Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

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.

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.

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.