“You mean, tonight, you . . .” Her voice has stopped working.
“Oh, Amie, not just tonight. For a year. The whole fucking year. We had guys in warehouses tell us about shipments. We’d pull the trucks over and . . . Well, you get it. You don’t need to know the details.” He rubs his haggard face. “We just heard—they’ve issued warrants for us. Somebody dimed us out. They got us cold. Oh, man, did they get us.”
She’s thinking back to the nights he was out on a set, working undercover to collar hijackers. At least once a week.
“I got sucked in. I didn’t have any choice. . . .”
She doesn’t need to respond to this, to say, yes, yes, yes, my God, we always have choices. Amelia Sachs doesn’t offer excuses herself and she’s deaf to them from others. He understands this about her, of course, it’s part of their love.
It was part of their love.
And he stops trying. “I fucked up, Amie. I fucked up. I just came by to tell you.”
“You going to surrender?”
“I guess. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Fuck.”
Numb, there’s nothing she can think of to say, not a single thing. She’s thinking of their times together—the hours on the range, wasting pounds of ammo; in bars on Broadway, slogging down frozen daiquiris; lying in front of the old fireplace in her Brooklyn apartment.
“They’ll look into my life with a microscope, Amie. I’ll tell ’em you’re clean. I’ll try to keep you out of it. But they’ll ask you a lot of questions.”
She wants to ask why he did it. What reason could he possibly have? Nick’d grown up in Brooklyn, a typical good-looking, street-smart neighborhood kid. He’d run with a bad crowd for a while but had some sense smacked into him by his father and gave that up. Why had he slipped back? Was it the thrill? Was it the money? (That was something else he’d hidden from her, she realized now; where’d he been socking it away?)
Why?
But she doesn’t have the chance.
“I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you later. I love you.”
He kissed the top of her motionless head. Then out the door.
Thinking back to those endless moments, the endless night, time stopped, as she sat staring at the candles burning down to pools of maroon wax.
I’ll call you later. . . .
But no call ever came.
The double hit—his crime and the death of their relationship—took its toll; she decided to quit Patrol completely. Give it up for a desk job. It was only the chance meeting with Lincoln Rhyme that pulled her back from that decision and kept her in uniform. But the incident sealed within her an abiding repulsion for crooked police. It was something that was more horrific to her than lying politicians and cheating spouses and ruthless perps.
This was why nothing would stop her from finding out if the St. James crew was in fact a circle of bad cops from the 118th Precinct. And if so, nothing would stop her from bringing down the crooked officers and the OC crews working with them.
Her Camaro now skidded to the curb. Sachs tossed the NYPD parking identification card onto the Chevy’s dash and climbed out, slamming the door fiercely as if she were trying to close a hole that had opened between the present and this hard, hard past.
“Hell, that’s gross.”
In the upper floor of the parking garage where the Watchmaker’s SUV was found, the patrol officer who made this comment to his colleagues was looking down at the figure, lying on his belly.
“Man, you got that one right,” one of his buddies replied. “Jesus.”
Another offered the uncoplike declaration, “Yuck.”
Sellitto and Bo Haumann jogged up to the scene.
“Are you all right? Are you all right?” Sellitto shouted.
He was speaking to Ron Pulaski, who stood over the man on the ground, who was covered with pungent trash. The rookie, decorated with garbage himself, was gasping. Pulaski nodded. “Scared the hell out of me. But I’m fine. Man, he was pretty strong for a homeless guy.”
A medic ran up and rolled the attacker over on his back. Pulaski’d cuffed him and the metal bracelets jingled on his wrists. His eyes danced madly and his clothing was torn and filthy. The body stench was overwhelming. He’d recently urinated in his pants. (Hence, “gross” and “yuck.”)
“What happened?” Haumann asked Pulaski.
“I was searching the scene.” He pointed out the stairwell landing. “It appeared that the perpetrators made their exit through this locale. . . .”
Stop it, he reminded himself.
He tried again. “The perps ran up those stairs, I’m pretty sure, and I was searching up here, looking for footprints. Then I heard something and turned around. This guy was coming for me.” He pointed to a pipe the homeless guy had been carrying. “I couldn’t get my weapon out in time but I threw that trash can at him. We fought for a minute or two and I finally got him in a chokehold.”
“We don’t use those,” Haumann reminded.
“I meant to say I was successfully able to restrain him through self-defense methods.”
The tactical chief nodded. “Right.”
Pulaski found the headset and plugged it back in. He winced as a voice blasted into his ears: “For Christ’s sake, are you alive or dead? What’s going on?”
“Sorry, Detective Rhyme.”
Pulaski explained what had happened.
“You’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Good,” the criminalist said. “Now, tell me why the fuck your weapon was inside your overalls.”
“An oversight, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.”
“Oh, it better not. What’s the number-one rule on a hot scene?”
“A hot—”
“A hot scene—where the perp might still be around. The rule is: Search well but watch your back. Got it?”
“Yessir.”
“So the escape route’s contaminated,” Rhyme grumbled.
“Well, it’s just covered with garbage.”
“Garbage,” was Rhyme’s exasperated response. “Then I guess you better start cleaning it up. I want all the evidence here in twenty minutes. Every bit. You think you can do that?”
“Yes, sir. I’ll—”
Rhyme disconnected abruptly.
As two ESU officers pulled on latex gloves and carted off the homeless guy, Pulaski bent down and started to remove the trash. He was trying to recall what there was about Rhyme’s tone that sounded familiar. Finally it occurred to him. It was the very same mix of anger and relief when Pulaski’s father had a “discussion” with his twin sons after he’d caught them having a footrace on the elevated train tracks near their home.
Like a spy.
Standing on a street corner in Hell’s Kitchen, retired detective Art Snyder was in a trench coat and old alpine hat with a small feather in it, looking like a has-been foreign agent from a John le Carré novel.
Amelia Sachs walked up to him.
Snyder acknowledged her with only a brief glance and, after looking around the streets, turned and started walking west, away from bustling Times Square.
“Thanks for the call.”
Snyder shrugged.
“Where’re we going?” she asked.
“I’m meeting a buddy of mine. We play pool up the street here every week. I didn’t want to talk on the phone.”
Spies . . .
An emaciated man with slicked-back yellow hair—not blond, but yellow—hit them up for some change. Snyder looked at him closely and then handed over a dollar. The man walked on, saying thanks, but grudgingly, as if he’d been expecting a five.
They were walking through a dim part of the street when Sachs felt something brush her thigh, twice, and she wondered for a moment if the retiree was coming on to her. Glancing down, though, she saw a folded piece of paper that he was subtly passing to her.
She took it and when they were under a streetlight, she looked it over.
The sheet was a photo
copy of a page from a binder or book.
Snyder leaned close, whispered, “This’s a page from the file log. At the One Three One.”
She looked it over. In the middle was an entry:
File Number: 3453496, Sarkowski, Frank
Subject: Homicide
Sent to: 158 Precinct.
Requested by:
Date Sent: November 28.
Date Returned:
“The patrolman I’m working with,” Sachs said, “said there was no reference in the log to it’s being checked out.”
“He must’ve only looked in the computer. I looked there too. It probably was entered but then it got erased. This is the manual backup.”
“Why’d it go to the One Five Eight?”
“Don’t know. There’s no reason for it to’ve.”
“Where’d you get this?”
“A friend found it. Cop I worked with. Stand-up guy. Already forgot I asked.”
“Where would it’ve gone in the One Five Eight? The file room?”
Snyder shrugged. “No idea.”
“I’ll check it out.”
He clapped his hands together. “Fucking cold.” He looked behind them. Sachs did too. Was that a black car pausing at the intersection?
Snyder stopped walking. He nodded toward a run-down storefront. Flannagan’s Pool and Billiards. Est. 1954. “Where I’m going.”
“Thanks again,” she told him.
Snyder looked inside then glanced at his watch. He said to Sachs, “Not many of these old places left in Times Square. . . . I used to work the Deuce. You know—”
“Forty-second Street. I walked it too.” She looked back again toward Eighth Avenue. The black car was gone.
He was staring into the pool hall, speaking softly. “I remember the summers most. Some of those August days. Even the gangbangers and chain snatchers were home, it was so hot. I remember the restaurants and bars and movie theaters. Some of ’em had these signs up, I guess from the forties or fifties, saying they were air conditioned. Funny, a place that advertised they had air-conditioning to get people inside. Pretty different nowadays, huh? . . . Times sure change.” Snyder pulled open the door and stepped into the smoky room. “Times sure as hell change.”
Chapter 19
Their new car was a Buick LeSabre.
“Where’d you get it?” Vincent asked Duncan as he climbed into the passenger seat. The car sat idling at the curb in front of the church.
“The Lower East Side.” Duncan glanced at him.
“Nobody saw you?”
“The owner did. Briefly. But he’s not going to be saying anything.” He tapped his pocket, where the pistol rested. Duncan nodded toward the corner where he’d slashed the student to death earlier. “Any police around?”
“No. I mean, I didn’t see any.”
“Good. Sanitation probably picked up the Dumpster and the body’s halfway out to sea on a barge.”
Slash their eyes . . .
“What happened at the garage?” Vincent asked.
Duncan gave a slight grimace. “I couldn’t get close to the Explorer. There weren’t that many cops, but some homeless man was there. He was making a lot of noise and then I heard shouting and cops started running into the place. I had to leave.”
They pulled away from the curb. Vincent had no idea where they were going. The Buick was old and smelled of cigarette smoke. He didn’t know what to call it. It was dark blue but “Blue-mobile” wasn’t funny. Clever Vincent wasn’t feeling very witty at the moment. After a few minutes of silence he asked, “What’s your favorite food?”
“My—?”
“Food. What do you like to eat?”
Duncan squinted slightly. He did this a lot, considered questions seriously and then recited the answers he’d planned out. But this one flummoxed him. He gave a faint laugh. “You know, I don’t eat that much.”
“But you must have some favorite.”
“I’ve never thought about it. Why’re you asking?”
“Oh, just, I was thinking I could make us dinner sometime. I can cook a lot of different things. Pasta—you know, spaghetti. Do you like spaghetti? I make it with meatballs. I can make a cream sauce. They call that Alfredo. Or with tomato.”
The man said, “Well, I guess tomato. That’s what I’d order in a restaurant.”
“Then I’ll make that for you. Maybe if my sister’s in town, I’ll have a dinner party. Well, not a party. Just the three of us.”
“That’s . . .” Duncan shook his head. He seemed moved. “Nobody’s made me dinner since . . . Well, nobody’s made me dinner for a long time.”
“Next month, maybe.”
“Next month could work. What’s your sister like?”
“She’s a couple years younger than me. Works in a bank. She’s skinny too. I don’t mean you’re skinny. Just, you know, in good shape.”
“She married, have kids?”
“Oh, no. She’s really busy at her job. She’s good at it.”
Duncan nodded. “Next month. Sure, I’ll come back to town. We could have dinner. I couldn’t help you. I don’t cook.”
“Oh, I’d do the cooking. I like to cook. I watch the Food Channel.”
“But I could bring some dessert. Something already made. I know you like your sweets.”
“That’d be great,” said an excited Vincent. He looked around the cold, dark streets. “Where’re we going?”
Duncan was silent for a moment. He eased the car to a stoplight, the front wheels precisely on the dirty, white stop line. He said, “Let me tell you a story.”
Vincent looked over at his friend.
“In seventeen fourteen the British Parliament offered twenty thousand pounds to anyone who could invent a portable clock accurate enough to be used at sea.”
“That was a lot of money then, right?”
“Huge amount of money. They needed a clock for their ships because every year thousands of sailors died from navigational errors. See, to plot a course you need both longitude and latitude. You can determine latitude astronomically. But longitude needs accurate time. A British clockmaker named John Harrison decided to go for the prize. He started working on the project in seventeen thirty-five and finally created a small clock that you could use on a ship and that lost only a few seconds over the course of an entire transatlantic voyage. When did he finish? In seventeen sixty-one.”
“Took him that long?”
“He had to cope with politics, competition, conniving businessmen and members of Parliament and, of course, the mechanical difficulties—almost impossibilities—of creating the clock. But he never stopped. Twenty-six years.”
The light changed to green and Duncan accelerated slowly. “In answer to your question, we’re going to see about the next girl on our list. We had a setback. But nothing’s going to stop us. It’s not a big deal—”
“In the great scheme of things.”
A brief smile crossed the killer’s face.
“First of all, they have security cameras in the garage?” Rhyme asked.
Sellitto’s laugh meant “in your dreams.”
He, Pulaski and Baker were back in Rhyme’s town house, going over what the rookie had collected in the garage. The homeless man who’d attacked Pulaski was in Bellevue. He had no connection to the case and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds.
“Wrong time, wrong place,” Pulaski had muttered.
“You or him?” Rhyme’d responded. He now asked, “Security cameras at the impound where he boosted the SUV?”
Another laugh.
A sigh. “Let’s see what Ron found. First, the bullets?”
Cooper brought the box to Rhyme and opened it for him.
A .32-caliber ACP bullet is an uncommon round. The semiautomatic pistol bullet has more range than the smaller .22 but not much stopping power, like the more powerful .38 or 9-millimeter. Thirty-twos have traditionally been called ladies’ guns. The market is somewhat limited but is
still quite large. Finding a compatible .32 in the possession of a suspect could be circumstantial evidence that he was the Watchmaker but Cooper couldn’t just ring up local gun stores and get a short list of who’d been buying these rounds lately.
Since seven were missing from the box, and the Autauga MkII pistol holds seven in a full clip, that was Rhyme’s best guess for the weapon, but the Beretta Tomcat, the North American Guardian and the LWS-32 were also chambered for those slugs. The killer could be carrying any of them. (If he was armed at all. Bullets, Rhyme pointed out, suggest but don’t guarantee that the suspect carried or owned a gun.)
Rhyme noted that the slug was a 71-grain, big enough to do very serious damage if it was fired at close range.
“On the board, rookie,” Rhyme commanded. Pulaski wrote as dictated.
The book he’d found in the Explorer was entitled Extreme Interrogation Techniques and had been published by a small company in Utah. The paper, printing job and typography—not to mention the style of writing—were third-rate.
Written by an anonymous author who claimed he’d been a Special Forces soldier, the book described using torture techniques that would ultimately result in death if the subject didn’t confess—drowning, strangulation, suffocation, freezing in cold water and others. One involved suspending a weight above a subject’s throat. Another, cutting his wrists and letting him bleed until he confessed.
“Christ,” Dennis Baker said, wincing. “It’s his blueprint. . . . He’s going to kill ten victims like that? Sick.”
“Trace?” Rhyme asked, concerned more about the forensic implications of the book than the psychological makeup of its purchaser.
Holding the book over a large sheet of clean newsprint, Cooper opened every page and dusted each one to dislodge trace. Nothing fell out.
No fingerprints either, of course.
Cooper learned that the book wasn’t sold through the major Web-based or retail bookstore chains—they refused to carry it. But it was readily available through online auction companies and a number of right-wing, paramilitary organizations, which sold everything you needed to protect yourself from the scourge of minorities, the foreign-born and the U.S. government itself. (In recent years Rhyme had consulted on a number of terrorist investigations; many had been linked to al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist Islamic groups but just as many had involved domestic terrorism—a threat he himself felt was being largely ignored by authorities in this country.)
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