The Cold Moon

the surrendering type.
    Sachs took her position with a side-door entry team while Baker and Pulaski remained at the command post with Haumann.
    Through her headset she heard the ESU commander say, “Entry devices are armed. . . . Teams, report, K.”
    The A, B and C teams called in that they were ready.
    In his raspy voice, Haumann called, “On my count . . . Five, four, three, two, one.”
    Three sharp cracks resounded as the doors blew open simultaneously, setting off car alarms and shaking nearby windows. Officers poured inside.
    It turned out that their concern about fortified positions and booby traps had been unfounded. The bad news, though, was that a search of the place made it clear that the Watchmaker was either one of the luckiest men on earth or had anticipated them yet again. He wasn’t here.

    “Check this out, Ron.”
    Amelia Sachs stood in a doorway of a small, upstairs storeroom in the church.
    “Freaky,” the young officer offered.
    That worked.
    They were looking at a number of moon-faced clocks stacked against a stone wall. The faces stared out with their cryptic look, not quite a smile, not quite a leer, as if they knew exactly how much time was allotted for your life and were pleased to be counting down to the final second.
    All of them were ticking, a sound that Sachs found unnerving.
    She counted five of them. Which meant he had one with him.
    Burn her to death . . .
    Pulaski was zipping up his Tyvek crime scene suit and strapping his Glock outside the overalls. Sachs told him that she’d walk the grid up here, where Vincent had said the men had been staying. The rookie would take the ground floor of the church.
    He nodded, looking uneasily at the dark corridors, the shadows. The blow to his skull the previous year had been severe and a supervisor had wanted to sideline him, put him behind a desk. He’d struggled to come back from the head injury and simply would not let the brass take him off the street. She knew he got spooked sometimes. She could see in his eyes that he was constantly making the decision whether or not to step up to the task in front of him. Even though he always chose to do so, there were some cops, she knew, who wouldn’t want to work with him because of this. Sachs, though, would far rather work with somebody who confronted his ghosts every time he went out on the street. That was guts.
    She’d never hesitate to have him as a partner.
    Then she realized what she’d thought and qualified it: If I were going to stay on the force.
    Pulaski wiped his palms, which Sachs could see were sweaty, despite the chill, and pulled on latex gloves.
    As they divided up the evidence collection equipment she said, “Hey, heard you got jumped in the garage, running the Explorer scene.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hate it when that happens.”
    He gave a laugh that meant he understood this was her way of saying it’s okay to be nervous. He started for the door.
    “Hey, Ron.”
    He stopped.
    “By the way, Rhyme said you did a great job.”
    “He did?”
    Not in so many words. But that was Rhyme. Sachs said, “He sure did. Now, go search the shit out of that scene. I want to nail this bastard.”
    He gave a grin. “You bet.”
    Sachs said, “It’s not a Christmas present. It’s a job.”
    And nodded him downstairs.

    She found nothing that suggested who the next victim was but at least there was a significant amount of evidence in the church.
    From Vincent Reynolds’s room Sachs recovered samples of a dozen different junk foods and sodas, as well as proof of his darker appetites: condoms, duct tape and rags, presumably to use as gags. The place was a mess. It smelled of unwashed clothes.
    In Duncan’s room Sachs found horological magazines (without subscription labels), watchmaker’s and other tools (including the wire cutters that were probably used to cut the chain link fence at the first scene) and clothes. Unlike Vincent’s this room was eerily pristine and ordered. The bed was so tautly made that a drill instructor would have approved. The clothes hung perfectly in the closet (all the labels removed, she noticed), the space between the hangers exactly the same. Items on the desk were aligned at exact angles to one another. He was careful to leave next to nothing about himself personally; two museum programs, from Boston and Tampa, were hidden up under a trash container, but while they suggested he’d been to those cities, they weren’t, of course, where Vincent