The Cold Moon

by Jeffery Deaver

  "On the ground, face down."

  "Come on. I--"

  "Now!" she snapped.

  He glanced at her gun and then complied. Winded from the run, her joints in pain, she dropped a knee into the middle of his back to cuff him. He winced. Sachs didn't care. She was just in one of those moods.

  "They got a suspect. At the scene."

  Lincoln Rhyme and the man who delivered this interesting news were sitting in his lab. Dennis Baker, fortyish, compact and handsome, was a supervisory lieutenant in Major Cases--Sellitto's division--and had been ordered by City Hall to make sure the Watchmaker was stopped as fast as possible. He'd been one of those who'd "insisted" that Sellitto get Rhyme and Sachs on the case.

  Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. Suspect? Criminals often did return to the scene of the crime, for various reasons, and Rhyme wondered if Sachs had actually collared the killer.

  Baker turned back to his cell phone, listening and nodding. The lieutenant--who bore an uncanny resemblance to the actor George Clooney--had that focused, humorless quality that makes for an excellent police administrator but a tedious drinking buddy.

  "He's a good guy to have on your side," Sellitto had said of Baker just before the man arrived from One Police Plaza.

  "Fine, but is he going to meddle?" Rhyme had asked the rumpled detective.

  "Not so's you'd notice."

  "Meaning?"

  "He wants a big win under his belt and he thinks you can deliver it. He'll give you all the slack--and support--you need."

  Which was good, because they were down some manpower. There was another NYPD detective who often worked with them, Roland Bell, a transplant from the South. The detective had an easy-going manner, very different from Rhyme's, though an equally methodical nature. Bell was on vacation with his two sons down in North Carolina, visiting his girlfriend, a local sheriff in the Tarheel State.

  They also often worked with an FBI agent, renowned for his antiterrorism and undercover work, Fred Dellray. Murders of this sort aren't usually federal crimes but Dellray often helped Sellitto and Rhyme on homicides and would make the resources of the Bureau available without the typical red tape. But the Feds had their hands full with several massive Enron-style corporate fraud investigations that were just getting under way. Dellray was stuck on one of these.

  Hence, Baker's presence--not to mention his influence at the Big Building--was a godsend. Sellitto now disconnected his cell phone call and explained that Sachs was interviewing the suspect at the moment, though he wasn't being very cooperative.

  Sellitto was sitting next to Mel Cooper, the slightly built, ballroom-dancing forensic technician that Rhyme insisted on using. Cooper suffered for his brilliance as a crime scene lab man; Rhyme called him at all hours to run the technical side of his cases. He'd hesitated a bit when Rhyme called him at the lab in Queens that morning, explaining that he'd planned to take his girlfriend and his mother to Florida for the weekend.

  Rhyme's response was, "All the more incentive to get here as soon as possible, wouldn't you say?"

  "I'll be there in a half hour." He was now at an examination table in the lab, awaiting the evidence. With a latex-gloved hand, he fed some biscuits to Jackson; the dog was curled up at his feet.

  "If there's any canine hair contamination," Rhyme grumbled, "I won't be happy."

  "He's pretty cute," Cooper said, swapping gloves.

  The criminalist grunted. "Cute" was not a word that figured in the Lincoln Rhyme dictionary.

  Sellitto's phone rang again and he took the call, then disconnected. "The vic at the pier--Coast Guard and our divers haven't found any bodies yet. Still checking missing persons reports."

  Just then Crime Scene arrived and Thom helped an officer cart in the evidence from the scenes Sachs had just run.

  About time . . .

  Baker and Cooper lugged in a heavy, plastic-wrapped metal bar.

  The murder weapon in the alleyway killing.

  The CS officer handed over chain-of-custody cards, which Cooper signed. The man said good-bye but Rhyme didn't acknowledge him. The criminalist was looking at the evidence. This was the moment that he lived for. After the spinal cord accident, his passion--really an addiction--for the sport of going one-on-one with perps continued undiminished, and the evidence from crimes was the field on which this game was played.

  He felt eager anticipation.

  And guilt too.

  Because he wouldn't be filled with this exhilaration if not for someone else's loss: the victim on the pier and Theodore Adams, their families and friends. Oh, he felt sympathy for their sorrow, sure. But he was able to wrap up the sense of tragedy and put it somewhere. Some people called him cold, insensitive, and he supposed he was. But those who excel in a field do so because a number of disparate traits happen to come together within them. And Rhyme's sharp mind and relentless drive and impatience happened to coincide with the emotional distance that is a necessary attribute of the best criminalists.

  He was squinting, gazing at the boxes, when Ron Pulaski arrived. Rhyme had first met him when the young man had been on the force only a short time. Although that was a year earlier--and Pulaski was a family man with two children--Rhyme couldn't stop thinking of him as the "rookie." Some nicknames you just can't shake.

  Rhyme announced, "I know Amelia has somebody in custody but in case it isn't the perp, I don't want to lose time." He turned to Pulaski. "Give me the lay of the land. First scene, the pier."

  "All right," he began uneasily. "The pier is located approximately at Twenty-second Street in the Hudson River. It extends into the river fifty-two feet at a height of eighteen feet above the surface of the water. The murder--"

  "So they've recovered the body?"

  "I don't think so."

  "Then you meant apparent murder?"

  "Right. Yessir. The apparent murder occurred at the far end of the pier, that is, the west end, sometime between six last night and six this morning. The dock was closed then."

  There was very little evidence: just the fingernail, probably a man's, the blood, which Mel Cooper tested and found to be human and type AB positive, which meant that both A and B antigens--proteins--were present in the victim's plasma, and neither anti-A nor anti-B antigens were. In addition a separate protein, Rh, was present. The combination of AB antigens and Rh positive made the victim's the third-rarest blood type, accounting for about 3.5 percent of the population. Further tests confirmed that the victim was a male.

  In addition, they concluded that he was probably older and had coronary problems since he was taking an anticoagulant--a blood thinner. There were no traces of other drugs or indications of infection or disease in the blood.

  There were no fingerprints, trace or footprints at the scene and no tire tread marks nearby, other than those left by employees' vehicles.

  Sachs had collected a piece of the chain link and Cooper examined the cut edges, learning that the perp had used what seemed to be standard wire cutters to get through the fence. The team could match these marks with those made by a tool if they found one but there was no way to trace the cutter back to its source by the impressions alone.

  Rhyme looked over the pictures of the scene, particularly the pattern the blood had made as it flowed onto the pier. He guessed that the victim had been hanging over the edge of the deck, at chest level, his fingers desperately wedged into the space between the planks. The fingernail marks showed that eventually he'd lost his grip. Rhyme wondered how long the vic had been able to hang on.

  He nodded slowly. "Tell me about the next scene."

  Pulaski replied, "All right, that homicide occurred in an alley off Cedar Street, near Broadway. This alley featured a dead end. It was fifteen feet wide and one hundred and four feet long and was surfaced with cobblestones."

  The body, Rhyme recalled, was fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley.

  "What's the time of death?"

  "At least eight hours before he was found, the ME tour doc said. T
he body was frozen solid so it'll take a while to determine with any certainty." The young officer suffered from the habit of copspeak.

  "Amelia told me about the service and fire doors in the alley. Did anybody ask what time they were locked for the night?"

  "Three of the buildings're commercial. Two of them lock their service doors at eight thirty and one at ten. The other's a government administration building. That door's locked at six. There's a late-night garbage pickup at ten."

  "Body discovered when?"

  "Around seven A.M."

  "Okay, the vic in the alley was dead at least eight hours, last door was locked at ten and garbage picked up then. So the killing took place between, say, ten fifteen and eleven P.M. Parking situation?"

  "I got the license plates of every car in a two-block radius." Pulaski was holding up a Moby-Dick of a notebook.

  "What the hell's that?"

  "Oh, I wrote down notes about all the cars. Thought it might be helpful. You know, where they were parked, anything suspicious about them."

  "Waste of time. We just needed the tag numbers for names and addresses," Rhyme explained. "To cross-check DMV with NCIC and the other databases. We don't care who needed bodywork or had bald tires or a crack pipe in the backseat. . . . Well, did you?"

  "What?"

  "Run the tags?"

  "Not yet."

  Cooper went online but found no warrants on any of the registered owners of the cars. At Rhyme's instruction he also checked to see if any parking tickets were issued in that area around the time of the killing. There were none.

  "Mel, run the vic's name. Warrants? Anything else about him?"

  There were no state warrants on Theodore Adams, and Pulaski recounted what his sister had said about him--that he apparently had no enemies or personal life issues that might result in his murder.

  "Why these vics, though?" Rhyme asked. "Are they random? . . . I know Dellray's busy but this's important. Give him a call and have him run Adams's name. See if the feds have anything on him."

  Sellitto made a call to the federal building and got through to Dellray--who was in a bad mood because of the "fucking quagmire" of a financial fraud case he'd been assigned. Still, he managed to look through the federal databases and active case files. But the results were negative on Theodore Adams.

  "Okay," Rhyme announced, "until we find something else let's assume they're random victims of a crazy man." He squinted at the pictures. "Where the hell're the clocks?"

  A call to the bomb squad revealed that they'd been cleared of any bio or toxic threat and were on their way to Rhyme's right now.

  The cash in the faux gold money clip appeared fresh out of an ATM machine. The bills were clean but Cooper found some good prints on the clip. Unfortunately, when he ran them through IAFIS, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, there were no hits. The few prints on the cash in Adams's pocket came back negative as well, and the serial numbers revealed the bills hadn't been flagged by the Treasury Department for possible involvement in money laundering or other crimes.

  "The sand?" Rhyme asked, referring to the obscuring agent.

  "Generic," Cooper called, not looking up from the microscope. "Sort used in playgrounds rather than construction. I'll check it for other trace."

  And no sand at the pier, Rhyme recalled Sachs telling him. Was that because, as she'd speculated, the perp was planning to return to the alley? Or simply because the substance wasn't needed on the pier, where the brutal wind from the Hudson would sweep the scene clean?

  "What about the span?" Rhyme asked.

  "The what?"

  "The bar the vic's neck was crushed with. It's a needle-eye span." Rhyme had made a study of construction materials in the city, since a popular way to dispose of bodies was to dump them at job sites. Cooper and Sellitto weighed the length of metal--it was eighty-one pounds--and got it onto the examining table. The span was about six feet long, an inch wide and three inches high. A hole was drilled in each end. "They're used mostly in shipbuilding, heavy equipment, cranes, antennas and bridges."

  "That's gotta be the heaviest murder weapon I've ever seen," Cooper said.

  "Heavier than a Suburban?" asked Lincoln Rhyme, the man for whom precision was everything. He was referring to the case of the wife who'd run over her philandering husband with a very large SUV in the middle of Third Avenue several months earlier.

  "Oh, that . . . his cheatin' heart," Cooper sang in a squeaky tenor. Then he tested for fingerprints and found none. He filed off some shavings from the rod. "Probably iron. I see evidence of oxidation." A chemical test revealed that this was the case.

  "No identifying markings?"

  "Nope."

  Rhyme grimaced. "That's a problem. There've got to be fifty sources in the metro area. . . . Wait. Amelia said there was some construction nearby--"

  "Oh," Pulaski said, "she had me check there and they weren't using any metal bars like that. I forgot to mention it."

  "You forgot," Rhyme muttered. "Well, I know the city's doing some major work on the Queensboro Bridge. Let's give 'em a try." Rhyme said to Pulaski, "Call the work crew at the Queensboro and find out if spans're being used there and, if so, are any missing."

  The rookie nodded and pulled out his mobile phone.

  Cooper looked over the analysis of the sand. "Okay, got something here. Thallium sulfate."

  "What's that?" Sellitto asked.

  "Rodent poison," said Rhyme. "It's banned in this country but you sometimes find it in immigrant communities or in buildings where immigrants work. How concentrated?"

  "Very . . . and there's none in the control soil and residue that Amelia collected. Which means it's probably from someplace the perp's been."

  "Maybe he's planning to kill somebody with it," Pulaski suggested, as he waited on hold.

  Rhyme shook his head. "Not likely. It's not easy to administer and you need a high dosage for humans. But it could lead us to him. Find out if there've been any recent confiscations or environmental agency complaints in the city."

  Cooper made the calls.

  "Let's look at the duct tape," Rhyme instructed.

  The tech examined the rectangles of shiny gray tape, which had been used to bind the victim's hands and feet and gag him. He announced that the tape was generic, sold in thousands of home improvement, drug and grocery stores around the country. Testing the adhesive on the tape revealed very little trace, just a few grains of snow-removal salt, which matched samples Sachs had taken from the general area, and the sand that the Watchmaker had spread to help him clean up trace.

  Disappointed that the duct tape wasn't more helpful, Rhyme turned to the photos Sachs had shot of Adams's body. Then he wheeled closer to the examination table and peered at the screen. "Look at the edges of the tape."

  "Interesting," Cooper said, glancing from the digital photos to the tape itself.

  What had struck the men as odd was that the pieces of tape had been cut with extreme precision and applied very carefully. Usually it was just torn off the roll, sometimes ripped by the attacker's teeth (which often left DNA-laden saliva), and wrapped sloppily around the victim's hands, ankles and mouth. But the strips used by the Watchmaker were perfectly cut with a sharp object. The lengths were identical.

  Ron Pulaski hung up, then announced, "They don't use needle-eye spans on the work they're doing now on the bridge."

  Well, Rhyme hadn't expected easy answers.

  "And the rope he was holding on to?"

  Cooper looked it over, examined some databases. He shook his head. "Generic."

  Rhyme nodded at several whiteboards that stood empty in the corner of the lab. "Start our charts. You, Ron, you have good handwriting?"

  "It's good enough."

  "That's all we need. Write."

  When running cases Rhyme kept charts of all the evidence they found. They were like crystal balls to him; he'd stare at the words and photos and diagrams to try to understand who the perp m
ight be, where he was hiding, where he was going to strike next. Gazing at his evidence boards was the closest Lincoln Rhyme ever came to meditating.

  "We'll use his name as the heading, since he was so courteous to let us know what he wants to be called."

  As Pulaski wrote what Rhyme dictated, Cooper picked up a tube containing a tiny sample of what seemed to be soil. He looked it over through the microscope, starting on 4x power (the number-one rule with optical scopes is to start low; if you go right to higher magnifications you'll end up looking at artistically interesting but forensically useless abstract images).

  "Looks like your basic soil. I'll see what else's in it." He prepared a sample for the chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a large instrument that separates and identifies substances in trace evidence.

  When the results were ready Cooper looked over the computer screen and announced, "Okay, we've got some oils, nitrogen, urea, chloride . . . and protein. Let me run the profile." A moment later his computer filled with additional information. "Fish protein."

  "So maybe the perp works in a fish restaurant," Pulaski said enthusiastically. "Or a fish stand in Chinatown. Or, wait, maybe the fish counter at a grocery store."

  Rhyme asked, "Ron, you ever hear a public speaker say, 'Before I begin, I'd like to say something'?"

  "Uhm. I think."

  "Which is a little odd, because if he's talking he's already begun, right?"

  Pulaski lifted an eyebrow.

  "My point is that in analyzing the evidence you do something before you start."

  "Which is what?"

  "Find out where the evidence came from. Now, where did Sachs collect the fish protein dirt?"

  He looked at the tag. "Oh."

  "Where is 'oh'?"

  "Inside the victim's jacket."

  "So whom does the evidence tell us something about?"

  "The victim, not the perp."

  "Exactly! Is it helpful to know that he has it in his jacket, not on? Who knows? Maybe it will be. But the important point is to not blindly send the troops to every fishmonger in the city too fast. You comfortable with that theory, Ron?"

  "Real comfortable."