The Cold Moon

begun at birth.
    — THE WATCHMAKER
    “Is it?” Rhyme asked.
    “Is it what?” Pulaski asked, as if he’d missed something.
    “The full moon. Obviously. Today.”
    Pulaski flipped through Rhyme’s New York Times. “Yep. Full.”
    “What’s he mean by the Cold Moon in caps?” Dennis Baker asked.
    Cooper did some searching on the Internet. “Okay, it’s a month in the lunar calendar. . . . We use the solar calendar, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, based on the sun. The lunar calendar marks time from new moon to new moon. The names of the months describe the cycle of our lives from birth to death. They’re named according to milestones in the year: the Strawberry Moon in the spring, the Harvest Moon and Hunter Moon in the fall. The Cold Moon is in December, the month of hibernation and death.”
    As Rhyme had noted earlier, killers referencing the moon or astrological themes tended to be serial perps. There was some literature suggesting that people were actually motivated by the moon to commit crimes but Rhyme believed that was simply the influence of suggestion—like the increase in alien abduction reports just after Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.
    “Run the name Watchmaker through the databases, along with ‘Cold Moon.’ Oh, and the other lunar months too.”
    After ten minutes of searching through the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the National Crime Information Center, as well as state databases, they had no hits.
    Rhyme asked Cooper to find out where the poem itself had come from but he found nothing even close in dozens of poetry websites. The tech also called a professor of literature at New York University, a man who helped them on occasion. He’d never heard of it. And the poem was either too obscure to turn up in a search engine or more likely it was the Watchmaker’s own creation.
    Cooper said, “As for the note itself, it’s generic paper from a computer printer. Hewlett-Packard LaserJet ink, nothing distinctive.”
    Rhyme shook his head, frustrated at the absence of leads. If the Watchmaker was in fact a cyclical killer he could be somewhere right now, checking out—or even murdering—his next victim.
    A moment later Amelia Sachs arrived, pulled off her jacket. She was introduced to Dennis Baker, who told her he was glad she was on the case; her reputation preceded her, the wedding-ring-free cop added, smiling a bit of flirt her way. Sachs responded with a brisk, professional handshake. All in a day’s work for a woman on the force.
    Rhyme briefed her on what they’d learned from the evidence so far.
    “Not much,” she muttered. “He’s good.”
    “What’s the story on the suspect?” Baker asked.
    Sachs nodded toward the door. “He’ll be here in a minute. He took off when we tried to get him but I don’t think he’s our boy. I checked him out. Married, been a broker with the same firm for five years, no warrants. I don’t even think he could carry it.” She nodded at the iron span.
    There was a knock on the door.
    Behind her, two uniformed officers brought in an unhappy-looking man in handcuffs. Ari Cobb was in his midthirties, good-looking in a dime-a-dozen businessman way. The slightly built man was wearing a nice coat, probably cashmere, though it was stained with what looked like street sludge, presumably from his arrest.
    “What’s the story?” Sellitto asked him gruffly.
    “As I told her ”—a cool nod toward Sachs—“I was just walking to the subway on Cedar Street last night and I dropped some money. That’s it right there.” He nodded toward the bills and money clip. “This morning I realized what happened and came back to look for it. I saw the police there. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to get involved. I’m a broker. I have clients who’re real sensitive about publicity. It could hurt my business.” It was only then that the man seemed to realize that Rhyme was in a wheelchair. He blinked once, got over it, and resumed his indignant visage once more.
    A search of his clothing found none of the fine-grained sand, blood or other trace to link him to the killings. Like Sachs, Rhyme doubted this was the Watchmaker, but given the gravity of the crimes he wasn’t going to be careless. “Print him,” Rhyme ordered.
    Cooper did so and found that the friction ridges on the money clip were his. A check of DMV revealed that Cobb didn’t own a car, and a call to