The Skin Collector

by Jeffery Deaver

  After he disconnected, Rhyme heard a laugh across the room.

  'That's pretty good,' Mel Cooper said, staring at a computer screen.

  'What?' Rhyme asked.

  Pulaski laughed too and turned the screen: It was the New York Post online edition. A headline over the story about the Stantons was Poison Pen.

  Referring to Billy Haven's murder weapon.

  Clever.

  As Cooper and Pulaski continued to analyze and catalog the evidence from both Pam's apartment and Billy's workshop and safe house, Rhyme motored back to the evidence table. 'Glove,' he called.

  'You want--?' Thom asked.

  'Glove! I'm about to fondle some evidence.'

  With some difficulty the aide slipped one onto Rhyme's right hand.

  'Now. That.' He pointed to the slim notebook titled The Modification, which contained pages of details on the poison plot: timing, victims to choose, locations, police procedures, quotations from Serial Cities, the true crime book about Rhyme and directions on how to 'anticipate the anticipator'. The notes were written in Billy's handsome cursive. Not surprisingly, given his artistic skill, the handwriting resembled that in an illuminated manuscript inked by scribes.

  Rhyme had skimmed the booklet earlier but now he wanted to examine it in depth to search for other conspirators.

  Thom arranged it on the arm of his wheelchair and, in a gesture at times awkward, at times elegant, but ever confident, Lincoln Rhyme turned pages and read.

  V

  REUNION

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 9

  5:00 P.M.

  CHAPTER 75

  The stocky, balding man, in a short gray overcoat, strolled along the wide sidewalk with feet pointed outward. He carried a battered briefcase. Few people on the street noted his physique or gait. He was as nondescript as could be. Businessman, accountant, ad agency executive. He was a Muggle. He was a Prufrock.

  He liked this place. Greenwich Village was less chic than, say, SoHo or TriBeCa but more of a neighborhood; Little Italy had come and gone but the Village remained a bastion for old-school Manhattanites, the quirky ones, the artistic, the descendants of European immigrants. The 'hood was populated by the families of, yes, stocky, balding husbands and stolid wives, ambitious yet modest sons, clever daughters. He blended here.

  Which was good. Considering his mission.

  The sun was down and the temperature low but at least the sky was clear and the sleet of the past few days had ended.

  He walked to the window of the Cafe Artisan and perused the stained menu. It was a real coffeehouse. Italian. This place had been steaming milk before Starbucks was even a gleam in the eye of whatever Seattlian, not Sicilian, had created the franchise.

  He gazed through the early deployment of Christmas decorations in the fudgy window and studied the scene at a table against the far wall: A redheaded woman in a burgundy sweater and tight black jeans sat across from a man in a suit. He was lean and looked like a lawyer on the verge of retirement. The woman was asking the man questions and jotting responses in a small notebook. The table, he noted, rocked a bit; the wedge under the north-by-northeast leg was not performing.

  He studied the man and the woman carefully. Had he been interested in sex, which he was not, the woman would certainly have appealed.

  Amelia Sachs, the woman he'd come here to kill, was quite beautiful.

  Since the weather was cold, it wasn't conspicuous for this man to be wearing gloves, which was fortunate. The ones covering his hands were black wool, since leather gives a print nearly as distinctive as one's own friction ridges. Traceable, in other words. But cloth? No.

  He was now noting where Amelia's purse sat - on the back of her chair. How trusting were people here. Had this been Sao Paulo or Mexico City, the purse would have been fixed to the back of her chair with a nylon tie, like the sort used to bind garbage bags and prisoners' wrists.

  The purse was latched but this didn't trouble him. Several days ago he'd bought a bag just like hers and practiced, practiced, practiced slipping something inside silently (he'd studied sleight of hand for years). Finally he'd honed the technique sufficiently so that it took all of three seconds to open the bag, slip a small object inside and refix the clasp. He'd done this a hundred times.

  He now reached into his pocket and palmed a bottle of an over-the-counter painkiller. It was identical in brand to those that Amelia Sachs preferred. (He'd learned this from her medicine cabinet.) She'd had osteoarthritis problems in the past and though she didn't seem to be too troubled recently, he'd observed, she still popped the pills from time to time.

  Ah, the trials our bodies put us through.

  The capsules in this bottle looked identical to the ones she bought. There was one difference, however: Each of his pills consisted of compressed antimony.

  Like arsenic, antimony is a basic element, a metalloid. The name is from the Greek for 'banishing solitude'. Antimony had been used in the past to darken the eyebrows and lids of promiscuous women, including Jezebel in the Bible.

  It's a ubiquitous and useful element, employed frequently even today in industry. But antimony, Sb, atomic number 51, has also been the cause of thousands of excruciatingly painful deaths throughout history. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was perhaps the most famous victim. (The question remains: intentional or not? We'd have to ask Antonio Salieri.)

  At a jab of pain from her reconstructed knee, which she'd feel sooner or later, Sachs would pop two pills.

  And instead of relief she'd be hit with a fierce headache, vomiting, diarrhea, numb extremities.

  She'd be dead in a few days - according to the media, yet another victim of Billy Haven, who'd managed to slip the tainted drugs into her purse before he and his terrorist relatives were stopped.

  Although in truth the Stantons had nothing to do with this impending murder.

  The man outside the Cafe Artisan, preparing to kill Sachs, was Charles Vespasian Hale, his birth name, though he was known by many others too. Richard Logan was one. And most recently: David Weller, the indignant attorney who'd contacted the New York Bureau of Investigation about the upstart young officer Ron Pulaski.

  The only name that he truly liked, however, was the one that described him best: the Watchmaker - echoing both his skill in crafting intricate criminal plots and his passion for clocks and watches.

  He now regarded one of these, a Ventura SPARC Sigma MGS, a digital wristwatch that cost five thousand dollars. Hale owned 117 watches and clocks, the majority of which were analog, even if powered by electronics and batteries. He had Baume & Merciers, Rolexes and TAGs. He'd had a chance to steal a six-million-dollar Patek Philippe Calibre 89, the famed commemorative pocket watch created to honor the company's 150th anniversary. It had more complications - those windows and dials giving information in addition to the present time - than any other watch ever created. The eighteen-karat masterpiece offered such data as the phase of the moon, power reserve, month, temperature, date of Easter, constellations, sunset and split second.

  And yet Hale had chosen not to steal the masterpiece.

  Why? Because the Patek was a relic. It was a new era now. The way of analog was gone. It had taken Hale some time to accept this but his arrest by Lincoln Rhyme some years ago had shown him that the world had changed.

  And Hale had risen to greet the dawn.

  The Ventura on his wrist represented this new face - so to speak - of timekeeping. Its unparalleled accuracy gave him great pleasure and comfort. He looked at the watch once again.

  And counted down.

  Four ...

  Three ...

  Two ...

  One ...

  A blaring fire alarm screamed from the back of the cafe.

  Hale pulled on a wool cap over his shaved head and stepped into the offensively hot coffee shop.

  He was unseen by everybody - including Amelia Sachs and her interviewee - as they stared toward the kitchen, where he'd left the device twenty minutes ago. The stand-alone sm
oke detector, sitting on a shelf, appeared old (it wasn't) and greasy (it was). The workers would find it and assume it had been discarded and left on the top shelf accidentally. Soon someone would pull it down, pluck the battery out and throw the thing away. Nobody would think twice about the false alarm.

  Amelia looked around - as did everyone - for smoke but there was none. When her eyes returned to the kitchen door behind which the blare persisted, Hale sat in a chair behind Amelia and on the pretense of setting his briefcase on the floor, slipped the bottle into her purse.

  A new record: two seconds.

  Then he looked around, as if debating whether he wanted to enjoy a latte in a place that was potentially on fire.

  No. He'd go someplace else. The man rose and headed out into the chill.

  The sound stopped - battery-plucking time. A glance back. Sachs returned to her coffee, to her notes. Oblivious to her impending death.

  The Watchmaker turned toward the subway entrance at West Fourth Street. As he walked along the sidewalk in the brisk air an interesting thought occurred to him. Arsenic and antimony were metalloids - substances that shared qualities of both metals and non-metals - but were rigid enough to be crafted into enduring objects.

  Would it be possible, he wondered, to make a timepiece out of these poisons?

  What a fascinating thought!

  And one that, he knew, would occupy his fertile mind for weeks and months to come.

  CHAPTER 76

  'Go with it,' Lincoln Rhyme said. The criminalist was alone in his parlor, talking through the speakerphone as he gazed absently at a website featuring some rather classy antiques and fine arts.

  '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 ag
o 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.'

  'You found the notebook?' The man sounded displeased. 'I told Billy to transcribe it into an encrypted digital file on a computer with no Internet access. Then destroy the original.' A pause. 'But I'm not surprised. That whole gang from Southern Illinois seemed rather analog. And, yes, not particularly brilliant. Like the toxins Billy decided to use? I recommended commercial chemicals but Billy had this affection for plants. He spent a lot of time by himself in the woods, I gathered, sketching them when he was young. Tough childhood when your parents are killed by the federal government and your moral compass is a neo-Nazi militia.'