The Cold Moon

also occasionally plant drugs on businessmen themselves.
    Rather than just taking the money, though, they’d arrange for the victims to lose it in sham business deals, like with Frank Sarkowski, or in fake poker games in Vegas or Atlantic City—the approach they took with Ben Creeley. This would provide the marks with a reasonable explanation as to why they were suddenly two or three hundred thousand dollars poorer.
    But then Dennis Baker made a mistake. He got lazy. It wasn’t easy finding the right marks for the scam and he decided to go back to some of the earlier targets for a second installment of extortion money.
    Some paid the second time. But two of them—Sarkowski and Creeley—were businessmen with pretty tough hides, and while they were willing to pay once to get Baker out of their hair, they drew the line at a secondpayment. One threatened to go to the police, and one to the press. In early November Baker and a cop from the 118th had kidnapped Sarkowski and driven him to an industrial section of Queens, near where a client of his company had a factory. He’d been shot, the crime staged to look like a mugging. Several weeks later Baker and the same cop had broken into Creeley’s high-rise, strung a rope around the businessman’s neck and tossed him off the balcony.
    They’d stolen or destroyed the men’s personal files, books and diaries—anything that might’ve led back to Baker and his scam. As for the police reports, there was virtually nothing in Creeley’s that was incriminating but the Sarkowski file contained references to evidence that a sharp investigator might draw some troubling conclusions from. So one of the people involved in the plan had engineered its disappearance.
    Baker thought the deaths would go unnoticed and they continued with their scam—until a young policewoman showed up. Detective Third-Grade Amelia Sachs didn’t believe that Benjamin Creeley had committed suicide and started looking into the death.
    There was no stopping the woman. They had no choice but to kill her. With Sachs dead or incapacitated Baker doubted that anyone else would follow up on the cases as fervently as she was. The problem, of course, was that if she were to die, Lincoln Rhyme would deduce immediately that her death was related to the St. James investigation and then nothing would stop him and Sellitto from pursuing the killers.
    So Baker needed Sachs to die for a reason unrelated to the 118th Precinct crimes.
    Baker put some feelers out to a few organized crime wise guys he knew and soon he heard from Gerald Duncan, a professional killer who could manipulate crime scenes and set up fake motives to steer suspicion completely away from the man or woman hiring him to kill. “Motive is the one sure way to get yourself caught,” Duncan had explained. “Eliminate the motive, you eliminate suspicion.”
    They’d agreed on a price—brother, the man wasn’t cheap—and Duncan had gone to work planning the job.
    Duncan tracked down some loser he could use to feed information about the Watchmaker to the police. Vincent Reynolds turned out to be a perfect patsy, soaking up the story Duncan fed him—about going psycho because of a dead wife and killing apathetic citizens.
    Then, the previous day, Duncan had put the plan into operation. TheWatchmaker killed the first two of the victims, picked at random—some guy he’d kidnapped from West Street in the Village and murdered on the pier and the one in the alley a few hours later. Baker had made sure Sachs was assigned to the case. There were two more attempted murders by the killer—the fact they didn’t succeed was irrelevant; the Watchmaker was still one spooky doer, who needed to be stopped fast.
    Then Duncan made his next moves: sending Vincent to attack Kathryn Dance, so that the police would believe that the Watchmaker was willing to kill police officers, and setting up Vincent to be captured and dime the Watchmaker out to the police.
    It was now time for the final step: The Watchmaker would kill yet another cop, Amelia Sachs, her death entirely the work of a vengeful killer, unrelated to the 118th Precinct investigation.
    Duncan now asked, “She found out you were spying on her?”
    Baker nodded. “You called that right. She’s one smart bitch. But I did what you suggested.”
    Duncan anticipated that she’d be suspicious of everyone except people she knew personally. He’d explained that when people suspect you, you have to give them