He rose, walked over to his stepdaughter and grabbed her by the hair.
“Is Allerton in there?” Amelia Sachs shouted to Charlotte, nodding at the closed bedroom door.
She said nothing.
“The girl?”
Downstairs, the desk manager explained what suite Charlotte and Bud Allerton, along with their daughter, were staying in and the layout of the place. He was pretty sure they were upstairs now. The clerk recognized the picture of the Watchmaker and said that the man had been here several times but hadn’t been back today, as far as he knew.
“Where’s Allerton?” Sachs now snapped. She wanted to grab the woman and shake her.
Charlotte remained silent, glaring up at the detective.
“Bathroom clear,” one ESU officer called.
“Second bedroom clear.”
“Closet clear,” called Ron Pulaski, the slim officer looking nearly comical in the bulky flak jacket and helmet.
Only the bedroom with the closed door remained. Sachs approached it, stood to the side and motioned the other officers out of the line of fire. “You, inside the bedroom, listen! I’m a police officer. Open the door!”
No response.
Sachs tested the knob. The door was unlocked. A deep breath, gun up.
She opened the door fast and dropped into a combat shooting position. Sachs saw the girl—the same one who’d been in Charlotte’s car at the Watchmaker’s first crime scene. The girl’s hands were tied together and adhesive tape was over her mouth and nose. Her skin was blue and she thrashed on the bed, desperate for oxygen. It was a matter of seconds until she suffocated.
Ron Pulaski shouted, “Look, the window’s open.” Nodding toward the bedroom window. “Guy’s getting away.”
He started forward.
Sachs grabbed him by the flak jacket.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s not secure yet,” she snapped. She nodded to the living room. “Check the fire escape from there. See if he’s outside. And be careful. He might be targeting the window.”
The rookie ran to the front of the room and looked out fast. He called, “Nope. Might’ve gotten away.” He radioed ESU outside to check the alley behind the hotel.
Sachs debated. But she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to save the girl. She started forward.
But then stopped fast. Despite the horrifying suffocation, Charlotte’s daughter was sending her a message. She was shaking her head no, which Sachs took to mean that this was an ambush. The daughter looked to her right, indicating where Allerton, or somebody, was hiding, probably waiting to shoot.
Sachs dropped into a crouch. “Whoever’s in the bedroom, drop your weapon! Lie down, face forward in the middle of the room! Now.”
Silence.
The poor girl thrashed, eyes bulging.
“Drop the weapon now!”
Nothing.
Several ESU officers had come up. One hefted a flashbang grenade, designed to disorient attackers. But people can still shoot if they’re deafened and blinded. Sachs was worried that he’d hit the girl if he started pumping bullets indiscriminately. She shook her head to the ESU officer and aimed into the bedroom through the door. She had to get him and now; the child had no time left.
But the girl was shaking her head again. She struggled to control the convulsions and looked to Sachs’s right, then down.
Even though she was dying, she was directing Sachs’s fire.
Sachs adjusted her aim—it was much farther to the right than she would have guessed. If she’d fired at the place she’d been inclined to, a shooter would’ve known her position and possibly hit her with return fire.
The girl nodded.
Still, Sachs hesitated. Was the girl really sending her this message? The child was revealing discipline that few adults could muster, and Sachs didn’t dare misinterpret it; the risk of hurting an innocent was too great.
But then she recalled the look in the girl’s eyes the first time she’d seen her, in the car near the alley by Cedar Street. There, she’d seen hope. Here, she saw courage.
Sachs gripped her pistol firmly and fired six rounds in a circular pattern where the girl was indicating. Without waiting to see what she’d hit she leapt into the room, ESU officers behind her.
“Get the girl!” she shouted, sweeping the area to her right—the bathroom and closet—with her Glock. One ESU trooper covered the room with his MP-5 machine gun as the other officers pulled the girl to safety on the floor and ripped the tape off her face. Sachs heard the rasp of her desperate inhalation, then sobbing.
Sachs flung open the closet door and stepped aside as the man’s corpse—hit four times—tumbled out. She kicked aside his weapon and cleared the closet and the bathroom, then—not taking any chances—the shower stall, the space under the bed and the fire escape too.
A minute later the entire suite was clear. Charlotte, red-faced with fury and sobbing, was sitting handcuffed on the couch and the girl was in the hallway being given oxygen by medics; she’d suffered no serious injuries, they reported.
Charlotte would say nothing about the Watchmaker, and a preliminary search of the rooms gave no indication where he might be. Sachs found an envelope containing $250,000 cash, which suggested that he’d be coming here to collect a fee. She radioed Sellitto downstairs and had him clear the street of all emergency vehicles and set up hidden takedown teams.
Rhyme was on his way in his van and Sachs called to tell him to take the back entrance. She then went into the hallway to check on the girl.
“How you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. My face hurts.”
“They took the tape off pretty fast, I’ll bet.”
“Yeah, kinda.”
“Thanks for what you did. You saved lives. You saved my life.” The girl gazed at Sachs with a curious look then glanced down. The detective handed her the Harry Potter book she’d found in the bedroom and Sachs asked if the girl knew anything about the man calling himself Gerald Duncan.
“He was creepy. Like, way weird. He’d just look at you like you were a rock or a car or a table. Not a person.”
“You have any idea where he is?”
She shook her head. “All I know is I heard Mom say he was renting a place in Brooklyn somewhere. I don’t know where. He wouldn’t say. But he’s coming by later to pick up some money.”
Sachs pulled Pulaski aside and asked him to check all the calls to and from Charlotte’s and Bud’s mobile phones, as well as the calls from the hotel room phone.
“How ’bout the lobby phone too? The pay phone, I mean. And the ones on the street nearby.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Good idea.”
The rookie headed off on his mission. Sachs got a soda and gave it to the girl. She opened the can and drank down half of it fast. She was looking at Sachs in a strange way. Then she gave a laugh.
Sachs asked, “What?”
“You really don’t remember me, do you? I met you before.”
“Near the alley on Tuesday. Sure.”
“No, no. Like, a long time before that.”
Sachs squinted. She recalled that she had felt some sense of familiarity when she’d seen the girl in the car at the first crime scene in the alley. And she felt it even more strongly now. But she couldn’t place where she might’ve seen the girl prior to Tuesday. “I’m afraid I don’t remember.”
“You saved my life. I was a little girl.”
“A long time . . .” Then Amelia Sachs squinted, turned toward the mother and studied Charlotte more closely. “Oh, my God,” she gasped.
Chapter 40
Inside the shabby hotel room, Lincoln Rhyme shook his head in disbelief as Sachs told him what she’d just learned: that they had known Charlotte some years ago when she’d come to New York using the pseudonym Carol Ganz. She and her daughter, whose name was Pammy, had been victims in the first case Sachs and Rhyme had worked together—the very one he’d been thinking of earlier, the kidnapper obses
sed with human bones, a perp as clever and ruthless as the Watchmaker.
To pursue him, Rhyme had recruited Sachs to be his eyes and ears and legs at the crime scenes and together they’d managed to rescue both the woman and her daughter—only to learn that Carol was really Charlotte Willoughby. She was part of a right-wing militia movement, which abhorred the federal government and its involvement in world affairs. After their rescue and reunion, the woman managed to slip a bomb into the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. The explosion killed six people.
Rhyme and Sachs had taken up the case but Charlotte and the girl disappeared into the movement’s underground, probably in the Midwest or West, and eventually the trail went cold.
From time to time they would check out FBI, VICAP and local police reports with a militia or right-wing political angle but no leads to Charlotte or Pammy panned out. Sachs’s concern for the little girl never diminished, though, and sometimes, lying in bed with Rhyme at night, she’d wonder out loud how the girl was doing, if it was too late to save her. Sachs, who’d always wanted children, was horrified at the kind of life her mother was presumably forcing the girl to live—hiding out, having few friends her age, never going to a regular school—all in the name of some hateful cause.
And now Charlotte—with her new husband, Bud Allerton—had returned to the city on yet another mission of terrorism, and Rhyme and Sachs had become entwined in their lives once again.
Charlotte now glared at Rhyme, her eyes filled with both tears and hatred. “You murdered Bud! You goddamn fascists! You killed him.” The prisoner then gave a cold laugh. “But we won! How many did we kill tonight? Fifty people. Seventy-five? And how many senior people in the Pentagon?”
Sachs leaned close to her face. “Did you know there’d be children in that conference room? Husbands and wives of the soldiers? Their parents? Grandparents? Did you know that?”
“Of course we knew it,” Charlotte said.
“They were just sacrifices too, is that right?”
“For the greater good,” Charlotte replied.
Which was maybe a slogan she and her group recited at the beginning of their rallies, or whatever meetings they had.
Rhyme caught Sachs’s eye. He said, “Maybe we should show her the carnage.”
Sachs nodded and clicked on the TV.
An anchorwoman was on the screen. “ . . . one minor injury. A bomb squad officer who was driving a remote-control robot in an attempt to defuse the bombs was wounded slightly by shrapnel. He’s been treated and released. Property damage was estimated at five hundred thousand dollars. Despite initial reports, neither al-Qaeda nor any other Islamic terrorist group has been implicated in the bombing. According to a New York Police Department spokeswoman, a domestic terrorist organization was responsible. Again, if you’re just joining us, two bombs exploded around noon today in the office of Housing and Urban Development in lower Manhattan but there were no fatalities and only one minor injury. An undersecretary of state and the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were among the intended victims. . . .”
Sachs muted the volume and turned a smug gaze toward Charlotte.
“No,” the woman gasped. “Oh, no . . . What—?”
Rhyme said, “Obviously—we figured it out before the bomb went off and evacuated the room.”
Charlotte was appalled. “But . . . impossible. No . . . The airports were shut down, the trains—”
“Oh, that,” Rhyme said dismissively. “We just needed to buy some time. At first, sure, I thought he was stealing the Delphic Mechanism but then I decided it was just a feint. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t done something to the NIST clock. So while we were figuring out what he was really up to, we called the mayor and had him order flights and public transportation in the area suspended.”
You know what’s going to happen if we push that button. . . .
She glanced into the bedroom where her husband had died such a pointless death. Then the ideologue within her kicked in and she said in a flat voice, “You’ll never beat us. You may win a battle or two. But we’ll take our country back. We’ll—”
“Yo, hold that rhetoric, wouldja?” The speaker was a tall, lanky black man, stepping into the room. This was FBI Special Agent Fred Dellray. When he’d heard about the domestic terrorist angle he’d handed off the accounting fraud case that he’d been assisting on (“Was a yawner anyway”) and announced that that he was going to be the federal liaison on the HUD bombing.
Dellray was wearing a powder blue suit and a shocking green shirt underneath a brown herringbone overcoat, circa 1975; the agent’s taste in couture was as brash as his manner. He looked Charlotte over. “Well, well, well, lookit what we caught ou’selves.” The woman gazed back defiantly. He laughed. “A shame you’re going to jail for . . . well, forever, and you didn’t even do whatcha’ll had your heart set on. How’s it feel t’be swimmin’ laps in the loser pool?”
Dellray’s approach to interviewing suspects was a lot different from Kathryn Dance’s; Rhyme suspected she wouldn’t approve.
Charlotte had been arrested by Sachs on state charges and it was now Dellray’s turn to arrest her for the federal crimes—both for this incident and for the UN bombing years ago, her involvement in a federal courthouse shooting in San Francisco and some miscellaneous charges.
Charlotte said she understood her rights and then started another lecture.
Dellray wagged a finger at her. “Gimme a minute, sweetheart.” The lean man turned to Rhyme. “So how’d you figure this one out, Lincoln? We heard X, we heard Y, all ’bout some boys in blue taking money they shouldn’ta been doin’ and then some bizarre fella leavin’ clocks as callin’ cards—then next thing we know the airports’re closed and there’s a priority-one security alert at HUD innerupting my nap.”
Rhyme detailed the frantic process of kinesic and forensic work that led them to figure out the Watchmaker’s real plan. Kathryn Dance had suggested that he was lying about his mission in New York. So they’d looked into the evidence again. Some of it pointed to the possible theft of a rare artifact in the Metropolitan Museum.
But the more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Rhyme figured Duncan had made up the story about the undelivered package to the Met just to get them focused on the museum. Somebody as careful as the Watchmaker wouldn’t leave the trail he did. He turned in Vincent, knowing the rapist would give up the church, where he’d left other museum brochures referring to the Mechanism. He mentioned it to Hallerstein and to Vincent as well. No, he was up to something else. But what? Kathryn Dance reviewed the interview tape again, several times, and decided that he might have been lying when he said he picked the supposed victims simply because their locations meant easy getaways.
“Which meant,” Rhyme told Dellray, “that he picked them for some other purpose. So, did they have anything in common?”
Rhyme had remembered something Dance learned about the first crime scene. Ari Cobb had said that the SUV was originally parked in the back of the alley but then the Watchmaker returned to the front to leave the body. “Why? One reason was that he needed to put the victim in a particular place. What was it near? The back door to the Housing and Urban Development building.”
Rhyme had then gotten the client list from the flooring company where he’d planted the fake fire extinguisher bomb and learned that they’d provided carpeting and tile for the HUD offices.
“I sent our rookie downtown to look around. He found a building across Cedar Street that was being renovated. The crews had tarred the roof a week ago, just before the cold spell. Flakes of tar matched those found on our perp’s shoes. The roof was a perfect place to check out HUD.”
This also explained why he’d poured sand on the ground at the crime scene and swept it up—to make absolutely certain they didn’t find trace that’d help anyone identify him later when he came back to assemble and arm the bombs.
Rhyme also found that the other victims had a connection to the building.
Lucy Richter was being recognized there today, and she’d had the specially issued passes and IDs to get into all parts of the building. She also had a classified memo on security and evacuation procedures.
As for Joanne Harper, it turned out that she’d done the flower arrangements for the ceremony—a good way to smuggle something into the building.
“A bomb, I guessed. We got the mayor involved and he called the press, had them hold off on the story that we were evacuating HUD so the perps wouldn’t rabbit. But the device blew before the bomb squad could disarm it.” Rhyme shook his head. “Just hate it when good evidence blows up. You know how hard it is to lift prints off pieces of metal that’ve been flying through the air at thirty thousand feet a second?”
“How’dja get Miss Congeniality here?” Dellray asked, nodding at Charlotte.
Rhyme said dismissively, “That was easy. She was careless. If Duncan was fake, then the woman helping him at the first scene in the alley had to be fake too. Our rookie got all the tag numbers of cars in the vicinity of the alley off Cedar. The car the supposed sister was driving was an Avis, rented to Charlotte Allerton. We checked all the hotels in the city until we found her.”
Dellray shook his head. “An’ what about yo’ perp? Mr. Clockmaker?”
“It’s ‘Watchmaker,’” the criminalist grumbled. “And that’s a different story.” He explained that Charlotte’s daughter, Pam, had heard that he had a place in Brooklyn but she didn’t know where it was. “No other leads.”
Dellray bent down. “Where in Brooklyn? Need to know. And now.”
Charlotte replied defiantly, “You’re pathetic! All of you! You’re just lackeys for the bureaucracy in Washington. You’re selling out the heart of our country and—”
Dellray leaned forward, right into her face. He clicked his tongue. “Uh-uh. No politics, no philosophy . . . All we want’re answers to the questions. We all together on that?”
“Fuck you” was Charlotte’s response.
Dellray blew air through his cheeks like a trumpet player. He moaned, “I am no match for this intellect.”
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 129
