Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

It turned out that their concern about fortified positions and booby traps had been unfounded. The bad news, though, was that a search of the place made it clear that the Watchmaker was either one of the luckiest men on earth or had anticipated them yet again. He wasn't here.

"Check this out, Ron."

Amelia Sachs stood in a doorway of a small, upstairs storeroom in the church.

"Freaky," the young officer offered.

That worked.

They were looking at a number of moon-faced clocks stacked against a stone wall. The faces stared out with their cryptic look, not quite a smile, not quite a leer, as if they knew exactly how much time was allotted for your life and were pleased to be counting down to the final second.

All of them were ticking, a sound that Sachs found unnerving.

She counted five of them. Which meant he had one with him.

Burn her to death…

Pulaski was zipping up his Tyvek crime scene suit and strapping his Glock outside the overalls. Sachs told him that she'd walk the grid up here, where Vincent had said the men had been staying. The rookie would take the ground floor of the church.

He nodded, looking uneasily at the dark corridors, the shadows. The blow to his skull the previous year had been severe and a supervisor had wanted to sideline him, put him behind a desk. He'd struggled to come back from the head injury and simply would not let the brass take him off the street. She knew he got spooked sometimes. She could see in his eyes that he was constantly making the decision whether or not to step up to the task in front of him. Even though he always chose to do so, there were some cops, she knew, who wouldn't want to work with him because of this. Sachs, though, would far rather work with somebody who confronted his ghosts every time he went out on the street. That was guts.

She'd never hesitate to have him as a partner.

Then she realized what she'd thought and qualified it: If I were going to stay on the force.

Pulaski wiped his palms, which Sachs could see were sweaty, despite the chill, and pulled on latex gloves.

As they divided up the evidence collection equipment she said, "Hey, heard you got jumped in the garage, running the Explorer scene."

"Yeah."

"Hate it when that happens."

He gave a laugh that meant he understood this was her way of saying it's okay to be nervous. He started for the door.

"Hey, Ron."

He stopped.

"By the way, Rhyme said you did a great job."

"He did?"

Not in so many words. But that was Rhyme. Sachs said, "He sure did. Now, go search the shit out of that scene. I want to nail this bastard."

He gave a grin. "You bet."

Sachs said, "It's not a Christmas present. It's a job."

And nodded him downstairs.

She found nothing that suggested who the next victim was but at least there was a significant amount of evidence in the church.

From Vincent Reynolds's room Sachs recovered samples of a dozen different junk foods and sodas, as well as proof of his darker appetites: condoms, duct tape and rags, presumably to use as gags. The place was a mess. It smelled of unwashed clothes.

In Duncan's room Sachs found horological magazines (without subscription labels), watchmaker's and other tools (including the wire cutters that were probably used to cut the chain link fence at the first scene) and clothes. Unlike Vincent's this room was eerily pristine and ordered. The bed was so tautly made that a drill instructor would have approved. The clothes hung perfectly in the closet (all the labels removed, she noticed), the space between the hangers exactly the same. Items on the desk were aligned at exact angles to one another. He was careful to leave next to nothing about himself personally; two museum programs, from Boston and Tampa, were hidden up under a trash container, but while they suggested he'd been to those cities, they weren't, of course, where Vincent said he lived, the Midwest. There was also a pet hair roller.

It's like he's wearing a Tyvek suit of his own…

She also found some clues that were possibly from the prior crime scenes-a roll of duct tape that would probably match the tape at the alley and that, presumably, was used to gag the victim on the pier. She found an old broom with dirt, fine sand and bits of salt on it. She guessed it was what he'd used to sweep the scene around where Teddy Adams had been killed.

There was also evidence that she hoped might reveal his present location or that related in some way to the next victims. In a small plastic Tupperware container were some coins, three Bic pens, receipts from a parking garage downtown and a drugstore on the Upper West Side, and a book of matches (missing three of them) from a restaurant on the Upper East Side. There were no fingerprints on any of these items. She also found a pair of shoes whose treads were dotted with gaudy green paint, and an empty gallon jug that had contained wood alcohol.

There were no fingerprints but she did find plenty of cotton fibers the same color of those in the Explorer. She then found a plastic bag containing a dozen pairs of the gloves themselves, no store labels or receipts. The bag had no prints on it.

In his search downstairs Ron Pulaski didn't find much but he made a curious discovery: a coating of white powder in a toilet. Tests would tell for certain but he believed it was from a fire extinguisher since he also found a trash bag near the back door, inside of which was the empty carton an extinguisher had been sold in. The rookie had looked over the box carefully but there were no store labels to indicate where it had been purchased.

Why the extinguisher had been discharged was unclear. There was no evidence that anything in the bathroom had been burning.

She had a call patched through to Vincent Reynolds, in the lockup, and he told her that Duncan had recently bought a fire extinguisher. He didn't know why it had been discharged.

After chain-of-custody cards were filled out, Sachs and Pulaski joined Baker, Haumann and the others just inside the front door of the church, where they'd been waiting while the two officers walked the grid. Sachs called Rhyme on the radio and told him and Sellitto what they'd found.

As she recited the evidence, she could hear Rhyme instructing Thom to include it on the charts.

"Boston and Tampa?" the criminalist asked, referring to the museum programs. "Vincent might be wrong. Hold on." He had Cooper check with Vital Statistics and DMV for any Gerald Duncans in those cities but, while there were residents with that name, their ages didn't match the perp's.

The criminalist was silent for a moment. Then he said, "The fire extinguisher…I'm betting he made an incendiary device out of it. He used alcohol as the accelerant. There was some on the clock at Lucy Richter's apartment too. That's how he's going to burn the next victim to death. And what's the one thing about fire extinguishers?"

"Give up," Sachs replied.

"They're invisible. One could be sitting right next to somebody and they'd never think twice about it."

Baker said, "I say we take whatever clues we've found here and divide them up, hope one of them leads us to the next victim. We've got receipts, those matches, the shoes."

Rhyme's voice crackled over the radio, "Whatever you do, make it fast. According to Vincent, if he's not at the church, he's on his way to the next victim. He might already be there by now."

THE WATCHMAKER

CRIME SCENE ONE

Location:

Repair pier in Hudson River, 22nd Street.

Victim:

Identity unknown.

Male.

Possibly middle-aged or older, and may have coronary condition (presence of anticoagulants in blood).