The Cold Moon (7 page)

Rhyme looked over the pictures of the scene, particularly the pattern the blood had made as it flowed onto the pier. He guessed that the victim had been hanging over the edge of the deck, at chest level, his fingers desperately wedged into the space between the planks. The fingernail marks showed that eventually he'd lost his grip. Rhyme wondered how long the vic had been able to hang on.

He nodded slowly. "Tell me about the next scene."

Pulaski replied, "All right, that homicide occurred in an alley off Cedar Street, near Broadway. This alley featured a dead end. It was fifteen feet wide and one hundred and four feet long and was surfaced with cobblestones."

The body, Rhyme recalled, was fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley.

"What's the time of death?"

"At least eight hours before he was found, the ME tour doc said. The body was frozen solid so it'll take a while to determine with any certainty." The young officer suffered from the habit of copspeak.

"Amelia told me about the service and fire doors in the alley. Did anybody ask what time they were locked for the night?"

"Three of the buildings're commercial. Two of them lock their service doors at eight thirty and one at ten. The other's a government administration building. That door's locked at six. There's a late-night garbage pickup at ten."

"Body discovered when?"

"Around seven
A.M.
"

"Okay, the vic in the alley was dead at least eight hours, last door was locked at ten and garbage picked up then. So the killing took place between, say, ten fifteen and eleven
P.M.
Parking situation?"

"I got the license plates of every car in a two-block radius." Pulaski was holding up a
Moby-Dick
of a notebook.

"What the hell's that?"

"Oh, I wrote down notes about all the cars. Thought it might be helpful. You know, where they were parked, anything suspicious about them."

"Waste of time. We just needed the tag numbers for names and addresses," Rhyme explained. "To cross-check DMV with NCIC and the other databases. We don't care who needed bodywork or had bald tires or a crack pipe in the backseat... Well, did you?"

"What?"

"Run the tags?"

"Not yet."

Cooper went online but found no warrants on any of the registered owners of the cars. At Rhyme's instruction he also checked to see if any parking tickets were issued in that area around the time of the killing. There were none.

"Mel, run the vic's name. Warrants? Anything else about him?"

There were no state warrants on Theodore Adams, and Pulaski recounted what his sister had said about him — that he apparently had no enemies or personal life issues that might result in his murder.

"Why these vics, though?" Rhyme asked. "Are they random?... I know Dellray's busy but this's important. Give him a call and have him run Adams's name. See if the feds have anything on him."

Sellitto made a call to the federal building and got through to Dellray — who was in a bad mood because of the "fucking quagmire" of a financial fraud case he'd been assigned. Still, he managed to look through the federal databases and active case files. But the results were negative on Theodore Adams.

"Okay," Rhyme announced, "until we find something else let's assume they're random victims of a crazy man." He squinted at the pictures. "Where the hell're the clocks?"

A call to the bomb squad revealed that they'd been cleared of any bio or toxic threat and were on their way to Rhyme's right now.

The cash in the faux gold money clip appeared fresh out of an ATM machine. The bills were clean but Cooper found some good prints on the clip. Unfortunately, when he ran them through IAFIS, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, there were no hits. The few prints on the cash in Adams's pocket came back negative as well, and the serial numbers revealed the bills hadn't been flagged by the Treasury Department for possible involvement in money laundering or other crimes.

"The sand?" Rhyme asked, referring to the obscuring agent.

"Generic," Cooper called, not looking up from the microscope. "Sort used in playgrounds rather than construction. I'll check it for other trace."

And no sand at the pier, Rhyme recalled Sachs telling him. Was that because, as she'd speculated, the perp was planning to return to the alley? Or simply because the substance wasn't needed on the pier, where the brutal wind from the Hudson would sweep the scene clean?

"What about the span?" Rhyme asked.

"The what?"

"The bar the vic's neck was crushed with. It's a needle-eye span." Rhyme had made a study of construction materials in the city, since a popular way to dispose of bodies was to dump them at job sites. Cooper and Sellitto weighed the length of metal — it was eighty-one pounds — and got it onto the examining table. The span was about six feet long, an inch wide and three inches high. A hole was drilled in each end. "They're used mostly in shipbuilding, heavy equipment, cranes, antennas and bridges."

"That's gotta be the heaviest murder weapon I've ever seen," Cooper said.

"Heavier than a Suburban?" asked Lincoln Rhyme, the man for whom precision was everything. He was referring to the case of the wife who'd run over her philandering husband with a very large SUV in the middle of Third Avenue several months earlier.

"Oh, that... his cheatin' heart," Cooper sang in a squeaky tenor. Then he tested for fingerprints and found none. He filed off some shavings from the rod. "Probably iron. I see evidence of oxidation." A chemical test revealed that this was the case.

"No identifying markings?"

"Nope."

Rhyme grimaced. "That's a problem. There've got to be fifty sources in the metro area... Wait. Amelia said there was some construction nearby —"

"Oh," Pulaski said, "she had me check there and they weren't using any metal bars like that. I forgot to mention it."

"You forgot," Rhyme muttered. "Well, I know the city's doing some major work on the Queensboro Bridge. Let's give 'em a try." Rhyme said to Pulaski, "Call the work crew at the Queensboro and find out if spans're being used there and, if so, are any missing."

The rookie nodded and pulled out his mobile phone.

Cooper looked over the analysis of the sand. "Okay, got something here. Thallium sulfate."

"What's that?" Sellitto asked.

"Rodent poison," said Rhyme. "It's banned in this country but you sometimes find it in immigrant communities or in buildings where immigrants work. How concentrated?"

"Very... and there's none in the control soil and residue that Amelia collected. Which means it's probably from someplace the perp's been."

"Maybe he's planning to kill somebody with it," Pulaski suggested, as he waited on hold.

Rhyme shook his head. "Not likely. It's not easy to administer and you need a high dosage for humans. But it could lead us to him. Find out if there've been any recent confiscations or environmental agency complaints in the city."

Cooper made the calls.

"Let's look at the duct tape," Rhyme instructed.

The tech examined the rectangles of shiny gray tape, which had been used to bind the victim's hands and feet and gag him. He announced that the tape was generic, sold in thousands of home improvement, drug and grocery stores around the country. Testing the adhesive on the tape revealed very little trace, just a few grains of snow-removal salt, which matched samples Sachs had taken from the general area, and the sand that the Watchmaker had spread to help him clean up trace.

Disappointed that the duct tape wasn't more helpful, Rhyme turned to the photos Sachs had shot of Adams's body. Then he wheeled closer to the examination table and peered at the screen. "Look at the edges of the tape."

"Interesting," Cooper said, glancing from the digital photos to the tape itself.

What had struck the men as odd was that the pieces of tape had been cut with extreme precision and applied very carefully. Usually it was just torn off the roll, sometimes ripped by the attacker's teeth (which often left DNA-laden saliva), and wrapped sloppily around the victim's hands, ankles and mouth. But the strips used by the Watchmaker were perfectly cut with a sharp object. The lengths were identical.

Ron Pulaski hung up, then announced, "They don't use needle-eye spans on the work they're doing now on the bridge."

Well, Rhyme hadn't expected easy answers.

"And the rope he was holding on to?"

Cooper looked it over, examined some databases. He shook his head. "Generic."

Rhyme nodded at several whiteboards that stood empty in the corner of the lab. "Start our charts. You, Ron, you have good handwriting?"

"It's good enough."

"That's all we need. Write."

When running cases Rhyme kept charts of all the evidence they found. They were like crystal balls to him; he'd stare at the words and photos and diagrams to try to understand who the perp might be, where he was hiding, where he was going to strike next. Gazing at his evidence boards was the closest Lincoln Rhyme ever came to meditating.

"We'll use his name as the heading, since he was
so
courteous to let us know what he wants to be called."

As Pulaski wrote what Rhyme dictated, Cooper picked up a tube containing a tiny sample of what seemed to be soil. He looked it over through the microscope, starting on 4x power (the number-one rule with optical scopes is to start low; if you go right to higher magnifications you'll end up looking at artistically interesting but forensically useless abstract images).

"Looks like your basic soil. I'll see what else's in it." He prepared a sample for the chromatograph/mass spectrometer, a large instrument that separates and identifies substances in trace evidence.

When the results were ready Cooper looked over the computer screen and announced, "Okay, we've got some oils, nitrogen, urea, chloride... and protein. Let me run the profile." A moment later his computer filled with additional information. "Fish protein."

"So maybe the perp works in a fish restaurant," Pulaski said enthusiastically. "Or a fish stand in Chinatown. Or, wait, maybe the fish counter at a grocery store."

Rhyme asked, "Ron, you ever hear a public speaker say, 'Before I begin, I'd like to say something'?"

"Uhm. I think."

"Which is a little odd, because if he's talking he's already begun, right?"

Pulaski lifted an eyebrow.

"My point is that in analyzing the evidence you do something before you start."

"Which is what?"

"Find out where the evidence
came
from. Now, where did Sachs collect the fish protein dirt?"

He looked at the tag. "Oh."

"Where is 'oh'?"

"Inside the victim's jacket."

"So whom does the evidence tell us something about?"

"The victim, not the perp."

"Exactly! Is it helpful to know that he has it
in
his jacket, not on? Who knows? Maybe it will be. But the important point is to not blindly send the troops to every fishmonger in the city too fast. You comfortable with that theory, Ron?"

"Real comfortable."

"I'm so pleased. Write down the fishy soil under the victim's profile and let's get on with it, shall we? When's the medical examiner sending us a report?"

Cooper said, "Could be a while. Coming up on Christmastime."

Sellitto sang, "'Tis the season to be killing..."

Pulaski gave a frown. Rhyme explained to him, "The deadliest times of the year are hot spells and holidays. Remember, Ron: Stress doesn't kill people; people kill people — but stress makes 'em do it."

"Got fibers here, brown," Cooper announced. He glanced at the notes attached to the bag. "Back heel of the victim's shoe and his wristwatch band."

"What kind of fibers?"

Cooper examined them closely and ran the profile through the FBI's fiber database. "Automotive, it looks like."

"Makes sense he'd have a car — you can't really carry an eighty-one-pound iron bar around on the subway. So our Watchmaker parked in the front part of the alley and dragged the vic to his resting place. What can we tell about the vehicle?"

Not much, as it turned out. The fiber was from carpet used in more than forty models of cars, trucks and SUVs. As for tread marks, the part of the alley where he'd parked was covered with salt, which had interfered with the tires' contact with the cobblestones and prevented the transfer of tread marks.

"A big zero in the vehicle department. Well, let's look at his love note."

Cooper slipped the white sheet of paper out of a plastic envelope.

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.

— 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.