The Cold Moon (2 page)

"Letter?"

He explained his theory that it was more patriotic to go about business as usual. "I'm going to give 'em hell. The
Times,
I think."

"Why don't you?" asked the aide, whose profession was known as "caregiver" (though Thom said that, being in the employ of Lincoln Rhyme, his job description was really "saint").

"I'm going to," Rhyme said adamantly.

"Good for you... though, one thing?"

Rhyme lifted an eyebrow. The criminalist could — and did — get great expression out of his extant body parts: shoulders, face and head.

"Most of the people who
say
they're going to write a letter don't. People who
do
write letters just go ahead and write them. They don't announce it. Ever notice that?"

"Thank you for the brilliant insight into psychology, Thom. You know that nothing's going to stop me now."

"Good," repeated the aide.

Using the touchpad controller, the criminalist drove his red Storm Arrow wheelchair closer to one of the half dozen large, flat-screen monitors in the room.

"Command," he said into the voice-recognition system, via a microphone attached to the chair. "Word processor."

WordPerfect dutifully opened on the screen.

"Command, type. 'Dear sirs.' Command, colon. Command, paragraph. Command, type, 'It has come to my attention — '"

The doorbell rang and Thom went to see who the visitor was.

Rhyme closed his eyes and was composing his rant to the world when a voice intruded. "Hey, Linc. Merry Christmas."

"Uhm, ditto," Rhyme grumbled to paunchy, disheveled Lon Sellitto, walking through the doorway. The big detective had to maneuver carefully; the room had been a quaint parlor in the Victorian era but now was chockablock with forensic science gear: optical microscopes, an electron microscope, a gas chromatograph, laboratory beakers and racks, pipettes, petri dishes, centrifuges, chemicals, books and magazines, computers — and thick wires, which ran everywhere. (When Rhyme began doing forensic consulting out of his town house, the power-hungry equipment frequently would blow circuit breakers. The juice running into the place probably equaled the combined usage by everyone else on the block.)

"Command, volume, level three." The environmental control unit obediently turned down NPR.

"Not in the spirit of the season, are we?" the detective asked.

Rhyme didn't answer. He looked back at the monitor.

"Hey, Jackson." Sellitto bent down and petted a small, longhaired dog curled up in an NYPD evidence box. He was temporarily living here; his former owner, Thom's elderly aunt, had passed away recently in Westport, Connecticut, after a long illness. Among the young man's inheritances was Jackson, a Havanese. The breed, related to the bichon frise, originated in Cuba. Jackson was staying here until Thom could find a good home for him.

"We got a bad one, Linc," Sellitto said, standing up. He started to take off his overcoat but changed his mind. "Jesus, it's cold. Is this a record?"

"Don't know. Don't spend much time on the Weather Channel." He thought of a good opening paragraph of his letter to the editor.

"Bad," Sellitto repeated.

Rhyme glanced at Sellitto with a cocked eyebrow.

"Two homicides, same M.O. More or less."

"Lots of 'bad ones' out there, Lon. Why're these any badder?" As often happened in the tedious days between cases Rhyme was in a bad mood; of all the perps he'd come across, the worst was boredom.

But Sellitto had worked with Rhyme for years and was immune to the criminalist's attitudes. "Got a call from the Big Building. Brass want you and Amelia on this one. They said they're insisting."

"Oh, insisting?"

"I promised I wouldn't tell you they said that. You don't like to be insisted."

"Can we get to the 'bad' part, Lon? Or is that too much to ask?"

"Where's Amelia?"

"Westchester, on a case. Should be back soon."

The detective held up a wait-a-minute finger as his cell phone rang. He had a conversation, nodding and jotting notes. He disconnected and glanced at Rhyme. "Okay, here we have it. Sometime last night our perp, he grabs —"

"He?" Rhyme asked pointedly.

"Okay. We don't know the gender for sure."

"Sex."

"What?"

Rhyme said, "Gender's a linguistic concept. It refers to designating words male or female in certain languages. Sex is a biological concept differentiating male and female organisms."

"Thanks for the grammar lesson," the detective muttered. "Maybe it'll help if I'm ever on
Jeopardy!
Anyway,
he
grabs some poor schmuck and takes 'em to that boat repair pier on the Hudson. We're not exactly sure how he does it, but he forces the guy, or woman, to hang on over the river and then cuts their wrists. The vic holds on for a while, looks like — long enough to lose a shitload of blood — but then just lets go."

"Body?"

"Not yet. Coast Guard and ESU're searching."

"I heard plural."

"Okay. Then we get another call a few minutes later. To check out an alley downtown, off Cedar, near Broadway. The perp's got
another
vic. A uniform finds this guy duct-taped and on his back. The perp rigged this iron bar — weighs maybe seventy-five pounds — above his neck. The vic has to hold it up to keep from getting his throat crushed."

"Seventy-five pounds? Okay, given the strength issues, I'll grant you the perp's
sex
probably is male."

Thom came into the room with coffee and pastries. Sellitto, his weight a constant issue, went for the Danish first, his diet hibernated during the holidays. He finished half and, wiping his mouth, continued. "So the vic's holding up the bar. Which maybe he does for a while — but he doesn't make it."

"Who's the vic?"

"Name's Theodore Adams. Lived near Battery Park. A nine-one-one came in last night from a woman said her brother was supposed to meet her for dinner and never showed. That's the name she gave. Sergeant from the precinct was going to call her this morning."

Lincoln Rhyme generally didn't find soft descriptions helpful. But he conceded that "bad" fit the situation.

So did the word "intriguing." He asked, "Why do you say it's the same M.O.?"

"Perp left a calling card at both scenes. Clocks."

"As in tick-tock?"

"Yup. The first one was by the pool of blood on the pier. The other was next to the vic's head. It was like the doer wanted them to see it. And, I guess, hear it."

"Describe them. The clocks."

"Looked old-fashioned. That's all I know."

"Not a bomb?" Nowadays — in the time of the After — every item of evidence that ticked was routinely checked for explosives.

"Nope. Won't go bang. But the squad sent 'em up to Rodman's Neck to check for bio or chemical agents. Same brand of clock, looks like. Spooky, one of the respondings said. Has this face of a moon on it. Oh, and just in case we were slow, he left a note under the clocks. Computer printout. No handwriting."

"And they said... ?"

Sellitto glanced down at his notebook, not relying on memory. Rhyme appreciated this in the detective. He wasn't brilliant but he
was
a bulldog and did everything slowly and with perfection. He read, "'The full Cold Moon is in the sky, shining on the corpse of earth, signifying the hour to die and end the journey begun at birth.'" He looked up at Rhyme. "It was signed 'the Watchmaker.'"

"We've got two vics and a lunar motif." Often, an astronomical reference meant that the killer was planning to strike multiple times. "He's got more on the agenda."

"Hey, why d'you think I'm here, Linc?"

Rhyme glanced at the beginning of his missive to the
Times.
He closed his word-processing program. The essay about Before and After would have to wait.

Chapter 3

A small sound from outside the window. A crunch of snow.

Amelia Sachs stopped moving. She glanced out at the quiet, white backyard. She saw no one.

She was a half hour north of the city, alone in a pristine Tudor suburban house that was still as death. An appropriate thought, she reflected, since the owner of the place was no longer among the living.

The sound again. Sachs was a city girl, used to the cacophony of urban noises — threatening and benign. The intrusion into the excessive suburban quiet set her on edge.

Was its source a footstep?

The tall, red-haired detective, wearing a black leather jacket, navy blue sweater and black jeans, listened carefully for a moment, absently scratching her scalp. She heard another crunch. Unzipped her jacket so her Glock was easily accessible. Crouching, she looked outside fast. Saw nothing.

And returned to her task. She sat down on the luxurious leather office chair and began to examine the contents of a huge desk. This was a frustrating mission, the problem being that she didn't know exactly what she was looking for. Which often happened when you searched a crime scene that was secondary or tertiary or whatever four-times-removed might be called. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to call this a crime scene at all. It was unlikely that any perpetrators had ever been present, nor had any bodies been discovered here, any loot hidden. This was simply a little-used residence of a man named Benjamin Creeley, who'd died miles away and had not been to this house for a week before his death.

Still she had to search, and search carefully — because Amelia Sachs was not here in the role she usually worked: crime scene cop. She was the lead detective in the first homicide case of her own.

Another snap outside. Ice, snow, branch, deer, squirrel... She ignored it and continued the search that had started a few weeks earlier, all thanks to a knot in a piece of cotton rope.

It was this length of clothesline that had ended the life of fifty-six-year-old Ben Creeley, found dangling from the banister of his Upper East Side town house. A suicide note was on the table, no signs of foul play evident.

Just after the man's death, though, Suzanne Creeley, his widow, went to the NYPD. She simply didn't believe that he'd killed himself. The wealthy businessman and accountant had been moody lately, yes. But only, she believed, because he'd been working very long hours on some particularly difficult projects. His occasionally dour moods were a far cry from suicidal depression. He had no history of mental or emotional problems and wasn't taking antidepressants. Creeley's finances were solid. There'd been no recent changes to his will or insurance policy. His partner, Jordan Kessler, was on a business trip to a client's office in Pennsylvania. But he and Sachs had spoken briefly and he confirmed that while Creeley
had
seemed depressed lately he hadn't, Kessler believed, ever mentioned suicide.

Sachs was permanently assigned to Lincoln Rhyme for crime scene work but she wanted to do more than forensics exclusively. She'd been lobbying Major Cases for the chance to be lead detective on a homicide or terrorist investigation. Somebody in the Big Building had decided that Creeley's death warranted more looking into and gave her the case. Aside from the general consensus that Creeley wasn't suicidal, though, Sachs at first could find no evidence of foul play. But then she made a discovery. The medical examiner reported that at the time of his death Creeley had a broken thumb; his entire right hand was in a cast.

Which simply wouldn't've let him tie the knot in his hangman's noose or secure the rope to the balcony railing.

Sachs knew because she'd tried a dozen times. Impossible without using the thumb. Maybe he'd tied it before the biking accident, a week prior to his death, but it just didn't seem likely that you'd tie a noose and keep it handy, waiting for a future date to kill yourself.

She decided to declare the death suspicious and opened a homicide file.

But it was shaping up to be a tough case. The rule in homicides is either they're solved in the first twenty-four hours or it takes months to close them. What little evidence existed (the liquor bottle he'd been drinking from before he died, the note and the rope) had yielded nothing. There were no witnesses. The NYPD report was a mere half-page long. The detective who'd run the case had spent hardly any time on it, typical for suicides, and he provided Sachs with no other information.

The trail to any suspects had pretty much dried up in the city, where Creeley had worked and where the family spent most of their time; all that remained in Manhattan was to interview the dead man's partner, Kessler, in more depth. Now, she was searching one of the few remaining sources for leads: the Creeleys' suburban home, at which the family spent very little time.

But she was finding nothing. Sachs now sat back, staring at a recent picture of Creeley shaking the hand of someone who appeared to be a businessman. They were on the tarmac of an airport, in front of some company's private jet. Oil rigs and pipelines loomed in the background. He was smiling. He didn't look depressed — but who does in snapshots?

It was then that another crunch sounded, very close, outside the window behind her. Then one more, even closer.