The Cold Moon

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 might 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.”
    “I’m so pleased. Write down the fishy soil under the victim’s profile and let’s get on with it, shall we? When’s the medical examiner sending us a report?”
    Cooper said, “Could be a while. Coming up on Christmastime.”
    Sellitto sang, “’Tis the season to be killing . . .”
    Pulaski gave a frown. Rhyme explained to him, “The deadliest times of the year are hot spells and holidays. Remember, Ron: Stress doesn’t kill people; people kill people—but stress makes ’em do it.”
    “Got fibers here, brown,” Cooper announced. He glanced at the notes attached to the bag. “Back heel of the victim’s shoe and his wristwatch band.”
    “What kind of fibers?”
    Cooper examined them closely and ran the profile through the FBI’s fiber database. “Automotive, it looks like.”
    “Makes sense he’d have a car—you can’t really carry an eighty-one-pound iron bar around on the subway. So our Watchmaker parked in the front part of the alley and dragged the vic to his resting place. What can we tell about the vehicle?”
    Not much, as it turned out. The fiber was from carpet used in more than forty models of cars, trucks and SUVs. As for tread marks, the part of the alley where he’d parked was covered with salt, which had interfered with the tires’ contact with the cobblestones and prevented the transfer of tread marks.
    “A big zero in the vehicle department. Well, let’s look at his love note.”
    Cooper slipped the white sheet of paper out of a plastic envelope.
    The full Cold Moon is in the sky,
    shining on the corpse of earth,
    signifying the hour to die
    and end the journey