The Cold Moon

by Jeffery Deaver

  Evidence:

  * Explorer owned by man in jail. Had been confiscated, and stolen from lot, awaiting auction.

  * Parked in open. Not near exit.

  * Crumbs from corn chips, potato chips, pretzels, chocolate candy. Bits of peanut butter crackers. Stains from soda, regular, not diet.

  * Box of Remington .32-caliber auto pistol ammo, seven rounds missing. Gun is possible Autauga Mk II.

  * Book--Extreme Interrogation Techniques. Blueprint for his murder methods? No helpful information from publisher.

  * Strand of gray-and-black hair, probably woman's.

  * No prints at all, throughout entire vehicle.

  * Beige cotton fibers from gloves.

  * Sand matching that used in alleyway.

  * Smooth-soled size-13 shoe print.

  CRIME SCENE FOUR

  Location:

  * Barrow Street, Greenwich Village.

  Victim:

  * Lucy Richter.

  Perp:

  * Watchmaker.

  * Assistant.

  M.O.:

  * Planned means of death unknown.

  * Entry/exit routes not determined.

  Evidence:

  * Clock.

  * Same as others.

  * Left in bathroom.

  * No explosives.

  * Wood alcohol stain, no other trace.

  * No note or poem.

  * No recent roof tarring.

  * No fingerprints or shoe prints.

  * No distinctive trace.

  * Wool fibers from shearling jacket or coat.

  INTERVIEW WITH VINCENT REYNOLDS AND SEARCH OF CHURCH

  Location:

  * 10th Avenue and 24th Street.

  Perp:

  * Watchmaker:

  * Name is Gerald Duncan.

  * Businessman from "the Midwest," specifics unknown.

  * Wife died in NY; he's murdering for revenge.

  * Armed with pistol and box cutter.

  * His phone can't be traced.

  * Collects old clocks and watches.

  * Searching watchmakers and horologic organizations.

  * No immediate hits.

  * No info from Interpol or criminal information databases.

  * Assistant:

  * Vincent Reynolds.

  * Temp employee.

  * Lives in New Jersey.

  * History of sexual assaults.

  Evidence:

  * Five additional clocks, identical to others. One missing.

  * In Vincent's room:

  * Junk food, sodas.

  * Condoms.

  * Duct tape.

  * Rags (gags?).

  * In Duncan's room:

  * Horological magazines.

  * Tools.

  * Clothes.

  * Programs from Tampa and Boston art museums.

  * Additional duct tape.

  * Old broom with dirt, sand and salt.

  * Three Bic pens.

  * Coins.

  * Receipt from parking garage, downtown.

  * Receipt from drugstore on Upper West Side.

  * Book of matches from restaurant on Upper East Side.

  * Shoes with bright green paint.

  * Empty gallon jug of alcohol.

  * Pet hair roller.

  * Beige gloves.

  * No fingerprints.

  * Fire extinguisher residue.

  * Empty box that contained fire extinguisher.

  * Extinguisher to be alcohol incendiary device?

  Other:

  * Murdered a student near the church, was a witness.

  * Local precinct is checking.

  * Vehicle is a stolen, dark blue Buick.

  * Murdered driver.

  * Searching--carjackings, homicides, missing persons.

  * Emergency Vehicle Locator ordered; no hits yet.

  Sarah Stanton walked quickly over the frozen sidewalk back to the Midtown office building where she worked, clutching her Starbucks latte and a chocolate chip cookie--a guilty pleasure, but a reward for what would be a long day at the office.

  Not that she needed a tasty incentive to get back to her workstation; she loved her job. Sarah was an estimator for a large flooring and interior design company. The mother of an eight-year-old, she'd gone back to work a few years earlier than planned, thanks to a tough divorce. She'd started as a receptionist and moved her way up quickly to become the head estimator for the company.

  The work was demanding, a lot of numbers--but the company was good and she liked the people she worked with (well, most of them). And she had flexibility with her hours, since she was in the field a lot, meeting with clients. This was important because she had to get her son dressed and ready for school, then escort him all the way to Ninety-fifth Street by 9 A.M. and then head back to Midtown for her job, the timetable subject always to the whims of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Today she would work more than ten hours; tomorrow, she was taking off entirely to go Christmas shopping with her boy.

  Sarah swiped her entry card and pushed through the back door of the building, then performed her afternoon workout routine--walking up the stairs to her office rather than use the elevator. The company took up all of the third floor but her workstation was in a smaller office, which occupied only a portion of the second floor. This office was quiet, housing only four employees, but Sarah preferred that. The bosses rarely came down here and she could get her work done without interruption.

  She climbed to the landing and paused. She reached for the door handle, thinking as she nearly always did: Why did these doors open without any kind of lock from the stairwell side? It'd be pretty easy for somebody--

  She jumped, hearing a faint tap of metal. Spinning around, Sarah saw no one.

  And . . . was that the sound of breathing?

  Was somebody hurt?

  Should she go see? Or call security?

  "Is anyone there? Hello?"

  Only silence.

  Probably nothing, she thought. And stepped into the corridor that led to the back door of her office. Sarah unlocked the door and walked down the long corridor of the company.

  Shedding her coat and setting the coffee and cookie on her desk, she sat down at her workstation, glancing at her computer.

  Odd, she thought. On the screen was the window that read, "Date and Time Properties."

  This was the utility in the Windows XP operating system that you used to set the date and time and time zone of your computer. It showed a calendar with the day's date indicated and, to the right, both an analog clock with sweep hands and below it a digital clock, both ticking off the seconds.

  The screen hadn't been there before she'd made the run to Starbucks.

  Had it popped up by itself? she wondered. Why? Maybe somebody'd used her computer while she was away, though she had no idea who it might be or why.

  No matter. She closed the window on the screen and scooted forward.

  She glanced down. What was that?

  Sarah saw a fire extinguisher under her desk. It hadn't been there earlier either. The company was always doing weird things like this. Putting in new lighting, coming up with evacuation plans, rearranging furniture, for no apparent reason.

  Now, fire extinguishers.

  Probably something else we have the terrorists to thank for.

  Taking a fast look at her son's picture, feeling comfort in seeing his smile, she set her purse under her desk and unwrapped her cookie.

  Lieutenant Dennis Baker walked slowly down the deserted street. He was south of Hell's Kitchen in a largely industrial area on the west side.

  As he'd suggested, the officers had divided up the clues found at the church in their hunt for the Watchmaker. He'd told Sachs and Haumann that he'd remembered a warehouse that was being painted with that same shade of sickly green paint found on the shoes in the Watchmaker's room. While the rest of the team were tracking down other leads, he'd come here.

  The massive building stretc
hed along the street, dark, abandoned, bleak even in the sharp sunlight. The lower six or seven feet of the grimy brick walls were covered with graffiti and half the windows were broken--some even shot out, it seemed. On the roof was a faded sign, Preston Moving and Storage, in an old-style typeface.

  The front doors, painted that green color, were locked and chained shut but Baker found a side entrance, half hidden behind a Dumpster. It was open. He looked up and down the street then pulled the door open and stepped inside. Baker started through the dim place, lit only by slanting shafts of light. The smell was of rotting cardboard and mildew and heating oil. He drew his pistol. It felt awkward in his hand. He'd never fired a single shot in the line of duty.

  Walking silently along the corridor, Baker approached the facility's main storage area, a massive open space whose floor was dotted with pools of greasy standing water and trash. Plenty of condoms too, he noticed in disgust. This was probably the least romantic site for a liaison you could imagine.

  A flash of light from the offices lining the wall caught his attention. His eyes were growing accustomed to the dimness and as he walked closer he noticed a burning desk lamp inside a small room. There was one other thing he could see, as well.

  One of the black, moon-faced clocks--the Watchmaker's calling cards.

  Baker started forward.

  Which is when he stepped on a large patch of grease he hadn't been able to see in the darkness and went down hard on his side, gasping. He dropped his pistol, which slid away across the filthy concrete floor. He winced in pain.

  It was at this moment that a man jogged up fast behind him from one of the side corridors.

  Baker glanced up into the eyes of Gerald Duncan, the Watchmaker.

  The killer bent down.

  And he offered his hand, helping Baker up. "You all right?"

  "Just got the wind knocked out of me. Careless. Thanks, Gerry."

  Duncan stepped away, retrieved Baker's pistol and handed it to him. "You didn't really need that." He laughed.

  Baker put the gun back in his holster. "Wasn't sure who else I might run into, other than you. Spooky place."

  The Watchmaker gestured toward the office. "Come on inside. I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen to her."

  What was going to happen meant how the men were going to commit murder.

  And the "her" he was referring to was an NYPD detective named Amelia Sachs.

  Chapter 29

  Sitting on one of the chairs in the warehouse office, Dennis Baker brushed at his slacks, now stained from the fall.

  Italian, expensive. Shit.

  He said to Duncan, "We've got Vincent Reynolds in custody and we took the church."

  Duncan would know this, of course, since he himself had made the call alerting the police that the Watchmaker's partner was wheeling a grocery cart around the West Village (Baker had been surprised, and impressed, that Kathryn Dance had tipped to Vincent even before Duncan dimed out his supposed partner).

  And Duncan had known too that the rapist would give up the church under pressure.

  "Took a little longer than I thought," said Baker, "but he caved."

  "Of course he did," Duncan said. "He's a worm."

  Duncan had planned the sick fuck's capture all long; it was necessary to feed the cops the information to make them believe that the Watchmaker was a vengeful psychopath, not the hired murderer he actually was. And Vincent was key to pointing the police in the right direction for the completion of Duncan's plan.

  And that plan was as elaborate and elegant as the finest timepiece. Its purpose was to halt Amelia Sachs's investigation threatening to unearth an extortion ring that Baker had been running from the 118th Precinct.

  Dennis Baker came from a family of law enforcers. His father had been a transit cop, who retired early after he took a spill down a subway station stairwell. An older brother worked for the Department of Corrections and Baker's uncle was a cop in a small town in Suffolk County, where the family was from. Initially he'd had no interest in the profession--the handsome, well-built young man wanted big bucks. But after losing every penny in a failed recycling business, Baker decided to join up. He moved from Long Island to New York City and tried to reinvent himself as a policeman.

  But coming to the job later in life--and the cocky, TV-cop style he adopted--worked against him, alienating brass and fellow officers. Even his family history in law enforcement didn't help (his relatives fell low in the blue hierarchy). Baker could make a living as a cop but he wasn't destined for a corner office in the Big Building.

  So he decided to go for the bucks after all. But not via business. He'd use his badge.

  When he first started shaking down businessmen he wondered if he'd feel guilty about it.

  Uh-uh. Not a bit.

  The only problem was that to support his lifestyle--which included a taste for wine, food and beautiful women--he needed more than just a thousand or so a week from Korean wholesalers and fat men who owned pizza parlors in Queens. So Baker, a former partner and some cops from the 118th came up with a plan for a lucrative extortion ring. Baker's cohorts would steal a small amount of drugs from the evidence lockers or would score some coke or smack on the street. They'd target the children of rich businessmen in Manhattan clubs and plant the drugs on them. Baker would talk to the parents, who'd be told that for a six-figure payment, the arrest reports would disappear. If they didn't pay, the kids'd go to jail. He'd also occasionally plant drugs on businessmen themselves.

  Rather than just taking the money, though, they'd arrange for the victims to lose it in sham business deals, like with Frank Sarkowski, or in fake poker games in Vegas or Atlantic City--the approach they took with Ben Creeley. This would provide the marks with a reasonable explanation as to why they were suddenly two or three hundred thousand dollars poorer.

  But then Dennis Baker made a mistake. He got lazy. It wasn't easy finding the right marks for the scam and he decided to go back to some of the earlier targets for a second installment of extortion money.

  Some paid the second time. But two of them--Sarkowski and Creeley--were businessmen with pretty tough hides, and while they were willing to pay once to get Baker out of their hair, they drew the line at a second payment. One threatened to go to the police, and one to the press. In early November Baker and a cop from the 118th had kidnapped Sarkowski and driven him to an industrial section of Queens, near where a client of his company had a factory. He'd been shot, the crime staged to look like a mugging. Several weeks later Baker and the same cop had broken into Creeley's high-rise, strung a rope around the businessman's neck and tossed him off the balcony.

  They'd stolen or destroyed the men's personal files, books and diaries--anything that might've led back to Baker and his scam. As for the police reports, there was virtually nothing in Creeley's that was incriminating but the Sarkowski file contained references to evidence that a sharp investigator might draw some troubling conclusions from. So one of the people involved in the plan had engineered its disappearance.

  Baker thought the deaths would go unnoticed and they continued with their scam--until a young policewoman showed up. Detective Third-Grade Amelia Sachs didn't believe that Benjamin Creeley had committed suicide and started looking into the death.

  There was no stopping the woman. They had no choice but to kill her. With Sachs dead or incapacitated Baker doubted that anyone else would follow up on the cases as fervently as she was. The problem, of course, was that if she were to die, Lincoln Rhyme would deduce immediately that her death was related to the St. James investigation and then nothing would stop him and Sellitto from pursuing the killers.

  So Baker needed Sachs to die for a reason unrelated to the 118th Precinct crimes.

  Baker put some feelers out to a few organized crime wise guys he knew and soon he heard from Gerald Duncan, a professional killer who could manipulate crime scenes and set up fake motives to steer suspicion completely away from the man or woman hiring him to kill.
"Motive is the one sure way to get yourself caught," Duncan had explained. "Eliminate the motive, you eliminate suspicion."

  They'd agreed on a price--brother, the man wasn't cheap--and Duncan had gone to work planning the job.

  Duncan tracked down some loser he could use to feed information about the Watchmaker to the police. Vincent Reynolds turned out to be a perfect patsy, soaking up the story Duncan fed him--about going psycho because of a dead wife and killing apathetic citizens.

  Then, the previous day, Duncan had put the plan into operation. The Watchmaker killed the first two of the victims, picked at random--some guy he'd kidnapped from West Street in the Village and murdered on the pier and the one in the alley a few hours later. Baker had made sure Sachs was assigned to the case. There were two more attempted murders by the killer--the fact they didn't succeed was irrelevant; the Watchmaker was still one spooky doer, who needed to be stopped fast.

  Then Duncan made his next moves: sending Vincent to attack Kathryn Dance, so that the police would believe that the Watchmaker was willing to kill police officers, and setting up Vincent to be captured and dime the Watchmaker out to the police.

  It was now time for the final step: The Watchmaker would kill yet another cop, Amelia Sachs, her death entirely the work of a vengeful killer, unrelated to the 118th Precinct investigation.

  Duncan now asked, "She found out you were spying on her?"

  Baker nodded. "You called that right. She's one smart bitch. But I did what you suggested."

  Duncan anticipated that she'd be suspicious of everyone except people she knew personally. He'd explained that when people suspect you, you have to give them another--harmless--reason for your behavior. You simply confess to the lesser crime, act contrite and they're satisfied; you're off the suspect list.

  At Duncan's suggestion, Baker asked some officers about Sachs. He heard rumors that she'd been involved with a crooked cop and he'd ginned up an email from someone in the Big Building and used that as a reason to be spying on her. She wasn't happy, but she didn't suspect him of anything worse.

  "Here's the plan," Duncan now explained, showing him a diagram of an office building in Midtown. "This's where the last victim works. Her name's Sarah Stanton. She's got a cubicle on the second floor. I picked the place because of the layout. It'll be perfect. I couldn't put one of the clocks there because the police announced the killer was using them--but I pulled up the time and date window on her computer."

  "Good touch."

  Duncan smiled. "I thought so." The killer's voice was soft, his words precise, but the tone was filled with the modest pleasure of an artisan showing off a finished piece of furniture or a musical instrument . . . or a watch, Baker reflected.