The Cold Moon

now?”
    “Naw, should be here in a while. You want I should have her call you?”
    “Give me her number.”
    The woman jotted it down. Sachs leaned forward and nodded toward the picture of Creeley and said, “Did he meet anybody in particular here that you can remember?”
    “All I know is it was in there. Where they usually hang.” She nodded at the back room.
    A millionaire businessman and that crowd? Had two of them been the ones who’d broken into the Creeleys’ Westchester house and had the marshmallow roast in his fireplace?
    Sachs looked into the mirror, studying the men’s table, littered with beer bottles, ashtrays and gnawed chicken wing bones. These guys had to be in a crew. Maybe young capos in an organized crime outfit. There were a lot of Sopranos franchises around the city. They were usually petty criminals but often it was the smaller crews who were more dangerous than thetraditional Mafia, which avoided hurting civilians and steered clear of crack and meth and the seamier side of the underworld. She tried to get her head around a Benjamin Creeley–gang connection. It was tough.
    “You see them with pot, coke— any drugs?”
    Sonja shook her head. “Nope.”
    Sachs leaned forward and whispered to Sonja, “You know what crew’re they connected with?”
    “Crew?”
    “A gang. Who’s their boss, who they report to? Anything?”
    Sonja didn’t speak for a moment. She glanced at Sachs to see if she was serious and then gave a laugh. “They’re not in a gang. I thought you knew. They’re cops.”

    At last the clocks—the Watchmaker’s calling cards—arrived from the bomb squad with a clean bill of health.
    “Oh, you mean they didn’t find any really tiny weapons of mass destruction inside?” Rhyme asked caustically. He was irritated that they’d been out of his possession—more risk of contamination—and at the delay in their arrival.
    Pulaski signed the chain-of-custody cards and the patrolman who’d delivered the clocks left.
    “Let’s see what we’ve got.” Rhyme moved his wheelchair to the examination table as Cooper unpacked the clocks from plastic bags.
    They were identical, the only difference being the blood crusted on the base of the clock that had been left on the pier. They seemed old—they weren’t electric; you wound them by hand. But the components were modern. The works inside were in a sealed box, which had been opened by the bomb squad, but both clocks were still running and showed the correct time. The housing was wood, painted black, and the face was antiqued white metal. The numbers were Roman numerals, and the hour and minute hands, also black, ended in sharp arrows. There was no second hand but the clocks clicked loudly every second.
    The most unusual feature was a large window in the top half of the face that displayed a disk on which were painted the phases of the moon. Centered in the window now was the full moon, depicted with an eerie human face, staring outward with ominous eyes and thin lips.
    The full Cold Moon is in the sky . . .
    Cooper went over the clocks with his usual precision and reported that there were no friction ridge prints and only minimal trace evidence, all of which matched samples that Sachs had collected around both scenes, meaning that none of it had been picked up in the Watchmaker’s car or residence.
    “Who makes them?”
    “Arnold Products. Framingham, Massachusetts.” Cooper did a Google search and read from the website. “They sell clocks, leather goods, office decorations, gifts. Upscale. The stuff’s not cheap. A dozen different models of clocks. This is the Victorian. Genuine brass mechanism, oak, modeled after a British clock sold in the eighteen hundreds. Costs fifty-four dollars wholesale. They don’t sell to the public. Have to go through the dealer.”
    “Serial numbers?”
    “Only on the mechanisms. Not the clocks themselves.”
    “Okay,” Rhyme ordered, “make the call.”
    “Me?” Pulaski asked, blinking.
    “Yup. You.”
    “I’m supposed to—”
    “Call the manufacturer and give them the serial numbers of the mechanism.”
    Pulaski nodded. “Then see if they can tell us which store it was shipped to.”
    “One hundred percent,” Rhyme said.
    The rookie took out his phone, got the number from Cooper and dialed.
    Of course, the killer might not have been the purchaser. He could’ve stolen them from a store. He could’ve stolen them from a residence. He could’ve bought them used