsub 89 had left an IED in the house. An acid bomb.

And with that thought, her lungs ironically began another bout of coughing.

She hit fifty again, balancing urgency with the conditions of one of her passengers: both the pregnancy and the nausea.

In the lot of the precinct, she stopped near the front door, turned to them.

“It’s poison?” the wife asked. “Acid?”

“That’s right.”

She began to cry.

“And you’re sure he put it inside?” From the husband.

“Yep, it’s detonated. It’s all through your house. Officers’ve seen the fumes.”

“Christ,” he muttered. “If we’d been inside...” He then asked, “This is all because I saw his SUV? That’s what I told him I saw.”

“Could you have gotten a look at him planting the device he used to sabotage the counterweights?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember anything like that.”

“How close were you to the crane?”

There was hesitation as the husband and wife glanced each other’s way. Apparently, her question surprised them, as if she were missing some detail that they both knew.

The man said, “Well, pretty close. I was the operator.”

24

Sachs said, “I thought the operator died.”

“What?” Garry Helprin’s face was confused briefly. Then it went still. “That was Leon Roubideaux who died. Beam man. Nobody better.” A grimace, laced with anger. “He was in the building, the twenty-first floor. Tried to run a plank to the tower, to rig an arresting cable. It was crazy. Wouldn’t’ve worked. But... He was a friend.”

“I’m sorry.” The image returned: the rebar, dark with blood, flecked with bits of flesh and brain. “You climbed down before it fell?”

His wife, Peggy, said, “He rappelled.”

Sachs lifted an eyebrow.

“Rock and mountain climbing’re my hobbies. I keep three hundred feet of line in the cab. Just in case. I mean, the just-in-case I was thinking of was that the stairwell got damaged or there was a fire. Never thought I’d have to bail out of a crash.”

“Can you tell me anything about the man who called, claiming he was a detective?”

“Not much. No foreign accent, or accent from here, like Southern or Boston. Said his name was Adams, I think. Didn’t really say anything about himself.”

“Caller ID?”

“It said ‘NYPD.’ No number. That’s why I didn’t think anything of it.”

“Easy to set up a phone to do that. Happens all the time. And what did you tell him? That vehicle you mentioned?”

Her pad was out and a pen.

“A beige SUV, I don’t know what kind, with Connecticut plates parked at the side of the site. Why I noticed it, it was parked in a funny place, not the lot reserved for workers. But I knew it was one of the crew ’cause there was a hard hat on the dash. We sometimes leave ’em there so the traffic cops know we’re working and give us a break.”

“What else did you see?”

“In the back there was a cardboard box, three feet square, eighteen inches high, maybe. No markings I remember. Some serious black gloves that went up to your elbows, a pair of what looked like expensive binoculars — I don’t know what brand — and a paperback book. Couldn’t see the cover very well, but it was bright: red and orange. Only one letter of the jacket you could see: ‘K.’ The last letter of the title.”

“You’ve got good eyes.”

“Crane operators — always looking.”

“Any drink cups or cans?”

“No. Or food wrappers.”

“Bumper stickers?”

“Don’t think so.”

What about Garry’s sighting bothered the unsub enough to try to kill him?

Gripping his wife’s hand, Garry asked, “When can we go back inside?”

“You can’t go back. I want you to leave town until he’s caught. Disappear. I want him to think you’re dead.”

The man nodded. “So he won’t know I told you what I saw.”

“Exactly.”

“Just leave?” his wife whispered. “No clothes? No money, nothing?”

“Whatever’s in your wallet or purse. That’s it.”

They looked at each other. She said, “Benji can pick us up. We can stay with them in Syosset.”

Garry was staring out the window. He said in a low, angry voice, “He killed her.”

Sachs lifted an eyebrow.

“Big Blue. That’s what I named her. After Paul Bunyan’s ox. We put up thirty-four buildings together.”

Sachs said, “Come on, let’s get you inside.”

Inside the precinct house, Sachs handed the couple off to the community relations officer, a kind-eyed woman of about fifty. She led them to the watch room.

The wife embraced Sachs hard — if awkwardly, because of the woman’s near-bursting physique.

The detective returned to the car and sat with her head back — which seemed to help the coughing. Some oxygen. A new sensation — stinging — in her chest.

The ER?

X-ray?

No.

She sat up, cranked the engine and texted Rhyme.

Sixty seconds after she sent the message, she received a reply.

She felt a blow in her gut as she stared at the words.

The Watchmaker... Well, this changed everything.

Her response was simple:

Yes.

A fast hit of oxygen, then she rolled the canister onto the passenger-side floor and slammed the transmission into first.

25

While he was never uneasy, as anyone else might use the word, anyone normal, an intense hum of edgy anticipation now pulsed within him.

Charles Hale’s entire plan hinged upon what was about to happen.

He wasn’t concerned about security; the associate he was meeting had been vetted multiple times and there were precautions in place. It was simply that, as with a timepiece, the slightest deviation from tolerances would make the difference between functional and useless. And he needed this person’s role in his plan to work out perfectly.

Like when he was making watches he had to depend on a metalworker in Germany to make the springs — an art in itself.

A third-party expert.

Just like now.

The traffic here in Harlem was thick and swam along the streets like a school of fish that were simultaneously uncertain and assertive. He pulled the Pathfinder into a slot near the City College of New York and walked west through St. Nicholas Park, along a winding pathway glistening from a recent sprinkling. He smelled earth, car exhaust, a floral scent from a row of yellow flowers that were nonlethal and, as he’d reflected not long before, of little practical use to him. They were, however, pleasant to look at. Hale had little time for aesthetics, but he was human, after all, and could be moved, provided the emotion wasn’t a distraction or dilutant.

He broke from the park and started along 139th Street, part of Strivers’ Row, a nineteenth-century residential real estate project by David H. King Jr., the man responsible for constructing the 1889 New York Times building, the base of the Statue of Liberty and the second Madison Square Garden. The brownstone, yellow-brick and limestone town houses here, many of them trimmed with terra-cotta, were gems. They had been marketed to middle-class whites, the predominant demographic in Harlem when they were built. The project failed and the foreclosing financiers let the units sit empty for twenty years before reluctantly agreeing to sell to Black purchasers.

Hale knew this fact about the neighborhood because there was something else here that appealed to him, and he saw it now: an outdoor clock, jutting over the sidewalk.

Six feet in diameter, dating to just after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, the timepiece was affixed to the façade of the Baker and Williams Building. The structure had at that time housed a musical instrument manufacturer, brass their specialty. Proud of their neighborhood — and more than a little aware of publicity — the owners decided to commission the clock.

Another motive for adding the attraction dated to the time that Baker, who was Black, was, for no fiscal reason, denied a loan by a vice president at Merchants Bank and Trust on Wall Street, over whose front door hung a similar clock. The timepiece that Baker ordered built and installed in Harlem was exactly one inch larger than the bank’s.

The company was long gone and the building had been converted. It featured a coffee shop at street level with apartments on the remaining eight floors.

The clock was simple — there were no complications, not even a day-of-the-week function. But the one thing that it featured, which many others did not, was a transparent face. You could see the workings perfectly. If he happened to have a job in New York, it was one of the half-dozen or so outdoor timepieces to which he made a pilgrimage.

This was perhaps his favorite. Both for its construction and its history, which was proof that time exists wholly independent of race, gender, national origin, orientation. It had, you might say, no “time” for such human constructs and the division that resulted from them.

An interesting philosophical question, and one he might think about further.

Though not, of course, at the moment.

“Borrrrrring.”

“Uhm. We’re sitting on our asses with Cubano sandwiches and coffee. What, you want to be running tweakers to ground?”

“We’re watching it being hung is what we’re doing.”

“What?”

“Watching wallpaper being hung.” A pause. “Instead of paint drying. I was trying to be clever. Didn’t work?”

“Hm.”

The young detective who’d slung out the botched metaphor stretched and sipped more of the sweet, powerful brew. He was in the driver’s seat of the plumbing van — confiscated during a drug bust and now used for stakeouts and surveillance. It had a vague scent of metal, which probably came from metal, but might also have come from blood, which the Vehicles crew at NYPD hadn’t sufficiently scrubbed away.

Assigned to the nearby 32 House, he and his partner, who was lounging in the passenger seat, resembled each other vaguely. They were both short, athletic. The noticeable difference: the driver was blond, the other brunet.

“We have to listen to that?” Brunet, slightly older, asked with an unnecessary glance at the radio. It was disgorging soft rock.

“So change it. Whatever you want. What’re the odds he’ll show up here?”

“You’re not saying that you really mean what’re the odds. You’re saying it like you mean this’s a waste of time.”

Blond: “Ex-act-ly. No, that’s country. Find another station.”

“You said whatever I wanted. I changed it to country.”

“Hip-hop.”

“I could do hip-hop.”

The NYPD unwritten rule was that on stakeout it was okay to listen to music because that tended to keep you awake. Sports were forbidden because games distracted from your mission of observing bad guys doing bad things. This was tough. Nine-tenths of the force loved sports. The rest were assholes.

The cultural compromise ironed out, they sat back and continued to watch the street.

“Uhm. Where’d this come from?” Brunet asked the question.

He hadn’t been at the briefing. Blond had snagged him for the detail because they got along pretty well and agreed on most stuff. Important stuff. Teams and politics. Music didn’t count.

“You know that guy in the wheelchair? Ex-cop.”

“Who doesn’t? Rhyme. Captain. Crime Scene.”

Blond told him, “There’s somebody got into the country. Terrorist or something. Snuck in in the wheel well of a plane. From England.”

“Calling bogus. You couldn’t do that. Impossible.”

“A hundred bucks?” Blond reached into his pocket and pulled out bills. He counted. “Eighty-seven bucks?”

Brunet grew cautious. “Put it away. But how the fuck?”

“Oxygen tank and a heater.”

“No shit.” Brunet was both impressed at the feat and relieved that he hadn’t lost the price of dinner for him and the wife.

“So this guy’s the one behind the crane this morning.”

“And Rhyme’s running the case? How’s that work? He’s a civie.”

“Sellitto out of Major Cases, downtown? He’s lead.”

“Oh, the sourpuss.”

“But Rhyme kind of runs it.”

Moments passed, more scanning the street. Brunet said: “So, he really can’t walk? Rhyme?”

“Sure, he can walk. He runs marathons too. He just sits in a wheelchair all day ’cause it gets him sympathy.”

“I’m only saying.”

Sipping more of the Cuban coffee, Blond looked at the printout once more, then scanned the street again for a sighting of the man depicted on the sheet.

Charles Vespasian Hale.

A more ordinary-looking man you could not find.

One thing was key: the suspect would probably pay a visit to one of the legendary outdoor timepieces of the city.

He’d actually said that, Sellitto had said. “Legendary timepieces.” Most of them in the watch room struggled not to snicker.

There were five of these Rhyme had picked and the PD had undercover teams on them all.

Brunet sat forward, scanned a passerby. Blond checked too. The pedestrian wasn’t him.

Blond kept coming back to the end of the briefing Sellitto’d done, when he asked what the teams should do if he was spotted. He’d replied, “Call it in, follow. Keep watching. He makes you, or he moves on somebody, you take him.” Sellitto had then hesitated and grumbled, “Standard procedures apply, but...”

The qualifier he ended his sentence with was a tough one.

He was talking about deadly force, while not really talking about it.

Officers can kill a suspect only when their lives or someone else’s is in direct danger.

But...

With that one word, Sellitto was suggesting that Hale fell into a different category.

Meaning, without saying: take him out at the least presentation of threat.

But it wouldn’t come to that.

Blond had decided that Sellitto was wrong. No way would Hale, if he really was that smart, risk getting collared or shot just to see a fucking clock, legendary or otherwise.

Especially the one they were parked across from. The timepiece that jutted out over the coffee shop in the Baker and Williams Building up here in Harlem was, the detective concluded, really just so-so.

26

Charles Hale was moving through the crowded streets, just another man in Harlem, on his way to eat, to an ad presentation, to see a cousin who’d moved here recently, to meet his mistress for a fast lunchtime, to meet his wife for a real lunch.

Not jaunty, not cautious.

Walking in New York City mode.

Purposeful yet distracted.

Eyes ahead of him on the Baker and Williams clock.

“Excuse me.”

He turned to see a woman in her thirties, blond hair pulled back, taut. She was tanned from the out-of-doors, not a machine. (Having tinted himself for various jobs, he knew the difference.) She wore a skirted suit of navy blue, a white blouse, pearls. She held a shopping bag from an upscale 58th Street boutique.

She displayed her phone. “I’m trying to find this mural.” On the screen was a picture of the street painting depicting the poet Langston Hughes, a native son of Harlem.

He looked down at it. Then he drew his phone and called up a map. She looked at his screen.

Green dots appeared in the upper right-hand corner of both phones as the retinal scans did their duty. This form of proving ID had the lowest false acceptance and false rejection rate of all biometric security measures.

“There,” he said, and they turned away from the huge clock and walked into the shop behind them, sat in the window. He ordered black coffee. It was chamomile tea for her.

“Did you get out to the Hamptons I didn’t even bother the train the cab I wasn’t sure if she’d get fired but sure enough and not a minute too soon the bottom line was a disaster...”

The rambling conversation, unrehearsed, ceased when the drinks arrived and they’d each assessed those sitting nearby were no threat.

Turning her deep blue eyes his way, she said, “Brad told me you’ve subbed out work to him before.”

Brad was the leader of the crew she worked for much of the time. They were, in effect, mercenaries, though the half dozen operated far more subtly than the camo-wearing, inked and bearded grunts one thought of when hearing that job description. When Hale had contacted Brad Garland with his needs, the man had instantly recommended the woman who sat in front of him now.

“That’s right.” Hale didn’t need to say the results had been good. If they hadn’t been, she wouldn’t be here now.

She sipped tea and sat back. “To let you know. Somebody saw me at the drop site.”

A dialectologist would situate her somewhere between the rust belt and cornfields.

“Yes?”

She went on to explain that the real estate agent who’d leased her the drop had lied or been mistaken. The buildings on either side of hers were supposed to be unoccupied, but the one to the west had been sold. A young stockbroker had seen her and insisted on helping her move some things into her space.

“Would have been too obvious to refuse. But it’s handled.” She added matter-of-factly, “I gave him a beer laced with thiopental and midazolam. My recipe. I know the dosage. He’ll be in a coma for four, five days. I drove to the South Bronx to get rid of the truck and dumped him on the way. Not a high-traffic area, but he’d be spotted. Wall Street boy buys drugs in a bad area, ODs. Nobody’ll think it’s more than that.”

“Are you sure he’ll wake up?”

“No.” Nothing followed that stark assessment but a sip of tea.

“What name are you using?” he asked. Pseudonyms were common in this line of work.

“With you, my real one. Simone.”

“And Charles.”

But they would stick to first names only.

He glanced at her ringless fingers and noticed that her right index pad seemed calloused. This happened occasionally when one practiced repetitively with handguns, firing hundreds of rounds a session.

“Did you build it yourself?”

“Some of it. Not the software. I can code, but I needed somebody special. I hired a good kid. He’s an expert at reverse engineering source codes. You need to know Assembly for that.”

Which told Hale nothing. He never burdened his mind with facts or skills that he didn’t use in his jobs. He had once read that Sherlock Holmes did not know the Copernican theory of the universe, and assumed that the sun revolved around the earth — and, why not? If a case could be solved by knowing that mornings saw the sun in the east, and evenings in the west, well, who needed more than that?

In this, Hale and Lincoln Rhyme were very similar.

He’d done a great deal of reading about his counterpart.

He set his coffee down and noted that she was studying him, and not obscuring the fact.

She knew his age and had probably seen pre-surgery pictures. He would have thought she’d be startled and put off by his aging and uglifying himself. But that did not appear to be the case.

Her head turned to her left, slightly.

“The plumbing van. Police or FBI?”

“NYPD.” The vehicle, which was on stakeout duty a block away, across from the Baker and Williams Building, had regular commercial plates, not government, but Hale had run them; it was registered to the city of New York. Confiscated.

“They’re there because of the clock?”

“That’s right. It means Lincoln knows I’m in town. That’s one reason I wanted to come here — to the clock. To find out.”

How this had happened, Hale couldn’t guess. The criminalist never failed to surprise him.

She handed him the bag she’d brought. Inside, there might be silk socks or a Brooks Brothers tie. Definitely there was an envelope, containing an address and a key.

He reached into his breast pocket and handed her an envelope. It was light, but contained a quarter million dollars in diamonds, those without microscopic registration numbers, which — people would be surprised to learn — nearly all retail gems contain.

A few clients accepted offshore wire transfer payments. Nobody in this business took crypto. If a client proposed it, Hale dropped them instantly.

She said, “That clock. The big one?”

He nodded.

Neither of them looked.

“You can see all the gears. It’s interesting.”

“They’re not called gears.”

“No?”

“They’re wheels.”

“Even with the teeth?”

“Yes. Gears’re what’s used in transmissions. In timepieces they’re ‘wheels.’ The mechanism’s called the wheelwork. Or train.”

“Are you making one now?”

“A watch? Not here.”

She cocked her head and said, “There’s a crane above the drop spot.”

He didn’t look into the bag for the address. “Where?”

“West Thirty-Eighth.”

Hale offered a faint, and rare, smile. “No, that’s not the next target. Though it would be ironic. We should leave.” He set money down for the bill. “That mural on your phone. Why Langston Hughes?”

“Poetry’s an interest.”

“So you really want to see it?”

“Yes.”

So the trip to Harlem was a pilgrimage for both of them.

She rose. Hale did too. The script required a pressing together of cheeks and a sincere “Thanks” — for the birthday present belatedly delivered.

He said, “I’ll text you about the next step. Tomorrow.”

Her eyes still on his, she offered, “My time’s yours.” Then she turned, blending seamlessly into a throng of passersby.

27

Sachs walked into the parlor, carrying what was not even a carton full of evidence. Just a few bags with chain-of-custody cards attached.

She vetted everything through the security devices in the lobby, then handed the material to Mel Cooper. After a hit of oxygen, she explained to Rhyme, Sellitto and Cooper, “The crane’s operator lived. It was another worker who died.”

Lon Sellitto asked, “How the hell?”

She set the tank aside and gave a faint laugh. “Rappelled from the top just before it went over. Apparently, the man loves his heights. A rock climber, mountaineer.”

“Lord,” Mel Cooper murmured, flipping through the evidence bags. “Heights.”

She continued, “The unsub, well, the Watchmaker, found out he was a witness and set a device to take him and his wife out.”

“Did any neighbors see anything?”

“No. One saw some mist coming from a window, but she thought it was steam. Nothing else.”

“How’d Hale get his name?” Rhyme asked.

“A detective called this morning and asked if he’d seen anything suspicious. He was canvassing all the workers. He had a list. Which I’m sure Gilligan swiped when he was here and gave to Hale.”

Rhyme nodded, then asked, “Well, what did the operator see that nearly got him killed?”

“A beige SUV parked where it shouldn’t’ve been. Inside, a hard hat on the dash. A three-by-three-foot-by-eighteen-inch box in the back. No markings that he could remember. Gloves that were probably neoprene. Binoculars — nice ones — and a book, paperback with an orange and yellow cover. Letter ‘K’ — the last letter on the cover. No other information.”

Rhyme said slowly, “All right. Maybe he’s worried about the SUV, but I’m sure it’s gone now. The Watchmaker wouldn’t use the same vehicle twice. The cardboard box, gloves, hat? Nothing there that Hale’d worry about. The binoculars or the book could be something. Why doesn’t he want us to see them?” No answer presented itself. He asked Sachs, “Get into the operator’s house?”

“No. The battalion commander wouldn’t release the scene. Too much acid and fumes. But I got a look through a window. The device had dissolved. Just like at Eighty-Ninth Street, on the counterweights.”

It was good she hadn’t pushed it. The exposure she’d had was bad enough. Any more might have knocked her into the hospital — and with their prey now being the Watchmaker, he couldn’t have her sidelined.

“And that?” Rhyme nodded to the carton Mel Cooper had taken.

The exceedingly minuscule carton.

“I got shoe prints and trace, front and back doors.”

A moment later Cooper called, “The shoe print’s ninety percent likely the same as what Ron found at the Gilligan homicide scene. I’m looking at the trace now...” Eyes on the GC/MS screen, he called, “Same trace as earlier — the clay, bacteria, rotting wood and cloth fibers. Liquor. Again, old, old, old... But an addition: ammonia and isocyanic acid.”

“Urea,” Rhyme said.

Sellitto shrugged. “He walked through where somebody peed. Doesn’t tell us anything.”

“Walked through where somebody peed a long, long time ago. Those are what urea degrades into.”

Sachs wrote the discovery on the whiteboard.

By comparison, yes, Sellitto’s scrawl was terrible.

The detective looked at his watch. “I’m getting home, shower and dinner. You need me, call. Why do people say things like that? If you need me, of course you’re going to call.”

He steamed out of the town house. Mel Cooper said he was doing the same.

Ron Pulaski was downtown. He’d switched temporarily to the Eddie Tarr case and was tracking down a lead on the red sedan that the bomb maker had supposedly driven when he killed a witness on the Upper East Side. Apparently, though, the lead had not panned out and now he was returning to the city to accompany Sachs in making the rounds of construction sites that contained the tower cranes they considered the most likely targets. This was mostly to check security — but it was possible that they might happen upon the Watchmaker in the act.

Stranger things had happened.

Thom appeared in the doorway and asked, “Dinner?”

“We’ll get to it,” Rhyme said absently, staring at the murder boards.

At that moment, an email appeared on Rhyme’s computer, a Zoom request.

The name on the sender’s email matched a name on the board: Stephen Cody, the U.S. representative currently in a race for reelection. The man Lyle Spencer had interviewed earlier in the day.

That man Rhyme had never heard of, despite the fact he was the criminalist’s advocate in Washington, DC.

He said, “Sachs, let’s see what he has to say.”

She sat down at the computer attached to the largest monitor in the room and typed. A moment later they were looking at the man, businessman handsome, thick hair a bit mussed, the sleeves of his light blue shirt rolled up. He wore no tie and his collar was open. His eyeglasses had dark red frames. Rhyme wondered, in passing, if the color affected how he visually processed what he saw. Interesting idea. He’d do a study to see if frame color had any effect on visual acuity. Something to consider at crime scene searches.

“Representative Cody. I’m Detective Sachs.”

“Detective. And, Captain Rhyme, an honor to meet you.”

Rhyme nodded.

Cody explained he’d been a federal prosecutor before seeking office and had learned of Rhyme through that job. He’d also read some of the books in a series about Rhyme — some of the more famous cases he’d worked on. Rhyme had always wondered why the author bothered.

“Detective Spencer was asking me about the attack on the crane, some affordable housing activists. Housing’s one of my platform planks. A real problem everywhere, especially in New York. There’s something to their demands: we have so much square footage the government could put to good use, but there’s resistance. Major resistance.”

“Hm. A shame,” Rhyme mumbled and Sachs cut him a glance, which unfolded into: don’t be sarcastic, we might need him. His response was to lift an eyebrow in concession.

“But I’m sure you’re not interested in lectures. I’ll tell you what I found: None of the organizations in the affordable housing world know anything about this Kommunalka Project. And no one’s ever heard of affordable housing terrorism. When you think about it, it’s not a cause where violence really works. You can burn down ski resort developments, you can spike trees in lumber forests, you can monkey-wrench land-clearing bulldozers. But those’re directed against an enemy: the oil companies, the developers. Affordable housing’s goal isn’t to stop anybody from doing anything. It’s just to make living quarters available to people who can’t otherwise afford it.”

“Helpful,” Rhyme said. And it was true. He had not thought about that.

“If I hear anything else, though, I’ll be in touch.”

Sachs thanked him and they ended the meeting.

She said, “You going to vote for him?”

“I don’t know. When’s the election?”

“November. It’s always in November.”

“Is it? Who’s he running against?”

“Her name’s Leppert, former prosecutor too. She went after the cartels in South Texas. I like her.”

“Really?” he asked absently. “So, I think that confirms it. Affordable housing? It’s just one of his complications.”

Charles Vespasian Hale was a killer and a scam artist and a burglar and a mercenary.

But he was something else as well: he was an illusionist. He took his lead from the concept of complications in watchmaking: any function of a watch or clock other than telling the time. Complications could be hidden within the instrument, like a bell-striking mechanism; or they could be visible on the display, such as dials indicating the phases of the moon, tides, seasons. Watches with many such features were called “grande complications.”

The term could also be used to describe Hale’s plots.

Rhyme had done considerable research into the subject of horology, to better understand his adversary. He’d learned that the watch with the most complications is the Franck Muller Aeternitas Mega 4. Thirty-six features and nearly fifteen hundred parts.

He wondered if Hale owned one. Maybe he’d made a watch himself with even more complications than that.

“All right,” he said slowly, “we’ll put affordable housing off the table temporarily. Then who hired him and what’s he really got planned?”

Sachs asked, “If it’s something else, then what does that do to the deadline?”

In thirteen hours, the Watchmaker had promised, another crane would come crashing to earth.

“We assume he’ll keep going. Whatever he’s up to, the sabotage is part of it.”

The front door buzzer sounded. Rhyme and Sachs both looked at the monitor, each with an at-this-time-of-night? expression.

A nondescript man, Black, middle-aged, was looking up at the camera. He wore a dark suit, blue or black, and a white shirt with a tie. On his belt was a gold badge.

“Yes?”

“Captain Rhyme. Lawrence Hylton. Internal Affairs. Sorry to bother you this late. Can I speak with you?” The accent was Caribbean, Rhyme judged. Jamaican, maybe.

Rhyme let him inside and Sachs went to greet and usher him into the parlor.

When he stepped inside, he scanned the impressive laboratory and then focused on Rhyme. Once again, a visitor’s face glowed with minor adulation.

Rhyme’s own expression was clouded. Not because of the man’s presence, or the somewhat irritating awe, but because of his learning just now that he had absolutely no idea what the Watchmaker was up to.

Thom swung through the room, surprised there was a guest. He asked about coffee or another beverage — missing, or ignoring, Rhyme’s frown meant to discourage anything that kept Hylton here a moment longer than necessary.

But the detective declined with a grateful nod.

Sachs stifled a cough and motioned to a chair.

Bad news. He sat. The stay might be longer than Rhyme had hoped.

“We understand Detective Gilligan was behind the Department of Structures and Engineering theft and was working with the man behind the crane attacks.”

“Yes, that’s how it appears.”

Hylton removed a well-worn notebook from his inside breast pocket, a gold pen too. He jotted something at the top of the small sheet. Date and place, most likely. In the old days, when he was a line detective, this is what Rhyme did too. Even then, though, he found himself taking more notes about the evidence at the scene than what the witnesses had to say. He sometimes missed their testimony entirely.

“And who is that other man?”

Rhyme had alerted One PP and the mayor’s office the minute they learned that Hale was in town. He supposed Internal Affairs wasn’t kept informed of cases out of their bailiwick, though given Hale’s reputation and his history of jobs in New York, it seemed odd that Hylton didn’t know.

“Charles Vespasian Hale. Professional criminal. He’s got a file, NYPD and FBI, if you want to read more.”

“Is he the one who killed Detective Gilligan?”

“We believe so.”

Notes were jotted, examined, and then added to. “And the reason for that?”

“Unknown at this point.”

Hylton’s eyes returned to the lab. He seemed about to ask a question regarding it, but then sensed Rhyme’s impatience. He gave a near smile and turned his eyes back to the criminalist. “What evidence do you have against Detective Gilligan?”

Rhyme nodded at Sachs and she explained what they’d found.

More jotting, and then Hylton was frowning. “I mean, all this to make housing available for the poor?”

A shrug. “We’ve decided that Hale is up to something else,” said Sachs. “We don’t know what at this point.”

“Though we do know one item on his agenda,” offered Rhyme. “To kill me.”

The gold pen paused.

“Some outfit has a contract on you? OC — the mob?”

“No. It’s personal. And that’s one of the reasons Hale hired Gilligan. To get inside here and find out what kind of security I have.”

Hylton looked at the X-ray and the nitrate detector. “I wondered about those.” He then asked, “You have any idea where this Hale is now?”

“No.”

If we did...

“Did Detective Gilligan give you any clues about associates he might’ve been working with? Either on this case or any others?”

Rhyme and Sachs regarded each other. She shook her head.

The detective put the pad and pen away, buttoned his jacket, and with a last look around the parlor started for the door. He paused and turned back. “So, this Hale wants to tag you, and Gilligan was working with him. I don’t know whether it’s important or not, but there’s something maybe you should know. After we got the paperwork on him, we pulled Gilligan’s activity report. Last week he went to Emergency Service and checked out six flash-bangs and five C4 breaching charges.

“Put ’em together and there’s more than enough bang to be fatal. We’ve searched his office and house. We didn’t find them.”

Hylton glanced at the scanner in the front hallway. “You get any packages from people you don’t know, well, make sure you take a close look. And don’t drop ’em accidentally.”

28

Charles Hale gazed up at the tower crane that Simone had mentioned as they sat in the Harlem coffeehouse.

The jib was weather-vaning in the wind; the slewing plate had been released so it could turn and keep pressure from the wind off the mast. A huge American flag flapped noisily two hundred feet up. He’d think that might affect performance, but it wasn’t his concern.

He turned and glanced at the building west of the one Simone had rented as a drop site. He’d half-expected the police, investigating how the young man who lived there had come to overdose on an anesthetic cocktail.

But no. He had the street to himself.

With the key she’d given him in the “gift bag,” he opened the door. Coincidentally, the key was the same as he used in all his safe houses, including the one here. It was of an unusual design, a short length of chain. The lock it fit into was as unpickable as one could be.

Inside, hand near a weapon in his waistband, he clicked on the green-tinted overheads and walked to the box containing the device she’d had made. He looked down at the printing on the cardboard side.

He was amused at the camouflage. He knelt and opened the lid, looking inside.

The device was of quite the compact design, resembling a generator of the sort you’d buy at a home improvement store. A burnished metal base, on top of which sat an array of metal and black carbon fiber boxes and tubes and fixtures and wires. To one side were large batteries. The top was the business end: a brushed aluminum tube, two feet long and six inches in diameter.

Most devices of destruction appear haphazard. True IEDs are just jumbles of wires and circuit boards and chunks of explosives. No order, sloppy and tangled.

What Simone had created, however, was stylish, elegant, even sensuous. German Bauhaus design of the early twentieth century came to mind.

He ran his hand slowly over the top, regretting the necessity for latex gloves. He would have liked to feel its texture on his skin.

As a watchmaker by avocation, Hale was talented with tools and had the ability to construct any number of things — the acid delivery systems for the cranes, for instance, or the one that killed the witness in Queens.

But this was different. This was special, beyond his skills.

All the more reason for respect. Then he sealed the box back up and wheeled the bulky thing out to the back of the SUV. He wrestled it in.

He then returned to the apartment and found the cardboard box that Simone had mentioned in the note she’d given him in Harlem. Inside were what appeared to be a bag of flour and a can of Crisco. Hale dumped the contents of the bag — a metallic-shaded powder — onto the floor near where Simone’s device had rested. He opened the can and poured the brown gelatin inside over the floor in a trail from the door to the powder.

The last thing he extracted from the box was a Fourth of July sparkler.

At the doorway, he turned and lit it, dropping it on the gelatin, which ignited immediately. The mix of gasoline, naphthalene and palmitate — napalm — caught fire immediately and began to burn toward the powder, which was iron oxide rust and aluminum, also known as thermite. The napalm burned at about 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to do considerable damage, but the thermite would reach a temperature of 4,000 degrees, guaranteeing that not a molecule of DNA remained.

Hale returned to the SUV and drove down to Greenwich Village. There, near the Hamilton Court cul-de-sac, he left the vehicle in a garage one of his companies had rented and returned to the trailer.

His security app told him that no one had breached either the cul-de-sac nor the safe house, which he entered. Closing the door, he shut off the security system, then walked into the bedroom, stripped off the outer garments he was wearing and hung them in the small closet. The suit jacket and trousers had been specially made and had neoprene linings. He was always careful when planting the acid but, of course, accidents happen, especially with such an unstable chemical.

In the minuscule bathroom, he opened the medicine cabinet door and removed the jar of Penotanyl, prescribed by the doctor who had done the cosmetic surgery. Unscrewing the top, he rubbed the white substance on his face from forehead to chin. The slicing and rearranging to alter him had been so extensive that the ointment was necessary to keep the skin from drying and cracking. Hale was a man of iron discipline, but even he found it hard to resist rubbing during the bouts of itching.

Another glance at the stranger in the mirror. Still startling.

He replaced the medicine and then dressed in jeans, a black T-shirt and a sweatshirt. His sidearm, a smaller Glock, a model 43, went into the holster inside his belt. No silencer for this weapon. In close combat, you want noise.

Logging on to his computer, he typed in a local news station’s URL. Hale was one person who did not regret the demise of print journalism. Oh, he read news voraciously. He had sixteen anonymous subscriptions — ranging from the New York Times to the Bulgarian State Daily — but he needed the immediacy of online editions.

The story reported that Andrew Raymond Gilligan, a sixteen-year veteran, had been shot gangland style. It was likely that the killer had been a mob enforcer, shooting Gilligan to stop an organized crime investigation he was working on. The police, though, had no suspects in mind.

“He was a good cop and a good man,” his brother, Mick Gilligan, 43, said. “He didn’t deserve this.”

He continued to scan several other sources and found nothing of the acid attack on Garry Helprin and his wife. Which meant they were dead. Their bodies would be discovered eventually; with luck, though, he’d be gone by then.

Hale closed out of the site. He brewed a cup of coffee and, after scanning the security monitors, sat back and sipped the hot beverage.

He reflected on the story about Gilligan’s death. It was illuminating. The theory that he’d been killed by an OC hit man was nonsense — a murder like that bought gang leaders far more trouble than it prevented. No, the story was floated as a smoke screen. And that meant that Lincoln and the others knew about the connection between Gilligan and him, and that Hale was the shooter.

This was unfortunate, but not unexpected.

He tried to anticipate what Lincoln would do with that connection.

That remained a mystery.

But Hale’s plan was unfolding quickly; he would finish up here and soon be gone.

More coffee. Drinking it slowly. Hale had an idea for a weight-loss program. The key thing to count? Not calories or carbs or fat, but time. The slower you ate, the fuller you felt and the less you took in. And you enjoyed the act of indulging longer. Another creative idea he would never put into practice. Every once in a rare while, he regretted striving for perfect anonymity.

His eyes were on the clepsydra that had so interested the late Andy Gilligan. The ancient Romans relied on sundials and obelisks for most of their timekeeping, but on overcast days and at night, they used hourglasses like this one.

Hale had once read a story about the emperor Caligula. A fascinating man, he was the world’s first Photoshopper, having a sculpture of his own head affixed to a statue of Jupiter. He was also completely mad, vindictive and paranoid. He got it into his demented head to kill a number of Jews who were not worshipping him with sufficient adulation. But an advisor convinced him that the clepsydra in his chambers was magic, and that it had transported him back in time. He’d already murdered hundreds in the Jewish community, so there was no need to kill any more.

Caligula believed the man and would spend hours playing with the timepiece, convinced that with it he could move back and forth in time.

As he sipped the coffee, finishing the cup, he let his thoughts wander away from imperial Rome — and away from Lincoln Rhyme.

A minute later he picked up an unused burner phone.

“No,” he told himself and set it down. He’d actually spoken aloud.

Then he lifted the unit once more and tapped in a number.

29

Driving north through Tribeca, Ron Pulaski was on the phone with an Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives supervisor.

“I’ll tell you, Officer, we’ve been talking.” Nate Lathrop was speaking loudly, as he’d done throughout the conversation. This happened occasionally with those in this particular profession. Because of the explosives side of the outfit’s business, a number of agents’ hearing had suffered over the years.

Pulaski was on Bluetooth earbuds and lifted the phone to turn the volume down.

“Go on, Nate.”

“What?”

Pulaski shouted, “Go on!”

“Us and the Bureau and Homeland? No trace of Tarr on any of the wires. No intel on any target. We think he was transiting.”

“So he’s not priority?”

Nate shouted, “So I have to tell you he’s not high priority.”

“All right, but you’ve got the red sedan out, don’t you?”

“The sedan? Yeah. But—”

“I know there are a lot of them, but I sent you the likely time he hit either the bridge or the tunnel to get back to Jersey. I just want somebody to look over the vids.”

“Yeah, it’s in the system.”

Pulaski almost added, “Did your meeting include the discussion that, target or not, he had probably murdered someone?” But what was the point?

They would care, of course, about a homicide in Manhattan, but they wouldn’t care as much as Pulaski.

He thanked the man in a shout and disconnected.

In truth, he didn’t really mind how it was turning out — the investigation into Tarr was his alone. He didn’t have to answer to the feds, who could be overbearing at times. A lot of jurisdictional turf wars in this business. Tarr was his and his alone.

Good.

He turned and negotiated his way through the warren of streets in this part of Manhattan — old, and designed when horses and wagons were the means of transportation. The lead had not paid off. A video camera had recorded a red sedan at the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, but the official camera had not been working properly and it didn’t record the tag. Pulaski had canvassed other cameras and finally gotten a number.

It was registered to a man who was a salesman for a drug company. He checked out.

Now time to get back to the Watchmaker and the cranes. He and Amelia were going to hit possible target sites.

He glanced at the time. Late. He’d hoped the search here, near the Holland Tunnel, would go faster and then he’d get a brief dinner with Jenny and the kids.

As he drove he reflected on Sellitto tapping him to be Lincoln’s replacement.

This, he did not count as a victory, because in order for it to happen, the criminalist would have to retire or... Well, no desire to finish that sentence.

He’d tell Jenny, of course. He’d tell his brother, Tony, a twin, who was Patrol, out of the 6 House in Greenwich Village.

He was debating where to go for a beer to talk about it. Next Thursday — the night he and Tone went out alone for drinks and dinner.

His mobile hummed. The caller was from Queens, the crime scene lab.

“Hello?”

“Officer Pulaski?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey,” the woman’s voice said, “sorry to bother you this late.”

“That’s fine. Go ahead.”

“I’m logging in the evidence from the Dalton murder? That you ran this morning?”

“Okay.”

“There’s an issue with chain of custody, I—”

A blaring horn filled the night and Pulaski’s car slammed full speed into an SUV that materialized in front of him. The Hyundai that he’d hit spun in a full circle, while the Accord that Pulaski was driving — their personal car — jerked sideways and flipped over onto its roof, skidding to a stop against a lamppost, which came tumbling down. Two pedestrians leapt out of its way.

Stunned, he blinked away the shock and began to assess if anything was broken. No. He was functioning okay. Fumbling for the phone, he glanced at the other vehicle. He had to get out and see about their condition.

But as he popped the belt and crumpled hard against the ceiling, he smelled the powerful, astringent odor of gasoline. And with a whooshing roar, orange and blue flames appeared as fast and as shockingly as the SUV had.

They danced around him, a bright and playful display that was in stark contrast to the monotone nighttime street.

30

“Complicated,” Hale said.

The light in this portion of the trailer, the office converted to a bedroom, was unenthusiastic, but he was close enough to make out the details of what he gazed at.

“When did you learn to do it?”

The two lay side by side on the weak mattress covered with pristine sheets and a down comforter, all of which were underneath their naked bodies at the moment.

Simone replied, “Young. I was young.”

He examined her handiwork once again, leaning closer, and in doing so, smelled her smells, and his. Saw a scar, of which she was not self-conscious in the least: a ragged slice under her left breast. Another was just below the rib cage.

She bore some tats too: a 5.56mm round, in silhouette, on one shoulder blade, and Chinese characters on the other. He didn’t know the meaning.

“May I?” Perhaps an ironic request considering how they had just spent the past hour. But it seemed right.

“Yes.”

He lifted her tawny braid and studied the twined strands.

The symmetry, the perfect intervals between turns... they touched Hale on some visceral level and gave him unusual pleasure.

“Your mother, she teach you?”

“She wasn’t part of my life.”

“Then how?” Maybe her father. Why only a mother could teach her child to braid hair was a thought from an older era. But if the topic of her maternal superstructure was off-limits, then paternal might be as well. “If you’re okay with it,” he said.

“Of course. It was my mentor. A former nun. She delivered food in sub-Saharan Africa. The outpost kept getting hit by a warlord. He told her to order twice the food she was allotted by the charity running the place and give it to him. If she didn’t, he and his men would take girls from the village instead. He ended up taking more than half and some girls anyway. She prayed they would stop. When that didn’t work, she quit the church. The warlord didn’t survive till their next encounter. He was gunned down.”

“And how did she become your mentor?”

“I found myself in Africa too. I was there with someone.” A pause. “Circumstances changed. I needed work suddenly. One of the men she paid to deal with the warlords turned on her. I found myself in a position to remedy the situation.”

Hale too used such euphemisms in his work.

Remedy...

“It seems I had a talent.”

She was not inclined to elaborate on this aspect of her biography either. He sensed there was nothing in the tale that was troubling or too sensitive to share. It was more that the narrative was tedious to her and, therefore, to anyone else.

Their original topic, though, enlivened her: “Braids have a history. Archeologists found figurines and statues that’re more than twenty-five thousand years old. Africa and France. Asia too. I do a different one every few days. They could be this.”

It was a single strand.

“Or a fishtail, a five-stranded rope, a French, a waterfall. Some I make up as I go. In some cults — even today — women are required to wear them. Their husbands insist. A sign of subservience. I like the irony.”

“You can also pin it up quickly if you need to fight.”

Her expression said that she had done just that.

The strands ended in a blue ribbon.

She rolled toward him. Her breasts, compact, pressed into a crease. He mirrored her pose and his hand went to her shoulder, near the bullet ink. The muscle was solid, which he knew not from this touch, but from their fierce joining. Legs too. He supposed she ran. Was it an attempt to bleed away some tension, some concern, some fire within her? She presented calm, to the edge of blasé. He didn’t believe it.

He had examined her scars. Now she looked at his. With the trigger-calloused index finger she touched the raised skin over a bullet wound. Then a longer one. It had been created some years ago when an IED meant to kill him had not, though it had turned a Coca-Cola can into an improbable but efficient piece of shrapnel.

Touching the braid again.

He had not been with a woman in this way — without paying — for several years. He found it consuming. And for Charles Hale to be consumed was a rare thing. It could be dangerous.

She seemed aware suddenly of the ticking of a clock, a Royal Bonn porcelain, which sat nearby on a shelf. Her eyes were on it and swung slowly to him. “I’ve followed you. When Brad told me he’d gotten your message, I told him I wanted the job. I wanted to work with you.”

He made a gesture toward his face, his scalp. “Wasn’t exactly who you were expecting, though, was I?”

Her face tightened and she scoffed, meaning she had no interest in what he looked like. He recalled their first meeting, at the coffeehouse, she’d glanced at his face quickly, out of curiosity at the surgery, and then focused for the rest of their time together on his eyes.

“I’ve wondered. Why clocks?”

“When you build watches, boredom is not a possibility.”

“Ah, boredom.” A very faint tightening of her lips. She understood.

He told her what he rarely thought of any longer: his childhood, in the Arizona desert, absent parents. Long hours to fill. “Time dragged. I was drawn to what marked the passage. Studying watches, collecting watches, making watches. It made those hours bearable.

“But then timepieces... they weren’t enough. I needed to put the theory behind them into something bigger. Just as complicated, just as elegant. But more intense.

“I got the answer when a friend’s life was destroyed. A drunk driver. He ended up in a wheelchair.”

“Like Lincoln Rhyme.”

“Hm. The driver? No remorse. None. I decided to kill him. But I realized I’d need to plot it out as carefully as a watchmaker plans his timepiece. It’s not hard to kill someone. You—”

“Hit them over the head with a pipe.”

He paused. His very words, with the exception that the weapon in his illustration would be a brick.

He said, “No elegance.”

“And then there’s escape.”

Hale offered, “It worked. He died. I got away. The line was crossed and I knew I’d never go back.”

“What’s next for you?” she asked.

“Underground. For a while, at least. With Lincoln’s death, there’ll be people after me.”

She said, “Always happens with a public target.”

“You?”

“A kill. College town. No one connected to the school. An OC informant. But I’ll use the faculty as a cover. I’ll be a poet.”

Hale couldn’t fathom how the wheels and springs of that plot would work.

Simone eased onto her back and tugged the sheet up to her armpits. Not from modesty, but because the trailer was drafty. “You must have hundreds of clocks and watches. Is there a favorite?”

“Always the next one, the one I’m working on at the moment.”

She nodded; she understood this too.

“But of those I’ve made in the past? A clock made out of meteoric iron.”

She said, “Kamacite and taenite. Alloys of nickel and iron. For one job, I had to be a geologist.”

“The only naturally found metallic form of iron on earth. Meteorites.”

She was considering something, eyes on the ceiling. “But... springs? Iron wouldn’t have elasticity.”

“No springs. I used a weight escarpment. I carved a small chain out of the iron. Another favorite? Not one I made. I acquired it. Made out of bone. It does have some metal. But I think you could make a tension device from bone that could power it.”

“Human bone?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it could be tested. Maybe there’s some DNA left.”

“Who made it?”

“A prisoner in Russia. Political prisoner. He was on a work detail and they let him have tools. It took him a year. He made it as a bribe for one of the guards to let him escape. It could be sold for thousands. In dollars. You couldn’t carry enough rubles to buy it.”

“Did it work?”

“The clock worked fine. His plans didn’t. The guard took it and shot him.”

“How do you know the story?”

“The horology world is small.”

“All the clocks you’re talking about are analog. Wheels, springs, weights, chains. No interest in digital ones?”

“I respect them but, no, not really. Other than one. The atomic clock.”

“I’ve heard of it. It sets universal time, right?”

He nodded.

“Even when working perfectly, mechanical and electric and electronic clocks’re affected by temperature, solar flares, magnetic fields, altitude changes. The highest level — nearly faultless — are ones that measure time according to the resonant frequency of atoms. In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses cesium atoms cooled to near absolute zero.”

“Nearly faultless?”

“They lose or gain one second every three hundred million years.”

“Does life need to be that accurate?”

“Business meetings, luncheon dates, theater curtains, weddings, no. Airline scheduling, trains, timing of radiation bursts in cancer treatments, yes. Outer space? A timing error of a billionth of a second can mean nearly a twelve-inch positioning error on reentry. And your spaceship disintegrates. Atomic clocks are being replaced by optical. Even more accurate. Do you collect anything? Poetry, I suppose.”

“And miniature steam engines. They run on alcohol.”

“Don’t know that I’ve ever seen one.”

“I find them hypnotic. The blue flame, the smell of the fire.”

“What do they do?”

“Turn wheels and belts, spin governors. There are a few that’re practical. One can run a generator in a safe house I have that’s off the grid. Steam can do just about anything electrons can. Charles Babbage had a design for a steam-powered computer, the Analytical Engine, he called it — 1834. It was never finished, but I’ve always thought I might like to get the plans and do it myself. Were there ever any steam-powered clocks?”

“One, also the eighteen hundreds, Birmingham, England. It was essentially a promotion piece for the values of steam. Here and there nowadays, some tourist attractions.”

“Are they accurate?”

“As accurate as the escarpment. The steam doesn’t turn the hands. It lifts weights that drive the wheels. There’s one in the Midwest. Instead of chiming the hour, it blows a whistle.”

“Why do you want Rhyme dead?”

“When a horologist builds a clock or watch, the rooms are as clean as scientists making a space telescope. Not a single bit of dust or a hair or grain of sand. The room I use, in Europe, has negative pressure.”

“Like a biohazard lab.”

“Lincoln is a grain of sand that keeps ending up in my wheelworks. We’ve been on a collision course for years. There was a job I wanted, last year. An oligarch. London. Highest security in the city. More than for the king.”

“Dmitry Olshevsky.”

“That’s him. Five million.” He felt the irritation once again. “I was passed over. Pierre LeClaire got the job. The buyer didn’t say, but I think it was what Lincoln had done to my reputation.”

“And you’re his grain of sand. Because he may have stopped some projects, but you’re still free.”

True. But little consolation.

Hale happened to glance at the security camera monitor. Someone — a man, he believed — stood at the mouth of the cul-de-sac just on the other side of the chain barring entry. Had the man gotten closer, the alarm would have sounded.

This was not unusual. People were curious about the demolition site.

Was this just a passerby who’d noted the crumbling buildings?

A potential buyer of the land?

A potential thief?

A precursor to a raid? If so, he had an escape plan prepared — Gilligan’s theft of underground passage maps in the city had been helpful. And anyone breaching the trailer would not live long enough to find any evidence of where he had gone.

He rose and pressed a button, which turned on a spotlight affixed to the building beside where the watcher stood.

The sudden bath of illumination seemed not to bother him at all. Even in the wash of light, his features were not distinguishable, and Hale could tell only his race, which was white, and a medium build. His head was covered with a baseball cap. The clothing was casual, not business attire. The visitor was behind a pile of construction rubble, so nothing below his chest was visible. He stayed in place for a moment, then turned and left.

She looked up at his still face.

“Nothing.”

She rose and began to dress.

Hale gauged his reaction to her impending departure. A definitive conclusion did not materialize.

Simone said, “He’s not well, Rhyme. I was reading.”

“He’s disabled. There are issues. But nothing to make me think he’ll die of natural causes anytime soon.”

Her eyes on the ticking clock as she buttoned her blouse with deft fingers. “He’s had a good run, you could say. Better, I think, for him to go out on a high note.”

This would be her poetic side speaking. Sentiment was not an aspect of Charles Vespasian Hale. He was, in this way too like Lincoln Rhyme.

The way he would describe the endgame fast approaching was simpler: time eventually runs out for everyone.

31

At 10:15 that evening, Amelia Sachs announced, “I want to get out to the sites. Still haven’t heard from Ron.”

She sent another text, as she’d done several times earlier. Pulaski had not responded. Not like him.

In jeans and a black T, she was gazing at the map of the city, on which the tower cranes in operation in the five boroughs were indicated with red X’s. She rocked back and forth on her low black boots. With her phone she took pictures of a half dozen, to record the addresses. She didn’t need to explain her selection. These were the tallest, the ones that would do the most damage when they tumbled to earth tomorrow morning, if the Watchmaker stayed true to his promise.

Rhyme could see she was restless, frustrated. The leads were not moving them forward, and this made her grow tense. She worked on curbing those habits she used to eliminate stress — the nails digging into her cuticles, digging into her scalp. She told herself to stop. The commands worked occasionally.

“I’ll go on without him.” She Velcro-strapped a plate of body armor over her torso. A check of her weapon and extra magazines. This was beyond redundant; he’d personally seen her check the equipment twice today. But this was his wife: both edgy and calmly, coldly professional. These are not mutually exclusive characteristics.

She caught him watching her clip two magazine holsters onto her left hip and place another in her left front pants pocket.

“I stumble across Hale, and it comes down to it? I’ll only wound him.”

Rhyme shrugged.

NYPD forbade shooting to wound. Weapons were made, and carried, to kill. They served no other purpose unless, on a breezy day, you needed a paperweight.

But this was the Watchmaker.

Rhyme wanted him alive.

Jacket back on, she pulled her car keys from the shelf. There were two, one for the ignition, one for the trunk, the Torino having been born in an era before the miracle — or curse — of digital electronics. The bits of metal jangled like tiny bells.

Rhyme could certainly see in her eyes the fire to find the killer. But tonight, that intensity was diminished by something else: her labored breathing, her unsteadiness.

The coughing.

“Sachs.”

She looked at him.

“It’s a good plan. But, no. Not you.”

Her lips tightened.

“No chest X-ray, all right. Your call. But get some rest.”

“It’s him, Rhyme. The Watchmaker.”

“Tonight, you’re talking guard duty. Anybody could handle that. Spencer.”

And helping make his argument: her breathing stuttered and she reluctantly took some more hits from the oxygen. He noted only now that it appeared to be a new tank. She hadn’t mentioned swapping the first one out for another.

“If we can’t find out where the next attack’s going to be, there’ll be a scene to search tomorrow. That’s where we’ll need you.”

Did she bristle at the hint? That he was a superior officer. If you took the relationship out of the equation, the marriage, that’s what he technically was, even if retired. He was a captain, she a mere gold shield.

The fraught moment might have become something harsher.

Except it did not; her eyes explained she knew he was right.

She didn’t move for a moment, then her shoulders sagged. “All right.”

And it seemed to Rhyme that relief washed over her. She dropped into a chair and placed a call to Lyle Spencer, telling him of her plan to hit several of the most likely target sites tomorrow and make sure guards were in place... and look for the Watchmaker himself, on the off chance that he was preparing one of the tower cranes for tomorrow’s attack.

After disconnecting, she nodded upstairs. “Early bedtime.”

He offered a half smile and was about to respond when there came the sound of the front door opening — the visitor would have the number pad code — and the brief rush of traffic before the door closed.

Ron Pulaski appeared in the arched doorway to the parlor.

Pale, eyes wide, he stopped and winced, then looked from one to the other.

“Ron, are you all right?” Sachs asked.

“There was an accident. Downtown. I hit somebody, another car.”

“But are you okay?”

“Just stunned. The other car, it caught fire, the driver — a kid, a student — he’s in the hospital. I went over there myself to see how he is. They couldn’t tell me. Or wouldn’t. Not family, you know.”

“Get to a doctor, Ron,” Sachs said.

“They checked me out at the scene, the EMTs. I’m good, just stiff.”

Rhyme said, “The word is Tarr doesn’t have any targets. It’s not that urgent, Ron. A day to rest won’t hurt.”

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice was bitter. “Looks like it’s going to be more than a day. They ran the standard post-accident blood panel. I tested positive for fentanyl.”

Rhyme and Sachs glanced each other’s way.

The criminalist asked, “Did you happen to—”

“Yeah, I sure did. Tried to save a banger in this crew we’d just taken down. Didn’t have gloves on.” He grimaced. “Stupid, with fent.”

Rhyme knew the dangers of the drug. Some first responders had passed out simply by touching an overdose victim. Several nearly died. Now the opioid antidote Narcan was carried by every responder — for themselves as well as for victims.

“I’m on administrative leave till the inquiry.”

“It’ll be a formality,” Sachs said. “This’s happened before.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure how good it’s going to go.” He sighed. “I screwed up. The whole thing was my fault. I ran a red light.”

Sachs said, “All right, Ron. Get yourself a lawyer. The union’ll set you up.”

He nodded, his eyes flat. “Yeah.”

Rhyme said, “Get on home. Get some rest.”

Sachs asked, “You have wheels?”

“Got a pool car. The director took pity. Have to return it tomorrow. I don’t know, I’ll... I’ll rent one, I guess.” He seemed dazed. “Just wanted to let you know...”

“Call us tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure. ’Night.”

And, shoulders slumped, he walked slowly out of the town house.

Sachs said, “That’s going to be a tough one. Drugs and running a light and an injury? He’ll beat the narc, but the optics’re bad. Cops I know’ve been fired for less. And, Jesus, there’re reporters already looking over the blotter. They love stuff like this almost as much as an officer-involved shooting.”

“We’ll make some calls,” Rhyme said, though he was thinking that his political pull in the NYPD extended only so far, as his official connection with the department was about the same as that of a Rite Aid clerk or Uber driver.

Sachs said, “I’ll go upstairs.”

They kissed good night, and carting the oxygen tank, she trod up the stairs, not conceding her condition to the extent she’d take the elevator.

Rhyme nodded, and after she left, his eyes settled on the murder board. Where the top had once said Unsub 89, it now read merely Hale.

Lincoln Rhyme was thinking:

Bishops and rooks and pawns...

I can see the movement of the pieces in our chess game, Charles.

As always, they’re moving with your, yes, clockwork precision, economical and unhesitant.

Moving on squares black and squares white.

Bishops and rooks and pawns...

One space at a time, two, ten...

But, Charles, what eludes me is your strategy. How can I counter this move or that without having a clue as to how you’re going to conquer my king?

Unless and until Rhyme could figure that out, his failure — and he felt it keenly — would have mortal consequences to the citizens of New York.

And, of course, to Rhyme himself. He was very aware of a note Hale had sent to him, a prelude to his trip here, a note that left no doubt what his intentions were:

The Latin translated into: “Some enemies can be ignored; other enemies must die.”