Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

"You stole the body, drove him to the alley and set him up with an iron bar on his neck to make it look liked he'd died slowly."

A nod.

"Then you left the clock and note too."

"That's right."

Lon Sellitto asked, "But the pier, at Twenty-second Street? What about the guy you killed there?"

Rhyme glanced at Duncan. "Is your blood type AB positive?"

Duncan laughed. "You're good."

"There never was a victim on the pier, Lon. It was his own blood." Looking over the suspect, Rhyme said, "You set the note and clock on the pier, and poured your blood around it and on the jacket-which you tossed into the river. You made the fingernail scrapings yourself. Where'd you get your blood? You collect it yourself?"

"No, I got it at a hospital in New Jersey. I told them I wanted to stockpile it before some surgery I was planning."

"That's why the anticoagulants." Stored blood usually has a thinning agent included to prevent it from clotting.

Duncan nodded. "I wondered if you'd check for that."

Rhyme asked, "And the fingernail?"

Duncan held up his ring finger. The end of the nail was missing. He himself had torn it off. He added, "And I'm sure Vincent told you about a young man I supposedly killed near the church. I never touched him. The blood on the box cutter and on some newspaper in the trash nearby-if it's still there-is mine."

"How did that happen?" Rhyme asked.

"It was an awkward moment. Vincent thought the kid saw his knife. So I had to pretend that I killed him. Otherwise Vincent might suspect me. I followed him around the corner, then ducked into an alley, cut my own arm with the knife and smeared some of my own blood on the box cutter." He showed a recent wound on his forearm. "You can do a DNA test."

"Oh, don't worry. We will… " Another thought. "And the carjacking-you never killed anybody to steal the Buick, did you?" They'd had no reports either of missing students in Chelsea or of drivers murdered during the commission of a carjacking anywhere in the city.

Lon Sellitto was compelled to chime in again with, "What the hell's going on?"

"He's not a serial killer," Rhyme said. "He's not any kind of killer. He set this whole thing up to make it look like he was."

Sellitto asked, "No wife killed in an accident?"

"Never been married."

"How'd you figure it out?" Pulaski asked Rhyme.

"Because of something Lon said."

"Me?"

"For one thing, you mentioned his name, Duncan."

"So? We knew it."

"Exactly. Because Vincent Reynolds told us. But Mr. Duncan is someone who wears gloves twenty-four/seven so he won't leave prints. He's way too careful to give his name to a person like Vincent-unless he didn't care if we found out who he was.

"Then you said it was lucky he didn't kill the recent victims and Amelia. Pissed me off at first, hearing that. But I got to thinking about it. You were right. We didn't really save any victims at all. The florist? Joanne? I figured out he was targeting her, sure, but she's the one who called nine-one-one after she heard a noise in the workshop-a noise he probably made intentionally."

"That's right," Duncan agreed. "And I left a spool of wire on the floor to warn her that somebody'd broken in."

Sachs said, "Lucy, the soldier in Greenwich Village-we got an anonymous phone call from a witness about a break-in. But it wasn't a witness at all, right? It was you making that call."

"I told Vincent that somebody in the street called nine-one-one. But, no, I called from a pay phone and reported myself."

Rhyme nodded at the office building behind them. "And here-the fire extinguisher was a dud, I assume."

"Harmless. I poured a little alcohol on the outside but it's filled with water."

Sellitto was on the phone, calling the Sixth Precinct, the NYPD Bomb Squad headquarters. A moment later he hung up. "Tap water."

"Just like the gun you gave Baker, the one he was going to use to kill Sachs here." Rhyme glanced at the dismantled.32. "I just checked it out-the firing pin's been broken off."

Duncan said to Sachs, "I plugged the barrel too. You can check. And I knew he couldn't use his own gun to shoot you because that would tie him to your death."

"Okay," Sellitto barked. "That's it. Somebody, talk to me."

Rhyme shrugged. "All I can do is get us to this station, Lon. It's up to Mr. Duncan to complete the train ride. I suspect he's planned to enlighten us all along. Which is why he was enjoying the show from the grandstand across the street."

Duncan nodded and said to Rhyme, "You hit it on the head, Detective Rhyme."

"I'm decommissioned," the criminalist corrected.

"The whole point of what I've done is what just happened-and, yes, I was enjoying it very much: watching that son of a bitch Dennis Baker get arrested and dragged off to jail."

"Keep going."

Duncan's face grew still. "A year ago I came here on business-I own a company that does lease financing of industrial equipment. I was working with a friend-my best friend. He saved my life when we were in the army twenty years ago. We were working all day drafting documents then went back to our hotels to clean up before dinner. But he never showed. I found out he'd been shot to death. The police said it was a mugging. But something didn't seem right. I mean, how often do muggers shoot their victims point-blank in the forehead-twice?"

"Oh, shooting fatalities during the commission of robberies are extremely rare, according to recent…" Pulaski's voice trailed off, under Rhyme's cool glance.

Duncan continued. "Now, the last time I saw him my friend told me something odd. He said that the night before, he'd been in a club downtown. When he came out, two policemen pulled him aside and said they'd seen him buying drugs. Which was bullshit. He didn't do drugs. I know that for a fact. He knew he was being shaken down and demanded to see a police supervisor. He was going to call somebody at headquarters and complain. But just then some people came out of the club and the police let him go. The next day he was shot and killed.

"Too much of a coincidence. I kept going back to the club and asking questions. Cost me five thousand bucks but finally I found somebody willing to tell me that Dennis Baker and some of his fellow cops ran shakedown scams in the city."

Duncan explained about a scheme of planting drugs on businessmen or their children and then dropping the charges for huge extortion payments.

"The missing drugs from the One One Eight," Pulaski said.

Sachs nodded. "Not enough to sell but enough to plant as evidence, sure."

Duncan added, "They were based out of some bar in lower Manhattan, I heard."

"The St. James?"

"That's it. They'd all meet there after their shifts at the station house were over."

Rhyme asked, "Your friend. The one who was killed. What was his name?"

Duncan gave them the name and Sellitto called Homicide. It was true. The man had been shot during an apparent mugging and no perp was ever collared.

"I used my connection I'd made at the club-paid him a lot of money-to get introduced to some people who knew Baker. I pretended I was a professional killer and offered my services. I didn't hear anything for a while. I thought he'd gotten busted or gone straight and I'd never hear from him. It was frustrating. But finally Baker called me and we met. It turns out he'd been checking me out to see if I was trustworthy. Apparently he was satisfied. He wouldn't give me too many details but said he had a business arrangement that was in jeopardy. He and another cop had taken care of some 'problems' they'd been having."

Sachs asked, "Creeley or Sarkowski? Did he mention them?"

"He didn't give me any names but it was obvious that he was talking about killing people."

Sachs shook her head, eyes troubled. "I was upset enough thinking that some of the cops from the One One Eight were taking kickbacks from mobsters. And all along they were the actual killers."