The Cold Moon

transcends morality.
    He now looked down at what sat on the seat next to him, the gold Breguet pocket watch. In his gloved hands, he picked it up, wound it slowly—always better to underwind than over-—and carefully slipped it between the sheets of bubble wrap in a large white envelope.
    Hale sealed the self-adhesive flap and started the car.

    There were no clear leads.
    Rhyme, Sellitto, Cooper and Pulaski were sitting in the lab on Central Park West, going over the few things found in the perp’s Brooklyn safe house.
    Amelia Sachs was not present at the moment. She hadn’t announced where she was going. But she didn’t need to. She’d mentioned to Thom that she’d be nearby, if they needed her—at a meeting on Fifty-seventh and Sixth. Rhyme had checked the phone directory. That was the location of the Argyle Security headquarters.
    Rhyme simply couldn’t think about that, and he was concentrating on how to continue the search for the Watchmaker, whoever he might be.
    Working backward, Rhyme constructed a rough scenario of the events. The ceremony had been announced on October 15, so Carol and Bud had contacted the Watchmaker sometime around then. He’d come to New York around November 1, the date of the lease on the Brooklyn safe house. A few weeks later, Amelia Sachs had taken over the Creeley case and soon after, Baker and Wallace decided to have her killed.
    “Then they hooked up with the Watchmaker. What’d he tell us, when we thought he was Duncan? About their meeting?”
    Sellitto said, “Just that somebody at the club put them together—the club where Baker put the touch on his friend.”
    “But he was lying. There was no club. . . .” Rhyme shook his head. “Somebody put them together, somebody who knows the Watchmaker—probably somebody in the area. If we can find them, there could be some solid leads. Is Baker talking?”
    “Nope, not a word. Nobody is.”
    The rookie was shaking his head. “That’s going to be a tough one. I mean, how many OC crews are there in the metro area? Take forever to track down the right one. Not like they’re going to be volunteering to help us out.”
    The criminalist frowned. “What’re you talking about? What’s an organized crime posse got to do with anything?”
    “Well, I just assumed somebody with an OC connection was the one who’d put them together.”
    “Why?”
    “Baker wants to have a cop killed, right? But he can’t do it in a way that’ll make him look suspicious so he has to hire somebody. He goes to some mob connection he has. The mob’s not going to clip a cop so he puts Baker in touch with somebody who might: the Watchmaker.”
    When nobody said anything, Pulaski blushed and looked down. “I don’t know. Just a thought.”
    “And a fucking good one, kid,” Sellitto said.
    “Really?”
    Rhyme nodded. “Not bad . . . Let’s call the OC task force downtown and see if their snitches can tell us anything. Call Dellray too . . . Now, let’s get back to the evidence.”
    They’d located some friction ridges in the safe house in Brooklyn but none of the fingerprints came back positive from the Bureau’s IAFIS system and none matched prints from prior scenes. The lease for the househad been executed under yet another fake name and the man had given a phony prior address. It had been a cash transaction. An exhaustive search of Internet activity in the neighborhood revealed that the man had apparently logged on occasionally through several nearby wireless networks. There were no records of emails, only Web browsing. The site he’d visited most often was a bookstore that sold continuing-education course texts for certain medical specialties.
    Sellitto said, “Shit, maybe somebody else’s hired him.”
    You bet, Rhyme thought, nodding. “He’ll be targeting another victim—or victims. Probably coming up with his plan right now. Think of the damage he could do pretending to be a doctor.”
    And I let him get away.
    An examination of the trace evidence Sachs had collected revealed little more than shearling fibers and a few bits of a green vegetative material containing evaporated seawater—which didn’t, it turned out, match the seaweed and ocean water found around Robert Wallace’s boat on Long Island.
    The deputy inspector at the Brooklyn precinct called to report that further canvassing of the neighborhood had been useless. A half dozen people remembered seeing the Watchmaker but nobody knew anything about