Jeffery Deaver - The Cold Moon

He gave the tactical officer the few details they had. Haumann's reaction, which Rhyme didn't hear, could nonetheless be inferred from Sellitto's expression. "You don't need to tell me, Bo."

Sellitto left a message with the district attorney himself and then called the Big Building to inform the brass about the problem.

"I want more on him," Rhyme said to Cooper. "We were too fucking complacent. We didn't ask enough questions." He glanced at Dance. "Kathryn, I really hate to ask this… "

She was putting away her cell phone. "I've already canceled my flight."

"I'm sorry. It's not really your case."

"It's been my case since I interviewed Cobb on Tuesday," Dance said, her green eyes cold, her lips drawn.

Cooper was scrolling through the information they'd learned about Gerald Duncan. He made a list of phone numbers and started calling. After several conversations he said, "Listen to this. He's not Duncan. The Missouri State Police sent a car out to the address on the license. It's owned by a Gerald Duncan, yeah, but not our Gerald Duncan. The guy who lived there was transferred to Anchorage for his job for six months. The house's empty and up for rent. Here's his picture."

The image was a driver's license shot of a man very different from the one they'd arrested yesterday.

Rhyme nodded. "Brilliant. He checked the paper for rental listings, found one that'd been on the market for a while and figured it wasn't going to rent for the next few weeks because of Christmas. Same as the church. And he forged the driver's license we saw. Passport too. We've been underestimating this guy from the beginning."

Cooper, staring at his computer, called out, "The owner-the real Duncan-had some credit card problems. Identity theft."

Lincoln Rhyme felt a chill in the center of his being, a place where in theory he could feel nothing. He had a sense that an unseen disaster was unfolding quickly.

Dance was staring at the still image of Duncan's face as intently as Rhyme stared at his evidence charts. She mused, "What's he really up to?"

A question they couldn't begin to answer.

Riding the subway, Charles Vespasian Hale, the man who'd been masquerading as Gerald Duncan, the Watchmaker, checked his wristwatch (his Breguet pocket watch, which he'd grown fond of, wouldn't fit the role he was about to assume).

Everything was right on schedule. He was taking the train from the Brooklyn neighborhood where he had his primary safe house, feeling anticipation and an edginess too, but nonetheless he was as close to harmony as he'd ever been in his life.

Very little of what he'd told Vincent Reynolds about his personal past had been true, of course. It couldn't be. He planned a long career at his profession and he knew that the mealy rapist would spill everything to the cops at the first threat.

Born in Chicago, Hale was the son of a high school Latin teacher (hence the middle name, after a noble Roman emperor) and a woman who was the manager of the petites department at a suburban Sears store. The couple never talked much, didn't do much. Every night after a quiet supper his father would gravitate to his books, his mother to her sewing machine. For familial activity they might settle in two separate chairs in front of the small television set and watch bad sitcoms and predictable cop dramas, which allowed them a unique medium of communication-by commenting on the shows, they expressed to each other the desires and resentments that they'd never have the courage to say directly.

Quiet…

The boy had been a loner for much of his life. He was a surprise child and his parents treated him with formal manners and apathy and a quizzical air, as if he were a species of plant whose watering and fertilizing schedule they were unsure of. The hours of boredom and solitude grew to be an open sore, and Charles felt a desperation to occupy his time, for fear the excruciating stillness in the household would strangle him.

He spent hours and hours outside-hiking and climbing trees. For some reason it was better to be alone when you were outside. There was always something to distract you, something you might find over the next hill, on the next branch up in the maple tree. He was in the field biology club at school. He went on Outward Bound expeditions and was always the first to cross the rope bridge, dive off the cliff, rappel down a mountainside.

If he was condemned to be inside, Charles developed a habit of filling his time by putting things in order. Arranging office supplies and books and toys could endlessly fill the painful hours. He wasn't lonely when he did that, he didn't ache with boredom, he wasn't afraid of the silence.

Did you know, Vincent, that the word "meticulous" comes from the Latin meticulosus, meaning fearful?

When things weren't precise and ordered, he'd grow frantic, even when the glitch was something as silly as a misaligned train track or a bent bicycle spoke. Anything not running smoothly would set him on edge the way a fingernail screech on a blackboard caused other people to cringe.

Like his parents' marriage, for instance. After the divorce, he never spoke to either of them again. Life should be tidy and perfect. When it wasn't, you should be free to eliminate the disorderly elements altogether. He didn't pray (no empirical evidence that you could put your life in order or achieve your goals via divine communication) but if he had, Charles would have prayed for them to die.

Hale went into the army for two years, where he flourished in the atmosphere of order. He went to Officer Candidate School and caught the attention of his professors, who, after he was commissioned, tapped him to teach military history and tactical and strategic planning, at which he excelled.

After he was discharged he spent a year hiking and mountain climbing in Europe then he returned to America and went into business as an investment banker and venture capitalist, studying law at night.

He worked as an attorney for a time and was brilliant at structuring business deals. He made very good money but there was an underlying loneliness about his life. He shunned relationships because they required improvisation and were full of illogical behavior. More and more his passion for planning and order took on the role of lover. And like anyone who substitutes an obsession for a real relationship, Hale found himself looking for more intense ways to satisfy himself.

He found a perfect solution six years ago. He killed his first man.

Living in San Diego, Hale learned that a business associate had been badly injured. Some drunk driver had plowed into the man's car. The accident shattered the businessman's hip and snapped both legs-one of which had to be amputated. The driver expressed no remorse whatsoever and continued to deny he'd done anything wrong, even blaming the accident on the victim himself. The punk was convicted but, a first-time offender, he got off with a light sentence. Then he began harassing Hale's associate for money.

Hale decided that enough was enough. He came up with an elaborate plan to terrify the kid into stopping. But as he looked over the scheme he realized it made him feel uncomfortable, edgy. There was something clumsy about it. The plan wasn't as precisely ordered as he wanted. Finally he realized what the trouble was. His scheme left the victim scared but alive. If the kid died, then it would work perfectly and there'd be nothing to trace back to Hale or his injured associate.

But could he actually kill a human being? The idea sounded preposterous.

Yes or no?

On a rainy October night he made his decision.

The murder went perfectly and the police never suspected the man's death was anything but an unfortunate home electrocution accident.

Hale was prepared to feel remorse. But there was none. Instead he was ecstatic. The plan had been so perfectly executed, the fact that he'd killed someone was irrelevant.