‘Well,’ said the voice, belonging to a captain at the NYPD, presently in police headquarters. The Big Building.
‘Well, what?’ Rhyme snapped. He’d been a captain too; anyway, he never took rank very seriously. Competence and intelligence counted first.
‘It’s a little unorthodox.’
The fuck does that mean? Rhyme thought. On the other hand, he himself had also been a civil servant in a civil servant world and he knew that it was sometimes necessary to play a game or two. He appreciated the man’s reluctance.
But he couldn’t condone it.
‘I’m aware of that, Captain. But we need to run with the story. There are lives at risk.’
The captain’s first name was unusual. Dagfield.
Who would name somebody that?
‘Well,’ Dag said defensively. ‘It has to be edited and vetted–’
‘I wrote it. It doesn’t need to be edited. And you can vet. Vet it now. We don’t have much time.’
‘You’re not asking me to vet. You’re asking me to run what you’ve sent me, Lincoln.’
‘You’ve looked it over, you’ve read it. That’s vetting. We need to go with it, Dag. Time’s critical. Very critical.’
A sigh. ‘I’ll have to talk to somebody first.’
Rhyme considered tactical options. There weren’t many.
‘Here’s the situation, Dag. I can’t be fired. I’m an independent consultant that defense attorneys around the country want to hire as much as the NYPD does. Probably more and they pay better. If you don’t run that press release exactly, and I mean exactly, the way I sent it to you, I’ll hang out my shingle for the defense and stop working for the NYPD altogether. And when the commissioner hears that I’ll be working against the department, your job’ll be in the private sector and I mean fast food.’
Not really satisfied with that line. Could have been better. But there it was.
‘You’re threatening me?’
Which hardly required a response.
Ten seconds later: ‘Fuck.’
The slamming phone made a simple, sweet click in Rhyme’s ear.
He eased his wheelchair to the window, to look out over Central Park. He liked the view more in the winter than the summer. Some might have thought this was because people were enjoying summer sports in the fine months, running, tossing Frisbees, pitching softballs – activities forever denied Rhyme. But the reality was that he just liked the view.
Even before the accident Rhyme had never enjoyed that kind of pointless frolic. He thought back to the case involving the Bone Collector, years ago. Then, just after his accident, he’d given up on life, believing he’d never exist in a normal world again. But that case had taught him a truth that had endured: He didn’t want that normal life. Never had, disabled or not. His world was the world of deduction, of logic, of mental riposte and parry, of combat with thought – not with guns or karate blows.
And so looking out at the stark, leaf stripped vista of Central Park, he felt wholly at home, comforted by the lesson that the Bone Collector had taught him so many years ago.
Rhyme turned back to the computer screen and waded once more into the world of fine arts.
He checked the news and discovered that, yes, Dag had come through. The unvetted, unedited, unchallenged press release had been picked up everywhere.
Rhyme glanced at the clock face on his computer and returned to browsing.
A half hour later his phone rang and he noted the caller ID report: Unknown.
Two rings. Three. He tapped the answer button with his right index finger.
He said, ‘Hello there.’
‘Lincoln,’ said the man he knew as Richard Logan, the Watchmaker. ‘Do you have a moment to talk?’
‘For you, always.’
CHAPTER 77
‘I’ve seen the news,’ the Watchmaker said to Rhyme. ‘You released my picture. Or the artist’s renderings of me as Dave Weller. Not a bad job. An Identi Kit, I assume. Both fat and slim, hair, no hair, mustache, clean shaven. Aren’t you so impressed with the confluence of art and computer science, Lincoln?’
The reference to the press release Rhyme had pressured the NYPD brass into going with. ‘It was accurate then?’ the criminalist asked. ‘My officer wasn’t sure when he worked with the artist if he had the cheek structure right.’
‘That young man. Pulaski.’ The Watchmaker seemed amused. ‘He observes two dimensionally and draws conclusions from the preliminary. You and I both know the risks of that. He’s a better forensic cop than undercover, I’d imagine. Less improvisation in crime scene work. I deduce a brain injury?’
‘Yes. Exactly.’
The Watchmaker continued, ‘He’s lucky that when I set him up, it was with the Bureau of Investigation, not some of my real associates. He’d be dead otherwise.’
‘Possibly,’ Rhyme said slowly. ‘His instincts are good. And he’s quite the shot apparently. Anyway, he’s all I could spare under the circumstances. I was busy trying to stop a psychotic tattoo artist.’
Now that he knew the Watchmaker had escaped from prison and was alive, Rhyme thought back to the man’s appearance from several years ago, when he’d last seen him face to face. Yes, there were similarities, he now reflected, between the lawyer Pulaski had described to the Identi Kit operator and the Watchmaker from several years ago – attributes that Rhyme could now recall, though some key factors were different. He now said, ‘You had non surgical work done. Like packing silicone or cotton into your cheeks. And the hair – thinning shears and a razor – a good job duplicating male pattern baldness. Makeup too. Most movie studios get it wrong. The weight – your size – that was a body suit, right? Nobody could gain fifty pounds in four days. The tan would be from a bottle.’
‘That’s right.’ A chuckle. ‘Maybe. Or a tanning salon. There are about four hundred in the metropolitan area. You might want to start canvassing. If you’re lucky, by Christmas you could find the one I went to.’
Rhyme said, ‘But you’ve changed – modded, if you will – again, right? Since we’ve run the picture.’
‘Of course. Now, Lincoln, I’m curious why you released my information to the media. You ran the risk that I’d go to ground. Which I have.’
‘The chance that somebody might’ve spotted you. They’d call it in. We were ready to move fast.’
‘All points bulletin.’
The press announcement Rhyme had just coerced the brass into releasing reported that a man known as Richard Logan, aka the Watchmaker, aka Dave Weller, had escaped several days ago from federal prison in Westchester. The Identi Kit pictures were given, along with the hint that he might be feigning a Southern accent.
‘But no takers,’ the Watchmaker pointed out. ‘No one dimed me out. Since I’m still … wherever I am.’
‘Oh, and by the way, I’m not bothering to trace this call. You’re using cutouts and forward proxies.’
This wasn’t a question.
‘And we’ve raided Weller’s law firm.’
A chuckle. ‘The answering service, post office box and website?’
‘Clever,’ Rhyme said. ‘The wrongful death specialty seemed a bit cruel.’
‘Pure coincidence. First thing I thought of.’
Rhyme asked, ‘Oh, a point of curiosity? You’re not really Richard Logan, are you? That’s one of your pseudonyms.’
‘Yes.’
The man didn’t offer his real name and Rhyme didn’t bother to push.
‘So how did you figure out that I’d escaped?’
‘Like so much about what I do – what we both do – there was a postulate.’
‘A hunch,’ the Watchmaker said.
Rhyme thought of Sachs, who often chided his derision of the word, and he smiled. ‘If you will.’
‘Which you then verified empirically. And what gave rise to that postulate?’
‘In Billy Haven’s backpack we found a notebook, The Modification , a how to guide for getting botulinum toxin into the New York City water supply. Elegant in the extreme. It was like an engineering schematic, every step outlined, timed down to the minute. I doubted the Stantons and Billy would’ve been able to come up with something that elaborate: a serial killer to misdirect from a plot to target the water supply with bombs, which was in turn meant to cover up the real plot to poison the water. And you learned how to weaponize the toxin. Resistant to chlorine. Quite a coup, that was.’