The Cold Moon

eat?”
    Duncan squinted slightly. He did this a lot, considered questions seriously and then recited the answers he’d planned out. But this one flummoxed him. He gave a faint laugh. “You know, I don’t eat that much.”
    “But you must have some favorite.”
    “I’ve never thought about it. Why’re you asking?”
    “Oh, just, I was thinking I could make us dinner sometime. I can cook a lot of different things. Pasta—you know, spaghetti. Do you like spaghetti? I make it with meatballs. I can make a cream sauce. They call that Alfredo. Or with tomato.”
    The man said, “Well, I guess tomato. That’s what I’d order in a restaurant.”
    “Then I’ll make that for you. Maybe if my sister’s in town, I’ll have a dinner party. Well, not a party. Just the three of us.”
    “That’s . . .” Duncan shook his head. He seemed moved. “Nobody’s made me dinner since . . . Well, nobody’s made me dinner for a long time.”
    “Next month, maybe.”
    “Next month could work. What’s your sister like?”
    “She’s a couple years younger than me. Works in a bank. She’s skinny too. I don’t mean you’re skinny. Just, you know, in good shape.”
    “She married, have kids?”
    “Oh, no. She’s really busy at her job. She’s good at it.”
    Duncan nodded. “Next month. Sure, I’ll come back to town. We could have dinner. I couldn’t help you. I don’t cook.”
    “Oh, I’d do the cooking. I like to cook. I watch the Food Channel.”
    “But I could bring some dessert. Something already made. I know you like your sweets.”
    “That’d be great,” said an excited Vincent. He looked around the cold, dark streets. “Where’re we going?”
    Duncan was silent for a moment. He eased the car to a stoplight, the front wheels precisely on the dirty, white stop line. He said, “Let me tell you a story.”
    Vincent looked over at his friend.
    “In seventeen fourteen the British Parliament offered twenty thousand pounds to anyone who could invent a portable clock accurate enough to be used at sea.”
    “That was a lot of money then, right?”
    “Huge amount of money. They needed a clock for their ships becauseevery year thousands of sailors died from navigational errors. See, to plot a course you need both longitude and latitude. You can determine latitude astronomically. But longitude needs accurate time. A British clockmaker named John Harrison decided to go for the prize. He started working on the project in seventeen thirty-five and finally created a small clock that you could use on a ship and that lost only a few seconds over the course of an entire transatlantic voyage. When did he finish? In seventeen sixty-one.”
    “Took him that long?”
    “He had to cope with politics, competition, conniving businessmen and members of Parliament and, of course, the mechanical difficulties—almost impossibilities—of creating the clock. But he never stopped. Twenty-six years.”
    The light changed to green and Duncan accelerated slowly. “In answer to your question, we’re going to see about the next girl on our list. We had a setback. But nothing’s going to stop us. It’s not a big deal—”
    “In the great scheme of things.”
    A brief smile crossed the killer’s face.

    “First of all, they have security cameras in the garage?” Rhyme asked.
    Sellitto’s laugh meant “in your dreams.”
    He, Pulaski and Baker were back in Rhyme’s town house, going over what the rookie had collected in the garage. The homeless man who’d attacked Pulaski was in Bellevue. He had no connection to the case and was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds.
    “Wrong time, wrong place,” Pulaski had muttered.
    “You or him?” Rhyme’d responded. He now asked, “Security cameras at the impound where he boosted the SUV?”
    Another laugh.
    A sigh. “Let’s see what Ron found. First, the bullets?”
    Cooper brought the box to Rhyme and opened it for him.
    A .32-caliber ACP bullet is an uncommon round. The semiautomatic pistol bullet has more range than the smaller .22 but not much stopping power, like the more powerful .38 or 9-millimeter. Thirty-twos have traditionally been called ladies’ guns. The market is somewhat limited but is still quite large. Finding a compatible .32 in the possession of a suspect could be circumstantial evidence that he was the Watchmaker but Coopercouldn’t just ring up local gun stores and get a short list of who’d been buying these rounds