The Cold Moon

the next morning, so the tour doc couldn’t do an accurate field test for cause or time of death.” Rhyme cocked his eyebrow. “So, Mr. Duncan. Who and how?”
    Duncan explained, “Just some poor guy killed in a car crash up in Westchester. His name’s James Pickering.”
    Rhyme urged, “Keep going. And remember, we’re eager for answers.”
    “I heard about the accident on a police scanner. The ambulance took the body to the morgue in the county hospital. I stole the corpse from there.”
    Rhyme said to Sachs, “Call the hospital.”
    She did. After a brief conversation she reported, “A thirty-one-year-old male ran off the Bronx River Parkway about five Monday night. Lost control on a patch of ice. Died instantly, internal injuries. Name of James Pickering. The body went to the hospital but then it disappeared. They thought it might’ve been transferred to another hospital by mistake but they couldn’t find it. The next of kin aren’t taking it too well, as you can imagine.”
    “I’m sorry about that,” Duncan said, and he did look troubled. “But I didn’t have any choice. I have all his personal effects and I’ll return them. And I’ll pay for the funeral expenses myself.”
    “The ID and things in the wallet that we found on the body?” Sachs asked.
    “Forgeries.” Duncan nodded. “Wouldn’t pass close scrutiny but I just needed people fooled for a few days.”
    “You stole the body, drove him to the alley and set him up with an iron bar on his neck to make it look liked he’d died slowly.”
    A nod.
    “Then you left the clock and note too.”
    “That’s right.”
    Lon Sellitto asked, “But the pier, at Twenty-second Street? What about the guy you killed there?”
    Rhyme glanced at Duncan. “Is your blood type AB positive?”
    Duncan laughed. “You’re good.”
    “There never was a victim on the pier, Lon. It was his own blood.” Looking over the suspect, Rhyme said, “You set the note and clock on the pier, and poured your blood around it and on the jacket—which you tossed into the river. You made the fingernail scrapings yourself. Where’d you get your blood? You collect it yourself?”
    “No, I got it at a hospital in New Jersey. I told them I wanted to stockpile it before some surgery I was planning.”
    “That’s why the anticoagulants.” Stored blood usually has a thinning agent included to prevent it from clotting.
    Duncan nodded. “I wondered if you’d check for that.”
    Rhyme asked, “And the fingernail?”
    Duncan held up his ring finger. The end of the nail was missing. He himself had torn it off. He added, “And I’m sure Vincent told you about a young man I supposedly killed near the church. I never touched him. The blood on the box cutter and on some newspaper in the trash nearby—if it’s still there—is mine.”
    “How did that happen?” Rhyme asked.
    “It was an awkward moment. Vincent thought the kid saw his knife. So I had to pretend that I killed him. Otherwise Vincent might suspect me. I followed him around the corner, then ducked into an alley, cut my own arm with the knife and smeared some of my own blood on the box cutter.” He showed a recent wound on his forearm. “You can do a DNA test.”
    “Oh, don’t worry. We will. . . .” Another thought. “And the carjacking—you never killed anybody to steal the Buick, did you?” They’d had no reports either of missing students in Chelsea or of drivers murdered during the commission of a carjacking anywhere in the city.
    Lon Sellitto was compelled to chime in again with, “What the hell’s going on?”
    “He’s not a serial killer,” Rhyme said. “He’s not any kind of killer. He set this whole thing up to make it look like he was.”
    Sellitto asked, “No wife killed in an accident?”
    “Never been married.”
    “How’d you figure it out?” Pulaski asked Rhyme.
    “Because of something Lon said.”
    “Me?”
    “For one thing, you mentioned his name, Duncan.”
    “So? We knew it.”
    “Exactly. Because Vincent Reynolds told us. But Mr. Duncan is someone who wears gloves twenty-four/seven so he won’t leave prints. He’s way too careful to give his name to a person like Vincent—unless he didn’t care if we found out who he was.
    “Then you said it was lucky he didn’t kill the recent victims and Amelia. Pissed me off at first, hearing that. But I got to thinking about it. You were right. We didn’t really save any victims at all. The florist? Joanne? I