The Cold Moon

Rettig, officers based at the department’s main crime scene facility in Queens. Nearby was their Crime Scene Unit’s rapid response vehicle—a large van filled with the essential crime scene investigation equipment.
    She slipped rubber bands around her feet to distinguish her prints from the perp’s. (Another of Rhyme’s ideas. “But why bother? I’m in the Tyvek, Rhyme, not street shoes,” Sachs had once pointed out. He’d looked at her wearily. “Oh, excuse me. I guess a perp would never think to buy a Tyvek suit. How much do they cost, Sachs? Forty-nine ninety-five?”)
    Her first thoughts were that the killings were either organized-crime hits or the work of a psychopath; OC clips were often staged like these to send messages to rival gangs. A sociopath, on the other hand, might set up such an elaborate killing out of delusion or for gratification, which might besadistic—if it had a sexual motivation—or simply cruel for its own sake, apart from lust. In her years on the street she’d learned that inflicting pain was a source of power in itself and could even be addictive.
    Ron Pulaski, in uniform and leather jacket, approached. The blond NYPD patrolman, slim and young, had been helping out Sachs on the Creeley case and was on call to assist on cases that Rhyme was handling. After a bad run-in with a perp had put him in the hospital for a long stay, he’d been offered medical disability retirement.
    The rookie had told Sachs that he’d sat down with Jenny, his young wife, and discussed the issue. Should he go back on duty or not? Pulaski’s twin brother, also a cop, provided input too. And in the end he chose to undergo therapy and return to the force. Sachs and Rhyme had been impressed with his youthful zeal and pulled some strings to get him assigned to them whenever possible. He later confessed to Sachs (never to Rhyme, of course) that the criminalist’s refusal to be sidelined by his quadriplegia and his aggressive regimen of daily therapy were Pulaski’s main inspiration to get back on active duty.
    Pulaski wasn’t in Tyvek, so he stopped at the yellow tape marking the scene. “Jesus,” he muttered as he stared at the grotesque sight.
    Pulaski told her that Sellitto and other officers were checking with security guards and office managers in the buildings around the alley to learn if anyone had seen or heard the attack or knew Theodore Adams. He added, “The bomb squad’s still checking on the clocks and’ll deliver ’em to Rhyme’s later. I’m going to get all the license plates of the cars parked around here. Detective Sellitto told me to.”
    Her back to Pulaski, Sachs nodded. But she really wasn’t paying much attention to this information; it wasn’t useful to her at the moment. She was about to search the scene and was trying to clear her thoughts of distractions. Despite the fact that by definition crime scene work involves inanimate objects, there’s a curious intimacy to the job; to be effective, CS cops have to mentally and emotionally become the perps. The whole horrific scenario plays itself out in their imaginations: what the killer was thinking, where he stood when he lifted the gun or club or knife, how he adjusted his stance, whether he lingered to watch the victim’s death throes or fled immediately, what caught his attention at the scene, what tempted and repulsed him, what was his escape route. This wasn’t psychological profiling—that occasionally helpful, media-chic portrait-painting of suspects;this was the art of mining the huge clutter at crime scenes for those few important nuggets that could lead to a suspect’s door.
    Sachs was now doing this, becoming someone else—the killer who’d engineered this terrible end to another human being.
    Eyes scanning the scene, up and down, sideways: the cobblestones, the walls, the body, the iron weight . . .
    I’m him. . . . I’m him. . . . What do I have in mind? Why did I want to kill these vics? Why in these ways? Why on the pier, why here?
    But the cause of death was so unusual, the killer’s mind so removed from hers, that she had no answers to these questions, not yet. She pulled on her headset. “Rhyme, you there?”
    “And where else would I be?” he asked, sounding amused. “I’ve been waiting. Where are you? The second scene?”
    “Yes.”
    “What are you seeing, Sachs?”
    I’m him. . . .
    “Alleyway, Rhyme,” she said into the stalk mike. “It’s a cul-de-sac for