“Rat poison.” Baker gave a laugh. “That Rhyme, he thinks of everything, doesn’t he?”
“And then some,” Sellitto added.
Dance joined them. She explained what she’d learned from the interview: Joanne Harper had returned from coffee and found some wire misplaced in the store. “That didn’t bother her too much. But she heard this ticking and then thought she heard somebody in a back room. She called nine-one-one.”
Sellitto continued, “And since we had squad cars headed to the area anyway, we got there before he killed her. But just before.”
Dance added that the florist had no clue why anyone would want to hurt her. She’d been through a divorce a long time ago but hadn’t heard from her ex in years. She had no enemies that she could think of.
Joanne also told Dance that she’d seen someone watching her through the window earlier that day, a heavyset white man in a cream-colored parka, old-style sunglasses and baseball cap. She hadn’t seen much else because of the dirty windows. Dance wondered if there was a connection with Adams, the first victim, but Joanne had never heard of him.
Sachs asked, “How’s she doing?”
“Shook up. But going back to work. Not in the workshop, though. At her store on Broadway.”
Sellitto said, “Until we get this guy or figure out a motive I’ll order a car outside the store.” He pulled out his radio and arranged for it.
Nancy Simpson and Frank Rettig, the CS officers, walked up to Sachs. Between them was a young man in a stocking cap and baggy jacket. He was skinny and looked freezing cold. “Gentleman here wants to help,” Simpson said. “Came up to us at the RRV.”
With a glance at Sachs, who nodded, Dance turned to him and asked what he’d seen. There was no need for a kinesics expert, though. The kid was happy to play good citizen. He explained that he’d been walking down the street and saw somebody jump out the florist’s workshop. He was a middle-aged man in a dark jacket. Glancing at the EFIT composite Sellitto and Dance had made at the clock store, he said, “Yeah, could be him.”
He’d run to a tan SUV, driven by a white guy with a round face and wearing sunglasses. But he hadn’t seen anything more specific about the driver.
“There’re two of them?” Baker sighed. “He’s got a partner.”
Probably the one Joanne had seen at her workshop earlier.
“Was it an Explorer?”
“I don’t know an Explorer from a . . . any other kind of SUV.”
Sellitto asked about the license number. The witness hadn’t seen it.
“Well, we’ve got the color at least.” Sellitto put out an Emergency Vehicle Locator. An EVL would alert all Radio Mobile Patrol cars as well as most other law enforcers and traffic cops in the area to look for a tan Explorer with two white men inside.
“Okay, let’s move on this,” Sellitto called.
Simpson and Rettig helped Sachs assemble equipment to run the scenes. There were several of them: the store itself, the alley, the sidewalk area where he’d escaped, as well as where the Explorer had been parked.
Kathryn Dance and Sellitto returned to Rhyme’s, while Baker kept canvassing for witnesses, showing pictures of the Watchmaker’s composite to people on the street and workers in the warehouses and businesses along Spring.
Sachs collected what evidence she could locate. Since the first clock hadn’t been an explosive device, there was no need to get the bomb squad involved; a simple field test for nitrates was sufficient to make sure. She packed it up, along with the remaining evidence, then stripped off the Tyvek and pulled on her leather jacket. She hurried up the street and dropped into the front seat of the Camaro, fired the car up and turned on the heater full blast.
She reached behind the passenger seat for her purse to get her gloves. But when she picked up the leather bag, the contents spilled out.
Sachs frowned. She was very careful always to keep the purse latched. She couldn’t afford to lose the contents, which included two extra ammunition clips for her Glock, as well as a can of tear gas. She clearly remembered twisting the latch when she’d arrived.
She looked at the passenger-side window. Smears on the glass made by gloves were consistent with somebody using a slimjim to pop the door lock. And some of the insulating fuzz around the window was pushed aside.
Burglarized while doing a crime scene. This’s a first.
She looked through the bag, item by item. Nothing was gone. The money and charge cards were all there—though she’d have to call the credit card companies in case the thief had jotted down the numbers. The ammunition and CS tear-gas spray were intact. Hand straying to her Glock, she looked around. There was a small crowd gathered nearby, curious about the police activity. She climbed out and approached them, asking if anybody had seen the break-in. Nobody had.
Returning to the Chevy, Sachs got her bare-bones crime scene kit from the trunk and ran the car just like any other crime scene—checking for footprints, fingerprints and trace inside and out. She found nothing. She replaced the equipment and dropped into the front seat once again.
Then she saw, a half block away, a big black car edge out of an alleyway. She thought of the Mercedes she’d seen earlier, when she’d picked up Pulaski. She couldn’t see the make, though, and the car disappeared in traffic before she could turn her vehicle around and head after it.
Coincidence or not? she wondered.
The big Chevy engine began to push heat into the car and she strapped in. She pushed the transmission into first. Easing forward, she thought to herself, Well, no harm done.
She was halfway up the block, shoving the shifter into third, though, when the thought hit her: What was he looking for? The fact that her money and plastic were still there suggested that the perp was after something else.
Amelia Sachs knew that it’s the people with motives you can’t figure out who are always the most dangerous.
Chapter 14
At Rhyme’s, Sachs delivered the evidence to Mel Cooper.
Before she put on her latex gloves, she walked to a canister and pulled out a few dog biscuits, fed them to Jackson. He ate them down fast.
“You ever think about getting a helper dog?” Kathryn Dance asked Rhyme.
“He is a helper dog.”
“Jackson?” Sachs frowned.
“Yep. He helps plenty. He distracts people so I don’t have to entertain them.”
The women laughed. “I mean a real one.”
One of his therapists had suggested a dog. Many paraplegics and quadriplegics had helper animals. Not long after the accident, when the counselor had first brought it up, he’d resisted the idea. He couldn’t explain why, exactly, but believed it had to do with his reluctance to depend on something, or someone, else. Now, the idea didn’t seem so bad.
He frowned. “Can you train them to pour whiskey?” The criminalist looked from the dog to Sachs. “Oh, you got a call when you were at the scene. Someone named Jordan Kessler.”
“Who?
“He said you’d know.”
“Oh, wait—sure, Creeley’s partner.”
“He wanted to talk to you. I told him you weren’t here so he left a message. He said that he talked to the rest of the company employees and that Creeley definitely had been depressed lately. And Kessler’s still putting together a client list. But it’ll take a day or two.”
“A couple of days?”
“What he said.”
Rhyme’s eyes were on the evidence she was assembling on an examination table next to Cooper. His mind drifted away from the St. James situation—what he was calling the “Other Case.” As opposed to “His Case,” the Watchmaker. “Let’s get to the evidence,” he announced.
Sachs pulled on latex gloves and began unpacking the boxes and bag.
The clock was the same as the first two, ticking and showing the correct time. The moon face just slightly past full.
Together, Cooper and Sachs dismantled it but found no trace of any significance.
&nb
sp; No footprints, friction ridge prints, weapons or anything else had been left behind in the florist’s shop. Rhyme wondered if there was some special tool the killer had used to cut the florist’s wire or some technique that might reveal a past or present career or training. But, no, he’d used Joanne’s own clippers. Like the duct tape, though, the wire had been cut in precise lengths. Each one was exactly six feet long. Rhyme wondered whether he was going to bind her with the wire or whether it was the intended murder weapon.
Joanne Harper had locked the door when she left the shop to meet a friend for coffee. It was clear that the killer had picked the lock to get inside. This didn’t surprise Rhyme; a man who knows the mechanics of timepieces could easily learn the skills of lockpicking.
A search of DMV records revealed 423 owners of tan Explorers in the metropolitan area. They cross-referenced the list against warrants and found only two: a man in his sixties, wanted as a scofflaw for dozens of parking tickets, and a younger man busted for selling coke. He wondered if this was the Watchmaker’s assistant but it turned out he was still in jail for the offense. The Watchmaker might well be among the remaining names on the list but there was no way to talk to every one, though Sellitto was going to have someone check those whose addresses were in lower Manhattan. There’d also been a few hits on the Emergency Vehicle Locator but none of the drivers’ descriptions fit those of the Watchmaker or his partner.
Sachs had collected samples of trace from the shop itself and found that, yes, the soil and fish protein, in the form of fertilizer, had indeed come from Joanne’s. There was some inside the building but Sachs had also found considerable amounts outside, in and around discarded bags of the fertilizer.
Rhyme was shaking his head.
“What’s the problem?” Sellitto asked.
“It’s not the protein itself. It’s the fact it was on the second victim. Adams.”
“Because?”
“It means the perp was checking out the workshop earlier—presumably the victim and looking for alarms or security cameras. He’s been staking out his locations. Which means there’s a reason he’s picking these particular victims. But what the hell is it?”
The man crushed to death in the alley wasn’t apparently involved in any criminal activities and had no enemies. The same was true with Joanne Harper. And she’d never heard of Adams—no link between them. Yet they’d both been targeted by the Watchmaker. Why them? Rhyme wondered. An unknown victim at the pier, a young businessman, a florist . . . and seven others to go. What is there about them that’s driving him to kill? What’s the connection?
“What else did you find?”
“Black flakes,” Cooper said, holding up a plastic envelope. Inside were dots like dried black ink.
Sachs said, “They were from where he got the wire spool and where he was probably hiding. Also, I found a few of them outside the front door where he’d stepped on the glass running to the Explorer.”
“Well, run them through the GC.”
Cooper fired up the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and loaded a sample of the flakes. In a few minutes the results came up on the screen.
“So, what do we have, Mel?”
The tech shoved his glasses higher on his nose. He leaned forward. “Organic . . . Looks like about seventy-three percent n-alkanes, then polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and thiaarenes.”
“Ah, roofing tar.” Rhyme squinted.
Kathryn Dance gave a laugh. “You know that?”
Sellitto said, “Oh, Lincoln used to wander around the city collecting everything he could find for his evidence databases. . . . Must’ve been fun going out to dinner with you, Linc. You bring test tubes and bags with you?”
“My ex could tell you all about it,” Rhyme replied with an amused grunt. His attention was on the black spots of tar. “I’ll bet he’s been checking out another victim from a place that’s getting a new roof.”
“Or maybe they’re reroofing his place,” Cooper offered.
“Doubt he’s spending time enjoying cocktails and the sunset on his own roof in this weather,” Rhyme replied. “Let’s assume it’s somebody else’s. I want to find out how many buildings are being reroofed right now.”
“There could be hundreds of them, thousands,” Sellitto said.
“Probably not in this weather.”
“And how the hell do we find them anyway?” the rumpled detective asked.
“ASTER.”
“What’s that?” Dance asked.
Rhyme recited absently, “Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer. It’s an instrument and data package on the Terra satellite—a joint venture between NASA and the Japanese government. It captures thermal images from space. Orbits every . . . what, Mel?”
“About ninety-eight minutes. But it takes sixteen days to cover the entire Earth.”
“Find out when it was over New York most recently. I want thermal images and see if they can delineate heat over two hundred degrees—I imagine tar’s at least that temperature when it’s applied. Should narrow down where he’s been.”
“The whole city?” Cooper asked.
“He’s hunting in Manhattan, looks like. Let’s go with that first.”
Cooper had a lengthy conversation then hung up. “They’re on it. They’ll do their best.”
Thom showed Dennis Baker into the town house. “No other witnesses around the florist’s workshop,” the lieutenant reported, pulling off his coat and gratefully accepting a cup of coffee. “We searched for an hour. Either nobody saw anything or has the guts to admit they did. This guy’s got everybody spooked.”
“We need more.” Rhyme looked at the diagram that Sachs had sketched of the scene. “Where was the SUV parked?” he asked.
“Across the street from the workshop,” Sachs replied.
“And you searched the spot where it was parked.” It wasn’t a question. Rhyme knew she would have. “Any cars in front or behind it?”
“No.”
“Okay, he runs to the car, his partner drives to the closest intersection and turns, hoping to get lost in the traffic. He won’t break any laws so he’ll make a nice, careful—and sharp—turn, staying in his lane.” Like speed bumps and sudden braking, sharp, slow turns often dislodge important trace from treads of tires. “If the street’s still sealed off, I want a team from Crime Scene to sweep up everything at the intersection. It’s a long shot but I think we have to try.” He turned to Baker. “You just left the scene, right? About ten, fifteen minutes ago?”
“About that,” Baker replied, sitting and stretching as he downed his coffee. He looked exhausted.
“Was the street still sealed?”
“Wasn’t paying much attention. I think it was.”
“Find out,” Rhyme said to Sellitto, “and if so, send a team.”
But the detective’s call revealed that the street was now open to traffic. Any trace left by the killer’s Explorer would have been obliterated by the first or second vehicle making the same turn.
“Damn,” Rhyme muttered, his eyes returning once again to the evidence chart, thinking it had been a long time since a case had presented so much difficulty.
Thom rapped on the doorjamb and led someone else into the room, a middle-aged woman in an expensive black coat. She was familiar to Rhyme but he couldn’t recall the name.
“Hello, Lincoln.”
Then he remembered. “Inspector.”
Marilyn Flaherty was older than Rhyme but they’d both been captains at the same time and had worked together on a few special commissions. He remembered her as being smart and ambitious—and, out of necessity, just a little bit flintier and more driven than her male counterparts. They spoke for a few minutes about mutual acquaintances and colleagues past and present. She asked about the Watchmaker case and he gave her a synopsis.
The inspector then pulled Sachs aside and asked about the status of the investigation, meaning, of course, the Other Case. Rhyme couldn’t help over
hearing Sachs tell her that she’d found nothing conclusive. There’d been no major drug thefts from the evidence room of the 118th Precinct. Creeley’s partner and his employees confirmed the businessman’s depression and reported that he’d been drinking more lately. It turned out that he’d been going to Vegas and/or Atlantic City recently.
“Possible organized crime connection,” Flaherty pointed out.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Sachs said. Then she added that there seemed to be no clients with grudges against Creeley but that she and Pulaski were awaiting the client list from Jordan Kessler to check it out themselves.
Suzanne Creeley, though, remained convinced that he’d had nothing to do with drugs or criminal activity and that he hadn’t killed himself.
“And,” Sachs said, “we’ve got another death.”
“Another one?”
“A man who came to the St. James a few times. Maybe met with the same people that Creeley did.”
Another death? Rhyme reflected. He had to admit that the Other Case was developing some very interesting angles.
“Who?” Flaherty asked.
“Another businessman. Frank Sarkowski. Lived in Manhattan.”
Flaherty was looking over the lab, the evidence charts, the equipment, frowning. “Any clue who killed him?”
“I think it was during a robbery. But I won’t know until I read the file.”
Rhyme could see the frustration in Flaherty’s face.
Sachs too was tense. He soon realized why. As soon as Flaherty said, “I’m going to hold off on Internal Affairs for the time being,” Sachs relaxed. They weren’t going to take the case away from her. Well, Lincoln Rhyme was happy for Sachs, though in his heart he would have preferred that she hand off the Other Case to Internal Affairs and get back to working on His Case.
Flaherty asked, “That young officer? Ron Pulaski? He’s working out okay?”
“He’s doing a good job.”
“I’m going to report to Wallace, Detective.” The inspector nodded at Rhyme. “Lincoln, it was good seeing you again. Take care.”
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